The Girl on the Pier

by Paul Tomkins

  I tried to put such concerns aside. I peeled away the packing tape, lifted the flaps. I lowered my outstretched fingers to clasp cold bone, and with great tenderness lifted Genevieve into the light. My hands shook violently, but I held her fast. And then it blew through me: the need to let out my own demons. All the while I’d envisaged an attack from this sacred object, but instead I suffered an internal crisis. I just about managed to set her gently on the drawing board when the swelling grief and remorse burst up into my chest and funnelled into my throat; exiting via stinging eyes and trembling lips.

  I fell to my knees, and wailed. I didn’t want any of this. I wanted her, not a life of regret; of persistent hauntings. I looked at her – still her, not it – and spluttered “I’m sorry!” over and over; sorrow for my actions, but self-pity, too. I deeply regretted the path she led me down, and my fatal mistake at the end of it.

  I began to get cold feet; did I really dare capture her likeness? It felt like suicide.

  And so I found myself presented with the ultimate test: do my best work, and years of incarceration almost certainly awaited, once someone joined the obvious dots; or betray Genevieve yet again, in the hope of continued freedom, but freedom blighted with constant glances over a guilty shoulder.

  Decisions, decisions. I traced my fingers over ridges in her skull; valleys formed where plates fused in infancy. Twenty-two bones in all, joined by delicately woven sutures. Thanks to me, one of these cranial bones had cracked: two fissures radiated diagonally from the impact scar, stopping at the junction with the parietal bone at the top of the head; Genevieve’s tectonic plates, disturbed by my earthquake.

  As much as I wanted to recreate her living likeness, I remained terrified by the implications. Each path involved its own freedom, its own damnation.

  Midnight approached. Midnight passed. I sipped at red wine that looked black beyond the reach of candlelight. My time, the early hours; human noise non-existent, even with the windows and doors open. Nature flitted outside, buzzing and twitching and humming. I’d get up and wander to the veranda, look at the moonlight on the lake, listen to the gentle rhythms of the wildlife. And then my mind would wander: insects once nested inside Genevieve’s head – that’s what I reduced her to.

  I had to make a start, perform the basics. The first task: attaching the skull to a stand – a self-made armature – before aligning the head on the Frankfurt plane, which fixes the eye-line straight-on. As if cupping Genevieve’s soft-skinned face, I gently adjusted the attitude: lifting her chin, as would a lover when trying to turn a frown into a smile. But there came no involuntary reaction in reply.

  Dead. Wholly dead.

  Only once the synthetic eyeballs settled into recesses packed with clay did I recall, vividly, how she looked in life. There could be no escaping the decision.

  She wouldn’t let me fail. I had to do her justice.

  FORTY

  They should have known, then. They should have guessed. It was not what fifteen-year-old boys did; certainly not ones from supposedly good homes, no matter how detrimental their formative years.

  I had held it together fairly well in the aftermath of Genevieve’s death, although I feared going to bed at night, aware that in dreams I couldn’t escape what I’d done. She wreaked her revenge, via my subconscious. She came at night, this Thumbelina, with an axe to grind.

  But on the outside, I don’t think it showed – not at first. Already quiet and withdrawn, not a lot changed in that sense. However, I felt it building: stress, in cumulative form. I’d secretly begun to drink cheap spirits, primarily as a means to get to sleep, as the first bouts of insomnia took hold. It couldn’t mask the fact that I’d begun to unravel, shedding threads like a fraying fabric in a gale.

  Exposed to every one of nature’s elements – bones shaking, muscles shivering, teeth involuntarily punching enamel against enamel – I sat up, vaguely recollecting the notion of going to bed for an early night; an idea that, in retrospect, seemed all the better in contrast to the decision I actually made. Instead: drinking an entire bottle of whisky and sleeping in my clothes on a rain-strewn beach. I awoke, cold and wet, to the sensation of the empty bottle butting up against my side. In the drained vessel I saw a message: You fucking idiot.

  I wanted to pull myself into the foetal position and slide back to sleep. The sea would come and take me, wash me ashore in Normandy. I’d awake and speak French. Strangers would know my name, and life would resume, plotted along some alternate course. I would be Jacques, in love with Yvette; a normal teenage boy who’d traversed no moral boundaries, an uncomplicated life stretching out ahead of him.

  The saltwater in my watch had frozen the hands at 4:17 a.m. The sun was up, and the sounds of a town fully awake could be heard. Moments later I was discovered on the shore, although I have no recollection of my rescue. Rushed to the Royal County Sussex Hospital, my physical recovery seemed relatively swift – days rather than weeks or months – but there followed a series of psychiatric tests, with my mind poked and prodded. In truth, I could easily explain away my reckless behaviour, after such difficult formative years. An abundance of scattered, seemingly random dots meant that no one joined up the relevant ones with the absence of Genevieve.

  At least I got a chance at recovery, which is more than I allowed her. But it would be wrong to say that I experienced no punishment. Penitence shadowed me every step of the way. Self-pity, too.

  Somehow I survived.

  * * *

  The hardest thing in human existence is to accept that what’s done is done. Death is final. But so too are our actions, each and every last one of them. We can seek to alter the course of where the present is heading, and we can apologise, and try to put right that which we have got horribly wrong. But none of it can change what actually took place. In modern life, everything is so easy to edit. Copy, cut, paste, delete. Pause, rewind, fast-forward. And yet nothing – and I mean nothing – can undo a moment that we wish with all our hearts could be reversed.

  I didn’t want to be this person. And no matter what I do, and how hard I try, I cannot be anyone else.

  FORTY-ONE

  Precocious, languidly confident students, with hairstyles, piercings and beards that leave me feeling old before my time, lounge and lean on the steps, blocking the entrance to the new Shoreline Gallery; far too cool to stand beside their work in search of feedback, or be in the same room as their parents. They blow smoke into lingering plumes through which I am forced to pass. Indifference seeps from their oily skin.

  I take from an offered tray a disposable plastic beaker of cheap champagne: this is the life. The space is stark, clinical, white-washed. There are alcoves and free-standing walls, but otherwise it’s sparse and spare. Work hangs from slim metal wires fixed on the ceiling, left to dangle inches from the wall – on which the obligatory name cards and titles are displayed. The first I encounter, by a graduate called Tim O’Callaghan, reads The Inexorable Plight of the Subconscious Human Mind in the Face of Irrepressible Social Oppression, No.2. It is a picture of a fish. Next to it is a piece called Cunt. It is nothing more than a simple household mirror. I age another year.

  And so it is with a heavy heart, and legs that appear similarly weighted, that, on this searingly hot June evening, I take a look at the work of the daughter of an acquaintance at a Fine Art degree show. I have a heavy cold, and I’m already regretting my decision to attend. I hope for her sake, and mine, that she has an oeuvre of Untitleds.

  In some distant way I once belonged to this world. But now – well, I may as well be just another parent, confused and awkward, smiling uneasily beneath harsh spotlights as I try to understand the dark recesses of my child’s mind. (“So son, what is the bloodied sheep’s anus supposed to signify?”) At least back then I was included, even if at the periphery. I flick my fingers through my hair, nervously. My friendship with Jacob validated me in places like this. The tutors’ darling – literally, in one case – I gained blessings by association.
Now I’m left to fend for myself, and age has further removed any sense of affiliation. Even some of the parents seem louche and bohemian, as if they too hail from this left-field world. The sooner I find Amy’s work and get out of here the better.

  My mobile phone begins to vibrate. Unsure of the etiquette in a place like this, I force my way outside, back through the smoke, to take a call from David.

  “Patrick, I need to speak to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Marina.”

  “Seriously? What is it?”

  “I’d rather not say over the phone. Where are you? Can you meet me in fifteen minutes? In town?”

  “I’m at this degree show I told you about. I still haven’t seen Amy’s work yet, or said hello. Can it wait till later?”

  “Well, it’s waited decades so far, so I guess so.”

  “Give me about an hour, should be more than enough time to get through this nonsense. I’ll see you in The Cricketers, just after seven.”

  I’m shaking as I walk back inside, bristling with fear. Suddenly the art and its youthful creators no longer bother me. I am involved in something far bigger than any of this. They may look down their coke-twitching noses at me, but I deal with issues far darker than even their most twisted subject matter. They are just playing games. I have killed.

  I find myself pleasantly surprised with Amy’s work, which I locate hanging on the far side of the gallery, a long way from prime position. Relieved, too: I hate doing the fake “it’s great” speech, as my tone always betrays me. At first I cannot find her to pass on my regards, so I spend a few moments studying her canvases: bold use of colour, interesting compositions, confident brushwork. It’s nothing spectacular, but the figures are vibrantly worked in oil.

  She sees me and heads over, and turns out to be a good kid, too. Down to earth, affable, and not at all cocooned in a shell designed to keep others at bay. But I keep things brief. I wish her luck, and mean it.

  Now for the real world. What does David know?

  I turn, and something on a free-standing wall catches my eye. I’m immediately struck by a strong sense of déjà vu, although it’s less a case of re-experiencing a previously lived moment and more like seeing a specific point of my life frozen in a painting. It’s hard to explain just how odd it feels. Obviously I must be imagining it; I have to be. I move closer. I squint, and then blink. Though heavily stylised, and lacking any great definition, it seems unmistakable.

  It is me, on the West Pier, as it was that night… as I was that night.

  But it makes no sense: how could a young student have painted a private moment that took place two decades earlier, to which he or she could never have been privy? I look at the name card: Madelaine Vaillancourt. It means nothing.

  “You like it?” a young girl asks, sidling up to me. She is of mixed race, possibly a little older than the 21-year-olds who comprise the majority.

  “You painted this?” I ask.

  “Yup.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s the old pier.” She moves to one side, to look out through the wide windows toward the black frame in the distance.

  “Yeah, sure, I recognise that. But where did you get this?”

  “I painted it – I told you.” She takes a step back.

  “But who is this?” I am almost prodding my painted face.

  “No one. I didn’t paint it from life.”

  The scene depicted is of a naked man on the West Pier, leaning against one of the old rotundas, in a pose that I seem to recall adopting. Behind him the distant blur of colourful lights form a beautiful circle, as the Ferris wheel on the Palace Pier spins. I feel unsteady and seasick, my fever worsening as I stare at the familiar reflection of yellows and reds that fuse into orange on the surface of the water. I feel my vision double, my head grow heavy.

  But the longer I study it, the less sense it makes: like a word repeated over and over, its form disintegrates. Of course it could be anyone, on a famous public landmark. Reference material in books on Brighton abounds. And the definition on the figure is so vague that I no longer see myself in the smudges of oil.

  “Hi honey, how’s it going?” asks a woman, and Madelaine turns away, glad to break free from my weird intensity. “Hi Mum,” says the girl.

  And, for a while, that is the last thing I remember.

  The movie cliché, where the victim of a fainting awakes to a circle of faces emerging slowly into focus is eerily accurate to life, I discover. The side of my head feels like it’s been struck with a cricket ball – maybe even a cricket bat. Grown men aren’t supposed to faint, and I’m just about sufficiently aware of what’s happened to feel embarrassed. I have indeed fainted, and there’s a very good reason for it.

  And yet for a second I do not recall that reason, the one that caused me – already feeling unwell and unsteady – to reach the literal tipping point. As I lie partially propped up by the jacket of some unknown person behind me, it still feels dreamlike, looking at too much information to take in at once, particularly with halogen bulbs haloing the row of heads.

  But then I clearly see one of the faces looking down at me with concern.

  It is Black.

  It is Black!

  It is Black.

  After all these years, she clearly has no idea who I am: she calls me ‘Mr’.

  “Hey Mr, are you okay?”

  I recognise her voice, but it now has a slight transatlantic twang. My appearance has changed, and she has yet to engage my fully focused eyes, to see the real me. And she has little to connect me to the event, unlike the link I have to her, with the painting that I now realise is formed from her photographs. Whoever painted it obviously had to know Black, but that didn’t mean she expected its subject to randomly appear. Somehow the artist is her daughter, although the ages don’t seem to stack up.

  I am helped to an upright sitting position, and I instinctively draw in my legs.

  “Black? Is that you?”

  “Black? No one’s called me that in years.”

  I wait for her to remember. But she just stares at me, confused. She smiles, but it is a smile feigning recognition, rather than confirming it. I point at the painting. “It’s me,” I say, softly.

  I can almost sense the penny hanging suspended before its fall. “Oh my God, it’s you.”

  In helping me to a stand, with the aid of a suited man I have no interest in acknowledging, Black has touched me for the first time in two decades. It is just a clutch of fingers pressed firmly into my inner elbow, but it is skin against skin. Our faces pass at close proximity on my way to a fully upright position. She still appears surprised, but I’m not quite sure if it’s of the pleasant variety. I take a swig from the half-empty bottle of water she offers, acutely aware that our saliva will mingle.

  She may no longer go by her surname, but Black is still there. Only: a little altered, and a little pulled at, pulled-upon; a little encircled, a little drawn over; a little darkened, a little lightened; a little lessened, a little extended. Time has been at her with its needle and thread, its weights and pulleys, its brushes and swabs. But it has done so with compassion and a gentle hand. Time never totally exempts. But time has loved her. Time has clearly loved her.

  “Do you have time for a drink?” I ask. “A coffee?”

  She hesitates, then confers with her daughter. Madelaine tells her mum she’s heading out with her peers after the event, and seeing that she has just met with an old friend, nudges her towards accepting my suggestion. Following a short pause, Black finally says, “Um, okay then.”

  Absent-mindedly I watch as the spirals of frothy milk blend with the oily coffee, the light swirls merging into the deep brown liquid. Black returns from the toilet and quickly sits, thanking me for her latte. Twenty years ago we shared an instant coffee in a greasy spoon. Now we sit in plush leather armchairs, enjoying exotic South American beans served by immaculately coiffured baristas.

  I know this wo
man so well, and yet not at all. I know her face, but not this face. I know her voice, but not this voice. I do, and I don’t. Conversation on the short walk flatlined, with, I suspect, too much to say as we strolled; everything kept back until there’s adequate time to do our stories justice.

  The first thing she notices, with my arm stretched out across the table, is the scar running from my knuckles back towards my wrist. It’s hard to miss.

  “You didn’t have that before,” she says.

  “What, my hand?”

  I am attempting humour, but achieve only facetiousness. She stares blankly back. “Sorry, yeah, I didn’t have it before. Although you only missed seeing it by minutes.”

  She looks perplexed. “How do you mean?”

  The things I have thought of saying, upon reaching this point in the conversation: That’s where I lost you. That’s where you disappeared. You vanished into a mess of peeling, warped flesh. Your number might still be there, the ink unattainably tattooed under the mound of dead, bubbled skin with its ugly pink-red sheen.

  Instead: “When you left the café, the waitress spilt boiling coffee over my hand. That’s where you wrote your number. I ended up in hospital.”

  I feel like adding The surgeons fought for hours, but they couldn’t recover what you wrote, but decide against risking another silent response. My humour, in the presence of such desire, has lead weights, and is heavy. Jokes, I sense, will sink, bomb, crash. I cannot do funny in her presence. All those years spent in my mind waiting backstage for a cue to go on and make her laugh has rendered me awkward and over-rehearsed.