“Then let’s leave it for the morning if you think you’ll be able to sleep.”
I don’t know whether this reaches her, because she says “They who tell fables or act them out, no less than composers of airs or of verse or bedaubers of canvas, give their flesh to the dreams of the pool.”
When did the author of all this obscure incoherence write it down? It sounds as if he’s speaking from a past far more distant than his own. Perhaps this was intentional—one element of the insufferable pretentiousness of his prose. “Thus the town has sprouted theatres like fungi rooted in the marsh.”
My mother laughs at this, however uncertainly. “He did have his way with words, didn’t he? I feel as if I’m praying, reading all this out. It gets inside your head, doesn’t it?” She may mean to prove this by intoning “Is a sports arena a theatre or a circus? Does a demon enter into men that makes them savage, or does their savagery call forth the demon? The god becomes the sacrifice.”
I thought Strong had football hooligans in mind, but the final observation throws me. In her normal voice my mother says “I’m thirsty again. Would you like some more water as well?”
“I’ve plenty.”
“Replenish?”
When my answer falls short of sound her slow heavy footsteps recede along the hall, to emerge from a downpour—at least, they return from the bathroom once the tap has been hushed. A rustle of the pages she left on the chair brings her footsteps to an end, and then it’s silent long enough to let me sink towards slumber, so that I can’t help resenting the intrusion of her voice. “I don’t think I like this bit.”
“Then don’t read it.”
I can’t tell how much of this trickles out of my mouth, but apparently the thought is clear. “I already have,” she objects. “Don’t you want to know?”
“If it helps.”
“It’s in hell,” she echoes or interprets, and pauses before saying “Some of its dreams shape the dreamer that shares them, others enter the world. Some show what is to be while others seek to obviate the worst. The blackest dream conjures its subject rendered more monstrous still.”
I’m put in mind of the vision, if that’s what it was, I experienced in Frog’s-lane—in Whitechapel. As I struggle to restore it to the past, my mother’s soliloquy floats into and out of my consciousness, and I have the odd notion that she’s trying to compete with me at storytelling. “A god is parasitic on the mob but symbiotic with its equal, the magician…The mass are but vessels it uses to dream…He who does not dance a demon to his tune must dance to the tune of the demon…” Why is she continuing to read if she’s as nervous as she seems? She sounds as though she’s being forced to read—as though the text is forcing her. I would ask her or help her to stop, but her words seem to be weighing me down. “Those that need eyes shall produce them…” I could imagine that mine are vanishing like globules of liquid into my porous head. I’m nearly asleep, that’s all, and my mother’s voice is retreating—staying on the surface of the dark.
I’m the dark. No, I’m spreading through it. It’s earth, which is very little hindrance to me in my transformed state. I seep through the soil and through the rock, groping into crannies with my infinitely fluid tendrils. Burial can’t stop me, however much it darkens my nature. As I extend my territory I sense life multiplying overhead. I can reach it by rising into the open; sometimes I drift through the air. However separate from my body portions of me may become, they simply expand my realm before returning to me. I’m vast and as old as the world, but my dreams are older still. They’re as infinite as time, that human illusion, and able to reshape it. I’m in the process of containing a dream in a vessel of flesh and observing how each changes the other when a voice interrupts my pastime. “Aren’t you awake yet? Sorry if I woke you, but you need to speak.”
I can only assume John Strong’s notions and his language infiltrated my sleep. Whatever they planted there seems to shrink into my brain as I blink my eyes wide. My mother’s face swims into focus and regains its shape while she says “You’re on the radio.”
This brings me a good deal more awake, but I’ve left some of my voice behind. “How?” I croak.
“Not yet,” she says and hands me the landline receiver. “You’re next. I rang up. Someone needs to put the story straight after what that man said about your tours. They won’t let me on again so soon, but I’ve got them to have you.”
“Gavin from the city centre,” a voice in my hand is saying. “Are you there, Gavin? Somebody was.”
I work my lips until they feel more familiar as I raise the phone to my face. “I am.”
“I believe you want to respond to the comments we had yesterday about your tours.”
“I’ll just give my number for anyone who wants a tour. Maybe the city ought to let people decide what’s true for themselves.” I feel as if the residue of the dream is hindering my thoughts, and if I started talking about Waterworth I don’t know where I might stop. Having intoned the digits, I’m anxious to add “If anyone’s seen my father Deryck Meadows in the last few days, could they call that number?”
“Can you say why?”
“He’s, he’s missing. Hasn’t it been on your news?”
“Not to my knowledge. I’m asking my producer. I take it you’ll have told the police.”
“Of course we have, but we’ve heard as good as nothing. They’re supposed to be tracing his mobile but they’re taking longer than, than someone else said it would take.”
“They have to prioritise. You’ll have heard they’re understaffed.” After a pause he says “The newsroom say we haven’t had the story.”
“Then someone needs to do their job.”
“We’ll look into it,” the presenter says, and not quite as briskly “I hope your father turns up safe and well.”
It’s the end of the conversation, and my mother is waiting to speak. “They ought to be able to phone the house about Deryck as well. I should stop being silly and go home.”
“You aren’t being silly. Nobody could blame you for not wanting to be on your own just now.” I’ve left the reasons ominously undefined, and so I say “You do whatever’s best for you.”
“I’ll think, then. Shall I keep the phones while you have your bath?”
In the kitchen she turns on the radio as well. I’m not long in the shower; the water seems too eager to invade my eyes and mouth, and it distorts the muffled voices on the radio, and a scrap of Beatles music too. I towel myself in front of the mirror, where I look not just blurred but puffed up by condensation, and dodge into my room to dress. On the radio a woman is complaining that there are too many Scouse criminals in films, and I assume I haven’t missed much until my mother plods into the hall. “Someone rang,” she says.
So the Beatles song was my ringtone, but her expression makes me reluctant to ask “Don’t you know who?”
“Oh yes, I know,” she says, and her face grows unhappier still.
Chapter Thirty-three
DON’T LET HIM IN
As the woman who has opened the front door parts her lips, a voice somewhere in the small rectangular two-storey house cries “Tunnel congested.”
“All right, mother,” the woman calls while half her mouth shows me a resigned wry grin.
She’s broad and short—lesser than me by a head plus a forehead. Her roundish face is framed by waves of greying hair that aren’t quite symmetrical. Before she can speak again, a lorry laden with containers not much smaller than the house thunders by on Vauxhall Road and turns along a street to the north docks. Even once the main road lost the name of Pinfold Lane, the speeding vehicle might have been a stagecoach desperate to outrun highwaymen. The hiss of rain that’s lingered on the road fades beneath the wheels as I say “Beverley Sharples?”
“Guilty as charged, and you’ll be Deryck’s son. It’s like turning the years back. You look more like him than him.” Perhaps her gaze isn’t considering just me, because she adds “I didn’t know if G
illian would tell you I called.”
“Why shouldn’t she?” I feel disloyal for asking.
“Maybe I’m a bit of his past she’d rather not know about.”
“He came to see you, didn’t he?”
“You’re right, that’ll be another reason.”
Though I didn’t mean to imply this, it may be the case. Beverley gazes harder at me and says “Has someone been knocking you about?”
I’d almost forgotten the bruise. It feels like a soft spot on my forehead, though I can’t define its boundaries. The question seems so pointed that I retort “My mother never has.”
“I was thinking of the people who don’t like your tours.”
“Not them either. I don’t know who, if it was anyone.”
Before she can pursue the issue, the other voice complains “Aren’t you coming in?”
“I was just going to ask him, mother,” Beverley says and steps back.
The terse hall is brightly papered in an Oriental pattern. More sunlight than we’ve grown accustomed to this summer is reaching through the upstairs rooms for the pine staircase. All this is overwhelmed by dozens of smiling painted clay faces that cling like limpets to the walls. No doubt they’re designed to seem friendly and welcoming, but on closing the door I feel as if I’m shutting myself up with an onslaught of mirth, so relentlessly concerted it’s worse than theatrical. The click of the latch prompts Beverley’s mother to call “Is that Frank?”
“He’ll be down at the docks still. He’s my husband,” Beverley confides to me and raises her voice. “It’s—you’ll see who it is, mother.”
She moves aside to let me enter the front room, which boasts an expensive fawn leather suite that’s grouped around a grey slab—the wide screen of a home cinema system. Two pine dressers display china, and the walls swarm with faces, fossils of jollity. A woman who may have been Beverley’s size until she spread, a process that appears to have drained all colour from her skin and shaggy hair, sits facing the screen and the window. Above the houses opposite, the grassy slope of Everton is scattered with huntsmen or at least men accompanied by unmuzzled Rottweilers, but her eyes don’t acknowledge them. As I venture into the room she turns her head, dislodging an antimacassar from the back of her chair and flailing her hands at it. “Is he back again?” she wonders aloud.
“It’s his son, mother.”
The old woman continues to regard me with suspicion until Beverley murmurs “Sit down and I’ll bring us a drink.”
Without giving me time to respond she tramps off to the kitchen. Her mother gropes ineffectually at the antimacassar, which has lodged like a ruff no paler than her skin behind her neck. She seems incapable of other movements—certainly of raising herself from the armchair into which she’s wedged, let alone using her legs, which are twice the width of her feet. “Let me,” I say and retrieve the antimacassar, only to find that it’s as damp as any towel. I drape it over the top of the chair and rub my hand surreptitiously on my trousers, though perhaps I don’t need to be discreet, since she has reverted to staring out of the window. “Don’t drink and drive,” she advises.
“I wasn’t planning to. I can’t.”
She watches me sit in the chair opposite hers. I have the notion that she means to ask if it’s damp, since I can’t be sure, but she says “Do you like my faces?”
“Are they company for you?”
I might have produced a better answer if I didn’t find them disconcerting. While looking at her I’m equally aware of the faces—a sailor’s and an eye-patched pirate’s—that flank hers. “They aren’t all mine. I can’t do that,” she says and pulls at her cheeks as if to demonstrate their lack of malleability, though the effect is closer to the reverse. “They always stay the same, that’s what I like.”
I’m some way from interpreting this when she says “Are you talking to Frank?”
“He won’t be home till teatime,” Beverley shouts along the hall.
“Your dad was,” her mother informs me. “Frank told him about them robbing from the docks.”
Since she has lowered her voice, I don’t know how incriminating the anecdote may be. All the same, she appears to expect me to ask “Who?”
Her eyes flicker as if to check that the one-eyed face can’t hear. “More like what,” she mutters.
“What, then.”
“They’ve always said there’s something fishy down there. My dad used to when he worked on the docks. Things go walking off the ships.”
“I’ve heard that. There was even a case in the eighteenth century when a ship was supposed to have sailed out of the old dock with nobody on board.”
“Meat’s the favourite. That does most of the walking.”
She’s referring to theft, and I do my best to repel the image—more like an unwelcome dream—of raw meat lumbering or hopping or wriggling maggot-like away from the docks. “And nobody knows what happened to it,” I say.
“Yes they do, only nobody believes them. It isn’t the dockers if that’s what you’re getting at. Maybe some of them rob and no wonder with their wages, but they couldn’t do all that. It’s the others that they can’t stop coming in.”
“Forgive me, but why can’t they?”
“Slimies, that’s what he called them.” She and the sliced-off faces fix me with their eyes as she says “In and out of the containers like a circus act, but how do you think they could open those big locks?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“They never,” she says in gleeful triumph. “They eat it all in there.”
As she waits for my reaction I hear water pouring into a jug. When I don’t speak she says “They’re meant to be like they might have crawled out of the river, only they didn’t. They’re from round here and come back this way too, and that’s too close to home.”
There may still be a chance of reducing all this to the truth. “Has anybody seen them?”
“Just their marks. They leave plenty, but he says the dock police have given up.” She ducks her head to mutter “He says you can’t tell from the trails they leave behind what they look like from one moment to the next.”
“Is she telling tales again?” Beverley wants or may want to know.
The old woman’s face grows as immobile as any of the faces on the walls, and considerably blanker. Beverley must have taken some care over keeping quiet in the hall, especially since she’s pushing a trolley. It bears a jug, three glasses and a decanter two-thirds full of an amber liquid. “Are you having water with it?” she asks me. “We always do this early.”
“What is it?”
“Scotch from the docks.”
If this sounds like a joke, it also suggests that pilfering does take place and needs a cover story, though the old woman’s sounds unlikely to convince anyone who matters. Perhaps hers is a distorted version of tales the dockers tell, but it makes the offer of a drink welcome. “Half and half,” I say, “thanks.”
I have to say when twice to prevent Beverley from drowning my whisky. Once her tumbler and her mother’s are topped up almost to the brim with water, she sits in the middle of the sofa. “You’ll be wanting to hear about Deryck,” she says.
“Do you mind telling me why he came to see you?”
“Of course I don’t. You might, though.” She takes rather more than a sip of her drink—I can scarcely taste mine for water—and says “He wanted me to talk about the times we used to have down in the shelter.”
“Think,” the old woman urges and stares out of the window. “Think.”
“Sup up, mother,” Beverley says and waits until she’s obeyed. “He’d forgotten till he heard me talking on the radio.”
“That’s not what he said,” her mother objects.
“All right then, mother, you tell the story.”
“He said he’d got so he didn’t know if he’d dreamed them up till he heard you on the wireless. I’m getting that way myself.”
“We all will.” Beverley celebrates or otherwis
e greets the prospect with a drink. “Is that why he’s gone walkabout?” she asks me. “Has he been forgetting a lot?”
“Gone walkies like the meat,” her mother seems to enjoy saying.
“Mother.”
Once they’ve finished I admit “I don’t know what he may have forgotten.”
“He’ll be in our prayers, won’t he, mother?”
“Dreams as well, if there’s a difference.”
“Thank you both,” I feel bound to say. “What did you talk about?”
“Just the shelter,” says Beverley. “He used to have me thinking he could hear things worming around behind the walls. I thought he was attracting them by going on about them. He didn’t seem to like that idea much when he was here.”
“Shouldn’t have dreamed it up in the first place.”
“I don’t think he did, mother. I think it was one of his grandfather’s tales.” Largely to me Beverley adds “Maybe Deryck was trying to forget some of the stuff he thought he remembered. Maybe he gave his wife the wrong idea about what we did down there and that’s why she’s taken a dislike.”
“Like the froggies,” says her mother.
As the old woman and the limpet faces observe my confusion Beverley says “The which?”
“The girls that used to be kept in cellars. Only they weren’t girls, more like things that had to live down there. Men liked them because their mouths were so big and they could stretch their legs and puff themselves up and do all sorts of other tricks, everything anyone could dream of. Some men went to them because they were cheaper than girls and some got the taste, and then they had to pay a lot more.”
By now Beverley has tried to interrupt more than once. “Mother.”
“Don’t blame me. It’s not my tale. My grandpa used to go on about them, the dirty old reprobate,” the older woman seems delighted to inform me. “Do you know what else he said?”
“I don’t,” I say and rather wish.
“If they had babies the men that owned them would take them and chuck them in the docks. That wouldn’t do much, would it? Even if they were dead they mightn’t be once the water got into them. He said that, and about the philanthropists.”
Creatures of the Pool Page 20