Desire Line, page 16
Yes, I have Tippy.
Watch her, you really should. I did while I went through that packet from the Coroner’s clerk a second and third time, with my hands gone shaky like I’d forgotten my meds and Libby and sister scraped chairs out on the flags after the last sun.
Chapter 16
October the what?The effort to get to her feet and check on the exact date was not worth it. Sara transferred the pen to the line beneath.
Days had passed since Kim’s show, the sham, the worse than sham, the con-trick according to Josh. Sham was preferable: it guaranteed Eurwen was not in danger, Eurwen was not dead. Sara found she could manage to repress emotions connected with the Tarot results by labelling them counterfeit. Still Kim tormented her; now with her uselessness, now with the possibility, fast becoming a certainty, that Kim would know the boy. It was a small town and she knew everyone, knew instantly that Sara didn’t fit, that Clive Upton was deep and crooked, that Josh was a detective—
—Or would pretend to know because this Kim, who was she? Information from a doubtful source could prove more mischievous than ignorance. Consider John Cane’s assertion that Thomasina (she who had lost him his wager) was none other than Orlando Tansley. Not a girl, not her peerless girl, but an effeminate wastrel and swindler hung at Newgate’s Debtor’s Door, the year preceding the slander. How conveniently! Because he existed, Tansley, one of three unfortunates in View of anexecution before the Debtor’s Door of Newgate,the famous 1809 engraving by Fisher Nuttall. But no record of any Oxford connection has ever come to light nor any Tansley accomplishments bar criminality. So entirely preposterous, yet the fiction dogged Thomasina and was one of the first things Sara set out to dispel. A lack of corroborating facts must always require Quo bono? being asked. In Thomasina’s case, John Cane… or now Cunning, parasitical, every-cruel-tag-Josh-could-attach-to-her Kim Tighe. Kim benefited, she reasoned, not materially (it was natural for Sara to discount a small sum) but in melodrama and the chance to star… which she has stupidly provided. Self-disgust broke out more powerfully than ever. Why begin to analyse now in excusatory mode, a woman she despised? So it seemed. After fear came fear’s fishy aftertaste, humiliation; she had been made a fool of and it was with gritted teeth she set herself to record the next incident.
Out again with the Eurwen leaflets she was high on hope, courtesy of the day’s opening shots of vodka: Excuse me… this is Eurwen Meredith. Have you seen her? No one refused. They said nope, don-think-so,sorry love. Two teenagers laughed in earshot, a young man whose earthy smell registered just too late to have her veering away, muttered incoherent sentences to himself rather than her. But no one refused. At the crossing of a side road she spotted a cluster of middle-aged women, the Holy Grail. When she called out they changed course; their small, dumpy leader, straining coat belted tightly though it was mild, said, ‘What’s up?’
‘It’s my daughter.’
An Eurwen was passed from hand to hand: ‘Na-a, you save your papers love.’
Haven’t, no. What about you, Shirl…? Oh, it’s a sod when they do that… She’ll turn up. I’ll bet she does. Luvly mum like you! For a few seconds before moving off they stood and enclosed her in their half circle, a female bastion. Then she was aware that, subtly, without meaning to, they freed themselves from her distress and she was grateful they hadn’t extended the conversation to become tedious, sickly. Instead, without needing reference to any etiquette, they had done just enough. She felt very tired. The midday turned drear above and cooler below and a tumbledown wall on the corner of Westbourne Road was something to make for, her face welcoming the onset of drizzle as excuse to give up. Her ankles ached from hard slow walking and a hollowness in her chest warned she would need drink the instant she was inside Josh’s house, well before thought or speech… or anything.
And suddenly there was Kim. Kim was smiling at her from a billboard.
She blinked and looked again. The collapsed wall she perched on seemed to be in defence of some sort of builders yard though no bigger than a suburban garden. A padlocked, tumbled-down shack at the far end was the sole indication of business premises. The predominant usage was as dumping ground for the extinct funfair only a street away. Remains of grotesque mechanical arms, other obscure contraptions and a cup-and-saucer roundabout with deep vessels into which toddlers could be strapped, all were stacked or spread. And propped jauntily against a giant cup was the billboard advertising Palace of Pleasure, a painted blonde in a red bikini reclining on her elbow, one leg bent while the other pointed skywards in an ecstatic stab of flesh. Kim’s calves and thighs were scrofulous with weather but the familiar smirk remained or a girlish version of it. ‘I was painted once, me, could of bin a model,’ she had bragged. Pitiable now, the idealised Kim… cushioned in scrap.
Fireworks! A crack and whoosh returned her to Westbourne Road. She pulled up her collar and made for the bridge, a rattle of shots following her out of town.
But fireworks were going off every evening as soon as the light faded. ‘A whole bloody month of this!’ was Josh’s response. On consideration, Rhyl did have an especially rowdy feel as she had walked it, as though Carnival were just around the corner, something to look forward to, a relief from yearlong Lent. But the hard-eyed children begging at the back of the Queens Market, their hideous Guy slumped like corpse, did not look safe to try Eurwen’s picture on.
‘You didn’t give them anything?’ Josh wanted to know.
‘Of course not,’ she lied. Guido Fawkes lay racked and broken at their feet… one of them had worn a death’s head mask and could have been a girl behind it. Another’s thin boyish face was daubed livid. Bonfire Night, All Hallows’ Eve, the Druidic Samhain and the Romans’ Feralia seemed blended, a brew to salve every lack and loss. Or just something to anticipate for this bunch of wild uncared for children that would come to no harm. As she focused on the eggs she was cooking and their yielding to heat, she was about to say more… maybe a mild disagreement with his attitude? But sirens sounded back across the river and his phone went off as the first golden solids caught at the spatula.
Hours later a burnt scent still filled the downstairs rooms. When he returned it was left to Josh to clear away the aborted meal. From the kitchen he shouted: ‘Just kids having fun out on the game reserve.’
Without even Polly Reith’s pamphlet open as prop he had surprised her staring at a blank television and inert long enough for one curled leg to crumple when she jumped up. She wore jeans still, though was half-ready for bed in a pyjama top, an intimacy interrupted or thought better of. Yet she had waited up, sobered by the suspicion he had gone to her. Then his expression as she staggered caused something to snap. ‘The game reserve. That’s what you call it?’ she asked, supporting herself in the arch.
‘Cher-rist Sara! The state of you.’ His hair had grown in the time she’d been here and needed a trim, needed to be brushed impatiently out of his eyes. He pushed past. ‘I’m getting a shower!’…and there it was, now it didn’t matter, the time and date on the kitchen wall. Five to ten on October 25th. The Feast of Crispian, she mouthed. This day in 1415 Welsh longbowmen turned back the French knights’ charge and won The Field of Agincourt for King Henry V.
Quickly she went and gathered her new, warmer clothes. That she owned the wool thing she was about to get into was a novelty, also this jacket with its nylon whisper. But both pulled on easily enough and she made it outside while the water was still thundering in the pipes overhead.
It’s the vodka – that’s what she should have realised. When she thinks she sees danger, she’s looking in the wrong place. Alcohol makes her imagine the children are squinting through slitted lids as she edges past them – and just visible, gleaming like citrines, are their rodent teeth.
Night had taken over the streets: it was their time, what they were best at. Sara made for the lemonade glow. At the front door of an arcade a mini roundabout-ride was being watched by two teenage girls. ‘Na, don’t know ’er. You, Col? Na, me neither.’ The tot that belonged to them shrieked with fear as he circled on his plastic pony to Ghost Riders in the Sky. Beyond this vivid little drama, acres of chortling gaming machines stood unused.
‘He’s not really enjoying it, is he?’ Sara said.
Eurwen’s picture could not do what slight criticism managed instantly. ‘He wanted to go on,’ the tall one answered, looking her in the eye. Squaring up.
‘It’ll stop in a minute,’ the other explained. Small, more placatory, her nails combed through shockingly bright hair, not Eurwen’s colour but a chemical carmine. ‘It’s rubbish. And you don’t get long.’
The story of Rhyl. Sara retreated into a collision with a heavy-set man. He, at least, examined the picture, frowning an already deeply-creased brow to signal effort. ‘Na— sorry. Oi— Colleen! Get that babby ’ome. It’s too bloody late to be in ’ere with him.’ To Sara he said, ‘You look wrecked, love.’
‘I’m… very anxious.’
‘Step into the office a minute. What made you come in ’ere looking? Plays the slots, does she?’
‘No. I’m not sure.’ Trailing behind him, she noticed the trodden down heels of his shoes and the holed socks. His office was tiny: a desk, a chair both piled with paper, walls covered in imitation wood onto which he pinned Eurwen’s picture next to a calendar. October featured a spotted puppy in a bed of autumn leaves. ‘I’ll ask around— that’s all I can do, yeah?’
‘Thank-you.’ A bed of leaves.When had October come, or gone?
He gave her a long speculative look. ‘Wait a sec.’ The desk drawer opened. Down, out of sight, she heard the bottle cap unscrewed and when he passed the mug across it was near-half full. She would never have taken him for a Drambuie-man. ‘You’ll be glad of that. Give it an hour and it’ll be brass monkeys out there. Get it down you.’
‘Yes.’ Sweet… sticky as myrrh. ‘Thank-you again.’ Her feet dragged as though in the man’s old shoes, fingers made contact with the freezing glass of the outside door a split second before her eyes told her they would. The cold was something to embrace not shrink from, though, now eased into that best of all drink-induced states, physically armoured, but mentally diamond hard, more lucid than she had felt in days… On the blue, number twenty-two-oo! came an amplified voice from further along the Promenade.
Waiting out the traffic to cross to The Sky Tower, each vehicle added to the surrounding brilliance. And once at the structure’s foot as though the spot were designated for that very purpose, she saw everything… and it was stunning. Her eyes swam and, rather than spoil the effect it was intensified to an almost unbearable degree, ripples of dazzling energy. Overhead may be a no-colour but down here vibrancy and pattern became a cipher and its message hugely benevolent: pleasure and forgetting. Tears ran the separate lights each softly against each until she lost the knowledge that these elements were mundane through pure visual sorcery. Part of her held onto the daytime map with its blots, that burnt-out hotel and an abandoned site she knew intimately, glimpsed through shuttering, overrun with growing weeds but still unclean; it could never revert to natural because trash lay waiting for the frost, for a chance to bloom again in naked squalor. But this night real Rhyl stepped forward, a small enamelled resort,tendering two centuries of panem et circenses. Ah-h! You’re the girl! thumpingfrombars and basements, Eurwen had heard it, seen it, exactly this with the ears and eyes Sara had given her, not minding the cold, breathing out, ‘Stun-ning!’ as a wisp of silk.
I understand, Eurwen. Complete comprehension at last. This existential joy has eluded me always… but for you? Your luck has turned and the coins are raining down in a silver shower. Stunning, huh Mum?
Eurwen had first run to Rhyl. And she was here still: the certainty urged Sara to her feet. At any moment around the next corner she would be; Eurwen no longer avoiding, not needing her spa-c-ce, instead lingering to be caught up… just as the last time they had walked through Oxford’s covered market and Sara had taken her arm.
OK, now they’ll we’re think gay! and you’re the fem, Mum! But Eurwen had not pulled away. That slim freckled forearm, sinewy with lugging buckets and pony fodder, was strong enough to fend her off in a single flick. Instead the latent life let itself be trapped by a mother’s elbow and could be pressed under the heart.
‘A scarf, what about that scarf? I see they are wearing them tied so that—’
‘Put it in the charity box, Mum. The drawers are full of scarves.’
Her first week she had been told to ‘Keep off the Lakeside after dark.’
Josh was laughing. She told it to Josh and he’d laughed into ugly new lines and nearly killed a… a Murcott, still laughing. But all was quiet enough. She didn’t intend to go as far as they had done then. The first seat would be best, close to the road and safe yet with a… nice view (she had to suppress her own snigger), a rather lovely aspect. This did force her to laugh aloud. Every light in the town must come down here eventually, settling on the surface to provide a spectacle to buffet the senses. And not lonely at all: people passed behind her, people who had no idea she was there, whose conversations could be eavesdropped on, a donated sentence or two, a homily from each.
‘I’m not doing that for nobody, not me— I told him fuckin’ straight.’
‘So next week she’s in againand they say they’ll have another go but they tell the family straight they’re not giving much for her chances. Hardly worth bothering. So no she says.’
Finally: ‘Won’t come back here… well I don’t think so anyroad. Got better things to do.’
Nothing after this though she waited. But there had to be a last reveller to walk home with a decisive summing up. Someone had rebelled at last: good for him or her. Or was gone away from Rhyl already… or had rejected one last try, having exhausted the very dregs of optimism: such a relief. It was enough to make her sigh and snuggle down into her alien clothes, letting peace and the smoothness of the scene filter through her veins until it combated the cold, drove off the need for a next thing, whether action or event, movement or speech. Finally, even those particular thoughts were quietened that had plagued her like moths fast inside a lamp. Her phone chirruped and the temptation was to pitch it out there and enjoy the splash, throw it as far as she could. Instead, ‘Hello?’
‘Sara! Where are you?’
‘I’m here. Watching the water. Josh.’
‘Where the fuck’s here?’
‘Here. Josh, listen… listen. It’s very… polished… and peaceful.’ The alliteration was a trap and caught her tongue. ‘Pestil… pest-il-lent Murcotts… nowhere to be seen! Anyway I think you made it all up, about… wanting trouble when they… all wedding rings and… bars of chocolate. You came looking… Yes?’ But it seemed an age ago. ‘Now no one’s here at all. Won’t come back.Got better things to do. Never much of a chance anyway. Remember?’ Ought he to remember?
‘Eh? Yeah, yeah… ’course I do. Why don’t we keep talking, huh? Sara! Hey, Sara! Describe to me how you feel.’
Strangely she couldn’t think of anything significant. ‘I’m very… calm. I know that.’ Out from the blackness a duo of light blades came slithering towards her, eating up the ripples like live things.
‘OK. What else? What else Sara?’
‘And tired.’ She would have tried to continue if only to please him but now a series of novel sounds, scrapes and crunches and then some dry thing snapping, distracted her. Maybe not that close, going away in fact… or were they coming closer?
‘Tired? Are you? Sit down then. You just sit there. Don’t move!’
‘Really, really tired. I’m so-o sorry Josh. I can’t find an answer… to tell you. I have to go.’
‘Sara!’
When the dark figure loomed at her back if she were aware, it went unremarked by Sara, giddy but determined, dragging her reluctant body upright and forward. There was neither lip nor discernible edge to the lake or none her toes could detect in the new cheap shoes beginning to rub.
II
Shade
The List’s always being maintained by somebody so it can look like the people on it are still active centuries later, works in progress.
The Vanished. We love them better than The Here.
Welsh chieftain Owain Glyndwr and minor league writer Ambrose Bierce are never coming back nor lunatic Lord Lucan, yet they’ve plugged into a way of staying famous. Go with plenty of style and a lack of witnesses and you join the tribe of the mythic. That’s your payback the world over. In France, for instance, they worship vaporised intellectuals and favourite is Louis Le Prince who not only beat the Lumière brothers to inventing motion pictures by years but was way ahead of all the other competitors, including Thomas Edison. Yet guess who went on to patent the process? This leaves Le Prince’s small-but-massive achievement as a frustration. Watch his few frames of loaded wagons crossing an urban bridge. Please. Only the second film ever made— but blink and you miss it. A restless-footed man squeezing an accordion will be Le Prince’s next subject and if he’d stayed around somebody could’ve asked about that. Of all things to record on silent film why choose a performer on a really difficult musical instrument? Is it a joke? The first ever prediction of the talkies? A Gallic metaphor? We’ll never know. Both these clips play as if on a time machine because remember they’re the second and third glimpses ever of the past. But best of all is Le Prince’s first attempt. A dead woman walks in an English garden. She’s his relative and in just over a week, and before the film is seen by anyone outside the family, she’ll die. Of natural causes. I’ve watched it over and over and every time an odd thing strikes me – she steps backwards out of shot. No obvious reason for it. But in that instant the camera becomes predator and this solid woman upholstered in clothes, nineteenth-century style, seems to deflate. Like she has a premonition and is sneaking away, avoiding notice. Just as the figure behind the lens will soon do. September 16th 1890 Le Prince boarded a train for Paris and never got off and wherever he went, the secrets of the world’s first cinematographer went with him.
