Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  And that was that. The council went on to debate the proposed draining of marshland, a dispute between cab drivers and a blacksmith who, they alleged, was over-charging for shoeing their horses, and the cost of extending gas lighting to all parts of the resort, but there was no further mention of George Parr. With some reluctance Colin closed the ledger, returning it to its place on the shelf, and with this short sequence of actions brought himself back into the twentieth century and all its banal coherence. The archivist always felt this disappointment on withdrawing from history; he felt so much more at home within its blinkered borders, where photographs or artefacts or musty pages shone a pale light into the gloom, but where all else waited, silent and fragmented, indifferent to the possibility of its discovery. Colin understood how the words terra incognita on a map had exerted such a pull on certain individuals. Fame, fortune and glory awaited the favoured few, but failure or even death were equally likely outcomes, that death sometimes occurring in a manner too grisly to contemplate. No. Terra incognita’s literal translation might be ‘unknown land’, but it could equally be interpreted as the euphoria of uncertainty.

  Evening rainclouds had brought a premature twilight to the resort, leaching the colour out of everything but the neon signs of the amusement arcades, which now broadcast their red and yellow promises with an acidic fervour in this drab and diminished world. Wet roads and pavements mirrored these pledges, but a footfall was sufficient to break them and prove how flimsy they were. One or two family groups shuffled along in the cold drizzle, shrouded in cagoules or huddled under umbrellas, their faces creased as though in pain, penitents on some dour pilgrimage.

  The windows of the bus had been rendered almost opaque by a combination of rain and condensation, turning what was normally an everyday route into an enigmatic, featureless journey, its only landmarks traffic lights and the blurred neon signs of the arcades. Those passengers familiar with the route sat calmly, either counting the number of stops, or waiting for some illuminated landmark to appear like an amorphous beacon, while others, visitors perhaps, rubbed portholes in the condensation and peered out anxiously, hoping to recognise something in the murk.

  Colin sat next to the window, pressed up against the cold glass by the presence of a huge woman next to him. He had known she was going to take the vacant space to his right from the moment he first noticed her lumbering down the aisle of the bus with two large shopping bags, and sure enough she did, collapsing onto the seat with a grunt and a sigh, the bags clasped in both arms on her knees. He had shuffled as far as he could towards the window in order to accommodate her bulk, but Colin was no lightweight himself, and the two were forced to continue their journey pressed together in reluctant intimacy. What most alarmed the archivist, however, was the fact that the heat from her body, combined with the bouncing of the bus, had given him an erection no amount of mental effort seemed able to dispel. His stop was only a few minutes away, and the prospect of manoeuvring past her whilst still in a state of arousal appalled him, so Colin decided to analyse the brief interchange he had found in the council meeting records, in the hope that a little dry Victorian debate would have the desired effect.

  There had clearly been some degree of tension between the mayor and vicar, but without further research into their respective characters or the council’s hierarchical structure Colin was reluctant to conclude that the discord reflected either a wider power struggle or significant personal animosity. Of course Councillor Ibbotson and the Reverend Fearnley may well have loathed and detested each other, but Colin Draper, council archivist and local historian — a man whose scrupulous adherence to the facts managed to co-exist with a sort of crusading subjectivity, a man who could display a passionate empathy for the dead and yet feel nothing but clumsy indifference to the living — refused to acknowledge any such rivalry without documentary proof, while at the same time remaining utterly convinced that they were complicit in some self-serving smear campaign against George Parr. Who were the ‘relevant authorities’ that the mayor had referred to? If he had meant the police why had he not simply called them that? And to defer any detailed debate on the wider implications of George and Hannah’s deaths until some nebulous investigation had been concluded was one of the oldest political tricks in the book. Awkward questions can be deflected whilst maintaining a sense of propriety, of being sufficiently humble to defer your own wish to reply to the greater good of due process, which then allows time to come up with either a convincing answer, or for the original question to be forgotten. Councillor Ibbotson must have been privy to details he felt unwilling or unable to relate in the chamber, and so employed a delaying tactic that he knew the vicar could not argue against. Colin made a mental note to seek out a painting of the man; he wanted to look him in the eye and see whether there was any sign of duplicity there, or if the mayor had merely been doing what he thought was right for the resort. An honourable man unnerved and, perhaps, overwhelmed by the savagery visited upon his town.

  Had any of that group of wing-collared, mutton chop-whiskered and rigid gentlemen looked towards the council chamber’s stained glass windows with fear and incomprehension at what they perceived to be the forces of chaos clamouring outside, or had they unleashed these same forces as agents charged with a particular task, the consequences of which had been engineered from the outset? But how could the death of a young prostitute and a well-known music hall entertainer possibly be of benefit to the resort’s ruling elite? If benefit there was, it would have to be substantial, given the risk of political and social suicide if any evidence emerged linking the council member to such a violent crime. Colin stared out at the phantasmagorical night, willing it to conjure up a logical explanation, but all it could offer was wet pavements and the diffracted lances of streetlamps, which cast orange splinters against the greater darkness without appreciable mitigating effect, like flecks of paint spattered on a black canvas. The bus drew up at a stop. Colin rubbed away a small patch of condensation and looked out. Quite close by, on the other side of a narrow front garden, was the bay window of a guest house, its curtains drawn back to reveal a brightly lit dining room. Seated at a table in the window was a man eating alone, hunched forward over the table as though the contents of his bowl were drawing him in with inescapable force. He lifted a spoon to his mouth, and Colin could see a portion of the watery soup dribble down the man’s front. He appeared not to notice, however, and again dipped the spoon into his bowl, a slow, deliberate movement, before raising it once more, only to lose a little more soup before the spoon reached his mouth. A small queue of people was joining the bus and paying their fare, so Colin had time to count fifteen identical scoop/spill/mouthfuls before the vehicle’s two sets of doors came together with a hiss of compressed air and it set off from the bus stop, drawing the archivist away from the robotic ingestion of the man in the window. Colin imagined the soup stains down the front of the man’s shirt and wondered whether or not he would be concerned by them, or even if he would notice them at all. Had the man started his meal without waiting for his wife to settle at the table, or was he alone? Had the presence of the bus, of Colin, impinged on him at all? He did not appear to be particularly old, but everything about the man, from how he had huddled over the table to the mechanical, undeviating method of his eating, exuded an enormous weariness, a weariness that he had learned to exist within by committing himself entirely to its natural frequency. He was sitting at the table. The bowl was on the table. The soup was in the bowl. The spoon was in his hand. The spoon was in the bowl. The soup was in the spoon. The spoon was in his mouth. The soup was in his mouth. The spoon was in the bowl… and so it continued. The bus, and its passengers, and the cold, rainy night, simply did not exist.

  Colin knew something was wrong the moment he opened the front door and stepped into the hall. Every day, on his return from work, his mother would call out from her bedroom ‘Is that you, Colin?’, and he would inevitably reply with something along the lines of ‘No, Mother, it’
s a mad axe murderer’, but tonight there was silence.

  “Mum?” The word seemed to hang in the air, unanswered and unadorned, almost mocking in the way its cracked, high-pitched sound filled Colin’s ears, forcing him to acknowledge how much he depended on the stanchion of his mother’s response.

  He threw his keys onto the hall table. A part of his mind registered that at the bottom of the pile of post — neatly arranged on the table by Pam their next door neighbour, who came in to give Mrs Draper her lunch — was a large buff envelope with IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS PLEASE DO NOT BEND stencilled across it, and, if he had had the ability to detach himself from the situation, to analyse it with scrupulous honesty, Colin would have been forced to admit to a moment of quite ferocious resentment towards his mother, whose stricken existence was delaying him from the joy of opening that envelope. This was the dark undercurrent of their interdependence: the quiet rage he sometimes felt at being hampered in his work, in his life, by the needs of his mother, and the inevitable feeling of self-loathing which always followed. This was not a moment for objective analysis, however, so Colin left the envelope and hurried into his mother’s bedroom.

  A pale amber glow from the streetlamp at the end of the garden seeped in through the curtains, accentuating the pulpy mound in the bed. The fan, its enduring hum imperturbable during those few seconds of tumult, blew a sweet and cloying odour towards him that Colin thought for a moment was the smell of death, until he realised that a bag of fudge lay open in the path of the fan’s current of air. He hurried round the bed, both dreading what he would find and yet desperate to determine the reason behind his mother’s silence.

  Edna was slumped against the chrome guardrail, her forehead pressed against its burnished bar. Her eyes were closed, but as Colin knelt beside her he could discern a gentle fluttering that played across her eyelids like a breeze ruffling the surface of a lake. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, not laboured, exactly, but rather as though she would be happy to relinquish the tedium of drawing air into her lungs.

  “Mum? Mum?” Colin laid his hand on her shoulder, which had slipped free of her nightie, and shook gently. The softness of her skin beguiled him, soothed him. How very pale she was, lustrous in the filtered light, emollient and utterly formless. Her skin was cool, but not cold.

  “Mum?”

  Her lips parted slightly. Some sort of white material had gathered in the corners of her mouth; it stretched like gum as she tried to speak. “Malcolm?”

  “No, Mother,” Colin corrected her, irritated beyond reason by her mistake, “it’s me… Colin. Colin. Your son.”

  Edna’s breathing lost its rhythm for a moment, and when she spoke again the words were so quiet they seemed little more than appendices to each exhalation. “Tired, Colin. Let me sleep. Let me go.”

  This last sentence filled him with dread. The archivist knew, of course, that the nature of his mother’s illness meant she would deteriorate over time, until the creeping paralysis reached her vital organs and slowly squeezed them to a standstill, but he was not ready for her to die. Not yet. Just the dislocation of entering the house, the absence of her unvarying welcome, had been enough to show him that.

  Colin stood up. “I’m going to phone the hospital,” he said decisively. “I won’t be long. Don’t go to sleep, Mother. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The only reply she gave was a brief noise, somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, deep in her throat, and again her eyelids fluttered. As Colin made his way back into the hall he could not help wondering about this sporadic movement. Did it reflect some inner distress, perhaps, or was she searching for something or someone in the darkness, a familiar image or figure that could offer solace and guidance in the face of a solitary death?

  Hours later, as he sat, neat and upright on the couch, cloaked in the silence of the house and with the unopened envelope across his knees, Colin thought back over all that had happened since arriving home after work, the emotions and sounds and smells, the movement and voices, and found that everything had been whisked together into a thick paste of sensory overload, an indigestible mixture of sirens and clattering trolleys, the tired eyes of a doctor, a hospital’s austere light, the trembling needle of a ventilator dial, reassurances spoken in terms which could never bring reassurance, tea which tasted of plastic and, having been drunk whilst staring blankly at the wall in a seating area, had become conflated with a poster about HIV, and, finally, a ride home through the same chimerical landscape as his bus journey, only this time accompanied by the haunting choral wash of Enya playing on the taxi driver’s cassette. Colin, bizarrely, could recall his brief exchange with the driver as they set off far more accurately than his conversation with the doctor.

  ‘Mind a bit of music?’ the driver had enquired.

  ‘No. No, that’s fine.’

  ‘Let’s have a bit of Enya, then. Calms folk down. Bit of Enya, everyone’s off. Sort of meditation, know what I mean? They won’t have been listening to her in the clubs. More likely some of that dance rubbish. Thump thump thump. All that gets you is wound up, but that’s no good in your cab, is it? I’m not going to put something like that on, there’d be a bloody riot. Bit of Enya, you’re going to have it nice and quiet. You look like an Enya fan.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yeah. Sensible. Brainy.’

  ‘Oh. Well… ’

  ‘Ha! I knew it.’

  Why had his mind seen fit to store such prattling nonsense, when all he could recall from the hospital was a collection of phrases, clumped together in a barely comprehensible aggregate of medical diagnoses and platitudes? Pulmonary complications… comfortable…fluid build-up… get some rest… best place for her… cardiac arrhythmia… doing all we can. He had no real idea how ill his mother was, whether she was likely to recover or if she had entered the final stages of her illness, and yet he could explain an anonymous taxi driver’s psychological manipulation of his passengers through his choice of music. Did this discrepancy mean that, on a fundamental level, he did not really care if his mother lived or died? Colin was appalled with himself. His mother deserved a far more attentive and caring son, and, if she pulled through, he vowed to become that son, even if it meant spending less time on research. George Parr was dead, as was Hannah Goodwin. They had waited patiently for over a century for him to uncover the truth; surely they would not mind waiting a little longer; surely they, more than most, would want Edna Draper’s transition from life into death to be as gentle as possible.

  Thinking of George and Hannah reminded the archivist of the large envelope on his knees. Opening it now, he admitted, would be an instantaneous renunciation of his pledge to put the living before the dead, but Colin did not feel tired, and how, by leaving the envelope unopened, would that benefit his mother?

  He carefully peeled open the sealed flap and drew out the papers. Clipped to a thin sheaf of photocopies was a note from his old university friend Neil Hanlon, who was now a senior archivist at the Public Records Office in London.

  Colin read out loud the typed note. “I’ve enclosed the death certificates you wanted. Sounds like another Victorian tale of woe. What are you up to these days? Found a girl blind or crazy enough to get you into bed yet? Masturbation at your age is so undignified. Give me a ring when you’re next in London. Neil.”

  The archivist shook his head despairingly, unclipped the note and brought that incredible focus to bear on the neat copperplate writing that lay between the regular dividing lines of the death certificate.

  “Where and when died,” Colin read. “The twenty-sixth of March, eighteen sixty-six, Bayham Street Camden. Name and surname: Katherine Jane Parr. Sex: female. Age: twenty-five. Occupation: teacher of piano. Cause of death: postpartum haemorrhage. Signature, description and address of informant: Doctor Ezra Zimmerman, in attendance, Cranleigh Street. When registered: twenty-eighth March, eighteen sixty-six.” With barely a pause, Colin removed the top photocopy and began reading the second, which had been written in
a less flamboyant hand and with a thicker nib, making the words appear bleaker, as though they had become infused with the sorry facts they imparted. “Where and when died: eleventh of August, eighteen seventy-five, Henry Street, Hinton Moss. Name and surname: Victoria Katherine Parr. Sex: female. Age: nine. Occupation: blank. Cause of death: scarlet fever. Signature, description and residence of informant: Emily Tindall, governess, Henry Street.”

  Colin looked up. He knew Henry Street. Located perhaps half a mile or so from the centre of the resort, Hinton Moss had, as its name suggested, originally been a boggy area of land dotted with small farmsteads, but was drained and built on as part of the town’s huge expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, mostly to house those working in the burgeoning leisure industry. The archivist was surprised a music hall star such as Georgie Parr had chosen Hinton Moss as his home, when the wider avenues radiating out from the park were becoming popular with the town’s more affluent citizens. It was an intriguing choice, one that only added to Colin’s admiration and interest in the man. Georgie Parr, the Camden Clown, who had built his act using the robust argot employed by the working class, who had been castigated for his choice of material by those agencies within Victorian society that saw him as a destabilising influence and yet stubbornly refused to dilute even one aspect of his act, who had walked on the same silvered boards above the waves as Colin, had now shown himself to have remained true to his empathetic connection with the underprivileged by living with them, even when his earnings would have dwarfed those of his neighbours. How could such a virtuous man, whose sympathies so clearly lay with his audience, end up murdering a girl who, in both profession and circumstance, represented that stratum of society so perfectly? It just did not make sense. Hannah Goodwin, hardly more than a child herself, would surely have brought out George’s paternal and moral instincts. He would have been more likely to make sure she returned home safely than kill her with his bare hands. Colin could not conceive how a man who had lost his own daughter would then deprive another father of his.