Desire Line, page 28
Glenn’s keenness shows by the way he licks round his mouth. ‘So did he do it? Did he ice’n’dice your granny?’
‘My grandfather wouldn’t harm his own wife.’
The chair sighs under Glenn’s weight. He frowns. Not near quite good.
Tomiko creates a rock-strewn gully with minute expenditure of ink.
‘I’m gonna need more than that,’ Glenn said.
‘Other people’d worry about the tone being wrong— you know, annoying or rude. Not you.’ Tomiko’s completed work makes up the final seconds of the display cycle. I realise I don’t admire it any more. This mountainside lacks substance, the birches are thin— and unbalanced. And what is going on with that hat we’re meant to believe has been ripped from an offstage actor? Was it a blemish, a false line somehow incorporated into the whole so it fooled most people, including me, but not the artist? Because you wouldn’t hide, Tomiko. Sara saw you. Across from the fire she must’ve been instantly recognisable as Eurwen’s mother and you gave yourself up. You were offering to be the victim. She notices you even on this totally bizarre night, and of course your excellent balance. Also how you can’t meet her eyes. If she’d spoken you’d have spilled the story. Gone back to drag Eurwen for her out of Jay and Neil’s van—
Glenn looked where I was looking and said, ‘Bollocks to that. You’ve gotto talk to somebody. Yeah?’ He head-gestured at Tomiko, back to recharging Big Cloud. ‘Family? Till this I didn’t even know you had one.’
‘Everybody’s got one.’ Watching Josh carry a corpse to his car had stirred up stupid responses. Childish responses when I should know better. I’d pretended to myself he could’ve killed her or been in on her death, let her die— whatever, just greedy for reprieve. As though the puzzle mattered. That was also a crime, downgrading Josh into an excuse of a man when he’d saved her once and would’ve kept on trying, given the opportunity. Geoffrey and Tomiko, I’d always respected— but I’d managed to lose sight of the courage and professionalism of Officer Meredith that used to make my eyes sting when said aloud. ‘She was a sad woman with— her problems, a lot of problems.’ I told Glenn. ‘She wasn’t caring for herself. She thought her husband and child didn’t want her, either. Then she seems to have gone out one day and decided— all too much. Nobody else involved. You let me see. ’ Glenn deserved the bit of flattery but as I was saying it, it turned into truth. I’d never have sorted out Sara’s journals without something to watch. We all live in pictures in the end. So worth it, Glenn and as promised you’ve done me a favour. ‘It gets worse. Now she’s really dead I bet there’ll be her life story coming out. There’s plenty about her doing the rounds. The Tom Swift film’s getting hyped, have you noticed? Like making more money is some sort of homage while it’ll actually be torture for the people left. Josh especially.’ I should’ve added Eurwen but Glenn came back with a list of the mentions he’d noticed himself, snippets of Sara, ‘That Charity woman looks a bit of—’ he made a vile sign. Then The Vanished muscled in. We knocked around the ideas you’ll find at the start of this section, a lot of them Glenn’s. I’d never heard of Ambrose Bierce or Lord Lucan, for instance.
At least Tomiko’s safe, I didn’t say, protected by distance and rusty English. ‘There’s no answer. The day she went missing I can’t find her in town. She doesn’t show. And the rest of the time— she’s just this sad woman looking for her daughter, wandering round, in and out the Clear Skies— gets mixed up with some scammer from there! D’you want to see?’ I show him Kim Tighe or at least the billboard Kim Tighe claimed was her. I know her story’s end at least.*
He breathed out. Said, ‘Sod it, eh?’ but he continued to lurk, staring now at my white seashell of building under blue sky, another secret he was going to be prying into soon. By bringing on PalmWalk, hunching over the next section, doing concentration about as subtly as a Kabuki artist, the shirt was encouraged to fade away as I had reached an untried route that could be absorbing – in fact, a real skill-bender – and probably was going to turn out more therapeutic than all the talk. Rhyl’s a small place but complicated. There are numerous other possibilities, twice as many as you first think. I make a new beginning hovering over the flat Apollo cinema now and finally I find it, the desire line everybody wants to follow—
November 17th 2008
The sun is a weak colourless disc and Sara has it behind her— means she’s shivering in SkyTower’s shadow. Then swamped by the school-party outside the lost Seaquarium. All the time she’s making for the quickest way out of town, using the edge of the land.
Nobody notices her. Not the massive workman stumping from a construction site in bulky overalls, though some instinct makes him glance over his shoulder. Two lovers are clinched in the middle of the path causing a pedestrian snarl-up she’ll need to skirt round but at the last moment they drift to one side as though half-aware, clearing the way. That cart-pushing oldie with cleansing implements pauses. He’s enough to obscure the slight figure he maybe recognises as the one who smiled— he was litter picking in Market Street the afternoon she shopped for Eurwen’s scarf. But even the camera has missed today’s chance to give her up.
Like AH is telling us she’s really ‘Judy’, she’s really ‘Rebecca’. She’s a ghost already.
Notes
*See Appendix D
III
Stone
Viewed from Rhyl, Sara’s life well justified the advice Tomiko gave me as a child. Re: family, wealth, occupation, place of origin— say nothing. Mizu ni nagusu.* Write her story, Yori? That weight tied to your foot’s finally flown off, has it? And hit you on the head? – which is exactly what I asked myself hour after hour, knee-caps to the polished parquet of Libby’s floor, trying to piece together her final days.
But another vantage point you can see Sara from is Oxford’s. Yare yare! (means Wow!) My grandmother – my grandmother – was an idol here. I learned that while growing up at Pryorsfield, heard it all the time, even out in a city overdosed on its own brainpower. Even my tutor Mr Dennis with the shakes so bad they could stop him drawing a straight line relied on her grandson having some facts (whether about Ruskin or Rembrandt) ‘because of your, er, impressive background.’ The academic take on Sara stayed positive and it was buttressed by hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, history-dabblers, television-viewers and movie-buffs who bought her just to read and while the first group never admitted the second mattered, it did. And to date you’d still have trouble finding much from either team that damages her reputation. The meanest? Maybe she couldn’t have pulled it off a second time. She’d found the subject to make any researcher look good. Lucky Sara. But never out of print right back to when most books never made it into print, when publishing was the last cartel, that says a lot.
Sara’s vanishing trick may’ve left holes in our family roof but for maintaining a profile it was one brilliant stroke.
And I got given her confessional. OK, it has already been sifted through by Josh, then his fellow officers. It has been shared with his superiors— interviews that result with him sunk in everybody’s estimation including his own and ended in his life being picked over. Never painless. I can imagine Kailash describing me. ‘Of course he was more or less dumped by his mother – so a real problem with women. Hardly went to school! He did what? No, it does not surprise me.’ As for Josh, Careless, huh? was probably passed around behind his back. You’ve heard the daughter’s turned up again, boyfriend in tow? – now the wife’s done a runner! Like a fuckin’ comedy.
The partner always heads the suspects and it was going to be worse for one of their own. ‘Officers investigating a missing person case will require access to the home address for a search with your consent’ is still part of the protocol. (Had the journal already been surrendered? Yes to that. Since Josh didn’t destroy it, he’ll have come clean straight away.) Then there’s the Last Seen Wearing report Charity reproduced on her site. Light brown chinos. Cream shirt retrieved from dry cleaners in Marsh Road. (Query when?) A man’s hooded jacket, gunmetal, bearing an H for Haglöfs logo, property of the husband. Heeled sandals. (Query why not the Orla Keily sling-backs recently purchased as proved by the receipt from Clarks Shoes, High Street, Rhyl? Style: Milly, Colour: Mint, Price: £89.99— cheap she’d called them, probably the most expensive pair of shoes she could find in the entire town!)
It could be accurate. Or invented by Josh. At least the journal, copied and returned to him to pass to me, proved she’d come through some dark times in that final week and survived or how else had damaging CCTV pictures of a boozy wife dragged home in the early hours been suppressed? Unless they were never in the public domain— unless fellow detectives totally believed Sara in silk shirt, chinos and borrowed coat was still out there, a Misper who left no note. But even back then a man in Josh’s fix, policeman or not, wouldn’t get an easy ride. His career is wrecked. Especially as the hunt goes on and on – and was stumbling along right up till child Yori watched a bunch of white flowers set sail off Splash Point.
Charity Weiksner’s recent post on her brand new HeresSara is tagged Women Funds University Virgin Isles Thomasina Swift Disempowered Refugee Abuse Access Memorial Scholarship. She’s lived up to her name by endowing one. Still she can’t leave it alone. ‘Sara’s husband and only child have always refused to discuss my wonderful sister,’ she has to go and remind strangers. ‘So unless there’s an amazing turnaround of events, the mystery of her death is going to stay just that.’
Wrong.
Notes
*‘Let it flow away with the water’ – fitting for Sara. Perfect for Rhyl.
Chapter 28
By mid-May an inquest had been opened and adjourned, Rhyl-style in a pre-formed structure on the corner of Wellington and Westbourne. Just-thrown-up clubhouse had the drop on public building. The burnt-out shell of Corbett the Bookmaker that Glenn said had stood on the site showed more gravitas. Not long after I returned from Ireland, the coroner issued to Sara’s next of kin – neither Eurwen nor me but Josh still – an ‘interim certificate of the fact of death’, freeing her from the half-life she’d lived for thirty years. That she’d died wasn’t provisional now, only unexplained.
Round this time, when my New Rhyl of the mind kept getting intercut with days generating nothing, I tried to stay in contact with Josh because A. He was Nearest Male Relative in every way that counted. B. Nobody could judge him hard as he judged himself which meant my grandfather was due a respect rebate and c. Neither of those was a real reason. Something close to panic would grab me several times a day and it was always connected with thoughts of him. A message arrives about tenders for salvage from demolitions in Avonside— and my mouth dries, my pulse races. A detective inspector announces a crackdown on thefts from the Royal Alex Hospital— I have to freeze what I’m doing and lose track of the task. Keeping him informed is the spin I tried to put on our conversations— he usually already knew as much as me. ‘’Course you won’t be called when the real inquest’s held. Why would—? It’ll be me they want. Unless they’ll accept my statement because the coroner’s still got all the original case notes available. There’s a number of possibles for the verdict— accident, suicide, unlawful killing or open. Take your pick.’ These were reeled off without a stumble over killing. ‘Or there’s one called a narrative. But they mightn’t want to bring that in because they don’t have enough facts.’ Do they? ‘Accident’s most likely. Open is the last thing anyone wants.’ The background to Josh’s head was a vertical field of broken rock that fixed his whereabouts. Croagh Patrick’s Pilgrim Path was about to enter a testing stretch by the looks of it.
‘Because?’
‘Leaves a forever stink. That’s what they used to say, the bosses.’ He shrugged. ‘People like things tidied up. Open is, well, like admitting it’s bad and just how bad who the hell knows?’
‘You’ll be coming back for it—?’ but I’d misunderstood.
‘Not if they don’t force me.’ That set face again. ‘I’ve nothing to give them. Not new.’ At a distance over one of his shoulders a figure was making poor progress from boulder to boulder, slipping back, spine bent, head tucked in. Reminded me of a subject by Tomiko. No one was sketched out enjoying a sunlit stroll, he concentrated on wretched humans struggling through hostile landscapes and this looked pretty hostile. I’d never set foot on Ireland’s holy mountain and according to Josh every July fewer pilgrims bothered with the mass ascent. While also according to Josh – he, a non-Catholic – walked there once a week.
‘Are you going up or down?’
He laughed as if I’d made my second mistake. ‘Just sitting. See that!’ The terrain lurched. He showed me out to flat grey cloud cover blending into flat grey sea full of leaden lumps, no birds or vessels to attract the eye and no competition for the perfect vision of Clew Bay we’d shared only a short while ago. It gave a moment for us both to think. Then, ‘Yori—’
‘What?’
A hiss of breath then, ‘Take care of yourself.’ His voice had thickened. After U, Westport At Night came up, colourful, busy, The Jester’s doors swinging behind an elderly couple holding hands. I thought, How can he stand that? Yet from our few minutes’ chat you’d assess him as in the top ten per centile of OK. As though he was signing off on the past. Or was it relief he could put his name to a document saying nothing in his possession (now) had any connection to Sara’s disappearance that November 17th, their daughter’s birthday?
Result? I was never going to know what happened to her. If I leaned towards letting Josh off all charges, it left one familiar culprit. Nothing you did Yori, I told young Archie Kao in the wardrobe mirror. He was in black pants, charcoal T-shirt, up on his toes, fighter-style.
But it’s looking like it killed her anyway.
There wasn’t a date set for the proper inquest ‘pending police enquires’ and the legal process kept pace with life at Forward Rhyl. I won’t wander far off-message. I know the town doesn’t count for anything with the inhabitants, never mind you but Rhyl was the last one to see Sara alive. It figured somehow if only as her enemy. September came in. If Sara was shocked when she arrived in this month in 2008, she’d be horrified now. How can you live here? I imagined her Oxford diction like a scalpel used on Josh. All major refurbishment has stopped. Not been completed. Stopped. Some days in the office— these were the busy ones— what we did was handle sinister requests from other agencies for information. So the population template could be declared inaccurate while the design code for the delivery of quality outcomes in respect of Massing, Density and Height was too detailed. To maintain our keenness, backing for this or that project was really a goer – was about to be drawn from a pot that had recently materialised – and had been reallocated – was never intended for us anyway because sealed by criteria that we’d failed to meet at the outset. Then we were put to work on a new Magic Formula. The brainchild of muscular planning superstar D. P. Cutler from Melbourne*, it takes weather pattern forecasts, familial resilience scores, changes in ‘personal downtime usage’, current central government/private enterprise health campaigns plus all the usual retail/commercial/service industry demands – there’s no column for architectural merit – and predicts what you should do with a dead beat area. Less than a week and D.B. Cutler was a hate figure at Forward Rhyl. Neither Glenn nor I could find a single UK instance of predictions based on Cutler’s formula being A. practical or B. just not mad.
But that didn’t stop his rise to first planning dollar-billionaire, did it? So our ‘robustness of benchmarks’ needed to be improved for Rhyl to get even to base camp on the Cutler GoodGradient. As a matter of urgency. Just to start. Rhondda Jones, ex-leisure services and now Recovery Czar had said it. Glenn’s fake poster business must be beckoning again. He predicted unemployment on the hour.
On the positive side, I stole time to fiddle about with the PalmWalk projection. A twisted cable of retrofitting and modern engineering, its aim was to tighten the fractured sea front and hold it in place for others to make something of. This strip of real estate is responsible for Rhyl’s existence. Starting in the 1820s and for a hundred plus years men on-the-make jostled for frontage, pouring in time, effort and hope like gold prospectors. Where land meets water is the thing – it is everywhere – and along this edge they’d strung their buildings and successful attractions, Morfa Hall and Lodge, the Italianate Baths Hotel, the Grand Pavilion, Victoria Pier, Queen’s Palace and as late as 1930, Goodall’s heated saltwater pool that a quarter of a million people entered in its first season. And – from the middle of the 20th century – some so hideous the brief might’ve been ‘Kill Rhyl!’
Here’s another not-so-magic formula. Knock out the signature pieces that make This Place not That Place. Infill using for a guide a blind man’s take on beauty. Then couple it with the tunnel vision of a mugger. Result? A seafront that demands, ‘You! Yes, you! Give us what bit of money you’ve got now. All of it NOW! Then fuck off home.’ But stripped bald by The Wave and redrawn by me, what I could offer was exactly what the site provided to start with. The ultimate desire line, the route people chose to follow when developers, civil engineers, local authorities, private landlords – and architects – let them. You can find tracks trampled across grass verges, running through broken down gates or holes in fences, cow paths they used to be called and it was a rule of planning once that you didn’t pave them. Like it was giving in.
I began modelling my Rhyl cow path, enjoyed the making and, creepily, Sara kept me going. She’d walked it or tried to. Starting on West Parade, jostled by a coach party. She nearly tripped and fell opposite Harkers— or was that Clear Skies? Come along, I invited her. It’ll give you the lowdown on the town that stole your daughter, from Splash Point in to the Blue Bridge out. All through your journey up here, crazy as a go on the Dodgems, you stayed fixed on Eurwen at the fair, leaning too far out, asking for disaster. You wanted to be at the Ferris Wheel, waiting for the finish – it’s rubbish and you don’t get long, the story of Rhyl – ready to pounce the moment she steps off. Instead you found no Eurwen and no rides. And plenty of freed-up space. But the practise of architecture takes nothing and clothes it in metal, glass, brick, concrete and a dozen other new materials. For pleasure and use. (You should’ve stayed around if only to witness what I could do!) Getting her involved through October was automatic— see my Walk wrapping itself round the base of SkyTower. You knew it when it actually worked! I envy you that. Allow me to impress with its refurbishment in Rhyl colours, my audioplaque to Princess Diana that it made sick, my removal of four physical barriers over the next one hundred metres, my tough little buckthorns employed for greening and, bringing you here to this exact spot, my hard landscaping in slate, a substance manufactured 400 million years ago. In Wales. Wasn’t that what A First was about, collecting your history together then knocking against its limitations to break out of the groove?
