Lost: Part 6

Back in his cottage, Winter lit a cigarette and poured a large glass of whisky. He stood at the window and looked across the village green to the far-away twisted terraces of the colliery and the sea beyond. He felt curiously alive: his skin tingled, every sinew of his body felt taught and stretched, almost to breaking point, the fingers of his left hand tapped restlessly on the bare windowsill. He did not even hear their agitated rhythm.

            That morning he had confronted an old adversary. The colliery, like the ageing nemesis of a fairy tale, had showed some of the deterioration of time, but its true self was still evident. Just as the geometry and landscape of a face is not altered by years: despite its creases and careless touch-ups, the colliery remained the same. As he walked, remembrances of faces, names, addresses, shabby front rooms and salt lashed allotments came rushing at him. A door had been opened. The spirits of the past were assembling.

            His final port of call that morning had been the old ice cream parlour. It had been closed for over twenty years, but he expected the shabby, boarded-up shell would always be Cichella’s to the older residents of the colliery. It would always be the home of the Coxon girls. Standing in front of the shop, he had noticed that his hands were trembling, that his breath was shallow and rapid. The body does not dissemble. Not totally. There are always signs, tells. He knew this. He had lived it. He observed his own body’s reaction with the detachment of a seasoned police officer dissecting a sweating suspect in an interview room. 

This was the place. This was the place. Life had bourn him away, on currents of failed promotions and unsatisfactory relationships, yet there he was. There he was, washed back by the relentless tide to the place where it all began.

.           What was he doing there? When he faced the shop front, the absolute futility of his situation overwhelmed him. He felt paralysed, entrenched. As if while he stood, tangled roots had sprouted from the old building and twisted round his legs, holding him firm, compelling him to gaze upon the site of his failure. People pushed and rushed past, going about the humdrum business of Monday. Did they see him? Did they recognise him? An awful, clammy paranoia slithered into his mind. If he was recognised, how would people react? They must surely look upon him with contempt. It was only right; he had failed those little girls. He imagined the sisters lying undisturbed in their desolate graves, covered by decades, covered by lichen and wildflowers and fallen leaves. Contempt was what he deserved. He saw himself as if from outside of his own body: a tired and ridiculous ageing man with tears in his eyes. He put his head in his tremoring hands to hide his distress. He slowed his breathing. He steeled himself. Heavily, he turned and walked away.

            Then, she was by his side, the pixie-like girl from the cottage next door. He did not acknowledge her presence. He sped up to shake her off, he was in no mood for company, but the girl simply walked with a skip to keep pace. He slowed, she did too. He glanced across at her and was struck by the perfection of youth, its smoothness and hopefulness. He pondered what it must feel like to be so young, to have a life full of possibilities, a life still malleable and unformed. He imagined Nell’s future curling in front of her like a fairy tale road twisting through sun-dappled meadows and friendly, cloud peaked mountains. She that fabled quality of innocence and adventure. Her rosy, apple-round face and her carefree skip made him picture a character from the cover of a Ladybird book, sallying forth to make her fortune. Instead of a chequered handkerchief on a stick packed with her worldly belongings, the girl carried a basket of books and a bag of groceries. She kept a little distance from him as she skipped. He remembered seeing her playing on the green with her imaginary dog, and wondered if her unseen companion was now trotting between them. She carried with her an aroma of home baking: sugar and spice and pastry. He walked in silence for a while. He had nothing to say. But, in the girl’s presence, he noticed his memories of hard, deviant faces and of the unmeasurable agony of loss paled and softened. Her company was a comfort. He had welcomed it. 

            His quest then, had begun, finally, after weeks of procrastination and self-reproach. In his cottage, Winter downed his whisky and took the sharpest knife he could find. He sliced through the seal on the first box from the kitchen table and lifted out a pile of yellowing notebooks, his own notebooks, methodically kept during the months and years of the investigation. They would be the perfect place to start. He felt an electrical surge of energy, excitement pulse through his body. It was beginning. Giving himself room to work, he moved the other boxes to the floor and spread the notebooks across the table, ordering them by date. There were eleven of them. Each, he recalled, would be crammed with scribbled notes, diary entries, questions, addresses and observations: messages from another age, relics of a darkness. The essence of his life, of his fate, of who he was and what he believed in was contained within the brittle, dry pages of those books. Once opened, he would enter another world, pass through a black curtain. He had to face it, face them. It was time. Just as he had pictured Nell moving towards her future through meadows, over misty mountains: he was moving backwards, back into the malignant past. He rose from the table and grabbed a pencil and a pad of paper. He sat down. He opened the first notebook and began to read. It was all there, just under the surface waiting for him, as he knew it would be: blackness, fear. He scribbled notes as he read. His eyes never left the notebooks; he wrote as if his pencil was controlled by a being from another realm. Later, when he read the comments and observations scrawled on the pad of paper, he was astonished. He had no recollection of his thoughts or actions.

Once, his trance-like concentration was broken by a bright rapping on the cottage door. He felt momentarily disorientated, like a diver breaking through the oily green surface of an ocean, leaving the dark depths for dazzling sunlight and air. He cursed and went to the door. There was no one there. From the corner of his eye he noticed a flash of a red-jumpered arm disappearing into the cottage next door. The girl. Nell. On his step he discovered a spruce-green pottery plate and one custard tart. He smiled and shook his head. He had taken his first bite before he had even closed the door. It was lunchtime, he supposed, although such temporal distinctions meant nothing to Winter; who ate only when he remembered to eat. The custard was smooth, sweet and nutmeggy. He put the empty plate on the kitchen table and wiped his sticky hands on his shirt. He’d lost another button, on his cuff this time, he absently noticed. He rolled up his sleeves and went back to work.