‘They must have used this to bring the children across to the asylum.’ As one, at Tim’s slightly morbid comment, they both turned their heads to regard the large stone building waiting for them.
Squeezy, naturally, had climbed up the legs onto one of the now horizontal wheels and was attempting to see if he could get it to spin around. Ben scrambled up after him. Even with the machine tipped on its side, they stood a good twenty feet up. ‘Great view.’
‘I’ll take your word for it. Don’t—’ He was too late. Their combined weight on the wheel snapped the rusty legs away from the wooden body. The whole underneath structure began to peel away. It all detached, tilted precariously, and then began to crash towards the sand. Squeezy leapt for another wheel, but this only caused the falling one to sheer away more violently.
Aleksey saw the accident in slow motion—Ben skewered by a vast rusty stake, his perfect body hanging limp like one of the Impaler’s victims. But Ben just dived nimbly from the falling wheel, rolled and sprang to his feet—sandy, but entirely unharmed.
If Aleksey’s heart had still been beating and he’d actually still been alive to make the assessment, he’d have said Sunny Boy was grinning. Then Ben had the grace to read his expression and mutter, ‘Sorry.’
The moron was now trying to get his new wheel to spin by jumping up and down on it.
When he caught them up, apparently grievously offended that no one had waited for him to get down safely, he glanced back at the wreck, screwed up his face in what he probably thought was his intelligent expression, and challenged, ‘Guess what the maximum rise of a tide is anywhere in the world.’
Aleksey sighed deeply. ‘You are going to go from the family idiot to the knower of all things maritime now, aren’t you?’
Squeezy smirked at him. ‘If you don’t want hidden gems revealed, you should stop fucking digging up dead things, Crusoe. What’s that sayin’? Let sleeping dogs lie.’
Tim was actually doing gestures with his hand and calculating between the two islands, as if his boyfriend’s question had been genuine and not just asked to annoy his boss. ‘About ten feet?’
Squeezy laughed and assaulted his hair. ‘Over fifty, my little bonking boffin. But in Scilly, maybe no more than fifteen.’
‘So…I was right then.’
Squeezy put him in a headlock.
Ben, entirely ignoring all this, said thoughtfully, ‘Imagine what it must have been like for the children—their first view of the asylum from the back of that thing.’
Squeezy allowed his boyfriend to breathe again and murmured, ‘Funny fucking word that, ain’t it? Asylum.’
Aleksey tipped his head to one side, considering this. He blew out his cheeks in resignation. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, you say it one way and it’s all fucking woo woo…’ He saw their expressions at his hand gestures, so added annoyed, ‘Scary shit. The asylum…taking me to the asylum. But then you got all these asylum seekers. Asylum is shelter and safety.’ He held his hands like balancing scales. ‘One word, but completely different connotations.’
Tim appeared so astonished that his other half had made a meaningful contribution to any conversation between the four of them, or possibly that he’d used the word connotation correctly, that it was some time before he could come back with, ‘Bedlam.’
Aleksey frowned, translating as ever, but got nowhere.
‘Bedlam is a word we use to mean chaos, isn’t it, but it was just the name of an actual building—anasylumin London. It was there for over seven hundred years.’
They began walking again. Ben glanced at his watch. ‘I guess the causeway’ll be okay for another three hours or so?’
‘We’ll probably be arrested long before that, matey. Carted off and interrogated. Probably tortured. Hey, boss, which identity you travelling under to Bedlam?’
‘I could ask that of you now.’
Shutting the moron up put Aleksey in a particularly pleasant mood. He flung his arm around Ben’s shoulders and was about to say something very intelligent when both dogs just stopped in their tracks. Radulf’s hackles came up.
PB started to back off.
They had just reached little Benhar, where steps cut into the rocks headed up from the sand.
Radulf’s muzzle lifted, canines glistening, and he growled.
It was entirely silent other than that incongruous noise. No seabirds and their endless raucous screeching, no boat rigging clinking, no human voices. Just Radulf.
Then PB barked.
They all jumped. Aleksey literally felt the sharp retort like a stab. They’d never heard him make that sound before—it was part of his dubious charm that he seemed to be constantly disapproving of everything, thinking through his views on any given event, but yet to finally decide what he’d concluded about them.
