The Girl on the Pier

by Paul Tomkins

  Although fairly certain that we’d see each other again in the next day or two, I didn’t want the moment to end. I’d managed to prolong the encounter on a couple of occasions, but I’d run out of options. The clock had beaten me: a muffled tannoy announcement caught Black’s attention.

  “That’s my train,” she said.

  “I’ll come and see you off,” I offered, moving to a stand.

  “Please don’t. It’s not necessary. Stay and have your drink. I need to hurry. I’ll be quicker on my own.”

  She leant in to kiss my cheek, and so I offered it. But then – and I’m not totally sure how much of this is imagined – I think she actually moved her lips towards mine, and I instead turned out of what could have been the perfect end to the perfect day.

  Even so, I could have no complaints. And I had the phone number of where she would be staying for the next few days written on my hand. Minutes earlier she had taken the waitress’s biro, and with it scrawled her contact details. I was so thrilled with the act of her tenderly taking my palm and turning it over, followed by the tickle of the pen tip as it ran across my skin, that I never bothered to study the number.

  “You need to get to a hospital,” the waitress informs me, applying a cold wet cloth to the back of my hand. “I’ll drive you. It was my fault. I’ll drive you. I’m taking him to hospital, Elliot.” The café manager offers a token resistance, but soon accepts she is right.

  We take the short drive to the Royal Sussex County Hospital, about a mile away, in her beat-up orange Fiesta, arriving at an antiquated building whose entrance mirrors that of the train station, with a similar ornate glazed veranda. She rushes me inside after some highly unorthodox parking in an area adjacent to the morgue, and we take our seats in the waiting room. In sharp plastic chairs apparently designed for torture rather than treatment, we sit in awkward silence. Sally makes a few attempts at conversation, but I’m not in the mood. She soon gives up.

  In the triage room the dishcloth is finally removed. The damage to my flesh is reasonably severe, but the damage to the ink is even greater. Black’s phone number is gone. Maybe if the peeled skin is taken away, dried out, ironed, and pieced back together by the expert conservers who unravelled the Dead Sea Scrolls, then the numerals will emerge intact and in sequence. Instead, my red-raw, blistering hand is cleaned and dressed, and I leave the hospital with a middle-aged stranger, having lost a link to the woman who fit the profile of the love of my life.

  I comfort myself with the thought that there’s still Jacob; the chance that he knows how to contact Black at her friend’s house.

  As we step out into blinding sunshine, and wander down the ramp towards the rear of the building and the hurriedly-parked car, a gurney is wheeled from the back of an ambulance towards the morgue.

  “Fucking junkies,” groans a uniformed man to the porter who pulls open the broad doors, unaware that we are approaching. The white sheet slips a few inches as the trolley moves, and the face it reveals, though pale and distorted with the disguise of death, is unmistakably that of Jacob Dyer.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jacob and I shared the detached existence of the only child. We felt the abstract presence of the missing sibling: never there in person, but always the awareness of what could have been: the brother or sister who might have stood beside us; the missing, who never existed. Also an orphan, his losses proved less dramatic – he was already a young adult when his parents died. But this was now it: the end of his family line, with no known members of an extended family. Although his sexuality made him unlikely to father a child, generations of Dyers ground to a halt with a needle in a toilet. Millennia of procreation, ceaseless struggles for survival and self-betterment, generation after generation, and it concluded like this.

  His untimely death left me all the more eager to locate Black, not least because it made it all the harder. I needed to share in the momentousness of the news, and in the deepness of her grief. I also harboured a macabre sense of excitement, at the power of disclosure. If the messenger is sometimes shot, he is also on hand to provide comfort, and to get caught in the crossfire of stray emotions fizzing and firing like pheromones.

  My first instinct, upon being dropped off by Sally at the Metropole, was to take a train to Haywards Heath. Walking towards the station I took a brief detour via Jacob’s studio. Police tape cordoned off the building. I didn’t hang around. I also hurried past the café upon reaching the station, eager to avoid Sally. But with the interminably slow Sunday timetable I spent thirty minutes waiting on the platform, and then ten more sat in a stationary carriage, trying to plan a strategy for when I got to a place I knew nothing about, to find a person whose specific whereabouts were a complete and utter mystery.

  The train, once it finally left the station, seemed to inch along, with several unexplained stops. By contrast, my mind raced with all the ways I could break the news, playing out various – albeit largely similar – scenarios of how she would react. In each she played the grateful recipient who breaks down in sorrow, and who turns to me for support – emotional and physical – before, deep in despair, cancelling her trip to Europe. In that instant our lives are fused together: two splintered shards of bone, bound tight by plaster, to heal in unison.

  The reality, however, was of a man wandering around a town like a vagrant, picking a direction as if blown by the wind, and finding nothing and no one he recognises. This man slept uneasily on a park bench, and resumed his search in the morning, walking until late afternoon. Defeated, he returned to his hotel in Brighton, to crash for 18 solid hours; awaking just a couple of days before her departure, from an unspecified terminal, to a far greater unknown and unsearchable landscape.

  The days following Jacob’s death involved a litany of moments that rank far from my finest. I wandered up and down the beach, back and forth on the shoreline paths and roads, hopeful of a reunion with Black. So chaotic: action for action’s sake. Through the shopping centre and back again, around the Lanes, to the head of the Palace Pier, and then back once more, only this time via Old Steine and the train station, on the way to Jacob’s studio. Perhaps there was one place to which I should have remained fixed, for the best part of a week – somewhere that, at some point, she surely had to pass. But instead I felt compelled to keep moving, because to stand still felt akin to doing nothing; taking the risk that I would always be in the wrong place at the wrong time, moving away as she moved near.

  I had so little to go on. All I knew was that, having recently moved out of her student lodgings, she planned to kip on a friend’s sofa in the days before her trip. College records were off bounds, despite my best efforts at persuading a clerical assistant to divulge information (which, I sensed, pushed her perilously close to calling security). I could find no record of Suzanne Black. A living ghost; alive, but invisible.

  Jacob’s funeral presented my last realistic hope, the one logical place I could expect to find her – but only if she’d heard the news. And as I waited and waited at the cemetery, scouring the crowd for that one face, it became evident that she hadn’t. I had little doubt that she would have postponed her trip had she known. She must have already left for the continent.

  Still, I could make enquiries. Awkwardly, I asked strangers, including Jacob’s lover Jez, if they knew her, and while some did, none could tell me anything I didn’t already know. And so I spent the funeral of a close friend sidetracked by selfish desires. I’d like to say that this proved to be the end of it all, but, alas, it did not – not for that day, and not from then on.

  I attended the wake, but made my exit after just fifteen minutes. An idea struck me: with everyone Jacob knew swapping tales in the dank, smoky function room of a nearby pub, an opportunity arose. I saw no other way around it: I had to break into his studio. Inside, I prayed, would be that elusive link. Soon the property would be cleared and sold, the chance gone. I had no doubt: now or never.

  The window to the downstairs toilet – where Jacob’s bod
y had been discovered – offered itself as the obvious entry point. Secluded from view, its pane of glass shattered quietly. With the last remaining shards knocked out, the gap was big enough to haul myself through. Once inside I stopped for a moment, at the spot where my friend spent his last living moments, to pay somewhat twisted respects. I wished I could honour him with more dignity, but it’s not like he was sentimental. Unlike him, I had a life to be getting on with, and in that sense, he would have approved. “Live, man. Live!” he used to say, as he downed another drink.

  The studio stood eerily silent, unnaturally still; my footsteps resonating with ripples of echo, nothing else making a sound. Perhaps I also imagined an additional silence – a deathly silence. After all, the space now held an eternal absence. Heart racing, I searched upstairs and down, rifling through personal artefacts: diaries, contact books, scraps of paper. I rummaged through things that took me to the heart of his existence: the art, that most personal means of expression; the clothing, on wire hangers, gradually unforming from the shape of the man; the treasured knickknacks, with stories bound up in those transparent things. But all I could locate of Black, in both the working and living quarters, had been created by the artist’s own hand. Images, not facts. She existed only as simulacrums in sketches and oils – patches of colour mixed and blended, scraped and stabbed, stippled and dabbed. She surrounded me, but never in more than two dimensions. From the front she lit up the room. Side-on she vanished.

  Then I recalled the video camera, which documented both the modelling session and my belated arrival. It was unlikely to provide any evidence to aid in my search, but it was a unique record of such a remarkable encounter; one I knew I simply must possess. I hit eject, and the mechanism whirred before delivering the cassette. With it in hand I made my way back upstairs, for one last look.

  Fatigue, swirling like a chloroform cloud, had me slump down on the bed. I’d felt feverish for days, since the night on the pier, with my sleep pattern increasingly erratic. Within a heartbeat I lay unconscious, exhausted to the point where I felt myself sliding through the duvet, beyond the mattress, under the floor, beneath the earth, on and on, to some unnamed darkness.

  From this comatose state I awoke neither gently nor in my own time. I heard a sound so loud that I found myself bolt upright before I’d even had a chance to break from a dream. Disoriented, until adrenaline injected me to hyper-alertness, I knew nothing other than something serious had happened downstairs. I felt sick. My presence here would not be easy to explain. Big trouble awaited.

  Shit.

  However, my fears soon dissipated. Upon descending from the mezzanine I saw a giant gull frantically flapping amid the splintered shards of a large window pane, slipping in smears of its own blood. As I reached the final stair it clearly lost its fight.

  Able to at last think clearly, with vitality now coursing through every fibre of my being, I had to get out. But one last thing drew me back to the studio floor: the painting of Black, the last oil applied to canvas by Jacob. On the easel, she awaited my rescue. Still wet, I carefully escorted her out through the front door.

  It was time to return home to London.

  I spent the next fortnight in the capital, trudging through routine with a vacant air. Even though I could do little in Brighton, I felt I had to get back, to be ready and waiting ahead of the following summer. I saw little to lose by relocating and starting afresh on the south coast, and within weeks I’d managed to do just that. I couldn’t help but feel optimistic. I had eleven months to forge a link with the unlived part of my life; eleven months to locate my future.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Kitty’s cancer is proving swift and ravenous, spreading like armies of insects eager to join together at a central hub. Tumours race through her, nesting in organs and slowly shutting them down. To them, nothing is inedible; metastases forming in bone and soft tissue, neoplasms leaving bad cells in their wake as they feast on the good. The only thing that slows their progress is her age, and the relative lack of healthy tissue. But for that, she’d be dead by now. Cancer likes the old, but there’s more to devour in the young.

  For the most part her mind is still sharp, when it isn’t in the shifting grasp of morphine. Now mostly bed-bound, nurses and care assistants visit several times a day. The plan, I am told, is to move her to a hospice within the week. I am fortunate to catch her at a good time, with the intensity of pain lower, and a balanced mix of drugs in her system. With a control pad she raises the back of the bed to a more upright setting, and asks how I’ve been.

  “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” I reply.

  “My health is entirely predictable. I’m dying, end of story. Are you looking after yourself? Eating properly?”

  “I’ve been living alone long enough now, Kitty. I’m okay. No alarms, no surprises.”

  She turns her head. “What alarm, deary?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “I’ve been going through Mum’s stuff,” I say, as I sit beside her bed. “It was weird reading those old love letters, from all those years before dad was around.”

  “She didn’t only exist once she met your dad. She was once young, and she knew love. But she had… issues.”

  “That sounds like a euphemism if ever I heard one.”

  “I don’t like using other words, the ones that sound more like labels. She was hospitalised for treatment in her twenties, you know,” she adds, coughing into a tissue, before continuing in a rasp that suggests something is lodged in her throat. “They discharged her after a month or so, and years later gave her the all clear, so to speak. But she shouldn’t have had you… Oh, not that you shouldn’t be here,” she quickly adds. “It was just too much. Too much for her, too much for the marriage. They thought they weren’t capable of having children, that she was too old. You surprised them.”

  I choose not to linger on this fact, although in its way it still hurts. “Did you ever go to see her in Croydon?”

  “No,” she says, staring blankly, as if trying to find something lost within her mind. “I don’t believe I did.”

  “What happened between the two of you?”

  She sighs. “Nothing too much – no big bust-up – but in the end I gave up trying to help her. I did my best. Maybe it wasn’t good enough? But she took herself away, and didn’t keep in touch. She wasn’t the same girl I grew up with.”

  “It’s so weird, thinking of her as a young woman,” I say, seeing my mother in the eyes of my aunt. “Had she managed to successfully stay with one of those men who wrote to her I’d never have been born. And yet part of me wishes that she’d had that happiness. She deserved better.”

  “You can’t change the past,” Kitty says, in between deep breaths. “It’s not even worth thinking about in those terms. What’s done is done.”

  “It was nice to get a sense of what she was like when she was excited about life.”

  “Then in its way it’s a kind of gift.”

  I ask a question about my mother’s antidepressants, but Kitty seems distracted. “And your father,” she says, out of the blue. “Well, he was a useless bugger. Waste of space, he was.”

  I can’t bring myself to hate my father, but she’s not wrong.

  “Look, deary, can you do me a favour?” she asks.

  “Of course.”

  “Take me out. I want to see the sea. One last time.”

  “No problem,” I say, eager to oblige.

  “But first let’s have our tea,” she says. “There’s always time for tea.”

  Kitty groans as I shift her from the bed into the wheelchair. There is little left of her – a skeleton in skin. In my grip her spine is a row of bony arcs pressing through cotton, and as I lift her up I feel her feet dangling limply against my shins. This close, in a kind of intimacy we’ve never before shared, a sour odour seeps from her pores. I feel like a parent, moving a helpless infant. Life has reversed our positions; I’m now the responsible
one. And yet neither of us is natural in the role of carer.

  A warm June afternoon: ideal conditions in which to take my aunt along the promenade. There is, however, a cool breeze, so I’m careful to wrap a blanket over her legs. In her usual way she insists it’s not necessary, tells me to stop fussing.

  She is still in good spirits, and relatively free from pain, as we make our way from west to east. A man on a motorised skateboard slaloms past, bulky headphones encasing his ears. Beyond him screams Tranny And Proud from a luminous pink t-shirt, its wearer not prepared to go under the radar. How must this all look to a woman of my aunt’s age, born into a different world?

  We pass the sad-looking West Pier, which, after catastrophes at the hands of three of the four elements, is all but gone. Kitty looks hard at the Metropole and the Grand, as I push her along King’s Road, as if memories are stirring within her mind –– although she remains silent. Then, out of the blue, she says “Take me home.”

  I stop the wheelchair and begin to manoeuvre a U-turn.

  “No,” she snaps. “My home. The cottage.”

  I explain that it is much too far to walk when pushing a wheelchair, and that she had recently given the property to me. I tell her that we went there, a few weeks ago. “Oh,” she says, unconvincingly, as if she remembers none of the recent past. “Oh,” she repeats, still sounding unsure.

  “I can drive you, if you want? I can take you to see the cottage one more time?”

  “No. Take me back to wherever I should be. I need my bed.”

  I walk around the wheelchair, to face her. Her eyes have darkened, confusion etched in a mid-distance stare.

  “Where am I?” she asks, lost in her own life.