Man with a Seagull on His Head Page 3

  Amanda pulled out her notebook and pencil from her bag and sat down. “If you don’t mind, Ruth, we’ll have a bit of privacy for the interview.”

  She didn’t want her friend to forget who was the reporter here. Ruth gave her a sharp-eyed stare, picked up her sherry glass and turned her back, wandering into the corner of the room that contained the kitchen.

  Jennifer sat herself down in a wing chair covered in olive velvet that was positioned opposite the sofa, on the other side of the coffee table. She crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap.

  “So,” said Amanda, setting her pencil to her notepad in readiness. “What exactly happened this morning?”

  And Jennifer explained how she’d been on her usual walk along East Beach that morning. It was a habit she’d started in this hot weather, getting out early on her bicycle and riding along the seafront to try and trick a little wind out of the air. She went past the boating lake and the pier and the beach huts at Thorpe Bay and on all the way to Shoeburyness and East Beach where the estuary opens out and can almost make you believe it to be the genuine sea. It was the only place you had any hope of finding fresh air these days. Back towards the town the estuary was either a seething slick of hot mud or a flat brown puddle depending on the tide, but here there was a bit of movement, little waves that came and went upon the shore.

  She’d propped her bike up against the ice cream shack, closed of course at that time in the morning, and had set off on her walk along the beach. She always walked along the sand rather than the grassy bank behind in order to be as close as possible to the water. Sometimes she removed her stockings and dipped her toes in.

  “Although I don’t suppose your readers care whether or not I was wearing my stockings,” she said, laughing nervously.

  Amanda flicked her head up and, keen to maintain the feeling of professionalism her purposeful scribbles had helped cultivate, ignored Jennifer’s remark. “And what time was it, Miss Mulholland?”

  “Call me Jennifer, please.” She reached out for her sherry glass and took a large, quite audible gulp. “Ah, yes, the time. It was around eight, a little before perhaps. There wasn’t another soul on the beach. Or so I thought—”

  “Yes—”

  “Yes, well, I’d had a little paddle and a little sit on the beach and I was standing up just looking at the water. And then I turned round and there was a gentleman kneeling right there on the grass behind me.”

  “And then you saw the bird fall out of the sky,” offered Amanda, a little impatient.

  “Well I wouldn’t say I saw it fall exactly, just that it was suddenly there. I must have had my mind on something else entirely. I thought I was on my own you see, because I usually am, and then finding out suddenly that I wasn’t—it really was most odd to find a man just there behind me when there was that whole empty stretch of grass. Like he was, well, waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “I’ve no idea, but he was looking straight at me and for a moment I was terribly frightened—no, not frightened exactly but … it’s silly I know, but I felt somehow that my time had come.”

  “You thought he was dangerous? A murderer?”

  “No, not a murderer as such but—” she stopped, and in the silence another word crept into the room. For Amanda, for whom all sexual acts were tinged with the thrill of newly acquired experience, it carried the deepest and most exclusive of carnal frissons. For a second the room, with its many fibres—the velvet, the thick carpet, the silky tassels of the lampshades, seemed to come alive with static buzz. Maybe she had a real story here. Attacker thwarted by falling bird.

  “Did he approach you?”

  “Oh no, nothing like that. What am I saying? It’s just that I can’t remember actually seeing the bird fall, rather … oh, I don’t know. I guess it just wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Of course I soon saw what had happened. A bird had plummeted from God knows where and landed on this poor man’s head.”

  Disappointed, Amanda floundered around for another question. “And what sort of bird was it?”

  “A gull. A small gull, but still, no gull is really so very small. It did quite a bit of damage. There was blood. The poor gentleman was knocked off his knees.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “Me? Well, once I’d got my senses together I went as quickly as I could to the phone box on Shoebury Broadway and called for an ambulance. They’d arrived by the time I got back to the poor man. Silly people thought I must be his wife. ‘No,’ I told them, ‘no, no, I’ve never seen him before in my life.’

  “Eccles was his name, like the cake. Raymond Eccles. They found it in his wallet, there was a letter folded up in there. Hang on a minute.”

  She eased herself up from the chair and walked over to a small bureau by the window. She opened it and retrieved a dishevelled-looking envelope from inside; she returned with it to her seat, continuing her story as she went.

  “Right away they started shouting in his ear. ‘Raymond, Raymond, can you hear me?’ I think he eventually he mumbled something. I didn’t see much cause to stick around after that so I left them to it. I had to get to work, after all.”

  Before she sat down she handed the envelope to Amanda. “Here. For some reason they handed this to me when they’d done with it and I forgot to give it back. I was halfway back across the beach before I realized I still had it in my hand. It’s the letter. It’s nothing personal, just a forwarding address for mail. He must’ve recently moved in somewhere. I’m going to send it back to him of course, but maybe it could be useful to you. It has his address on the envelope.”

  Amanda took it eagerly, for the question of how she was going to find out his address in order to get his side of the story had been bothering her from the beginning.

  “Thanks, that’s fantastic,” she said, smiling at Jennifer.

  “Do you want to copy it down?” she said as Amanda tucked it into her bag. “It’s just I feel responsible for returning it to him.”

  “Oh, that’s alright, I can give it to him when I go to interview him. Save you a stamp.”

  Jennifer looked unsure, as if reluctant to give it up, but then nodded her acquiescence—“Very well”—and returned to her seat.

  “What about the gull?” asked Ruth suddenly from the other side of the room.

  “Ruth, that’s hardly relevant.”

  Jennifer peered round the wing of her chair at Ruth. “The gull? Well, funny you should ask because I walked right past it on my way back across the beach. I stopped for a moment because I noticed it twitch. It wasn’t actually dead. Very nearly, but not quite. Its wing was twitching. As if, despite its sorry state, it was still trying to fly.” Then she turned back to face Amanda. “I’m afraid, Amanda, I just left it there.”

  Three

  Mrs. Jean Foyle was in her front garden picking stones from the bare earth of the flowerbeds when the taxi pulled into the Close. She watched with mild interest from her crouched position as it slowly and smoothly turned the corner, and then stood up as it came to a stop outside number eight. The sound of the door opening then closing again cut through the quietness of the hot still air, and now that the taxi had pulled away she could see who the passenger had been. It was the young man who now lived at number eight: Raymond, a nephew or cousin of poor Mary Wilson’s, who’d moved into the property shortly after Mary herself had left for the care home. She had, once or twice, asked him how Mary was getting on but he claimed not to be in contact with her, or with her daughter in Australia to whom he paid the rent.

  He was a quiet boy, lived alone with no visitors that she’d been aware of, and Mrs. Foyle knew very little about him, apart from the fact that he had recently lost his mother. She couldn’t now remember how she’d come by this information. Possibly it had come from Raymond himself, for she had welcomed him as she would have done any other newcomer to the
Close, by calling with a cake and a pot of her homemade jam. But she couldn’t imagine that in this doorstep conversation they would have touched on a matter so personal as a recent bereavement for, as she remembered it, the encounter had been short and rather awkward. She had put his reticence down to extreme shyness rather than rudeness and had not since bothered him with much other than a friendly smile on the occasions their paths had crossed on the street. Indeed, she would not have offered anything more on this occasion had she not been conscious that he’d seen her stand up rather purposefully when he got out of the taxi, and that they were positioned now directly opposite each other. But also there was something about the way he lingered on the pavement without making any immediate move towards his front door which seemed to invite her to cross the street. The sun was in her eyes as she did so and it wasn’t until she got quite close that she noticed he had a dressing on his forehead, a square patch of wadding taped to the skin just below his hairline.

  “Good afternoon, dear,” she said as she approached, holding a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.

  He offered her a nod by way of greeting.

  To find relief from the glare in her eyes, Mrs. Foyle positioned herself within his shadow, which fell across the pavement, causing their stances to be a little closer and more direct than they might have otherwise been.

  “Are you okay, dear?” she asked, instinctively putting a hand upon his arm, for he had a most worried look upon his face.

  His hand rose slowly to where the dressing was taped, his fingers rubbing lightly back and forth across its surface, a slight frown appearing on his brow.

  “Was the taxi bringing you from the hospital? Did you have some kind of accident?”

  Her questions had yet to be met with a response and even these direct ones were met with a silence that suggested something other than mere shyness. It occurred to her that whatever had happened to him had put him in a state of shock and she wondered why, if it was indeed the hospital he had come from, they had let him go in such a condition. He was about a head taller than her and she looked up now to try and meet his eye, but his gaze was distant, directed intently over her shoulder as if fixed on something across the other side of the street. She turned to check if there was anything worthy of his attention. But there was only her own house, her trowel abandoned on the dry grass beside the flowerbed, alongside the flowerpot in which she’d been collecting stones. She tried questioning him further:

  “Do you remember what happened, dear? Did you fall? Do you remember anything at all?”

  Still he was silent and she was just wondering what to do next, for it was clear to her she couldn’t leave him out here on the street in such a state, when he did, at last, speak:

  “Yes,” he said, looking down now, still rather worriedly, into her eyes. His brow was still fixed in a frown and it seemed as if he might elaborate but again he fell silent, lifting his gaze back over her shoulder, so intently that she once again looked behind her, and saw this time her husband just now returning in the car from the bowling club. She was now suddenly impatient for the encounter to be over, for she remembered an important call she had promised him she would make and, although there had seemed plenty of time when he left, here he was already returned and the call not yet made.

  She was aware that he had spoken again but, as her back had been turned and her attention elsewhere, she hadn’t caught exactly what he’d said. She’d heard only the word “everything”, which was to her a reassuring kind of a word. He remembered everything, perhaps, or maybe everything was okay. Either way it was enough to put her immediate concerns to rest, especially as he had now shifted his stance slightly towards the house as if preparing to enter it.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” she said, stepping down off the pavement so that the sun once again fell across her eyes. “You should go in and get some rest now; it looks as if it might be painful.”

  She assumed now that the conversation was over and, telling herself that she would check on him again later, she turned to leave. But he spoke again, quite clearly this time. And what he said so surprised her that it diverted her for a moment from her impatience to cross the road and, in the years to come, was the one thing she recalled when recounting the conversation to others. Forgetful of many of her true feelings and motives at the time, she became quite proud of her own part in his story. Whether he was saying it directly to her or more to himself she couldn’t tell, as her own back was once again turned. But she heard him quite clearly:

  “Not painful. Beautiful.”

  It was this last word, beautiful, which caused her to stop. Not only because it was not a word she expected to hear in connection with an injury, but because of the way in which he said it: carefully and precisely, as if it were a word he had never said before. It dropped unexpectedly into the space between them like something fallen from the sky, making her turn back round to face him. And for a moment they both stood quite still in silence, as if examining it. But eventually Mrs. Foyle said, “Well,” for she did not quite know what else to say, and the matter of the phone call had started to distract her again. “Blows to the head can make you feel awfully strange. You go and have a little lie down. I’ll bring you over some soup later on so that you don’t have to think about food. I made plenty yesterday, knowing that the water would be off, much more than Donald and I can possibly eat.”

  It was around six when Mrs. Foyle crossed the road again with her dish of tomato soup. With some effort she held one arm around it as she used her other hand to ring the doorbell. She waited but there was no answer, which was strange as she hadn’t seen anyone leave the house. She thought perhaps he was asleep and this thought set her worrying, as she knew the dangers of falling asleep after a head injury. As she crouched down, putting the dish on the path beside her, she was already imagining a future conversation with someone in authority—a doctor or policeman—and how she would have to admit that she had indeed found his behaviour a little odd but had left him alone anyway. Oh dear, she thought to herself as she lifted the flap of the letterbox, she really shouldn’t have done that, what was she thinking? And all because of a silly telephone call which had not been nearly as important as Donald had insisted. She called through the letterbox:

  “Raymond dear, are you in there?” She put her eyes to the opening but couldn’t see much beyond the hall carpet. There was no answer.

  “Raymond?”

  She would have no choice but to call the ambulance herself if he didn’t come. She raised her voice: “It’s Mrs. Foyle, dear … with the soup.”

  She peered in once more, and she was just about to give up and go back across the road to consult Donald about what to do next when the door suddenly opened. Mrs. Foyle fell backwards onto her hands in surprise, then quickly scrambled up, hurriedly brushing down her skirt. When she looked up she saw that, strangely, the door had not fully opened. Indeed she could not see round it at all, and it was only when she peered quite closely into the chink that had appeared that she could see Raymond, who, even more bizarrely, was crouched close to the floor just as she had been. He was looking at her, the upward glance making his eyes appear large and fearful, almost glowing in the semi-darkness behind.

  “Everything okay, dear?” asked Mrs. Foyle, looking down, most puzzled.

  And now, in a gesture she thought a little rude, he reached out his hand—for the soup, she assumed. She bent to pick the dish up from where it sat upon the path and having done so remained crouched, level with Raymond, as she held it out towards him.

  “It’s heavy, I think you might need two hands,” she said, but he ignored her advice, the dish wobbling slightly as he tried to manoeuvre it around the door, making some effort, it seemed, to open it as little as possible as he did so. Once he had it inside he looked up at her again, the corner of his mouth raised very slightly in acknowledgment.

  “Thank you,” he said. He did say thank y
ou.

  “No bother, dear, no bother. Well, I’ll leave you to your rest. Just pop the dish over when you’re done, I’ll—” But the door closed before she had a chance to finish.

  She stood there for a moment, puzzled, the coolness of the dish, which had been in the fridge since yesterday, still on her hands. She saw something that she hadn’t noticed when she’d first arrived: the curtains in the two front rooms were closed. And this settled in her mind that something odd was going on. Whatever could he be hiding in there? She turned and walked back down the path, running her eyes once more over the exterior of the bungalow as she slowly closed the gate behind her. But there was nothing more that could be gleaned from out here. She would have to talk it through with Donald over dinner.

  Four

  Returning home that evening after her interview with Jennifer Mulholland, Amanda retrieved the street map for Southend and its environs from its place in the drawer of the hallway table, consulting it for the first time in order to find Belvedere Close, which was the address written on the front of the envelope. Following the grid references she found it popping out like an inquisitive worm from the side of Elm Road in Shoeburyness, and, turning the corner of the page down, tucked the map into her bag, ready for the following day.

  The morning was as white and dry as a blank page, the dew already evaporated from the parched grass by the side of the roads and pavements, the quietness of which was enough to allow Amanda to feel the freshness of the air even so, and a kind of virtue at being out at this hour when most were still in bed.

  She decided to walk to Shoeburyness rather than take the bus. It was not a short distance and might take her an hour, but the bus involved waiting for one to arrive and she was not in the mood for that somehow. As she walked along the path that ran in front of the detached villas overlooking the estuary, of which her home was one, she saw herself from afar, as if in a film, the camera following her now as she skipped lightly down the long flight of steps that took her to the Western Esplanade, her movements disturbing the stillness of the warm morning air just enough to lift the hem of her skirt.