In the Approaches

‘A nice, little potato in hiz exhaust, hah?!’ Shimmy volunteers.

Forty minutes later and I am walking Rogue on the beach (or – strictly speaking – dragging him along behind me like a giant and mutinous, heavily lactating sow) when who should I see striding towards me, at improbable speed (head down, hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets) but the man of the moment: Mr Franklin D. Huff! I observe that his footwear is completely unsuitable: black, patent-leather dress shoes clumsily kicking up giant arcs of sand and shingle! I pity him his unsuitable footwear! I do. No, no, really I do.

I stand and await his approach (while Rogue laboriously masticates a piece of sea kale), hoping that he has settled on a date for my maintenance trip. But instead of stopping when he draws abreast of me, he just storms straight on past! No acknowledgement of any kind! None! Not even so much as a cursory nod!

I turn, rather astonished, and call after him – ‘Have you worked out a time yet, Mr Huff? For the maintenance works?’ – and am shocked when he spins around on his name as if stung, stares at me, in complete amazement, then down at the dog, then back up at me again, his lean face contorting wildly, points an accusing finger at us both and virtually yells, ‘What on earth are you thinking, Miss Hahn? To feed a dog to that monstrous size? Whatever possessed you? It’s an act of the most extreme cruelty! An obscenity! A crime against nature! It’s a travesty, don’t you see? Call that care?! Call that love?! Shame on you, Miss Hahn! Shame on you for not knowing any better! Shame on you, Miss Hahn! And shame on your idiotic father!’

Then off he storms.

I can only … I can’t …

Deep breath. Deep breath. Count backwards, slowly, from twenty to one.

Deep breath. That’s better. Good. That’s …

AAAARRRRGHHH! It’s virtually impossible for me to describe the violent effect Mr Huff’s insulting words have on me! How dare he? How dare he?! The initial confusion followed by the shock, followed by the embarrassment, followed by the outrage … That this man, that this … this … that this awful, arrogant … URGH! I’m just … I am just … I am shaking from head to toe. I am slightly dizzy. I blink. Everything blurs. I blink again. I feel this … this heat in my belly, in my chest. I open my mouth and I simply … I pant! I pant like a wounded beast! And then I feel something burning on my cheeks. Tears! He has made me cry! Mr Huff has made me cry! And I am so angry that Mr Huff has made me cry that I pant even harder. And my stomach is hurting. It’s hurting. (I am hit! I am stung!)

I turn and head back in the direction from which I came. Everything is misty. I sense my feet pounding across the sand. Rogue is dragging along behind me. Several figures enter my peripheral vision but they are nothing, merely fleshy shadows. One of them speaks. It is Georgie Hulton who is digging up lugworms. I can’t answer. I just keep on walking. After about thirty or so paces I stop, with a gasp, drawn up short by the macabre sight of a small, dead sand shark, its belly split open, its guts writhing with tiny, pupating maggots. I stare at it for several minutes, and only the clarity of its predicament – the horror of its outline, the exquisite brightness of its intestines – restores me to anything remotely akin to a semblance of normality.

Damn him! Damn Mr Huff! I hate him! I hate Mr Huff! I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!

4

Mr Franklin D. Huff (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)

Kimberly Couzens is dead. Kimberly – my Kimberly – dead! Lara just rang. There was a garbled message when I got back to the cottage. ‘I’m sorry, Franklin, but Kimberly is dead. She died. Something to do with a tooth. It was very quick. I just spoke with her mother. She died on Saturday. Four, five days ago. The funeral’s on Friday. I’m really sorry. I know you might find that hard to believe after … well. Yes. No need to go back over it all again, eh? I just want you to know that I’m very sorry, Franklin. Honestly. I’m … Okay. Bye.’

I listened to the message three times (‘Something to do with a tooth?!’) and then rapidly calculated back. I spoke to Kimberly five days ago and she was absolutely fine. Vital. Exuberant. Laughing. Mocking. Alive. So how on earth is this possible? How can she be dead? How? After everything she survived? And why do I feel so … so empty, so flat? Not angry. Not raging. Not tearful. Not …

It almost seems – disappointing. A let-down. Laughable.

Kimberly – snuffed out. Defunct. Dead. She hopped the twig. She popped her clogs. Stupid, hopeful, brave, indefatigable Kimberly. Dead. Dead.

Oh God, what the hell to do now? The funeral’s on Friday, but I’m broke! Can’t even afford the plane fare. The stupid travel agent – the bastard airline won’t … ‘What?! Not even on compassionate grounds?’ I yelled.

Oh God. She’s dead. Where to go? How to …? I’m only here because of Kimberly. I’m here for her. As a favour. Because of her dotty mother. We’d been agonizing about Trudy’s declining health for months – upwards of a year, in fact. She’d been growing increasingly confused, woolly, dithery – and Kim simply couldn’t cope. I mean Trudy was meant to be Kim’s buffer – her back-stop, her support (a rich irony!). Bottom line was, Trudy needed to go into sheltered accommodation.

But how the heck to afford it? After much heart-searching and arguing and sulking (in equal measure, on both our parts) Kimberly Fed-Exed me the only remaining thing of any value she possessed: the negatives of those infernal photos – the ‘picture diary’ of Bran Cleary, Kalinda Allaway and their daughter, Orla, ‘in hiding’, that infamous late summer of 1972.

I was given a brief to sell them to the highest bidder, and had agreed a good price for her – with a fair amount of wrangling – but then Kimberly underwent a sudden (not untypical) change of heart, damn her (Damn Kimberly! Damn her! Poor Kimberly. Dead Kimberly). She’d found out something unpalatable about the purchaser and had developed a whole host of last-minute ‘scruples’. We didn’t discuss the details. It was obviously a painful subject for us both. But we rose above – same as we always do. Same as we always did – Kim and me. Kim and I. We two. Us.

The Catholic Church was interested, obviously, but Kimberly wouldn’t countenance the idea, just on the off-chance … Well, I suppose she thought they might simply get swallowed up (her gorgeous images) – subsumed – in a maelstrom of clerical bureaucracy. It was illogical. But that’s Kim for you. Or that was Kim, before …

‘Something to do with a tooth?’

It was stupid. And time-consuming. And expensive. I complained about the cost (human, financial). ‘I have an import/export business to run in Monterrey,’ I grumbled, ‘and a tower of translation work to be done.’ The truth was that the photos had already disappeared – to all intents and purposes – by dint of being stuck in an old trunk at the end of Kim’s bed for the past twelve years. But that was okay, apparently. That was different. Kim wasn’t their jailer, she insisted, but a broody hen perched lightly atop. This handful of fragile spools was Kimberly’s creative and emotional legacy. She never said it, because it didn’t need saying. It was the unsayable. But I knew.

She was highly conflicted over the whole thing. We both were. In the end she persuaded me to go to a publisher with them, to flog them (for less money) in the guise of a book, but the publisher offering the best price (and it was a good price, a great price) still wanted text – context. Who might be expected to provide that? Kim herself? No. She couldn’t – wouldn’t – trust herself. ‘I was way too close to the whole thing,’ she insisted, ‘and I’m “the bad guy”, remember? The scapegoat?’

‘Well maybe you should try and see this as an opportunity,’ I valiantly suggested, ‘a chance to alter those popular misconceptions …’

‘But are they?’ she murmured. ‘Misconceptions, I mean?’

I couldn’t answer. I really wish now that I had – in retrospect – just with … I don’t know … the benefit of hindsight. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t bring myself to respond. Call it mean-spiritedness. Call it pride. Call it whatever you damn well like. You’re probably right.

‘I was blind-sided by it all,’ she sighed, ‘I was bowled over … seduced. And above and beyond that, I really don’t want the whole “tragic” angle to eclipse … well … “the work”.’

In a toss-up – a fair gamble – Kimberly would always – always – have opted for death over pity. Poor Kimberly. So defiant. So flawed. So proud. So …

Scared? Was it fear that kept them quiet?

Superstition?

Loyalty?

What was it? What was the indelible hold Bran Cleary had over them all: strange, little Orla, crazy Kalinda, the countless others? Witchcraft? Voodoo? Charm? Art?!

‘Okay, Kim,’ (yet another international call at completely the wrong time of day. Kim isn’t – wasn’t – ever happy unless a conversation was charged at peak rates. It was her last great extravagance. ‘Keeps you on your toes, Frankie-boy,’ she’d laugh, ‘keeps you sharp!’) ‘so who else, then? Eh?’ I demanded. ‘Who else can be trusted? Any suggestions, Oh Wise One?’

‘I do have somebody in mind,’ Kim confided, and then, with typical unreasonableness – balls-out, that was my Kim – suggested Franklin D. Huff. Yes. Me. Franklin D., no less: currently occupying the not-especially-coveted role of Jilted Lover. Betrayed Friend. Fall-Guy. Stooge.

There were weeks of heated negotiations. ‘You seriously feel you can trust me with this?’ I was astonished – touched – horrified! Trust me? I could barely trust myself! Wasn’t I the last person to be trusted? The most angry? The most cynical? The most dark? The most wounded? ‘That’s precisely why, Franklin,’ she’d chuckled (I always loved her laugh), ‘and because – when push comes to shove – you’re a born professional.’

This was not a commission I was eager to accept. Quite the opposite. This was the story I’d been running away from – at high speed – for twelve, long years. Several others (some reputable, others less so) had been pitilessly tossed against the jagged rocks of this sorry tale and left horribly becalmed. There were just way too many angles. The narrative was dangerously overloaded. How to gain access? There was the mysterious death of Bran Cleary while on remand, for starters, after a bomb (the second bomb he’d been ‘unwittingly’ connected with) planted – or being stored? Transported? – in the boot of his car went off. All the dodgy political stuff. There was the curious disappearance of crazy Kalinda, aka ‘Lonely’ Allaway, his wife (the fame-hungry vengeful Australian shepherdess). And Orla? Poor, sweet Orla Nor Cleary – their daughter? The tiny-armed girl visionary? Where even to start with that particular hornets’ nest?

‘Simply go back to Mulberry,’ Kim sighed (with typical clarity), making it sound like the simplest undertaking in the whole world, ‘and just inhale the atmosphere. You missed out the first time around. Aren’t you intrigued to have a little snoop about? Apparently they’ve kept the cottage exactly as it was – like a kind of shrine. They do short- and medium-term rentals. They’re very picky about tenants, though, so keep your head down. Be discreet. Why not invite Lara along for the ride? Build some bridges. Make it into a little holiday! I’ll cover all expenses from the advance. Try and reach out to the people who were there – on the periphery, in the background. Knit. Walk. Relax. Breathe. It doesn’t have to be the final word or anything, just a … I don’t know … a cut and paste job – a kind of collage, a human collage.’

‘But none of them will talk!’ I argued.

‘Several of them already have,’ she corrected me. And she was perfectly right. Several had.

Of course what I didn’t tell Kimberly was that we actually needed way more than that. To raise any kind of worthwhile sum on the photos I’d had to make a series of strategic promises to the publisher – moral compromises, of sorts – which Kimberly (as yet) had no inkling of. They wanted to smash the whole Bran Cleary cover-up wide open. They wanted a hatchet job on Kalinda. And Orla? That all-too-familiar ‘victim of circumstance’ schtick writ large: the ever-popular ‘vulnerable minor led astray by the wicked Catholic machinations of Father Hugh Tierney’ angle.

Why did they want these things, exactly? Oh … They wanted them because, well, I’d promised them. I’d offered them all up on a platter. Kim’d thank me for it in the long term, I was certain. Once I’d exonerated her – and, by extension, myself – once the royalties started rolling in. She said it herself: I was a consummate professional (a professional what, though?! Cuckold? Fool? Dupe?).

Let’s face it – this was the story dear, old Kimberly (dead Kimberly) was too close to tell: the awful truth. Although how to gain access to it, first-hand? Kim was right: several people had spoken out publicly, yes, but only the small players – the bit parts – and never candidly. Father Tierney had become a Benedictine monk and entered a monastery. He was virtually a non-starter. Father Paul Lynch (of Rye, now retired) had proven curiously gnomic and diffident. Seems they’d all contracted the disease Kim herself had fallen prey to.

Although Carla Hahn, Kim had confided, was definitely the one to watch out for. She’d been the family’s nanny and cleaner during their time in Pett Level and had later inherited the house. ‘She was very quiet, rarely spoke. I don’t know why, but I always thought of her as “the other camera”. She had this strangely unsettling watchful quality about her. Engaged but unengaged. Hardly uttered a word to me the whole week I was there. Smiled a lot. A strange girl, very tight – tender – with the child, training to be a nurse.’

Carla was the key, Kim maintained, the ‘inside-outsider’.

So I came. I waited. I made connections with the other witnesses. Lara left; there’d always been … well … fault-lines. I drank heavily for a few weeks. Just the atmosphere of this place – the house. This awful feeling of … the simplicity, the roaring quiet, the certainty. An unbearable itchiness. In my head. In my soul. As if the place, the sea, the furniture, the entire house were all slowly rejecting me. Developing a gradual intolerance. I know it sounds …

Or was that just …?

Then the phone call – the garbled message. Kimberly Couzens was dead. Dead! Something to do with a botched tooth extraction. Kimberly Couzens was dead.

I left the cottage in my suit and dress shoes. I was empty, flat (remember?) and I was paradoxically Day-Glo; blank and cynical, yet strobing with emotion. Urgh! I was neither. I was both. I was confused. I was walking away from my feelings and I was running straight into them. It wasn’t … I wasn’t … I … I dunno.