‘I just went off for a bit of a wander,’ she said when she came back.
‘No problem,’ Hampson said.
‘It’s a bit neat, this park. Don’t you think?’
‘I quite like it.’
‘I was just sitting on a bench down the path,’ she said.
Two or three boys were kicking a ball about on the grass behind them, and in front the sea was dissolving into the sky behind the tall black net shops and the art gallery. ‘That yellow lichen on the roofs down there,’ Hampson said, ‘I wonder what it is?’
She laughed.
‘I thought you were a local?’ she said.
From there they went up on to the golf course, where groups of children hunted around all weekend for lost golf balls, paying particular attention to the base of the old black smock mill. There was a constant wind which seemed, Beatrice said, to come all the way from France. ‘Look!’ she said. From up there you could see clearly how the houses flowed between the downs, filling up the valley with humanity or something like it. Hawthorn and sloe grew on the edge, low, lichenous, wind-sculpted, dense. Lower down a fox sat calmly in a small sloping field between woods and allotments, watching some people tend horses. There were little valleys, warm, still and full of life, a few hundred yards from the sea. ‘Anything can happen here,’ she said, ‘safe and out of the wind.’ They ended up at the Open Art café, which offered an all-day breakfast sandwich, fragile-looking wildflowers in old glass bottles and the Sunday afternoon gathering of the Philosophical Society.
‘What’s the topic for this afternoon?’ someone asked Hampson, as if he and Beatrice were members too. For him, Hampson said, to some laughter, it would have to be the existential quality of the art on the walls: several versions, in different sizes, of a sunbather sitting naked on the shingle, seen from behind, hugging her knees, framed in such a way as to render the whole experience anxious and claustrophobic – the sunshine, the beach, the wideness of the air, all denied. They were all called ‘Woman from the Sea’, with a hashmark and a number.
‘Well I enjoyed that,’ Beatrice said when they were back in town.
‘Come out one evening,’ Hampson suggested.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
She stood awkwardly on the pavement outside a pub called the Plough, waiting for him to kiss her cheek; then laughed and walked off up the hill. ‘But we could do this again,’ she called back. Then she stopped and turned round and added: ‘I’ve got kiddies. Two.’
He couldn’t imagine that. He sat in his room later that night, watching the TV with the sound turned down, and tried to remember what she had looked like when they were younger. He couldn’t remember much of anything. A smile, a pleated uniform skirt. Wet light shining off the seafront benches, streets steepening away north and east into middleclass cul-de-sacs. A gang of Year Ten girls laughing about something they had seen, or perhaps done, in the Shining Dene public toilets where moths with fawn pillowy heads and eyes like cheap red jewels lay stunned and immobile on the windowsills of the lavatory stalls. If he tried, he could remember how he felt – it was a crush – and someone giving him a sweet; but he was afraid that if he tried too hard he would begin inventing things, so he put it out of his mind and went to bed. A couple of evenings later he waited beneath the old railway arches until he saw her come out of the storage place, then allowed her 40 yards’ start and followed her home. There was a qualitative difference between this time and the last: he understood what he was doing. Also what he was feeling. Curiosity. Excitement. On top of that, a kind of peculiar self-satisfaction, as if following her made him superior.
It was cold and lively up there. The shabby white stucco facades, the columned doorways peeling and cracked in daylight, had under the moon a pure, abstract look. By day you could tell from their mismatched curtains and rows of doorbells that they had been divided as thoughtlessly into flats as ‘Pendene’; at night they curved away like fresh illustrations of themselves in watercolour and architectural ink. Beatrice approached a house. He watched her put key to lock, listened for her footfall in the hall, waited until a ground floor window lit up; then turned up his coat collar and went back down into the town.
After that he followed her most evenings. Sometimes he was tempted to make his way straight to the house and wait for her to arrive; but something kept him honest. He wanted the sound of her heels, the lucky emptiness of the streets, the sense of the two of them being figures caught moving on an almost abstract ground. Her life seemed simple. Hampson couldn’t see much of it. The children ran about playing some game upstairs. They had a television up there. Beatrice called out to them from the bathroom or the kitchen. They seemed happy. Later, she might sit for an hour on her own in the yellow-lit front room, staring ahead of herself. Crouched painfully in a soft patch of the bit of garden at the back of the house, he found himself shaking with attention. His hearing sharpened until he thought he could hear her breathe. When she leaned forward to pick up a magazine he could feel his heartbeat rocking his upper body. Walking home afterwards, he felt dizzy – as if he had been released from some vast effort – and at the same time quite unreal. It would have been easy to believe that, at night, the town had no existence except as a picture – or not one but several of them, stacked planes, layered and imbricated in the rising salt air and faint sound of waves, implying three dimensions yet completely two-dimensional.
One evening as he hid in the garden, he realised someone else was in the room with her. She was listening to someone he couldn’t see; someone, perhaps, who had been there all along; a male voice, first questioning then reassuring. From then on, Hampson wondered if he too had company. Though he never saw anyone, might other men be crouched in the garden near him at night, their attention as excited and obsessive as his own?
All the time he was following her at night, they had an easy familiarity by day. They sat in the English Channel at lunchtime, eating a pint of prawns each. When she could organise childcare they visited the art cinema and had arguments about Michael Haneke. It was a normal relationship, although Hampson often felt she was trying to tell him something without actually saying it. She took him to a famous house a few miles inland. This confection of butter-and-honey stone, built by an Edwardian author to enclose the memory of his dead son, had first passed into the hands of the Bloomsbury group – who, in their anxiety to control the cultural conversation and contribute to English post-Impressionism, had painted watery greyish designs on the wallpaper and doors – and now belonged to the Nation. Standing in extensive gardens, behind warm brick walls and tall yew hedges, it boasted an oast house, a box maze and a fully operational watermill from which the public were encouraged to buy flour. Beatrice and Hampson took the Saturday tour, after which she led him through a little wooden gate into one of the more intimate gardens, which featured a rectangular pool and some statuary among exuberant cottage garden plantings. There, she sat him down on a bench.
‘Look!’ she said. ‘I love this!’
Hampson wasn’t so impressed. The rim of the pool had been tiled by amateurs – an effect less of Tuscany than of the mouldy bathroom in a Spanish holiday villa – and all you could make out in the clouded water was a kind of feathery weed moving to and fro. It might have been growing on something, Hampson thought, some shape he couldn’t quite bring to mind. Overseeing the pool from a short plinth of home-made concrete was a ten-inch figure without head or legs but with detailed, slightly disproportionate male genitals. There were similarly broken or partial bodies all over the garden – both sexes reduced to loins and buttocks half hidden by foliage.
‘Isn’t it calm?’ she said.
‘Very calm,’ Hampson agreed. But he hated the place and couldn’t wait to get away: within a week he was having a dream in which it seemed less like a garden than the site of a crime. Limbs had been torn off for reasons unfathomable; the aesthetic of careful disarrangement – of humorous disarray – tried but failed to dissimulate the rage that lay behind it all
. Hampson knew he wasn’t looking at a celebration of Mediterranean influences and classical forms, or even the operations of a disturbed mind. One night he woke up understanding the difference between the garden and his dream of it: in the dream all those dismembered trunks and torsos were real. The knowledge exhausted him. He groaned and turned over. He fell asleep again. He had begun the night throwing body parts into the pool: he spent the rest of it trying to force an object the colour of a plastic lobster into an open pipe.
When he woke again it was six the next morning and the sun was out. He walked down the hill to Shining Dene, where he found two old women already swimming from the shingle. They ran laughing into the sea, carrying between them a child’s bright blue-and-yellow plastic inflatable upon which was printed the words HIGH VELOCITY SPORT, which they lost for a moment in the surf; then, still laughing, ran out again. They shouted and waved to someone on the cliff above, stumbled about in the shallows chasing one another. Hampson, puzzled by their energy, sat under the sea-defences, pulling up clumps of chamomile and yellow horned poppy. Down among the roots he found beads of a material resembling cloudy plastic, washed in by the tide. It was difficult to tell what they had been; on the shingle, the difference between organic and inorganic was constantly eroded by water, weather, sun. This idea made him think about the object in his dream. It had looked crustacean but felt fleshy and limp. It had been about the size of a seven year old boy. The old women finished swimming, dried themselves and pulled on their vast shorts. Soon after that, he began avoiding Beatrice during the day and stopped following her at night.
He couldn’t have said why. He was angry. He didn’t like the pool, he blamed her for the dream; he was angry that he had to follow her. He didn’t phone and he didn’t answer when she phoned. He took the train up to London once or twice a week. It was the same as ever: he would spend the evening in Soho getting pissed, wind up outside the Bar Italia with all the other digital creatives, clutch a beaker of hot chocolate too glutinous to drink. He would grin vaguely into the warm drizzle and wonder what to do next. He missed her. He missed their walks together. In a week or two, he felt, he would be all right again: meanwhile this was the best his personality would let him do. Eventually she came to find him.
Thursday, after midnight. The corridors and studios of ‘Pendene’ exuded a false warmth; the smell of old cooking oil hung in the corners. The residents were locked-down in silence for the night, while, outside, strong winds came blustering down the Channel from the Hook of Holland. Hampson sat in his room playing Death Camp 3 for the X-Box through an old Sony TV set, out of which issued faint hissing noises he couldn’t fix. When Beatrice knocked on his door he opened it but sat down again immediately. She was wearing black jeggings and a short white lozenge-quilted parka with fake fur round the hood. The cold came in with her. ‘I don’t know how you got in,’ was all Hampson could think of to say. He kept his eyes on the screen, after a minute adding: ‘They’re supposed to keep the outside door locked at night.’
‘You’re going too far with this,’ Beatrice said, looking around as if the room were part of it.
‘How far is that?’ Hampson said.
‘Don’t be puerile.’
She lifted the lids of the as-yet-unpacked boxes of books, poked the bin bags into which Hampson had compacted his clothes when he left London. ‘It’s like the back room of a charity shop in here,’ she concluded. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ She switched the electric kettle on and the TV off, then knelt down in front of him so that he had to look at her. Her hands were cold. He wondered briefly if she had come to have sex with him. Instead she smiled with a kind of painful intensity and urged him: ‘Listen to me.’
‘How are the kiddies?’ Hampson said.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘no one can show you anything if you won’t involve yourself.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’
She shrugged and let go of him.
‘Come and find me when you do,’ she said.
A few nights later he turned on the TV and a woman was striding around in a derelict house shouting, ‘We could put a pa sha in here! Plenty of space for a pa sha!’ For a moment Hampson had absolutely no idea what she could be talking about. Then he saw that it was the bathroom she was in.
He turned the TV off again and went out to look for Beatrice, and soon he was following her once more, every night, up the quiet steep streets on the landward side of the town, or along the deserted sweep of the seafront. They were a hundred, two hundred yards apart, the two of them, in the night wind and strange light. Everything was very silent. There never seemed to be an ordinary passer-by. Hampson felt rapturous, even though, after a while, he saw that after all they weren’t alone. Other men were following her too, two or three at a time; some women, too. Though Hampson saw them, they didn’t seem to see him. They had the look of the figures in Stanley Spencer’s ‘Beatitudes of Love’ paintings, shabby, collapsed and watery, rather grotesque. He wondered if he looked like that to other people.
To a degree, he felt relieved by this turn of events. He felt as if some weight had been lifted; a weight and perhaps a barrier. But his dreams didn’t improve. He dreamed of Beatrice’s children, who he’d never seen: they were a boy and a girl, toddlers in matching woollen coats, their little gloves dangling on elastic from the ends of their sleeves. He dreamed of the beach at Shining Dene. He dreamed of a hollow below the Downs, where the sun fell through dense, wind-sculpted hawthorn on to ashes, on to candle grease dripped over the stones of a temporary hearth. An event enacted itself in front of him, some episode which transfigured everything, in which a madwoman strode across the golf course to the smock mill, carrying her coat across her arms like a child. Soon there were lots of women, all carrying their coats that way, like sleepy children across their arms; but now they were throwing them off a pier into the sea. Lines of people followed a leader down to the sea, where they first sang an old Morrissey number, ‘Every Day Is Like Sunday’ and then something, coat or child, was let fall into the water. All this dream-content seemed so distant! At first it was musing, lyrical but simple and matter-of-fact. It seemed strange but kind: the arms of the coats fluttered and gestured as they fell: they were like the expressive arms of performers in a charming traditional drama. But then someone was being killed and dismembered at a distance, in a rusty enamel bath or perhaps an empty brick sump. Hampson was helping with it. Great chunks of translucent, whitish flesh were falling heavily apart along clean cutlines. They were weighty and substantial, but there was no blood. It was more like fat. On waking he thought, I can’t do this any more. He didn’t really know what that meant: it was just the kind of thing you thought. But he knew he had to get things out into the open.
‘You know full well what’s going on,’ he said, when they were alone in the storage place next day. ‘You always knew.’
She smiled. She looked at him sidelong.
‘I don’t get it,’ Hampson said.
‘Why should you,’ she said. ‘Why should you get it, after all?’
‘You’ve made me into a voyeur,’ Hampson said. ‘That’s not what I am.’
‘I know. You’re a man escaping the London vomit. Ask yourself if that’s all you are.’ She came out from behind the counter and offered him her hand. When he took it, she led him through the office and into the storage itself. Rows of shoddy cubicles stretched away in all directions, their plyboard doors fastened with little cheap padlocks. ‘People leave stuff here for a decade or more,’ she said. ‘When they come for it again, their lives have changed. They might as well be going through someone else’s things. A lot of it they don’t recognise. They don’t know why they didn’t just throw the rest away and save themselves the trouble.’
‘Other people are following you too,’ Hampson said.
That made her compress her lips and turn away abruptly. ‘I don’t want to know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know what you see.’
‘What have
you got that they want?’
No answer.
That night he followed her down towards the sea. She knew he was there, and he knew she knew: there was a satisfaction to that. He knew she was smiling, though she never looked back. He was one among many, but Hampson didn’t mind: he had seen them all before, trailing after her up and down the windy streets; they were easily recognisable. He could also identify other groups of followers, following other individuals. Some were women, some were men; some were members of the Philosophical Society. It resembled a midnight passeo, in which everyone in the town went down on to the vast, brutalist sweep of the sea-defences and filed along them in the transparent, motionless dark. After crossing Marine Drive to the seaward stub of the High Street, they all paused for a moment on the apron between the car park and the Brazilian JuJitsu Academy, halted, apparently, by the smell of the salt. For a moment they had an air of being discarded, agitated by a breeze too faint to feel in their world. And the thoughts you had when you watched them were the same, like the continual blowing or silting-down of the chalk detritus from the cliffs. Groins of piled rock, with acres of flint shingle strung between them so that from above they looked like webbed fingers, reached out from the land; the sea, though calm as a pool, gave the impression of hidden disorder. Beatrice walked down between her followers to where the shingle steepened. Everyone was smiling. They were all watching her. They all shared the secret now, even Hampson. He watched Beatrice walk slowly into the water until it closed over her head. Her hair was left floating for a fraction of a second, then it vanished too. But he knew not to follow her, or call out to anyone, or otherwise raise the alarm.
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 21