A Place Of Strangers Read Free

their
yesterdays. It felt to McCall as if he had never been away. Garth always took
back its own eventually, made them warm, made them safe so they never wanted to
leave again.
    ‘Where’s Francis?’
    ‘Can’t you guess?’
    ‘Gone to Russia.’
    ‘Where else would he be?’
    *
    The eastern boundary of Garth’s ten acres was Pigs’ Brook,
haunt of kingfishers and grass snakes and fat little fish. It eased off to a
trickle in summer but with the rains of winter, it became a swell of fallen
branches and debris washed down from the Shropshire hills. Over time, it had
elbowed its way into Garth Woods, nibbling at the banks where oaks, beech and
ash held sway. This was where Francis built his shed, his dacha, like those he
had seen in the Soviet Union during missions in the iciest days of the Cold
War.
    On weekends home, he would shout ‘Off to Russia!’ then be
away in Garth Woods till supper, writing official reports to the accompaniment
of gramophone records. But often, he would just sit and listen to the wind in
the trees and the wash of water over pebbles for Francis had much to forget.
    The dacha was constructed of timber and sheeted in
corrugated iron, painted red oxide. Inside were two rooms with shelves of books
and files, a pot-bellied stove and a pair of soft leather armchairs. Power came
from an overhead line beyond Pigs’ Brook so it had electric light and sockets
for a kettle and toaster. This was Francis’s demesne.
    McCall’s earliest memories were in this private, brambled
place, overgrown with rhododendrons and trees that shielded the dacha from
those who would steal its secrets. When it snowed and the light faded, Garth
Woods became quiet. Creatures that hunted, creatures that cowered, none moved
in a landscape sewn into a winding sheet of its own making, tired and needing
to rest.
    McCall, the urchin child, would stand with his backside to
the hot stove like Francis the man, Francis his hero. There would be stories
then, tales of battles and bravery and the way the world had been before God’s
British Empire was blown to bits.
    *
    McCall saw Francis through the dacha’s side window, setting
up the Eumig projector he bought during a posting to Vienna. Francis was rarely
without a little movie camera. Much of McCall’s childhood was preserved in the
square yellow boxes of mute Kodak stock lining the dacha shelves.
    Francis laced in one of the black spools, unaware of McCall
by the door. He closed the curtains and switched on. The Eumig’s worn cogs
squeaked and its light cut a beam through a swirl of twinkling motes.
    Then they were in the past.
    Somewhere on an empty beach where sunshine splintered on the
crest of every wave, a man and a woman run barefoot across gleaming wet sands.
They stop short of the camera, put their arms around each other and dance a
can-can, breathlessly hoofing their legs in the air till they collapse in a
heap, happy and giggling. The picture changes and there is Francis again, an
Englishman-on-holiday – trousers rolled to the knees, bowling a ball to a kid
in a vest and flappy white shorts, slogging away with a new cricket bat and
running like the wind. Bea, her long black hair untidy in the sea breeze,
smiles as she returns from the Alvis with their basket lunch. Francis chases
the boy across the hummocky sand dunes then carries him, kicking and bucking
through the spiky grass and back to Bea at their beach towel camp.
    The child blinks against the sun then grins at the camera
and is gone.
    It was as if some escape hatch had opened from all the
hideous and bloody complexities of the day and McCall had slipped back to life
as it once was but could never be again. He had no recollection of that trip to
the sea, only of what was lost.
    The footage tailed out. Everything in the dacha went dark.
Francis switched on the light and saw McCall. Both were trapped between then
and now and it took a moment for them to shake hands, almost formally.
    *
    McCall lit a fire to get