12. Answers and More Questions

12

Answers and More Questions

‘Grandad was a writer,’ Robinson said, tipping the flask to refill Josie’s cup. Wearing her own jumper, with Robinson’s shirt covering her legs, she was slowly defrosting. Her jeans, hung up between two pieces of driftwood nearby, billowed in the breeze. Robinson, wearing only his jeans, seemed to feel no cold at all. ‘Earnest Blackthorne. You won’t have heard of him. He never published anything, just put these humongous manuscripts away in boxes in the loft. Growing up I remember him boasting about being the Cornish Charles Dickens, and that one day he’d be discovered, and he’d end up rich. He never was, though. Sadly, he died unknown to the wider world. Dad was inspired enough to name me after Robinson Crusoe, however.’

‘Which was written by Daniel Defoe.’

Robinson grinned. ‘The look on Grandad’s face must have been something. Dad was never much of a reader, except for tide tables. He got it right for my sister, though. Her name’s Scarlet, after The Scarlet Letter .’

‘Did that make your grandfather happy?’

Robinson shrugged. ‘Who knows? He was in the ground by the time I was ten. I barely remember him. Dad has all his stuff in a shed somewhere. I remember his legacy rather than the man himself.’

‘Perhaps that’s for the best.’

‘Any interesting characters in your family?’

Josie sighed. ‘Dad and Mum were both gone by my late teens,’ she said. ‘Cancer for one, an aneurysm for the other. Dad went first, slowly, and I think that might have triggered Mum. I waved her off to work one morning, and never saw her alive again. She dropped down dead at her desk.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

Josie shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. I’m older than I look.’ At her attempted joke, Robinson gave a half-smile, not quite wide enough to convince Josie he saw the funny side. Feeling a little chastised, she said, ‘What about your mum? Is she up there in that shack somewhere?’

‘Oh, no,’ Robinson said, shaking his head. ‘She lives in London. My parents were never married, or anything like that. Dad was kind of a wanderer. He wandered into her life long enough to give her a couple of kids, and for a while we were a family of sorts, then he wandered back out again. He kept in touch, mostly through postcards or random phone calls in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t until he went blind and needed looking after that I really got back in touch with him.’

‘Growing up without a father, that must have been hard.’

‘If you knew my dad better, you’d probably decide it was easier without him than with him.’ He gave a chuckle and shook his head. ‘So … Hilda said you were divorced?’

Josie nearly coughed out the coffee she was sipping. ‘Ah, yes. Recently. I mean, we had been separated for several years, but he decided to make it final.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘Yeah. He spent our time apart improving his lot in life, and when he was fully armed, he came swooping back in to take what he had left behind.’ She sighed, wishing she didn’t sound so bitter. ‘And then half of what I had, too.’

Robinson said nothing. After a long period of silence, Josie glanced up at him. He was still looking out to sea, the wind still ruffling his hair, the sun leaving shadows across the lines of his face. She wondered what he did for a living: something outdoors for sure, judging by how toned his body was, even in, she guessed, his forties. Lifeguarding, perhaps. Maybe he was a fisherman, or even a farmer. Perhaps a landscape gardener. Something honest, salt of the earth.

‘The campsite,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s too much for me. It was good of your dad to give me the opportunity, and I know Hilda thinks it’s like some kind of challenge I need to overcome in order to you know … find myself again, but it’s … too much. If it was just cutting grass, whatever, maybe….’

She began to explain about the people living in the treehouses. For a few minutes, Robinson listened without interrupting, nodding sagely from time to time but saying nothing until Josie gave a flap of her hands and said, ‘I really don’t know what to do.’

‘Let’s go and see Dad,’ Robinson said. ‘We’ll find out what those people are doing and have them moved on.’ He stood up. ‘I suppose we’d better get back.’

He reached out a hand. Josie stared at it for a moment before letting him pull her up. She held on just a little longer as she found her feet, not wanting to let go.

Nat stirred a cup of cabbage water, then sprinkled a little more pepper on the top before taking a long sip.

‘Ah.’ He grinned through his beard. ‘Tis better. Having trouble with the lads down there, are ’e? They’re harmless. Just pretend they’s not there.’

‘But they’re causing me trouble. They left a frog in my bag, they pushed the strimmer off the cliff, and they … set up the table tennis tables without … without asking. Oh, and they stole your radio.’

Nat grinned. ‘Ha, that’ll be Geoffrey, done that. Lad likes the cricket. Just give him a holler, tell him you’ll take a chainsaw to his tree if he don’t give it back.’

‘They have names, do they? And do they have addresses, places to live that aren’t in those trees? I’m a little nervous about it, and I can’t get anything done if they’re going to sabotage everything I do.’

‘Safe as houses,’ Nat said.

Robinson came into the small, cluttered living room from the even smaller kitchen next door. He handed Josie a cup of coffee and sat down on a wicker stool, setting his cup down on a round glass coffee table, pushing a couple of fishing magazines aside to make space. Josie, sitting on a plastic garden chair opposite Nathaniel, who occupied the only proper armchair in the room, glanced at Robinson for moral support.

‘Who are they, Dad? You know, don’t you? Are they old friends?’

Nat gave a wistful sigh. ‘Ah, those lads, they’s all that’s left of me tribe.’

‘Your tribe? So they are mates of yours.’

‘Disciples,’ Nat said. ‘Started a bit of a cult back in the late eighties,’ he said, as casually as though it was something people did every day. ‘Just felt like it, you know.’ He chuckled. ‘The old man, he had that old campsite down there, and I thought it was as good a place as any. Out of the way, like, not bothering no one, no campers about out of season. Made up some rules, picked one of them rocks out there in the sea as the sacred place, all that kind of stuff.’ He sipped his drink, a bit of pepper catching on his beard.

‘I remember Mum claiming you’d joined a cult,’ Robinson said.

‘No, boy. Didn’t join nothing. I was like the top dog. Made up the rules.’

‘And those people down there, they’re from your cult?’

‘Tis a funny old thing,’ Nat said. ‘They just started to show up. Soon we had fifty of them down there, living in the cabins, dancing around, making a mess, all that. They just started showing up. But you know, got bored, you see. Decided to wander off.’

‘You just wandered off?’

‘Yeah, and then it all kind of ended. Came back a year later, they’d all gone.’

‘But what about those guys down there in the treehouses?’ Josie asked. ‘Have they been living down there for the last thirty-five years?’

Nat threw back his head and cackled with laughter. ‘Good heavens, no, maid. They’ve only been down there since March. Someone from back in the old days was posting something on tinternet, then those boys showed up, asked if they could hang out down there, worship old Mike, ha. Get away from the rat race and all that. And I was like, why not? Got nothing else going on down there, have us?’

‘Who’s Mike?’

‘Ah, the god, see. Gotta have a god if you’re gonna have a cult. Saint Michael, him of the Mount down Mount’s Bay. Just round about sunset, you can see a bit of a face in the cliff there, across the cove. Looks like a lad peering out of the rocks. Tis St. Michael, so I said. ‘Mikey boy.’

‘That’s madness.’

Nat shrugged. ‘Weren’t me showing up, wanting to hang out.’

‘So, you said they could stay down there?’

‘Yeah, why not? Not doing no harm, are they? One of them’s a lad from the village. Perhaps you could have a word with ’e about keeping out of trouble.’

‘Do they all have names?’

‘Geoff, Lindsay, Dennis, and the lad from the village is Barney.’

‘All right,’ Josie said. ‘That’s a start.’

‘Not doing no harm,’ Nat said, sipping on his drink. ‘But if they don’t start behaving themselves, I’ll go and have a word.’

‘Thanks.’