E-Book, Englisch, 148 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-912665-28-0
Verlag: Story Machine
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Sarah Bower is the author of three previous novels and is also a short story writer and essayist. She is a lecturer in creative writing at the Open University where she is also a creative and critical writing PhD candidate. Sarah lived in Suffolk for twenty years and now lives in Norwich. She finds the bleak, shifting East Anglian coastline endlessly inspiring.
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3 She knew no more until her travelling alarm clock was ringing in her ear and Frank’s voice on the other side of her door was confirming that it was six a.m. The light filtering through the curtains promised a fine morning. She opened them on to a cloudless sky, an expanse of delicate aquamarine behind the castle, shading to primrose yellow as she looked to her left, to the east and the sea and the rising sun. The light gilded the tower’s old stones, lending them a honeyed glow and haloing the sheep as they cropped the mound. In daylight she could see the tower was only part of the ruin, that an arch at its base gave on to a courtyard surrounded by the rubble of walls. A pair of gulls perched on the battlements, their morning quarrel easily loud enough to be heard through the glass; they rose into the air as a horse-drawn milk float clopped past then returned to their perch and continued their squabble. The sea itself was barely a glint in the corner of Ginny’s eye yet it pervaded everything, as if the light only came to her refracted from its surface. As the girls walked down the lane after breakfast, it dipped completely out of sight of the water, but the sea’s restless shushing filled Ginny’s ears and she could taste salt on her tongue. Her lungs filled with the iodine tang of seaweed. Outside the final cottage in the row they were joined by two other girls, one introduced as Jean, the other whose name she failed to catch. Jean, who was short and curvaceous and wearing a pink bobble hat, cast Ginny a mournful look and asked, ‘I suppose you’re in poor Sue’s room?’ ‘Sue?’ Custodian, she assumed, of the third bicycle in the bathroom. ‘Yes. Surely they’ve told you…’ ‘Those are our boats.’ The lane had opened out on to a broad sandy space strewn with fishing boats and tractors. There was a slipway into a narrow channel of steely water and a row of mooring posts alongside it. A single storey building of gunmetal grey weatherboarding with a lookout tower bore a sign beside the door proclaiming it to be the harbourmaster’s office. Flags and a windsock snapped from the pole on its roof. The boats to which Frank was pointing were moored together, six of them, painted in matching camouflage with outboard motors and cross thwarts and a uniformed helmsman sitting in the stern of each. Ginny had no time to wonder about the mysterious ‘poor Sue’ as the civilians employed on the base converged on the boats and jostled for places. There were ten of them to each boat. She found herself sitting between Alicia and a nondescript man of indeterminate age who reminded her of the clerks in her father’s office, kindly, balding, with pockets full of humbugs. Men in whose eyes she would never be more than ten or eleven, an odd little girl with an arithmetic book in the corner of the room. Alicia turned round to chat to the girls sitting behind her, the man fought with the breeze for his newspaper as their boat bobbed out into the channel. The channel was not wide, but the breeze blowing straight across their bow from the south made it choppy. Ginny enjoyed a day on the beach as much as the next person but she was wary of the sea. Its endless, restless shifting made it feel to her like a bad night’s sleep interrupted by dreams of impermanence. She checked her appointment letter was safe in her handbag and checked again, and then their helmsman was throttling back the motor as they came alongside the base landing stage. As she watched his manoeuvres, something unexpected appeared in the tail of her eye, something dark and round, there and then gone. ‘What was that?’ The words seemed to well up involuntarily from somewhere deep in her unconscious, prompted by an instinctive fear of the unknown, the unexpected. ‘What was what?’ asked Frank, turning to face Ginny from the thwart in front, the breeze kindling the flames of her hair. ‘I don’t know. It looked like a…a…head. Floating in the water. Should we report it? Call out the coastguard or something?’ ‘My, darling,’ Alicia exclaimed, ‘you’re as white as a sheet! I expect it was a seal. There’s a big colony at Walberswick, not so far from here. Sometimes they even come up on the Island. I think they like watching us.’ Alicia squeezed her hand, an intimacy which made Ginny feel all the more foolish and disconcerted. She forced a laugh as the helmsman leapt out of the boat to secure it to the landing stage. Aldeford Island was, in fact, a long spit of sand still joined to the mainland five miles north of the base. Until some three hundred years earlier Aldeford had had a decent deep water harbour and was a prosperous port, exporting raw East Anglian wool to Flanders and bringing back finished Flemish weave for the burghers of Lowestoft and Norwich. But this was a shifting, friable coastline, its winds and tides sometimes throwing up great mounds and ridges of mud and sand to confound the dredgers that worked ceaselessly to keep the harbour clear, sometimes gnawing at the edges of the land, flooding dykes, turning marsh water brackish, sucking houses and byres and cattle into the sea. The Island was barely a few feet above sea level, knit together by the shallow roots of marram grass and sea thrift, held in place by a weighted hem of shingle and pebbles. Even on a morning such as this, when, now the sun was up, the light possessed the solidity of an impasto, the Island had a quality of shifting, dream-like impermanence. You felt as if it would take no more than a winter storm to blow it all away, the Nissen huts, the blockhouses, the radio masts, the smartly snapping flags, the landing stage and the bobbing boats, empty now as the workers followed paths marked out by white-painted boulders towards their offices and laboratories. Ginny accompanied Alicia to Wing Commander Drummond’s office, her cheeks still burning from her foolishness over the seal, her heart thudding in her chest as if she had just run a race. What would her work here be? All her letter of appointment said was that she had been posted to ‘general computing duties’ at RAF Aldeford. It could mean anything she thought despairingly, as she followed Alicia along a sandy path towards a two-storey weatherboard block painted Air Force blue with a flagpole outside it, surrounded neatly by the ubiquitous white marker stones. Her contribution to the Cold War effort might just as easily be accounting for supplies as calculating missile trajectories. ‘You’ll be joining Section Four,’ the Wing Commander told her, after they had exchanged pleasantries about her journey from Manchester, her accommodation, and the idiosyncrasies of the Island. He was a bluff, avuncular figure with a network of broken veins over the bridge of his nose that spoke of an enjoyment of a drink. His eyes, however, had a cool, grey distance to them that left her in no doubt that he could give the order to launch a nuclear missile without breaking a sweat, if called upon to do so. ‘It’s all men, of course. Bit of a poser where to put you to be honest, but I think you’ll be comfortable there. Phin MacNamara, the chief engineer, is a married man and the photography analyst, Adrian Fletcher, is a bit older. Couple of kids, seven, eight, thereabouts. Just as well.’ He left the last comment hanging and Ginny wondered what it was about Adrian Fletcher which made it just as well he had children. He cleared his throat. ‘There are a few young chaps as well, of course, but Phin and Adrian will take care of you.’ ‘And the work?’ she enquired. ‘Ah yes. Triggers. Not the triggers themselves, you understand, we don’t do that here. Boffins elsewhere. What Section Four is doing is designing bomb-proof housings for the triggers. I know you’ve signed the Official Secrets Act so I don’t have to tell you that nothing you do can be discussed with anyone, not even your housemates. Neither of them has the same clearance level.’ Nor, Ginny speculated, was it likely either of them would be very interested. Frank apparently thought only of American pop music and Alicia seemed to have no passions at all, wherever she was behind the screen of vague and generalised niceness which enveloped her. ‘Decent girls at Briar Cottage. Such good fortune you came along when you did. Take their minds off poor Sue Reynolds.’ And as if he knew she was about to ask about ‘poor Sue’ and did not want to have to give her an answer, he picked up the phone on his desk and spoke briefly into the receiver. ‘Do come in, Bonn. Miss Matlock is ready to go to her section now.’ Flight Lieutenant Ralph Bonney – ‘Call me Bonn, everyone does, like the city’ – appeared every inch the flyboy with his chiselled jaw and a dark blond quiff which fell into his blue eyes and had to be scraped back under his cap whenever he put it on. ‘Section Four’s out on the edge,’ he said as he led her towards the seaward side of the Island, ‘I should think a girl computer will fit right in.’ ‘Can I ask you a question?’ ‘If the answer is eight o’clock in The Merman, ask away.’ Ginny shuddered, an image of the macabre pub sign staining her mind. ‘I very much doubt it,’ she said, with more vehemence than she had intended. ‘I know what you mean,’ said Bonn, apparently taking no offence. ‘It does have a bit of an odd atmosphere.’ ‘Odd how? I haven’t been in there yet. It’s just…that horrible sign. Hardly designed to welcome people in, is it?’ ‘It refers to the legend of the Aldeford Merman.’ They walked on, the cinder path skirting a shallow, reed-fringed lake. Small black and white birds on long pink...
