The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

and water, but his chest and arms were exposed. Across the face was the silk scarf he had seen Mallory wearing at their last meeting.

      ‘Mallory!’ Halliday stood up, as the black-suited figure of the chauffeur stepped onto a ledge twenty feet above. Halliday went over to Gabrielle Szabo, who was standing by the step, apparently gazing out to sea. ‘That’s Dr Mallory! He lived with me at Columbine Sept Heures! How did he – Gabrielle, you knew he was here!’

      Halliday seized her hands, in his anger jerked her forward, knocking off her glasses. As she fell to her knees, scrambling helplessly for them, Halliday held her shoulders. ‘Gabrielle! Gabrielle, you’re –’

      ‘Halliday!’ Her head lowered, she held his fingers and pressed them into her orbits. ‘Mallory, he did it – we knew he’d follow you here. He was my doctor once, I’ve waited for years …’

      Halliday pushed her away, his feet crushing the sunglasses on the floor. He looked down at the white-suited figure washed by the waves, wondering what nightmare was hidden behind the scarf over its face, and sprinted along the terrace past the auditorium, then raced away through the dark streets.

      As he reached the Peugeot the black-suited chauffeur was only twenty yards behind. Halliday started the motor and swung the car away through the dust. In the rear mirror he saw the chauffeur stop and draw a pistol from his belt. As he fired the bullet shattered the windshield. Halliday swerved into one of the kiosks, then regained control and set off with his head down, the cold night air blowing fragments of frosted glass into his face.

      Two miles from Leptis, when there was no sight of the Mercedes in pursuit, he stopped and knocked out the windshield. As he drove on westward the air grew warmer, the rising dawn lifting in front of him with its promise of light and time.

       1966

THE IMPOSSIBLE MAN

      At low tide, their eggs buried at last in the broken sand below the dunes, the turtles began their return journey to the sea. To Conrad Foster, watching beside his uncle from the balustrade along the beach road, there seemed little more than fifty yards to the safety of the slack water. The turtles laboured on, their dark humps hidden among the orange crates and the drifts of kelp washed up from the sea. Conrad pointed to the flock of gulls resting on the submerged sandbank in the mouth of the estuary. The birds had been staring out to sea, as if uninterested in the deserted shoreline where the old man and the boy waited by the rail, but at this small movement of Conrad’s a dozen white heads turned together.

      ‘They’ve seen them …’ Conrad let his arm fall to the rail. ‘Uncle Theodore, do you think –?’

      His uncle gestured with the stick at a car moving along the road a quarter of a mile away. ‘It could have been the car.’ He took his pipe from his mouth as a cry came from the sandbank. The first flight of gulls rose into the air and began to turn like a scythe towards the shore. ‘Here they come.’

      The turtles had emerged from the shelter of the debris by the tideline. They advanced across the sheet of damp sand that sloped down to the sea, the screams of the gulls tearing at the air over their heads.

      Involuntarily Conrad moved away towards the row of chalets and the deserted tea garden on the outskirts of the town. His uncle held his arm. The turtles were being picked from the shallow water and dropped on the sand, then dismembered by a dozen beaks.

      Within barely a minute of their arrival the birds began to rise from the beach. Conrad and his uncle had not been the only spectators of the gulls’ brief feast. A small party of some dozen men stepped down from their vantage point among the dunes and moved along the sand, driving the last of the birds away from the turtles. The men were all elderly, well into their sixties and seventies, and wore singlets and cotton trousers rolled to their knees. Each carried a canvas bag and a wooden gaff tipped by a steel blade. As they picked up the shells they cleaned them with swift, practised movements and dropped them into their bags. The wet sand was streaked with blood, and soon the old men’s bare feet and arms were covered with the bright stains.

      ‘I dare say you’re ready to move.’ Uncle Theodore looked up at the sky, following the gulls back to the estuary. ‘Your aunt will have something waiting for us.’

      Conrad was watching the old men. As they passed, one of them raised his ruby-tipped gaff in greeting. ‘Who are they?’ he asked as his uncle acknowledged the salute.

      ‘Shell collectors – they come here in the season. These shells fetch a good price.’

      They set off towards the town, Uncle Theodore moving at a slow pace with his stick. As he waited Conrad glanced back along the beach. For some reason the sight of the old men streaked with the blood of the slaughtered turtles was more disturbing than the viciousness of the seagulls. Then he remembered that he himself had probably set off the birds.

      The sounds of a truck overlaid the fading cries of the gulls as they settled themselves on the sandbank. The old men had gone, and the incoming tide was beginning to wash the stained sand. They reached the crossing by the first of the chalets. Conrad steered his uncle to the traffic island in the centre of the road. As they waited for the truck to pass he said, ‘Uncle, did you notice the birds never touched the sand?’

      The truck roared past them, its high pantechnicon blocking off the sky. Conrad took his uncle’s arm and moved forward. The old man plodded on, rooting his stick in the sandy tarmac. Then he flinched back, the pipe falling from his mouth as he shouted at the sports car swerving towards them out of the dust behind the truck. Conrad caught a glimpse of the driver’s white knuckles on the rim of the steering wheel, a frozen face behind the windshield as the car, running down its own brakes, began to slide sideways across the road. Conrad started to push the old man back but the car was on them, bursting across the traffic island in a roar of dust.

      The hospital was almost empty. During the first days Conrad was glad to lie motionlessly in the deserted ward, watching the patterns of light reflected on to the ceiling from the flowers on the window-sill, listening to the few sounds from the orderly room beyond the swing doors. At intervals the nurse would come and look at him. Once, when she bent down to straighten the cradle over his legs, he noticed that she was not a young woman but even older than his aunt, despite her slim figure and the purple rinse in her hair. In fact, all the nurses and orderlies who tended him in the empty ward were elderly, and obviously regarded Conrad more as a child than a youth of seventeen, treating him to a mindless and amiable banter as they moved about the ward.

      Later, when the pain from his amputated leg roused him from this placid second sleep, Nurse Sadie at last began to look at his face. She told him that his aunt had come to visit him each day after the accident, and that she would return the following afternoon.

      ‘… Theodore – Uncle Theodore …?’ Conrad tried to sit up but an invisible leg, as dead and heavy as a mastodon’s, anchored him to the bed. ‘Mr Foster … my uncle. Did the car …?’

      ‘Missed him by yards, dear. Or let’s say inches.’ Nurse Sadie touched his forehead with a hand like a cool bird. ‘Only a scratch on his wrist where the windshield cut it. My, the glass we took out of you, though, you looked as if you’d jumped through a greenhouse!’

      Conrad moved his head away from her fingers. He searched the rows of empty beds in the ward. ‘Where is he? Here …?’

      ‘At home. Your aunt’s looking after him, he’ll be right as rain.’

      Conrad lay back, waiting for Nurse Sadie to go away so that he could be alone with the pain in his vanished leg. Above him the surgical cradle loomed like a white mountain. Strangely, the news that Uncle Theodore had escaped almost unscathed from the accident left Conrad without any sense of relief. Since the age of five, when the deaths of his parents in an air disaster had left him an orphan, his relationship with his aunt and uncle had been, if anything, even closer than that he would have had with his mother and father, their affection and loyalties more conscious and constant. Yet he found himself thinking