Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  I reached the rear of the pavilion and checked my watch. Night was due to start its shift here in a couple of hours. Till then I had the crude graffiti scrawled on the back of the pavilion to keep me company. That, the cold, and the grumble of hunger in my belly.

  * * *

  Becs came to me, during those cold two hours, after I had given up trying to break into the pavilion to see if there were any barrels of biscuits from the previous summer’s afternoon teas. She sat with me while I huddled against the back wall, under the red words SHAZ SUX COX, looking out over the field I had trudged across as it turned dusty, its white fence growing ghostly in the gloaming. I didn’t turn to look at her, in case that meant she would go away. I stared straight ahead and we talked in low voices, about Sarah, mostly, but also about Melanie. When it was time to get up and turn my thoughts to other things, I could remember nothing of our chat apart from the way she had said it would be all right, really, if I wanted to be with someone else: Being with someone else doesn’t mean that you’re not with me as well.

  The cricket pitch had meanwhile become a black hole separating me from the hospital. Lights now punched through the blocks of brown stone. I saw silhouettes in the windows, figures looking out at the screaming miles of darkness and seeing nothing but a mirror for their own minds. I wiped away my tears and began to walk the boundary that would take me along a line of tall, slender cypress trees, keeping me hidden until I reached the forecourt. As I got nearer, I checked for possible ways in to the building. The visitors’ car park was still being used, which was a relief: it would mean I probably wouldn’t be stopped if I was spotted wandering the wards. To bolster my chances, I snatched up a handful of irises from a flower bed at the edge of the car park, and returned to focusing my scrutiny on the doors. My best choice, I decided, was not one of the orthodox entrances that might be manned by security muppets looking out for me to return. Instead, my attention was drawn to the fire doors, and one in particular, since it seemed to provide unofficial access for admin slaves who needed to pop outside for a cigarette break. To facilitate ease of passage, a brick had been placed against the door to prevent it locking and thus stranding poor, freezing nicotine addicts on the wrong side of it. I watched while a group of three women shivered there and turned the air blue, then hurried back inside. As soon as they were gone, I rushed out of the shadows, across the road, and in through the same door. Wisps of smoke hung around the chilly interior, along with the dulling echoes of heels on stone steps, the chatter and laughter of colleagues well known to each other.

  I hesitated in that alcove by the steps, suddenly cowed by the enormity of the building I now needed to search. I didn’t have a clue where to head for. What got me moving was more footsteps descending: the next wave of lung-abusers.

  I headed along the passageway to the main ground-floor corridor, tastefully decked out with mushroom-coloured paint on the walls and a carpet that was a kind of creamy, broad-bean green. I spent the next five minutes or so walking along it while the irises spilled crumbs of soil from their exposed roots. I must have looked suitably visitor-ish, however, because the white coats, starched skirts and blue overalls didn’t stop me to ask where I thought I was going.

  I experienced a bit of a heart murmur when I stumbled upon the reception area and, although Sonya had clocked off, No. 1 and No. 2 were still spoiling the scenery, as unpleasant as their toilet-task namesakes.

  Just to the side of the reception area I found a little map of the building that showed me exactly where I was, but where precious little else could be learned. A squeak of leather on the marble floor warned me that YOU ARE HERE might soon become YOU ARE HERE, HERE AND HERE, so my eyes fell upon the large space that was the recreation room, and I decided that would have to do for now. I hurried along as the serge uniforms turned on to the corridor. I felt their eyes on the back of my head, maybe beginning to recognise the battered leather jacket, and it was all I could do to stop myself from breaking into a sprint.

  I turned a corner and felt some relief that they hadn’t shouted out for me to stop. A minute or so later, I was standing by a large wooden door with a plastic plaque affixed to it: REC ROOM.

  I went in. Thankfully, although I had suspected so, the recreation hall turned out to not be for the use of staff.

  The air was thick with illicit cigarette smoke. Through it drifted patients in varying modes of what looked like catatonia. They all wore pyjamas and slippers, or bathrobes. A snooker table stood at the centre of the room, with a yellow lamp spilling low-wattage light over it. On the far side, a soporific game of table tennis was taking place. A bunch of unmoving heads watched a film on a television that rendered all colour as an eerie mix of green and blue. The lazy slam of darts into a cork board. Sticky trays bearing plastic cups of orange squash were doing the rounds, along with plates of bourbons and ginger nuts. One of the guys with a tray offered me a drink and I took it, along with a couple of biscuits, which I snaffled.

  ‘Do you know Gary Cullen?’ I asked him, before he could move away. He shook his head.

  I moved deeper into the torpid mass of bodies. A couple hunched over a chess set might even have been asleep. A guy leaned over a cue to try for the blue into a centre pocket as a great spill of silver drool spun out of his slack mouth.

  Medication time had come and gone at the zoo.

  I took my time and spoke gently, not wanting to upset anybody’s narcotic tranquillity. But after half an hour I was beginning to get impatient. I sat next to a woman in front of the television, where a green Roy Scheider was talking to a blue Meryl Streep across a green-blue desk. ‘Do you know Gary Cullen?’ I asked her. I had said nothing else since I got here, and I was starting to feel very weird, as though I might say nothing else ever again. As if I had taken some medicine, too. My words were even slowing down to match the pace of theirs.

  She shook her head.

  Christ. ‘Does anybody in here know Gary Cullen?’

  A no chorus.

  ‘He used to be a patient here. He was a little violent, I think. Messed up. He sneaked away without asking permission. About two months ago. Surely one of you knew him?’

  A yes chorus.

  ‘You all knew him?’

  I couldn’t have wished for more yeses if I had been at the antonym club and had just asked if anyone knew what the opposite of no was.

  I collared the guy with the tray just as he was taking the empty cups back to the kitchen.

  ‘You knew Gary Cullen?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘But I asked earlier and you said–’

  ‘You asked me if I know him. No, I don’t know him. He’s gone now, but I knew him.’

  Great. I fall into a room full of basket cases only to find they’re playing semantic jokes. Fucking wonderful.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, trying to swallow my anger. ‘Can I talk to you about him? Just a few questions?’

  We were in the kitchen by now. A woman was kneeling in front of the guy doing the dishes and fellating him with the kind of energy you might find at a narcoleptics’ sleepover. He was as flaccid as his dishrag. It was all too appallingly bathetic.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

  ‘I’d like to know about his visitors,’ I said. ‘One in particular.’

  ‘He never had visitors.’

  ‘Never?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure about that? Not one?’

  ‘No, not even his wife. She couldn’t afford to come up here from London. Nobody came to see Gary. Nobody came to see a lot of people.’

  I must have looked distraught, because he asked me if I was all right.

  I nodded and then, moronically, asked him again: ‘Not one visitor?’

  ‘No, it’s not as if he was alone. Don’t think Gary Cullen was a sob story. He had plenty of friends. One in particular.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A woman.’

  ‘Did his wife know?’

  ‘She wasn’t that kind of friend.’


  I said: ‘Do you know… did you know her name?’

  He shook his head. The guy at the sink was starting to laugh in a way that put me in mind of a car with a small engine starting up on a very cold day. ‘That tiggles,’ he said.

  ‘Look, can we go back to the other room?’

  He introduced me to Paul after we returned to the snooker table. Paul had slept in the bed next to Gary’s. Paul’s place in the queue of players had been jumped by a small, stocky scowl called Ronnie. To pacify him, Ronnie was allowing Paul to chalk his cue after every couple of shots.

  ‘I understand you were quite close mates with Gary Cullen,’ I said to him. Paul didn’t say anything. His arms moved ceaselessly inside his voluminous silk nightgown. A red serpent crawled up the back of it.

  ‘Blue tip?’ he asked Ronnie, and Ronnie bowed his lips, shook his head. Then, as if his thoughts had caught up with what I asked him, Paul said, ‘He used to give me his dessert whenever we had rice pudding or semolina, or any of that stuff. I love that stuff.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘like I say, close mates. So were you around whenever he was chatting to this best mate of his, this female friend of his?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘Oi, blue tip?’

  He went off and chalked Ronnie’s cue and I chewed my lips. One of the nurses had come in and was giving everyone half-hour warnings that it was time to start winding down and think about heading back to their beds.

  Paul was back, blowing chalk dust off his fingertips. ‘No miscues, not with me around,’ he said.

  ‘Where can I find her?’ I asked. ‘It would be really helpful to have a chat with her.’

  ‘I bet it would,’ he said. ‘Why do you need to know?’

  ‘She’s my wife,’ I said. ‘She was cheating on me.’

  ‘Ouch.’ Paul waggled his hand, said: ‘So why didn’t you come and visit her?’

  ‘Who says I didn’t?’

  ‘If you did, you’d know where to find her now.’ People laughed at that. He laughed too.

  I ignored him, and pressed on. ‘What did they talk about when they were together? Do you know?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I was always sent away when she was around. He always wanted to talk to her in private. She must have been good for him, though, because whenever they were together, he looked peaceful, relaxed, you know? Sorry to say that about your wife, but that’s how it looked to me, at least. Oi, blue tips? Blue tips?’

  ‘Look, help me out here. Okay, she isn’t my wife. But do you have any idea where she is? I’m desperate.’

  He looked at me properly for the first time. ‘I wouldn’t tell you, even if I knew,’ he said. ‘What would you do? Kill her?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Gary was my friend,’ Paul said, suddenly vehement. His hands, with their strange blue fingertips, fluttered violently around his face and then mine. I backed off. The nurse was coming our way.

  ‘Calm down, Paul,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean anything by that. I just want to know where she is.’

  ‘Yes, so you can kill her. I tell you where she is and she winds up on the news, dead. Well, no. Understand? No.’

  The nurse intervened: ‘Paul, no need to shout. What’s got your back up?’

  Time to make myself scarce.

  * * *

  I found a place to hide. The gents’ toilets. I locked myself in a cubicle and pressed my fingers into my eyes until weird blooms of colour unfolded inside my head. Hours passed, silence fell incrementally: cars leaving the car park; the shuffle of feet coming in for a piss, shuffling away towards bed; the cleaners with their vacuums; the security guards on their patrols, soft footfalls and murmurs in the corridor. Lights out.

  At around midnight I levered myself upright and gritted my teeth against the sudden rush of pins and needles that turned both my legs into blocks of numb nothingness. The smell of smoke and something else – bleach maybe, madness possibly – was deep in my clothes. The most insane place to be on Earth must be the inside of a toilet cubicle in an institute devoted to mental health. I saw pictures and read messages carved on the walls that ought to exist nowhere other than the inside of criminal minds, or those of horror writers. I was cold, hungry and depressed. But then I thought about Rebecca, and remembered how lucky I was. Nothing that shat on me in life could give me proper cause for complaint. Nothing.

  The corridor was quiet. I made it to the entrance hall without incident, and slipped the lock of the door into the reception area. There was a signing-in book tucked under the counter, which still, alluringly, smelled of Sonya’s perfume. I took a Maglite torch out of my pocket and waded through the pages, realising that it was a fruitless task but not knowing what else I could do. The chances of Kara signing her real name were pretty slim, let alone her including an address, but you never knew; maybe the troubled air here might have affected her thinking.

  Scanning the entries for August, I found no mention of Gary Cullen’s name in the To Visit column. He was unlucky in September, too, and, flicking back further, also in July and June.

  I closed the book and returned it to the shelf beneath the counter, before sneaking over to the long rank of four-drawer filing cabinets. Thankfully, none of them was locked. I established that the files were arranged in alphabetical order, and quickly found a label reading: CULLEN, Gary Terence. Lots of stuff about his criminal past. Lots of medication references. Lots of chaff. And one ear of wheat among it. A photograph, black and white, from some Christmas party on the ward. Gary with his arm around a woman. The woman? She was the woman in my eyes: it was definitely Kara Geenan, although her hair was different, longer. On the back was a handwritten caption: Gary Cullen and Olivia Rawle get into the spirit of Xmas. I stuffed the photo in my pocket and quickly flicked through the other stuff in the file, but there was nothing of note.

  I shut the drawer and was thinking about leaving when something tapped me at the back of my brain and whispered: What if? I pulled open a few more drawers. RAWLE, Olivia. There was nothing in her file save a piece of paper with a phone number on it. Frustrated, and swearing lightly, I checked between her file and those of RANKIN, Elizabeth Lucy and RAYMOND, Colette but nothing had slipped out.

  Torch beams picked out patterns on the ceiling: the nightwatchmen approaching.

  I pocketed the phone number and sidled out of the reception booth. The main doors were locked, so I set off a fire alarm and melted into the shadows until the place was milling with patients and staff, in a barely restrained mosh of hysteria. The security guards had as much say-so in proceedings as a newborn has in what it should be named. When the doors were opened, I drifted along with the crowd until we were outside, then I peeled off towards the cypress trees and the field, and the car and some sort of resolution.

  * * *

  Later, much later, in the sanctity of my room at the Bed & Breakfast, in the dark, I called that number.

  A recorded message. Her voice so near that if I turned my head she could be lying on this bed next to me.

  She said: Show yourself, Sorrell.

  14

  There’s a little part of Aigburth Vale where people used to congregate in the summer. The triangle of land at the corner of Aigburth Road and Ashfield Road, just south of Sefton Park, used to become waterlogged sometimes, providing an extremely unpleasant swimming pool for the local kids – abutting, as it did, the public toilets situated under the raised part of the road. The toilets were closed now, and many of the buildings that had contributed to the flooding were gone, leaving a patch of wasteland. It was here that I now parked the car.

  I remembered sitting here in a deckchair one summer afternoon, having taken a sicky from the security job I was then enduring. I had a mate who lived nearby but we didn’t like the park. In the summer it stank of dog shit and you were in danger of being mugged for a wallet full of fresh air, so I preferred the banter on the street. We were listening to the cricket on the radio and watching the kids play football, or asking the ne
ighbours if they could wash their cars for fifty pence. There was a lot of cheeking going on, but it was good-humoured, the sun softening everybody’s edges. Towards evening, a radio announcement told of a young girl who had been raped and strangled, her body discovered that afternoon on a patch of land near St Michael’s Hamlets, no more than a mile from where we were then sitting. Everyone went inside, silently and finally, as if a switch had been thrown. Nobody said a word, not even the children as they trooped home after their parents or older siblings. I think a couple of families moved away from Liverpool not long after that.

  As I crossed the A561, I wondered if the same kind of thing had happened after Georgina Millen’s body had been discovered. Just on the left there was a little track, a path that nevertheless possessed the sign Otterspool Road, which took you through Otterspool Park to the promenade and various beauty spots by the river. Under the road sign was the bracketed, unpleasant word Unadopted. The girl had been discovered just beyond the gate that prevents vehicles from using the track, her broken body hidden from the main road by the first bend. Her head had been removed. I ducked under the barrier and tiptoed through the mud. I didn’t have to look too hard, because there was an old bunch of flowers pinned to a tree, all colour drained out of them, and hiding their faces like shameful children. I scuffed about in the mud, wondering what I’d hoped to find here, considering that forensics would have taken every last fleck of gnat shit away for scrutiny. But I knew I wasn’t really here in the hope of finding a miracle shred of evidence; I just needed the smell of him, I needed to be able to see what he had seen. Somehow that comforted me, made me feel closer to him. And once I was closer to him, he didn’t seem so out of reach.