the house by the sea pt. 4: a voice in the dark

The sky was rough charcoal grey and heaved under the weight of its own possibility and the rain had come and fell hard with it and the wind blew violent and with great force lifted the waves and spat them crashing into the land when they arrived at the house by the sea. It crouched between telegraph poles, dirty white at the cliff’s edge, weathered by the salt and by the constant wind, the peripheries of its former garden now lost to the encroaching tides, an essential amputation that bought time in weeks or months if nothing more. There was a glass conservatory to the front of the house and through the glass he could see houseplants in black plastic pots still green and alive, the hopefulness of which somehow felt so inappropriate, and bottles thick with dust through the windows into the kitchen, of wine and different vinegars and plant feeder, whose labels had faded with time. A sign out front read: ‘This house is still occupied and will be until the sea gets too close’, painted in cheap white emulsion on a square of fractured hardboard whose edges had become papery in the rain; the neighbouring houses had all been sold off, bought by the local authority at knock-down prices so they could be demolished before the cliff gave in, part of an initiative to build a new car park and visitor cafe and reconstruct safe beach access. It had been the only choice left, said the distributed literature, as though the authority of sanctioned parking spaces could somehow put an end once and for all to the problems of unstable land, as though redistribution of the village some metres inland could in any way evade this awful certainty. The insurers wouldn’t touch it, and they’d cut the money they had once poured into sea defences which now rot on the beech like a fallen army, the remnants of a once mighty civilization, their wood and metal now twisted and corroded and powerless against the persistence of the water, leaving great chunks of East Anglia to sink back into the past in which it had always stagnated. The house was not occupied; the sign had been left along with everything else when the problem spread.

They pulled the tandem into the front garden and listened to the sea and longed for something less constant and less sure, but it was their best option. The village had a rushed feeling of emptiness and the cliff left the house defensible, with the only approaching road eroding in a sheer drop downwards like a dream, a project left on hold until the land could be built to accommodate it. In this desertion they would see neither living nor dead, they hoped together. It was the very end. There was a flatbed truck left along one side of the house and he opened the passenger door and popped open the bonnet but the engine had been taken. They walked to the end of the garden where the land stopped and looked down to the sea. The waves left heaps of foam in their wake. They could see a pile of four or five bodies at the foot of the cliff all snagged on bits of sea defence, their backs facing upwards, the darkness of their clothes breaking through the yellow foam in conspicuous streaks when the waves withdrew. The sea reached the very foot of the cliff and the violated defences jutted conquered from the water. Behind them the house almost whimpered with its own impermanence. The last time he and Linda had been there together had been two or even three years previous, when there was no the problem. A towering metal staircase had been erected, sunk into concrete in the centre of the beach and connected to the cliff by a walkway that creaked with every step and moaned in the wind and which you could peer down through to the sand beneath, the only route down to the beach around the subsiding soils. The staircase still stood but the walkway was gone, and he felt an affinity with the kind of haunting ridiculousness of the spectacle. Untouched by all but the sea it would remain for centuries, and form the foundation of future myths of morality or of creation, myths borne of its own neglected metallurgy, its corroded banisters still gasping above risen sea levels, and with the land receded all the further it would be just a speck in the still sea beyond the falling waves, a memorial to an affluence and arrogance that would never again compose a humanity, a memorial to certain failure. He felt Linda’s hand take his own and they felt the wind on their faces and stood for some time which didn’t feel lost but merely used. The bodies bobbed on the rising water with a good humour that belied the truth of their presence there.

He looked around at Linda whose eyes were closed and led her back towards the house. The door was open as he had imagined it would be. There were plates on the table with half-eaten meals still on them, the food spoiled and congealed into a coarse scab of gravy and sauce, piles of dirty washing dropped around the room, TV remotes left upturned on the arm of the sofa, as if whoever lived here had remembered something they needed to urgently do and had just gone out awhile. He went out to the tandem and started to unload their provisions from the trailer, passed a box of candles to Linda, who lit a couple with a cheap cigarette lighter and melted some of the wax onto two saucers and then stuck the candles into the cooling wax. He carried everything into the living room and piled it neatly onto the floor. The house was furnished sparsely and it looked very outdated but was more than adequate for their needs. There was a large open fireplace full of fine cold grey wood ash that looked like a landscape in miniature. Linda found a packet of cigarettes which still contained eight cigarettes and held it up for him to see. He looked inside the packet and nodded and then put it in his shirt pocket to save for some possibly appropriate time. Life itself looks outdated, he thought. They set to clearing things up, methodically piling all of the dirty cups and crockery into the kitchen sink and the dirty clothes into a laundry basket that they found in the conservatory. The water was still running but he figured it would only be good for another day or so. They filled up some containers and lined them up in the kitchen. He would have to break up some of the pallets he had seen outside so he could then fix the planks to the windows and to the door at night. He opened one of the kitchen cupboards which was clad with a custard-yellow melamine and found a bottle of supermarket scotch. He poured a good shot into two clean glasses and passed one to Linda and they drank in silence. The scotch burned but felt good. He found himself expecting to see people or cars pass by the windows but there were just brittle leafless lengths of spiralling bramble and clusters of huge green weeds as tall as he was that leant with the wind. He would enjoy boarding them over as there was no reason not to. Raindrops hit the corrugated roof of the conservatory and sounded like popping corn. Linda jumped when they heard a dull thump come from one of the rooms at the back, so loud out of the silence. He put his glass down and opened one kitchen drawer and then another, found a claw hammer and took it out. Linda was already holding the screwdriver she had been carrying when she arrived at his place yesterday. They walked in single file back out through the living room and into the hallway that led off of it. There was a dead kid on the floor of the first bedroom. His head was beaten in at the front and the skin of his face was limp over the sunken frontal bone and they could see the brain destroyed beneath it. There was a bloody table leg on the floor alongside the body and the kid’s eyes were half open and his face locked in this awful penetrating expression, and he knelt down and laid a blanket over the kid, which somehow rendered it as soft furnishing or decor rather than the dead kid they both knew it to be. They heard the sound again from the room next door and followed it. There was another kid, a little girl, he figured five or six but was bad with ages. The problem had got her. She was sitting with her back against a wall and a huge wooden wardrobe had been pulled down onto her legs to keep her from moving. He could see the legs almost completely flattened beneath the wardrobe, skin and flesh bunched up into doughy wedges like decorations adorning the raw tibias where she had tried to pull herself free, and she lurched her torso towards them in the doorway. This was what he and it had amounted to. He could see the tendons in the kid’s tensed arms where the skin had decayed and she snarled like an animal, the threadbare carpet around her left darkened by her slowly collapsing body. Linda was looking away, had her hand over her eyes. Five or six, he said to himself, and repeated it and looked at the kid. He barely noticed the smell in the room but saw Linda trying to throw up. “She’s a child,” said Linda. “Just a kid.” He put his hand on Linda’s shoulder and took her back into the living room, gave her another shot of the scotch and sat her down on the sofa as though they were visitors, family friends on a day trip. He returned to the second bedroom and closed the door softly behind him. The kid looked at him with vacant resolve, with guttural exclamations; like she knew that he himself was doing what he had to. No hard feelings. He pulled a soiled sheet from the single bed and rolled it up and carefully took hold of the kid’s lank hair and poked the sheet into her mouth with the handle end of the hammer to stop her biting down. He lined the hammer up in the middle of her forehead and then the centre of her cranium but he felt his arms heavy and weak and knew that he couldn’t bring himself to do it, that she was just five or six. The door opened and he could feel Linda’s eyes on him, could hear her crying. He put the hammer onto the floor and knelt in front of the kid, sounds dulled by the sheet, and he gripped onto her head with one hand on each side and slammed it backwards into the wall over and over and the decay-softened skull broke quickly and he kept on slamming until his hands were bloody and there was really nothing left but fragments of bone and diced brain and he realised his eyes were tightly shut.

He stood and walked wordlessly past Linda to the kitchen to wash his hands, then carried the two dead children outside and to the edge of the cliff, and dropped their bodies into the wind and the sea. He locked the door behind him and sat exhausted on the sofa. Linda’s face was pink and swollen from tears and she sat next to him and gave him the bottle of scotch which he drank from, and then took the cigarettes from his pocket and lit one for them to share, and after a while she kissed him very gently on the face and the neck and they made love slowly and quietly where they sat, and the candlelight flickered in the draught of the old house, and he listened to her voice encouraging him in the dark.