Desire Line, page 8
‘I cannot believe nobody died,’ Omar said in an accent I always link with the South of England and private schooling, word endings like knapped flints. ‘Apart from the old couple.’
‘Another went off the bridge as well. He was young.’
Omar pulled a face.
Low down in what had once been the ground floor of the Westminster Hotel, windows were slimy inside and out. But one storey up there’s a picture of optimism. In a small kitchen a MultiCook was dumped in an armchair which had then been heaved onto a table, all unmarked. But having made it to our creepily unchanged office with its cramped work stations, dissatisfaction set in and we jostled each other to stare out.
‘Cher-rist!’ Even Glenn Hughes was lost for anything else.
It was a shambles. Familiar friends had gone and the absentees gave the sky extra volume. Only the grey-brown sea was intact and that was hitting a different beach. As we watched the tide inching in across our famous Golden Sands, Rhyl’s Spring Festival could’ve just finished (we don’t have one) or its refugee camp been overrun. The partygoers or inmates all fled, the spoilageeverywhere. No one who hasn’t witnessed it can understand. And the smell from the open window was a mixture of river mud, hydrocarbons, human waste, rotting fish— and the rest. Even now any one of them brings back that morning and the shock I thought I was ready for but wasn’t. Both Old Woolworths and Clubbers further along had collapsed— no loss, architecturally, this gave an improved vantage point to spectate from. The sun came out and polished up the sluggish breakers and it only got worse. Now it was highlighting every oily pool and stripped-off sheet of corrugated iron. Fine for the clean-up though! A bulldozer fleet like giant dungbeetles had congregated at the base of SkyTower, probably because it was still there. Slowly they pushed portions of debris along a West Parade whose existence you had to take on trust because there wasn’t a visible square metre of tarmac.
‘Fuckin’ ’ell,’ Glenn said. If Tess had been standing next to him a baboon arm would’ve liked to snake across her shoulders. ‘This has gotta be the worst acid I ever dropped. Bloody robber she is, that Rhondda Jones, Leisure Services. When somebody puts the town back I’ll be straight up there for a refund.’ He was dressed in the striped sweater and pants I’d laundered for him. Although his entire wardrobe, unfortunately, would be saved, everything on the ground floor of his home is gone. Why? I wanted to know. Why not get what you could? Why all that walking around Rhyl, all that I-am-a-camera, asking to get yourself killed? Why are you at my house?
Nobody spoke. Next he tried, ‘The first thing’ll happen, we’ll get a new name. My money’s on Backward Rhyl.’
‘It could’ve been worse.’
‘Puh!’ A blob of saliva shot from between two rows of big teeth. ‘Worse? Even for Rhyl— worse?’
But it could, if the flood had reached the hospital, if it’d come in darkness— when even in daytime it did this. Still, I’d made my choice balanced on a wooden chair and Glenn wasn’t going to tip me over by acting like he’s not involved. I’ll never understand him and the only way to deal with someone like that, someone who won’t defend the side you’re both on, is you don’t just stick to your guns. You give them covering fire. ‘A lot’s repairable and most of what isn’t was waiting for the wreckers anyway. And at least there were only three deaths,’ I said.
Our mystery dead person was still a footnote to any media mentions of us. Not even a gender had been released. (I was living in a lull – didn’t know it). Glenn Hughes occupying my sofa, that was bother. He’d stayed. The night of the storm it felt OK to shelter the deluged-out. These things have instant payback. A third of the town is underwater and you have a loud, pink refugeein your house – the upset’s nearly gratifying. But next morning and the next, to have him pebbledashing the mirror, removing his yesterday’s sweatshirt, bag of sweets and finally dirty socks before finding a seat— he was like a tomcat spraying its new home. I hate cats. Only the second night he picked up an image from my desk and wants to know, ‘Who’s this then, Yori?’ and when I answer ‘My mother’, it’s grinning and, ‘Still about is she?’ like there was a chance for him.
‘Alive, yes. She moved away. After my father went back to Japan.’ Not quite true but near enough.
Libby’s ground floor wasn’t designed for even a single man. Its sitting room I slept in, dining room I lived in and the shower room was a step outside the back door to an open porch for access— like the admired Muroa house in Tokyo but not meant. Also there was Tess. For the last few months on Fridays I cooked us a meal while she pretended to be interested. ‘Yakisaba— means fried noodles,’ I’d say tasting, holding up a sample I longed to see her eat. ‘The pieces of fish are marinated tilapia. The little cakes are called mochi – white ones plain, green ones coloured with seaweed.’
Well I bet nobody’d guess to taste them!is what she always said, which is fine, and afterwards we’d have dependable sex during which her face stays smooth, as do the generous lips you want to dance your fingers over. Tess-ss.
What she didn’t know was I remembered her from school. A little girl with twigs for arms, always on the edge of things, poor-looking, trying to be invisible. I saw her though. And – me that bit older – I’d speak to her. She was too shy. I got yes, no, I dunno. But like the town’s reward for coming back, here she was again, grown to a perfect Linda Darnell, not-shy, standing naked on Fridays – smaller breasts though – some Saturdays, an Art Deco statue in ivory and bronze. Impossible, now. Well, stopped. My private Hollywood star couldn’t appear. Tess’s home was off-limits as well, due to crowding because her backstory was filled out with a feckless parent and, worse, brothers. Of course away from wrecked Rhyl I could have rented us another flat. Or bought a house for Tess who’d grown up deprived and whose mother and half-brothers were always in scrapes over money and semi-illegalities, an entire house for Tess to ogle and touch the surfaces of— part of me saw it happening. A cottage in the hills, properly done up by English weekenders where I’d point out the garden through an original, five plank door— What d’you think, huh? But that needed the Yori Tess knew to explain how he was able to do it. A major reboot. Time consuming.
So instead of Tess, ‘Hiya!’ from Glenn Hughes in the mornings, and, ‘race yer to the crapper!’
Only a couple of weeks and I found out all of his tastes without asking. I gave up trying to eat well, work at home, keep tidy, watch movies with proper attention, and, a continuing project, listen out for the things that made J.S. Bach Top Composer. What do you do when you find a tiger sharing your cave? Wear stripes. Even catching me talking to Tomiko would have Glenn joining in. I’m not recording here what with. Tomiko and I never referred to it afterwards. As I lugged the salvaged pieces of Glenn’s life back to his drying out semi in Bank Street I smelled the river under all that detergent and kept quiet. The original quarry tiles had come out pretty well thanks to me, the new skirting boards showing only a slight warp already. ‘It’ll be better in your own home again,’ I said. But it’s a case of live here, Glenn or I might have to kill you too. Except it couldn’t be ‘too‘, because I wasn’t counting my first victim back then. ‘As for the present, the poster I mean, there wasn’t any need. And you’re right, you shouldn’t let Alice see it till you’ve got more things in.’
At least Alice wouldn’t be coming home a widow and how close a call was that? Before he stumped off to check upstairs he surprised me with, ‘Any time I can do something back, I will you know, for putting me up,’ which turned out to be a promise he kept. In return for houseroom, Glenn would go on to give me three presents over the summer. The poster I already had. An annoying mug from Spain followed and would end up my favourite— once I’d handed it on. (I’ll explain another time.) As for Glenn’s third favour, that changed everything.
But happy enough to eat an aubergine sideways, hot enough to boil a kettle on my navel, lucky enough to pick seven winning numbers on Casino Pigalle, I took the beach road home, the pretty way, not. I wanted to wallow in disaster and index its huge opportunities. They could make my revamp of good old Quay Street before The Wave more of a scab-pick— so attend to the plum sites, I told myself, now you get to see them and now actually moving from one to the next was possible. They were spread out in a chain from Foryd Harbour along two point five kilometres to Rhyl’s untouched Edwardian east. All the way you have the sea on your left. On the right there was action and colour and amazing structures and people coming back to fill them, landscaping, sudden vistas, new and old, though all still in my head. An empty blue sky’s thrown over the lot, making one of those days you lay down in the memory, warm, hardly a breath of wind so of course you treat yourself to a twenty-minute walk along Rhyl’s ultimate desire line that has just, to use another technical planning term, had the crap rubbed off it.
With Glenn further behind at every pace and my plans branching fractal-like, I wish I’d stayed out the rest of the day. Back home Libby Jenkinson and her younger sister – I could tell you her name but not relevant – were sunbathing strapless on the front crazy paving. Flesh bulged above Libby’s tight top the way excess sealant does. The sister was starved in comparison though sharing Libby’s other traits of loud and over friendly. They were drinking from cans and shuffling away from the shade with chairs attached, giggling between themselves, girly and non-threatening. And when, ‘What you done now?’ Libby wanted to know, it was still laughing and aiming her cider at me, slopping it. The sister tutted over the waste. ‘There’s been somebody here for you. You’ve gotta contact the police— oo-o! He left a proper letter I had to sign one of them things for. It’s sitting on the stairs.’
News of Sara was inside.
Chapter 8
Writing and reflection through writing had often allowed her to recoup what alcohol stole. A journal can be used to document and, in some fashion, constrain extremis… also to record small successes: cheap homilies, both, from an expensive therapist after Josh left. Absolutely, Dr Tilney… Tilson? Buying the notebook in the little general store in Sussex Street on a meandering walk this morning, had served as alibi for a Smirnoff purchase. In Oxford she was expert at entering run-of-the-mill booze merchants intent on something very specific, ‘a 2001 Meursault for my father? He’s very particular about his Burgundy.’ Usually a safe choice to be thwarted in, then swayed by the special offer on spirits, a sop to the retailer becomes almost a pleasantry. But as the afternoon came on she redrafted her letter to Fleur and lacking anything else, opened the book to find it a useless diary, its year unplanned and nine months of blankness already in the past. As a memory test she tried filling in names and addresses of acquaintances, though telephone numbers escaped her save Pryorsfield’s, the Severings’ family home. Then, scoring through the printed date, she wrote ‘September 23rd. 12.05 am. Josh rang’ and recent events came easily at first. But a few sentences into 24th ‘I’d read, after discovering I was pregnant, that in the giving of a name lies much of the receiver’s futurity—’ she fetched the Smirnoff. Stopping cannot mean stopped, she told the absent Dr Tilston, or perhaps it was Josh she explained to. You cannot stop as though pulling the communication cord. It causes damage, is not recommended. Experts agree. (Somewhere there would be an expert who agreed). With drink, no, with a certain dosage of drink, everything matters intensely. Another, and nothing does. Each day the hands shake a little more or less. Estimate well and there lies the key to contentment: now try and fit to the lock.
Sara was never going to fit the key into that lock, not here. Or now.
I own a poster of past Rhyl. Not a famous one, not the Jackson Burton you might have seen if you call up ‘Rhyl’, with children on sand like icing sugar, the Pavilion behind them— or better, Douglas Lionel Mays’ Punch and Judy audience that fetched a record at auction recently. Mine is a bit of an embarrassment, hangs above the veg rack and was gifted me by Glenn Hughes. I suspect he made it himself, it’s his sort of thing and he’s forgotten admitting to that little fakery business he ran twenty years ago in vintage ephemera. He’s done a passable ageing job on my piece, graduated the fade and then put it in an old-fashioned tube. Added damage to the top right corner just where you might grab hold to take it down— all, so one day he can say ‘Y’know that poster I gave you that time—?’ Bars of printed text prop up sepia roundels of vanished views. The Belvoir Hotel is fancy as a wedding cake, the elegant East Parade fountain hasn’t been broken up yet, and parked under the pier are a convoy of horse-drawn wheeled sheds to bathe from. And so on. Central is a head-and-shoulders portrait of John Sisson, First Developer, the Father of Rhyl. Each morning I read, ‘Indisposed and Delicate as I am, I do not believe there is another place so good in the country… having visited the South of France, Spain and Mexico… I prefer the atmosphere of Rhyl to any of them.’ A pity the writer’s holiday was taken (as it admits) in 1848.
At 6 a.m. and ready for another day on Project Sara I don’t let it bother me. Like a lot of projects this one’s mutated as it goes along but I need to say it started harmlessly. I was very attracted by her better qualities, like her respect for parents, love for Eurwen, who I knew from personal experience wasn’t an easy love, and doing good work. OK, she was a forty-year-old semi-famous woman and I was a younger half-Japanese but I kidded myself if we’d met in ideal circumstances we’d have got on. Am I wrong to?
Showered, I walk naked and chicken-skinned back into to my three-metre-long kitchen which contains a sink, shelving, a basic MultiCook and not much else, so reminding me of student days. Access is via a sliding door. A finger of yellow light poking through says Success Is Waiting! But the signals are everywhere. For example the alloy runners of the door into the living room are grit-free and move with the silkiness of the recently installed, something I can’t usually get to happen even by rigorous cleaning. Tea scent is filling the kitchen but I repeat the action. Each time the panel of board vanishes noiselessly, leaving a crisp cutout in the wall through which Sara’s shrine is on view. Along a tarnished silver chain, her moonstones, one detached, catch the sun.
September 27th
Two calls this morning, the first from Geoffrey: ‘You’ll ring often from now on? But I feel I should I speak to—?’ her father tormented her with a short intermission. Sara conjured him into being: the silver hair, raffishly curled to collar length but also neat and gleaming against a fresh Viyella shirt… now pinching the high bridge of his nose as forensic eyes focused two hundred miles to his north. ‘No? I’ll bide my time then. For the present.’ Their conversation finished with the professor softened as much as a man wrestling a huge annoyance could soften and Sara felt the nails in her palms gradually relent.
A decent interval while Fleur made sure he was study-bound, then the excessive precision of her: ‘It is just me, darling!’ came as much more welcome. ‘I’ll send the postcard at once. But I thought you may be in want of reading matter? Something you can’t get there to help pass the time?’
‘I’m not in hospital, Fleur.’
‘Of course not. But what about work, then? Something that could perhaps—’
‘No. Really.’
Fleur gave up. It left Sara wishing she had prolonged the conversation instead of this lapse into vacancy, staring out at the river, a glass of orange juice cradled to her breastbone. No drink today, yet, hence the slight crawliness across the back and shoulders, as though a colony of small beetles continually searched for a way out of her clothes. She shuddered. Since Josh left, very early, she had gone through his room. This was perfectly permissible: as she’d begun to dress in a white bra and cotton briefs picked from the tallboy drawer, she realised her own pathetically few belongings had already been searched. The two items of underwear were neatly lined up together whereas her distinct memory was of throwing the briefs in on top of her only sweater. Her small empty vanity case had just budged from the wall. I’ve stopped,she had announced to him in absolute sincerity… and he had looked for her hidden supply at the first opportunity.
The master suite: half the size of their three-windowed room in Tackley Close it accommodated a double divan (just) and his and hers wardrobes connected by a white melamine counter. Josh’s laptop, removed from the living room on the day of her arrival, sat where a woman’s brushes, combs and creams might be laid out but weren’t. Connected up in an amateurish way (in a hurry?) cables trailed to the carpet and out of sight. She sat down on the end of the bed from where it was perfectly usable… and opened it. His emails were password protected as expected. A complete waste of time but she entered Eurwen then Rosemary, Josh’s long dead twin… Megan? and experienced joy when that one failed. She was no adept (Geoffrey or Eurwen often having to extract her from a state of techno-paralysis) and giving up, she tried other easy, familiar routes, Microsoft Word, Adobe Reader and found an oddity in the absence of any stored documents, in fact cyber-rooms bare as Avonside’s actual ones. Everything she presumed had been deleted and was beyond her powers to track or recall, making the back of her neck prickle at Josh’s surveillance from afar. Just on the point of shutting the machine down she thought to click on My Pictures. Accessible. A dozen images, and from the first Meg Upton jumped out. Yes, she was significant… that had been apparent… so not even a pretence of shock, please. Yet her heart’s flutter transmitted itself to her fingers, mis-keying and the resultant frustrated sob, more painful than it justified. When the thumbnail was enlarged all it revealed was a bigger restaurant scenario with an empty chair pulled away from the vacated table setting. A slinkily dressed Meg leaned towards the photographer, the blemish-free throat and upper slopes of breast on display… the sexual fantasy this one photograph engendered in her mind was surprisingly crude. It was of the woman naked across Josh’s loins, the slow rhythm of intercourse stolen straight from a lesson in equitation… a seamless transition of pace is what you’re aiming for, dear, into a rising trot that comes directly from the animal’s movement… She actually giggled.
