East Coast Road Read online

  EAST COAST ROAD

  By Anna Chilvers

  Dedication

  For Poppy, Izzy, Wilf, Johnny and Betty, who,

  between them, walked with me all the way from

  Scotland to Cambridgeshire.

  Imprint

  Copyright © Anna Chilvers 2020

  First published in 2020 by

  Bluemoose Books Ltd

  25 Sackville Street

  Hebden Bridge

  West Yorkshire

  HX7 7DJ

  www.bluemoosebooks.com

  All rights reserved

  Unauthorised duplication contravenes existing laws

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback 978-1-910422-63-2

  Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press

  Act One

  Chapter One

  At first Jen didn’t know what it was. It could have been bags of rubbish, or someone’s rucksack which had grown too heavy for them. But as she went nearer, limbs separated out from each other and she could see two people. They were lying with their arms spread wide. She and Rebecca had done the same ten minutes ago, except they’d done it standing on their feet.

  At the top of the hill the Angel of the North spread his wings. They were brown, not gossamer white like school nativity angels. Their squared shape contrasted with the sculpture’s curved body. Jen and Rebecca had taken it in turns to stand at his feet, arms spread out in imitation, while the other snapped a picture. Now Rebecca was taking more photos, up close, for her portfolio. Jen could see her small figure appearing and disappearing around the Angel’s feet.

  Jen walked closer to the figures on the ground. She didn’t want to interfere in what might be some kind of private spiritual moment, but she was curious. They were very still, lying there with their legs together and their arms spread wide like they were pretending to be aeroplanes, their fingertips just touching. They were face down.

  How could they could breathe, with their faces pressed close to the earth like that? Jen watched the outline of their bodies to see if there was movement. She couldn’t see anything. The breeze ruffled their clothes.

  “Are you alright?” Jen called.

  She couldn’t tell if they were men or women, or one of each. They were both wearing dark blue canvas trousers and green waterproof coats. The nearest one wore a yellow hat, which covered most of their hair, just a few short brown strands stuck out at the bottom. The other had their hood up, covering their head entirely. Even their hands were covered with gloves. Jen couldn’t see any skin as their faces were pushed right into the grass.

  “Do you need any help?”

  A gust of wind rushed up the hillside, filling their jackets so they made a cracking noise. Jen turned and ran up the hill as fast as she could.

  Rebecca was crouching behind the Angel with her head close to the floor, taking photos from ground level.

  “There are some bodies,” Jen gasped, the cold air hurting her throat as it rushed in.

  “Hang on,” said Rebecca.

  “No, really, there are two people lying on the ground and I think they’re dead. A suicide pact or something.”

  Rebecca lowered her camera and looked up at Jen.

  “Bodies?”

  “Come and look.”

  Together they ran down the hill. It was still early and there was no one about. Cars were roaring past on the roads which walled the Angel’s sanctuary, but none were parked in the carpark. No one was walking across the grass in any direction. When they reached the place where the bodies had been, there was nothing. There wasn’t even a place where the grass was flattened.

  There was a lane between two hedges and Jen ran over to the entrance, but there was no one walking up the lane. There was no sign of a green waterproof jacket or a yellow hat.

  “They must have gone,” said Rebecca. “Maybe they were just messing about and they were too embarrassed to get up when you appeared.”

  Jen shook her head. “I saw them from right over there, they weren’t moving at all. And where could they have gone? There’s nobody here.”

  “Someone playing a trick on you? They might be hiding somewhere. In the hedge or something.”

  The idea that someone was hiding and watching creeped them both out. Rebecca said she had enough photos. They walked quickly back across the mound to the car park.

  Before Jen got into the car she looked back to where the Angel stood, its back to them and to the city of Newcastle, arms stretched in welcome to all travelling north. Later there would be people here, visitors taking photos, laughing and dropping litter. There might even be an ice cream van. Right now, there was nobody. Jen could hear traffic on the A1 and the road into Newcastle, early commuters trying to beat the rush. Between those two walls of sound, the silence seemed full, like a balloon, as though each molecule of air had sound bound up inside it. Maybe it wasn’t sound. Maybe it was life or memories, or something to do with two people wearing blue trousers and a yellow hat who had vanished into thin air. The air was holding a secret.

  Jen slid into the front seat of the mini.

  “You sure you’re not seeing things again?” said Rebecca.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, that nun you thought you saw on campus…”

  “I did see her.”

  “Jen, did something happen when you went home at Easter?”

  Jen closed her eyes for a moment. Breathed in until it felt like her lungs might burst. Then she let the air out slowly through her nose, controlling the flow. She turned to Rebecca.

  “Back to York in time for breakfast?”

  The sun was up above the horizon and the graininess of the May dawn was disappearing.

  Rebecca stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. “OK.”

  “Coffee and croissants in the union café,” said Jen.

  She wondered if that boy would be there this morning. The one with the dark floppy hair and the big coat.

  Rebecca pulled out of the car park into the stream of commuters on their way into Newcastle. As they drove away, Jen looked back and saw a bird of prey hovering in the sky, just above the Angel’s head.

  Jen didn’t see Rebecca the next day. Now she had her photos of the Angel, she needed to get on with her coursework. She’d left it to the last minute and only had until the end of the weekend.

  Jen still had two more weeks of lectures before term ended in the middle of June. She went to the library and the student union. She chatted to the other students on her course. She tried not to think about the bodies, but if she closed her eyes she could see drops of water on green coats. She could see the curl of hair escaping from the yellow hat, tickled by blades of grass. She could smell the wet earth, the dew.

  In the café she looked out for the boy with the floppy hair, and on Friday he was there.

  He sat on a stool at a corner table with one of those old books he was always reading, dark covers with titles embossed in gold, the pages either Bible thin or thick as blotting paper. His coat was too big for him, and his hair was a fringe of black silk across his eyebrows. She’d not seen him in the first two terms, only recently, since Easter.

  Jen was sitting with a couple of girls from her medieval seminar discussing a presentation they had to give together. She glanced over, and he was looking their way. She turned away quickly.

  When she got up to leave, he’d gone. Jen had an essay to write on Marjorie Kempe, so she went back to her room to work, but it was difficult to keep her mind on the sub
ject. As soon as she leaned back or closed her eyes for a second, she was back in the shadow of the Angel of the North watching green jackets for signs of breath.

  Rebecca messaged her. Come round. Got something to show you.

  Rebecca had both of her computer screens on and each was displaying a photograph of the Angel. They were taken close-up and most of the screens were filled with detail of the sculpture, but in the background there was the slope of green as the hill descended.

  “Look,” said Rebecca. She pointed at one of the screens. In the left-hand corner was a figure wearing white. “That’s you,” she said, “but look over here.”

  On the other side of the screen, indistinct, there was something yellow on the ground. It was impossible to tell what it was. It could have been a plastic bag, some litter.

  “I’ve tried blowing it up, but it doesn’t get any clearer,” said Rebecca.

  Jen peered at the yellow blob. Could it be a hat on a human head, attached to a body? It was possible.

  “Now look at this one.”

  The photo on the other screen was similar, but angled slightly to the left so there was a better view of the place where the bodies had been. It was much clearer than the other photo. Rebecca zoomed in. Jen was crouching, her hand stretched out towards the grass. There was nothing yellow at all. No body, no coat, no blue trousers, no walking boots.

  “These were taken ninety seconds apart,” said Rebecca. “You came up the hill to talk to me straight after.”

  Jen stared at the empty space on the grass in the second photo. She remembered crouching, how she had been going to touch the nearest body, shake them a little, ask again if they were OK, but she’d chickened out. She’d been scared they wouldn’t answer.

  Rebecca shrugged. “It was early, low light levels. Things can look weird at dawn and dusk.”

  Jen thought about the drops of dew gathering together to form a sudden rivulet in a crease in the green jacket and spilling out onto the grass. She remembered that the curl of hair escaping from the hat was dark brown, that the hat itself was knitted in a thick single rib.

  “You think I made them up?”

  Rebecca looked at Jen and their gazes locked for a moment, then she looked away.

  “Maybe you just have a strong visual imagination,” she said. She closed the pictures and turned off the screens. “Fancy a drink?”

  Chapter Two

  Rebecca’s boyfriend, Craig, was in the bar with some of his friends from Psychology, so what was supposed to be a quiet drink was suddenly rowdier. Jen decided she would just have one, then leave them to it. Rebecca wouldn’t mind if she was with Craig.

  They sat at a corner table and Jen noticed the boy with the fringe sitting alone at a table on the other side of the bar. Jen thought about pointing him out to Rebecca, but she and Craig were kissing. Jen tapped her fingers on the side of her beer bottle. They were always kissing. They’d only been together for two months and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

  Jen crossed the bar and sat down opposite the boy. She pulled at the corner of the beer label.

  “Hello, I’m Jen,” she said.

  He smiled. “Finn.”

  “What’s the book?”

  Finn handed it to her. It was bound in dark blue cloth and the pages were roughly cut. She opened it and saw poems, black print in the centre of the creamy page. They were in French.

  “Baudelaire – Les Fleurs du Mal. The Flowers of Evil. Some of these poems were banned in France until 1949. Sixty-nine years ago, that book would have been contraband.”

  “If we were in France,” said Jen.

  “Yes, if we were in France.” His eyes were dark brown.

  Jen could feel a tic beneath her left eye, but she didn’t blink.

  “I’m doing a course on Baudelaire,” she said. “I’ve got a lecture tomorrow.”

  “You’re studying French?”

  “Literature.”

  Finn nodded. “That one,” he said, pointing at the page, “would definitely have been banned.”

  “À celle qui est trop gaie,” Jen read. “What’s it about?”

  “Beauty, anger, rage, sex.”

  “Wow, sounds amazing.”

  “He was an amazing poet, but pretty fucked up as a person – if he really thought the way he wrote.”

  “Are you doing literature too?”

  “I’m a geologist.”

  “Then why…?”

  “My gran gave it to me. She’s French. She died earlier this year.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No reason for you to be sorry.”

  Back in her room, Jen sat on the bed and closed her eyes. She thought about Finn and how his arm had touched hers as they were talking. She took off her jeans and looked at the scars on her legs. Just silver lines – they had healed completely. She touched them with her fingertips. Flat, not raised, they felt just like the rest of her skin.

  She opened her laptop and searched for À celle qui est trop gaie. She found several translations; some gave the title ‘To she who is too lovely’ and some ‘To she who is too gay’. They were all the same poem though. The poet, unable to stand the laughter and gaiety of this lovely girl, felt he must destroy her. Like ripping a flower to shreds because it’s too perfect to bear. The poet wanted to cut the girl open and inject her with his venom – and his use of words like ‘lips’ and ‘dizzying sweetness’ made it pretty obvious what kind of venom.

  Jen ran her hand from her thighs to her waist. The poem horrified her and excited her. She thought about the story of the Buddha’s conception that Rebecca had told her, his mother impregnated through her side by an elephant.

  Jen hadn’t cut herself since she’d been at uni. She was done with that.

  She closed the computer and lay on the bed. She turned onto her front, lay with her face in the pillow, her arms stretched out to the side in the same way the two people had. It was a narrow bed, next to the wall. One arm draped down to the floor and the other bent upwards from the elbow. She counted. At thirty she had to lift her head and breathe in.

  She sat up and googled yellow woolly hat. There were quite a few hits, including some on eBay. Most of them were for children or were sports hats with logos, but halfway down the second page there was one that looked like the hat she’d seen. She clicked on the ‘Buy It Now’ button before she could stop to think about it. Yellow wasn’t her colour. She wouldn’t wear a hat like that.

  She lay down and thought about Finn. It was easy to talk to him. She hoped she would see him again in the bar tomorrow. She’d tell him she’d read the poem and they could talk about it. She might tell him about the Buddha’s mother and the elephant. Or even about her cousin.

  No one else could see her cousin. Even Jen hadn’t seen her in ages. Once, just before her GCSEs, her cousin had come into Jen’s room at night and taken the knife out of her hand. She didn’t say anything at all, but when Jen tried to make a grab for it, she stepped back and there was nothing to hold on to. She was always like that; slippery, evasive.

  In the morning, Jen stopped by Rebecca’s room on the way into uni. She was working, with both screens on.

  “Can I see those photos again?”

  Rebecca flicked back through the images until she came to the one of Jen staring at the empty ground, then the previous one with the yellow blob.

  “Can you zoom in?”

  “I told you, there’s nothing to see,” she said, but she clicked until the area filled the screen, swipes of green and brown merging into each other, the yellow solid in the middle, blurring out at the edges into an irregular squashed shape.

  “Can you see a shoulder?” Jen pointed at a smear of brownish green next to the yellow. “If you were looking straight down, at the crown of the head, that could be the slope of a shoulder. And they were wearing g
reen jackets. That sort of colour.”

  Rebecca clicked the mouse and the photo filled the screen again.

  “No, Jen, I don’t think it’s a shoulder. I don’t think anyone was there. Look.” She pointed at the corner of the photo where the bodies had been. “Apart from the yellow thing, there’s nothing that couldn’t be just grass and shadows. A trick of the light.”

  “I know what I saw,” Jen said.

  “Well you saw something that wasn’t there then.”

  Jen felt tears rising and turned away to blink them back.

  “Are you walking over?” she said.

  “No, I want to spend some more time on this.”

  “See you later then.”

  Rebecca caught Jen’s arm as she walked towards the door.

  “Are you OK, Jen?”

  Jen nodded. “I better get going, I’ve got a lecture in twenty minutes.”

  Rebecca let her go. “Let’s meet later in the café,” she said. “I’ll text you.”

  Jen let her eyes flicker back for a moment to the yellow thing in the corner of the screen, then left the room.

  The first time Jen met her cousins was the year Natalie Portman came to Ely. It had been in the newspaper and everyone at school was talking about it. Danny was at high school by then and he was pretending he was too cool to care, but Jen could tell he was just as excited as her. They’d gone to see Star Wars with their mum and dad a couple of years before – an almost unheard-of family outing – and since then Danny had been collecting posters and cards. Jen was collecting stickers for a sticker book, and her favourite was a photo of Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala. They were filming at the cathedral that weekend and Jen was hoping to catch a glimpse.

  Donna, their mum, was nervous, but not because of Natalie Portman. It was because her sister was coming to stay, the sister she hadn’t seen or spoken to for fifteen years. She was bringing her daughters, whom Donna hadn’t known existed. Jen was excited. Two new cousins and a Hollywood star all in one week!

  When they arrived, there was another; a third cousin who never showed her face, who wasn’t introduced, who stood next to doors and curtains, slipping out of sight if you looked. No one else seemed to notice her. Donna was doing her bright and breezy hostess performance, and Aunty Barbara was quiet, as though she didn’t know how to act. Jen knew how she felt. She always wanted to hide when Mum started organising people. The two flesh and blood cousins with cotton dresses and brown legs did as they were told.