Page 51 of The Elements

The twins’ names were Arthur and Pascoe, traditional Cornish names, and to this day I don’t know which of them came up with the idea of burying me alive, but, as they coexisted in a strangely symbiotic state, it’s possible they devised the plan together through some unspoken telepathic power without either taking the lead.

When I think of that night, there are three things I recall above all else.

My frantic longing for water. The sound of the earth as they flung spadefuls down upon my improvised coffin.

And my desperate need for air as I sucked what I could through the small breathing tube they had left me with.

Only one of the four elements—fire—was missing that night, but its time would come.

Growing up in Norfolk with my grandmother, Hannah, I had been starved of the company of children my own age as she didn’t allow me to socialize.

Although she seemed ancient to me, Hannah was only thirty-two when I was born and thirty-three when my mother, Beth, moved to Cornwall, leaving me in her care.

She preferred me to call her by her given name, insisting that “Gran” made her sound like an old lady, just as my mother made me call her by hers because she didn’t want people to think that she was old enough to have a child.

Both had become pregnant when they were teenagers and, thinking this was the natural order of things, I assumed that I would be a mother myself at sixteen, but, thankfully, I realized that it would be cruel to bring a child into this world.

My first task when I got home from school every afternoon, regardless of the time of year, was to light the fire in the living room, a job I rather enjoyed, clearing out the ashes from the previous evening’s blaze before sweeping the grate clean and re-laying it with crumpled-up pages from yesterday’s newspaper, a few sticks of wood, and pieces of coal, artfully arranged, and then taking a match to it all.

I became proficient and could build the flames so they would burn all night.

For two months every summer, however, I was dispatched on the train to Cornwall to spend July and August with Beth, who threw her arms around me and wept when she collected me at the station, wrapping me in her cigarette-scented embrace, telling me how deeply she’d missed me and how much I had grown, but quickly becoming irritated by my presence.

By the time we reached the small cottage she rented by the sea, the tears with which she’d greeted me had been replaced by eye rolls and muttered asides if I asked too many questions, spoke too loudly, sang along with the radio, breathed too heavily, sniffed, coughed, scratched, opened the window, closed the window, did anything, in fact, to remind her of my existence.

Instead of feeling welcome in her home or being overcompensated for her lack of maternal affection across the other ten months of the year, I always went to bed on my first night aware that she was counting down the days until I could be dispatched back to Norfolk.

With each passing summer, the cottage grew shabbier, while Beth grew skinnier and more wide-eyed.

Her drinking and smoking, along with her habit of just picking at her food, made her increasingly gaunt, but this seemed to attract men, rather than turn them away.

Every year, there was at least one new boyfriend for me to acquaint myself with, few of whom showed any interest in me, and in return I barely acknowledged their existence.

There was little point, after all, in trying to build a relationship with someone who would be long gone by the time my next visit came around.

There was a Derek, who sat on the sofa plucking impotently at the strings of his guitar.

A Roger, who chewed his nails and spat the pieces across the room.

A Dave, who told me that I’d better hope I grew into my face or no one would ever want to fuck me.

A Nick, who was a Mormon, but, he insisted, a bad Mormon.

A Chris, who took me for long walks along the beach with his enormous husky in tow.

A Jonathan, who swore that he could have been the greatest actor of his generation, only other people were jealous of his talent and they’d ruined it for him.

A Joe, who always had a can of cheap lager on the go.

A Daisuke, whose family came from Hiroshima, “where the bomb went off,” but who had never traveled further east than Exmouth or further west than Penzance.

A Gethin, who taught me how to spell and pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch , the village in Anglesey where he had grown up.

A Jasper, who read voraciously but rarely got past page fifty of any book.

A Tom, whose conversation always seemed to return to the death of Princess Diana, which he insisted was a murder covered up by the Establishment.

And these are just the ones that I remember.

I didn’t begrudge their presence in Beth’s life.

Each new addition, each throwaway, seemed as much part of who she was as the clothes she wore, the cheap makeup she applied every morning, or the roll-up cigarettes that always protruded from her right hand like a withered extra finger.

She wouldn’t have been Beth without any of them.

As uncomfortable as these visits could be, I enjoyed being in Cornwall.

I liked the sunshine, the fresh air, and the screech of the seagulls in the morning.

I liked the local curiosity shops and the winding lanes, some of which I ran quickly down, then struggled to ascend on the way home.

But most of all I liked the beach, and that summer, the summer I was buried alive, I liked the fact that I made, or thought I made, some friends.

Beth’s cottage was rented to her by a local man named Kitto Teague, who also owned the much larger property next door, having inherited both from his parents.

The Teague home was probably five times the size of Beth’s but had been in a state of bad repair for a number of years, and Kitto was in the process of making renovations.

Enormous glass windows had been installed facing down toward the sea, and the garden had been dug up and was due to be replanted.

Beth’s that-summer-boyfriend, Eli, who was friendlier to me than most of his predecessors, was site foreman and told me that Kitto was plowing hundreds of thousands of pounds into the makeover.

“He wants it to look like one of them Grand Designs off the telly,” he told me. “And it might do by the time we’re finished.”

Beth liked to complain about the lorries that gathered outside, the delivery skips and large wooden boxes that brought new furniture in and took away the old, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Her home was on Teague land, after all, and she lived in constant fear that her rent might be raised, or the cottage knocked down entirely to extend his property.

Aware of my interest in the house, Eli asked whether I wanted to see inside, and we waited until Mr. Teague had gone into town for the day, when I followed him in, studying the shiny new stove and the granite marble of the kitchen island.

Some of the workers lit cigarettes as soon as their employer had left, and Eli shouted at them, saying they were causing a bloody fire hazard, and if they wanted to smoke, then they could bloody well do it down by the beach on their breaks.

Even though he was younger than most of them, it impressed me to see how seriously he took his job and how attentive they were to his instructions.

Upstairs was more of a mess, but he explained the layout of the bedrooms and bathrooms and it was obvious that when all the work was finished it would be a beautiful home.

I developed a fantasy that Eli would marry Beth, become my father, then divorce her and take me to live with him instead.

He would build a home just like this one, only better, and I would never have to see either my mother or my grandmother again, but when I asked Beth whether she thought he might propose she just laughed and shook her head, saying she had no intentions of shackling herself to one man from here to eternity.

Men, she told me, were like knickers. You needed to change them regularly.

We never talked about my real father. There was no point, as Hannah had already told me all I needed to know.

That he was a lad from the year above Beth in school, a wrong ’un from a family of tinkers who were no better than they ought to be, and he’d just shrugged his shoulders when Beth told him that he’d got her up the spout, saying it was nothing to do with him if she was the town bike and how did she know it was his anyway?

Half the school first eleven had had her.

“Which they hadn’t,” she insisted. “Not half, anyway.”

He left Norfolk before I was born, and that was the end of that.

Before I met Arthur and Pascoe, I would spend my afternoons strolling up and down the beach, paddling in the water, and, on sunny days, changing into my swimsuit beneath a towel before swimming as far out as I dared, which wasn’t far, as although I loved the water I had a terrible fear of sharks.

(Hannah’s favorite movie was Jaws , and whenever it was on television she made me sit down to watch it with her, even though she knew that it gave me nightmares.)