The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  "Well?" she said.

  He spun around, spooked like a rabbit. She was standing by the stile, one hand still on the topstone, and she was looking at him; he hadn't heard anything of her approach, anything at all.

  He said, "I thought you wouldn't come."

  "Why would I lie to you?"

  "That's not what I meant. But you've strung me out for so long, I was starting to believe that it would never happen." He was also starting to sound the way he knew that he'd sounded on the phone, but he couldn't help it.

  "I'm not so hard to get hold of," she said.

  "You want to bet?"

  "I'm a working girl, Mister Liston, I can't come running every time you call. Why is it so important to you, anyway?"

  This was it; and he knew, without need of omens or evidence, that he was somehow going to mess up the next couple of minutes.

  He said, "I don't know what you did to me."

  "Me?" Alina Peterson moved away from the stile and into the clearing, not toward him but in a wide circle around him. It was as if she were deliberately staying out of his reach — half taunt, half provocation. She made no sound on the bark and fallen leaves. She said, "I've done nothing."

  "That night," he insisted, "at the party. I thought that you'd stay, but you didn't. I tried to call you, and you kept putting me off. What do I have to do?"

  "Try explaining what you mean."

  He wasn't sure that he could. He said, "I can't stop thinking about you. It's way out of control. I can't relax, I can't sleep. I sit around all the time just wondering how you are, and what you're doing."

  She stopped, and fixed him with a hard look. "Are you trying to say that you're in love with me?"

  "No," he said bleakly. "I might understand it if I was, but how can I be? We went upstairs, we talked for ten minutes, you disappeared. Nothing works that fast. I'm thirty-five years old, and I've made a fool of myself often enough to know the real thing when I get it. This is something else."

  "So now you're asking me for an explanation, and I can't give it to you."

  "Do you affect anyone else like this?"

  "I don't know. I'm not the one to ask."

  She looked away from him now, and moved toward a fallen trunk to sit. The trunk was hollowed out and scorched, lightning-burned. As she took a perch, Liston said, "It's tearing me up, and every day I don't see you it gets worse. If I don't get help, I'm going to crack up."

  But she wasn't exactly taking all of his soul-baring with the sympathy that he'd hoped for.

  "So see a doctor," she said.

  "I don't need a doctor, I need you."

  "How?"

  "Come and stay with me. I've heard about the place where you're living now, and I can give you better than that. All I'm asking for in return is the chance to get you out of my system."

  She looked at him for a long moment, her hands clasped around her knees and something in her expression that might have been amusement. Over on the far side of the wall behind her a stream could be heard, a constant sluicing like rain on the darkest of nights. A breeze sighed, and lightly shook the branches overhead.

  "My, my," she said. "How you sweep a girl off her feet with your romantic talk. You may have made it through thirty-five years, Mister Liston, but you don't seem to have learned much about other people. If you can stop looking on the rest of humanity as minor characters in your biography, then perhaps we can start to discuss this. Until then, I don't think there's anything more to be said."

  And with that, she got up from the burned log and walked back toward the stile over which she'd arrived. "Alina, please," Liston began as she passed him, not reaching out to stop her even though she was close enough for him to be able to; and she half-glanced back, as if in approval.

  "That's a start," she said. "Keep trying."

  "Can I call you?"

  "No." She reached for the topstone again. "I have to make a few changes in my life around here. When I've made a final decision on what I want to do, then you'll hear from me. Until then you wait, and you say nothing to anyone about this."

  He was about to speak, but he quickly changed his mind. Unless he was mistaken, she'd just offered him some hope. He had a profound sense of being like a fish on a line; she was playing him and it was painful, and with every move the hook was biting deeper. It was maddening, frustrating; he was used to women that he could pick up and use, blow off his infatuation like so much steam before letting them go. Alina seemed to know it, and she wasn't going to play it his way; instead, he was going to have to follow the rules that she'd laid down for the occasion.

  He didn't understand it.

  But he didn't have any choice, either.

  She paused at the top of the stile, as if she'd just thought of something; and she said, "Who cut in on the call?"

  Liston shrugged. He'd heard the click of the extension, but that happened all the time and everyone in the Hall knew better than to stick around and eavesdrop.

  "I don't know," he said.

  Alina seemed to think for a moment; and then she lightly swung herself from the stile, and landed without a sound on the other side.

  By the time that Dizzy Liston had reached it, she was gone.

  THIRTY-TWO

  From the moment that he walked into the rendezvous, Pavel sensed trouble.

  It wasn't a place that he'd have chosen, but perhaps the woman had thought that she'd be safer if she were to meet him somewhere public like this. She knew nothing of him, after all, and the sight of him now would probably do little to reassure her. He looked across the bar to the reservations counter, and saw two of the staff in a hurried conference.

  He crossed to an alcove, and sat down.

  It was a three-masted restaurant ship moored in the harbour by the town's market square, and the message had specified for him to be there at seven. He was early, and the bar was empty. It was also an upmarket looking kind of a place, all wood panelling and buttoned velvet padding, and Pavel was aware that he was no longer an upmarket looking kind of a person. He didn't even like to look in a mirror any more; his eyes were so dark-ringed and sunken that it was a shock to stare into them. He knew that he had the appearance of someone who was either close to exhaustion, or long-gone on drugs.

  He leaned out, and checked the clock over the bar. One of the staff glanced his way and, on meeting his eyes, hurriedly looked away again.

  He wondered how close to the road's end he really was.

  A teenaged girl came over and offered him a menu. He said, "Thank you, but I'm only here to meet someone. It was her idea to come here, not mine. As soon as I've had the chance to speak to her, I'll leave. Perhaps just some coffee?" He could afford coffee. Just about.

  She backed off uncertainly. He didn't get to see exactly how they took his reassurances behind the scenes, but after a few minutes he noted that they seemed to be leaving him alone for now.

  He stretched out a little, and leaned back.

  If she didn't get here soon, he'd probably fall asleep where he was sitting. He didn't seem to be sleeping much at all, these days, almost as if he'd trained himself out of the need; but what sleep he did get was mostly in odd moments like this, and then he'd either be roused by somebody or have to remember to rouse himself and move on. It was affecting him, he knew. Sometimes the effect could be a little weird; sometimes it could feel as if as if the world around him was utterly unreal.

  He took a cardboard coaster from the table, and started idly to pick it apart. He hadn't expected to be so calm. Perhaps something in him knew that this was finally going to be it, leaving him no room for anxiety.

  Well, he could hope.

  "Are you the one I'm here to see?" she said.

  "The radio message," he said. "Yes, I'm the one." And he half smiled then, and could feel the ghost of a warm human being looking out from inside the automaton. Perhaps she sensed it, too, because she seemed to relax slightly.

  They sat down.

  "You're another Russia
n," she said.

  "You know all about that?"

  "Not from her, but I know about it. The one I don't know about is you."

  "So, what can I tell you?"

  "Exactly who you are. And why you're so desperate to find her."

  The coffee tray arrived, set out for two. Pavel waited until the teenaged girl had withdrawn before saying, "Who I am is easy. I'm the policeman who was sent out to bring her back from the border, the first time she got caught. I was one of those who guarded her while she sat in a cell, waiting for them to decide what they were going to do with her. And after she'd been helped to escape from the prison hospital, I was the one that she went to for shelter."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'd all but begged her to. Like a dog. If I could have got her out of there myself, I'd have done it. Once she'd been freed, I risked everything to keep her. I helped to search for her by day, I went home to her at night. One evening when I went back to my apartment, I found her with a dead man in my bathtub. The dead man was a doctor named Belov — she'd once told him about me and he'd tracked down my address and she'd panicked. Later it came out that he was the one who'd forged her release papers. I took him out at two in the morning and dropped him into the river. I tried to make it look like a botched robbery. I didn't succeed."

  The woman stared.

  "My God," she said.

  "I know," Pavel said. "I know."

  "What will you do when you get to her?"

  "I don't know. So much depends. Is she happy?"

  "She seems to be getting along. You're not doing all this because it's your job. Are you doing it because you're in love with her?"

  He looked down, smiled, and rubbed at his forehead with the back of his hand. "Love," he said. "I don't even know what it means, any more. Being so miserable you'd be happy to die rather than go on living with loss, is that love? Because then I suppose you could say that I am."

  "This man who died. This doctor. Something went wrong for her, didn't it? I mean, how responsible was she?"

  "She murdered him," Pavel said.

  "But was it because he was threatening to take her back to prison, or what?"

  Pavel looked at her. She was intent, very serious, and he felt like a man who'd travelled far and seen desperate sights that he could never quite communicate to those who'd stayed at home. Whatever he told her, he could recount only a small part of his vision.

  He said, "Do you know what a Rusalka is?"

  The woman shook her head.

  "You'd call it… you'd say it was something from a fairy tale. A female spirit of the water. Very beautiful, and very deadly. They carry people away to live with them under the sea or in a lake or in a river. It's an old, old story."

  "I grew out of fairytales a long time ago."

  Pavel looked straight into her eyes.

  "Alina never did," he said.

  He told her what he knew about Alina as a child; about the unwitnessed death of the simpleton named Viktor and the explanation she'd constructed to defend herself of blame — a story that she'd clung to even harder the more they'd tried to prise her from it — and how, years later, it had been tied in with the incident at the school that had led to the loss of her job, then her apartment, and finally to her first, unsuccessful attempt to cross the border. She'd always said that the reason for her dismissal was a mystery but Pavel knew that it was due to a parents' petition over the suitability of Death by Drowning as an essay subject not once, but more than five times in the course of a school year. The children were having nightmares, and Alina's long fall from grace had begun.

  "I still believe she'd have been all right had it not been for the hospital," he said. "The hospitals then were used for punishment, not for a cure. I believe that she was sane when they took her in. There was a line, and she wasn't yet on the wrong side of it. That changed."

  "Are you trying to tell me she's dangerous?"

  "Belov was like a door that she opened. There was no going back. When we were together, she used to put bread outside the window; one time, I found her trying to drown a cat that she'd lured in. She was ashamed and wouldn't talk about it. But I don't know that it stopped her. Have there been deaths?"

  He saw her ready to make a denial.

  But he also saw her hesitation.

  "Have there?" he said.

  He followed her up onto the deck, to the obvious relief of the staff in the bar below. They hadn't touched the coffee, but he'd picked up all of the Sweet'n'Low sachets from the sugar bowl.

  Pavel knew that he hadn't entirely managed to get the woman onto his side. He wanted to grab her and face her again, to explain that she was making a big mistake; he wanted somehow to make her realise that he was worthy of her trust, to make her see that inside his raggedy-man exterior there was hope and pain and sorrow that deserved her understanding.

  At the head of the gangplank to the shore, she stopped and turned to him. It was almost dark now, just a couple of lustrous grey streaks leaving a trace of the day in the evening sky, and strings of fairy lights in the overhead rigging had been switched on. A faint breeze blew across the deck.

  "I don't know what I'm going to do about this," she said.

  "You mean you don't believe me."

  "Maybe I should go and tell her what you told me. See what she says about it."

  "She'll run," he said. "And it'll start again somewhere else."

  "Nothing's started," she said. "Now I'm starting to be sorry that I even told you all that stuff."

  And it was clear to Pavel that neither of them believed it.

  He glanced around, at the cobbled quay and the darkness of the harbour below. The harbour esplanade was still early evening quiet, just a few strollers browsing along the more expensive shops and about half a dozen teenaged kids sitting over at the non-functional fountain.

  "She'll be somewhere close to water," he said. "Is she here? In this town?"

  "I'm going now," the woman said.

  He followed her down, descending with a steadying hand on the rope balustrade.

  "Please, is she here?" he said again.

  "I need time to think," she said. "Give me until tomorrow night. I want to talk to Pete before I do anything else. I'll leave you a message at the same number."

  He stopped, knowing that if he pushed too hard then he'd lose her for good. She was his lifeline, he couldn't take the risk of that happening.

  "Please," he said. "Be sure to call."

  Without realising it, she'd given him a name. And now, she was walking back to a black car. It had been reports of a black car that they'd been following on the first night, all those weeks ago. Could it be? Could it all be coming together for him at last?

  She'd parked at the end of the row on the harbour esplanade, no more than half a dozen spaces along from his own car; but of course, she'd have no way of knowing that. He could see that the interior light was on and that there was a child inside, sitting in the back, reading. The boy looked up as the woman unlocked the driver's door.

  She glanced back once at Pavel, as he stood by the foot of the gangplank. She probably felt safer, now she was at a distance from him. She didn't smile, or wave, or anything. Her face was troubled.

  Somebody called Pete. The car. The area.

  Even if she gave him nothing more, he was getting closer.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Pete was working late that night; he'd stayed on at the yard to clear up a few small jobs, which included taking a look at Diane's Toyota after Frank Lowry had gone home. Alina wasn't working, but was up at the house; after their last serious conversation Pete felt a certain awkwardness when he was around her, and so it had been no tough decision to keep going. Instead of heading for the Step, he'd run the pickup onto the hoist and reached for the air spanner.

  Ted joined him after a while. He came in through the side door, and he was carrying something that Pete recognised after a moment's lag; it was Wayne's radio-cassette player, Pete's present to him of two Chr
istmases back.

  "I came to give you a hand," Ted said. "It's too damn quiet over in the house." And he placed the ghettoblaster on the workbench, pulled out the FM aerial, and switched it on. It put out a lot of sound for such a small unit.

  "Yeah," Pete said, wincing. "That ought to cure it."

  Ted lowered the volume. He hitched up onto the bench beside the radio and watched for a while and then said, "Any problem?"

  "Not for a mere expert."

  Ted watched for a while longer. Then he said, "I've heard of enthusiasm, but this is ridiculous."

  "Just a little after-hours special," Pete said, tossing the offending brake shoe onto the bench beside Ted. "I assumed you wouldn't mind."

  "Mind?" Ted said. "Why should I mind? That's Diane Jackson's car, isn't it?"

  "The man has brains as well as eyes."

  "This has got to be the weirdest courtship in the history of sexual relations."

  "Oh, no," Pete said. "Don't start that. I'm thinking of jacking it all in and becoming a monk."

  "Why?"

  "Diane won't come anywhere near me while Alina's around, but then every time Alina talks about leaving I get this strange feeling that I won't know what I'll do if she goes. Now, what would you call that?"

  "A mess," Ted said.

  "Exactly. So I'm going to be a monk. I'm going to wear a sack, and I'm going to shave the top of my head."

  "Yeah," Ted said, leaning over to peer at the crown of Pete's hair. "I can see you've made a start."

  He picked up the damaged pad and inspected it, turning it over like a valuer with some not-so-rare antique. The radio thumped away in the background.

  And then he looked up and said, "Beer would help."

  "Back in the seat, please, Jed," his mother told him as she indicated to pull off the road onto the forecourt of the last late opening petrol station before civilisation ran out and darkness began, and Jed did as he'd been ordered. He'd been standing up and hanging himself forward over the backrest of the passenger seat, swinging his arms like a monkey. This was great. Bedtime was sliding past, and no one had said a word about it. He was out on strange roads, at night, in the safety of an unfamiliar car; the world seemed to have lots of exciting new edges to it, and he was in no hurry to get home.