In the narrow cut from the apartment blocks, the sky was undulating. A single point of white light shone; beyond it black depths opened up. From the streetlamp’s glow, a tear-streak reflection ran all the way to Cordonnery’s feet. He trudged. For as long as he’d been walking, he’d been walking to the coast. One final rise and he would reach the ocean.
Breaking from the cover of the buildings, he crossed the esplanade and went to stand at the seawall. The streetlight threw his shadow off the drop to the beach. A bed of sand spread out below him, the distant ruffle of shallow breakers curving across it like a thrown back sheet. Further out still, the horizon was obscured. Cordonnery hoisted himself onto the wall and swung his legs over. He sat and looked out.
Though he strained to hear the sea, the sky expressed its tempest on him. It was only when he shut his eyes that he could pick from its bluster the churn of waves. When he opened them again, he saw a sea fog rolling in. “End of the end of the line,” he said.
*
The tide was soon as hidden as the horizon had been. If I stepped onto the sand, Cordonnery thought, would it come rushing in? He yawned, expecting a gullet of salt air. Instead, he tasted blood and rust. He slapped his chops, hawked up, and breathed in through his nose. “Clear the pipes,” he said, enjoying the feeling of talking aloud. Alone on the seawall, he felt emboldened. “Sea-wall, sea-wall,” he intoned, dragging out the water’s syllable.
Fleck-wetted, the weather front moved in and spat its droplets at him. He felt the prick of each as it hit his skin. Opening his mouth again, he offered the sky his tongue. He bowed his head and gave the night the back of his neck. He held out his arms. The wind picked up, playful, and tousled his hair. Under the cover of the fog, black waters were advancing. They soaked into the marrow of the sand. Cordonnery welcomed the ocean in. He planted his hands on the coping stone. The wall was slick and cold. He clapped and rubbed his palms together, pulling his overcoat around him, before readying his hands again.
The tide was all around him now, no longer muted by the damper of the sky. He thought about slipping off his shoes, sliding out of his coat, and striding into its folds. He felt the sea soak through his clothes. He saw the sandbanks leeching with his steps, his weight bringing the water to him; bringing him into it, it into him. The bones of his arse began to ache and his shoulders tightened with the chill. You’re not the man for a thing like that, he told himself. Wouldn’t have it in you to go through with it, and then where would you be? Wet through, and miserable as sin. And sandy, worst of all. He rubbed his eyes, the grit on his fingers scratching at their bruisy bags. The ocean settled back into heft and distance; the spurring wind seemed to tire of him. Cordonnery turned from the gusting open.
The promenade bent around the shoreline, its sweep picked out by points of teary light. As he followed them around, Cordonnery saw the bay take shape. Away to his right, the front stretched off as far as he could see, a branch of reaching promontory leading to the flicker of a lighthouse at its end. To his left, he saw the slice of the breakwaters and the block of an industrial pier, its warehouses squat, unlit and inactive, fallen, he assumed, into disrepair. Beyond that, a headland loomed, a shadow more solid than the night itself.
Cordonnery shuffled around and dropped back to the pavement. He set off following the esplanade.
Every shop front, hotel, bistro and bar was closed. And from the looks of things, Cordonnery thought, not just for the night but for the season. He weighed his options. “Can’t be too long left ‘til morning,” he said, as much for the comfort of hearing his voice as for the calming sentiment. He decided to walk out to the lighthouse. “Keep moving until the sun comes up, that’s the way to do it.”
As Cordonnery walked, his shadow circled, tilt-a-whirl with every passing light. It stretched and shrunk in his shuffling orbit, dizzying him when his eyes caught its movement. I should slow my pace. If I slow my pace then, by the time I reach the lighthouse, the sun will’ve come up.
He thought about the games he’d played as a child when he’d used to follow his big brother around. That was all there had been to it: follow Eckerlee about. And when his brother was in a mood, frustrated with Cordonnery or otherwise grumpy, follow him without being seen. He recalled the places he would hide, the nooks, the crannies and blind corners; the hollow in the hedge where he could loiter unnoticed when Eckerlee played out in the yard; the airing cupboard on the landing from where, if Eckerlee forgot to close the door, he was able to peek into their room. The point had never been to spy on his brother, keep tabs , or catch him out. Despite how often he’d ended up getting one, he hadn’t been looking for a chase. All he’d wanted was to be close. Close to him without being seen. Close without his brother knowing he was there.
With Rintoul it’d been the same. In the earliest days of his infancy, Cordonnery would stand at the foot of his crib, out of the child’s sight, but close. He liked to listen to the baby’s breaths, to hear the shush of his cotton clothes as he wriggled on the blanket, the squeak of the thin and rubbery mattress. On more than one occasion, Celia had come running to find their son in tears and Cordonnery sat in the corner of the room, unperturbed by the baby’s wailing. “Can’t you hear him?” she’d demand, with the child in her arms, and Cordonnery would snap to attention, as though being woken, and meekly nod or shrug off the question.
*
Having reached the lighthouse, Cordonnery looked back to the shore. He had no memory of walking as far he’d gone. Only a blink before, it seemed, he’d been standing on the seafront. He sat on the round, circular lip of the promontory, which stepped precipitously down to the sea. Cold pressed into the lengths of his thighs as he swung out his legs and rapped his heels against the concrete. The fog which had greeted him as he’d met the ocean had rolled on now beyond the shore, the town emerging faintly as the air began to thin. Bright bands unfurled amidst the clouds, glowing furrows that burned through the burling cover. Against this was the headland, lurching from the fret. It was as black now as the sea had been, the early hours monochrome trading off from one element to another. A gust of wind turned out the lit strata, the cloud peeling back its fish-skin glimmer to leave the sky colourless and sodden as flesh. Slate waters chopped at Cordonnery’s feet. I suppose I should go back.
He felt glassy-eyed and hollow. The chill had drawn around the outline of his skull, and his lips were shading blue. The immanent day was in his bones, as cold as any he had known. There was a rusted ladder leading down to the ocean. He imagined its metal cutting into his toes; its grind as it flaked against his hands’ refusal, their inability to let go. Cordonnery didn’t move.
Footsteps. Hooded figures approached. They were wearing cloaks of midnight blue, the hems of which swept to lift the seafoam from their paths. Cordonnery could hear the murmur of their voices, but couldn’t pick out a single thing they said. When they bowed and put their heads together, he thought he caught one of them uttering a name, either his own or that of his brother. He lost it in the burble of their laughter. A white-gloved hand emerged from a gown, held in a fist, closed and concealing. The nearest of the figures turned to him. Beneath a black mask, she seemed to be smiling.
*
Mewling hours passed. The concrete ran with rivulets and dried. The sun, as much as it would ever be, was up.
By the time he was approaching the seafront, the tide had begun to recede. In the morning light, the mud wet sand had taken hues of red. Cordonnery saw a figure emerging from the waves. The man strode up the beach lop-stepped, haggard seeming with exhaustion. How long was he out swimming? Cordonnery thought. In all the time he’d been sat out at the lighthouse, all the time that he’d been walking back, he hadn’t seen a soul approach the water.
Scanning up and down the beachfront, Cordonnery could see no pile of clothes or belongings to which the swimmer was returning. “Poor bastard must be freezing.” Cordonnery watched. The way the man walked was odd and intriguing. His stride was long and lolloping, yet furtive, hurried and hunched. On reaching the seawall, he vaulted up and over it in a single fluid movement. Taken aback by this show of strength, Cordonnery tracked him down the pavement. He lost him in the shadows of a side street. Cordonnery stopped. He had the feeling he’d witnessed something that he shouldn’t. From some cranny of his imagination, one from which he was unused to hearing, it occurred to him he’d seen the sea give birth. He pictured it happening up and down the coast.
*
Back on the esplanade, Cordonnery decided to walk to the point he’d seen the figure leave the water. Other people, whose arrivals he’d also missed, were dotted about the promenade. Women exclusively, it seemed, some alone and others in groups, but all of them looking towards the horizon, as though waiting for a ship that was bringing loved ones home.
He approached a trio who were stood close to where he remembered the figure emerging. “Morning,” he opened. Only one of the women turned around. She looked him over without saying a word and returned her gaze to the ocean. “Thought I saw a man coming out of the sea about here,” Cordonnery continued, still ignored.
Giving up on the conversation, he shrugged and moved away, standing to peer out in the direction that all the women were looking. Slumped across the line of the tide, there was a shape which he first took to be a rock. As the ocean washed in and washed back, however, the object moved. Despite its size, it lifted on every swell, its silhouetted outline shifting. “What is that?” Cordonnery asked, no longer expecting any response. “Has a whale beached?” Though there were people watching down the length of the promenade, the eyes of all, it now appeared, trained on the mass, no one had stepped down onto the beach to get a closer look.
In an act of uncustomary dynamism, Cordonnery concluded it was on him to investigate. He leapt from the seawall and dropped to the sand. The trio of women didn’t make a sound and only one was looking down when, having stumbled, winded, he looked sheepishly around. Her hard face met his eyes without the least show of surprise, even less of consternation. She raised her eyes to the horizon.
Striding towards the shape, Cordonnery’s ears were full of the whistling wind. The sand leeched dry with his every step. “No point now being tentative.”
He seemed to have stepped into an optical illusion. No matter how far he felt he’d walked, neither the waterline nor the shape got any closer. Fears set in of quicksand and rush tides closing in. The wincing scent of iodine, the exposed ocean bed, and his trespass choked the breath from him. He slowed his pace.
There on the sand lay the body of a horse. Cordonnery looked back towards the shore. “It’s a horse!” he called half-heartedly, knowing his voice wouldn’t carry. “A horse,” he whispered to himself. He approached its back. The water having retreated, the carcass was no longer swayed by the breakers. Its tail splayed and floated on the furrowed silt flats, and, between its chestnut fore and hind, its stomach was distended. Cordonnery moved towards its head.
The horse’s mane was speckled with sand, braided with seaweed and jewelled with shells. He paused and squatted. Despite the nausea rising from his stomach, Cordonnery wanted to reach out and touch it, pat its shoulder and stroke its coat. The wind picked up and gently rocked it, legs stiff and akimbo, cantering the ghost.
Standing again, Cordonnery came around, putting himself between the horse and the ocean. He took in each feature of its dereliction: the skull was exposed around the eye, socket picked out and hollow; the muzzle was shredded to a snarl and ribboned, teeth on show, flesh shorn and ghastly, grinning; a gash up its flank had been torn at and bitten; at its groin, the carcass gaped. Cordonnery gagged.
*
The walls of the bedroom were painted blue; the furniture was spartan. Other than a single bed on an iron frame with a wardrobe at its head, the room was bare. In between the two windows, a patch of richer colour hinted at a dresser which had been moved. Four evenly-spaced dimples in the thin carpet suggested a chair, and Cordonnery could well imagine a desk set against the empty wall, and a hunched figure sat writing, occasionally looking up over his shoulder for a glimpse through the window of the ocean. He opened it a crack to let in some fresh air.
Fluffing his pillows, Cordonnery propped them against the head of the bed so he could lie back and look at the sky. As he sat, the bed springs creaked loudly. It seemed to be the only sound for miles. Although the proprietor had repeatedly assured him there were other guests in the hotel, he’d seen no sign of anybody since he’d arrived. “There are always one or two, even at the quietest times,” the owner, a bald and nervy man, had insisted.
Cordonnery looked down at his feet. His shoes and the hems of his trousers were still crusted with brine and dry, gritty mud. He hadn’t mentioned the horse to the hotel owner. He hadn’t spoken about it to anyone. By the time he’d made his way back to the seawall, all the watching women had gone. He’d had to walk a good distance along the front before he’d come across a ramp that would lead him off the sand. He hadn’t bothered trying to hoist himself over. Either the man he’d seen had had super human strength, or perspective had put the dimensions out of whack. I must have misremembered, Cordonnery had concluded, exactly where it was that I saw him crawling out.
Kicking off his shoes, Cordonnery lay back. If he closed his eyes, he could just about hear the tide. He turned to watch the furl of the far window’s curtain, the lace rising slowly and slowly sinking. It was as though the room itself were breathing. He fell into its rhythm. Not too bad, all told, he thought.
While waiting for the owner to prepare his room, Cordonnery had been ushered into a conservatory. The air had been stifling. Large and ornate ferns, sprouting philodendron and painted nettles lined the walls; vines grew up the window casings. Slumped in a rattan chair, Cordonnery had barely been able to keep his eyes open. His lunch of fried potatoes and several pints of beer hadn’t helped. His skin had cracked as each blink pressed and spread into glow, his face contorting with ever-deeper gawps as he yawned like a child, with no effort to hide it. He’d made sounds, audible sighs; tapped his feet, hummed. “A lot of fresh air, fresh sea air, today.” He’d felt his neck begin to loll.
At some point he’d heard footsteps in the hall. He hoisted himself against the bedhead, the pattern of its wrought iron digging in his back. I definitely heard a heel on the floor. His mind flashed with the image of the upended horse. How shiny its shoes had looked, he thought, how new. He shook his head and pinched his nose. Anything but that. He focused on the hallway tiles. Their geometric pattern had been printed on his mind; the tessellating blacks and whites, the buff, oatmeal and terracotta. It was so familiar. It reminded him of entryways he’d been in countless times, in countless townhouses, offices or practices that he could neither remember nor describe.
The sound of the footsteps had been known to him too, the gait, it’s drag and snap. Other tenants, he’d been told, stayed for the season. Or one did. Or they once had. “He winters here,” the proprietor had said. Cordonnery had turned away from the door, so as not to be looking directly at it in case whoever it was entered.
“I must’ve drifted off,” he said aloud, as though there was someone in bed beside him. Cordonnery rubbed his eyes. He shuffled down the mattress and sank into the pillow. Outside the sky had shaded to a powdered indigo, dusty with the evening already encroaching. The days are short, he thought. Always shorter than I imagine. The nights much longer.
On the wall opposite the parlour door, there had been a large and gilt-edged mirror hung above the fireplace. Cordonnery had snuck sideways glances at the reflection from the hall. The footsteps had still been approaching. For how long had they been approaching?
Cordonnery was too tired to take his jacket off, remove his trousers, slip beneath the blankets.
He’d been told to wait; he had been waiting. The other guest had come in. Must have, the front door had slammed. He could hear the proprietor moving around on an upstairs floor. Footsteps approaching. Cordonnery had looked over his shoulder. The clock on the mantelpiece was chiming. The mirror hung above the mantle. He’d peeked out from the fronds and leaves, sat in his chair in the conservatory window. Yes, it was the guest. He’d come to the door.
Cordonnery sat up in bed. “I’ve seen that man before.”
