True North

It was a brisk but sunny Saturday, perhaps one of the last of the year. Capt. Alastair Braithwaite took the time to shave meticulously before donning a white shirt that he had starched and ironed the night before, rounded off with a pair of dark blue enamel sea turtle cufflinks. He stood and checked his appearance in the bathroom mirror; for a man of sixty-two, he had a physique that could shame a man twenty years his junior. He plucked the newspaper from the letterbox and set the kettle to boil. If he could finish the cryptic crossword on the back page by the time he had finished his tea, it would be a good day.

There was a neat red cross on the calendar on the wall. Braithwaite remembered with a spark of excitement that it was the day of the rowing regatta in Stevenbridge. Any opportunity to see people out on the water as the year drew to a close was welcome. He had got to the final clue in the crossword and had exactly one mouthful of tea left, but the answer eluded him and the tea was growing cold. It would have to be a good enough day.

Stevenbridge was a two-hour drive away and the regatta was due to start at noon, so Braithwaite figured that setting off straight after breakfast would give him time for a pot of tea and a tour round the small town’s traditional shops. He had not been to Stevenbridge for years but remembered the way clearly, so he did not bother to set the GPS. When he arrived shortly after ten, the town square was already bustling with people and he could hear the loudspeaker from the riverbank boom with interviews with minor celebrities in attendance and adverts for local businesses. The atmosphere was fresh and lively. After tea and a slice of toffee drizzle cake in a café overlooking the water, he made for the serpentine streets of the old town and their motley of boutiques. He passed a shop selling all things woven and carved, and another with a dazzling palette of inks and paints on display, before coming to a dark green emporium named only Finnegan’s. The window featured an intricate diorama of survival tools, rings, paintings and other items with no obvious connection to each other. Braithwaite’s curiosity was instantly piqued and he went inside.

The shop had that specific dense dustiness of a space in which nothing had moved for a considerable period of time. The owner, a bald man with a magnificent set of mutton chop whiskers that Braithwaite thought made him look very old-timey nautical, looked up from his book at the counter.

‘Good morning, sir. May I help you with anything?’

‘Good morning! I’m a little intrigued, I have to admit: what exactly is your line of trade?’

‘Ah! Antiques, house clearances, unwanted bequests, remnants of former lives…anything that doesn’t quite fit in anywhere else, I suppose. Most of what you see here meant a great deal to someone who is no longer here to tell us about it.’

‘Hmm, I see. Mind if I have a look around?’

The shopkeeper spread his hands broadly. ‘Be my guest.’

Braithwaite moved very slowly through the aisles, taking in the sheer randomness around him. To his left, a chess set where all the characters were monkeys. To his right, a collection bound in gorgeous red leather about the lives of the saints. When he reached the end of the row and turned for the next aisle, however, he could not help but let slip an ‘Oh, I say.’ Standing in front of him, in its own corner of the shop, was a magnificent copper and brass binnacle. Its heavy patina and pitting and the broken glass above the compass card indicated significant wear and tear, but Braithwaite thought it was beautiful.

‘She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’ The voice of the shopkeeper came from right behind him.

‘Good lord, you startled me. Certainly impressive, all right. Can you tell me anything about it?’

‘I can. This is the last remnant of the Claradora, the yacht of Mr Hamish Harford, late of this parish, who never let a storm get in the way of a good sortie. That is, until he set off into the face of a force seven gale three summers ago and saw his cherished vessel smashed to matchsticks, and himself introduced to Davy Jones a little ahead of time. God rest his soul. This was found by beachcombers at the neck of the harbour a month later.’

‘Well…the sole survivor, you might say. And how much would you be asking for it?’

‘To you, sir, five hundred pounds, and she is yours.’

‘I say four hundred, since she’s out of commission.’

‘Then we will say four hundred and fifty, and everyone will be happy. Including old Hamish.’ They shook hands firmly.

After Braithwaite had paid at the till, he asked the owner whether he had a trolley or something he could borrow in order to get the binnacle to his car. The two of them wheeled the massive object through the streets of Stevenbridge; Braithwaite thought he heard a quiet ‘Bye, Hamish’ from behind him at one point.

The regatta was everything Braithwaite had hoped it would be: fierce competition between the boats, people giving their absolute all to make it to the finish line first, an audience who cheered them on like champions and spectacular weather all afternoon. By the time the last race had concluded, it was nearly four o’clock and he began to think about the drive back. If he wanted to get home before night fell, he would have to leave before the general wave of people returned to their cars and blocked the motorway solid for hours. He made it just as the crowd was converging on the town square and queued up some vintage rock for the drive. He did not set the GPS; he knew the way home.

Dark was just beginning to fall when Braithwaite arrived in the outskirts of his home city. Traffic had been quiet and at some point he had allowed his thoughts to drift, driving with the mechanical reflexes of forty-five years behind the wheel. He made to turn into his home street and snapped awake: the twin elms at the entrance to the road were not there. Instead, he was staring at a complex of grey and white buildings blending into the sky in the fading light. He glanced around agitatedly in an attempt to find out where he was until he saw a sign saying BizHub and realised that he was on the industrial estate on the other side of the city. He must have taken the wrong motorway exit without noticing. It did not matter. He was not very far from home, and the experience would serve as a reminder to him to stay alert. He did not want to call on his neighbour and ask for help to get the binnacle inside; there was a perfectly good trolley in his shed that would do the trick. Twenty minutes and probably a good pint of sweat later, Braithwaite had hefted the binnacle from the boot of his car and wheeled it to the corner of his living room beside the bookshelf. He took a proper look at it for the first time. The port and starboard balls were a little loose and the gimbal rings over the bowl had probably seized. The whole copper body needed refinishing, and he might need to print out a new compass card as well. There was a lot to be done if he was ever to restore it to working order, but he had been looking forward to such a challenge for a while. If he ever got it back to looking properly new again – literally shipshape, he chuckled to himself – he would have to take a photograph and send it to the owner of Finnegan’s. He made kippers for supper, allowed himself three slender fingers of scotch and took to bed early. As he pulled the covers up to his chin, he smiled to himself and said, ‘Goodnight, Hamish.’

The following morning was clear but bitterly cold. Braithwaite got up and actually ran downstairs because the answer to the final crossword clue had come to him during the night. He just needed to find where he had put the paper and then he could fill it in. The paper was not on the kitchen table, where he remembered leaving it. It was not in the newspaper rack. Neither was it on the coffee table in the living room, although he could not think of any reason why it would be there. Exasperated, he jotted down the answer on a scrap piece of paper and went to make breakfast. The smell of frying eggs and black pudding was enough by itself to put a grin on his face and he hummed along in tune as the kettle started to whistle. He carried the tray over to the kitchen table and took his usual seat facing the window. The teapot would get cold in five minutes in this weather; he picked up the tea cosy from the corner of the table and there he saw it: the newspaper from yesterday morning. Why had he not seen it earlier? He muttered to himself and fitted the cosy before taking his pen and filling in the clue answer. Now, he could relax. It was Sunday and there was nowhere he had to be. He would take his sweet time finishing breakfast and then go and look in the workshop shed to see if he had any brass polish or sheets of glass left, for the restoration of his new binnacle.

The phone rang. He sighed and looked at the wall clock, wondering who would be calling so early on a Sunday. He hoped it was not a harbinger of bereavement or some other awful news. He went to the living room and sat in his reading armchair to take the call.

‘Hello?’

‘Alastair! Graham Havers. Sorry to call so early, but I knew you’d be up.’ A jocular laugh.

Braithwaite relaxed and thawed a little. ‘Hello, Graham. How are you? Everything alright? How’s the leg doing?’ The last time the two had seen each other, Havers had had his leg in plaster up to the waist after falling down the stairs in his holiday home.

‘Aha! Well, that’s sort of why I’m calling: they’re not taking the cast off for another fortnight, but Lucy’s just called me to say she’s on the train down. Any chance you could go and pick her up from the station? She said she’d be in just before eleven.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Lucy was Graham Havers’ daughter and Braithwaite had always liked her. She was exactly the kind of free spirit he had never been allowed to be and the only rule she ever followed in life was to be kind to people. The fact that she was paying her father a surprise visit when she could have been enjoying city life with her friends only proved the point further. ‘I’ll bring her straight round once she gets in.’

‘Thanks, old man. I owe you one. Are we still on for All Souls’ drinks on the Saturday?’

‘Oh yes, very much so. Looking forward to it. See you later on.’ He hung up and looked at the binnacle in the corner of the room. It seemed so much more inert in the morning light, as if it had never served any purpose and were merely an abstract sculpture. The deadness of it repulsed him.

The station was about ten minutes’ drive from Braithwaite’s house. He decided to set off at half-past ten in case Lucy’s description of ‘just before eleven’ was less than military. There was still a thin crust of ice on the roads so he took the corners cautiously. When he got to the station district, he saw that they appeared to have set up some kind of contraflow in order to do roadworks. He dutifully followed the redirected traffic and found himself on the wrong side of the flyover. Not a problem: he would loop round under the flyover and take the slip road back onto the main street, where he could park in the short-stay car park for the station. He had time. He filtered through the traffic and took the slip road, which felt longer than he remembered it being; it had been a while since he had last driven through this part of town, after all. The slip road took him out into what looked like the southern end of the business district, which meant that it had been the wrong slip road. He could not see how that was possible. There was only one slip road from the western approach to the station. If he took the next right and went east down the main boulevard of the business district, it would take him out next to the bridge and he would be able to cross back over and get to the station that way. It was then that he remembered that he had forgotten to get petrol after the long journey of the day before. He flicked his gaze to the fuel needle and reckoned he had about another fifteen miles left, which was plenty. He could always pick up Lucy and fill up on the way to bringing her to Graham’s place.

The boulevard through the business district took Braithwaite past endless office buildings and finally into a miniature commercial village he had never seen before. There were fast food restaurants, trendy branded clothes shops, cinemas and bowling alleys in every direction, all linked together by a dizzying spiderweb of roundabouts. He tried to keep a sense of direction in his mind but the turns were too many, and he ended up circling the whole complex multiple times. The ‘low fuel’ light eventually came on and he thought it would be better to park in one of the commercial centre car parks, make for one of the shopping centres and ask at the reception if he could borrow their phone. He cursed himself for being so determined to resist the mobile phone trend. The air was violently cold as he got out of the car and he could see the horizon mist over as the clouds coalesced. He would make it to the large shopping centre in front of him, and someone would lend him their phone so that he could call Graham and tell him what had happened. His legs were leaden with the effort of walking through the freezing temperatures and he hugged his jacket closer around him, wishing he had brought a proper winter coat. It was only supposed to have been a brief trip. As he drew level with the bus stop outside the centre, there was a man in curious clothing sitting on the bench. Braithwaite approached and saw that the man was wearing oilskins, and that he was soaking wet in spite of the dry morning weather. His face was a deathly grey-green but his mouth was twisted into a smile, and as Braithwaite drew closer he could hear that the man was laughing: an icy, rattling diesel laugh, soured by the man’s dark and venomous eyes. Braithwaite felt the pain in his chest hit him like a rugby tackle and folded to his knees. As he looked up at the man on the bench bending over him, his vision began to blur, but he could still hear the man laughing.

‘H...Hello, Hamish,’ Braithwaite said.