The Girl on the Pier

by Paul Tomkins

  I laugh. “I bet he had a car.”

  “No… He had a motorbike.”

  I laugh again. “That’s such a cliché!”

  “I didn’t like him because he had a motorbike. Well, a scooter, actually. A Vespa.”

  “When you said he was older, you mean he was a Mod from the sixties? Was he in his sixties?”

  She kicks my foot.

  “He was a year older. I thought he was interesting, at least at first. He was the guy that every girl in my class swooned over, but I soon realised that he was too self-absorbed, and my role was to fluff his ego. Still, somehow I let him get under my skin, and even though I didn’t really like him that much, I was jealous when he gave other girls attention, and that made me think I was in love with him, which was stupid really, looking back. He dumped me because I wouldn’t sleep with him. I soon got over him, but only after a week of feeling like my life was over.”

  We move on to discuss music. She tells me how much she loves the new Depeche Mode album, although I haven’t even heard it. Still, I have at least heard of them, unlike her other suggestions. When asked the same question in reply I say The Beatles, because I don’t think you can go wrong with them.

  She then asks me about my favourite film, and again I feel uncomfortable that I’m not as hip or switched-on as her.

  I pause to think. There are so many different types of film that I enjoy, but I’ve never really picked a personal favourite. My first thought is Die Hard, which I watch for escapist pleasure, but I’m pretty sure that this isn’t a Yipikaye motherfucker moment. I quickly move on to consider the type of film she’d enjoy. Something arty and well-photographed. Something from the annals of film history. Something romantic, but not soppy or sentimental. In truth, there are not a lot of films in this category I feel able to discuss, given that I’m no movie buff. In the end I plump for Rear Window, although it’s perhaps a little creepy, and not full of stunning cinematography. It is, however, one of the few bona fide classics I’ve seen multiple times.

  “Oh, I love Rear Window!” she says, her eyes widening.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah! I wouldn’t say it’s one of my very favourite films, but it’s still a classic. That set! It’s amazing!”

  “I know!” I say, nodding furiously. “I’d love to be able to walk around it. Imagine that? It’s enormous!”

  “How cool would that be? Who would you visit? I’d go and keep Miss Lonelyhearts company.”

  “The songwriter makes me laugh,” I say, deciding against mentioning Miss Torso for fear of sounding shallow. “I love when he’s drunk and knocks the pages off his piano and falls over.”

  “How pretty was Grace Kelly?” she says, nodding at her own suggestion. “What a stunning woman. So elegant!”

  “Gorgeous…” I say, stopping myself from talking about the actress’ tragic death. “I must watch it again some time.”

  “Actually, you remind me a bit of James Stewart.”

  “You’re not the first person to tell me that,” I say, dishonestly. Even so, it’s clear that I’m more James Stewart than James Dean. But at least she didn’t say James Cagney. “You really think so?” I ask.

  “Yes. The shape of the face, I think. Nothing too specific, but there’s something. Definitely.”

  “Interesting. Could be worse.”

  “He was a fine looking man. My favourite film is Mirror, by Andrei Tarkovsky. Have you seen it? It’s the most beautiful film imaginable.”

  “Can’t say that I have. What’s it about?”

  “It’s not really a film that has a plot as such. Not a conventional one, anyway. The imagery is stunning, though. It’s a collection of moods and feelings – very dreamlike. It’s Russian, from the seventies.”

  “Sounds great,” I say, thinking that it doesn’t really seem like my cup of tea. But I can’t help but feel that I would enjoy it in her company. I can’t help but feel that I would enjoy anything in her company.

  THIRTEEN

  Laura did not die. But she may as well have done, given her altered status in my life. I suffered a bereavement, only without the accompanying sympathy a widower receives. Unless it’s suicide, death is not rejection. You won’t bump into a deceased partner with a new lover. You don’t have to wonder what they are doing, or how happy they are doing it – because they are doing nothing. Your grief, with death, is acceptable, and indulged, and ritualised. Death doesn’t divide up your friends, halve your property. Not that I ever wanted her dead – don’t get me wrong. But it does provide a cleaner break. David and I sometimes discuss the issue, and while he never fully admits it, I sense he prefers that his wife was stolen away by death rather than another man.

  For months after our split I pondered where the past goes, as it slips from our grasp. Where does love disappear to? Are there parallel universes in which the future we planned is enjoyed by other versions of ourselves? As I came to terms with our sudden separation, I asked myself if I still loved her, or if I loved the time we shared, and the future we were denied.

  Laura became just the latest in a long line of absences. Our relationship, after we lost our way, was something I felt I could live without; my brain apparently incapable of understanding what it would miss until given no choice but to stare down that absence, feel its absolute hollowness. Every last drop of happiness infused during the relationship bled out as pain; the exact inverse of the good times revisiting in equal measure as hauntings, torments, nightmares. For a while our relationship was a phantom limb I could sometimes still feel, go to reach out with. Twitching, jittering; confused nerves sending corrupt signals.

  We got on well, and, up until that night when it so violently combusted, never seriously argued. I always took that to be a positive sign – it meant we were somehow compatible. But a lack of conflict does not automatically make for the perfect union. Maybe we were just saving it all for that conclusive night.

  The simple memories – the companionship – belatedly struck me as most important, as I came to terms with life as a single man. In a swimming pool, somewhere warm, holding onto my shoulders, piggybacking through the water. Reading in the garden: paperbacks and newspapers on a summer’s Sunday morning. Coffee and hot chocolate in a quaint café, sheltering from a storm. Laughing – laughing, at anything. And smiling.

  Laura’s heart, in terms of its capacity for love, was the opposite of the Grinch’s; in her case, two sizes too large. She felt, physically, the pain of others, and helped to soothe it. She possessed the same affinity with animals; hating suffering of any kind. Laura not only wanted a cat, she simply had to have the three-legged tabby at the shelter, abandoned by its owner and then overlooked time and again by visitors. And so Maisy came home with us, her stump swinging gyroscopically as she walked, her balance somehow unaffected.

  Arguably the greatest gift ever bestowed into my hands, Laura’s compassion could not dampen my restless spirit, which nagged and gnawed at me like a febrile disease. Even though it may have been beyond me, I wanted to create something: a lasting work of art, something perfect, a statement to endure. I wanted to leave a legacy; and yet I did not know the form it should take, or if I actually possessed the necessary talent to even attempt it. All the same, that restlessness overpowered my better judgements.

  Over and over – even now – I ask myself if life with Laura, rather than my fantasies about Black, represented the truer form of love? Or is it all, no matter whether formed from years of intimacy or concocted from imagined hopes and dreams, confined to our head?

  Is love, no matter how it happens, all in our mind?

  It seems we simply feel what our brains tell us to feel. The message can be right or wrong, real or imagined, genuine or no more than a trick, but ultimately it’s all the same: just chemicals and electricity, creating thoughts and emotions.

  Is our relationship out there – wherever ‘there’ is – floating into distant space? Or is it all still here, locked inside the dense networks of grey m
atter?

  Around this time I took to carrying a journal everywhere. On the inside cover I wrote: Believe what you see, as later it will be refuted. I wanted to write my life story, for what it was worth, but never managed to finish it. Even now, various freehand drafts are piled up in my study, on loose sheets and bound in notebooks; different versions of events, scribbled down, annotated, crossed out, rewritten. On my trusted Smith Corona I typed up diary entries, but nothing was ever completed.

  In those months I discovered that a cherished memory can transform into one of pain if there’s a change in the relationship with those involved. The past, therefore, is never set in stone; what we subsequently learn will colour what we knew and experienced at the time. Good memories turn bad, with a sense of loss or betrayal, and yet bad memories rarely turn good. The best we can hope is to recall the comfort provided by loved ones in times of crisis, and by those pertinent, reassuring songs that somehow keep us going.

  FOURTEEN

  Where the cottage has changed since my childhood is in growing old, wearing down; fading, flaking, crumbling, mouldering. The lustre has long-since disappeared from the patterned paper, which has grown dull in patches and soiled in others. The paintwork is chipped and peeling, the white gloss turned yellow. The house itself seems structurally sound, but the cosmetics are in grave need of attention. I need to rip this place apart.

  It is spitting with fine rain as I lift the last of the boxes from the back of the car, carrying it through to the living room to put with the others. My life’s accumulations seem pretty scant, when laid out across the floor. I’ve faced several crossroads over the years, where moving on involved paring down belongings to the essential, plus those few luxury or sentimental items which enrich my existence. Stacked together, it doesn’t amount to much.

  I score a key through the tape fastening the boxes, peel back the flaps. I lift objects mummified in newspaper and bubble-wrap and place them on all available surfaces. Three sculpted busts are of vital importance to me – reconstructed faces from several years ago: a woman discovered behind Brighton train station, a homeless man found sheltering on the seafront, and a woman washed up in the Adur. I want to know their stories.

  But nothing matches the emotional pull of the painting of Black. When I’ve decided which room I’ll use as my study I will hang it with pride of place. Even now, every time I look at her face I feel that she is staring back – staring only at me.

  * * *

  Despite having fully settled back into the cottage, the childhood feeling of isolation is never far away. The last thing I needed at the age of eight was another new school – my third in three years – but Kitty lived in a different catchment area to my father and the foster family with whom I briefly lived, so there was no choice. That first day at St Edmunds, after the autumn half-term, was like stepping into a cage of prepubescent hate. Word soon got around about my status as an orphan, and my reluctance to make eye contact had me pegged as a ‘weirdo’, even at such a tender age. A lack of sportiness meant that I was an obvious target for bullies, with some declaring me a ‘poofter’, on little evidence other than I was quiet, thoughtful and uncoordinated.

  One moment stands out, as clear today as it was then. Pushed to breaking point one lunchtime, I punch one of my tormentors in the mouth, feeling thrilled as his split lip leaks rich blood. I imagine grabbing his hair and smashing his face into the concrete. However, in a swift response, I find myself on the wrong end of a beating – inasmuch as you can get a ‘beating’ at that age. (I’ve since worked on the corpses of those for whom the term is far more appropriate.) As I grapple and grasp at my opponent the onlookers shout ‘Errr, queer!’ For my troubles I am dragged by a teacher to be caned and demeaned by the hateful headmistress, to add insult and injury to insult and injury.

  While it didn’t stop the playground taunts, no one dared touch me again, knowing that even if they beat me to a pulp I was not afraid to inflict some damage in reply. Even so, friends hardly announced themselves in their droves. If you opted to hang around in my presence you would be inviting bullies to find you guilty by association. As such, I spent evenings and weekends with my face pressed up against my bedroom window, looking over the lake in the back garden, or, in better weather, out in the sprawling cottage grounds, inventing games, discovering potential hideouts, alone but for nature.

  Both my prison and my liberty, then as now.

  The cottage had been in my mother’s family for several generations. By the outbreak of war just she and Kitty survived. They lost their mother to cancer in 1935, and their father, who boasted a proud record of never having taken a sick day from the accountancy firm at which he’d worked his whole life, dropped dead of a heart attack late in 1937.

  My grandparents, long lost to me before I even entered this life.

  Is tragedy genetic?

  I’d never really appreciated it – not that a son necessarily would – but my mother was once a beautiful woman. Perhaps she hadn’t aged as well as she might. My memories are, after all, of someone who was fifty, but the photos secreted around the cottage reveal a striking woman almost unrecognisable to me: loose mousy-blonde ringlets that suited her youth – reminiscent of Carole Lombard – and, looking at her fresh face in one black and white picture, a hint of a late-teen/early-twenties Judy Garland about the fall of her features and the fullness of her lips.

  I never even existed when she was truly alive.

  * * *

  A week has brushed by since I saw Kitty. Sorting, unpacking, searching: removing my world from bags and boxes, finding it all a new home, overtook my days. Walls were shorn of paper, and white emulsion applied, as I pared back the past. Anything of my aunt’s, bar obvious junk and large furniture, I shunted upstairs, to further fill her bedroom, which now resembles a shrine.

  I can’t continue to put off seeing her. It’s time to return to Hove.

  Visiting my aunt assuages some guilt, but in its way it’s also rather soul–destroying: the unnerving proximity to old age and illness, to imminent death, both with her and within the nursing home itself, which reeks of incontinence and bleach. I can’t help but think that we should have had these conversations long before now.

  I arrive late-afternoon, on a day of evaporating cloud. We hug once more, but this time it feels forced. She makes some tea – in a teapot, which strikes me as quaint – and asks if I will carry it through on a tray with some biscuits. We exchange pleasantries, and I ask after her health. “Mustn’t grumble,” she notes, out of habit. There are periods of silence as we eat and drink.

  “So,” she says, setting down her empty cup on its saucer and peering over her glasses. “How are you settling into the cottage?”

  “Fine. It’s nice to be back. Weird, but nice.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d be good enough to take me over there?” she asks. “There are a couple of things I couldn’t find when they rushed me in here.”

  “Funny you should say that. I wanted to ask you about what stuff might be my mother’s? I could use your help.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “You mean now?”

  “At my stage of life there’s always less chance of tomorrow.”

  Kitty is still able to walk with the aid of her frame, although she’s noticeably slower, even within just a week. I help her into my car, fasten her seat belt.

  “How did you end up with the cottage?” I ask, as we pass along the shoreline. “Didn’t Mum live there before you?”

  “She did. It was towards the end of the war. I’d started teaching up in Glasgow after university. Then the time came when I wanted to move home. Around that time your mother started getting ill and had to stop nursing to spend some time in, well, I suppose they called them institutions back then – although you must understand that it wasn’t one of those awful places, with straightjackets and all that. She got better, over time, but she never wanted to live back at the cottage. Any time she came back to visit it made her feel il
l. So she moved to Croydon, and I took the cottage.”

  I let her talk. By the time she finishes we are on the winding country lane that leads to the cottage. The giant horse chestnut heaves into view. Once parked I grab the walking frame from the boot, then help Kitty out of the car. Her eyes, big behind oval lenses, light up at the sight of her home of nine decades.

  “I have to warn you, I’ve made a few alterations,” I note. “Nothing major, mind.”

  “That’s fine. It’s your house now, deary.”

  “I’ve not thrown anything of yours away, though.”

  “After today, unless there’s something you want, just chuck the lot of it. Set fire to it for all I care, or give it to the Sally Army.”

  We enter the house, and she takes in the changes. But she passes no judgement; she knows her time is short, and that, in the grand scheme of things, cosmetics mean nothing. She heads first to the back room, which is now my study. The ornaments that once lined its broad shelf have been replaced with reconstructed skulls, and this clearly takes her by surprise.

  “Your stuff – it’s up here,” I tell her, leading her to the stairs. “All your things are in your bedroom,” I add, helping her up each step, one at a time. On the landing we face Genevieve’s room.

  “Do you remember Genevieve?” I ask.

  “Of course I do,” she says with a scowl. “My memory’s going, but it’s not that bad. She was a real handful, that girl. Trouble.”

  “Her mother – Alice. Did she ever give up hope?”

  “No, I don’t believe so. Drove her to an early grave.”

  “And she never heard anything?”

  “No, nothing. Mind you, I don’t think any of us were surprised. She’d done it before, and she’d do it again, we all knew that. We hoped that she might grow out of it, but no, it wasn’t to be. God-knows what happened to the girl in London. We all feared the worst.”