Desire Line, page 25
She came on stage as a skeleton thrown up by the sea but run her backwards and the horror reverts to my grandmother. I find her really lovely from certain angles which photographs didn’t show and she lives, she breathes. For one last time. And she’s going to fall. My arms want make a scoop, hold her safe as though I’m the father or the husband.
A freak of a feeling.
Final scene.
EXT. STREET. NIGHT.
MAN appears out of shadow and walks toward car parked half up on the kerb, its driver’s door wide open and headlights blazing. He carries the body of a WOMAN in his arms. She is either unconscious or a corpse. MAN stops level with car. He seems to be considering how and where inside the vehicle he is going to place her. Then he gets the passenger side door open. She’s small but he has trouble. He lowers her in.
Here’s what I was shown. Just this— a man carrying the inert body of a woman up a slope to the big saloon, obviously left by him in a hurry. Nothing’s on the road and nobody’s to mind he’s abandoned the vehicle with its wheels up, its door wide enough open to get ripped off by traffic.
That’s basically all it is. But everything is referenced. You can never witness this sort of movie trope even in eerie silence without the hundred other variations you know, Hitchcock’s and all the wannabes since, feeding extra info in re: his purpose. The odds are, bad. And the result for her? Ditto. I recognise the exact spot it’s being played out on and, though his full features aren’t caught whether by accident or cunning, who they both are. And with every re-run the component parts read as extra menacing. Her arm drops, solider somehow than it should be. The angle of her head as it sags on his shoulder— and for a split second is perfectly illuminated— is even more wrong. He settles her into the vehicle’s front seat and leans in to guarantee the torso’s fixed upright and going to stay put. Now he’s strapping her down. What’s already happened by the lake isn’t recorded. So you’d need to be pre-told through flashback, maybe, that she’s wringing wet— and so make sense of the dead weight of her and explain the problem he’s having.
Notes
*see Appendix B
**’Rhyl and Penzance— A study in failure and success’— Yori Sato, UWE, 2031
Chapter 23
Either somebody’s shining a torch in my face or it’s dawn out there. Libby’s house is end terrace so Thorp (if it really was him made us) had given her dining room/ my living room a pair of extra sash windows denied the rest of the row. The wooden chair I’d dozed on was directly in their line of fire. Physically? Only a bit shabby thanks to doubling up on and because with it’ll always be the dehydration that gets you, and I’d kept the tea going all night. The last half-empty cup was next to my elbow gone cold while the car I was convinced contained Sara was driven off for the nth time. CC sticking to its remit of No Sara, No Interest had chosen that point to freeze.
Replay.
Once he’d tucked her up and joined her inside, the car performed a reckless U turn and exited the scene via the bridge although it was a manoeuvre that had to be completed by your brain. The camera on this side lacked a director’s guidance. It stayed trained on Rhyl’s distant gleam and by a trick of reflection even the shot you might have banked on straight through the windshield isn’t there. Do what you like— zoom, freeze, contrast, reverse— it fails to materialise thanks to that dirty smear of light across the glass. So eventually you let the car proceed on its way. A creepy, deserted Wellington Road is all that’s left, the darker strip to its right is land that you know slopes down to the lake. Those scrubby trees (they’re taller now) don’t offer any obstruction. But this being the wrong angle for Rhyl’s signature flash of sea, we could be almost anywhere—
And still I hung on one more time for the closing scene. Held my breath for the dénouement that wasn’t going to be provided. When I had to move I stretched, rubbed at my hot eyeballs and yanked Libby’s curtains apart, feeling just for a second or two so far out of myself it could be the surface of Mars I’m about to reveal— instead of the good old avenue and an empty sky.
The implication was huge.
I’m not a murderer. I’m descended from a murderer. That’s Josh manhandling a female corpse with a lot of effort but not seeming in any hurry. A witness could’ve turned up any moment, him being stopped on Rhyl’s main drag and though it was empty at 1.06 a.m. if a camera was able to record the action, another vehicle from either direction would throw a searchlight on him. But there he was, tucking in. Checking this is OK. Then something else. I actually feel anxious for him as he smoothes the soaked hair away from the face— no the camera couldn’t show that. But he did. I knew. And he took his time. Love, you’d think, again and again. Tenderness. Also absolute confidence he’d get away with it. Which he had.
Next door my bed’s very convincing and I sleep four hours, an unlucky number.
Under the subheading Things We Don’t Do Now, Gramps Geoffrey once told me this. Before all our personal messaging systems, to speak to another person you were forced to ring their house. Often they didn’t answer. In which case the caller— Geoffrey admitted it was himself— waited a moment and rang again.
‘Why would you—?’
‘Ah-h,’ he said. ‘Good question, Yori. Excellent. Because being clever doesn’t make you not a silly old fool.’
When I wake around midday as soon as I come to, the Professor’s right there. He’s solid as that wardrobe. His high-bridged nose, which will always look comic to a Japanese, like something stuck on, is being tapped with one mottled finger. Tap tap tap tap tap. A silly old fool. And actually very much not a fool, his expression tells you though he went to his grave afraid he’d acted it over his daughter. I see him and the background is always his white study. He had used Pryorsfield just as the big solid building it was till Sara was taken. His defence against the intolerable? Paint in a shade they could market as SnowBlindness and new glazing. For contrast, matt black gadgets constantly revised. A room with no dark corners and nowhere for dusk to settle. A space he could be master of.
Cruise Control claimed no more sightings of Sara once she’d been dragged from the lakeside but, keeping up family tradition, I ask for one last rerun. Nobody home. No catch— I’m a fisherman reeling in a holed net and feeling just about as sick over it. And it was Saturday. No work. I’d slept but felt too leaden to move from the seat.
Tess would have plans or I made up plans for her.
The civil disturbance in East London re: a disrupted water supply is over thanks to Casino Pigalle sending in tankers.
Some ex-friend from Bristol is in hospital in Lima, one leg cast from groin to ankle— he’s asking me, and about four hundred others, if we have contacts to help get him to the airport tomorrow?
Tomiko’s not in studio but horizontal rain is lashing his window.
Oxford will have 30 degrees plus again today, high for August let alone May.
Kailash has a new man, ‘a Malayan billionaire— u’ll no name when u hear.’
In a mad impulse, I send Hurray!
Nothing back.
Then there’s Josh. But we can’t speak. Now. Whoever else saw what I’d seen must have helped him. His colleagues, his friends. How come, otherwise? So never a fool, Geoffrey, you knew the man I thought was Josh was a flicker on a lightboard. Or a shell, maybe, rotted from inside.
I make tea. I wish Libby would come down here and bang on the door and bring her human smell in. (Japanese do not smell and half of me must miss it.) I heat soup. Catch the mug’s sulky expression as I choose to drink from a beaker at my desk where I’ve left Sara’s broken necklace lying— Oh and now from Kailash a single . Yes! I feel like a bit of bug this morning— you’ll get no arguments.
There’s no difficult call to make. No arguments here, either. I join the ranks of Josh’s anonymous accomplices by starting to pack everything up – and the letter from Fleur falls out. Still in its envelope. Opened and put back. Even if I hadn’t recognised Fleur’s writing there’s the postmark across the commemorative stamp (a man in a comedy hat, labelled Henry 1V). Big clue that, the history stamp chosen for Sara. As well as the smudged ‘Oxford 15.11.08’.
Pryorsfield,
Monday
Dearest Sara
The time you’ve been away seems to have flown by. Though perhaps on heavier feet for you? I cannot imagine. I do know the date, and what it will be very soon and how you must dread it. I’d say bear up, darling, if it didn’t fix me in a previous century! Geoffrey and I are convinced the more we discuss it (and we discuss little else) that either Eurwen will arrive unheralded or one of Josh’s enquiries will come to something. He is a clever, resourceful man don’t forget, and a father.
Geoffrey, as you know, was already acquainted with Julien Fortin, which helped. His daughters seem truthful and comment made by Henriette (the cleverer, with the alarming haircut?) has stuck in my mind. It was that she had ‘got the idea’ Eurwen was wanting to go ‘a different way’ and made it very plain (before she left) she had no intention of working for her GCSE’s, no interest in A levels and would never consider University. So Eurwen has had her own thoughts. When she returns we can encourage her to share them with us.
But it is you who concerns us darling, perhaps as much as Eurwen. You are not answering our calls. Last night I very nearly decided to turn up on Josh’s doorstep, weather the storm if there were one (perhaps I’m misjudging?) and to take stock, to find our next move. Would that have been so bad?
One more thing before I leave you in peace. I can say in a letter what I should have but did not when we were face to face (our lunch at La Croix springs to mind). Your problems, your unhappiness can be made better. I am not so vacuous as to say solved. But among people who love you there can be healing. I’m a great believer in the power of love. I send all of mine now.
Yours, as ever,
Fleur
PS Even the work, darling, we can mend.
On Rhyl-sky-blue paper that no one made any more, Fleur’s letter was rational and kind. And posted on Nov 15th. Even allowing for a proper postal service operating back then surely it couldn’t have arrived in time to be read by the drowned woman? By Josh then? No. Having just proved several times over Josh was responsible for Sara’s death, I failed to convince myself he’d open a letter addressed to her. On the reverse side, he was a policeman. By instinct would he turn any information down? No. Yes. I couldn’t get over how the letter came from Fleur, a woman he did respect, whose intentions he wouldn’t go against without— without— ? All this seems trivial to the majority of people. I know. I know. But I was right to get hung up on it— just my reasoning was wrong. The organiser/journal still broke off with Sara and Josh in a Rhyl pub joined by Meg who might bounce if dropped. I laid A First out all over again in its fat chapters face up. Getting them to this position didn’t mean any sort of decision had been made. Turned them over to Sara’s side. One good idea was still to burn the lot. Josh had kept his secrets all these years then burst on-screen in the early hours with a body in his arms— nothing put down on paper could blur that. No one but a policeman, my grandfather, could’ve got away with that. He was a violent man at bottom so could’ve murdered her.
Or, at best, failed to save her.
Did he make the distinction himself? He was letting it kill him either way. But a single action alters your future not who you are. And somewhere deep in the molecules, Josh remained the Josh I’d grown up with. And forgetting arguments and counter-arguments, Fleur’s letter had been opened and read— and kept. A mistake Josh would never have made.
Chapter 24
16th November, a.m. 2008.A dream? Perhaps not yet myself, but aware nevertheless, I followed…
…Thomasina Swift’s dash through the fields to meet a lover. At fifteen, slim and supple as bamboo and tall for her age they lock glances, their eyes level. Where could the girl’s length of bone have originated? One parent a tradesman, the other a housemaid: so from whence came this patrician height and Renaissance mind? ‘The mother Maria, being so tiny her husband could place her on a barrel as a jest, making customers roar to see the doll-like woman beg to be got down. It is probable she never learned more than to sign her own name. Though Jacob Swift was lettered and expert in bills and accounts, before the end of childhood Thomasina could out-compute her father in her head and would do it over and over to win pennies. Turned away by a local clergyman we must assume she taught herself Latin, Greek and some Natural Philosophy since over the course of a single year the innkeeper claimed to have obtained for this prodigy Virgil’s Eclogues, some early books of the Iliad (though he was cheated by the seller for it turned out a bastardized, illegible version) in addition to a treatise by Roger Bacon and a tract by Sir Thomas More.’
Of course, in A First she was both scrupulous and shy with regards the question of Thomasina’s paternity, disproving almost by the way Elizabeth Longford’s ridiculous candidature of Samuel Richardson. (The Father of the Novel was otherwise engaged that year getting his eldest daughter well married and writing his will). She, herself, refrained from nominating even when a paucity of evidence made it so tempting, a good story if poor history. It was enough to record one Abram Foley’s expression of delight to his brother for ‘those tender treats’ provided at the Merman’s Tail; he is writing in 1757, late June, the month of Thomasina’s conception. So it was enough for her purpose to append here: ‘Abram Foley, (1709–1778), an intriguing and highly attractive figure of the time, always on the edge of great matters; essayist, revelator, scientist and mystic, friend of Benjamin Franklin, supporter of stricken writer Christopher Smart (even in the poor man’s extremis, at Mr Potter’s Madhouse) and a correspondent of the polymath, Swedenborg.’
Her mind had been flicking through the Thomasina pages of its own volition, scanning ahead as only someone who has given birth to them is able to… recited Horace’s odes by rote, comprehended Pythagoras and Archimedes and yet was blessed with such an exquisite femininity that—Those opening paragraphs had remained unsatisfactory somehow though the drafts multiplied around her in her shady St Clement’s cubby-hole. But who could fully grasp the sheer out-of-time, out-of-gender verve of Thomasina’s spirit? It was the very thing whose likeness had been rekindled in women the world over and became their torch.
A pair of crumpled jeans lay draped over a chair next to the bed, a tide mark indicating the level the dirty water had fallen to before evaporation took over. The sight helped bring her to herself, as did the scarf, another stream of blue, dislodged from its position on the chest and seeming to flow down to the carpet. Bought for Eurwen… but she had to bolt for the bathroom and it was there Josh came and found her, slumped on the side of the tub, dry-heaving into the sink. His expression was easy to translate: pity flecked with revulsion at her goose-pimpled nudity. ‘I’m all right,’ she lied and he backed out.
For penance, when she could stand upright again, it was beneath a barely warm shower. No wonder Josh had fled from mottled flesh the colour of putty, the bones everwhere highlighted. Her feet had the previous night’s silt dried into them, a grey fringe to the nails and a gritty line in their hidden valleys, the tweenies of Eurwen’s giggling joyous babyhood… but she fended off that memory, close to panic. Leaning over to attend to the dirt invited true vomiting so a gentle swish, a toe caress of toe, gave a tinge in the flowing water and had to do. She turned up the heat and washed, one-handed wherever it could reach, the other braced against the tiles until, flushed to a better tone, and very carefully she stepped out, straightened her spine like a good Bradwardine girl, slim not thin! …and marvelled at the human body’s capacity to disguise its internal squalor. Even the face; a candid examination in the swiped mirror showed the jawline firm, skin maybe a touch puffy but unlined: a spatter of Rhyl freckles could almost be taken for good health. Teeth, perfectly maintained since their first erupting, were even and white, only this summer bleached at a very expensive Summertown dentist. Who would ever imagine what the assembled parts hid?
Downstairs, Josh was hardly in the house. He sat on the doorstep, the big muscles along his spine bunched and then relaxed in the familiar (to her) act of shoe-cleaning. And the smell of it! An eye-watering essence of turpentine. One and a half pairs were lined up between Josh’s trainer-clad feet. His hand made a last for the singleton. Always an obsessive shoe-cleaner, the sight of this doppelganger of a husband was too cruel… he’d sat on the limestone threshold in Tackley Close, calling back over one shoulder, pleading almost Anything, Sara? Black, brown— I’m on black now. Can do navy next… the small brush dives into polish, onto a heel of boot, working it forward straight to the instep, roundabout and return. His array of polishes in differing shades suggested an artist’s paintbox, every tin and brush and tube lined up, cloths folded neatly as handkerchiefs in bedroom drawers, spare laces coupled with Josh’s special knot. At home there had always been a wooden case kept by him, old, steel-banded, also meticulously neat.
With every change of task came the possibility of his suspending what he was doing.
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
‘Where’s your watch?’ He dismissed his own question. ‘Getting on for eleven.’
This boot he was restoring to gloss black had delivered a terrible click to a Murcott knee… she could feel its weight, hear again the retort. She squatted down, swivelled and sat, back up against his, experiencing his movements through a thin sweater… and his blessed warmth.
He did not move apart but said, ‘It’s a wonder you don’t have pneumonia. Or dysentery. The Marine Lake? A fuckin’ joke, isn’t it? It was only saying you could see the reflections did it. Made me think. Otherwise… Probably not even deep enough anyway. I mean if you were serious.’
‘Don’t! Of course not. I was… I—’ She was denied his expression but made a guess at a flinty look in the eyes. Another memory of their married life invaded her peace: the debates that ended only one way: with a slamming door. ‘Are you on duty? Are you going out… soon?’
