The Endless Beach Page 23

  The boys stomped grumpily behind, Ash moaning that he had a stomachache, Ib pointing out every five minutes that he was bored. Saif thought for a second what would have happened if he had ever spoken to his own father like that, but again, it wasn’t worth bothering about right now.

  And the view from high up really was worth it, as they finally reached it and threw themselves down, complaining even though they could see all the little boats in the bay and the gray slate of the roofs of all the houses of the town.

  Saif pulled out sandwiches and cans of juice and the boys picked at them listlessly. It had heated up a little bit up here, and he stretched out on the grass and let it tickle his nose. When you got close, you could see the beetles scuttle here and there, a busy world beneath the world they lived in. Were they as concerned? Did such awful things happen? How many bugs had he trodden on just to get here, and did they even notice when children, wives, parents got lost—vanished off the face of the earth?

  Even so, it was pleasant up in the hills. Even Ib had lost his characteristically guarded look. Saif stared at him.

  “Do you guys . . . ?”

  He tried to start casually. It had been the last thing Neda had said to him before they left. They had to discuss Amena. Don’t make a big deal out of it, she’d said. Just talk about her. Just let it flow naturally so they didn’t feel that anything was their fault, or not up for discussion. It would be hard at first, but the more they talked, the better it would get. He had nodded when she’d said that, thinking how reasonable she sounded.

  “Do you think about Mama a lot?”

  Ash shot up immediately. “Mama is coming? She’s here? Mama’s back?”

  Ib read Saif’s expression better. “Of course she isn’t, you idiot. She’s probably dead. And even if she wasn’t, why would she want to come here?”

  The crushed look on Ash’s face made Saif more furious with Ibrahim than he’d ever been with anyone in his life. He did his best to swallow it down. He was so upset he could have . . . No. No. It was a child he was dealing with. A sad, wounded child without a mother.

  He did his level best to keep his voice calm.

  “We don’t know where Mama is,” he said softly. “But lots of people are looking for her. I just want you to tell me a bit about how you think about her and how you feel.”

  Catastrophe unfolded. Ash collapsed into hysterical tears, like those of a two-year-old: endless, sobbing until he was hyperventilating. He cried until he threw up the sandwiches and scones all over the grass, whereupon Ibrahim called him a disgusting baby, which made him cry more and Ib stormed off in disgust.

  Saif tried to hold on to Ash and move him away, even as a large column of ants came to investigate the spew, and grabbed his phone to call Neda, cursing when he remembered, yet again, that there wasn’t a bloody mobile signal in the middle of one of the most peaceful, technologically advanced countries in the world—and he swore again.

  “I just want Mama back,” Ash was howling and Saif rocked him like a baby, while shouting for Ibrahim, at first crossly, and then more and more worriedly. The fell was trickier than it looked; there were plenty of gullies and precipices one could easily get lost down.

  “Come on,” he said to Ash. “We need to go find Ibrahim, right?”

  Ash just howled harder. “Now Ib has gone too!”

  “He hasn’t gone. We just need to find him.”

  Saif’s head was instantly filled with horror stories of children drowning in gullies and tripping and falling over rocks.

  “IB!” he roared, but the wind carried his voice away. He swore massively and rapidly in English, which he didn’t think counted as proper offensive swearing, even though Ash looked up at him as if he totally understood what he was saying.

  “Where’s Ibrahim? Where’s my brother?”

  Ash’s hysteria seemed to be taking on an even higher pitch. To make matters worse, the black clouds that could appear out of nowhere on even the sunniest days, like a speeded-up film, were gathering overhead. That’s all they needed, a quick drenching.

  He stood up and gazed around. Nothing stirred, except for the wind through the straw and the lambs hopping through the lower fields. Oh goodness.

  * * *

  Joel was following behind the boys as they walked in a line, finding an odd sense of recognition—even though the dialect they spoke was different—of the memories, of boys together. They bawled and hollered and laughed out loud and Jan and Charlie let them—as long as they were roughhousing and not being cruel—shake the kinks and the wiggles out, bay at the moon, tire themselves out, expend their energy without feeling that they were being troublesome; without having to conform to an institutionalized Victorian style of behavior that so many boys simply weren’t designed for. There was some singing of songs, including one that got abruptly halted for reasons Joel didn’t understand, as it couldn’t possibly be worse than the filthily rude rugby song they’d been on a moment or so before. Jan made a face and said “sectarian,” which left him no wiser than before.

  The clouds were coming in, but Joel had learned fairly early on that weather was simply a condition of clothing—nothing to revel in or complain about, but merely to be got through with a song and a lot of shouting. The boys had bird-spotting manuals, which Joel had thought they would ignore, but they were actually very officious about spotting the various breeds, and laughing at one another when they made mistakes. They were just about to stop at the top of the river, where there were gentle rapids that Charlie let them kayak down, when he caught a flash of a raincoat out of the corner of his eye.

  At first Joel thought it was one of their boys, but when he looked closer he caught sight of a thin, darker-skinned lad plowing blindly through the trees, tripping and stumbling up the hill. Charlie caught his eye and nodded and Joel peeled off and headed toward him.

  He hadn’t met Saif’s children, but he guessed pretty quickly that this was who this must be. There was something almost transfixing in the boy’s misery and rage, and he wished he spoke a few words of Arabic.

  As he drew closer, the threatening rain began to fall, and the boy, who still hadn’t seen him, grabbed for a tree root, didn’t make it, and stumbled down the hill, tumbling over the too-large and unfamiliar Wellingtons he was wearing.

  Joel leaped down the copse and grabbed him by the shoulder just in time to stop him tripping back even farther. The boy lashed out.

  “It’s okay,” said Joel. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I can help you.”

  “NO ONE HELP ME!” shrieked the boy, and Joel didn’t know whether he meant no one ever had or that he didn’t want anyone to, and realized of course that it could easily be both.

  “NO ONE HELP ME!” the child cried out again piteously. “NO ONE HELP ME!” and Joel looked at him, and he saw himself, and he saw little Caleb, and he saw a gulf he didn’t know how to cross.

  He saw all of those things before the boy, to Joel’s utter surprise, collapsed into his arms, and Joel stiffly put his arms around him and said, “There, there,” although he didn’t know why people said that, or whether it helped, or maybe it did, and then he said, because he knew this much was true: “People want to help you. They do.”

  * * *

  Saif was soaked and bedraggled by the time he’d carted Ash halfway across the damn mountain and found Joel and Charlie and a bunch of other people with his boy, warm and dry in a vast tent, a fire crackling outside. Ib wasn’t saying much, but the other boys didn’t seem to care about that. They’d met plenty of quiet ones in their time too. Caleb was sitting right next to him.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” said Saif. He wanted to be cross, to ask the boy what the hell he thought he was doing, but he was just too relieved. Actually what he wanted to do was cry.

  “Do you want to stay and have some sausages?” said Charlie jovially. “They’re veggie.”

  “Are they?” said one of the lads. “Chuff’s sake.”

  “You’ll have to pay for them,” int
erjected Jan. “We’re a charity.”

  “Um. Yes. Yes, I think we would,” said Saif.

  * * *

  “You know,” Neda said on the phone when he finally got a signal again, with a smile in her voice that made Saif think that perhaps everything hadn’t been quite as dreadful as he’d expected. “This is a good start. Tears, anger, shouting, pain . . . These are all feelings. Letting them out. It’s a good starting point.”

  “Are you serious?” said Saif. “I nearly lost one of them.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t,” said Neda.

  Saif glanced over to where the two boys were snuggled up to each other back in the house, drinking hot chocolate and watching television—in English, hallelujah, even though it appeared to be some strange adult drama full of people confronting each other in bars; however, in his state of mind he’d take it. And of course Neda was right: nobody had ever said this would be easy.

  Then he took a deep breath and went and turned the television off.

  “Let’s talk about Mama,” he said, and he brought out the pictures he had stored on his phone, and they looked at them together.

  There was no need to talk about the last thing the boys remembered, that Neda had shown him on the transcripts, that he couldn’t allow himself to dwell on, not yet, possibly not ever: that one morning, after a night of heavy shelling around Damascus, Amena had gone to fetch bread, leaving the boys at home for safety, and had never been seen again.

  Instead, they talked about the food she had cooked and the songs she used to sing until both the boys had inched closer, and Ash curled across his lap, which he’d expected, but Ibrahim fitted himself under his arm, which he had not, and they talked into the night, gradually quieting, until all three of them fell fast asleep on the sofa, tangled up like puppies.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  In a funny way, seeing Neda had fired Lorna up too. She had to stop with this ridiculous pining: Flora for once was right. She was going to go to this barbecue on Sunday and she was going to dress up and have fun and stop feeling like a dowdy spinster schoolmarm.

  And Flora was right about another thing: come Sunday, the weather was once again kind. The rest of the UK had been battered by the storms, but they had passed through and now the country was bathed in a funnel of high pressure, and the sky was a deep and cloudless blue. Already, the teenagers swigging cider by the harborside were turning a deep shade of pink for skin unused to the bright rays of a sun that never set.

  Lorna took a bottle of prosecco from the fridge. She wore a pretty flowered dress she’d bought for a wedding down south three years ago—if she breathed in and stood up really straight, she could still get into it—and she curled her red hair round her shoulders and put on lashings of mascara and some light lipstick. As she looked in the mirror, she reminded herself: she was a young woman. She should enjoy it. Especially on a beautiful day like today.

  * * *

  It seemed that the MacKenzies had invited pretty much everyone to the engagement barbecue. To be fair, when you got weather like this, which was quite rare, you just wanted to follow the smell. There were the Morgenssens, all the dairy boys, who got precious few days off and were going to make the most of this one, so they were already quite far into the local ale. The boys had pulled hay bales out so everyone could sit around the farm courtyard, and had not just set up the underused barbecue, but had dug a pit too and covered it in woodchips Fintan had set smoking the night before. Innes had sniffed and told him he was just showing off, but Fintan was adamant. If they were throwing a party, they were going to do it right. And just as well, as everyone brought engagement gifts, properly gift-wrapped and everything.

  Fintan tried not to show how touched he was. In public, he was defiant that this would be the first gay wedding Mure had ever seen. Deep down, he was as keen to be accepted as anyone ever was. It was all right for Colton, who didn’t give a toss what anyone thought about him, and hadn’t grown up here. But being welcomed meant a lot to Fintan, who, more than almost any of the MacKenzies, desperately missed their mother’s comforting ear. She would have had a good time today, he thought, looking around: the musicians tuning up; the beer cold in the bins full of ice; dogs and children already starting to lark through; Flora’s spectacular chocolate mousse chilling in the fridge.

  Innes came over. “Mum would have liked this,” he observed, and Fintan started.

  “Yeah,” he said. Innes passed him an already open bottle of beer, and they toasted.

  * * *

  Saif wasn’t sure what time to show up and what to bring. He didn’t really get invited to many social events on Mure—partly because he kept himself to himself and didn’t join the golf club or the pub quiz team; partly because he was foreign; but mostly because he’d seen absolutely everyone’s private parts, and nobody likes that. So he was excited to go, and dressed the boys in clean white shirts.

  When he’d woken up—very cricked and cold and uncomfortable on the sofa with a dead arm and broad daylight outside, even though it was 4 A.M.—he’d had a sense that things were changing. Not quickly, but changing they were, and for the better. And now, he had the inclination to believe Neda. He’d see her again in a month; he wanted to show her how much they’d improved. He thought, for the first time, that it might be possible. Then he looked back into the bedroom and sighed.

  “I DON’T WANT TO GO!” Ibrahim was shouting. He’d returned to his bedroom and was lying full-length on the bed.

  “There’ll be other kids there.”

  “I hate them!”

  “Agot will be there,” said Ash happily.

  “Exactly.”

  “She’s a baby.”

  “She’s not a baby! Just play nicely.”

  Ibrahim sighed in a very teenage way. “Can’t I just play on the iPad today? When there’s no school?”

  “No,” said Saif. Saying no did not come easily, but he was trying it out for size. “If you’re polite and speak English, then I will let you play on it tonight.”

  Ibrahim weighed this up and declared it officially acceptable.

  “But not with that baby Agot.”

  “Deal,” said Saif.

  * * *

  They walked through the farm gates—late, obviously: he’d gotten it wrong again. A group of people were in the corner playing a piano they’d trundled out of the house, and there was a fiddle, and various already quite drunk people were standing up to do a song. Huge numbers of children were tearing round and round the house playing with the dogs. The smell of grilled meat went all the way down the drive and was driving the dogs potty. He felt suddenly nervous as they walked through the gateway, feeling that awful party feeling when you think you won’t know anyone or that everyone is looking at you, and he realized that bringing a bunch of flowers when the field in front of the farmhouse, which was lying fallow this year, was absolutely teeming with poppies and wild daisies, was perhaps a little unnecessary. Agot came tearing up to them, her almost-white hair glinting in the sun. She was wearing a medieval princess dress of velvet with a long train, goodness knows how or why. But, oddly, it rather suited her.

  “MY FRENS!” she yelled.

  From Agot’s point of view, she had been feeling most out of it, as all the other children went to the local school and had been ignoring her, and she had been on at her father to let her attend simply by calling it “MY SCHOO!” whenever they drove past it. Eilidh’s parents were elderly, and on the mainland. When she was with her mother, Agot got farmed out to a succession of babysitters and, it seemed to Innes, anyone who could take her. It wasn’t that Eilidh was a bad mother—she was a wonderful mother. But trying to keep together the fabric of family and home and work when her ex lived a body of water away was so tough on both of them. It gladdened his heart to see so much of his daughter; he knew many divorced fathers didn’t or couldn’t. But he had no idea what to do with Agot’s apparently implacable will to move.

  Ash lit up. “AGOT! PLAY!” he demanded. His
small vocabulary of English words tended toward the imperative.

  “YES!” said Agot, equally happy to respond in shouts, and the six-year-old and the four-year-old took themselves off. Saif looked for Ibrahim, who was staring rather longingly at a rowdy football game that was going on at the end of the low field, consisting of several boys, a couple of girls, some drunk dads, and some dogs.

  “You could go and play,” said Saif.

  Ibrahim shrugged. “They won’t want me.”

  “This is a party. It’s different from school. You’re good at football.”

  “I’m not,” said Ibrahim.

  “Well, you can’t be worse than that dog there.”

  The ball came soaring toward them. Saif nudged him. “Go on.”

  “ABBA!”

  “Just return it. Then you can come back to me.”

  “You are so embarrassing.”

  Saif found himself grinning. That was all he wanted to be. An embarrassing dad.

  He straightened up as Ibrahim slouched off, handed back the ball, and was ushered in by one of the fathers. He smiled once more to himself and moved forward.

  Two things struck him, almost simultaneously. The first was Lorna. He would barely have recognized her. Gone was the fleece she wore for cold walks in the early morning, hair pulled back. Instead, she was wearing the prettiest summer frock—Saif didn’t know a lot about women’s clothes, but he could see the tumbling flowers and the way the long skirt swayed in the light breeze, and it looked pretty to him. Her hair was loose and glorious—that shimmering red that looked so exotic and foreign—and tumbled down her back. She was wearing a little makeup, and her eyelashes were long, and she was laughing in the sunshine, and Saif felt a jolt of something he hadn’t felt for a long time, and he remembered suddenly last year, when they had nearly, just for a moment, kissed at the town ceilidh. Suddenly he found his throat was dry, and his cheeks were pink, and as the sun glinted off her hair he felt a way he hadn’t felt for a long time. It was several seconds before his reflex guilt kicked in, before he told himself, I am married, I am, I am, in the eyes of God and the world, to a woman I love, even though every day brought less and less news; even though even the boys now only asked at night.