sea sounded like gunshots through the house. ‘Again?’ Ivor said, too loudly.
The last time Crystal had gone away, it had been to Cyprus, and it had been for a whole year. Before that, it was somewhere he’d forgotten the name of, for six months. One day she was here, the next she wasn’t. It was because her parents worked at the Dishes. They had to go to places where there were other Dishes. She’d been born on an island called Ascension, which meant going up in the air and not coming back down.
‘How long for?’ he said, quieter this time.
‘I’ll pay you two pounds right now,’ Gull Gilbert said.
Crystal’s hand went back towards the pot. ‘Three,’ she said.
Ivor took a step backwards then turned and kept walking until he was out of the room and in the hallway. Something moved in the glass of one of the pictures and he glanced round quickly, then realised it was just himself. He went into the front room and stood by the window. The sea was rock-coloured and surging. There was the familiar feeling in his chest – tight and untethered at the same time, like a straining balloon. They said it was his asthma and gave him an inhaler to use. But asthma was what happened when you’d been running or fighting, it wasn’t what happened when you were standing still.
Along the window there were yoghurt pots crammed with sand and shells and bits of smooth blue glass. The bits of glass were so small; it would have taken a long time to find them all.
Gull Gilbert might leave too. Then he wouldn’t have to move up to the big school next year like everyone else. Any time he felt like it, he could wave goodbye to his grandparents and go and live with his father, who worked in a town with shops so huge you could walk around in them all day, and eat in them, and stay in them until it was night.
Ivor reached out and gently knocked each pot over, until the sand and the stones and the glass spilled down the wall and onto the floor.
He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there before he saw Crystal and Gull Gilbert outside. They were running towards the path, shouting back at him that it was boring, it was a bit bollocks. They were going back into town. What they wanted was helium, cheap biscuits from the out-of-date food shop, that sticky hairspray that smelled like the bottle of drink they’d found washed up on the beach last summer.
His father was kneeling in the grass by the front door. The road out the front was full of parked cars, cats sleeping against wheels, a skip loaded with rubble and cracked sinks and flowerpots. At the bottom of the street there was a wedge of sea, strung between the houses like a wrinkled sheet.
Ivor opened the gate and his father looked up and then back down again. There was a bike strewn in pieces around him – handlebars, wheels, a seat with a split like the skin of a tomato. His father picked up the chain and held it for a moment. There was a bottle of oil on the grass and oil on his hands.
Ivor pulled at an oily dandelion. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he said.
‘Fixing it.’ When his father was kneeling like that, the top of his head showed through his hair and there were bright blue veins, so thin they looked like they might break, behind his ears. But when he looked up there was the same face as ever – creased eyes from squinting into the sun, cheeks that scraped when they touched against Ivor’s, the bent top tooth like a door off its hinges. There was a hole in his eyebrow with a ring in it, which he’d got when he was sixteen, just before Ivor was born.
‘Why are you?’ Ivor said.
His father ran his hand down the back of his neck. ‘Dean’s brother asked if I could. He’s paying me.’
‘Can you?’
‘There’s loads of bikes when you think about it,’ his father said. ‘Think how many bikes there are that need fixing.’
Ivor ripped at the dandelion. ‘Can you?’
‘Almost everyone has a bike. They always need fixing, don’t they.’
The window in the flat above them opened and TV and laughing came out. A seagull lifted itself off the roof and circled the chimney, barking sharply.
Ivor leaned against the wall until the pebbles dug into his spine. His father was turning the bike wheel with his finger. Ivor took his inhaler out of his bag and puffed it. He moved his arm into the shape of a gun and aimed at the seagull, bang bang. He would never hurt a seagull. Bang. If his father could fix the bike then there would be a lot more bikes he could fix, almost everyone had a bike. But if he stopped turning the wheel, got up and went inside without saying anything, then he couldn’t fix the bike.
Then it would be like that time the hotel management changed and they could stick their longer shifts with no extra pay up their arses. And when the car park closed where his father gave out tickets and they played guess who would be fattest when they stepped out of their car. Or when everyone stopped coming on his walking tours because whenever he took people out onto the headland, where the cliff suddenly sloped and there was the beach for three miles and the rocks in horseshoes and waves galloping in and everything was silver, his father would just stand there shaking his head and say, fucking delectable, absolutely fucking delectable.
The bike wheel kept turning like it was a clock slowly being wound.
‘Did you ring Mev yet?’ Ivor said.
‘Did I do what?’
‘Did you ring Mev.’
Still the wheel kept turning, grating softly each time.
‘She said she needed to know,’ Ivor said.
‘What?’
‘About the restaurant. She said she needed to know.’ Before Mev moved away, she used to stay over, and in the mornings Ivor was allowed to get in their bed and keep sleeping. But that was last year, when he was a little kid.
‘I know,’ his father said. ‘I told you that.’
‘Why don’t we?’
‘What?’
‘Go and live with Mev and work in her restaurant.’
The church bells near the beach tolled five times. ‘That’s a hundred miles away, Ivor.’
It was almost dark. If his father could fix the bike, there would be potatoes frying in oil and tomatoes sliced with sugar on them. ‘So?’ Ivor said.
And for dessert they would shake up cans of cream and spray them straight into their mouths.
The bike wheel went round and round.
His father got up, put the screwdriver down carefully on the grass and went into the house without saying a word.
Ivor pushed the window up until his wrists burned. The frame shuddered and jammed, then finally opened.
Below him, the cliff was slumped and worn, the rock underneath pale as a shinbone. Green waves crumbled
