The Tide Runner

By Christopher Holt

The Tide Runner - Christopher Holt

After too long away from our Book Shelves, Christopher Holt is back with a bang !
In this superb novel, he once again, shows us the joy and power of real prose.
Simply Wonderful
John Brown - Bookopedia

 

Few knew that Gaius Proctor, the brilliant ecologist and UN Director of Ecosystems was a raving psychopath who loathed and detested every person on the planet including himself.

It was Proctor who created the Intercontinental Innocent Zones where all species would be free to roam, fly, or swim undisturbed. Forever.

All species, that is, except human beings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookopedia
• Release date: Sep 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223241010

Book preview

Greenland

The beach curved like a talon. Rags of snow speckled its low cliffs. Foul meltwater stained the rocks above the high tide mark.

Bloated carcasses of harp seals rolled about in the eddies like empty barrels. Windpuffs clumped like mushrooms. The scene looked as desolate as an asteroid.

The white she- bear raised her long neck to sniff the wind. Despite the sour miasma from the dying tundra, she could still detect the stalking male, ravenous for her cub. Their one escape was the open sea.

The she-bear lurched forward down the slope.   She weighed a quarter of a tonne, and the pebbles were slipping, creaking, crunching under her feet. 

It was easier for the cub with its soft juvenile fur on its soles. It followed its mother, skidding and sliding down until the frothy water closed over their heads.

By dog- paddling and scooping their rear legs like rudders they pulled themselves towards the shifting horizon.

The she-bear thrust her bulk through the green swells and the cub followed in her wake until she slowed to let it paddle up close and they swam together side by side.

Five miles out they were engulfed in raw sewage discharged the previous night from a cruise ship.

Both animals would have choked in the fumes had not the Polar Current torn through the morass with the fury of a Viking god, hoisting the bears onto a monstrous billow which swept them out to the dark  rollers and deep  troughs of the North Atlantic Ocean.

1

South Western Railway

Exeter St Davids to London Waterloo

The train would take three and a half hours  to reach Waterloo. This would be a rare opportunity for Harris to observe the countryside without having to survey farm boundaries. It would also  give him a chance to write.

Of course, it would be less conspicuous for him to use a laptop, but it wouldn’t be the same. He needed the words to spill from his brain, to run across his wide shoulders, down his right arm to the delta of his hand then trickle through his fingers to the stubby pencil and his clandestine notebook.

Only eccentrics used notebooks and wrote by hand. Everyone knew that.  But Chantelle said eccentrics were more interesting people anyway.

He glanced around the carriage at the other passengers.  Although most were caught up with their smartphones and laptops, he was cheered to see one woman actually reading a  book.

Another  eccentric, he wrote.

His pencil scurried across the page. His jaws tightened as he battled to keep pace with the flow of words in his head. 

- woman approaching late 40s - not a weirdo – more a trendo –  lean greyhound type -  blue tracksuit –  stalking down aisle - keeps perfect balance despite swaying train – piggy eyes fixed on  step- counter strapped around her wrist like a single handcuff  - creepily white teeth –   passes by without seeing my  pencil.

He scowled when he detected an acid tang in the air, paused for a second to find its source, then carried on.

- garrulous old men - 2 seats down wolfing vinegar- flavoured crisps – thank God it’s not hot food – I’d be gagging.

I’ve become too precious—should be ashamed of myself –  admit it, Harris  – you’re a snob - ok I’m a snob – a weirdo snob.

Across aisle from me - the 2 girls who boarded at Exeter Central – one putting on make-up – other  slumped against window  half asleep with her mouth open – both so  slack- slack – slack.

Out of the army 5 years – but still can’t cope with civilians.

Train stops at Fenton  - piggish man gets on - crumpy brown suit - hovers around luggage hold – plenty of seats vacant yet chooses to stand,  hostile – keeps his eyes  fixed on his  tatty red suitcase  -

Train slithers from the platform like a steel serpent - spats of rain wriggling down window like baby serpents.  Low sky with long clouds – one arched like a scimitar-  all reflected in brooks and ponds-

Ardrey says each cloud has a soul - should an archbishop believe that? - scribbling blind because greyhound returning - glowers at me- why me? – thank God she’s passed on -  She who  Never Was.

- greasy dumpling of a man - yellow T shirt, mucky black shorts, baseball cap back- to- front. Says it all - eyeing me since Honiton –  won’t take his eyes off me – worse and worse - I think he’s morphing into a Gawker – I swear he’s morphing - Hey!  Does South Western Rail  allow morphing on their trains? 

Probably.

I’m Jonah in the whale – I’ve no control – being hauled along. - a fishy journey  changed Jonah – but  all journeys alter people – that’s if they’re proper journeys –not cruises.

Chantelle had given him the notebook.  She was a scribbler too. Harris found it ironic that schools still taught handwriting. When Chantelle had to learn it, she refused to keep to the lines and always turned the page around so she could write across it sideways. Got herself into endless grief but she relished it.

This is to make you more aware, Dad, she’d said as she gave him the notebook.

Aware?

Absolutely. It forces you to live in the present. Jotting things down will get you into the habit of experiencing the world about you – especially the little things. You’ll appreciate them better.

Are you saying I don’t appreciate things?

No, only that you will be forced to notice them and appreciate them more.

Ok.

"So, you will write in it?"

Yes.

Promise?

Promise.

"Brilliant, but PLEASE, Dad, be secretive. Don’t let Gawkers catch you doing it.  Just write your flash impressions - jot them down - no time for proper spelling or punctuation or even thinking. Write what you see and hear. What you Feel.  And be deadly secretive about it."

OK. He’d smiled.

And write in it every day?

Well, nearly every day.

That promise had been made three months ago, and he had found it easy to keep. 

- every man should be blessed with a seventeen- year- old daughter.

Chantelle was a dedicated environmentalist. Three generations back they would have called her a tree-hugger. Sometimes her empathy with nature could be too much for him. He remembered when she was twelve, how she had wept as the trees moulted in Autumn, the ‘Unleafing’, as she called it. It had made him feel like weeping himself.

From the time she learned to talk, Chantelle had always meant what she said.  Older people might have thought that she was being preachy, even rude but nobody doubted her sincerity. 

Two months before, she’d e-mailed the bishop of Crediton. She told him that the Church of England should speak up more for the natural environment.  We must let the Wilderness speak its own truth, she said. She had invited the Bishop to come and help clean up the River Otter.

To her surprise, the bishop turned up on a motorbike. He climbed into his waders and started scrambling among the osiers and reeds, hauling out dripping plastic bags and shopping trolleys. Afterwards he made it a regular commitment.

Fariba had told Harris that it worried her that their daughter wasn’t a ‘normal’ teenager.  She had never said the same about Luke.  Luke’s ‘normal’ was on a different plane altogether. It was marked with detachment, almost indifference. When Fariba had suggested he bond more with the family, Luke responded with Mum, ‘bond’ is a chemical term. Is that how you see us, as mere elements on the periodic table?

Luke questioned everything. After attending the funeral of Mr McColl, his science teacher who died in a motorbike collision, Luke even questioned the phrase ‘dust thou art and to dust ye shall return’.

Mr McColl wouldn’t have agreed with that, he told his father. "Dust is reduced to atoms and finally subatomic particles.  Our bodies are made of stardust. The words should be Stardust thou art and to stardust ye shall return. Harris hadn’t replied.

At Axminster two young men with beards and backpacks joined the train.  One of them spied Harris as they moved down the aisle.

Unbelievable, Harris heard him say.  Did you see that? I wish I’d had my phone out.  In this day and age, that old guy is writing with a pencil.

An old guy?  Harris studied his reflection in the train window. He could only see himself at an angle. Neither full faced nor profile. Just the familiar tight square jaw, honed cheek muscles, deep lines and the piercing hard-bitten eyes of a once regular officer of the Royal Engineers.

The cruel sun of the Middle East had eroded his skin making him look older than his forty-three years, but he had never abandoned his military grooming. His hair was square cut. Perfect short back-and-sides with a parting as straight as a Roman road. He turned away from the window. 

Alone with his thoughts, he added them to his notebook. More slowly this time.

What am I doing with my life? Army pension but not retired – working full- time surveying old boundary lines, locating headwaters of streams - advising on water-meadows, soil erosion, planning out stables and Dutch barns.  I’m not sure I want to play this game any more.

Harris sighed, then opened his wallet and took out the card from Lambeth Palace.  Ivory white. Smooth. Rounded corners. Elegant simplicity. It bore an embossed crest with an archiepiscopal staff and four raised gold crosses on an azure shield. Its message began:

"Brigadier Mark Harris is invited  ..’

The Archbishop of Canterbury wanted him to attend an ‘Extraordinary Assembly’. Why him? And why call him Brigadier? He was now a civilian, plain Mark Harris. That should be enough.  

Fariba would agree.  But then he wondered if his wife even cared.  After she had driven him to the station, she wished him ‘good luck’.  He knew from the tone of her voice that she thought anything to do with the Church didn’t matter.  Her own ‘real world’ was secular, wholly scientific. And yet she had used the expression, good luck. Luck?

The previous week she had given him a birthday present.  An electric hedge-clipper!  Not gift wrapped. Just in its original box. No card. 

Once it would have mattered. Not now.  Every day he was feeling more and more superfluous to his wife.  His marriage had become just another game.  ‘Game’ was such a useful word. At school they had taught him that everything was a game. As he grew older, he could see what they had meant.

That morning the family had been in its usual rush.  While he was still coming down the stairs Fariba was already outside with the car to drive him to St David’s Station.

In the hall Chantelle called to him as she wheeled out her bicycle. Carpe Diem, Dad, then closed the front door behind her.

Go for it, Dad, said Luke pulling on his school blazer. His son had actually patted him on the shoulder. You need a bit of time out, anyway.

The train was rushing him along pell -mell. He dreaded having to alight in London.  All those milling people. Plus, the Gawkers.  Oh God, he had forgotten the bloody Gawkers. 

He hoped Bob Ardey would be attending the Assembly today. He needed to see a friendly face there. Bob should be there, he was the Archbishop of York after all.

2

Harris pondered his marriage again and the happiness of those early years with Fariba.  Deliriously, happy years, mythical. Until they became myths.

Dr Fariba Amani had met Harris when he was a young Captain in the Royal Engineers. At the time she was working for Medecins sans Frontieres at a refugee camp by the Euphrates. Harris would turn up at the camp as a cartographic surveyor drawing up plans for a field hospital and a new airfield.  His Arabic was passable and his rapport with the refugees was superb. In his spare hours, he played football with the boys and taught them to speak some English.

Fariba’s NGO had its own canteen and Harris would stop by for a coffee. As soon as he swallowed it down, he would disappear among the matrix of tents. Apart from a smile and the occasional ‘hello’ he hardly spoke to anyone who wasn’t a refugee. 

One evening Fariba had found him standing alone looking through the concertina razor wire by the river. On the opposite bank, a village had been bombed five days before.  They could still smell the smoke.

She locked eyes with him. ‘So, who’s to blame for this, do you think, Captain?"

At this stage, It doesn’t matter, Doctor. Doesn’t matter at all.

‘Please call me Fariba.’

‘Fariba.’

‘And you are?’

‘Harris.’

She locked eyes with him once more. ‘I mean your first name.’

‘It’s Mark, but I’m called Harris,’ he said, turning to gaze once more at one of the greatest rivers of antiquity. 

Fariba had been taken back. Harris was the first man who had ever deliberately shown not the slightest interest in her as a woman. She found it refreshing, exhilarating even. Then, suddenly she looked at her watch.

‘I’ve got to get back. Goodbye, Mark,’ she said. But for Harris, the blur of the desert had focused into distinct shapes:  rocks and tamarisks and tufts of silver grass and above it all a blazing mesh of stars.

The desert had gifted them a rose-gold sunset. The sky glowed like burnished copper with bands of opal. The stark red and green of the military sign boards faded into irrelevance.

That night Fariba was determined to heal Captain Mark Harris even if she had to marry him to do it.

The marrying part had been easy. Harris couldn’t resist her large and very dark Persian eyes, her onyx black hair, Cyrus vanilla skin, and her sharp intelligence.  She had told him that she was an atheist and only believed in hard science.  Harris doubted this. His wife was as  mystical to him as Scheherazade.

That was nineteen years before and Harris had told her that she had made a better man of him. Whether he had become a happier man was a question she didn’t ask.

After his discharge Harris returned to his profession as a Chartered Surveyor. The family moved to Devon, Harris’s birthplace. Fariba became a GP in Exeter and bought her own surgery in the Cathedral Close.

She adored living in their seventeenth century thatched cottage in Countess Weir by the River Exe. There were really two cottages with an adjoining wall which together made a reasonably sized family home.  The cottage’s upkeep was a challenge. Small things, like repairs to curtains or basic plumbing Fariba could do herself. Her hands were quick and instinctive and, despite her husband being ex- Royal Engineer, he was unbelievably impractical, so she found it less fuss if he was not involved. 

She knew that at all costs, she must keep her skills a secret.  One whisper of a D.I.Y. doctor on social media and the Gawkers would have been descended on them by the hundreds, squirming to get inside her shed – just to loll about taking photo shots but mostly to stare. And stare. Always staring.

Harris also took chances. These were even more risky because he played the piano and he played it very well. He played so well that he was warned that the busy bodies were starting to hang around the cottages to listen.

Their presence had been a shock to Fariba.  She hadn’t realised how much snooping had become a mainstream hobby.  She asked herself why.  Surely, they should be getting more than this out of their lives. That is if they would summon up the energy. But that was it, she concluded. They were all lazy.

She had done some research. She found that the snooping habit started early. Even in their twenties most people seemed content to be mere sightseers. They were forever booking up tourist trips and cruises until, apart from their home chores and paid work, they never really did anything constructive at all. Their passivity was terrifying.

Fariba’s greatest dread was to end up as a perpetual tourist herself or, much much worse, to be diagnosed with Compulsive Observation Disorder, a Gawker.  She knew she would rather be dead.

Her fears weren’t groundless. She was already becoming more tired than she should be but her worst fears were not for herself but for her family.  Mark was tired too, though, being Mark, he would never admit it. And then there were the children, not just her own but all children.  Charlotte and Luke told her that most of their school friends were in bed by eight thirty, or even earlier. Such behaviour would have been met with universal derision when Fariba was in her teens.

3

As soon as Fariba had dropped Harrris off at the station she drove straight to the surgery, taking the opportunity to arrive an hour earlier than everybody else.

First, she checked to see that the consulting rooms had been properly cleaned over the weekend. ‘Cleansed’ was the word the company used.  The stainless-steel instruments glowed under the Led ceiling lights, the computer screens were gleaming and a hand vacuum cleaner had removed all dust and human hairs from the grooves in her key-board.

Next, she inspected the waiting room, where twelve green ergonomically correct chairs were set precisely fourteen inches apart.

A quarter of the far wall was taken up with a tropical aquarium.  Neon fishes and rosy tetras weaved through the drifting strands of flame moss and Java ferns and glided between silver columns of ascending bubbles.

But that morning she had a shock. As she approached the tank, the fish ceased their circumvolutions and sped to the glass, right up to her face.  Instinctively she stepped back. Of course, they couldn’t see her. But could they?  Surely, they were just confronting their own reflections.

Or were they? Something about their behaviour made Fariba uneasy. She stepped back further. The fish swam off but then formed a single shoal and returned to the glass en masse and Fariba had the horrifying sensation that the fish had somehow scored a victory.

Before leaving the waiting room, she checked the magazines, flicking through them quickly for any defaced or torn-out pages. In West Country Pics, there was a double-spread to publicise the latest mantroid. It had a slim athlete’s body and a blazing smile. The mandroid was holding out a beach towel to an obese woman emerging from the surf at Bude.  Underneath was the caption:

Time to take me home.

According to the magazine, you could purchase a bespoke mantroid like this one or an equally alluring femtroid for a little over two hundred pounds.

How illogically cheap, she thought. It must cost more than ten times as much to manufacture a troid like one of these. She checked the manufacturer: Evocative  Solutions.  That figured. It was a company owned by the reclusive ecologist, Gaius Proctor.  She had read somewhere that his factories manufactured them as sexual substitutes in the hope of reducing the human population. 

The