A short story by Maggie Gee
It was the last day of Joe and Amber's end of summer treat, a bargain "late break" Joe had found on the internet. He had been awake since seven o'clock, and had taken a solitary walk around the harbour. Cool early sunlight; he wished she was with him. The little yachts shone, gleaming, deserted. The owners painted their dreams on the side: Free Spirit, Blue Bird, Indian Summer. One name appealed to him: The Good Hope. He had never been to the Cape of Good Hope. It cheered him, though, that someone, somewhere had thought that "hope" was a good name for a boat. A neat little cruiser, pale blue, chrome gleaming, anchored very near their hotel.
Back in their room, Amber still dozed. He tried to get her to come out on the balcony so he could show her the pretty boat.
"Come on darling, take an interest."
"I need my breakfast," Amber yawned.
"Please, darling, take a look."
"I've got to have my breakfast, Joe."
"Why Ramsgate?" she asked, when he first told her. But Ramsgate was lovely. Very English, they thought. Georgian terraces on top of low cliffs, a wonderfully elaborate Victorian seafront with carved red brick and bright swags of flowers, geraniums, petunias, lobelias, scarlet, purple, white, pink, mauve. And pebble-free sand, and a gently shelving sea. Pink-skinned families gambolled in the sunlight.
"There's not a lot here," she complained, quite mildly.
"There's Thai, or French," he said. They both liked food.
"I don't mean that. I mean . . . What shall we do?"
Joe said: "At least we've got some time together."
"But we're always together, Joe. I want an ice cream."
He went off promptly and bought her one. A two-ball gelato, Green Apples flavour, which made her gasp with pleasure as she licked and sucked. Joe watched the pink tip of her tongue, working. Did she still love him? Did she see him, or hear him?
Women tended to be inward-looking. Whereas Joe was more au fait with the world.
He wanted her to see that each moment counted, each one was a bonus, in the age they lived in, where death could arrive through a misunderstanding, through hatred they hadn't even seen or known about.
The sun was shining on their last day.
At breakfast, he read the Telegraph while she worked methodically through the guide book.
"There's a grotto in Margate. A Shell Grotto . . . Apparently, it could be Phoenician." She wasn't quite sure how to pronounce "Phoenician".
"Phoenicians in Margate? Oh, trade, I suppose." Joe's head went down again into his paper.
"What are you reading?"
"About the Twin Towers. Anniversary thing. Goes on a bit."
"I hate all this stuff in the papers," she said. "It makes it all so . . . real, somehow. Brings it all back. Those tiny people. You think, what can have gone through their minds? Before they jumped. Knowing what would happen."
"Shh," Joe winced. He'd spotted some Arabs eating cereal not far away across the quiet dining-room. Three youngish boys, a mother in a headscarf. The father had shiny dark hair, a light suit. "There's a Viking ship at Pegwell Bay," Joe said, tactfully changing the subject. "They've got the pamphlets in Reception. And a nature reserve."
But she continued, impervious: "I don't think I'd be brave enough to push myself off. That moment when you go over the edge - "
"Please, Amber, there are Arabs, over there."
"They aren't Arabs, they come from Southall. And the woman is English. We were chatting in the Leisure Club."
Joe had a closer look, when they passed the table, and the woman's eyes under her heavy scarf were a calm pale blue, and he caught a scrap of talk: "Why can't I steer the boat? Mum? Mum?"
"Because you're not old enough. Unless Abu says so."
"More coffee, Mrs Khan?" the waiter asked her.
Joe and Amber decided on Pegwell Bay, or rather Joe decided for Amber. On the way out they passed the Khan family getting dressed up in the foyer. The children were excited, shrieking with laughter. "Abu! Abu! Can I steer the boat?" They were wearing bright yellow oilskins, except for the mother, who still wore her headscarf. She smiled at Amber, and said: "Have a good day."
"Hope the sea's nice," Amber replied.
Joe and Amber sat at the front of the bus. It was already afternoon. "Did she take that thing off in the Leisure Club?" he asked Amber, who was pale with sun cream.
"She says she can't swim. She was just watching her boys. Apparently they're mad about sailing. She's a brave woman to go along."
"Seems a bit odd, Arabs sailing," said Joe. "I suppose we don't actually know any, though. Or Jews, either. Of course, they're just people."
"Well spotted, Joe."
Amber could sound sharp.
The Viking Ship was very easy to find. It was set in concrete in a clearing by the road, an enormous wooden boat lined with coloured shields.
"It's not real though, is it," Amber said.
"Read the notice," he invited her. "Men rowed this actual boat over from Denmark, in 1949, and left it here. Sort of re-creation. But it was still real."
Joe felt suddenly cold in the wash of sunlight. The men who had done it must now have grown old. Behind this ghost ship were all the others, rowed by real Vikings, a thousand years ago. How brave they had been, the old invaders. Pushing blindly off the edge of the world.
"So where's this nature reserve?" Amber asked. Joe peered through the bushes with his binoculars, and got a fuzzy close-up of a crisp packet.
Leading away from the road, a path took them over a railway line overgrown with brambles. They came to wide rafts of weed-scattered concrete. Silky-eared grasses grew up through the cracks. Beyond them, shallow sea, and sand-flats.
No people anywhere. It was very quiet, except for the distant drone of the road. Suddenly Joe heard birdsong.
"It's some sort of dump," Amber decided.
"I think I get it," Joe said, slowly, reading a faded notice on a wall. "This was where the Hovercraft used to land. Do you remember the Hovercraft? Once it was the fastest way to get across from France. The local council must have left it like this. Just left nature to sort it out."
"It's not what I'd call a nature reserve," said Amber. "I was imagining, you know, flower beds . . ."
"That's not nature," Joe pointed out.
"It's depressing here," said Amber, with a shudder. "It's as if humans have gone extinct. And it's just you and me. Just you and me, left."
"If you were the only girl in the world," Joe sang, and went down on one knee to Amber. But she didn't laugh, and the concrete hurt his kneecap.
"I like it here," Joe said. "It's history. Just as much as the Viking Ship." Blue butterflies hovered over the nettles.
"But I wanted to go to the Shell Grotto," she said.
"Don't those Vikings mean anything to you, Amber? They're - British history. They turned into us . . . Better than Margate. It's a girl thing, grottos," said Joe, kissing her, trying to make a joke of it, but she turned away, so his mouth was full of hair, dry red hair, tasting bitter, of perfume.
"The Grotto was Phoenician," Amber protested. "I don't want to waste our last day on this."
"Stay here with me," Joe said, taking her hand. "No one can see us. We can do what we like. We could swim with no clothes on. We could make love."
She frowned. For a moment, she looked like her mother.
"We're not too old," he said. Tears came to his eyes. "We mustn't quarrel. It's our last day. You get a bus to Margate. Meet me at the hotel."
"You don't mind?" she asked, docile again. She flung her arms round his neck, and kissed him. "I won't stay long, Joe. I'll come back here and find you."
Left alone, he felt hurt, at first, but soon that yielded to silent happiness. Blackberries ramped along the derelict fence, hot little black and red knots of sweetness with a tart edge, a tinct of winter. All their history was tangled together: a few pink and yellow flowers still clung, and the berries were growing at every stage from yellow-green to maroon to fat black. Joe got blue stains on his white shirt, and was briefly glad Amber had gone.
He scrambled down to the little bay. It seemed to be covered with small white stones, but when he got closer, he found they were shells; Joe crunched over layers of white paired shells. Colonies of shellfish must live and die here. The hum of bees mixed with the road's low murmur, a sleepy, happy, late summer sound. Joe thought, if I died here, no one would know, and at the same moment, a piercing gladness to be alive poured through his veins. The light bounced off the white concrete, flooded from the water, poured from the sky, the amazing bowl of silver-trailed sky a tiny plane was snailing across . . . There was some pattern he was on the verge of grasping: it dazzled him, it lifted him up; they were almost part of it, he and Amber: his love for her, her love for him, and the ghostly Vikings, and the plane, and the grasses, the blowing grasses, the passing of things, the shells in the bay and the Shell Grotto, the blue-eyed woman with the veil at breakfast, the inexorable brambles pushing their sweet fruit up over the concrete, away to the sea . . .
Yes, I understand it all.
Warm and weightless, he lay down and slept.
When he woke up, the light had deepened to the old gold of late afternoon. He ate chocolate from his pocket and sat with his binoculars, dipping and swooping out over the sea, suddenly zooming in on large heads of seagulls, greedy yellow beaks, implacable pupils, dive-bombing earthwards, too fast for him. There was a sand-spit in the far distance: the binoculars picked out a tiny family, pulling something into, or out of, the water. He changed the resolution: it was a boat. Three children in yellow and two bigger figures, one of them with a towel on his head. Or her head, it might be, but they had pushed off: one of the yellow children was steering: they rocked away into the dim distance.
He sat and stared as the sky changed colour. Time expanded; it became endless. Nobody would ever die . . .
The chill of night blew in off the sea. He started to worry. Where was Amber? It was fully dark, and the stars were up, when he heard her thrashing through the brambles, calling.
"Amber, love! I'm over here!"
Their kisses on meeting had real passion. "Joe, darling. The Grotto was fantastic. It's an underground temple. Completely pagan. Fantastic pictures all made of shells. You know, fertility symbols, and flowers, and a tree of life, and suns, and stars . . . They must have been, you know, fantastic, the Phoenicians."
"Fantastic," Joe echoed, glad she was happy, kissing her cheek, her neck, her ear.
"Can you see stars through your binoculars?" she asked him, and began to look. But something lower down caught her eye. Single red rockets were shooting up into the air, from the middle of the sea. "Where are those coming from?" she said. They fell strangely slowly, in suspended motion. Something unpleasant occurred to Amber. "Take a look. Please, Joe. It might be, you know, distress rockets. People in trouble."
"Flares," Joe corrected her. "I'm sure it isn't. Let's go home. I want my supper. It's only fireworks."
"Please have a look, Joe." But he had walked on. Sighing, Amber followed him.
They waited till ten for a bus to arrive.
"Where did the Phoenicians come from?" she asked. Joe knew more about the world than she did.
"Somewhere in the Middle East, I think . . . could have been Syria, come to think of it."
"Fancy Syrians living here. What if they got together with the Vikings?"
"Honestly, Amber, your history is hopeless."
Next day, everything was over. They woke late, and packed quickly. The eggs were cold in the grey morning light and the staff seemed rushed, with downcast faces. No one offered them a second cup of coffee. The Muslim family were not at breakfast.
"I hope they had a good day," said Amber. "Nice woman. I've forgotten her name."
They were cutting it fine for the ten o'clock train. There was some kind of major hold-up in Reception. A huddle of men who smelled of cigarettes. A policeman was standing by the desk, crackling into a radio. Then Amber saw the receptionist was crying. She was actually crying as she answered the phone. The words Amber caught were "Mrs Khan".
"Excuse me," Joe said. "We do have to pay. We've got a train to catch at ten."
"The press are here," the policeman was saying.
"It's the children I'm sorry for," another voice said.
No one took any notice of Joe. They didn't seem to hear him, they couldn't see him.
"Please," he said, "we need some help. Would you mind?"
But no one came.
Maggie Gee's latest novel, The White Family, is published by Saqi Books (£7.95)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
