Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  Colin suddenly thought of something to say. “As I was walking down the pier I noticed how neatly the deckchairs were lined up, and if I didn’t know better I’d have thought Mickey Braithwaite had set them out, but he can’t still be working, can he? He’ll be knocking on ninety by now.”

  Ivan smiled. “Oh, he’s still here, Mr Draper, believe it or not. He’s only supposed to do weekends now, but he’s here most days, for a few hours at least. There’s a new lad who’s supposed to be in charge, but I’m afraid Mickey doesn’t seem to think too highly of his efforts. He’s always rearranging the deckchairs, which drives the poor lad to distraction,” he chuckled. “You know what Mickey’s like.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “I know. He doesn’t look a day older than he did twenty years ago, either, the sod. I don’t know what his secret is but I wouldn’t mind a bit of it meself. Must be all the fresh air.”

  “Good old Mickey. He’s been on this pier since the war, you know.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? Makes us two look like part-timers.”

  “Amazing,” Colin concurred. The archivist was aware that his heart had begun to beat faster, and a prickling sensation was creeping across his scalp. He desperately wanted Ivan to begin another topic of conversation to delay his inevitable confrontation with Sammy Samuels, but the stage door manager appeared to have reached a natural end-point to his observations on life and simply sat back down, his wistful expression a jarring incongruity amongst the background of beaming showbiz smiles.

  “Well,” Colin said, “I suppose I’d better get a move on.”

  Ivan straightened the signing-in book. “Aye… Mr Samuels is expecting you.”

  “Is he? Oh.”

  “I thought I’d better tell him after you rang. I didn’t want you turning up and Mr Samuels not to be here. Did you not want me to tell him?”

  The prickling across his scalp was intensifying. “What did he say? Was he alright?”

  Ivan shrugged. “He wanted to know what you wanted to see him about, so I said it must be something about the show. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I haven’t spoken out of turn, have I? You didn’t say much on the phone, so I just assumed… Would you like me to ring his dressing room?”

  “No!” Colin coughed, embarrassed by the note of panic in his voice. “No, no, that’s fine. I’ll just go up, thanks.”

  The stage door manager leaned forward, resting his forearms on the wooden shelf that separated him from the corridor, the theatre, and the rest of the world. “Are you sure you’re alright, Mr Draper? You look a bit pasty.”

  “Oh, I’m just weary, Ivan. Old age catching up with me, you know?” Colin tapped the window frame, as though some percussive note were required to signal an end to their discussion.

  “I’d better get cracking.”

  “You know where you’re going, don’t you?”

  Colin laughed. “I should hope so!”

  Ivan shook his head. “Of course you do. Daft question. You know this place as well as I do.”

  “Almost,” Colin corrected.

  “They’ll never be able to knock it down in our memories, will they, Mr Draper?”

  “No, Ivan, they won’t.”

  The archivist began to climb the stairs, eyes fixed on the stained linoleum and the worn patches on every step. The sounds of the theatre and pier resonated in the stairwell: the gulls’ callous shouts, old metal beneath his feet shifting slightly as it mustered the strength to withstand another incoming tide, the sudden howl of an electric guitar on stage, voices from somewhere in the building that were so indeterminate they might have been whispers from another century, all funnelled into the air around Colin and transmuted, by his ears at least, into a perfect melody. At that moment he knew he would always remember these sounds, bundled together with the worn lino, his tingling fear, and his astonishment at the continuing presence on the pier of Mickey Braithwaite. An indivisible, complex and yet beautifully clear memory. The future would never be totally unknowable as long as these enduring moments of clarity were capable of being woven into the present.

  He reached the first floor. The dressing rooms were here, a row of identical green doors with laminated name-cards slotted into brass brackets, the doors arranged on one side of a corridor almost brutal in its strict functionality, with bare walls and concrete floor, pipework and fire extinguisher. Colin’s hands were shaking, but he was still able to see how these doors and signs would make an eloquent installation piece on the theme of fame’s transient nature. The doors, offering access to celebrity, money and privilege were permanent, always ready to be opened by those who possessed the correct key, and yet the rooms’ stars would not occupy them long enough to warrant any specific identity more enduring than a thin piece of card printed on the pier manager’s computer. Whose names would be fixed there next season? And how many of those attached there now would be remembered in a hundred years’ time?

  He walked past the first door: Kerry Hunter. The second: Mike Kavana. He stopped outside the third: Sammy Samuels. The archivist stared at the two words, their neat and memorable alliteration, the sturdy capitalised font David Clark had chosen, and tried to imagine standing outside a similar door, spatially in much the same position as the one now in front of him, with Georgie Parr written on it. What, Colin, asked himself, was he doing there? What did he hope to achieve? What possible relevance could a nineteenth-century music hall comic have to this foul-mouthed twenty-first century comedian? He was about to turn away when he heard laughter coming up the stairwell, so, not wanting to be discovered loitering in the corridor, Colin watched with a kind of detached horror as he raised his hand, balled it into a loose fist, and knocked.

  “Yes?” came a voice from inside the dressing room.

  “It’s Colin Draper… Ivan said—”

  “Who?” Already the comedian sounded irritated.

  Colin cleared his throat. “Colin Draper. I used to work for the council. Ivan on the stage door told you I was coming.”

  “Is this going to take long?”

  “No, no.”

  “Come in, then. You’ve got five minutes.”

  With a speed of response that echoed Ivan’s throwing away of his father’s effects, Colin pushed open the dressing room door and stepped inside.

  The first thing he noticed was the heavy pall of cigarette smoke which filled the room and instantly brought to mind a question regarding fire regulations, but Colin thought it best not to voice his concerns, at least not until he had delivered his message. Samuels was sitting at his dressing table, dabbing gently at his forehead with a piece of sponge, his other hand holding a cigarette over a metal ashtray half-filled with ash and butts.

  “Five minutes,” Sammy reiterated, without turning away from the mirror. “I’ve got a show to do.”

  Colin closed the door. He looked round the room for somewhere to sit, but the only piece of furniture, a tub-shaped armchair, was tucked away in a far corner beyond the comedian, a position the archivist sensed would leave him vulnerable if Samuels became violent. He decided to edge closer to the table, but in so doing accidentally kicked a metal wastepaper basket, which tipped over with a loud clang and deposited its contents onto the dressing room floor.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t see it,” Colin explained. He made to bend down and begin tidying up the mess, but Samuels wafted the arm holding the sponge in a dismissive gesture towards the upturned basket.

  “Leave it,” the comedian instructed, “somebody’ll sort it later.” He turned slightly in his chair and studied the portly, dishevelled-looking old man for the first time. “So, you wanted to see me. What’s your name again?”

  “Colin. Colin Draper.”

  “Okay, Colin Draper, you’ve had a minute already, so I suggest you get on with whatever it is you’re here for.”

  The archivist tried to hold the comedian’s gaze, but
there was such a profoundly cold absence in the pale grey eyes looking up at him that he found himself addressing instead the reflection in the mirror, as though hopeful that this doppelgänger possessed a more tolerant and benign nature.

  “Yes… um, I realise you’re very busy… I appreciate you giving me a little of your time.” How on earth was he to begin? Ever since his decision to confront Samuels Colin had struggled with an internal debate as to how to introduce Georgie Parr, but for every imagined scenario he could always see a disadvantage. There was, he had reluctantly concluded, no method without risk. He took a deep breath. “There was once a comedian who worked on the pier called Georgie Parr, and he died here in 1880… they found his body hanging under the pier, but no one knows whether he committed suicide or if he was murdered. And nearby, on the beach, they found the body of a prostitute called Hannah Goodwin. She’d been strangled. The police assumed Georgie had murdered her and then hung himself in some sort of act of remorse, but whatever the circumstances, he was dead. It came out afterwards that Georgie had been a frequent visitor to the town’s brothels, but he had lost both his wife and daughter in tragic circumstances, so that wasn’t so surprising. He must have been very lonely.”

  Sammy, whose dabbings had slowed during the archivist’s short speech, now placed the sponge back in its pot of concealer and swivelled his chair round to face Colin. “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with what was on the front page of the paper last night, would it?”

  Colin, who could feel his bowels loosening at the quiet menace in Samuels’ voice, tried to smile reassuringly. “Yes, but please, please don’t think I’ve come here to judge you, or… or, well, anything. I just don’t want you to make the same mistake as Georgie Parr, that’s all. I don’t want history to repeat itself, is what I’m trying to say.”

  “I see.”

  “You do?”

  Sammy ground out his cigarette. “Oh, yes, I think so. You think that because some stupid tart talked herself into a black eye this time I’m going to murder the next one that comes along. That’s it, isn’t it? You think I’m going to kill a prostitute. And then I’m going to string myself up under the pier.”

  “No, no, not… well, not quite as literally as that, but—”

  Sammy stood up. Colin took a step backwards, but he was still within reach of Sammy’s forefinger, which jabbed him in the chest on each emphasised word, inching him further and further backwards with every painful contact. “No, that’s exactly what you’re saying. He was a comedian, I’m a comedian. I hit a prostitute, he strangled a prostitute. He worked on the pier, I work on the pier. Isn’t that just fucking peculiar? Oh, hang on. Do you think I’m this murderer reincarnated? Is that it? Have I been possessed, d’you think? Is he telling me to do things?” Sammy spread his fingers and gripped the sides of his head. “Is that what the voices are all about?”

  Colin felt the dressing room wall against his back. His breast-bone was hurting from Sammy’s prodding, but what alarmed him most was the psychotic glassiness of the comedian’s eyes. He imagined the battered and bruised girl in the newspaper photograph cowering before this same impervious surface, wondering, as he did, where the assault would end. Had Hannah Goodwin also been witness to some similar expression? The thought of it being the last thing she saw appalled him.

  “I want to help! That’s all. Please, just read this.” The archivist felt in his coat pocket and brought out an A5-sized booklet, bound in pale blue card, which he held out like some armistice agreement.

  Sammy knocked the booklet out of Colin’s hand and leaned closer to him so that their faces were only inches apart. “That, you fat fuck, is what they all say. Agents, women, fortune-tellers… ’I want to help, I want to help’, but you know what’s really funny? All they really want to do is help themselves. So what is it you’re really after? Eh? What?”

  Colin wondered if he was right. Was there something he wasn’t admitting, not even to himself? Were his amateurish attempts at psychoanalysis with Mickey Braithwaite and his new desperate hope in synchronicity both just pitiful diversionary tactics to delay the inevitable; that was, his failure to solve the mystery of Georgie Parr and Hannah Goodwin?

  “Nothing,” Colin replied, his voice flat and blunted. “I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time.”

  “You will be, sunshine, if you say a word about this to anyone.” Sammy took a step back. “Who else have you talked to about this bullshit?”

  “No one. Honestly, I wanted to speak to you first.”

  “Well now you have, so you can fucking well forget you ever thought about it, can’t you. And if you don’t keep your trap shut I’ll know where to find you. D’you get my drift?”

  The archivist nodded. “I won’t say anything, I promise.”

  “You’d better not.” Samuels pointed at a spot between Colin’s eyes. “You’re in my sights, you crazy bastard. Now piss off, I’ve got a show to do.”

  Colin reached for the door handle, opened the door and left the room without looking again at the comedian.

  With the archivist gone, Sammy slumped onto his chair, lit a cigarette and scrutinised the back of his hands, dismayed by the brown blotches and grey-green veins, the loosening skin and sparse clumps of hair; they were an old man’s hands, which had somehow been grafted onto his arms at some time during the last ten years. He turned them over, squinting in an attempt to bring the voiceless fissures across his palms into focus, but they writhed and blurred, reluctant to supply any kind of answer. What was it she had said? Something about his grandfather’s death, a girl he was meant to love, and being successful. It had all been so obviously vague, subjects that could equally have been applied to anyone stepping in to her stupid little booth, so why had the fortune-teller left such an enduring impression? What was it that bound them together? He remembered — with a clarity made all the more remarkable because when he looked back to his drinking years there were precious few memories with any kind of reliable definition to them — the look of terror in her eyes when he had touched her that night in the bar. There was no way she could have faked such a primal fear, and what made her reaction even more ominous was that it had been conjured from nothing but the slightest of contacts. What had she sensed through his fingertips that sent her blundering out of the bar as though being pursued by all the hounds of hell? And now here was this crazy old fool babbling on about a comedian who murdered a prostitute over a hundred years ago and saying the same was going to happen to him! Why were these lunatics allowed to roam the streets, and why did they all gravitate towards the pier or, more to the point, towards him?

  Samuels snorted and shook his head, and in so doing caught sight of the pale blue booklet lying on the floor. He bent down, picked it up and read out loud the title. “Laughter and Tragedy — The Life and Death of Georgie Parr.”

  Colin needed a brandy to calm his nerves. He could still feel the comedian’s finger jabbing at his chest, still see that shark-like blankness in his eyes; perhaps Sammy would glance through the booklet out of curiosity, and hopefully realise that Colin had meant him no harm.

  Just inside the doorway a group of young men were clustered around an electronic quiz machine, raucously debating the answer to one of its multiple choice questions.

  “Is it bollocks.”

  “It is. Daz’s mate’s been there.”

  “So what? Daz knows fuck all about anything.”

  “It’s Toronto, I’m telling yer. Hurry up and press the fucking button.”

  “Oi, mate.”

  Colin realised that the last phrase had been aimed at him. He stopped and smiled at their bland, alcohol-flushed faces which glistened like lacquered masks in the bar’s gloom. “Yes?”

  “What’s the capital of Canada?”

  “Ottawa,” the archivist replied without hesitation.

  His questioner frowned. “You sure?”

  “Yes. It’s in the French-speaking area—”

  “Okay, we don’t need a fuck
ing lecture!” The young man turned back to the machine, punched a button, and was rewarded by a brief electronic fanfare. The group cheered.

  “Get in!” one of them said.

  Colin lingered for a moment, expecting some small indication of gratitude for his contribution, but their attention had returned to the quiz machine, a dismissal which irritated but did not particularly surprise him. These young men were typical of the type of visitor that seemed endemic in the resort these days: groups of girls and boys who tottered from bar to bar, shrieking and bellowing because, deep down, they knew they had nothing to say. The girls draped in sashes, their bare legs mottled in the chill wind, boys cavorting in ill-fitting comic book hero costumes, outfits deeply ironic given their mundane existence, and all of them propelled by a belief in the redemptive power of a hedonistic lifestyle as espoused by their celebrity gods.

  As he walked away Colin heard their blundering debate move on to the next question.

  “Who wrote Moby Dick?”

  “Sounds like a porno.”

  “Nah, it’s that thing about a whale.”

  “Moby Dick! That’s me!”

  “In yer dreams.”

  “Fuck off.”

  ‘Herman Melville, you idiots,’ Colin said silently, thankful to the general hubbub of the bar for absorbing the conversation at that point. He needed a large brandy, then home on the bus and the sequestered hush of his study. How he longed to be safely concealed behind the barricades of books, to put himself beyond reach of the world, with all its volatility and unanswerable questions. To interact with this world was to open oneself up to its disorder, a vulnerability Colin now knew he could not withstand. If Sammy Samuels and Georgie Parr were indeed following identical paths then it was incontestable and inviolate, a destiny he could now be nothing more than a bystander at. He was an archivist, a bringer of order; there was nothing more to be done.

  When the five minute call came crackling through the dressing room speaker Sammy Samuels closed the booklet and dropped it into the now upturned wastepaper basket, knowing that it would be gone by the time he came off-stage later that night, carried away in a black bin liner, its riddles silenced.