The sea wasn't concerned with anything except itself, and it didn't care about anyone.
Mark watched as the starlings began to fly along the front, heading for the West Pier, and then finally started for home.
BY THE TIME Mark had walked over the pedestrian crossing and up the pavement around the square, it was quite dark. It looked nice that way, he had to admit, lights coming on in the other houses.
When he got to David's house he noticed another light there, too.
The building they were living in was tall like the others, three big storeys above street level with a further lower one at the very top. To the right of the wide steps which led up to the front door there was a little curving staircase that headed downwards. It was made of metal which had been painted black more than once but was now leaking rust. Losing a long battle against the salty air, like everything else on the seafront. At the bottom of this staircase was a tiny basement courtyard, about four feet deep by eight feet wide, and under the steps to the main house was another door. There was a window in the front of this section, a smaller version of the big bow-fronted windows above. It was covered with lace curtains, which meant you couldn't see inside. Apparently someone else lived there, an old woman. David, who liked to explain everything – like the fact his accent sounded weird at times because he'd spent a long time living in America – had explained that although he owned the whole house, the basement was a self-contained flat which he hadn't even been inside. The woman who lived there had been there for years and years and years, and so he'd agreed to let her stay. Mark had never seen any actual evidence that anyone lived there, and had half-wondered if the whole story had been a lie to keep him out of that part of the house.
But tonight there was a glow behind the curtains, dim and yellow, as if from a single lamp with a weak bulb.
He let himself into the main house with his keys. The hallway felt cold and bare. David had had the whole place painted white inside before they moved down from London. He had never lived here himself, having bought it only six months ago using all the money he'd made while he was away doing whatever boring thing he'd been doing in America.
Mark shut the door very quietly behind him; but not quietly enough.
‘Mark? Is that you?’
His stepfather's voice sounded flat and hard as it echoed down the wide staircase from the floor above. Mark put his skateboard in the room that was serving as his bedroom, on the right-hand side of the corridor, and slowly started up the stairs.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
Who else was it going to be?
His mother's bedroom was on the second floor, the highest level currently in use. The top two floors were closed up and used for storage, the rooms uncarpeted and bare, with heating that didn't work. Mark got the idea that David didn't have enough money left to do anything about them right now.
His mother was in the front room when he walked in. ‘Hello, honey,’ she said. ‘How was your day?’
She was on the couch which had been put in the middle of the front room on this floor, the one with the wide bay window looking over the square. There was a thick blanket over her. The television in the corner was on, but the sound was turned off.
Originally the idea had been that this would be Mark's room, but soon after they'd got down here it had become obvious his mother wasn't finding the stairs easy. She needed somewhere to spend time on this level, because it drove her nuts to be stuck in the bedroom all day, and so Mark had wound up in the room underneath, which was supposed to be a sitting room. He didn't mind, because his mother needed it to be this way, but it still felt as if he was camping out.
Mark kissed her on the cheek, trying to remember how many days it had been since she had left the house. This room looked nice, at least. There were four or five lamps, all casting a glow, and the only pictures in the house were on its walls.
She smiled up at him. ‘Any luck?’
‘A little,’ he said, but – having been trained by her to be honest, he upturned his palms to reveal the grazes. ‘Not a lot.’
She winced. Mark noticed that the lines around her eyes, which hadn't even been there six months ago, looked a little deeper, and that there were a couple more grey hairs amongst the deep, rich brown.
‘It's okay,’ he said. ‘I'll get there.’
‘Sure you will,’ said a voice.
David came out of his mother's bedroom, looking the way he always did. He was slim and a little over medium height and he wore a pair of neatly-pressed chinos and a denim shirt, as usual. His nose was straight. His hair was floppy but somehow neat. He looked – according to a friend Mark had back in London, whose uncle worked in the stock exchange and so had experience of these matters – like someone for whom every day was Dress Down Friday. He did not look at all like Mark's real father, who had short hair and was strongly built and wore jeans and T-shirts all the time and in general looked like someone you didn't want to get in a fight with.
David was drying his hands on a small towel. Mark found this annoying.
‘Let's see,’ he said, cocking his head at Mark.
‘Just a graze,’ Mark muttered, not showing him. ‘What are we eating? Can we order from Wo Fat?’
The question had been directed solely at his mother, but David squatted down to talk to him. This made him a good deal shorter than Mark, which seemed an odd thing to do. Mark wasn't a little child.
‘Your mother's not feeling too hungry,’ David said, with the voice he used for saying things like that, and just about everything else. ‘I went to the supermarket earlier. There's cool stuff in the fridge. Maybe you could forage yourself something from there?’
‘But…’ Mark said. What he wanted to say was that he'd done that the previous evening, and the night before, not to mention both lunchtimes. Also that frequently ordering food in from Wo Fat, a Chinese restaurant up on Western Road, was traditional when they stayed down in Brighton – though this was a ritual which involved Mark's real father, not David.
Mark caught sight of his mother, however, and didn't say either of these things. She smiled at him again, and shrugged.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow, maybe, okay?’
Mark nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was furious at David for putting his mother in this position, for making her be the one who apologized when Mark knew it was David who didn't really approve of takeaways, and who felt she should only be eating very healthy things. Who just didn't … get it.
Didn't get anything. Shouldn't be here.
‘Right – maybe tomorrow,’ David said, unconvincingly.
‘Who knows – perhaps we'll even go out to eat.’
Mark sat on the couch and talked with his mother for a while, and then they watched some television together. She moved the blanket so it lay over the two of them, and it was nice, even though David was hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.
‘You must be getting hungry, aren't you?’ his stepfather said, after half an hour.
Mark turned to stare at him. His mother was looking tired, and Mark knew what was being implied. But it wasn't David's place to say it, and Mark wanted him to realize that. David just looked back with eyes that were equally unblinking.
Mark muttered goodnight and took himself downstairs, where he made a ham sandwich in the kitchen, added a couple of biscuits, and took the plate into ‘his’ room with the last available Diet Coke.
There was no carpet on the floor of his room and nothing on the walls, and it was not terribly warm. The sash window did