Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  “Mmm, yes, I do. Well, thank you very much.”

  Eddie beamed. “You’re welcome.” He turned back to Bella, who had seriously contemplated running away during this brief exchange. “Now where was I?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “Ah! Yes. I knew I had something to tell you.”

  “Which was?”

  “Someone was asking after you.”

  Bella felt a slight prickle run down her spine. She could not explain why such an innocuous-sounding statement had produced the reaction it had; there was nothing remotely ominous in those five words, neither had Eddie spoken them with any kind of emphasis, and yet a direct, unequivocal threat could not have triggered a stronger response. It was as though a part of her subconscious had been expecting just such a message.

  “Oh?” she said. “Who?”

  “Young fella,” Eddie replied. “Didn’t look familiar to me, but he seemed to know you.”

  Bella glanced up and down the pier. Where was he? What had he come back for? She already had a good idea what the answer to her next question would be, but she felt obliged to ask it anyway.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Oh, you know.” Eddie waved his sticks of rock in a gesture designed to encompass an entire generation. “Slim, dark hair, suit. Quite well turned out, for a young ‘un.”

  “Did he have a signet ring?”

  “Blimey, Bella, I’m not Sherlock Holmes!”

  “No, of course you’re not. Sorry, Eddie. It’s just that… well, if it’s who I think it is, let’s just say I’m not desperate to get reacquainted. What did he say?” the fortune-teller enquired, trying to keep the apprehension out of her voice.

  “He asked me if I knew you, so naturally I said yes, and then I asked him if he knew you and he said very well. He said he knew you inside out, which I thought was a bit strange, because I couldn’t remember seeing him before, but he didn’t seem to be joking so I took him at his word. I thought he might be family.”

  Bella could feel her heart beating faster. “He isn’t.”

  “Oh? Oh… Well, anyway, he said to tell you he’s been thinking about what you said, and he’s going to do something about it.”

  She waited several seconds, expecting to hear more, but Eddie remained silent. “Is that it?”

  “That’s it. I explained to him that you’d probably have a minute between customers, what with me thinking he was family, but he said he had other things that needed taking care of. Just tell her that, he said, and then he was gone.” Eddie chuckled.

  “Disappeared that quick I didn’t even have time to sell him any rock!”

  “And you’re sure that’s all he said?”

  Eddie, at last alerted to the strained note in Bella’s voice, let his grin slowly ebb away, replacing it with an expression of concern. “Yes, that was it, word for word. Why? Who is he?”

  Bella glanced up at the sky. She was trying not to let her profound irritation with the rock seller show; after all, he was not to blame for shattering her good mood. Eddie had simply relayed what on the face of it seemed a perfectly harmless message. The trouble was, this well-intentioned act had revived all the more threatening aspects of that fractious reading, aspects she believed had concluded the moment the young man left her booth. “Oh, just someone who didn’t like what I had to tell them,” Bella explained with a dismissive shrug. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Eddie’s smile reappeared. “Ah, well, sometimes the truth hurts, eh Bella?”

  “Yes, sweetheart, it does.” She managed to conjure up a smile herself. “Well, thank you for passing on the message, Eddie. I’m definitely ready for that drink now.”

  The moment she said it, Bella could have kicked herself; the last thing she wanted was the rock seller interpreting her statement as an invitation, but fortunately he appeared to see it as nothing more than a way of rounding off their conversation.

  “I’d make it a double if I were you!” He suggested, before noticing a family with two young children peering into the window of his booth. “See you anon. Duty calls!”

  As Bella walked down the pier she considered the meaning behind her inscrutable customer’s message. Had he deliberately meant it to be ambiguous, or was she reading too much into a perfectly ordinary statement of innocent intent? Remembering the coldness of his eyes, and combining this with the circumstance of his departure, Bella found it impossible to believe the young man’s phrase had been conceived as anything other than intimidatory. He did not seem the type of person to take advice, much less make the effort to confirm this change of heart. She sensed a cold intelligence at work, carefully constructing a sentence that would oblige her to replay their entire exchange in the quest to discover a motive, knowing full well that the last thing fortune-tellers wanted was to go back over something meant to be transient, a flimsy construct modelled for and in the moment. Did he know she was a fraud, and took a sadistic kind of pleasure in forcing her to face her own gentle deceit? Bella thought it unlikely. Of course he knew she was a fraud! Everybody with half a brain knew that, and possessing such an understanding meant he also must have realised that pointing this out, however obliquely, was unlikely to cause a great deal of distress. The question Bella returned to, again and again, were his reasons for visiting her on such a horrible day, particularly if he had no real faith in her abilities. And yet there were moments during the reading when she had sensed a willingness to believe, perhaps even a need, but this had then been swept away as though countermanded by a stronger voice. Whatever his motives for battling through the wind and rain to her booth, the young man had left incensed. Whether this anger had been caused by some detail of the reading, or him not finding the answers he had hoped to find, or indeed if he had visited Bella under some sort of duress or obligation, she did not know. The only certainty in all of this was that he obviously believed there remained unfinished business between them. She tried not to let her imagination run away with her as to how he planned to resolve this problem.

  The rather grandiosely-named Tudor Bar was packed with customers. The hubbub of a hundred conversations and a smog of cigarette smoke filled the room, pierced irregularly by the cry of a baby or young child, and during the odd moments of relative quiet that settled across the bar, as though orchestrated by some collective subconscious, the Dave Clark Five could be heard, gamely offering to ‘show you where it’s at’ despite a lack of interest from the assembled drinkers.

  On entering the bar, Bella glanced around, her vision on high alert for the glimpse of a pale face with those disconcerting, case-hardened eyes, but he was nowhere to be seen. As she stood surveying the room a man with a bushy ginger moustache brushed past carrying two glasses of whisky. Ever since her abuse at the hands of Uncle Reg the smell of whisky always made Bella feel sick; not only did it instantly conjure up the cloying taste of him in her mouth, it also acted as a bitter reminder of her silence. She never told her parents what happened that evening, and even Bella was not sure why. She even managed to stay in the same room with her uncle on his subsequent visits, positioning herself so that one or other of her parents was always between her and her abuser. He would try and catch her eye, but Bella never found out what silent message he wished to communicate because she studiously ignored him, answering any sentence or question directed at her with a sullen nod or monosyllabic reply, her eyes fixed firmly on some piece of furniture or patch of carpet. Less than a year later he was dead, crushed under the wheels of a London Underground train after falling from the platform whilst drunk. Uncle Reg’s death was explained as a tragic accident, but Bella, in a rare departure from her usual lucid understanding of human nature, always hoped that her uncle’s fall had in some small way been propelled by a pang of conscience. After his death she felt even less inclined to recount the event, not out of any sense that Reg could no longer defend himself, or to spare her mother in particular any further anguish over the loss of her brother, but rather because to dwell on
his abuse would hand him a kind of victory. It was neither forgetting nor forgiveness, but a state of mind without a word to describe it that lay somewhere between these two, and that meant she was able to perform a similar act for Vincent and take pleasure in his pleasure, like a roar of defiance in the face of her uncle’s ghost.

  The smell of whisky spurred her towards the busy bar. As Bella approached, her friend Val caught sight of her and raised her pencilled-in eyebrows in greeting.

  Over the heads of men two deep at the bar Val said, “What’s it to be, honeybun?”

  Several of the men looked back over their shoulder, disgruntled expressions targeted directly at Bella. One of them turned back to Val and held up a pound note as though in evidence. “Hey, hang on a minute. I’m in front of her.”

  Val looked at him with disdain. “Not very gentlemanly of you, is it?”

  “What?”

  “Not letting the lady go first.”

  The man snorted. “I thought you lot wanted treating the same. You can’t have it both ways, eh lads?” He looked around, hoping to elicit some form of camaraderie.

  One or two of the men made affirmatory noises, but none joined the discussion. Bella did in fact feel slightly embarrassed by her friend’s blatant favouritism, so she held up both hands as though in surrender and said, “I don’t want you fighting over me, fellas. I’m in no rush.”

  Val straightened behind the bar. A tall, athletically built woman to begin with, her platinum-blonde beehive hairdo and high heels made her an imposing, if not intimidating, sight. “Alright, boys,” she said, slowly scanning the group of men in front of her, “Hands up anybody who’s been at work today. Come on, don’t be shy.” When there was no movement she continued, “Thought as much. Well, I know for a fact that the lady behind you has been slaving away since first thing this morning, helping to make sure you all have a nice relaxing time, so in my book it’s the workers who deserve a drink first. Now has anybody got a problem with that?” She paused and looked again at her silent audience. “Wonderful. I knew I could rely on you boys to make the right decision.” She turned her attention to Bella. “So, what’s it to be, my darlin’? The usual?”

  Bella shuffled forward slightly, impressed as always by her friend’s ability to take control of a situation by thinking of a logical explanation for her behaviour and then, by apparently offering several opportunities to question its validity, convince everyone concerned that it was in fact the only logical explanation, thereby defusing any potential tension whilst at the same time completely vindicating her course of action. It was a skill she envied. “Gin and tonic, please. A double.”

  “You see?” Val said, opening her arms in a theatrical gesture. “I knew she needed serving first.”

  While waiting for her drink, Bella moved to the end of the bar left clear for glass collection and positioned herself at its junction with the wall. Tucked away, with the reassuring solidity of brick at her back, she again looked round the room. The extra confidence conferred by her strategic location meant she could be more methodical in her second inspection, but the only familiar faces she found belonged to several of the day’s customers, all of whom appeared to have been left psychologically unmarked by their reading. In some ways Bella would have preferred to find him amongst the crowds; not only did she feel on safer ground in the bar, but the young man’s presence, particularly if some malign intent was obvious, would at least have clarified the situation and made her own response more straightforward. His absence tainted everything, as though the pier and all its visitors were complicit in his scheme, shielding him from view while he plotted his next move. This was paranoia of the highest order, Bella realised, but she could not silence a tiny voice inside that insisted there was a grain of truth to it.

  “One G and T.”

  Bella flinched visibly at the sudden voice to her right, but when she turned and saw Val standing there, still holding the glass she had just placed next to her on the bar, she disguised her reaction by slapping her outstretched hand on her chest and glancing upwards in an exaggerated gesture of surprise. “Bloody hell, Val, don’t sneak up on me like that! Give me a heart attack, you will.”

  The bar manager, however, was too astute to be taken in by such an unwieldy performance. She had seen, albeit briefly, the flicker of fear in her friend’s eyes, but Val was also wise enough to realise that someone who so hurriedly and deliberately masked their anxiety would be unwilling to explain its cause through direct questioning. Instead she made a mental note of Bella’s reaction and determined to seek an answer later, after several gins had calmed her nerves.

  “You can normally detect an approaching G and T from fifty yards away,” Val replied. Pleased with her response, which she felt contained both a sort of oblique acknowledgment of her friend’s insecurity as well as a touch of humour to help relax her, she jerked her head in the direction of the sun lounge and continued, “D’you fancy watching a bit of the show?”

  “Aren’t you meant to be working?”

  “My shift finished half an hour ago. I was only covering until Jo got here. Come on. You never know your luck, if it’s as bad as it was during rehearsals it’ll be hilarious.” Val tapped the side of the glass with one of her extravagant false nails. “What’s up with this, anyway? Taken the pledge?”

  “Good God no.” Bella took a gulp of her drink, swilling it round like mouthwash and savouring the astringent flavour of juniper, which dissolved her foreboding like acid and left her feeling, for a moment at least, quite ridiculous. She swallowed and exhaled contentedly. “I needed that. You’re right, we could do with a laugh. Let’s see what they’re up to in there.”

  “That a girl,” Val said encouragingly. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down, eh?”

  “Exactly.”

  The sun lounge was a comparatively recent addition to the pier, constructed in the early fifties as post-war austerity gave way to a more optimistic period. Essentially a giant conservatory built onto the back of the bar, its main function was to offer visitors a place in which they could sunbathe when it was too cold to sit outside. The lounge also hosted organ recitals and beauty contests, the former attended by an audience of over-forties who, whilst warming their bones, also found a melodic kindling in the medleys of wartime songs, whilst the latter drew young men with cameras clamped to their faces, capturing the girls on films developed later at home and printed in the sour-smelling gloom of a makeshift darkroom.

  The hand of Mickey Braithwaite was evident in the rigorous geometry of the deckchairs, which faced the temporary stage in two blocks separated by a central aisle. Every chair was taken, with more standing around the perimeter of the lounge, and a cluster of children sat cross-legged in the space in front of the stage, faces tilted upward in mute expectation. The sun, which seemed fixed in the sky as though reluctant to set for fear of some final, extinguishing immersion in the sea, cast shadows like a tender prison of black bars over the audience, though the stuffy air had induced a torpor so seductive and complete that no restraint was needed. Suffusing this matrix of light and dark was a heady atmosphere of body odour, perfume, tobacco and alcohol: the resort’s distillate. And on stage were four men, shirt sleeves rolled, gripping a reddish-grey wooden scaffold that formed a surprisingly emotive reduction of the pier’s structure. Through this triumphal arch a man strode, dressed in a dark suit and stovepipe hat, and clutching a large roll of paper. This man was Harvey Birdsall.

  The bar manager and the fortune-teller, mismatched in practically every physical way possible and yet identical in their phlegmatic worldview, settled themselves on stools carried through from the bar and prepared for an enjoyably critical dismantling of the centenary performance.

  “I might have known he’d give himself a big part,” Bella commented as the pier manager stepped on to the stage.

  Val leaned closer to her friend. “It’s the only big part he’s ever likely to see,” she whispered, and they both giggled like schoolgirls in asse
mbly.

  Harvey made a great show of unfurling his scroll, which had been curled so tightly it snapped shut again twice before he managed to wrestle it under control. A murmur of amusement rose from the audience, who clearly thought they were watching a comedy performance.

  “Ladies and gent… ladies… and gentlemen,” Harvey boomed, looking round the room with a supercilious air. “This is indeed a historic occasion. You are here to witness the grand opening of our new pier, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five. I, Eugenius Birch, engineer and designer, have worked long and hard to provide this town with a pier fit for a queen, and this, I believe, we have achieved.” He glanced down at the scroll. “Our noble pier, a full year in its making, one thousand feet in length, thirty feet in width, with seven hundred and forty tons of iron beneath our feet, all to offer an unrivalled experience to the visitor, who may perambulate as far out to sea as they would hope to if they were aboard a pleasure cruise, and all, I would greatly hope and desire, without getting their feet wet!”

  Val tapped out a cigarette from her packet of Pall Malls and gestured towards the stage. “He’s loving this, isn’t he? I always thought he’d been born a hundred years too late.”

  Bella smiled in agreement, but despite her long-standing antipathy towards the pier manager she had to admit to a sneaking regard for his performance so far. Perhaps it was his naturally pompous manner which suited the role, but both the suit and stovepipe hat, as well as the declamatory speech, fitted him so comfortably that she could easily imagine it was the Victorian engineer standing there, proudly enumerating his latest creation’s vital statistics. Harvey’s convincing act, combined with the soporific atmosphere and the effects of a rapidly consumed double gin on an empty stomach, were drawing Bella into a sort of timeless reverie, where past, present and future blurred together. The pier, she mused, was in some ways like a time machine. Yes, certain elements of it had been either added or removed since its opening, but the basic structure was the same, which was more than could be said for almost any other part of the resort. In fact, now she thought about it, earlier that morning, before the day’s visitors had begun to arrive and the only people on the pier were employees dressed in period clothes, the sensation of having been transported back a hundred years was utterly convincing. Could time possibly be so flimsy?