Free The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison Page A

woods towards Jenny Brown Point, where she sat on some rocks in a stupor of delight in the sunshine, looking out over the sea-hardened grass at the distant water of the Kent Channel. Holiday-makers came and went along the shore, laughing and shouting. The tide rose, rearranged the sand and glazed it carefully, and then receded again. All afternoon Pam tried to remember her first fit, the hallucination which had accompanied it, her subsequent appalled dreams of that other seashore, with its rocky platforms shaken by the waves.
    The evening was warm, night came: before she knew it the lights of Morecambe hung in the air to the south. She fell asleep, to be woken freezing at 5 a.m. by the astonishing racket of the seabirds on the sand. By then Lucas had arrived and was combing the shore for her; the police were out. “I didn’t remember anything after all,” she told Lucas. “I only got a very strong sense that I might.” She touched his arm and smiled tiredly up at him. “I’m sorry.” She seemed happy but dazed for the rest of that day, and kept asking her mother, “Do you remember someone taking a picture of me, at the convalescent home? What was he like?”, to which the old woman could only reply:
    “He was a black man. Very interesting to talk to, very educated. You didn’t get that much in those days.”
    “I knew everyone would be worried about me,” Pam admitted. “But I felt so lazy.” She laughed. “Fancy falling asleep on the beach!” Then, in a panic: “My suitcase! Did anyone get my suitcase?”
    * * *
    Pam was certain the woods and sands were benign. But the very nebulosity of the incident had frightened Lucas. Thereafter, he always tried to be at “Castle Rock” with her.
    “Better the devil you know,” he wrote to me: meaning perhaps epilepsy.
    Remembering Yaxley’s demented face thrust under the edge of the wedding marquee in the mud, I had my own doubts. But as far as Pam and Lucas were concerned, Yaxley had vanished. They seemed to have healed the old wound, and I wasn’t anxious to reopen it. Besides, by then I had a life of my own. So I said nothing and, motives aside, this turned out to be a good decision.
    As a way of diverting her attention from Park Point and Jack Scout Cove, Lucas organized trips to local towns. There, inevitably, Pam became bad-tempered. Morecambe had good fish and chips, but it was too crowded; Carnforth (though for obvious reasons they were drawn repeatedly to its vast secondhand bookshop) bored her; she was driven to distraction, she complained, by Lancaster’s university-town smugness. All of them were needlessly expensive. Oddly enough she liked Grange-over-Sands: she had been there often as a child. It was middle-class, but it seemed to be in the grip of an endless bank holiday, which a real seaside town should be. She was quite happy to sit in the sunshine at the foot of the sea wall with her sandals off, eat ginger biscuits, drink 7-Up and gaze dreamily across the Kent Channel. Lucas was relieved until in September that year he realized she had been staring all summer at the hill above Arnside, where the convalescent home was situated. He shaded his eyes, consulted the now dog-eared OS map. Arnside Knott, 159m. From this distance the woods, wrapped in dusty gold afternoon light and showing no signs of habitation, seemed even more threatening and enigmatic. If he closed his eyes, black, aimless, muddy paths ran back into his memory. (All he could see were plastic gnomes, and then he was finding Pam again, newly awake and shivering on the shore at Jenny Brown Point, her mouth shocked and her soul as visible as a bruise.) When he opened them again and looked sidelong at her, her head was tilted back and she was laughing. Dazzled by her white cotton dress, which he had glimpsed suddenly from the water’s edge, a little boy perhaps two years old had screwed up his eyes against the glare, abandoned his parents to the water, and trudged all the way up through