Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  Colin, having cleared the movable table beforehand as he always did at mealtimes, carried his mother’s tea into the room and placed the tray on the table, swinging it round so that the bowl of finely chopped Spaghetti Bolognese was within reach of Edna’s functioning hand and arm, before returning to the kitchen and bringing his own. He settled in the chair, and the two of them ate for several minutes in companionable silence before, with a clatter, Edna dropped her spoon.

  “Oops! Butterfingers,” she said.

  Colin put down his food and leaned forward to retrieve the utensil, which was resting on the base of the fan. He picked it up and studied it, checking for any signs of dirt.

  “It’s lost nothing,” his mother noted. “A bit of dust won’t do me any harm.”

  “You don’t know that,” Colin replied. He gave the spoon a perfunctory polish on his shirt and handed it back. ”Who knows what germs are lurking in dust?”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Colin, stop fussing me. I’m not a baby.”

  Her son placed both fisted hands on his hips and gave her an ‘oh really?’ look. “It might have escaped your notice, Mother, but—”

  “Yes, yes,” Edna interrupted, “I’m well aware of my situation, Colin, and the more you wrap me up in cotton wool the worse it is. All anyone in my position wants is a little bit of normality… to be treated like anybody else. We don’t need constantly reminding of our… ” She searched for the word.

  “Plight?” he suggested.

  “Oh, Colin!” Edna laughed. “You really are a miserable so-and-so at times.”

  “What’s wrong with plight? If I was in your position I’d think it was the perfect word to describe it.”

  Mrs Draper closed her eyes for a moment and exhaled, a long, deliberately toned expulsion of breath, as though she hoped it would carry off some bothersome notion with it. “And at times I do too, love, I do too, but there’s no point shaking your fist at God and asking ‘why me?’ all the time. It doesn’t get you anywhere but to a very angry place.”

  “Particularly when God doesn’t exist,” Colin said pointedly.

  “Says you.”

  Colin retrieved his bowl and sat back down. “No, Mother. Empirically, he doesn’t exist.”

  Edna scooped up a spoonful of pasta and sauce and guided it into her mouth. She sometimes wondered how she had managed to raise such a dogmatic individual, who seemed somewhat frightened of life. Her husband Malcolm had occasionally slipped into a sombre mood, but after being propelled, physically if need be, out to his garden shed for a few hours he always returned with dirt under his fingernails and a renewed sense of humour. She missed his dry wit. Colin, bless him, had his father’s nose and broad, thick-fingered hands, but there was none of Malcolm’s sense of the absurd. If Edna challenged God about anything, it was his taking away of her husband at the age of fifty-three. This was the only injustice that truly tested her faith.

  “I don’t want us to fall out, Colin,” she said, a note of chastisement in her voice, “so can we please change the subject? Thank you.” Edna continued in a cheery voice. “Well, what have you been up to today?”

  The archivist recognised the tone and knew it was pointless trying to argue, so he paused, indicating to his mother that his reply was a concession rather than a capitulation, then continued, “I’ve been researching a Victorian music hall comic who hung himself under the pier.”

  “Oh dear. What on earth did he do that for?”

  “The papers seemed to think he’d strangled a prostitute, but I think there’s more to it than meets the eye.”

  Mrs Draper tried to lever herself into a slightly more comfortable position, pivoting her body on her elbow. She managed to move no more than an inch, but to her it felt as though she had rolled from one side of the bed to the other, such was the easing of pain at the points where her body’s weight rested. “Ooh, Colin, you sound just like Columbo.”

  He gazed witheringly at her. “This is not one of your lurid American programmes, Mother, this is a man scapegoated by a cabal of worthies in order to safeguard the town’s tourist trade. I think they were hiding the killer in their own ranks. I’m not even sure he committed suicide. He was a successful comic, top of the bill in the pier’s theatre… Why would he kill himself?”

  “A lot of comedians are miserable as sin,” Edna remarked.

  “Really? How many comedians do you know?”

  “It’s a well-known fact,” she countered. “‘The tears of a clown’, that’s what they say. Most of them can hardly crack a smile once they’re off-stage. Perhaps he was fed up with all that laughter.”

  Colin edged forward in his chair. He already felt a sort of proprietorial protectiveness towards George Parr — his defender against a century of misinformation — that he knew had the potential to turn his research into a subjective, unscientific endeavour, but he somehow sensed the righteousness of his cause. Was the truth, supressed for all those years, finally pushing its way to the surface, assisted by his investigative work?

  “Fed up? Mother, your mastery of the understatement never ceases to amaze me. People do not hang themselves because they’re ‘fed up’. Apparently his wife and daughter had both died, though not at the same time, if the wording of the newspaper article is to be believed, and he didn’t commit suicide then, so I hardly think an excess of laughter would push him over the edge.”

  “Well I didn’t know that, did I?” Edna put down her spoon and frowned. “The poor man. Losing your other half is bad enough, but then to lose your child as well.”

  “Rather vindictive of your kind and righteous God, don’t you think?”

  “God doesn’t have anything to do with these things.”

  “Ah!” Colin said triumphantly, “So he isn’t all-powerful after all. He’s just as helpless in the face of fate as anybody else.”

  Edna felt tears starting to cloud her vision. “I don’t know why you feel the need to constantly mock my faith, Colin. It isn’t hurting you, is it? It doesn’t make any difference to your life, does it? Why can’t you just let me believe what I want to believe?”

  He noticed the tears glistening in his mother’s eyes and realised he had gone too far. Like she said, what harm did it do? And yet the archivist felt duty-bound to try and prepare his mother for that devastating moment, as the blackness of death descended, when even the strongest faith was snuffed out like a candle, and each individual was obliged to understand that not only their life, but all life, all creation, was nothing more than an effect, following on inevitably from the Big Bang’s cause, and that effect did not require meaning, any more than the ripples spreading out across the surface of a lake after a stone was thrown into it required meaning. Water was being displaced, in a concentric and agreeable form, but it meant precisely nothing. Colin had come to terms with this; indeed, he found a degree of comfort in it, but he feared for his mother. He did not want her final moment of consciousness to be one of pure terror, as everything she had expected to happen failed to materialise.

  “I just don’t want you to expect answers, that’s all,” he explained, “when there isn’t really a question.”

  “I’ve been answered already, but you wouldn’t understand what I’m on about. Oh well, I suppose that’s as close as I’m going to get to an apology. Here’s a question for you: how did his wife die? And his daughter?”

  Colin wagged an appreciative forefinger at his mother. “Good question. I don’t know. I don’t know how they died, or when they died, in relation to George.” He tried to recall the newspaper article’s exact wording. “From what it said I think they died a while before he did, and not at the same time. We need to get hold of the death certificates. They’ll give us the timing and the circumstances. I’ll drop Neil a line at the PRO, he’ll dig ‘em out. Thanks, Mum. That was an obvious follow-up and I hadn’t thought of it. Too busy thinking about Georgie Parr.”

  “Mum!” Edna exclaimed. “Blimey, I don’t often get one of them. I am honoured.�
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  Colin stood up. “Indeed you are. I tell you what, as a reward, how do you fancy a bit of Angel Delight for afters?”

  “Strawberry flavour?”

  “Of course. What other flavour is there?” Colin replied, and mother and son laughed, relieved to have navigated their way back into the safer waters of shared whimsy and domestic detail. There was a darkness around George Parr that seemed able to reach across the years, infiltrating and staining both the mind and wider world of anyone who came too close to him; Colin and Edna had sensed it too, even in the limpid tranquillity of her bedroom, even one hundred and nine years after George’s death, and despite being able to pull free of this darkness because of their deep-rooted love and symbiotic relationship (and a well-rehearsed exchange concerning the choice of pudding), there remained an echo of his former presence, creeping across previously inviolable boundaries as easily as an incoming tide washes over a child’s sandcastle.

  The Euphoria of Uncertainty

  A single fluorescent tube illuminated the town hall basement, its austere light softened by the dust and cobwebs that had collected around it. From this shrouded source the light percolated downward, filtering through a thick, musty gloom, until it reached tea chests and cardboard boxes, then wooden plaques and pennants exchanged with much pomp and handshaking before being consigned to obscurity, their bestower forgotten. It continued, to pick out framed photographs of former mayors now stacked together so they could discuss the ignominy or justness of their abandonment; old furniture, and broken lamps meant at some juncture to be repaired. Finally what remained of the light settled on the balding pate of Colin Draper, who sat, very much at home, in a threadbare armchair next to the shelves containing the oldest council meeting records, an archive which began in 1870 when the council was formed.

  The tube gave off an incessant, high-pitched buzzing noise that to some would have proved infuriatingly distracting, but not Colin. Anyone who worked with him could attest to the archivist’s prodigious powers of concentration, which were sometimes mistaken for ignorance or rudeness by those unfamiliar with his singlemindedness. He had the ability to shut out everything except the document or task in hand, effectively isolating himself within a bubble that contained nothing but Colin and the voices of those long dead. As a young boy he would think nothing of sitting for hours at the tiny desk his uncle had made for him, either drawing or reading. Later, to block out the taunts and bullying which seemed to follow him wherever he went, Colin developed this incredibly narrow field of focus, so much so that during his latter years at grammar school his tormentors largely abandoned their campaign, so impervious to its blows had he become.

  Behind a dividing wall, built much later from breeze blocks, the wumph and clatter of a boiler could be heard, followed by a metallic resonance from the pipes which ran over Colin’s head. Subconsciously the archivist must have glanced at his watch and concluded that Dougal, the small, fearsome mayor’s attendant, had turned up the council chamber’s thermostat in advance of a meeting that evening, but consciously he was wholly immersed in the leather-backed ledger resting on his knees, and the copperplate handwriting it contained.

  “The twenty-second of November,” Colin read out loud, as was his habit. “That’s eight days after George and Hannah’s deaths.” He flipped back a page to check the dates. “No special meetings convened? No committee formed? Just the normal council, on its normal day? Come on, you lot, aren’t you bothered?”

  But then he remembered the social standing of those present on the resort’s council, which back then consisted solely of (though Colin hated the term) middle-class professionals: lawyers, doctors, civil servants, businessmen and clergy, none of whom would have wanted to be associated with the sordid events under the pier. By even raising the subject before full council on its allotted day they would have attracted attention, if not suspicion, for involving themselves with such a typically proletarian demonstration of immorality.

  “Let’s see if anyone’s brave enough to say anything in the chamber,” Colin said, turning back to the minutes from that November evening so long ago.

  There was an introductory statement from Councillor Allardyce, at first congratulating the mayor on the recent birth of his first grandchild, before continuing with the minutes of the previous council meeting. These were followed by the town clerk, who reported on a variety of applications to the council, consisting mostly of requests to build or alter a property, as well as what seemed to be an ongoing dispute over boundaries to a proposed park on the northern edge of the resort. Normally Colin would study these apparently trivial items with the same thoroughness and interest as he would a royal proclamation — he regarded both as of equal importance, because whereas the proclamation undoubtedly wielded greater influence over the entire country, and therefore dominated the macro-historical picture, the minutes and applications from a council meeting illustrated what was happening on a day-to-day basis, at the level of ordinary people… where history began, in other words — but today his mind had narrowed its field of view further; today all it was concerned with were the words Parr, or Goodwin, or pier. Anything else may as well have been written in hieroglyphics.

  His eyes skimmed over the immaculate copperplate handwriting, attuned to its slender loops, long, vigorous crossing of ‘t’s, and the slight thickening of certain letters as the clerk dipped his nib in the inkwell and continued his notes. Had this faithful recorder ever questioned the relevance of his work, all those thousands and thousands of words? Had he ever been tempted to simply write down what he fancied, or even put down his pen altogether and allow the spoken words to be heard by those present and then vanish forever, unrecorded, and perhaps the better for it?

  The word pier brought his scanning to a halt, but it was only a request from the company that owned and ran the pier to be allowed, from next May, to run pleasure boat rides from a mooring at its seaward end, the request being made now so as to allow them time to construct steps, a ticket booth, and to procure a quantity of advertising posters for the new venture.

  Lured in by mention of the pier, Colin continued reading at a more sedate pace. The polite debate, and the subtle political manoeuvring that could be discerned running below its surface, delighted the archivist, but for all the coded insults and the proposals made with one eye on getting their name chiselled into a foundation stone or engraved on a plaque, Colin had to admit that there was an obviously genuine desire to promote and develop the resort. These men seemed well aware of their responsibilities as founding fathers, whose decisions would shape the town for generations to come, and he had to respect them for that. He wondered what they would think if they could see it now, with its penis-shaped sticks of rock, marauding packs of stag parties, and the older parts of its infrastructure — the pier, winter gardens, theatres and hotels that these men watched rise from their foundations — crumbling and corroding for a lack of investment?

  And then he found it. Following a jocular interlude concerning a group of passengers who alighted from their train only to find themselves face to face with an angry chimpanzee that had managed to escape from its cage as it was being transported to the resort’s new zoo, Councillor Hind then proposed a motion calling for an additional rental to be levied on traders whose businesses were either on, or adjacent to, the promenade, as this was clearly the most profitable area of the resort. This was seconded by Councillor Routledge, but then the Reverend Thomas Fearnley spoke, and Colin could almost hear the booming, denunciatory tones echoing round the council chamber.

  ‘There is one trade,’ the Reverend Fearnley had stated, ‘that makes a good part of its despicable profits on the promenade and pays not one penny piece in rent! These harlots seem to think that they can behave with impunity wherever they please, and decent folk will rightly shun anywhere such a business is being plied. And where these women work, so too does every other disreputable trade, along with its basest of associates, as was amply demonstrated by the events of Tuesday l
ast. If the full weight of the law is not brought to bear on these women, and the men who control their purse-strings, then we shall see a great deal more such tragedies, and our promenade will become nothing more than a latterday Sodom and Gomorrah.’

  Colin puffed out his cheeks and widened his eyes. “Don’t beat about the bush, reverend,” he said. The similarity in tone between the vicar’s outburst and that used in the newspaper articles amused him, but also lent added credence to his idea of a group of influential people working together to steer public opinion. They obviously wanted to create a distraction, but from what? The archivist continued to read.

  Councillor Ibbotson, the mayor, called for order. ‘We are all painfully aware of what happened last Tuesday, reverend. The death of Mr Parr and the girl will undoubtedly go down as one of our town’s darkest chapters, but it is all in the hands of the relevant authorities. We must let them do their work without interference.’

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Colin enquired of the shadows.

  He read on. Reverend Fearnley. ‘My parishioners will not venture into certain areas after dark for fear of being propositioned or robbed. If the promenade develops a similar reputation then the very resort is in jeopardy.’

  Councillor Ibbotson. ‘Indeed, which is why I have asked for a thorough investigation into the matter. Any further comment would be nothing more than speculation, and as I hardly need remind all those present in this chamber, to act on nothing more than hearsay would be imprudent, to say the least. On receipt of this investigation’s findings we will debate the issue fully, and take the appropriate steps.’

  Councillor Appleby. ‘I gather there are certain street vendors selling lengths of rope which they claim are from the one on which Mr Parr chose to suspend himself, but I suspect that if we joined together all these pieces we would have a rope long enough to comfortably hold the Great Eastern at bay!’