our presence like a rat resents Rentokil. He is literally filthy. Naturally I have it in mind to seduce him. Or for him to seduce me. Come on, the man’s a modern Heathcliff with his catatonic dial, his cat-gut breath, his loose, lardy belly (So I’m only four inches taller. I picture it as an act of revenge, on his part. Well hell. Beggars can’t be choosers).
In the absence of all other island staff, Jack has been temporarily placed in charge of the Sea Tractor – a mythological machine in these parts: half bird, half monster, which, when the tide is high and the conditions are tolerable, we use to ferry post and people and provisions one way and another.
It is his pride. Seven-foot-wide wheels attached to twelve-foot-tall stilts. On top, a kind of oily, open-sided tram carriage. It chugs through the water like a superannuated steamroller.
I have cunningly been employing monosyllabic Jack’s passion for this vehicle in my four-pronged attack on his affections. Last week I cleaned it. This week I’m expressing an interest in its rudimentary mechanics. I’ve invited him out fishing (I’m a dab-hand, me). And all the while I bore him with tales of our time on Soames Island in Wellington harbour, New Zealand. He loves it.
(Jack has this fantasy about turning our current crummy bolt-hole into some kind of nature reserve. He’s a nutter. He likes to mutter about the surf and stuff. He’s into Polynesian culture. He even has a Maori tattoo.
The man is plainly out of his tree. I mean, how does he plan to keep nature reserved on a place part-connected to the mainland? In truth he’s nothing more than a tragic booze casualty, but somehow, in some way, he brings out the nasty, sexy, six-foot Nurse Nightingale in me.)
This particular morning I find him standing on an overturned bucket, poking his nose into the ancient inn’s low-slung but very clogged-up gutters. It’s still high tide. We’re cut off. The coast is clear. And luckily my extra inches mean I don’t have to yell up at him.
‘Need a hand?’ I whisper.
He jumps and scowls. ‘Why did God make you so obliging?’
Side-on he looks like Gene Wilder. But no perm. I say nothing. (What do I know of God’s intentions?) Instead I peer through a window then saunter down the hill a way.
‘So who’s the freak in the balaclava?’ he asks. He can’t help himself. He wants me. I stop sauntering.
‘Balaclava?’
‘Five this morning, I brought him over on the tractor. Your dad was spitting fucking tacks.’
I shrug. I am mesmerized by the sheer sum of words spilling out of him.
‘Sorry,’ I finally manage again, ‘you said balaclava?’
‘Then not ten minutes since,’ he continues, ‘I saw him carrying a shitload of chicken wire…’
He points to the hazy summit – past the old croquet lawn, towards the Herring Cove – a sumptuous grass-strewn rise glimmering with an obscene verdancy in the early summer shine (the cliffs crash beyond it, all chalk and shag).
‘That way.’
Jesus, the man is almost trippy.
He peers again, ‘And there he goes…’
I walk back towards him, up the hill. Once I reach his level I stretch my neck. Sure enough, I see a black-headed creature processing regally along the horizon, arms full of silver.
‘Chicken wire? Where’d he get that from?’
‘And he’s got some old lavender,’ Jack observes almost squinting, ‘and a fucking tonne of blue grass… Still in his balaclava, note. The twat.’
You know what? He’s been here all of three hours or something and already the bastard’s appropriating. He’s re-inventing. He’s running bloody riot. Collecting chicken wire for no known reason, and gathering lavender. Wearing a balaclava.
Oh, so he’s softened you already with the chin thing, has he? You think I didn’t notice? You have a handsome chin. You think that didn’t impact? This man is clever, certainly. But I am single-minded, oestrogen-fuelled and cunning.
Right. So he sees me coming from way off and is courteous enough to stand waiting. As I draw closer – I am panting a little and wet-legged from the dew (I’m resolutely bare-footed – my soles are like emery boards. You can strike matches off them. We do it all the time in winter), I see that the balaclava has no nose or mouth holes, although the wool’s much darker where the mouth and nose should be. Wet. Sweaty.
‘And the chicken wire?’
He stares at me, hazel-eyed. My words hang in the air a while. Soon they’re flapping like old underwear on a windy washing line.
And the chicken wire?
He blinks.
‘Oh. Was that a question you just asked me?’
(Imagine his words, all tight and clipped and southern hemispherical, but completely ensnared by woollen weave – Uh. Gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah hi?)
‘Sorry,’ I lie. ‘I cannot understand what you’re saying through your mouth.’
He still looks quizzical.
‘Sorry,’ he answers eventually, ‘I cannot hear what you’re saying through my ears.’
He proffers me the bunch of blue grass. I stare at it, impassively.
‘Are you offering that grass to me?’
He nods.
‘And the chicken wire?’
‘No. That’s mine. I have need of it.’
I take the grass. He grunts his satisfaction at our transaction then strolls away.
‘Thank you,’ I finally yell, but he’s already twelve steps down the hill. I inspect the bunch then look up.
Four foot off, perched on the clifftops, two jackdaws are quietly watching. Heads cocked, beaks glinting. I tickle my nose self-consciously with the grass’s silver, whispy flower-heads, my eyes still fixed upon them.
Suddenly they lift and plummet, peeling like bells. I stiffen. Perhaps I’m paranoid, but I honestly get the impression they might be laughing at me. I drop the grass that very instant (well, almost immediately), and calmly kick it over the cliff and down and down and down, into the sea.
The mean-beaked, dirty-vented, scraggy-feathered sods.
Chapter 4
I corner Patch in the Ganges Room. She likes to hang out there sometimes with Feely. It’s actually the front half of an old ship (the Ganges, circa 1821, you nerd), the captain’s cabin, to be precise, but sawed off and just kind of tacked on to the hotel dining-room, with a steering-wheel (not period) dug into the dark timber floor, and portholes and old wooden benches and ancient photos on the walls and everything.
