The Shape of Clouds Page 3

  I had a niece in Liverpool; I visited her but didn’t recognise her, she didn’t recognise me and we didn’t have anything to say. She watched television during the day and stayed out all night; I packed my sea-bag and walked away again.

  I was strong, I had savings. I did not want to drown in a dry place so I bought a tent and a new pair of boots. These were Italian and comfortable, and I began to voyage through the country.

  One foot in front of the other and I became a story sailors tell, the one about the old captain who travels the earth looking for the comfort the ocean used to give him. He sees meaning in the shape and track of clouds, and in the cast of the sun. He stands at crossroads and can hear waves as they break a hundred miles away, and he always heads towards them. He carries a shell in his pocket, and lines his shoes with seaweed, but he will always be disappointed, he will never find what he is looking for. His hands soften, he forgets to work, he weakens and dies alone in a churchyard.

  I avoided churchyards, worked casual jobs and visited every county. I never stayed long in one place, never got into a fight, never hurt anyone, never kissed a woman. Dogs liked me; they would gather at my feet if I sat in a park to eat a pie, and I would talk to them. Their owners would whistle and they’d hesitate before leaving me, but I’d wave them away, and leave alone.

  I dug ditches in Lincolnshire, built a wall in Yorkshire and sawed logs in Derbyshire. In Dyfed I painted a young farmer’s caravan, and played with his dog along the shore. In Norfolk I cleared shingle from a widow’s garden, and spread it on her drive. I visited Scotland, and spent a month on the Clyde. I haunted the deserted docks, and watched the tides. I collected driftwood and tried to whittle animals — fish, rabbits, ducks and chickens — but I never got the hang of it.

  The Clyde, Lothian and the Lammermuik Hills led me to Northumberland, where walking and working and keeping busy caught up with me. One morning I woke up with a pain in my chest and weakness in my legs; when I tried to move, I couldn’t. I lay in my bag, in my tent, listened to the wind on the canvas and had no choice. I began to call for help.

  I called for hours. I managed to crawl to the front flap and open it, and then I lay back with a view of the beach and the North Sea, a cruel, grey bastard of water. I shouted ‘Help!’ and ‘Hello!’, and rubbed my legs, but I couldn’t get any warmth or feeling into them. I began to feel curious and detached from the world, as if I was beginning to slip away from it. I was overtaken by a light-headedness; this wasn’t a drunk feeling, more like a release of pressure in my head. I cared, but I didn’t care. I wanted to enjoy life but I decided to stop calling for help and lie back instead and let the cold northern air freeze me dry.

  I was making myself comfortable, listening to my bones as they creaked, and I was wondering about God, prayers and missed opportunities when I heard movement outside. A timid voice said ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’

  ‘Yes!’ I called. ‘In here!’

  I sat up, and as I did a face appeared at the front flap, a round face with spectacles and a beard. ‘Hello?’ it said, and was joined by another, a woman. ‘Are you all right?’

  Sometimes it is difficult to be civil. I wheezed deeply, and said, ‘I can’t move my legs.’

  The woman looked at my feet, then looked at the man, and back at me. Her eyes lit up, and her mouth curled into a grotesque smile of sympathy. ‘We’ll call you an ambulance. Brian?’

  ‘Sylvie?’

  ‘Go and call an ambulance. I’ll stay here.’

  Brian pushed his glasses up his nose with his middle finger, and jogged away without another word.

  I spent a difficult hour with Sylvie, who was one of the most talkative people I have ever met. She told me about her work for British Telecom, her dislike of children, her husband’s dental practice, her home town of Oldham and the price of a cup of tea in the café they’d just visited. ‘A cup of tea, you wouldn’t believe it. Mrs Weggley does a mug, a mug mind, for twenty-five pence. That café; you couldn’t drown a mouse in their cups.’

  I wondered: could the discomfort of a slow death in a stranded tent be any worse than this as she went on and then changed the subject without a breath and told me about the many walking holidays they had enjoyed. Of course they used to go on boating holidays — narrow boats, mainly — but now it was just walking. She would ask me a question but not bother to wait for a reply. ‘Are you on holiday too? This time of year is so good for holidaying, isn’t it? Would you like a biscuit? Northumberland’s such a surprise, don’t you think?’

  Brian reappeared with a red face and the news that the ambulance was on its way. He was going back to the main road, where he had promised to meet them and direct operations.

  There was nothing I could do. I felt pathetic, useless and old. The ambulancemen tried to make light of the situation, cracking jokes about this and that, but I didn’t join in. Some feeling was returning to my legs, the numbness was stealing away; I sat up, and watched the fields fade at the edge of town.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen the inside of a hospital. I was carried in and put on a bed in a cubicle in out-patients. When the doctor came to see me he took my wrist, checked my pulse and remarked that men of my age should be careful when they went on camping holidays. ‘The cold’s more dangerous than you think,’ he said. ‘You don’t know that it’s creeping up on you, and before you know it…’ He cut the air with the side of his hand.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Before I know what?’

  ‘You could end up not waking up.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Really,’ he said, then, ‘I’d like to keep you in for a couple of days. Run a few tests.’

  ‘What tests?’

  ‘You say you couldn’t feel your legs?’

  I nodded.

  He looked at the clipboard at the end of the bed. ‘I can’t see your address. Where’s home?’

  ‘My tent is my home.’

  The doctor looked at me sideways, shook his head and said, ‘You don’t look like…’ He hesitated and looked at his shoes.’… like a man of the road.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said, and now I felt better. I swung my legs off the bed, stood up and staggered as I reached for my coat.

  ‘But you live in a tent?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and I dropped the coat and had to sit down.

  ‘In all weathers?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and I told him half my story.

  ‘When was the last time you had a check-up?’

  ‘I don’t know. Five years ago? Six?’

  ‘Okay. Okay…’ He rubbed his chin and pointed to my legs. ‘How do they feel?’

  I lied when I told him I knew I was going to be all right, and he knew it.

  ‘Mr Blaine,’ he said, seriously, ‘I’m going to admit you, if for no other reason than I think you need a rest. That’s what most men your age do all the time.’

  ‘I’m not most men,’ I said, ‘and I have a rest every day,’ but the words sounded feeble. I was feeble. I remembered a captain I served under, Captain Beck, who refused to admit that he had to retire early, who called himself feeble and died of a broken heart in a basement flat in Liverpool.

  ‘Admit your age,’ he said.

  ‘A couple of days?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  I looked down at my legs, and tried to feel my toes. ‘All right, Doctor,’ I said.

  The tests showed nothing but the doctor was right about having a rest, and told me to buy myself a bicycle. He told me that my feet were telling me something, and my legs too. He said, ‘If I’m in as good shape when I’m your age, I’ll be a happy man.’

  ‘Happy?’ I said, and I wanted to ask him what the word meant. He was an intelligent man, but there was something missing from his life. When he looked at me I think I saw a hint of envy in his eyes. His work never gave him time to reflect, his young children were tiring, his wife was tired, he hadn’t been to the cinema for years.

  ‘Yes,’
he said.

  There was something I wanted to say to him, something more than ‘Thank you, Dr Burrell,’ but I couldn’t get the words out. I was never good at advice. I could only give orders.

  He helped me on with my coat and waved me away from the hospital.

  Roads, hedges, moors and empty barns. I owned a bicycle for a year, but it was stolen in Cornwall. I had been working for a farmer, clearing dung from his barns. I had the barns clean and the cattle came in for the winter. The farmer handed me an envelope of notes, said something regretful about my bicycle, and shook my hand.

  I walked again, six miles to Blackwater, then on to St Agnes. My legs were fine. I could feel every toe. I took more sit-downs than I had before Northumberland, wore my cap all the time, and two vests. Half the body’s heat loss occurs through the scalp, several thin layers of clothing are better than two thick ones — these are a couple of pieces of advice Dr Burrell gave me. I didn’t disappoint him by telling him that I knew. He was in my thoughts as I reached Trevaunance Cove. I camped in sight of the broken blocks of granite that used to be a harbour and decided that he would have liked the place. The beach café was shuttered. The only visitors were surfers and old women with dogs.

  It rained for days, so I sat in my tent and read about St Agnes. Reading was my hobby at sea. Novels, histories and biographies; you know, the isolation of command forces a captain to develop a solitary interest. Some carve bones, others study orchids or dream about opening a hotel in a ski resort. One used to write love songs to the navigation stars and sing them to himself in the middle of the night, and I knew the Captain Willes who taught himself Cantonese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai.

  Reading was the only thing that ever caught me, picked me up and ran. I never bothered with it when I was a boy; my imagination was stronger than words, but when I went to sea, the work smothered thinking. Hard work, deep sleep, hard, wet work, sleep so complete that I could not remember a thing about it. Books did my imagination’s work.

  The first novel I read was The Happy Return by C. S. Forester, and I was hooked. I raced through every Hornblower I could lay my hands on, before a motorman leant me A Tale of Two Cities. Motorman Barton of the MV Solea out of Hamburg, with an oily rag in his back pocket, a grease gun in his hand and every novel Dickens had written in his cabin. Dickens, Stevenson, Conrad… name it.

  As I got older, my reading followed the seasons. Romances in the summer, or travel books. Biographies through the autumn, and fat, serious novels through the winter. I would lighten up as spring approached; detective stories would climb to the top of the pile, and sometimes even an old Hornblower, like an old friend sending an unexpected letter. Other worlds, other minds and the suspension of belief; these were the antidotes to navigation and the responsibilities of my work.

  In the tent, as the rain poured down. I learnt that St Agnes was a Christian virgin who refused to marry, consecrating herself to God instead. She was thirteen years old when she was executed by being stabbed in the throat, and her blood rotted the feet of her executioner. That was enough: I left the cove at the beginning of November and walked to Portreath.

  Three weeks later I was on the road from Zennack to Penogan. I stopped to rest on a broken stone wall. It was a thin and watery day and the road to Port Juliet crossed the fields that dropped to the sea, but I didn’t see it. I ate a cheese roll, and an apple.

  I like fruit. Dr Burrell had told me to eat as much of it as I could. ‘Especially oranges. You can’t have too much Vitamin C.’

  I scuffed the ground with my boots. I never forgot to rub dubbin into their stitching every night. I noticed a beautiful lichen on the wall, and a wren hunting spiders in the cracks. The clouds gathered above me, the first drops of rain began to fall, and a wind blew in from the sea.

  I turned to watch the weather come and as it did the fields changed from pale to wild, and I saw the road’s first bend. I stood up and saw more, and followed the wall to a gap, and the tumbled signpost in the verge. Thunder rumbled over the ocean, and the sun failed.

  I was at sea again. I was in the Baltic, twenty, working for my steerage certificate through waves the size of cathedrals and spires. The captain was brazen and happy. As we yawed and smashed through, he yelled and took photographs of my expressions. He would say, ‘There’s nothing to it,’ about anything.

  Playing violin in a symphony orchestra. ‘There’s nothing to it.’

  Writing Lord Jim. ‘Nothing to it.’

  He took a photograph of me and said, ‘If I can do this anyone can. All you’ve got to do is point and press the button. There’s nothing to it.’ He didn’t notice the sea, the screaming of the engines, the pumps racing or the buckled bow rail. He took another photograph. ‘Piece of cake,’ he said, as the door to the bridge wing suddenly cracked, opened and water slewed over us. ‘Secure that!’ he shouted.

  ‘Sir!’

  I left my position at the chart table and grabbed the door handle. As I did, the ship yawed over another wave, slewed to starboard and I slewed too, out of the door and on to the wing. I saw a bulkhead and I saw a rail; I put my arms out as I fell, banged my head against the bottom of the compass housing and slid towards the rail. I heard the captain shout my nickname, ‘Lucky…’, like the last word of a prayer, the ship yawed again, and I was tipped through the rail to the deck below.

  As I fell I remembered dozens of things. First, take your cap off and stuff it down your shirt. Second, call your mother’s name. Third, put your arms over your head. Fourth, yell. Fifth… Sixth… Seventh… I saw a lifebelt attached to the deck below me, then the ocean opening for me, then the lifebelt again and I landed next to it. I clipped my head on a cowling, tried to sit up, couldn’t, sat down and was immediately picked up by a churn of water and swept towards the bows.

  I heard the captain yelling again, it was my name, my name, and as I passed the bosun’s cabin I saw his face at the porthole. It was trapped and white as the ship pitched me on, and my arms thrashed and I tried to grab anything I could, anything under those circumstances. I saw lights and a wall of water, and I saw a wall of sky. My head filled with salt and my mouth with terror; the water slammed over the bows, wrenched a bolt from a hatch and tossed it towards me. I saw it coming, I watched it sitting on the lip of a curl of a wave and I knew it was coming for me, I could see the glint on the edge of the steel. Stupid how you think you recognise death; I remember wondering if the captain would be angry because I had not secured that door, as the bolt flipped off the lip and shot past me. I saw it, it was an inch away from me, flying, twisting in the air, rusty at one end and shiny where it had sheared. I ducked and felt a stanchion brush my shoulder. I grabbed it, I heard the bosun’s shout, the ship slewed again and I was wrenched around and creased against a ventilator. Another wall of water, another of sky, another wrench and I grabbed the stanchion with my other hand, and would not let go. I held on for a minute, waving backwards and forwards, feeling my cap against my skin, my skin against my cap, my cap doing its work, my cap warm as my mother’s face, my hot cap. I took short, shallow breaths.

  I saw the bosun’s face again, this time ten feet away, looking around a corner, holding a roped lifebelt. Another face appeared beside him, and he shouted, ‘Lucky!’

  I tried to shout, but failed.

  ‘We’re going to throw this!’ He held up the belt. ‘We’ll haul you in!’ The sea broke again, the ship screamed, I yelled, ‘Throw it!’, and he did. It skidded down the deck and clipped my knees; as I caught it I was swept sideways, away from the stanchion to the rail. The ocean yawned beneath me, the bosun shouted, ‘Do it, Lucky!’, and I did. I got my arms into the belt, wrapped the ropes around my wrist and I felt the first steady tug. Then another and I was being pulled. I was losing my strength but I didn’t care. I looked up and saw the captain leaning over the bridge wing. He was holding his camera, and when he saw that I was safe he took a photograph of me and called, ‘Change his watch. Bosun!’

  ‘Aye, sir.’
>
  I never owned a camera. Maybe I should have. Maybe I have been wrong to think that I will never forget. The first time I walked the road to Port Juliet, the first time I saw the ruins, the first sight of my house; everything has blurred into one. Broken waves were crashing along its shore, the offshore stacks could not be seen, the wind picked up rocks and lobbed them on to the beach. I remember these things, but at the moment, at that moment I didn’t recognise what I saw. I didn’t see the ruins as a ship to guide me, or a light blazing.

  I camped for three nights, then walked away. I was an hour gone before I realised I’d left the place I’d set out to find. I turned around and prayed that I hadn’t dreamt the place. I began to run. I put my hand on my cap. I was thinking straight. The clouds stopped and I thought: Enough.

  I bought the house from a man I never met, a Mr Simonswell. He lived in a London nursing home and owned property in fifteen English counties; the business was concluded through a solicitor in Zennack, Mr Parker. He was an old man with a room of files but never the right one. He smoked a pipe and never opened his windows. He had a huge nose and very spidery writing. He didn’t ask me any personal questions.

  ‌7

  I was on my roof when I saw the woman coming. She was walking down the road. Her hair was white like frost. I was fixing ridge tiles, bedding them in cement. While I was up there I had checked the chimney.

  I crossed the roof, climbed down the ladder and whistled for Gloria. We crossed the track behind the house and stood in the shelter of the ruined barn. From here we could see the road, my house and the edge of a bank of cloud as it rolled in from the sea. Gloria looked up at me with her tongue hanging from the side of her mouth. I touched her nose and said, ‘Don’t make a sound.’