The Winter Son
Chapter 1
16-minute read
November 1980, North Cornwall
The Boy
The boy lay in bed, trying to remember what had happened after his mother had died. They’d collected her ashes from the funeral parlour but the days before were all a blur. He knew that he’d spent most of the time in his room and that the pills had made him sleepy.
The covers had been pulled up to his nose that morning and he was aware of the sounds of the farm all around him. The wind in the trees, a pigeon that hooted all day, a car coming down the track to the house. His dad downstairs. And scratching from up in the loft, something in the rafters.
An ambulance had taken her away. In his room, the doctor stood at the foot of his bed, a hand placed on the covers. The boy stared up at the hatch in the ceiling, aware of his father standing in the doorway, the other man close by.
The doctor wore mustard coloured trousers and smelt of pipe tobacco like his grandfather. He soothed him, gently rubbing his feet through the covers, and saying ‘it’s okay’ over and over. He had a calm voice that nudged towards him like a boat coming out of the fog.
The boy liked having the other man in his room and when he stopped rubbing his feet, he asked him to stay.
“I have something that’ll make you feel better,” the doctor had whispered, like he was offering sweets, but not creepy.
The boy stared glassily at the cobwebs in the corner of the room, nodding, unsure what this meant.
The doctor had muttered something, and the boy was aware of his father shifting his weight in the frame of the bedroom door.
“Can you swallow this, do you think?”
He nodded at the small white pill. His father returned with a glass of water from downstairs.
“I’ll leave you more of these before I go. No more than one for the boy, take a couple for yourself if you need to rest. I’m so sorry.”
The next few days in bed were jumbled. There were snatches of memory, with all of the hard edges rounded off. He felt shut behind thick glass walls, all the sounds and sensations dulled. There was a pleasurable ache as if he’d been squashed under something soft and heavy.
In the middle of the night, he crept downstairs to use the bathroom. His father sat silently in his chair watching the flicker of flames in the open door of the Rayburn. The boy had been as quiet as a mouse, not even flushing the toilet. He climbed the stairs, avoiding the creaks in his socked feet. No words were exchanged.
Dulled by the tablets, he could barely face his dad. They sat together at the oak table, hunched over a pair of bowls, silent but for the slurp of soup. He’d snatched a look when he knew he wouldn’t be seen. His father in his black coat, his skin grey, eyes two wells of sadness. If he saw his dad crying, he thought he’d burst. The cold stone behind his ribs would crack, busted open forever.
Later, he woke in the light to the sound of his father. A heavy wooden chair scraping across slate, dishes and pans clattering in the sink. He thought he could make out sobbing and pulled the eiderdown over his head to block it all out.
That evening, his father sat on the end of his bed, his hand in the boy’s hair. He’d made up a story for him about a steam train driver with the same name. The story had started well, but was badly told, childish, rushed, and he fell asleep before his father was done.
Days later, the fog had begun to lift. They drove to the crematorium in silence, the Ford Fiesta too small after the Land Rover. The boy peered out of the side window at the last of the leaves, hanging in the trees like lonely birds. He could see his father’s white knuckles gripping the wheel and sensed that deep inside he was breaking apart. As he turned to ask his father a question, he thought better of it. The thick vein on the side of his neck throbbed blue.
They sat next to each other in the front row of an empty room and when a man in a black suit came in, his father had taken his hand. A coffin sat on a plinth in front of them, a single white rose on the lid. On the wall, a picture of a lake and a mountain covered in snow. Next to this, a pair of red curtains. The boy couldn’t look at his father, nor the coffin. Instead he stared at the painting. He imagined paddling, his trousers rolled up, the reflection of the mountain distorted in the ripples he made. The man in the suit read out some words and mentioned his mother’s name. He heard the words life and death and imagined a tiny blue fish swimming between his toes.
At the end of the reading, the man in the suit nodded at two others who placed a hand each on the coffin. They pushed it along a track of rollers to the curtains.
“Would you please stand for the committal.”
The boy could feel the heartbeat in his father’s hand.
“To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose on earth, a time to be born and a time to die. Here in this last act, in sorrow but without fear, in love and appreciation, we commit this body to its natural end.”
His father let out an awful moan, an injured animal. He gripped tighter and faced straight ahead, his eyes darting between the painting and the coffin.
His father sobbed, just once, a sudden intake of breath like he’d swallowed a boiled egg whole. Tears welled in the boy’s eyes, his focus locked on the reflection of the mountain in the lake. He was aware that the curtains had opened and the men in suits were nudging the coffin along the track.
He could feel his father’s shoulders shaking through his hand and he stared into the painting, focused on the mountain and the lake, taking in every detail as if he was going to be tested later. His father turned to face the back of the room, red faced and wild eyed. A man and a woman from the pub were sat in the last chairs by the door. The strains of Eleanor Rigby buzzed thinly from a single speaker.
The coffin was gone, the curtains closed. His father yanked him by the arm, dragging him along the line of chairs. They burst through the double doors at the back. A wind blew a handful of leaves and an empty crisp packet into the room as the doors snapped shut.
Ten minutes later the couple from the pub were stood under a yew tree near the entrance to the chapel. Cigarette smoke hung in the air and they kept glancing across the car park to the red Fiesta. In it, the man smoked a cigarette, the boy fiddling with the folding knife his grandmother had given him.
“I’m sorry dad,” the boy sobbed.
“Put that away,” his father snapped back.
There was a long pause, neither keen to fill the silence.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered again.
“I’m sorry too.” And then, “I love you, little man.”
The boy stared at the windscreen, a single drop of water slowly working its way down the glass. The man squeezed his eyes shut and his pain filled the car.
#
It would have been three days later. They were in the Fiesta again, parked up on a patch of gravel that looked down over the rocks to the beach. On the backseat in the middle, where the boy usually sat, a small cardboard box contained his mother’s ashes.
At low tide, in the summer, the wide beach would be full of families. The handful of wooden shacks that opened out onto the car park sold Cornish pasties, doughnuts, inflatables and beach towels. Half a dozen cottages clung to the sides of the valley that ran back from the beach. In the mist they looked abandoned, shuttered, no lights in the gloom. The shops were boarded up for the winter. Theirs was the only car.
It was high tide and the swell washed in and sucked at the gaps between the rocks. They’d left the car in silence, the man collecting his wife’s ashes and locking the doors without thinking.
Side by side on the slick black rocks, they stared into the water, and out to the blur where sea met sky. The boy’s eyes were wet with tears from the cold and from a sadness behind his ribs.
The two figures - one small in red, the other tall in blacks and greys - looked painfully solitary. Close enough to be fully aware of the other, yet far enough apart to reinforce a sense of distance between them. They stood sentinel, a few feet from where the rocks fell away into the ocean.
The light was failing. The high tide rolled onto the rocks; great surges of swell breathing in and out. To either side huge slabs of granite funnelled the wash into a gully.
Five hundred yards out to sea, a giant half dome of rock looked like a dog’s head, just visible in what remained of the light.
The boy turned to look at the small car park, their car huddled against the low wall. In one corner a yellow streetlight flickered on and warmed to a soft sodium glow. The mist was like a blanket over everything. A pair of gulls fought over a paper bag from the bin, their shrieks muffled in the fog.
His hands were stuffed deep inside his duffle coat pockets, his hood pulled down low over his dark eyes.
“Dad?” he tried, hesitantly.
His voice was weak and his father didn’t hear him. Or he did and chose to remain static, solitary, lost in thought.
In his father’s bare hands, the small cardboard box contained her ashes. It looked like it might be filled with noodles from a Chinese takeaway but he knew it was all that was left of his mother. A plastic bag filled with ash and grit.
His father held the box out in front of him. Around his boots a dirty cream of foam slowly inched across the rocks. The boy fiddled the knife in his pocket, easing the blade open a little, then thumbing it shut. He concentrated on the action, his gaze lazy across the swell beyond the rocks.
The mist was turning to rain and he looked up into the darkening sky, cold drops on his cheeks.
“Dad?”
The man turned to face his son, his eyes full of sadness and mist and rain.
“Jesus,” his dad muttered, a thick cobweb of snot dancing at the end of his nose. His face was tight and twisted, his back bent, doubled over. He looked like he was going to be sick, like he was in pain, his sadness almost overwhelming him, crushing him against the rock.
He reached for his father’s shoulder but stopped. He hesitated and his dad straightened, regaining his composure. The man looked at his son’s arm and smiled with his lips. His sad eyes returned to the box, held out like he wanted to give it away, get rid of it.
“Say goodbye, son”.
The boy made tight fists in his pockets and pressed his lips together to stop the sobs from welling up and out into the mist. His father missed the sad, silent “bye Mum” that his mouth made, any sound lost in his throat.
The tide was creeping its final few inches to the turn, its edge marked by the thickening band of yellowy foam. There were no waves, just the rise and fall of the swell, the whole Atlantic breathing in and out, only the two of them at its very edge.
The boy’s father took two small steps towards the lip of the rock and bent down onto his haunches. His long black coat dipped into the salty sludge that had washed in. He kept his feet apart, one slightly ahead of the other, and his weight low. The boy joined him standing upright at his side, their eyes level, both looking at the box in the man’s hands. His hair was plastered like a grey rag against his neck and the boy noticed that it was thin on top, that he could see scalp. It was raining properly now but it seemed his father hadn’t noticed.
He peeled the box open and removed the clear plastic bag filled with grit and ash. His hands were cut and scarred and looked pale against the featureless black of the rocks. His fingers shook as he held the bag in one hand. He put the box down and it drifted away on the foam, a little white boat heading into the darkening expanse.
He untied the knot in the neck of the bag and reached in to grab a fistful of ash. Standing, he turned to face the boy, the bag open in his hand. His other fist gripped the top of a smoking trail of ash. His teeth were clenched tight and the blue vein twisted in his neck. The air was chill, but he had sweat above his lip and in the dark circles under his eyes.
The boy waited for him to speak but he didn’t. It looked like he was straining to remember something, his breathing shallow, his lips nibbling at a lost thought.
Shifting, he turned to face the ocean and as he did his left boot slipped. He fell hard onto his side on the wet rock and let out a grunt as his arm buckled beneath him. His right hand, still gripping the bag, flew up, sending an arc of ash into the air. The grey grit rained down, dusting them both.
“Dad!” he cried as his father struggled to grip against the greasy rock. He tried to push himself up, but his boots slipped under his weight, the polished slab slick with kelp.
The boy turned and slipped, suddenly on his backside in the foam. He was next to his dad and he stood quickly, backing away from the edge of the rocks. His father held the bag of ashes, his boots struggling to find a grip.
The boy turned for a second to look for help at the car park. When he looked again his father was in the water, a few feet from him. He backed away from the edge and his dad rushed towards him, the swell pushing him up onto the rock. And then he was dragged back down and into the dark water.
The boy froze, his boots firm again. Rain washed the rocks. Seaweed and foam. Ash turning dark grey on the front of his coat, his arms.
“Get back!” his father yelled from the water.
He was close again, but his voice muffled, far away, weak and reedy. He’d been dragged from the rock and was being turned over in the surf. One arm was held aloft at an odd angle, marking his place. The light was failing but the boy saw his father’s face for a moment, etched with fear. A sharp red cut from his mouth to his ear, his coat billowing out behind him as he was turned over again.
“Dad!” he shouted suddenly and loudly, the spell broken. He could see the empty bag held aloft in his father’s hand, his arm battling the force of the water.
“Get back!” he spluttered. His coat was pulling him under, his mouth frothing, eyes bulging.
He saw him signal from the water to get off the rocks.
Another surge and he was pushed onto a vast rounded boulder, almost to the boy. The ocean tugged, the water pulling him back. His arms dragged limply as if he’d been taken by a creature. Rolling over, he kicked hard to push out beyond the break. Twisting, he tried to shrug his coat off, but was caught again as the sea rose up behind him, forcing him face down into the water. He arched his neck to snatch a fill of air and was rolled again.
The boy climbed gingerly across the rocks, keeping low. His father sunk into a trough between two sets of waves and rose up, yelling again.
“Dad! Here!” he shouted.
His father was pulled back out into a deepening hollow that rose up, rolling him over onto his side.
Turning back again towards the car park, he yelled with all that he had, long and strong.
“Help!”
He shouted again, into the mist and the rain, but there was nobody to hear. The red car was lit beneath a cone of fine mist from the single yellow bulb.
He turned back to the ocean and his father was gone. He pulled his hood down and scanned the waves.
“Dad!” he yelled into the rain, doubling over.
“Dad!” he screamed; tears and spit and ash and rain.
He picked his way across the rocks, his eyes darting wide between his feet and the sea. Mounting a boulder, he crouched down to stare into the blue-black chop, scanning the surface, waiting for his father to reappear. He felt his stomach throb with a heavy emptiness; hunger and panic tinged with something that could almost be rage. He was woozy from the pills the doctor had given him, slowed, a little confused. Squeezing his eyes tight, he wiped the ash from his face. He could see his mother looking up at him from the bottom of a well. Her green eyes turning a milky blue, and the water in the well filling with blood. His chest tightened; a big fist squeezing his heart so he could hardly breathe.
Out to sea he could just make out the darkening silhouette of Gull Rock, a huge dog’s head almost lost in the darkness. He looked down the gully, across the rocks, and into the sea. The dull ache in his chest gripped again, the air all squeezed out, his head spinning.
He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his duffle coat. The water was dark and cold and terrible. His father had gone.