This is my first story in a series entitled "On Love and Loss". Elements of it are based upon real events. I did indeed gather ancient bones when I was a boy from the bottom of an eroding cliff at Dunwich in Suffolk. And my father did have a visit from the police some months after we had moved from a property which was demolished by developers. His life was blighted by grief, not for me as I survived him, unlike Miko, but for my mother and my stepmother.
The Beachcomber
Two police officers stood at the front door. Some questions about where I had lived before moving in to the flat. And then, with appropriate gravity, “We have to inform you sir, that human remains have been found at that property.”
I was thrown by the announcement. In my initial confusion I found my mind racing back to happier times. When my son was preoccupied with the adventure of growing up, and his mother still my wife. He now irrevocably lost to me; she also lost to me, having sought solace, and finding disillusionment, with another man even while we still lived under the same roof.
I was shocked, and frightened. Were they accusing me? Would I be spending tonight and many more to come in a police cell on suspicion of murder?
“Are you able to account for them?”
Of course I could account for them. I knew at once the significance of their discovery, and wondered how I could have been so careless. Our leaving the house that had been home, a contented home to our small family, had been precipitate. It held too many memories, which could only sustain a grief that was almost impossible to bear. Even then Mary and I had started to bicker and on at least one occasion had had a furious row, over nothing very much in particular. I know now that this had more to do with our suppressed rage at our loss rather than anything seriously wrong between us. And a sense of shared guilt which I know now was groundless. Yet we were almost consumed by it.
Michael … Miko, you were my only son, my only child. And I adored you. What might you have become had had you not gone? Every parent sees their child as exceptional, but there surely was something quite unique about you. Not just the driving curiosity common to all young children, but the sheer joy you experienced in your discoveries. You were a hunter after things to fire your imagination, and your imagination fired further your desire to seek out yet more wonders in the world where you found yourself. You of the grimy knees, the scuffed shoes, unkempt hair and perpetual grin. Yet you were quite without guile. You were a respecter of wild things and their habitats, although there was little enough that they could keep secret from you. Fossil hunter and star gazer you were. And an avid beachcomber on our occasional holidays by the sea.
I hear his voice even as I think about him. “Dad, Dad! What’s this? It looks like a baby shark!” He had run to me clutching a dogfish, pretty much intact and only recently dead, judging by the absence of stink. He insisted on taking it home. “I’ve seen fish pickled in jars in the museum. Couldn’t we do that?” I warned him of what his mother might think, but he was not dissuaded. At a hardware store on the way home we bought a quantity of methylated spirit under the suspicious eye of the brown-coated shop keeper. An hour later the creature was consigned to an old sweet jar, suspended incongruously in purple preservative, and placed with pride on the mantelpiece in the boy’s room.
He was drawn to the sea and the sea shore. Even the days in high summer were not long enough to satisfy his desire to seek out exotic treasures in the shingle and the flotsam cast up by the previous winter’s gales. On two or three occasions we gathered driftwood and lit fires in a roughly constructed hearth of stones. Sausages cooked in a cheap frying pan, fresh bread and tomato sauce we feasted upon. I see Michael’s ketchup smeared face split by his grin, and in my imagination I ruffle his hair again. No queen or king ever delighted in such banquets as we tasted then.
Back home he arranged his treasures haphazardly in seed boxes and placed them on roughly constructed shelves in the redundant hen-house. Outside he hung a sign “Michael’s Miniature Museum
I saw his point - and theirs. Not many shared his enthusiasm for abandoned birds’ nests, the bunch of porcupine quills given to him by a keeper at the zoo, and his prized dogfish. But his collection was essentially for his own enjoyment and it seemed that he thought little of other people’s views on it. As the months went by it became clear that finding a space for everything was going to be a problem. And it was equally clear that any sort of a “cull” was not an option for consideration. I noticed, however, that with the passage of time he did become more selective about what he picked up.
The last summer that I shared with him was what I guess was something of a pinnacle for the boy. We rented a cottage on a remote part of the Suffolk
“You could get swept away by the tide in your sleep” she cautioned. He did not press the matter. For he had also learned that the coastal erosion was still very much ongoing. Yet he seemed content enough to occupy himself pretty much entirely with his searching among the sea wrack for whatever might lurk beneath the glistening fronds. This year, too, he became more inclined to wander off on his own, always promising his anxious mother that he would not go so far as to lose sight of us or we of him. The fact that he showed fewer of his discoveries to us caused us less concern. With hindsight it may well have been that we were remiss in showing less interest than we might have done. But this was all in the days before contamination with used syringes and other unsavoury human detritus had begun to blight our shorelines.
I did not discover the full extent of his collection until early in the next year, when I was able to steel myself to go through his things.
“Sir?” one of the officers jerked me out of my reverie. “Are you O.K? It’s not as if we’d suspected … the pathologist said that the bones are very, very old.”
I nodded. “Yes, I know they are. Hundreds of years old.”
“Much older than the house even. Seems that they were put there. In a box, under the stairs. So you know about them?”
With relief I realised that the police officers were not, after all, making any sort of criminal enquiry. Perhaps they already had a pretty good idea of how the remains had come to be there and just wanted confirmation.
I nodded “Five years ago … we, my son and his mother and I … we were staying near the east coast. It’s a part that gets hammered by the gales in the winter. I’m told that the waves smash into the cliffs when the tides are high. They’re soft, and several feet get cut away each year …”
I recalled the conversation I’d had with a local, a retired coastguard from a nearby town. He told me how some years earlier the erosion reached the edge of the grounds of a long ruined monastery, encroaching at last upon the burial ground of the monks who had lived and worked there. It seemed that the sea was no respecter of the dead. In the wake of every onslaught was a scattering of bones across the shore. When he found them I think Michael must have realised what they were and could not resist taking such as he came across and adding them quietly to his other trophies. But I did regret his not telling his mother and me what he had done. It was never in his nature to be secretive.
“We thought that might be the way of it, sir. Probably best if you have a quiet word with your lad some time. This has taken up some police time that could have been better used …”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I’ll have a word with him … later today.”
They took their leave and left me to my thoughts, and the lonely evening that lay ahead of me. At last I put on my coat and set out on the familiar route to the cemetery. Ten minutes later I was standing by the grave. “Well now, Miko … would you ever guess who came to see me today?”
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