The Girl on the Pier

by Paul Tomkins

  “All the stories you told me. They interest me.”

  “How so?”

  “They don’t all make sense,” he replies, bluntly.

  “What do you mean they don’t make sense?”

  “I just don’t see how the girl – Black – can vanish like that.”

  “She went overseas. Maybe she never came back?”

  “But where are the traces of her beforehand. They should still be there, shouldn’t they? You should have found something.”

  “I tried, believe me,” I say, continuing to withhold the story of how I also broke into the studio and rummaged through a dead friend’s belongings, to no avail. “You looked her up, too.”

  “All that did was show she had no criminal record, and that she hadn’t been the victim of any crime. Although I did phone the university yesterday, and they couldn’t find a record of her either.”

  “Obviously they wouldn’t tell me when I asked all those years ago. Perhaps the files got lost?”

  “Maybe. It’s still all a bit strange though, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I never said it wasn’t. It’s nice that you’re taking such an interest,” I say, unsure of his motivations.

  “I’m like you, Patrick – I like to find missing people. And I hate unanswered questions.”

  David stops, pauses for breath; wincing as he takes in air. “Just give me a moment,” he says, leaning against a shop window.

  “We can stop in a café if you want?”

  “No, I don’t want to seize up,” he says, getting ready to move once more. “I need to push on now, rest later, preferably when I’m dead.”

  I follow his lead, as he takes us up the incline of West Street, towards the train station in the distance. We reach the Victorian clock tower, where West Street becomes Queen’s Road. “This way,” he says, motioning with his cane to the top of the hill. On we crawl. He comes to a halt as we reach the station’s entrance, breathes hard. “So this is where you had that infamous coffee?” he says, as, under the cover of the veranda, we look at what is now a small convenience store.

  “It is. This is where it all changed.”

  “She got a train to Haywards Heath, you said?”

  “Indeed she did, David.”

  “Didn’t you ever find out precisely where she stayed that week?”

  “No. Again, no trace.”

  “Come on,” he says, leading me back into sunlight.

  “Where now?” I ask.

  “I want you to show me Jacob’s studio.”

  “It’s gone.”

  David stops. “Gone?”

  “Converted into flats.”

  “But the actual building is still there?”

  “In some form. To be honest, I’ve never been back to look. Not even walked past it. It’s been remodelled I think. So I heard.”

  “Can we walk by?”

  “Sure.”

  I now take the lead, heading down side streets on the way to where the studio once stood. We make a couple of turns, and come to a stop below some flats.

  “Here?” David asks.

  “Yes.”

  “It all looks rather old – the conversion, I mean. Doesn’t look at all recent.”

  “It’s been two decades.”

  He doesn’t seem to hear me. “I think I’ll try and find somebody who knew Jacob, see if they also knew Black. I might have more luck than you. What do you reckon?”

  “It’d be amazing if you could,” I say. “I asked a few people at the funeral, and they didn’t know her, but it wasn’t really the time or the place, so I thought I’d leave it until another time. And then later I struggled to get hold of anyone else who was there.”

  “What about his family?”

  “He had none. An orphaned only child, like me.”

  “He must have sold his work to galleries? People in the art world must have known him?”

  “I’m sure they did. I just couldn’t find anyone directly connected to him. By that stage we had no mutual friends.”

  We walk on, back down to the seafront, only now in silence. I wonder what David is getting at. Why does he keep questioning my story? Why is he so interested in finding Black? I can’t help but see it as more than the act of a concerned friend.

  We reach the shore. His face shows signs of pain. “I need to get home,” he says, his limbs beset by tremors. “Can you help me back?” he asks in a weakening voice.

  “Of course,” I say, aware that I’ve never been to his house before. It’s also the first time I’ve ever heard him ask for help. I link my arm through his, as with his other hand he nudges his cane across the pavement, and we shuffle along in tandem like the slowest pair in a three-legged race. He doesn’t live far, but it takes a good fifteen minutes. Once at his front door he manages to remove the key from his pocket, but his hand is shaking too violently to slide it into the lock. After watching his frustration grow I place my hand over his, ease the key in. An unhealthy odour greets us as the door swings open; a sour mix of damp, dust and cat urine. I help him up the step, then shuffle his awkward body a few feet down a dimly lit corridor. He opens a door to a neat, unremarkable front room, its surfaces still covered with his wife’s trinkets and knickknacks, her picture pride of place on the mantelpiece. I assist him into his armchair, and once he’s comfortably set, ask to use the bathroom.

  On the way to the downstairs toilet at the rear of the house I can’t help but glance into the back room, into which harsh sunlight diffuses through a grubby uncurtained window. In sharp contrast with the front room, it is an utter mess. His wife Jean must have passed away a decade ago, and it looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned in all that time. There is no visible floor space, just layers of faded furniture, papers, books, chintz and tat. In a cardboard box in the corner sit two curls of animal faeces, and I hear one cat, and see another, crawling above and below the hills of debris. Further down the corridor the kitchen is unclean and almost certainly unsanitary, and the toilet, surrounded by discarded wrappers and tubes, is in dire need of a serious bleaching.

  “Tomorrow I’ll try and trace some people who knew Jacob,” he says, when I return to living room. “If I’m up to it. Think I’ve overdone it today.”

  “Whatever you can manage, David.”

  “How’s your aunt?” he asks, changing the conversation, but intoning the question without much apparent concern.

  “Not so great, I’m afraid. I saw her the other day, but she was unconscious. She had no idea I was even there. Won’t be long now.”

  “Shame,” he notes, with what sounds like sincerity, but adds no more.

  On the walk home it strikes me: my days are now split between the ill and the dead. Mine is a life spent in between, stuck with the barely alive and the already deceased.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Although initially slow to get online, the internet opened up for me a whole new world of search options. Googling Black is now routine; and yet time and again the same unrelated results pop up. Variations on the criteria –– such as adding ‘photographer’ or ‘Brighton’ –– fail to locate the specific hit I am after. At first I visited social network sites like Friends Reunited, then MySpace and more recently, Facebook. Still nothing. Not a Tweet. I visited records offices: Births, Deaths and Marriages. Still no sign.

  Then there’s Genevieve. I admit to occasionally googling her too, but as a runaway she had disappeared from a far greater radar screen, not just mine. Once I’d met Black I found it surprisingly easy to move Genevieve into the background. I outgrew her. Though still an infatuation of sorts, and briefer in duration, Black was a case of adult emotions rather than adolescent desires. I will always remain curious to know what became of Genevieve, but I am under no illusions.

  A sum total of sixteen hours and twenty minutes. Sixteen hours and twenty minutes: a period of time forever imprinted on my mind. How can you fall in love with someone in less than twenty-four hours, and still be in love (or obsessed) with that person
more than two decades later, despite never having seen them again in all that time? It’s the maths I am forever tripping over, trying to justify my feelings. As an equation it simply doesn’t work. I’ve heard it said that if X is the amount of time spent with someone, then X should be the length of time necessary to get over them. By that reckoning I should have been over Black by the Monday morning.

  But now, with more than a year having passed for every hour spent in her company, what percentage of my feelings are based in reality? However rational I try to be, there is always a nagging suspicion that she will suddenly reappear. Do these beliefs qualify as in any way legitimate, or are they nothing better than fanciful notions? Is Black now, as an actual part of my life, nothing more than pure fantasy?

  You can’t invent your own feelings, but you can trick yourself about their causes.

  And say that I do find Black? What if she has aged in the most awful way – less Loren, more Bardot? It’s an inevitable process, losing tone, shedding your looks. Once through the hell of puberty you think you are now set in stone; that’s it, growing done, change at an end. But then the gradual reversal starts. You know you will age, just not yet; and then it creeps up on you. If you are particularly unfortunate, it hoods, binds and kicks the living shit out of you.

  In my mind she is still inescapably twenty-one, perfectly formed but on the cusp of that fine line of deterioration, when the first tell-tale signs of the body’s slackening appear. I need only look at myself to see the damage of time: hairline slightly receded, a touch of slack skin pointlessly sagging from my chin, eyebrows on the wane, thin wrinkles across my brow. Then again, it could be a lot worse. Truth be told, time hasn’t totally trashed me.

  It’s said that the best way to find something is to stop looking. This is usually applied to the search for love. Of course, it’s bullshit. Little in life is going to make its way to you. Why should it? The vast majority – 99.99% – of the world’s people, objects and locations exist outside of your own personal sphere. Even if you travelled across each and every country on the face of Earth you’d still barely scratch the surface of its land mass, or bump into more than the tiniest fraction of its inhabitants.

  The other thing to do when you’ve lost something is to try and remember where you last saw it. And that’s why Brighton remained the logical place to be. But with regard to finding Black, it’s time to give up. I’ve stopped looking. All this time, and beyond vivid dreams, she didn’t come.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The broken oak slouches half-collapsed at the far edge of the grounds, just beyond the barbed wire fence separating the cottage from dense woodland. Beneath its fractured bough sits a patch of soft earth that, late in the damp June of 1981, I spent an entire evening digging with my bare hands. The hole grew and grew, deeper and wider. As darkness set in I backfilled it with rocks and placed a small boulder over the top. I had no idea what purpose it would serve, but it was mine.

  The next day I created a treehouse: no actual structure as such, but a den could be determined at the point where the tree split in two. I climbed the broken limb like walking up a slide, and with a saw from the garden shed cut away the thin branches and leaves that dangled overhead, then sliced off a gnarly knot to make the surface flat to sit upon. It provided somewhere to escape to, a secret hideout, even if I had nothing specific to hide from. That summer, after dark, I’d make my way to the tree, to sit in the pitch blackness and listen to the night.

  Then Genevieve arrived, to turn my world on its head.

  By August I’d begun to spend more time in Genevieve’s room. Having already taken some underwear, and not been caught, I started stealing little items: knickknacks and small trinkets, stuff I thought she wouldn’t immediately miss. She had a box of cheap jewellery, from which I lifted a ring beset with a fake ruby stone. Loose on a table sat stubs of concert tickets and nightclub flyers; the one I took, adorned with a picture of Siouxsie Sioux, advertised a disco a few weeks earlier. Although she mostly listened to vinyl, she also had a Sony Walkman, for which she had created a number of cassette tapes. From the dozen or so scattered in a draw I grabbed one marked ‘Leonard Cohen, The Cure, Japan, various chart music’, and slipped it into my pocket. Finally, I helped myself to one of her five hairbrushes.

  I had no idea what I would do with any of the items. I didn’t have a cassette player. I combed rather than brushed my hair. I had no plans to wear the ring, even if it fit (it didn’t). But together, as a collection that included the delectable black bra and panties I’d already stolen, it formed part of her essence; a link to some kind of intimacy. At first I stowed them under my bed, but feared the reprisals if discovered. After all, how could I explain away their presence? Then I remembered the hole. Taking a biscuit tin from the larder, and eating the last of its chocolate Bourbons, I removed the flimsy plastic tray and placed the cache neatly inside, then made my way to the tree. I shifted the large stone capping the cavity, and the rocks I’d placed inside. The tin nestled snugly. I replaced those stones that still fit, and blocked the hole with the small boulder, to form a type of cairn. Still feeling insecure, I dragged, with all my might, the collapsed tree limb, managing to move it, bit by bit, a few inches until it came to rest over the hole.

  * * *

  More than three decades later, the long-forgotten memories of that burial flash back into my mind.

  I rush to grab my shoes.

  The sun is setting, but there is still enough residual light to see what I am doing. I circle the lake, traipse through long grass, and carefully climb the barbed wire fence, which, though lacking its tension of old, still possesses a rusty bite. Even though I am more muscular than in my mid-teens, I find the tree harder to shift. The effort leaves me breathless, but eventually I manage to edge it off the capping stone. In the focus of effort I haven’t really thought about the emotional impact of what I am doing, but then it strikes me. It almost feels like exhuming a corpse. I clear the rocks from the tin, then carefully lift it out. Red-black with rust, its paintwork has worn away. Despite being fused to the main body of the container, I manage to loosen the lid with my door key. Tentatively I open it up. And there it all is: the ring, the cassette, the underwear and the hairbrush. The flyer has gone – turned to mush. And the cheap ring has oxidised. But the underwear, although damp, has survived, and the cassette, in its protective case, and the hairbrush, are almost like new. Would she forgive me, wherever she now is, if she knew about all this? Strangely, I feel more guilt than I did at the time, when, fevered with hormones, I felt driven to act that way.

  * * *

  One blurry photo, taken early in the summer of 1981: the only hard evidence of Genevieve Frazer’s appearance that I retain. She is sixteen, forever sixteen. Except that now, if she is still alive all these years later, she will be almost fifty. I say it out loud, aghast at the thought.

  Fifty.

  In my line of work I am occasionally required to age the faces of people who, in decades past, went missing, never to be found. Looking at the photo once more – she is sat on a blanket in front of the lake, neither smiling nor frowning, the big broken oak in the background – it strikes me that I could attempt to draw her as she might now look. Despite the lack of clarity, there is sufficient information present to work with, in terms of her facial geometry. I can measure the distances between her features, and extrapolate the figures to create a life-sized sketch on A3 paper. If it ultimately serves no other purpose, it will at least give me an idea of who she went on to become.

  We all age, albeit in different ways and at different rates. But overall, the same things tend to happen to our faces, within roughly the same period of our lives, give or take a handful of years. Unless we resort to surgery, lines will appear. Lines become grooves, grooves become furrows. Already a smoker, if she persisted with the habit it will have taken an additional toll. Time spent in the sun can also impact appearance, although she wasn’t one for the great outdoors. Will she have remained slim, or ret
urned to the overweight nature of her early teen years? For the purposes of this drawing I decide on a compromise, with just a little of that fat returned to her features.

  With reasonable certainty I conclude that the following age-related changes will have occurred. Her face will present evidence of lateral orbital lines, or crow’s feet, curving down from the corners of eyes that are now plumped with bags. There will be a loosening and sagging of the eyelids, with her eyebrows hanging slightly lower. Transverse frontal lines – wrinkles on her forehead – will be fairly prominent, and circumoral striae – vertical lines above the lips – will have developed early, due to smoking. Those lips will have begun to thin, with oromental grooves arcing down from the corners of her mouth. Time will have softened her jawline. And of course, there’s a reasonable chance that her hair may have turned grey – although she may still dye it. Older women tend to cut their hair shorter, and yet for some reason I don’t see her doing that, whatever its condition. She may now wear glasses, but that’s far from certain. Despite the science, it still requires some guesswork.

  First I draw the core of her face, as it was then. After all, the position of the key features does not alter. Skin may droop around them, but the eyes, nose and mouth themselves do not move. On top of this I sketch the imprint of time, with muscle and skin weakening, lines rising and falling, grooves and furrows burrowing callously into flesh. With my pencil tilted I shade the cheeks, the temples, and add further shadows to contrast with the light.

  After twenty minutes I put down the pencil and step back from the desk to survey my work. The eyes remain clearly identifiable, but I’m not sure I recognise the rest of Genevieve. Perhaps the accuracy of my sketch – or rather, the lack of – is the problem, but I just cannot feel her as an adult, as a middle aged woman. In my head she is locked in time, never able to age.