Submersion

  It was rare of the authorities to act this harshly, but everyone knew that they could – and would – and whenever they did, they were always unnecessarily cruel and harsh, ensuring we all noticed. Ensuring we all remembered. Another way we were all being controlled; another thing to fear.

  Peter was returned in equally clandestine circumstances a month later, thinner, greyer. He hadn’t repeated the offence to my knowledge, but for her efforts, Sheila Bacon had been allowed to continue with her illicit trading, attracting no interest from the government whatsoever.

  ‘I’d be tempted to shop her myself,’ Jessie had said at the time, aware of the hypocrisy.

  Standing next to Papa Harold a year later, a shallow carpet of water sloshing around our booted feet, I looked out and wondered just what had led to the current disruption.

  ‘Do you think it was Peter?’ I questioned.

  ‘Peter?’ Papa H retorted with his own question, his face puzzled. I wondered if he knew who I meant.

  ‘The guy across the road, arrested last year for-.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know who you mean, but what makes you think he did this?’

  I shrugged, thinking.

  ‘Revenge.’

  ‘Revenge?’ Papa H chuckled at my dramatic assumptions.

  ‘Against that woman who snitched to the authorities about his polluting the river with his rubbish.’ I gave the possibility some thought. ‘He rips open all her garbage as soon as she’s put it out. Any evidence of her contraband trading is revealed to the whole street again – there’s no way those in charge can turn a blind eye this time. Her crimes are too public. Maybe we’ll see her arrested later today.’

  Papa H conceded to my theory with an affirming purse of the lips.

  ‘But you’re overlooking one important fact,’ he said, a smile creeping across his face, suggesting he was about to blow my ideas apart.

  ‘And that would be?’

  ‘It’s not just Sheila Bacon’s rubbish that has been strewn across our river road.’

  I paused, thinking again, and solution came quickly.

  ‘So he’s making sure it doesn’t look too obvious, or he’s taking revenge against us all – no one came to his rescue, after all, no one showed him any support, and people still appear to be happy to trade with his archenemy,’ I proposed, determined that my theorem would withstand Papa H’s dismissal.

  He simply laughed another small laugh and turned from the window, heading for his stairs to the first floor. If he had a different notion of what had occurred, we didn’t discuss it that day. Whilst he ascended, I got on with what I had come for: I put three black bags out to float on the road, in advance of the monthly tug-boat arrival. Once I’d joined Papa H upstairs, he’d made us both a cup of tea and changed the subject.

  ‘So,’ he said, pouring weak brown liquid into two old mugs, ‘what are your plans today?’

  It was late morning by the time Jerry arrived at my house and any drama surrounding the apparently intentional spillage of waste had dissipated. The tug-boat workers had arrived and collected the bags that were intact. Then shortly afterwards, another crew arrived, with nets that trawled the waters, gathering up as much stray rubbish as possible. There were a few shouts during the operation, but no doors were knocked on, no questions were asked and no one was taken away. When Tristan returned home one evening, just under a week later, he would impart news that gave the incident a different twist.

  Jerry Carter was a short, stocky man, who kept loose change and big, old-fashioned cotton handkerchiefs in his pockets. His belly spilled over his belt and he was often late, panting and sweating whenever you came across him. He had a general uncared-for and out-of-date feel about him, but he was a good man. He cared about those of us who knew and worked for him. As a consequence of all that, he didn’t quite fit in with his superiors. He was a relic of bygone days and values. Sooner or later, we all feared he would be replaced by a newer, slicker and colder model and that our work-lives would become a lot harsher and unbalanced. So, we lived for the moment with Jerry Carter as our boss – appreciating his fairness and flexibility, knowing we were all on borrowed time. This made my mission to exploit my position at work – and, more importantly, his position – all the more distasteful.

  ‘So, what’s made you decide the time is right for you to come back?’ was one of his first questions, sitting on a chair in my kitchen-living room.

  I need to your help to break into the system and check where the government has taken my daughter, I yearned to say. If I could get his assistance voluntarily, at least part of the moral issues would be resolved.

  ‘You can’t take that chance,’ Reuben had insisted, when I’d run this thought past him. ‘You don’t really know how far you can trust him. Friends turn on each other. You know that. Plus, if you play your cards as close to your chest as you can, it will leave you more options. You mustn’t tell him.’

  ‘I just need to get back to normal, that’s all,’ I told Jerry instead. ‘I can’t keep putting it off.’

  He’d nodded kindly, understandingly, thinking his compassion would put me at ease, when in fact it had simply exacerbated my internal conflict. With every word, I was betraying him further, getting in deeper and deeper.

  ‘So, let’s agree a state date, and maybe just a few hours a day to begin with, eh? Small steps.’

  ‘Small steps,’ I agreed, thinking that as soon as I got back through that government office I wasn’t leaving until I had ransacked its files and archives for every little bit of evidence I could find. I wouldn’t leave until I had found her.

  ‘Small steps then,’ Jerry echoed, and set about defining the terms of my return.

  He left after an hour and, as he rowed away, the river road was all but cleared of the debris from earlier. We had agreed I would return a week later, working shorter days to begin with and then we would see how it went - Jerry’s words.

  I next saw Reuben a day later. He knocked about thirty minutes after Tristan had left – on another job with Jessie, I didn’t ask for the details. It was safer being ignorant, even if I still worried in the dark. As usual, Reuben wore his sharp black suit and tie, his crisp white shirt and the high polish on the toes of his shoes reflected like mirrors. I admired his effort and discipline, given that he still had to travel from lost soul to lost soul in the head to toe rubber-based suits every citizen had been issued.

  ‘People don’t like to let strangers into their homes,’ he reasoned. ‘But they like to let scruffy, dirty strangers in even less.’ He had a point.

  As he knew about the meeting with Jerry, I thought he would be keen to find out how I had got on, but he didn’t. I mentioned it myself and he simply acknowledged it with a good, good – the kind of old-man phrase Papa H used when he pretended to listen, but was clearly pre-occupied with something else. I wondered if my appeal was waning. After all, I hadn’t exactly fallen for the charms of his faith, and wasn’t that the purpose of him visiting me? Maybe he had more deserving candidates floating aimlessly further along our street?

  ‘Is there something you want to talk about today?’ I offered, once teas were made and placed on the table. Up until that point, I had been prattling on, jumping from subject to subject – Jerry’s visit, Tristan’s work, an issue with the plumping at my aunt and uncle’s tenth floor flat – spending just a sentence or so on each, sensing no change in Reuben’s disinterest. ‘Is there something wrong?’

  At last, a question that provoked a change in his demeanour. He placed his mug back on the table and looked to his lap.

  ‘Yes,’ he eventually said, this singular sound a struggle to unleash.

  Something had truly got his tongue, a phrase my mother would have used. I forced a natural, warm smile on my face.

  ‘You’ll need to say a little more than that,’ I told him, sensing the tables had turned on this occasion – I was the counsellor to his patient. ‘If I’m to understand, to help,’ I added, hoping to coax just a little more.


  ‘Okay,’ he responded, another solo expulsion that I hoped would be succeeded with a few more syllables this time. It was. ‘There’s something I feel I’ve not been quite honest about.’

  ‘Oh?’ I asked, feeling fingers of alarm clutch at my throat. What was he going to say? I’d shared quite a lot with him, after all. Entrusted him with dangerous information that could so very easily be used against me, and Tristan for that.

  ‘I don’t think either of us has been entirely honest,’ he continued, finally looking up, his earnest eyes burning deep into me, so intensely that I physically felt their heat, felt their impact.

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Reuben,’ I protested, as softly as I could. I didn’t want to sound defensive, despite the fact that was exactly what I was doing. Defending myself from what he might say or assume next.

  This isn’t what we do. This isn’t how we play this out. These aren’t the rules.

  ‘I think you-.’ Reuben responded, but a noise below cut him dead. The shutting of the front door. Someone else had been in the house.

  I went to the window that looked out on the front and saw a small boat rowing away.

  ‘Tristan,’ I muttered, loud enough for Reuben to hear.

  ‘I’m sorry if-.’ This time I cut him short.

  ‘You need to go.’

  ‘You don’t mean that. We need to talk more. We need to-.’

  ‘No. I just want you to leave. I’m not interested in talking any more today. Please just go. You’ve made me feel uncomfortable in my own home.’

  You’ve broken the rules. I don’t know how, but somehow you’ve broken the rules.

  Something about my final accusation – you’ve made me feel uncomfortable in my own home - struck a chord with Reuben, as if the accusation of ill manners was a crime he associated with great shame.

  This is better. This is how we play it out. Much, much better.

  ‘May I come back?’ he asked, turning back at the front door. I hung back on the stairs, halfway down. I didn’t reply, letting him leave under a grey cloud of silence and doubt.

  But I did let him come back. You see, he wasn’t wrong. There was something between us, something unspoken that maybe needed to come out and sit on the table with the mugs we drank our tea from. But I just couldn’t do it yet. Once out in the open, I wasn’t exactly sure where it would lead us. I’d made progress on a lot of things lately, but I wasn’t quite ready for that.

  When Tristan came home that evening, he didn’t say a word about his unexpected return to the house. So, if he saw or heard anything, it wasn’t significant enough for him to mention it.

  The remaining days leading up to my return to work left me with spare time to fill with thoughts. With Tristan absent most days and no visits from Reuben, I could have donned my old rubber gloves – once yellow, now faded grey through years of use – and set to work, cleaning the house from top to bottom.

  But I wasn’t my sister.

  Instead, I made plans. Mulled over what I knew so far – the details of Elinor’s disappearance, who was where at the time she was taken, what we had found so far, and what I should be looking for once I was back within the government fold. One particular question – what we had found so far – took me in a particular direction. And, on the night before I returned to work, I made my first ever visit to the Cadley residence.

  Whilst I had heard stories from both Elinor and Billy about their visits to the Cadley place, I wasn’t quite prepared for the labyrinthine mess that greeted me when the old man opened the door. Refreshing as it was to enter a house that had a dry ground floor, it might as well have been flooded for the wash of chaos that drowned his floor space. An endless carpet of screws, nails, wires, leads, tubing and other scattered nik-naks caught my footing, as I ventured further in - past a room that appeared crammed with rusting kitchen appliances, through another that looked like the television showrooms I recalled as a child, and into a smaller room at the back, that was a cross between a laboratory and a kitchen.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ he offered me, filling a kettle and setting it to boil next to a rack of glass tubes that were filled with murky water. ‘Just experimenting,’ he said, catching my wandering eyes. ‘Testing the water. To see if there really is something in it.’ He followed this with a hearty laugh and I found myself joining in. Okay, there was definitely a sense of insanity about the man and his house, but he was harmless. He was no threat. He’s my friend, as Elinor described him, when I had initially objected to her spending time with a strange old man I knew so very little about.

  ‘Always coffee,’ I eventually said, finally answering his question, relaxing a little.

  ‘A little gift from our mutual friend,’ he added, referencing Jessie.

  He set about making the coffee in a pot, with a plunging mechanism, the like of which I hadn’t seen in as long as I could remember. A memory of my grandmother’s breakfast table flashed in my mind.

  ‘You know, I don’t actually know your name,’ I continued, taking a mug of thick, dark, steaming coffee, refusing the offer of milk. I like to taste my coffee pure. Plus, I didn’t quite trust the old man’s judgement on what constituted fresh – he’d taken the milk carton from the side, adjacent to his test tubes of road water.

  He smiled a subtle, amused smile in response to my question.

  ‘You can call me Mr Cadley, if you like,’ he responded, heading back through the way I had come in. ‘Or Merlin – people seem to like that.’

  ‘So, is that your name?’ I asked. Oddly, he didn’t answer the question direct.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said instead, indicating a steel, spiral staircase that appeared to twist up through the centre of his multistoried house. And, distracted by what lay ahead, I didn’t pursue my question any further.

  What he hadn’t mentioned, as we twirled upwards, our steps in tandem, was that he had a guest. On the first floor, as we whirled past, I glimpsed a room of toys and a small library; there was a third door, just slightly ajar, from which a whirring noise emitted.

  ‘Young Billy,’ the old man explained. ‘Playing with the trains. It’s okay,’ he annexed, pausing between floors, as something occurred to him, ‘his mother knows. Doesn’t like it, his being here, but tolerates it.’

  I nodded a reply; his being here was a little odd. Not his presence in itself – I knew he came here, with and without Elinor – but it was strange he hadn’t popped by to see us. To see Tristan, his story-teller hero. Being a Sunday, Billy was almost guaranteed to find Tris at home.

  ‘Ah, in here,’ the old man announced, drawing me back from my musing. ‘This is what the kids call my music room and I guess it is, really. Haven’t given all these rooms names,’ he said, pointing around, randomly, indicating the multitude of rooms, I guessed. ‘But they appear to have. Take a seat, Agnes.’

  I plunged into one of two fat, soft chairs that effectively swallowed me up. The comfort it gave up was pure luxury, but, unsteadied, I nearly spilled my coffee. I could finally see the appeal of coming here.

  ‘Billy likes it in here in particular. Young Elinor preferred the games and the dressing up,’ he continued, facing away from me, fiddling with equipment that was housed in one of two cabinets in front of him. ‘He likes to come up and read and play the golden oldies, as my mother used to call them. Likes the Beatles in particular. I’ve got it all on an old hard-drive Jessie sourced for me.’

  He looked back at me, to check my understanding and my reaction, I guess, to the mention of my daughter. I nodded: I understood, and it was refreshing to hear Elinor mentioned without either caution, drama or apology. I’m so sorry slipped from lips far too easily and thoughtlessly, in my view. Esther, Aunt Penny, even Ronan and Papa H – all too eager to apologise for Elinor’s disappearance. Like they had a hand in it.

  ‘Buggers used to slip up to the top floor and poke through my personal belongings,’ he said, laughing that throaty laugh again, a sentence that suggested that som
ehow the rest of the house wasn’t his, at least not exclusively. ‘Think I didn’t notice, but I have eyes in the back of my head,’ he added, nodding to the corner to the left of us – a small camera was spying down on us. ‘Just a bit of fun,’ he explained. ‘This old hoarder likes his gadgets – that was another find from Jessie. A security system he unearthed from the Atrium in the city centre – still boxed and only slightly water-damaged. Right, here we go. What you came for!’

  This final exclamation made me question the old man’s ability to mind read. Up to that point, I hadn’t given any clear indication regarding my motive for visiting. And yet, when he pressed a button on the machine before him and a sound filled the room – the speakers were hidden somewhere in the ceiling – it was clear he understood.

  The sound that filled the room was Elinor’s voice.

  It was the tape Tristan had found at the old train graveyard. The tape he’d kept a secret from me – with good intentions – until the old man had popped round one night with a video tape and Tristan had confessed it wasn’t the only recording he’d asked him to check over.

  ‘Tell me a story. A dark one, a bit scary! I want to have nightmares!’

  Those fifteen words pricked my skin with pimples and my eyes with tears. That voice – suddenly so distant, suddenly just a ghost, suddenly filling up the room and pushing out all hope. Hearing her again simply highlighted how lost she was to me, what little chance I had of getting her back.

  The old man paused the sound.

  ‘Want me to continue? I haven’t a lot more to play. The tape Tristan found is very damaged and I’ve not repaired much so far. I know it’s important, but I’m being careful. Taking my time with it so I can extract as much of the recording as I can. Shall I play on?’

  ‘Yes.’ I managed just a single word.

  ‘Have I told you about the Chamber of Doors?’

  ‘The Chamber of Doors?’

  ‘Yes, the worst form of torture you can imagine.’