The man behind the counter filled Benny’s mug with a brown foam of coffee and slapped a bacon sandwich down before the other man at the counter. Johnson, sitting back by the café wall, his breakfast finished, watched them closely in the way he had perfected, seeming not to, seeming miles off.
“An’ it’s allus this time of the month.”
“Didn’t know you still had them, Benny, times of the month.”
Benny shook his head, dismissing-or just missing-the joke. “I don’ mean that.”
“What do ya mean then, pal?”
“I don’ like it. Great big bloody dog like that, out there in the water when it starts ter get dark and just that big moon ter show it.”
“Sure it weren’t a shark?”
“Dog. It was a dog.”
“Live and let live,” said the counter man.
Benny slouched to a table. “You ain’t seen it.”
After breakfast Johnson had meant to walk up steep Hill Road and take the rocky path along the clifftop and inland, through the forest of newish high-rises, well-decked shops, and SF-movie-dominated cinemas, to the less fashionable supermarket at Crakes Bay.
Now he decided to go eastwards along the beach, following the cliff line, to the place where the warning notices were. There had been a few major rockfalls in the 1990s, so he had heard; less now, they said. People were always getting over the council barricade. A haunt of drug-addicts, too, that area, ‘down-and-outs holing up like rats’ among the boarded-up shops and drownfoundationed houses farther up. Johnson wasn’t afraid of any of that. He didn’t look either well-off or so impoverished as to be desperate. Besides, he’d been mugged in London once or twice. As a general rule, if you kept calm and gave them what they wanted without fuss, no harm befell you. No, it was in a smart office with a weakened man in tears that harm had happened.
The beach was an easy walk. Have to do something more arduous later.
The sand was still damp, the low October sun reflecting in smooth, mirrored strafes where the sea had decided to remain until the next incoming tide fetched it. A faintly hazy morning, salt-smelling and chilly and fresh.
Johnson thought about the dog. Poor animal, no doubt belonging to one of the drugged outcasts. He wondered if, neglected and famished, it had learned to swim out to sea, catching the fish that a full moon lured to the water’s surface.
There were quite a few other people walking on the beach, but after the half mile it took to come around to the pier-end, none at all. There was a dismal beauty to the scene. The steely sea and soft grey-blue sky featuring its sun. The derelict promenade, much of which had collapsed. Behind these the defunct shops with their look of broken toy models, and then the long, helpless arm of the pier, with the hulks of its arcades and tea-rooms, and the ballroom, now mostly a skeleton, where had hung, so books on Sandbourne’s history told one, sixteen crystal chandeliers.
Johnson climbed the rocks and rubbish-soggy pizza boxes, orange peels, beer cans-and stood up against the creviced pavement of the esplanade. It looked as if bombs had exploded there.
Out at sea nothing moved, but for the eternal sideways running of the waves.
At the beginning of the previous century, a steamboat had sailed across regularly from France, putting in by the pier, then a white confection like a bridal cake. The strange currents that beset this coast had made that the only safe spot. The fishing fleet had gone out from here too, this old part of the city-town, the roots of which had been there, it seemed, since Saxon times. Now the boats put off from the west end of Sandbourne, or at least they did so when the rest of Europe allowed it.
Johnson wondered whether it was worth the climb, awkward now with his leg, over the boarding and notices. By day there were no movements, no people. They were night dwellers very likely, eyes sore from skunk, skins scabrous from crack.
And by night, of course, this place would indeed be dangerous.
As he turned and started back along the shore, Johnson’s eye was attracted by something not the cloud-and-sea shades of the morning, lying at the very edge of the land. He took it at first for some unusual shell or sea-life washed ashore. Then decided it must be something manufactured, some gruesome modern fancy for Halloween, perhaps.
In fact, when he went down the beach and saw it clearly, lying there as if it had tried to clutch at the coast, kept its grip but let go of all else, he found it wasn’t plastic or rubber but quite real. A man’s hand, torn off raggedly just behind the wrist bone, a little of which stuck out from the bloated and discolouring skin.
Naturally he thought about it, the severed hand.
He had never, even in London, come across such an item. But then, probably, he’d never been in the right (wrong) place to do so.
Johnson imagined that one of the down-and-outs had killed another, for drugs or cash. Maybe even for a burger from the Alnite Caff.
He did wonder, briefly, if the near-starving dog might have liked to eat the hand. But there wasn’t much meat on a hand, was there?
That evening, after he had gone to the supermarket and walked all the way back along Bourne Road, he poured himself a Guinness and sat at his table in the little ‘study’ of the bungalow and wrote up his find in his journal. He had kept a journal ever since he started work in Staff Liaison. Case-notes, histories… people-cameos, whole bios sometimes.
Later he fried a couple of chops and ate them with a green salad.
Nothing on TV. He read Trollope until 11:36, then went to bed.
He dreamed of being in the sea, swimming with great strength and ability, although in reality he had always been an inadequate swimmer. In the dream he was aware of a dog nearby, but was not made afraid by this. Instead he felt a vague exhilaration, which on waking he labeled as a sort of puerile pleasure in unsafety. Physically he had long outgrown it. But there, deep in his own mind, perhaps not so?
The young man was leaning over his motorbike, adjusting something apparently. The action was reminiscent of a rider with his favourite steed, checking the animal for discomfort.
Johnson thought he had seen him before. He was what? Twenty-five, thirty? He had a thick shock of darkish fair hair, cut short the way they did now, and a lean face from which the summer tan was fading. In the sickly glare under the streetlight his clothes were good but ordinary. He had, Johnson thought, very long fingers, and his body was tall and almost athletic in build.
This was outside the pub they called in Sandbourne the “Biker Inn.”
Johnson didn’t know the make of the bike, but it was a powerful model, elegant.
Turning off Ship Street, Johnson went into the Cat In Clover. He wasn’t yet curious as to why he had noted the man with the bike. Johnson noted virtually everyone. An hour into the evening he did, however, recall where he had twice seen him before, which was in the same launderette Johnson himself frequented. Nice and clean then. Also perhaps, like Johnson, more interested in coming out to do the wash than in buying a machine.
During the rest of the week Johnson found he kept seeing the man he then named, for the convenience of the journal, Biker. The rather mundane region where Johnson lived was one of those village-in-city conurbations featured by London journalists writing on London -like Hampstead, for example, if without the dosh. You did get to be aware, indirectly, sometimes, of the locals, as they of you, perhaps. Johnson believed that in fact he wasn’t coincidentally and now constantly “bumping into” Biker, but that he had become aware of Biker. Therefore he noticed him now each time he saw him, whereas formerly he had frequently seen him without noticing, therefore without consciously seeing.