Wolves by Simon Ings Read Free Book Online

telephones stop ringing, and the pipes go cold and brittle, and the only water’s rain which they must boil.
    I should not have come. I seem to be gathering all the living room’s dampness into myself, pooling it behind my breast-bone – a big wet bag of phlegm I cannot even bring up. ‘I just need—Just a moment.’
    I fumble with the door knob, trying and failing to suppress the welling inside my chest. I have to get out. I have to get out now . The door squeals against the frame, and I stumble out of the shack, into the shadow of the ketch.
    Beneath the hull, on a shipping pallet and under clear shrink-wrap, there are sheets of marine ply. Next to them there’s a stack of tins and plastic gallon buckets – gelcoat varnish, stripper, paint. Unopened bags of chopped glass fibre ripple and crackle in the wind. This itself is a sort of garden, I suppose, its boundaries marked by shadows that develop even as I watch.
    The evening sun is still strong enough to burn through the haze. I move out of the shadows, into the light. Still I am trapped. There are no lines for me to cross, no boundaries to leap. This garden goes on forever. I keep walking. The distant houses are black and soft, sculptures of burnt sugar, without doors, without windows, silhouetted against the setting sun. The upturned hulls of the fishing boats might have been sculpted from blocks by winds howling off the sea. Their shapes are natural, circumstantial – no need to infer a human agency at all. Even the road, what’s left of it, might have been scoured by rain, a line as contingent as any runnel in the stones.
    ‘Conrad?’
    I half-expected Michel to come running out after me. Not Hanna. I am glad it is her, and embarrassed. What has Michel said about me, that she is so easy with me, so friendly, so concerned?
    She falls into step beside me – her errant house guest, bolting off. She does not question me. I don’t know where I’m going; round here there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go. She isn’t bothered. She does not try to stop me. I am glad of that. After a minute’s pointless ambling, gently, she slips her small, hard arm through mine. After Mandy, the feel of Hanna’s arm against the edge of my ribcage, the heat of it, is deliciously cruel. I should never have come. I squeeze her arm hard against me as though staunching a wound.
    Two lighthouses guard the point. Swirling round the modern, automatic one, a concrete ramp leads to a door half way up the tower. Why a ramp? As though the people who built this, for all their aptitude in cast concrete, never got around to inventing stairs.
    The old lighthouse is taller, massier, painted black. A board painted with opening times is screwed to its only door. This has already been padlocked shut for the night. ‘Oh,’ says Hanna. ‘Bugger.’ As though this lonely tourist attraction had always been our quarry. It is impressive, how Hanna is nudging me, gently, gently, back into the ordinary. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s go see the keeper’s house.’
    ‘Going to see’ anything round here is really just a form of words. To see anything from anywhere here requires no more than a shift of one’s attention. The house is behind and a little to the left of us. It is the biggest structure on the shingle. It is perfectly circular – a mansion bent round upon itself to form a perfect ‘O’. In the centre, where the back gardens should be twisted round to nothing, there is a greenish glass cupola. To bring so much expensive stone to such an out-of-the-way place, never mind pile it up and dress it in this radical form, suggests a level of self-belief the present age could not muster. The building’s big blocks of dressed honey-coloured stone are fitted together with a neatness that reminds me of Mandy’s townhouse with its bridges and canals, its traffic of exotic hybrid bicycles and semi-electric executive cars.
    I had better call her, after all.
    When Mandy speaks, she instinctively