The Endless Beach Page 13

  He turned his face to the sand.

  “What if they are injured, Lorenah? What if one of them has lost a hand, an arm . . . You still want everyone looking, asking? Huh?”

  Lorna didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “I’m sorry,” she said eventually. “I’m sure Flora hasn’t told anyone else.”

  Saif shook the paper furiously. “Are you?” he said. “I . . . I am not sure.”

  And he turned round and stalked off down the beach and Lorna watched him go in absolute dismay, wanting to be cross with Flora but knowing full well deep down that the fault was entirely her own.

  * * *

  It was odd. Saif was to remember every second of the next two weeks in the same way he remembered the very first night of his eldest son Ibrahim’s life: in the house, every second weighing upon him with the enormity of how his world had changed forever as he gazed down at this tiny, tiny being, while Amena slept in the back room, torn and utterly wearied.

  That first night had been quiet. He remembered every sound the cicadas made in the courtyard; the distant rumble of Damascus traffic that didn’t permeate into their pleasant suburb; the little bundle, with bright red cheeks, tiny fists, a wobble of black hair. It wasn’t crying exactly, just snuffling and twisting slightly crossly. Saif had been a doctor for long enough to know that he should of course leave him to settle and on absolutely no account lift him up. He lifted him up.

  In that tiny yet huge new world and new dawn, he had walked Ibrahim up and down, out into the blessed cool of the courtyard, where the heavy scent of the hibiscus petals opening up in the night lay upon the gathering dew and mingled with the dusty smell of the city streets and the last remnants of the delicate scent of evening meals passing on the breeze. They had paced up and down, Saif and his baby, as Saif pointed out the moon and the stars above and told him how he’d love him to there and beyond, and the little thing had snuffled and nuzzled into him and fallen asleep on his shoulder and Saif had promised to protect him with his life.

  He had not done that. He had failed. The world Ibrahim had been born into—and Ash too—had slowly, then to their mounting disbelief very suddenly, crumbled around their ears. And worse: it had crumbled as the rest of the world had stood by, wrung its hands, prevaricated, wobbled.

  But that first night. The heavy scents; the quiet rumbling; the tiny, snuffling, incessantly alive creature in his arms; where it had all begun. And now, did he have the chance to begin again?

  ***

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” said Flora. “I am so, so sorry.”

  Flora had closed the shop on the Monday. Partly because she was just so exhausted after the wedding and partly because they had literally nothing to sell and she was going to have to wait for supplies to be replenished—flour, and milk for more butter to be churned. There was a real problem when you promised to make everything locally. You couldn’t just nip out to the cash-and-carry and stick everything back in the cupboard.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” said Lorna. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “You didn’t tell me! I guessed!”

  Flora had gone to fetch Lorna from school, where she had nervously covered over a book she was reading in her office.

  “What’s that?” Flora had said suspiciously, but Lorna had shaken her head and refused to answer. “If it’s How to Leave Teaching, I will kill you,” said Flora.

  Lorna shook her head. “God, no,” she said, waving at the collection of pupils who liked to stay behind in the playground for some fairly competitive intramural football matches. It was easy to have intramural matches in a school with only two classes, and sometimes the bigger ones would make up the numbers in the littler class.

  The little school sat at the top of the hill overlooking Mure Town. Made of red sandstone, it still had the original carved letters over the doors for “Boys” and “Girls.” It was a windy spot in the wintertime, but in the summer the high vista with water on two sides of the hilltop, the town down in the sheltered harbor below, the boats steaming off to far-distant lands, and the oil rigs on the horizon was a beautiful sight. Of course, the view was entirely unappreciated by the children who ran freely back and forth there, blithely unaware of their unfettered childhood—unconstrained by helicopter parents. Everyone knew all the other parents, and the children roamed at will—the few cars on the island rarely traveled at more than twenty miles an hour anyway—up and down the lanes and in and out of each other’s houses.

  There was danger on Mure—in unattended creeks; in climbing the fell in bad weather; or in jumping in the sea on a day when the riptide wanted to pull you out—and regardless of how warm the summer’s day might be, the water was never going to be warm. But the normal dangers—of heavy traffic, of abduction, and of strangers and muggings—were not present. Children were free to play. In the long winter months, they had to hunker down, like everyone else, with books or video games. But as soon as the light returned, desperate to be free, they were outside as late and as long as possible. It was not unusual, in the height of the summer when the sun never set, to see children playing in broad daylight at ten o’clock in the evening.

  “No,” said Lorna again. “Actually, I want to do more of it. I just need more people to have some damn children.”

  “Probably starting with us,” said Flora gloomily as they headed down to the Harbor’s Rest. There was a pretty beer garden there, as long as you were wearing a fleece, and they sat outside, smiling happily at other friends coming past.

  “Hahaha,” said Lorna. “God, there’s more chance of Mure getting the Olympics.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Flora. “Oh God, can you imagine? All those rowers?”

  “You’re going to fix it, aren’t you, Flores?”

  “I don’t know,” said Flora soberly. “I seriously don’t know where his head is. He’ll be back soon. And meanwhile, I don’t dare look at the accounts.”

  “Just send Jan another invoice.”

  “I would,” said Flora, “except I know exactly what will happen: ‘Ooh, Flora, I know you’re so jealous of our amazing happiness but I would have thought you could have spared a thought for penniless orphans, blah, blah, blah . . .’”

  “Can’t you talk to Charlie on his own?”

  “Oh God, no, he’s terrified of me now, like I’m suddenly about to cast my womanly wiles and try to ensnare him, like I totally didn’t do last time. Gah.”

  “Maybe it’s Mure,” said Lorna. “Maybe it’s being on this island makes our love lives totally suck.”

  “Has to be,” said Flora. “Can we go drinking on a school night more? I mean, if you can pay . . .”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” said Flora. “Yes. It really is that bad.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Saif had had a flurry of checks. A woman had come to check the house, and as he looked at it through the eyes of a stranger—the first person apart from Mrs. Laird who had stepped over the threshold since he’d moved in the previous year—he realized how unsuitable it was for children: still full of the last occupant’s heavy dusty furniture; an ancient creaky fridge; no television.

  He tried to cheer up the bedrooms upstairs by ordering some stencils from the mainland—boats and rocket ships, who knew what boys liked? But they made the old sofas with their antimacassars and the damp, sagging beds somehow look rather worse. The woman, however, simply checked a bunch of boxes on a form and said nothing either positive or negative. Evidently he had passed as he soon got an e-mail requesting that he present himself at an address in Glasgow on a certain date—and to expect to book lodgings for two weeks. His young, rather ditzy-seeming replacement had arrived from the mainland, and Saif tried to slip away without anyone noticing. He also tried to sleep at night, a million questions swirling around his head. It was not, he thought morosely, the best of times to fall out with his only friend, who also worked with small children every day. But his pride stopped him from cal
ling her—he never called her anyway; their relationship was much more casual. To call her felt like it would be crossing a line. And his thoughts were so overwhelming he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  At last the day came.

  He tried to slip into Annie’s Café by the Sea without attracting attention—which is actually quite difficult when you are a six-foot-one Middle Eastern man on a small Scottish island where you are one of only two doctors.

  “Hello, Dr. Saif!” chorused Iona and Isla as he walked through the door. He looked nervously around for Flora—he was reasonably sure Lorna would have told her everything—but she wasn’t out front yet. She was still finishing off some chive and herb focaccia out the back, with the expectation that in today’s mild but windy weather something that could be eaten by the harborside but wouldn’t blow away might be just the ticket, and trying to balance the accounts, which was an upsetting job at the best of times.

  “Um . . . can I have some kibbeh?” he said. He had absolutely no idea that Flora had finally gotten wise to the falafel catastrophe and put the hot spiced lamb sandwich on the menu purely for him. It had never even occurred to him. Now they had become instantly wildly popular in the village and were beginning to be seen as quite the specialty, excellent lamb being something Mure had no shortage of.

  “Of course!”

  The bell tinged, and old Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Blair came in together, quite flustered.

  “That whale is back! Look! It’s not safe!”

  “It’ll block the ferry.”

  “Flora, you need to do something!”

  “No, I don’t,” said Flora immediately.

  Iona immediately grabbed her phone.

  “I’m going to stick it on my Insta.”

  “It always just looks like a blob,” said Isla.

  “Well, I’ll zoom in then. Whale selfie.”

  “It’s not a whale,” said Mrs. Kennedy seriously.

  “Okay, well why did you just say, ‘The whale is back’?” said Iona petulantly, shuffling with the camera on her phone.

  “It’s a narwhal,” she said. “It’s very wise, very rare, very beautiful, and absolutely is going to overwhelm this entire island before they sort it out.”

  “What do you mean?” Saif couldn’t help himself asking.

  “Oh hi, Saif. Now, I really am having a terrible bit of trouble with my . . .”

  Saif was used to this kind of thing and brushed it off.

  “Make an appointment with Jeannie . . . I mean, why will we be overwhelmed?”

  “Tourists,” tutted Mrs. Kennedy, as if tourism wasn’t the lifeblood of absolutely everything they did. “Everyone wants to see one. Then the authorities will want to tow it away. Then the Greenpeace campaigners will turn up.”

  “What do they want with it?”

  “They don’t know either. I think they just like their pictures being taken next to it. Flora, just go talk to it.”

  “It’s not like that!” said Flora. “I’m not a seal! And you’re being . . . seal-ist!”

  “All the women in your family can talk to whales.”

  “Is this true?” said Saif.

  “Yes, Man of Science, it is,” said Flora, rolling her eyes. “Do you want coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Flora passed him his customary four sugars. “I need to catch the ferry,” said Saif. Flora blinked. She wanted to ask why but didn’t dare.

  “The ferry won’t go if it’s in its way,” said Mrs. Blair.

  “I am trapped,” said Saif, trying to sound casual but actually panicking. His meeting in Glasgow was at 4:30. He had to make this ferry—he had to—and it had to be on time. He hadn’t slept a wink. He had spoken constantly out loud to Amena as if she were there, but he’d felt stupider than ever. He was terrified. He wished Lorna and he were still friends, that she could come with him; he knew what she was like with children. But of course she didn’t speak Arabic and the children would be even more confused, and, no, that was a terrible idea too. Oh God, why couldn’t they have found his wife?

  But no. This was his to do alone. But on what should be the happiest, most amazing day of his life—the day he had dreamed and dreamed would come when his babies would be returned to him—he was filled with terror and foreboding. If he said the wrong thing, would they refuse to let him take them? Would they think they’d been radicalized? Surely not—they were only little.

  As a rule, he tried to avoid the sensationalist headlines—most people on Mure read the local news and little else. The passing crazes of Edinburgh and Westminster and Washington meant little to people whose lives were measured by the changes in the weather and the length of the days, not Twitter and politics and shouting on television debates.

  But still, he knew it was out there: ugly, ill feeling that infected people whether they wanted it to or not; every terrible tragedy; every spitting, postulating right-wing and left-wing and all sorts of crazy given airtime. He just kept his head down, tried to do his job as well as he was able. And of course, as people got to know him they knew what was more or less intrinsic to human beings: everyone was pretty much all right, just bumbling along trying to make the best of it like everybody else, although he disliked it when people felt the urge to point out to him that he was all right, you know? Because he knew it meant “for one of them,” however kindly said.

  He accepted his coffee and bade everyone a good morning.

  “Why are you going to the mainland?” said Mrs. Blair suspiciously. She hadn’t been to the mainland since her daughter had married an Aviemore snowboarder, and, well, look how that had all turned out. It had confirmed to her absolutely that going off the island was pretty much a bad idea, and why would anybody have to, seeing as everything anyone could ever possibly want was here, in her opinion?

  Saif hadn’t thought about people asking him this, although he had a brief moment of relief that she didn’t know already.

  “Um, bit of shopping?” he tried vainly. It was a reason he’d heard from people before, which was specific enough to give a reason and vague enough to discourage speculation, so hopefully it would do. It would be all round the village by nightfall that he was some kind of crazed shopaholic, but there wasn’t very much he could do about that. Flora didn’t catch his eye.

  Mrs. Blair nodded. “Well, be careful on that mainland,” she said. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Thank you,” said Saif.

  ***

  By the time he reached the harbor and nodded to the other passengers—there were more than usual as the flight had been canceled—the narwhal had, he assumed, moved on. There was no holdup and soon the mate was unwinding the thick rope from the harborside, and the pastel-colored houses of Mure, jolly and sparkling in the windy sunlight, started to recede from view. The water grew choppier and the puttering noise of the boat tilted them up and down in a way that reminded Saif unpleasantly of another journey across the sea—memories of which faded into dimmer images in the daytime but were never terribly far from him in dreams that were filled with the weeping women and, somehow worse, the silent children who had learned how to stay very quiet and still as their world was torn apart around them. He remembered the rough shouting of the smugglers, who would send a swift kick to those they didn’t think were moving fast enough, and the freezing cold of the waves—he had never known such cold as they broke over the side—and the strong smell of cheap diesel infiltrating everything, even over the unwashed bodies, and the fear of the people crammed together inside. It had been a glimpse of hell.

  Saif shut his eyes briefly and tried to dispel the memories and focus on the task ahead. His heart was glad, but still so fearful. He wished . . . Oh, how he wished Amena were there. He imagined—let himself imagine briefly as he stood with his hands gripping the railing far too hard—walking into a small windowless room, like the many he had passed through as he’d been singled out and processed into the new world of the British Isles. He imagined himself
walking through the door, and Amena there, her long hair shining, smiling at him, as beautiful as she’d been on their wedding day, her face lighting up, the boys as beautiful and loving as ever, saying, “It’s okay! It’s okay! I took care of them! They’re fine! And now we shall all be happy!”

  His eyes shot open. This was a ridiculous fantasy and it would not help him in the slightest to deal with the real world: to deal with things as they were. Spray splashed up against the side of the boat. And then . . . He squinted. Surely not. Surely . . . Was he still dreaming? Was that . . . ?

  He stood alone, most of the other passengers having decided the wind was just a little too bracing, so they had taken happy refuge in the cafeteria or the bar below. He stared straight ahead, but his brain couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. It was a whale—the whale he had seen, he was sure of it, the same deep belly, the white tinge to the skin, the same beautiful twist of curves, as if a child had drawn parabolas on the sky.

  But there really was something different he could clearly make out now. This whale had . . . There was no denying it . . . It had a horn, like a unicorn’s. It was huge, twisted like barley sugar, and it protruded from the animal’s mouth. It was the single strangest thing that Saif had ever seen: stranger than the phosphorescence on the Greek shore, or the scarab beetle his brother had once kept in a matchbox, marveling over its jewel-like brilliance.

  But this . . . This must have beamed in from space, or from some other magical realm. It really was quite the most amazing thing Saif had ever seen, and it frolicked in the wake of the big ferry as the water churned up behind it. Saif was worried it would get sucked underneath the great propellers, but it seemed perfectly happy, swimming under and over the bouncing wake, curling itself up and down.

  Was this a symbol? A message, even, from Amena? Saif was not the holiest of men: he was a scientist and had been trained to be rational. But surely it would take a harder heart than his not to think it possible, as the great, impossible beast tossed in the sunlight glinting off the waves . . . If wonderful, amazing things could happen . . . Well . . .