Orkney Twilight Page 3

  Sam was never quite sure where she stood on her sister’s philosophizing about men.

  ‘So what kind of bloke rides a Yamaha XT500?’

  Jess pursed her lips, turned to look through the rear-view window. ‘The kind of bloke who likes a spot of trouble.’

  Sam said nothing, events, faces and words churning in her mind, the spectral trunks of silver birch trees slipping past in the dark outside. Dutch. What did Dutch people look like anyway? Weren’t they supposed to be quite tall?

  Liz parked the car in the damp garage of their boring forties red-brick and walked off in disgust. Jess and Sam eased Jim’s dead weight out of the car and managed to steer him as far as the kitchen where he aimed for the dog’s bed and tipped himself on top of the hairy black mutt already lying there. George the dog was a recent acquisition; a sly gift from one of his mates, a rejected bomb-sniffer who snarled and lunged at anyone entering or leaving the house with a bag in their hand, making the weekend supermarket run a bit of a nightmare. Jim was the only one who called the dog by his name and repeatedly excused its behaviour on the grounds that the animal had lost his purpose in life, didn’t like being an ordinary family pet. The dog shifted accommodatingly on its bed to allow Jim a bit of space. Jim belched.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jim said from his resting place on the floor.

  It wasn’t clear for what or to whom he was apologizing. ‘I won’t do it again,’ he added. Sam sniffed, switched off the light, glanced back as she left. In the darkness of the kitchen, Jim had merged with the dog to become a single, grotesque two-headed beast.

  Trudging up the stairs, mulling over the evening’s events: the biker, the self-imposed death sentence, the gobbets of secret information dribbling from the corner of Jim’s mouth. Operation Asgard. Perhaps it wasn’t a joke. Perhaps he was being deadly serious. Perhaps Operation Asgard really was the name of his latest mission. She wondered whether there was anything more than lack of imagination and hubris to the naming of their operations. Some not immediately obvious rationale, an alphabetical ordering perhaps like the naming of hurricanes or a link between title and mission objective. Asgard. It sounded like something out of Lord of the Rings. Or was it a name from Norse mythology? That was it. Asgard, home of the Norse gods. They were always raiding the storybooks for their stupid mission names: Merlin, Troy, Neptune. Asgard. She lay down on her bed. Asgard, Asgard, Asgard. She chanted the word into meaninglessness as the room around her rocked and the rising moon cast a gilded path across the floor.

  A persistent tap-tapping outside the window woke her somewhere in the dead hours just before dawn. She panicked: an intruder in the garden. She crept across the thin carpet, carefully lifted the dilapidated bamboo blind slats an inch and peeked out. A corpulent thrush was posing just below the sill on the flat, leak-prone extension roof and was waving a half-smashed snail in its beak dementedly as if it were trying to flag an SOS message in her direction. She knocked sharply on the pane.

  ‘Go and do that somewhere else. You’re giving me a headache.’

  It fixed her with its beady yellow-ringed eye and shook its head from side to side once more before flitting off into the apple tree. She sighed, relinquished the idea of sleep and opened the window wide, climbing over the sill and slumping on the roof, back against the wall.

  The moon was casting a low-down hazy glow now from the far side of the railway line at the bottom of the garden. She shivered, despite the sweatiness of the dark. Jim’s words flitted through her consciousness, she couldn’t dislodge his voice; he didn’t think he’d live to see her next birthday. She tried to dismiss his pronouncement as the usual drunken rambling but she was plagued by the haunted look in his eyes, the tears she might have seen. He didn’t know which side he was on. He wasn’t even sure who he was anymore. She sat in deep contemplation, listening for early morning bird song, a hint of the dawn chorus. But there was no sound. And in the stillness of the dark she found herself wondering about Jim’s real identity, the true self beneath the cover. She hadn’t really thought about his identity that way before; his history, where he was coming from, what he was really like. She had always taken it as given that his past was no-go territory. Restricted access. Assumed it was part of the secret policeman deal. The family omertà of silence about Jim. She hadn’t really cared; she had her own life to be dealing with. She had grown up casually lying about her father, inventing the details of his history. But now, as she wrapped her arms around her knees, she wondered whether she should know about her own dad, whether she needed to know, whether she could ever know who she was, her own real identity, if she didn’t know about Jim. His job. She had a fleeting vision of herself at Freshers’ Week: the chatter, the clamour, the new faces, the personal questions, the endless need to provide answers. What could she say about her father? She sighed.

  Her eyes followed the arcs of the stars falling towards Heathrow while her mind turned over the fragmented pieces of information she had about Jim, attempting to sift out the basics from the handful of stories he had fed them over the years. The facts were limited. All she really knew was that he was the son of an itinerant publican, born in Glasgow, the youngest of three brothers. He had attended a Jesuit school and had run away at the age of fifteen for undisclosed reasons and joined the army. He served for six years in hot and exotic places. Somewhere, at some point in the army years, he had lost three of his toes from the middle of his left foot. Explosion. Landmine, he had told her, leaving him with what looked like the sign of the devil blasted into his foot. After the army he had drifted to London; he was twenty-two when he joined the Force and was sent out on the beat in the East End where he spent his days dealing with card sharks and his evenings drinking with the Krays. At least, that was Jim’s story. But it was always difficult to triangulate his tales: she had never met any of his relatives and he didn’t seem to hang on to childhood friends.

  And when she checked her own memories, Jim was always in some disguise or another, doing something secret. She was six, in bed, woken by the laughing of strangers, the funny accents. She had crept downstairs, stuck her head through the banisters, curiously assessing the two strangers drinking in their front room: sharp-angled, olive-skinned, exotic faces, incongruously dressed in boring navy pressed trousers, white shirts and ties. One of them was pointing at the fireplace and commenting on their lovely carp. She had shouted down from her hiding place at the top of the stairs that he meant hearth, not carp. Jim had been furious, he didn’t want her spying on him, but the two men had thought it was a great joke – having their English corrected by a six-year-old. She had asked Jim the following morning where they were from and he had told her they were Russians. Grunts, he had added quickly. Just a bit of friendly business.

  She was eight when Jim had left his post at the docks unexpectedly. Harry had stayed on. No clear reason had been given for Jim’s sudden departure and his evident lack of a replacement posting. Not to her at least. Although later she had heard Jim and Liz discussing it in another room, their voices barely audible over the Magpie theme tune blaring from the telly. She had listened to their conversation as she sang along with the words of the familiar nursery rhyme; ‘five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret…’ They just didn’t appreciate his methods, Jim had said, you had to give something away to get something in return. Liz’s pointed silence had radiated through the serving hatch.

  It was the Commander who had rescued Jim after the docks. The Commander had been in charge of operations at Tilbury and now he had moved his sights, apparently, to another, bigger agenda. It obviously wasn’t the Commander, then, who had failed to appreciate Jim’s methods because he had invited Jim to move with him, brought him back into the fold. The Diggers, Jim had christened them, his new lot. Then Jim was setting off to work in a fresh disguise: Chairman Mao cap, thick donkey jacket, combat boots and a dirty black Bedford van. The beard had appeared overnight, a prolific growth of his curly sideboards fusing under his chin, transforming him into a wi
ld man, a degenerate hippy in the heartlands of the conservative outer suburbs.

  ‘Dad,’ she had asked when she had first seen the fuzz, ‘is the beard your disguise?’

  ‘No,’ he had replied. ‘The disguise is when I shave it off.’

  He had laughed when he said it and she had laughed with him, even though she wasn’t quite sure why it was funny.

  Ten. Eleven. Twelve years old. Sometimes he was away for days before he resurfaced, triumphantly brandishing some sub-standard item he’d picked up in a bar room deal – the set of kitchen knives that didn’t cut, the thin carpets that fell off the back of a lorry and reeked of noxious chemicals. They, Liz and the sisters, would stare perplexedly at his crappy acquisitions. He would shrug off their doubts and lurk in the back garden, nursing a can of lager, huffing and puffing and failing to light the poxy barbecue before he said fuck it, poured some petrol on the charcoal, produced the Watneys party pack, and summoned the neighbours. The Smiths, the Hunts and the Drains would huddle by the kitchen door, standing well back from the inferno, gingerly eating the cindered fish that Jim liked to grill whole because he said it tasted better that way and he didn’t have time for whingers who were scared of swallowing fish-bones.

  ‘You can always tell when summer is here,’ said Mr Hunt with a nervous wink, ‘because Jim stops wearing a shirt.’

  And now she was eighteen, and earlier that year he had crashed his Bedford. It hadn’t seemed significant at the time, but thinking about it now she could see the accident had marked a watershed in many ways; another change in his persona. He had driven the van into the railings running down the hill from Blackheath. He had walked away unscathed, but the Bedford had been a write-off. He had hinted it was brake failure, sabotage. The local paper had suggested something different. The front-page report in the Southern Advertiser had appeared a couple of days after the crash and had implied that the thankfully nameless driver had been drinking. Jim had taken one look at the article and stormed off to the pub, muttering that he didn’t want the press poking its nose into his business even if was only the local rag that everyone threw into the bin before they read it. The Bedford hadn’t been replaced. Two weeks after the crash, he had turned up on the doorstep without his beard, his freshly mown face strangely pale and luminous in the fading evening light. They had tried hard to conceal their shock. The beard had been well past its sell-by-date, but shaving it off had aged him instantly, revealed his jowls, the softening lines between jaw and neck, the flash of wiry silver at his temples. His past was catching up with him.

  Sam rested her chin on her knees. The moon had disappeared, leaving a faint trail of brimstone in its wake. She searched for the first signs of the sun. And she wondered whether the most recent Jim – middle-aged, clean-shaven Jim – was his real identity at last: a washed-up, ornery bloke on the run, trying to escape the shadows of his life, fleeing the deceptions, the blowback from a lifetime undercover. Or perhaps it was his final cover. The disguise was when he shaved it off. Operation Asgard. The unlit milk train rattled past the far end of the garden. A slight breeze stirred up out of nowhere, rustled the leaves of the apple tree as it passed and whipped a scrap of newspaper high into the air and over the garden fence. Somewhere down the track a mangy fox screamed and a blackbird shrieked its early morning alarm call.

  3

  She threw on a crumpled T-shirt and fading 501s, stomped down the stairs, dragging her finger along the wall as she descended, pulled at the corner of one of the pictures of far-flung places that Liz had snipped from the Sunday colour supplements and plastered on instead of wallpaper. She noted, with some satisfaction, that she had left a white jagged trail across the blue sky above a palm-fringed, golden beach of some exotic island. Barbados. Or Mauritius perhaps. She slammed open the kitchen door, kicked the empty dog’s bed as she passed. No sign of Jim. Liz was rummaging around in a cupboard, dressed for work in her usual carefully uncoordinated smart casuals, brunette bob blow-dried perfectly. Sam glared at her mother’s back.

  ‘What was Jim on about last night?’

  Liz shrugged indifferently, didn’t bother to turn round.

  ‘What makes him think he’s about to die this time?’ Sam persisted.

  Liz picked up a spice pot, examined it. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

  ‘Cowards die many times before their death.’

  ‘You could at least provide the complete quote.’

  Sam sometimes thought her parents should swap jobs: Liz would make a deadly undercover cop with her forensic attention to detail and Jim would make a flashy academic with his ability to craft a gripping narrative on the basis of a couple of things he’d picked up from some blokes down the pub.

  Liz added, ‘And anyway you could call your father many things but I don’t think a coward is one of them.’

  ‘Okay then, he’s not a coward. He’s an ageing undercover cop with a drink problem.’

  Liz twisted round now, opened her mouth to speak, paused long enough for Sam to suspect that she was about to say something that wasn’t going to sound very convincing.

  ‘I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be a detective.’

  They all had their own ways of relabelling Jim’s job when it suited them; detective was Liz’s. ‘He’s thinking of leaving the Force. He told me today that he has arranged a holiday in Orkney. He wants to get away from it all for a while.’ Liz was speaking to the back of the cupboard again. ‘He knows somebody up there with a holiday cottage. It’s sitting empty for the rest of June and he’s said Jim can use it. He’s going to take the car-train up to Inverness at the end of next week. He wants a chance to think about something other than work.’

  Orkney. When was the last time she had been there? 1978 when she was twelve. The last time they had managed a holiday all together, as a family. The ferry crossing from Scrabster to Stromness had been particularly rough that year. It was always bad, because the ferry didn’t have any stabilizers. But that year an insistent north-easterly had churned up the sea, and the ferry had pitched and lurched across the turbulent Pentland Firth. Liz and the girls had stayed below, turning green. Sam had remained outside on the deck with Jim, just as she always did, whatever the weather, drenched by sea-spray, searching for the first signs of the Old Man of Hoy. Jim had struck up conversation with an old fisherman, his features etched by saltwater, and she had listened to his tales of island life, uncertain whether he was retelling his own past or the distant history of his ancestors. Long ago, the fisherman had said, Orkney was at the heart, not on the edge. In those days, if you had a good boat, then it was quicker to travel by water than land; water offers less resistance than land, less friction. Jim had nodded in agreement. Orkney was in the backyard of the Norsemen, the fisherman had continued, once they had perfected their oak-timbered longboats, built to bend not break. Beautiful oak boats, he had said, peering into the distance. And then he had pointed. She had thought, for a moment, he had spotted a dragon’s head prow advancing through the swell. But he was indicating the dark fins of a pod of porpoises, chasing the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream.

  ‘Seafood paella,’ Liz said now, ‘I must buy some saffron.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit expensive?’

  Liz ignored her comment. ‘He’s thinking about taking an early retirement deal. Picking up his history degree with the Open University.’

  ‘But the Open University degree was a joke.’

  Jim had registered with the Open University in the wilderness weeks after leaving the docks; something to fill the empty hours between lunchtime closing and evening opening, an excuse for getting out of the house and visiting unidentified people in unspecified locations. He had abandoned it as soon as he had joined the Diggers.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so dismissive of your father’s academic interests.’ There was something immensely irritating about the way Liz asserted that Jim was ‘your father’, when she suspected he was up to no good but didn’t want to admit it. ‘We should give
him a chance, support him if he wants to leave the Force and do something different.’

  We. Sam glanced out of the window, spotted a sleek blackbird with its head tilted to one side, listening for worms.

  ‘Are you going with him then?’ she asked.

  ‘Unfortunately, I can’t. Roger has organized a conference on concepts of gender in Marlowe’s work and I have a long-standing commitment to present a paper. It’s a shame I can’t go, but it’s too late to do anything about it now.’

  Somewhere in another room the dog growled as if it were having a bad dream.

  ‘I thought Roger did modern literature,’ Sam said.

  ‘That is his specialism. But as head of the department it’s his job to ensure that we maintain our reputation in all areas.’

  She was about to make a sarcastic comment about all the areas in which Roger had a reputation, at least according to Helen – Roger the Todger, Helen called him and cackled in a disturbingly knowing fashion whenever she said it – but Liz spoke first.

  ‘I was thinking.’ Liz was looking directly at Sam now. ‘Maybe you could go and keep an eye on your father. You seem to be getting along with him better than anybody else in the family these days.’

  Sam dropped her jaw, mouthed a silent scream like the Munch poster she had bought from Athena and Blu-Tacked to her bedroom wall.

  Liz remained unmoved by her daughter’s gurning. ‘You loved Orkney when you were a child. You and Jim were the ones who insisted on going there every year. You two were always more interested in all those ancient ruins than the rest of us. We always wanted to go to the beach, the Mediterranean, anywhere it didn’t rain the whole time.’

  Sam was momentarily taken aback by her mother’s undertone of accusation, the suggestion that they were on opposing sides.