Her monologue appears to have foundered on her triumph at pronouncing the word, however much this misshapes her mouth. Then she says “They saved some of the babies before they got dumped and gave them to families to look after. He used to say there’s a fair few folk living in the town that mightn’t like to know where they came from.”
“Old people,” Beverley says halfway between indulgence and reproof. “They were like that in the shelter.”
The interruption is so relatively welcome that I’m anxious to prolong it. “Who were?”
“My gran and grandfather and Deryck’s.”
The old woman is already opening her mouth, and I hold my breath like a swimmer until she speaks. “My dad used to get everyone singing.”
“Even if they didn’t know the song.”
“Even the Cuthberts. That’s what we called men that were too soft to go and fight. I remember one of his songs,” the old woman declares and treats me to an excerpt—the words and the waltz rhythm and a sally at the tune. “I’m not composed of loot, old boy. I’m not composed of loot.”
As I refrain from thinking of a song I’m glad she didn’t sing, she tells me “And Deryck’s old feller, he’d take off all the Liverpool comedians. Arthur Askey and Tommy Handley and the one who played Constable Unstable.” Having pronounced the words of the name like each other in two different ways, she says “And the other one, who was that? Hardly Yardley.”
By the time I grasp that it’s a catchphrase rather than a name, Beverley is saying “Whenever he was down there he’d say ‘Don’t let Jack in.’ It used to scare me, but I expect it was some old comedian’s line.”
“Hardly, Yardley,” her mother says with glee. “People were always saying the thing about Jack, but maybe Deryck’s grandpa meant one of them behind the walls.”
“You sound like you believed in them,” Beverley protests. “You used to clout me for talking about them.”
“That’s why I did, because you and Deryck talking about them brought them.”
I’m about to point out that she’s as good as contradicting what she said earlier—at least, the objection will do for me—when Beverley complains “You’re not saying you ever heard one.”
“Saw one too. A bit of one.”
Beverley utters a laugh that sounds more determined than mirthful. “Which bit?”
“A hand. A big wet hand, or that’s what it wanted to be. It was feeling for Deryck’s grandpa like it was going to get hold of his head or stroke it or something. Only people started flashing lights about and it went back in its crack in the wall.”
“Behave yourself, mother. How could a hand come out of a crack?”
“Squeezed,” the old woman assures me.
Surely they’re competing for the most extravagant reminiscence, and I think I’ve heard enough; I can’t see how any of this would lead to my father. I drain my glass and set it on the trolley. “Well, thank you both for all—”
“Aren’t you going to show him what Deryck saw, Beverley?”
“I don’t think it would help him.”
“Then I will. I want people to see.”
The old woman clutches the arms of the chair and struggles to heave herself forth. As the effort squeezes moisture from her brows—surely not from the rest of her—Beverley sighs. “All right, mother, if it means so much to you. Don’t go getting yourself in another state.”
Is she reluctant to make for the kitchen or only slow? At least the wide room harbours not a trace of an observant head except for those outside the window. The three men are fishing from the opposite bank of a canal at the end of the back garden. Beverley unlocks the door and plods out of my way. “There you are,” she says loud enough for her mother to hear.
As I step out of the house the edge of a mass of black cloud engulfs the sun. The unnatural dusk appears to soak into the houses across the water, turning the red bricks the colour of disinterred clay. Above the roofs, cranes along the docks resemble prehistoric skeletons in a museum. What else is there to see? The small lawn is occupied by a pair of loungers mottled with patches of damp, and it’s bordered by rocks overgrown by ferns glistening with moisture. If they were much wetter they would resemble underwater vegetation. I’m wondering why my father would have found any of this significant when I notice the path to the garden gate.
It’s composed of six flagstones, the farthest of which extends beneath the gate onto the towpath. A tendril of water snakes from the chink between the third and fourth stones to vanish into the canal. I’m put in mind of the many springs that used to feed the townsfolk, though the more prosperous had wells in their grounds. Even if the path has sprung a leak, I don’t know what it would have meant to my father. Is it moving? Perhaps only my efforts to distinguish it make it seem to writhe. I turn back to the house, to be confronted by Beverley. “He didn’t know there was a canal,” she says. “Too much water everywhere, he said.”
She’s stepping back when I hear a sound behind me. It’s liquid, and so close to a whisper that I could think it surreptitious. It ceases as I swing around. Has anything changed? The three men are still squatting on stools beside the canal, and of course they’re fishing, even if I’m unable to focus on the rods. I’ve no business fancying that the lines that trail from the wide-eyed trio bear any resemblance to umbilical cords. I’m more concerned with the water on the garden path, or rather with my previous misperception. The trickle must already have begun halfway up the third flagstone from the house; it can’t have sneaked closer, since the path slopes slightly but unmistakably downwards to the towpath. “Something the matter?” Beverley says low.
I presume she doesn’t want her mother to hear. “I don’t think so,” I murmur, but at once there seems to be: her mother is telling someone to keep their hands off.
I’m at least as disturbed that Beverley doesn’t react. As she locks the back door I whisper “Nobody’s with her, is there?”
Beverley shakes her head without looking at me. “It’s just a sign.”
Of what? I’m in the hall, between the watchful but ineffective faces, when the old woman cries out again. “Don’t phone and drive,” she exhorts, and at last I understand that ever since I arrived she has been reading advice for drivers aloud from the matrix sign ahead of the junction outside the window. She didn’t tell anyone not to touch her—she was saying that drivers should keep their hands free. My relief lasts until she catches sight of me and bulges forward in the armchair to demand “Have you seen it?”
“The canal,” I try assuming. “I expect you like sitting by it.”
“Used to. He put me off. Too wet.” As Beverley joins me the old woman says “He came back.”
“I told you before, mother, this is Deryck’s son.”
“I know that, Beverley. I’m not completely off my head yet. I’m saying his dad came back.”
“When?”
Once the old woman has finished laughing at my question and her daughter’s overlapping one she says “This morning when you were at the shops. It wasn’t all of him. Just his face.”
This time only Beverley speaks. “Where?”
“Right there.”
For a moment I’m able to believe she’s pointing outside, but her pudgy finger with its ragged bitten nail is indicating the floor in the corner to the left of the window. More of the premature dusk appears to have gathered there than in the rest of the room. As I peer at it, part of the darkness appears to swell towards my gaze, and then I recognise that it’s a discoloured patch above the skirting-board. “It’s just more damp,” Beverley says. “We’ll get it seen to.”
“No, it’s where his head came through.” When Beverley frowns at me, perhaps to remind her that I’m there, the old woman says “I hope you’ll still want to find him.”
This sounds like my cue to leave, which I would have preferred to do sooner. I mumble a shapeless answer and make for the front door. Beverley sidles past me to open it and murmur “Her and her faces. She just li
kes telling stories. They keep her alive.” As if there’s some connection she murmurs “Good luck with finding Deryck.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Let me know if you hear anything.” I shut the wet wooden gate and walk away without looking back or caring for the moment where I’m bound. I just want to leave the house behind, and far too much that I’ve heard.
Chapter Thirty-four
THREE MINUTES ON THE TRAIN
I haven’t walked far—I’m still in High Rip territory—when my mobile tries out its new ringtone. I thought it sounded nostalgic, but the day has grown so dark that I could imagine the song about the blackbird is summoning the dead of night. The maze of streets designed for cheerfulness alongside Vauxhall Road may have ousted the grim Victorian lanes where gangs lay in wait for intruders, but they aren’t much less narrow or secretive. Perhaps they’re just as introverted—focused on the canal—and certainly able to hide any of their denizens who don’t want to be found. Though I’m at the edge of the area, I feel as if the warbling of the mobile has identified me as an intruder. The caller’s number is unidentifiably familiar, and so is his voice. “Gavin Meadows? We’ve got your computer.”
I’m distracted by a figure that appears at a junction ahead and immediately shrinks out of sight. “What are you doing with it?”
“Not a lot. It did Fin’s head in. He had to go home.” “I’m sorry,” I feel expected to say. “What happened?” “He kept thinking he’d got it running, but there was never anything when he shouted us to look. You want to be careful what you bring in to be fixed. Good job there’s no girls here and we’re all broadminded.”
“I don’t know what you mean. It isn’t my computer.”
“That’s lucky, isn’t it? Tell it to the law.” Having celebrated the threat with a pause, he says “The kind of stuff you’d watch by yourself when you’re sure there’s nobody else about. Fellers having it off, and not just with people. Someone must have messed with the images, he said. Nobody could really look like that.” As I remind myself that my informant didn’t see any of this he says “What do you want done?”
“What can you do?”
“The hard disc’s shot. Can’t retrieve a thing. Two of us have tried since Fin went.” He sounds as if he’s holding me responsible for some or all of this, even when he says “Do you want a new disc putting in?”
Some element of my concern for my father makes me say “Better not, thanks.”
“Suit yourself. No charge since we couldn’t fix it. When can we drop it off?”
“Any time. Someone’s in now.”
“On the way, mate.”
I could imagine he’s so eager to clear the workbench that he can’t waste even another second. During the conversation I’ve turned along Blackstone Street, one of the wider roads leading to the docks. It predates the High Rip era, and so does the railway bridge halfway down, beyond which the perspective has wedged a cargo vessel between the buildings at the end of the street. The bridge is where a sailor was kicked to death, having strayed into territory a High Rip tribe regarded as exclusively theirs. Now the figure I saw turning the corner is under the bridge.
Almost everything is in focus—the aggressively new houses that have claimed both sides of the street, the brown brick arch that spans it, the cranes raising skeletal snouts towards the clouds above the docks, the sun opening a luminous fan through a gap in the blackness across the river, where a windmill on a ridge gleams like a bleached bone. The only detail that I seem unable to see clearly is the squat figure in the gloom beneath the arch.
I take it for a man. Although his face and the rest of him is steeped in shadow, I have the impression that he’s watching me, perhaps even waiting for me. As I head downhill, the dark fabric in which he’s dressed appears to glisten like the rain that lingers on the pavement. It must be the change in perspective that makes him look even more dwarfish, both broader and shorter. Perhaps I’m better able to see his eyes because they’re widening, though surely not as much as I imagine. I’ll be able to discern him better once the light that’s slanting through the clouds reaches the bridge. The cargo vessel brightens and the dockland cranes blaze, and the road beyond the arch glares like scraped tin. The figure shrinks against the left-hand wall, and then there’s nobody under the bridge.
He must have dodged around the wall. In less than ten seconds I’m on the far side of the bridge. The wall of the railway embankment stretches for hundreds of yards to the next arch. The bricks are unbroken except for the occasional crack, but there’s no sign of the figure I saw—at least, none apart from marks on the pavement under the bridge. They have to be wet footprints, though they must have begun to dry to be so seriously misshapen. I’m staring at them and at the absence of their maker when a man’s voice addresses me, loud enough to suggest that his mouth is enormous. “Looking for something?”
It’s amplified by the bridge. He’s on the opposite side of the road, where he has emerged from a house on the corner of a side street. His wide low scalp is shaved as if to make up for the hairiness of his body, most of which is left exposed by sandals and capacious shorts. His black pelt glistens like a mass of wire, and the shorts glare a fiercer red, as the sunlight reaches him. “I was trying,” I admit.
His heavy footsteps resonate under the bridge, and his voice does. “What’s stopping you?”
“Well, nothing,” I say without amplification. Presumably he has himself in mind. “Have you noticed anything odd around here?”
“Bloody right I have.” By now he’s close enough that I can see beads of moisture decorating his chest hairs. “Like what, for instance?” he demands.
“Anyone, I don’t know, behaving oddly. Someone who doesn’t belong to the neighbourhood.”
“I’m looking at him.”
“I don’t think I’ve done anything particularly odd, have I? I’m just searching.”
“For what?”
I’m about to bring my father up when a new voice shouts “Trouble, Des?”
A man has emerged from the house opposite my interrogator’s. He’s hairier on top but otherwise less hirsute, for which he appears to have compensated with tattoos. “Caught this feller snooping round and asking questions,” Des informs him and scowls at me. “Hang about. Were they saying about you on the radio?”
“That was my father. He’s missing.”
“Forget him. We’re talking about you. It was you, wasn’t it? By Christ it was.” Des turns his back on me to yell “Know who this is?”
“Never saw him before as I know of.”
“He’s been here enough. Likes digging up stories we don’t want dug. Brings his customers round to oggle the animals in the zoo. That’s us, Mick.”
I’ve begun to feel he’s using the archway to dwarf my voice, and so I step beneath it to say “I’ve never done anything like that. I just take people through your history. Not yours, this area’s.”
“Like I said, digging up the dirt and chucking mud,” Des insists as a third nominally dressed man stomps out of the house next to Mick’s to bellow “What’s all the row?”
“Des caught him hanging round our houses, Bill. Looking for stuff he can say shows we’re throwbacks.”
“Not at all,” I protest with a laugh, which the archway exaggerates more than seems helpful.
Bill reaches behind the front door to produce a baseball bat. “I’ll be showing him who’s a throwback.”
“Look, it’s got nothing to do with anyone living round here. I just run a tour about the Victorian gangs. You can’t deny history. It’s part of us.”
“Never mind saying who it’s part of,” Bill says and deals his garden path a clunk of the bat.
“They were just taking care of their patch,” says Mick. “They didn’t want anybody else acting like they belonged here.”
“Anybody blame them?” Des enquires.
I’m compelled to speak up on behalf of the victim and of history itself. “Do you realise somebody was kicked to dea
th right here?”
Des swings to face me. “And what was he up to, I’d like to know.”
“Who’s he saying gave him a kicking?” Mick shouts.
“Fellers like us, he means,” says Bill.
“Excuse me, you don’t know what I mean.”
“He’s saying we’re too thick to understand his crap,” Des declares not far short of my face.
“Try to understand I’m only looking for my father.”
“Well, you won’t find him round here or any bastard else we don’t know.”
“What’s he saying we done now?” Bill bellows.
“Sounds like he thinks we done his dad,” says Mick.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
This is said for me alone to hear, but it gets to Des. “You want to watch what you’re saying about us,” he says, and so does the archway. “You heard him right, Mick.”
“Not at all. Really, if you’d like people to think you’ve evolved…”
I shouldn’t have said that. Any remark seems potentially dangerous, but so does keeping quiet once Des calls “We don’t want him going home disappointed, do we?”
It’s the cue for his neighbours to advance. As Bill lifts the bat in my direction and lets it sink like a dowser’s wand, I step back. “I’ve a train to catch,” I say and walk not too cravenly fast downhill.
Even if I was doing my best not to sound scared off, I shouldn’t have told them where I was going. Immediately beyond the bridge a branch of the road angles towards the station past a tract of industrial land, but it’s deserted and too remote from any traffic. I head for the docks until I reach the next main road, and glance back from the corner. Des and Mick are standing like sentries on the near side of the bridge, but there’s no sign of Bill.
I want to think he’s satisfied with warning me away. Surely he wouldn’t have used the short cut I avoided, which joins the main road a few hundred yards ahead. However little traffic there is, would he really attack me in daylight—even in the meagre light that penetrates the clouds, which are unbroken again? I mustn’t let apprehension hinder me, and I hurry towards the station. Perhaps a bus will come to any rescue that I need.
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