The Girl on the Pier

by Paul Tomkins

  When I get home I find the ciné film Kitty gave me waiting on the doormat, along with a five-minute DVD transfer. I waste no time, placing the disc straight into the player.

  A distorted face crackles on the screen, a twitching mouth flickering at the bottom corner. Lines dissect the jagged features, out of focus from close contact with the lens, until a circle of white with a flaring yellow-red circumference darts diagonally across. The face – that of my father – is gone, dissolved in a flash-fire of sunlight, until a blurred and smudged hand waves before the eye of the camera holder, a No-no-no hand, a You’re doing it all wrong, here, let me have it back hand. The lens is directed away from the sun – a denim-jeaned knee, the rush of grass, approaching fingers – and the camera changes hands. Subject turns to cinematographer, cinematographer to subject.

  I see my mother, and for a fleeting moment she is smiling apologetically back at me. And then that is it; the camera pans across the landscape, never returning to the face I want to see. My mother and father, briefly happy before I was born. Fractured memories, held together by film.

  For a few seconds they are alive again, and I am young again. And then they are gone again, and I am middle-aged again.

  THIRTY

  A short distance beyond where the tide dissipates, David and I sit on wooden deckchairs, like gatecrashers staged centrally at a stranger’s wedding: everything occurring naturally and spontaneously around us as we incongruously inhabit the scene; surrounded by dozens of disparate people united by a knowledge of how to enjoy the summer. Bikinis, speedos, sarongs and shorts of all styles and colours ripple and stretch on browned bodies as we, two pale men in long trousers, sit with flasks of warm coffee.

  “I hate the sun,” David says, as we soak in its cutting midday rays.

  “How can you not like the sun?” I ask.

  “I just hate how I’m supposed to enjoy it. The pressure. Gets to me. Pisses me off.”

  “Well, it was your idea to come here.”

  “True,” he notes, with a sigh.

  Our attention is drawn to a woman–– late teens, early twenties – emerging from the shallow water in a white bikini; but for the lack of a conch shell and a different cut of cloth, it is Ursula Andress, 1962. Her figure is flawless, her face distinctive and regal. We watch as she walks to her spot on the beach.

  “That could have been her,” David says, eyes fixed on the woman as she dries her hair with a towel.

  “Who?” I ask, even though there’s only ever one answer.

  “Marina. She could have looked like that. Could have been here, one sunny day like this. Not a care in the world.”

  “You think she looks like Marina?”

  “Ah, I don’t know. Not entirely. It’s just that stage of life, that vitality, that… optimism. My heart’s too old to be broken again, but it remembers what it’s like.”

  “Not at all nice,” I note. “But all part of life, I guess.”

  “She was so beautiful,” he says, shaking his head.

  “She was. But why is there always so much more fuss about someone beautiful dying?”

  “I don’t know. Because of all the potential, I suppose.”

  “The appearance just strikes me as totally irrelevant,” I say, still watching the woman in the bikini, as she lotions smooth legs. “Someone has been killed. If anything, the beautiful have it easier. What about the poor unfortunate-looking soul who gets bullied, gets overlooked – has a really shitty life – and then gets murdered? Shouldn’t they be given greater sympathy? Or are ugly people more expendable? Is that the message?”

  “I’m sure you know it’s not that simple.”

  “I think it is. The beautiful get all the attention in life, and all the sympathy in death. The ugly are treated much the same as prostitutes in the wake of a serial killing – as if somehow they had it coming. Somehow they won’t be missed. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  David ignores me, his eyes locked on the woman as she slowly wipes a squirt of white liquid across her belly. Then again, perhaps he does indeed reply, and it’s my mind that’s wandered elsewhere.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” David says, refilling the plastic Thermos mug over the sounds of kids splashing in the shallows. “The girl you told me about – Black. I thought I’d help you try to find her.”

  “Really?” I say, somewhat taken aback. “That’s very good of you.”

  “Suzanne Black, you said her name was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I went into HQ and searched the database. Nothing, I’m afraid.”

  “You had my hopes up there for a second.”

  “Leave it with me, though,” he says. “I’ll do some more digging. Gives me something else to think about.”

  “I really appreciate that.”

  “One thing you never told me is what happened to your wife,” he asks, staring ahead, at the horizon.

  “How do you mean? Nothing happened to her.”

  “After you got divorced, I mean. Where did she go?”

  Due to a slight deficiency in his social skills, where he sometimes fails to modulate the tone of his voice, David’s questions can sometimes feel like interrogations. “Why?” I ask, defensively; uneasy at what he might be getting at.

  “Just curious. You never talk about her. You talk about the other loves of your life, some of them quite fleeting, but never her.”

  “She went to Hastings, I believe. It was pretty clear we weren’t going to stay in touch. At first I missed her.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it’s almost as if she never existed.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  It was 1986 when I dropped out of the Glasgow School of Art, at the end of my first year. I’d grown tired of lagging behind everyone else in terms of individuality and originality; feeling fraudulent when placed up against genuinely left-field thinkers, with their Fuck-you clothes and Look-at-me hairstyles. I got to know the artists who inspired Jacob, from obvious beacons like Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, through to Sidney Goodman, Jean Rustin and Tibor Csernus. But I never did understand how they made their marks on the canvas.

  Attitude was everything. Art as an excuse: Jacob’s enduring approach. The creative process permitted any transgression the imagination could concoct, transcended accepted bounds of decency and taste, even the laws of the land. It could be honest or dishonest; it didn’t matter.

  “You’re too repressed, Clement. Loosen up, for God’s sake, boy,” my tutor used to tell me. “You have no imagination.” I hated him for that, but felt incapable of proving him wrong. “You have no imagination, boy. Open your eyes. Look around. Inspiration is all around!”

  While no creative wunderkind, I’m not sure that I ever lacked imagination. Indeed, I spent most of my childhood locked inside my head. But something always stopped that inner world from coming out – that was the problem. My English teacher made similar accusations; with a pen I fared no better. I could write well enough factually, but struggled to create a good story. A sense of shame abided at what lay within; an unworthiness, an embarrassment about who I was, what I felt, and how I interacted with others. It may have proved cathartic to expel it all in one giant emetic outpouring, but I just couldn’t translate what I saw in my head, and felt in my heart, onto the callous blank page. I made nice, safe images. I wrote nice, safe sentences. Always afraid of making a mess, getting it wrong, sullying the pure whiteness with my muck.

  In a dramatic change of direction, and with my mother’s career in mind, I transferred to Sussex to study medicine, but again, in time, came to realise my future lay elsewhere. I lasted twenty months. At least I didn’t pass out or vomit during the autopsies, and learned a few things along the way. In terms of a career it didn’t prove much help at the time, but it provided some useful life experience and many of the medical basics.

  And so it fell to Black, during a simple conversation under the firmament, to combine in my mind the two areas, and set me on the road to a s
uccessful vocation: yet another way in which she altered my life. The things – good and bad, great and shameful – that I owe her for. How could I not think about her every day?

  In the months following her inspired suggestion I was concerned only with her whereabouts. The career could wait. With the savings accrued from a couple of years’ pen-pushing in London I finally took the plunge and moved to simple rented accommodation in Brighton, albeit as far away from the cottage as I could get; now officially a full-time daydreamer. I had eleven months – which could be endured with funds topped up by bar work – to learn of the exact location of Black’s return.

  I conducted my own investigation into her past, but it never went far. I approached the current undergraduates on the course she had completed, but beyond finding a couple of her photographs left in a studio drawer, they offered no insight. Unable to locate her peers, or any friends or family, I gleaned no further knowledge during the entire time, and Black, as far as I know, never returned to Brighton – either before or after the year ended.

  By the autumn of 1994, with hopes of a reunion fading, I finally acted upon her suggestion to combine my areas of expertise. Like someone wishing to please their deceased parents, I approached it with her abstract approval in mind.

  I found a workshop run by Richard Harrington, an ageing forensic artist in East Grinstead, whose increasingly poor eyesight and unsteady hand gradually pared away at his craft. He confirmed Black’s suspicions: this was indeed my true calling. I studied under him twice a week, working on the real skulls of those who donated their bodies to science. By the time our sessions drew to a close he could barely keep his left hand still. My development pleased him, and through his contacts I soon found work ranging from South London down to Sussex.

  It was Richard who first introduced me to David, who, of course, led me to Marina, and this whole new obsession. Unlike Genevieve and Black, this girl cannot get away.

  The winter of that year saw fading hopes dissolve into total pessimism, dark replacing light. In between lessons with Richard I maintained my seafront routine, retracing those same footsteps, often unaware of hard rain lashing and waves violently breaking; frequently walking in complete isolation along the promenade, in a different Brighton to the one of eighteen months earlier. I’d gaze at the facades of hotels and shops, with the orange-red rust of ironwork bleeding down walls painted at the start of the summer. I walked in the mornings, once light, and on late afternoons, as streetlights burned up to brightness, in between shifts of bar work.

  These walks required no great effort on my part. At least, not when compared with the rather desperate act of a year earlier.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Seated at the rear of an Airbus descending through thin night fog, I stared out at mini vortexes whorling from the wingtips, spinning in a mist lit red by landing lights. Sweat gathered on the St Christopher clasped so tightly it rendered my knuckles sharp ivory peaks. Sinuses throbbing, eardrums imploding, and with throat and mouth dried out by the air conditioning, I checked my watch, grateful to see that a delay in departure had been redressed by a tailwind.

  I loathe flying. My stomach never quite recovers from the moment the engines burst into full fury to send a rattling fuselage bolting down the runway – too fast for those silly little wheels, but never apparently fast enough to project such an unbelievable mass into the air, until, somehow, it does; and then, as the buildings shrink away, the point where the power seems to wane, and a banking manoeuvre brings the ground on one side closer, so that it feels like the flight is doomed before even reaching cloud. But most of all I hate landing – those few seconds before touchdown when the descent seems too sharp, the approach too fast, and the plane slightly off-kilter, with one wing higher than the other. All that weight, all that speed, and a hard, flat surface a short distance below.

  I breathed hard, every muscle in my body tensed. Constellations of lights pierced the fog – the dot-to-dot of a city at night – and I closed my eyes; holding my breath as the final seconds ticked down.

  The things this woman made me do.

  Tyres and tarmac collided. A bounce, a jolt, a skid – the back end of the plane swaying left and then right – and the vigorous reverse thrust that sucked the last air from my lungs.

  And, finally, relief…

  Prague, in winter, is unforgiving. This much I discovered on an afternoon spent wandering through snow drifts, with wind-chills that sliced skin from exposed cheeks. Not the ideal time of year to be walking the streets looking for one specific face: banks of women passing in the twilight, coat collars turned up, scarves coiled around necks and hooked high over noses, thick woollen hats left to slip down below eyebrows. Still, I had to take the chance. Even with her features shrouded within a balaclava I’d recognise Black’s eyes.

  “Christmas in Prague”, she said on a warm night that now seemed a million years ago, a billion miles away. Knowing that her plan was to visit this city at this time of year, where else could I be?

  I did not plan the trip straight away. With winter still in the distance I tried to remain aloof, feeling that such behaviour would constitute desperation. But as mid-December approached I could no longer keep the reality of my desires at bay. Foolish or not, I had to go. What did I have to lose? Some money, but not a fortune. Some pride, but my grip on that had always been tenuous.

  I booked a tiny hotel room in Žižkov, a slightly grotty suburb on the edge of the city, its skyline dominated by an immense, ugly TV tower. I dumped my bag on the bed, wasting no time in hitting the streets. The first few hours mixed incredible excitement with an overwhelming sense of the impossible: like finding that one specific snowflake in the white squall. Later that evening I returned to the hotel dejected, but not defeated.

  I had no plan, other than to search and sleep. A shower, change of clothes, followed by some food: a cheese and ham toastie whose escaping heat seared the roof of my mouth; and outside again, heading towards the Vltava.

  I breezed along a pavement that ran parallel to tram tracks, electric wires overhead awaiting their buzz and vibration at dawn. I passed countless pubs and a handful of neon-lit strip clubs, before heading under a crudely constructed concrete flyover, beyond which modern buildings gradually gave way to those constructed in previous centuries; walking back through time. The city’s beauty shone beyond the flakes swarming around me, its architecture illuminated by the flashes of headlights that darted across the facades.

  The lights from Vyšehrad, the castle on the distant hill, flickered into view as I turned and made my way up towards Charles Bridge. Once there I could feel the coarse cobbles beneath the blanket of snow as I traversed its camber. Flanking me, a battalion of statues set in two regimented lines: a litany of saints and kings, augmented by the Madonna, and Christ suffering crucifixion. All these and, for just a few minutes, no one else but me, frozen amid their number. I eventually bade them temporary farewell, making my way back to the hotel.

  Returning in daylight I discovered what I thought to be a link to Black. By this time – almost noon – mimes, portrait painters and camera-eyed tourists formed dense crowds. One artist, sheltered from the thinning snow beneath plastic sheeting, had on display a sketch of a face that could be hers. Hope rose within me, a warmth bubbling up from my chest. However, my ardour evaporated during a brief conversation with the artist: he’d drawn it a couple of years earlier, from the pages of a magazine. It wasn’t her. No matter how far and wide I looked, it was never her.

  Settling snow formed to the thickness of a deep-pile carpet on the pavement as I stared out through a café window, watching the first bursts of pale blue light pierce the black between late-medieval buildings. I checked my watch, tapping its glass for no real reason other than nervous habit – sometimes sensing, despite its Swiss precision, that the second hand took a fraction too long to make each move.

  Christmas was over, New Year come and gone. So too, no doubt, had Black. I left the remainder of my loose koruna as a t
ip, stepping out into the gathering blizzard. Weather permitting, my flight to England departed in four hours. I filled my final moments with one last look around the city’s nexus, at all times aware that, at best, the attraction I came to see lay somewhere within its vast boundaries, and at worst, in an entirely different country.

  On the way to locate the correct tram-stop for the airport I reached the Jewish Cemetery, walled-off and closed to the public out of hours. I circled its perimeter, looking for a view within. A small grate in a gateway gave sight of thousands upon thousands of gravestones jostling for position, cramped within the encasing walls, piled high, one on top of another; a Victorian football terrace of drunken and swaying bodies, frozen to sudden stillness by a wind of pure ice.

  From over my shoulder I heard the roar of a large motor and the clangour of wheels against steel, and turned to see a tram pull up outside the adjacent art gallery. I jumped onto the crowded carriage, not certain it would take me to the airport, but prepared to take my chances. I sat between two people reading books with dust jackets removed, and watched central Prague – and possibly, just possibly, Black – speed past in a blur.

  * * *

  Returning from Prague to a wintry Brighton that, although beautiful in its own way, subdued me with the greyness and familiarity of home, I had yet to fully understand despair and utter futility. That came precisely twelve months later, when the waste of a year-and-a-half spent chasing a pipe-dream hit home.

  New Year’s Day, 1995, proved the nadir. I’d made friends over the years, but none with whom I wished to celebrate the final hours of 1994. I also avoided returning to the cottage to see Kitty; still unable to face my distant past. The next day, as the rest of the town slept off the excesses of the night before, or sat in the warmth eating and watching television, I wandered the cold, wet streets, heading down to the shoreline at dusk, a recently-emptied whisky bottle in my pocket. Christmas lights – depressing, so long after the event – illuminated the horizon below the leaden skies, until, with the last corner turned, nothing but the dark Channel lay ahead.