by Graham Joyce
“We’ve come to the pier,” I heard myself say.
I looked around and I was there, at the water’s edge. I seemed to have arrived there in mere moments. Dot’s voice had gone and I inhaled the brine and heard the lap of the water and felt the soft sand under my feet.
I followed the man and the boy to the pier, and there was a boat drawn up at the water’s edge. The man looked around nervously as if he didn’t want to be seen. He still wore his blue suit and it too foamed with gentle phosphorescent light, like it was made of water. Eels of blue light swam and sparkled in the threads of its fabric. It was beautiful. He took the boy by the hand, and together they walked into the water and climbed into the boat.
As the man pushed off with the oars I ran and caught up. I hurried into the water, splashing and soaking my shoes and my trousers, and I climbed into the boat beside them. The boy smiled at me briefly but the man didn’t so much as acknowledge me.
The man rowed steadily. The bright moon shone on his face and for the first time I was able to see him clearly. He no longer had eyes of clear glass. Now he wore spectacles. The boy, too: Now instead of eyes of glass he had ordinary wide, trusting eyes of nut-brown. Though I had an aching dread inside me, I sat in the boat quietly as we moved deeper out to sea. We cast a moon shadow on the calm water behind us.
The little boy watched me carefully. He turned sharply to look at his father, then back to me. It was as if he was asking one of us for an explanation about the presence of the other. I tried to speak, but some paralysis had me by the throat and I struggled for the faculty of words. Still the man showed no interest in me as he rowed steadily.
About two hundred yards out to sea the man stopped rowing and shipped oars. He looked back at the shore and decided to take off his shoes and socks. Then he stripped off his jacket and shirt and trousers. He wore swimming trunks underneath.
At last I overcame my paralysis and managed to speak. “Isn’t it cold for that?” I said. The balmy nights had given way to chilly evenings, and even though I was fully dressed I was shivering and wet from the knees down.
The man looked at me, and in a voice that I knew he said, “No one will bother us here.”
I looked for the boy, but he had gone. The man reached for some ropes that were lying in the bottom of the boat. The ropes were secured to heavy iron weights, not unlike those weights that braced the flats backstage at the theater. He made certain that the weights were properly secured to the ropes and then he tied one of the ropes tightly around his leg just above the ankle.
He took another rope and a weight and he looped it around my ankle and knotted it tightly.
“What’s that for, Daddy?” I said. My voice was tiny, childlike.
“No one will find us, even if they’re looking for us.”
A surge of panic and self-preservation shot through me. Moonlight reflected in the glass of the man’s spectacles, preventing me from seeing his eyes. I looked for the little boy again. I was scared. I thought he must have fallen over the side of the boat.
“Just you and me together and all the time in the world,” said the man.
The man was my father. I didn’t know what he was doing but I trusted him.
He glanced back at the shore, as if expecting or perhaps hoping that someone would come after us. I looked over the side of the boat at the dark water. I didn’t like it at all. It looked cold. “I’m frightened.”
“No need to be frightened, David.”
I opened my mouth again to say “Can we go back” but something silvery and red flew into my mouth. It flew into my throat and I spluttered. Then the thing was on my tongue and I spat it out into my hand. It was a ladybug. It righted itself and crawled into the center of my palm, where it stayed. Here we were in the middle of the night and a ladybug, painted by moonlight, had flown into my mouth.
I showed it to my father. I said very clearly, but in my deep adult voice, “I’ve come here from another time.”
He seemed thunderstruck, hunched forward in the boat staring at the tiny creature in my hand.
But it was as if I couldn’t remember what I’d just said to him. That is, I knew as myself, as the older David, exactly what I’d just said. But as the little boy I couldn’t remember.
I held the ladybug in the palm of my hand up to the light of the moon. The great strontium-white ball of the moon seemed to expand massively in the sky. I blew on my hand and the ladybug, silhouetted, expanded its wings and flew in a dizzy pattern across the face of the moon before disappearing into the blackness.
“Can we go back?” I said. “I’m frightened.”
My father seemed crestfallen, beaten. His brow was creased. In a kind of daze he gathered the oars and dipped them in the water. He turned the boat around and steadily but firmly rowed back to the shore. I sat opposite him and he didn’t take his eyes off me, not for a single stroke.
When we reached the shore he untied the rope from around my ankle, then from his. He put his trousers and jacket back on and lifted me out of the boat to carry me onto the sand. After setting me down, he took my hand and we walked to the pier.
The light changed and it was instantly daytime; the sun was shining, gulls were calling and wheeling in the blue sky, and the pier was busy with people and music and gaiety. We walked together to the end of the pier. “I’m leaving you here, David,” he said. He took his wallet out of his pocket and pressed it into my hand. “Someone will come for you. Wait here.”
I watched him walk away, along the boardwalk of the pier. He didn’t look back at me. I could see him through the crosshatch of railings as he got down onto the sand again, making his way back to the boat. He pushed the boat into the water, climbed in, and heaved on the oars, rowing steadily out to sea all over again. The tiny boat became a dot on the sea and seemed to become still. I watched it lift and fall on the swell for a long time.
Eventually I became distracted by some music playing on the pier. I moved between the people. I found a penny on the boardwalk and tried to put it into a machine, but I couldn’t reach. A young couple saw me and laughed. The young woman lifted me up so I could reach the coin slot, but then the young man said, “Oh a penny won’t do it for Madame Zorena.”
He found the right coin and Madame Zorena began to whir and click and go through her routine, but I kicked away from the young couple and ran down the pier, following my father. I ran onto the sand shouting his name. I think I knew he was never going to come back.
“It’s my daddy!” I shouted. “It’s my daddy!”
In an instant I was crying and screaming and there was no one to hear me. I wanted someone to help me. The sun was high and hot in the sky as I ran over the sand. I slipped and fell. The loose sand scraped my face; it seemed not to want to let me get help for my daddy. I fell again and scrambled along the beach, screaming for him to come back.
But there was no one there. I couldn’t even see the boat out on the distant swell of the water. Tears stung my ears. I couldn’t breathe. The beach had become a vast and hostile wilderness. No one came. “It’s my daddy!” I screamed, and the sea just groaned and shifted its obstinate and infinite weight. “It’s my daddy.”
I sat down on the beach and sobbed, gulping, trying to breathe.
Then I saw the young woman from the pier rushing toward me. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Who are you with?” she asked me. “Tell me who you are with?” Then she took both of my hands.
“Hush! Hush!” she said. “Here you are! Here you are!” And the person holding my hands was no longer a young woman on the pier but Dot in the laundry room. “Hush now. Here you are.”
“It’s my daddy,” I cried to her.
I cried openly and unashamedly before this hardened old woman as she sat quietly and held my hands. Finally she got up and found me a clean handkerchief and told me to blow my nose. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen a lot of tears,” she said. “A lot of tears.”
WHEN I’D RECOVERED enough, Dot said, “Are you all rig
ht? I’ve got a lot of work to get on with, duckie.”
“Yes.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s hard for a lot of people. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“Anyway, at least we know who they are, don’t we?”
I said, “But why are they haunting me?”
“Oh no, duckie,” she said. “No no no. They’re not haunting you. You’re haunting them. They don’t want to be here.”
“But—”
“It’s not your father; it’s what he was. That boy isn’t you; it’s what you were. Leave them alone. Why don’t you leave them alone?”
My eyes wanted to fill with tears all over again. I managed to stop it. Someone tapped on the door. She ignored it.
“He was very, very confused,” she said.
“Yeh.”
“He wasn’t much older than you are now.”
“No.”
“You can’t hate him.”
“No. I don’t.”
“You have to forgive him. That’s important.”
I nodded.
“You have to forgive him. I pull the stopper out. That’s all I do.”
I stood up. “I’m ready to go. Thank you.”
She got up stiffly, pressing a hand to her arthritic hip, and moved to the door, where she lifted the latch. I thanked her a second time and made to go outside. “Hold on a moment,” she said, “there’s something else.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve had some new shirts and trousers in as will fit you now.”
22
OH THERE WILL BE TIME FOR SWEET WINE
Can someone hold your hand and make lost memories come tumbling down? Nikki and I fell asleep that night drugged with sex and folded in each other’s love. But new forces were dragging me back. I had a dream that looped horribly. It played over and over. If I woke and went back to sleep, it would start again. It was just a dream of being in a small boat out at sea, but a hole had appeared in the boat. Instead of water running in, grains of the boat were running out and into the water like sand running in an inverted hourglass. At first the grains appeared not to move at all, then a hole collapsed in the boat and the grains appeared to run faster, running toward some groaning terror that would cause me to wake up.
I spent the next day curled up in bed like a fetus. Nikki went into work and told them I had a stomach bug. In breaks between activities she came back to the flat above the bucket-and-spade shop and fed me soup or got into bed with me and made me talk about these things.
“I can see why your mother never wanted you to come here,” she said. “But you must have known. You must have known that this is where it all happened.”
“I was three years old. I didn’t know anything.” Perhaps that wasn’t entirely true. Clearly some dark, secret place inside me knew everything perfectly. But those events had accreted a shell and burrowed under sand to be covered with water. Not everyone with lost memories can swim their way back to remembering. The muscle will perish; the shell will be picked clean; the waves will break the shell and pound it into sand.
I didn’t blame my mother or Ken, even though they should have spoken to me about these things. They were already busy blaming themselves. They simply could not bear to prize open the subject.
After the events I have described, other memories came tumbling back to me. I remember being at home and playing in the front garden. The wooden gate opened and there was my natural father in a smart blue suit. I hadn’t seen him for some weeks and when I ran to him, he swept me up in his arms. I loved him and I’d missed him. I didn’t know why he’d been away so long.
He was wearing spectacles. I hadn’t seen him wear them before and I didn’t like it. He seemed not to be quite like my father. But then he looked up the path and asked me if I wanted to go to the seaside. I said yes. He put me in his car and drove us to the seaside. He hadn’t told my mother. He hadn’t told anyone. When we got to the seaside we were hiding out while he made his plans.
Nikki encouraged me to go back into work the next day. Even though I was in a fragile condition, I was mindlessly efficient. I smiled when I needed to smile. It can be done, and is done often. I sometimes think that half of humanity is smiling across a profound agony. Nikki and I were in every sense professional. We didn’t tell anyone about what had happened.
ONE EVENING NIKKI was dancing in the variety show at the theater while I was calling the giant bingo session in the Slowboat. Between intoning “Two little ducks” or “Kelly’s Eye, number one” into the microphone, I medicated myself with beer and stood at the bar, chatting with Eric the Brummie drummer. Someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned round and I almost dropped my stein of beer.
“Awright?”
I felt the blood drain from my face, and then rush back again. “Colin. How are you?”
“I’m all right. You?”
I stared at him as if he were the ghost in Macbeth. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Just the one. I’m not staying. I’m up for poker night. Last time.”
I moved over to the bar and ordered a pint of Federation ale for him. I was afraid of my hands shaking again, just as they had when he’d taken me for a beer at the Dunes. I took a breath, composed myself, and carried his beer over to a table. He joined me, but he kept looking out the corner of his eye, as if he was scanning the room for someone.
“Is Terri up here with you?” I asked.
“Na.” He took a sip of beer and the foam printed a mustache on his upper lip.
“Where is she?”
“Dunno.”
We sat in silence for a minute. He scanned the room constantly. Then he volunteered some information. “I took her off to Marbella after last I seen you.”
“Marbella.”
“Yeh. It’s in Spain.”
I wanted to say I knew where Marbella was but I thought better of it.
“Thought that would suit her. We used to go there in the old days. We was all right for a while. Then she ran away.”
“Ran away where?”
“I’ve a good idea.”
“Oh?”
“With someone from ’ere.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
His eyes flared open and he tipped back his head. I saw the back of his upper fillings. “I nearly catched her at it. In that feater over there.”
“What, this theater?” I was incredulous.
“I followed her in one day. It wasn’t that Italian ’coz he was ’aving a smoke with Pinky. When I gets in there she’s in the dark with that scrote, your mate.”
“My mate?”
“That fuckin’ soft Mancunian. Whats’isname?”
“Nobby? Are you sure?”
“He was wearing that kit like you wear.”
“But are you certain it was him?”
“Less it was you, or that prat with the wig.” He flashed me a half smile. “Na, it was him all right. I know ’coz he disappeared off the scene straight after.”
“I don’t know, Colin,” I said helpfully. “Nobby? It doesn’t add up. He’s not her type.”
“Her type? Anyone with a hard cock is her type. Maybe I’ll go up to Manchester. See if I can’t find ’em both.”
It occurred to me that Colin might just do that. I don’t know what it was about Nobby but he always fitted the bill. I suddenly felt emboldened. “Colin. Why do this to yourself? Sometimes you have to let it go. Walk away.”
He sniffed. “Listen to you. Givin’ the advice out now, ain’cha?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right, son. I’ve heard it. It’s all right.”
It was impossible to tell if he was lying about Terri’s fate. I tried to look deep into his eyes. It was like looking down a mine shaft.
He drained his beer glass and stood up. “Might see you here next season, then?”
I got up off my stool. He d
ug his hands in his pockets, almost as if to tell me that he didn’t want any handshake ritual. “Might well do, Colin. Might well do.”
He nodded briefly, turned, and left. It wasn’t until he’d passed through the doors that I let out a big sigh.
I rejoined Eric at the bar. He was chatting with one of the bar staff and when the barman moved across to serve someone, Eric said to me, “I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.”
“He’s not,” I said.
THE SATURDAYS CAME and went, the sea turned the gray of gunmetal, and the infamous bracing east coast wind grew squally and bitter. Most people had gone back to work and for the last couple of weeks the resort was populated by special groups: disabled people, children from care homes, and the like. It was actually more fun to work with these groups but the numbers of holidaymakers were already well down on the peak season and I was aware that many of the staff had already left.
The performers were signed off and a rudimentary program was offered for the rump of the season. A goodbye party was held for the theater people. Luca Valletti made a brief appearance. He arrived late, had one drink, and then went round solemnly but punctiliously shaking hands with everyone equally.
When he came to me he blinked, smiled, and offered his hand. “I wish you every success with your studies.”
“Thank you, Luca. I learned a lot from you.”
He blinked and regarded me rather strangely, I thought. Then he offered me almost a bow and moved on to the next person.
Nikki meanwhile was already thinking about her next job. She had an audition in Coventry for a part in a Christmas pantomime production: Puss in Boots, where the chorus line wore leather boots up to the top of their thighs. I saw her off at the train station and went to meet her when she came back. She didn’t know whether she’d got the part or not. We avoided discussing the future.
In the final week we had a party of disabled children from a special home arriving, and Nikki, Gail, and I threw ourselves into designing a fresh program suitable for kids in wheelchairs. Even Tony—yes, Tony the fascist—got enthusiastic about making it accessible and high energy, so that we could give the kids our very best.