He must be hoping it will shut me up. “Can I have a word?” I murmur. “About the deal we discussed.”
“That’s expired, sir, I’m afraid.” At least none of his colleagues is looking, and he has lowered his voice. “If you’d like me to show you anything else…”
“Whatever you like, but I need to talk about that. You were right, I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“We’re the buddies of your budget,” he says, quoting the new Frugo slogan, and ushers me away from his workmates. “Have you seen our latest Frugosh? Mobiles you can watch six free films a month on.”
“Sounds good, but I really need to get that other deal.”
“You should have got it while it was going. You were in the right place for it then.”
“This is as well. Nobody’s listening.” When he widens his large eyes but leaves them blank I say “Can’t I just give you the number to trace? I mustn’t be without my phone.”
“Keep it down.” His expansive face has grown so mottled that it seems in danger of puffing up, though his jowls stay pale. “Give us your number,” he mutters.
“It’s my father’s. It’s—”
“I’m saying give us yours and I’ll let you know if I can do anything.”
“When will you?”
“Should be after work.”
“I can’t wait that long. It’s too urgent. It could be a matter of I won’t say what. It’s desperately urgent, I promise.”
“Not so desperate if you went looking somewhere else. Take it or leave it. If you’re giving me your number, make it quick.”
“Let me give you this first.” I reach in my hip pocket, and my mouth dries up. Have I been a victim of that Victorian survival, the pickpocket? No, the notes have taken refuge in the folds of my handkerchief. I crouch towards a shelf of mobiles, their little screens as featureless as slates awaiting chalk, while I count out fifty pounds to plant in the salesman’s hand. “That’s what we agreed, yes?” I remind him.
He looks both ways before slipping the money into his back pocket. “It’ll do,” he says and unclips a ballpoint. “Let’s have your number, then.”
He’s about to turn away, having inscribed it on his wrist, when I murmur “You’ll want my father’s too.”
I bring up the message onscreen, covering it with my thumb so that he can read just the digits. The police would insist on reading the message, one reason I’m wary of contacting them. “I need you to let me know where that came from just as soon as you possibly can.”
“Something up with your lugs? I said—”
“I’m begging you, all right?” Perhaps he finds this absurdly old-fashioned, and certainly deserving of no more than a stare, which provokes me to add “You don’t want me making a row. We’re being watched.”
His throat works—it bulges, and so do his eyes. I have to decipher his question from the shapes his swollen lips adapt. “Who by?”
“The security cameras,” I say and nod at the monitor above the counter. “We’re up there. I won’t have to tell the manager why you took my money, will I?”
I’m belatedly assailed by the notion that if he wasn’t smart enough to avoid the camera he may not be much use in tracing my father’s number. As he yanks his sleeve down, surely not so hard that he smudges the information on his wrist, I murmur “Don’t keep me waiting any longer than you absolutely need. You don’t want me coming back or ringing the shop.”
Is this too threatening? Alternatively, is it convincing enough? I can’t think of anything else I could risk saying. I leave him before he has time to respond, but I sense his distended gaze on me all the way to the street. When I glance back through the glass door, he lifts a finger to his lips. I don’t know whether he’s musing on how to deal with me or enjoining silence.
I have less than an hour to my tour, but I mustn’t simply kill time, and I need to take my mind off waiting to hear from the salesman or, surely better, my parents. Even showing the librarians that the unpublished papers exist would be something to do on my father’s behalf, and then I realise I haven’t brought the photocopied typescript with me. “Use your head,” I blurt so fiercely that people seem to think I’m haranguing them as I tramp across the road. Why are so many people wearing a badge? It depicts a drop of water hovering above or falling on a word. At first I think it’s WADE, and then I see it’s WAD. No doubt it refers to yet another event designed to publicise Liverpool.
The blackbird has been silenced, whichever cellar it was in. As I hasten along the lane I hear a subterranean rumour of someone living in a nowhere land. Above Castle Street the sky has grown so dark that the sanctuary stone is indistinguishable from the road. I dash across as the green men start to gutter. Darkness presses the waterfront buildings low as I descend towards the river, and I could imagine the giant birds have been hooked by lines that are dragging them into the depths.
Somebody is taking a late bath in one of the apartments. As I pad fast upstairs I hear water sloshing above me. It subsides as I reach my floor. The afternoon is even darker than it seemed; I have to switch on the light in my hall, even though most of the inner doors are ajar. I’m in the main room and reaching for the page on the table before I realise why the apartment is so dark. Has my parents’ disappearance robbed me of awareness? When I left, all the curtains were open, but now they’re drawn as close as they will go.
I snatch the page from the table on my way to let the meagre daylight into the room, calling “Who’s here?” That’s thoughtless too. Only Lucinda could be, but why would she shut out the light? I’ll ask her when I see her. I’m in the hall, where the discolouration of the pages looks as if large damp hands have been fumbling at them, when I hear water sloshing again. It’s beyond the only inner door that’s shut—the bathroom door.
I repeat my question, which brings silence except for a watery gurgle that might belong to the plumbing or express stifled mirth. I take hold of the doorknob, which is as wet as a stone in a marsh. “I’m coming in,” I announce, which feels more like an attempt at a vow. I twist the knob and fling the door wide. The shower curtain flaps, and surely that’s the reflection I glimpse in the mirror, not a pallid figure with far too little notion of its shape ducking low in the bath. As I venture unwillingly forward, isn’t that just my shadow slithering along the wet green trough towards the plug that’s half out of the hole? Surely I don’t see the glistening tail or some other section of an intruder squeeze into the hole and disappear like a snail into a shell. I can’t be certain of any of this, because I’m out of the apartment at a speed that leaves behind most of my breath.
Chapter Forty
AT THE MONUMENT
I don’t quite slam the door of my apartment. At the last moment I block it with one foot, because I’m almost too furious to think. How can I let myself be scared out of my own home in broad daylight, or at any rate today’s version of it, by nothing more than suspicions of an interloper? I won’t be much use to my parents if this is the best I can do. I’m acting too much like my mother. I take a breath and then a deeper one to hold while I inch the door wide.
The lamplit hall leads past the darkened rooms to the solitary uncurtained window. Beyond the golf bag bristling with umbrellas the illegible documents are lined up on the carpet like eroded slabs in a churchyard. The stillness makes my ears and the bruise on my forehead ache, and arrests my breath until I have to gasp, and turns my mouth as dry as paper. I won’t move until the trespasser betrays its presence, although my immobility feels as if I’m paralysed by a waking dream. But I am moving—I’m inadvertently crumpling the photocopy in my hand. I fold it small enough to fit into my hip pocket, and then I grip the doorframe and take a single stealthy pace into the hall.
I’ve no idea how long I may have stood with one foot across the threshold when it occurs to me that the electric light could inhibit any trespasser. I let go of the doorframe and feel absurd for covering the switch with my hand to mute the click. Darkness returns to the ap
artment, taking refuge in the blacked-out rooms, but there’s no sign that anything else does. I support myself with the doorframe again and glare at the section of mirror that’s visible in the dim bathroom. At last I glimpse movement—a shifting of the shower curtain, but it’s just a flicker of eyestrain. As I blink my eyes wide I feel as if I’m wakening or not quite, and glance at my watch. Somehow it’s nearly time to start the tour.
I won’t leave the apartment dark, not least because it puts me in mind of the way a death used to be signified. All the curtains of a house with a corpse in it would be drawn, as if any light from the world outside could bring about some kind of revival. Only water can, except that’s one of John Strong’s deranged notions, and what is it doing in my head? The intrusion enrages me, and I stalk along the hall.
Are the kitchen curtains wet? I haven’t time to be sure, nor whether there are faint damp almost shapeless tracks in the hall. I’m in the bedroom, tugging the curtains as wide as they’ll go, when I hear a noise in the bathroom. It’s only a trickle of water, but is it leaving the bath? It’s beginning to sound larger and heavier too. Quite a weight seems to be groping forth and gaining far too much substance as it extends towards the hall. It’s between me and any escape other than jumping from a window, which is such a nightmarishly ridiculous idea that I’m furious again. Have I let in enough light to keep anything back? “Come out if you’ve got the guts, you—” I shout, but the rest of my breath is needed for a dash along the hall. Is that my shadow—the blurred shape that rears up as I pass the bathroom? It’s as much as I glimpse on the way to slamming the apartment door so hard that the impact seems to end up in the cellar.
As I hurry downstairs I’m seized by a kind of hysterical glee, like a child running away from a prank he’s committed. It seems grotesquely inappropriate, more like an emotion in a dream. Until I reach the outer door the pen rattles in the inkwell as if it’s amplifying my panic or eager to transcribe it. When I step into the street the mossy cornucopia bestows a drip on me like a warning of a storm.
I’ve forgotten to bring an umbrella again. I don’t know whether I’m more infuriated by the oversight or by its pettiness in the midst of so much else. My lightweight jacket is meant to be waterproof. The narrow street appears to have squeezed most of the light from the strip of sky, but when I emerge into James Street, which is several times as broad, my surroundings simply expand the dark. As I hurry uphill to the monument that rises where the Castle used to stand, however, the pillars elevating the dome above the bronze queen blaze white and their shadows topple onto the statue. I could imagine that the dome is about to collapse like the church that was its predecessor, undermined by water lurking beneath the site. The pillars have been shaken only by a glare of light above the river. A reverberation suggests that a portal as wide as the sky has opened at my back. In a moment the slope behind me breaks into a hiss so fierce that it’s on the way to convincing me the Mersey has burst its banks. Then the storm falls on me, and although it takes just a few seconds to sprint to the monument, I’m drenched before I reach the shelter.
As I rub my wet scalp with my wet hands, which has little effect beyond making my skull feel softened, the buildings around the square grow as falsely bright as a diorama—a display of architecture spanning more than a century. The light vanishes with a prolonged rumble like an earthquake, and I’m reminded that two Liverpool churches were struck by lightning in a great nineteenth-century storm. People are fleeing through the afternoon dusk to whatever refuge they can find. Policemen in daffodil jerkins retreat into the law courts as pensioners shuffle and hobble down James Street to the underground station. All along Castle Street to the town hall workers dodge into offices while shoppers race down Lord Street to Frugo Corner and the neighbouring stores, pursued by a miniature flood that might almost be seeking to revive the Pool at the Whitechapel crossroads. Within a minute not a single human being is to be seen.
Where are my customers hiding? Perhaps they’re sheltering in the Moat House at the corner of the square. It’s the oldest building, a mid-nineteenth-century bank that is now a hotel. Because it was built over a stretch of the moat the cellars are unusually deep, and I’d prefer not to think that anyone feels at home down there. I pace around the giant tenant of the dome to find that the bunches of pillars don’t afford much protection from the downpour. The orb in Victoria’s hand drips like a treasure she has just found in the river or an internal organ she’s offering to Whitechapel and the Pool, and she gazes towards the crossroads as if she’s mocking my fruitless search for customers. One plodding circuit around the hem of her bronze robes shows me only drenched deserted streets. I wouldn’t blame anyone for failing to show up, perhaps on the assumption that I won’t. I’m huddling behind the queen’s massive skirts, the best in the way of shelter that the monument can offer, when a jagged lurid rip appears in the black sky above the river.
The buildings around me seem to lurch forward as though they’re eager to be photographed by the flash, and I glimpse a movement that’s more real. For some reason it puts me in mind of a creature retreating beneath a stone. As the untimely twilight returns with a crash as vast as the sky there’s another movement—more than one. Someone’s wielding an umbrella at the near end of Lord Street, and somebody else is holding one outside a pub on the corner of James Street, among tables and chairs spitting rain.
For a moment I wonder if the newcomers are associated with the Histrionic History troupe. It isn’t just that they’ve grown so theatrically still; their costumes could well be described as historical. Indeed, the outfits look not just so haphazard that they might have been chosen in pitch darkness but positively ancient, close to mouldering, certainly glistening with moisture. However much of that is rain, it’s hardly reassuring. Despite the downpour, the loiterers aren’t holding their umbrellas up. They’re leaning on them.
I’m reminded of the photograph of Joseph Williamson gripping his stick like a blind man. Their motley clothes are reminiscent of his shabby crumpled garb. I can’t distinguish much else about the watchers in the twilight veiled with rain, and perhaps I’m glad. Though their large round greyish heads are bald, this doesn’t seem to guarantee their gender. Surely the outlines of their wide-mouthed expressionless faces are unstable only with streams of rain, but in spite of the downpour their big eyes don’t blink. I’ll feel less threatened if I wait in the entrance to the law courts. Before I can head that way there’s another vicious flash.
I see what made me think of creatures beneath stones. The umbrellas jerk up to fend off the lightning, inevitably not fast enough. I’m facing the watcher in Lord Street. Its eyes don’t simply wince at the light—they don’t even close so much as shrivel, retreating into the head. The umbrella hides the figure from its rudimentary neck up, but not until I’ve glimpsed two wrinkled indentations in the pallid rubbery flesh where the eyes were. The sight seems as paralysing as the worst nightmare, but I have to move while I’m not being watched. I stumble around the monument towards the law courts, only to lean against the statue like a child clutching at his mother’s skirt. The rain outside the courts seems unnaturally amplified, and now I see why. The drumming lessens as two figures in faded voluminous dresses lower their umbrellas and raise their hairless globular heads to the rain.
Can’t I shout for help? The police may be deep in the courtroom building by now, and I don’t know who else would respond, let alone what may have happened by the time they do. I twist around and wish I hadn’t, though ignorance might be even worse. A fifth watcher has appeared on the corner by the Moat House, and another is crouching over an umbrella on the opposite corner of Castle Street. I’m surrounded, and I have a sense that there’s more of the gang I’ve yet to locate.
If I can see just one person as human as myself I’ll cry for help or even company or perhaps no more than their awareness, which ought to let me make my escape—surely my captors won’t risk being noticed by anyone else. I cling to this hope until several fig
ures in yellow jackets cross the far end of Lord Street from Paradise Street to Whitechapel. They’re too distant for me to determine whether they’re workmen or police, and suppose they’re neither? So many people wear that sort of item these days it’s no longer a uniform, and how easy is it to obtain? The figures don’t seem bothered by the downpour, and could they hear me at that distance? Before I can find out they vanish into Whitechapel.
While I was preoccupied with them, reinforcements have arrived. Two newcomers in crumpled sodden dungarees are leaning on miniature umbrellas in the gloomy corner between the law courts and the concrete offices at the top of Lord Street. The smallness of the figures is no comfort. They’re too squat, and the lower sections of their unnecessarily large heads are sunk in the unbuttoned collars of their ragged shirts as if they’re neckless. Even if they’re children, this suggests they belong to the family I was lured here to meet. What do they all want of me? In the midst of my panic, which has made me dry-mouthed and so breathless that it feels like drowning in the storm, I wonder if they only mean to keep me here, since they aren’t closing in—if they’re preventing me from going somewhere else. Then, as though my fancy was an inadvertent summons, the watcher on Lord Street advances at a slithery pace.
Every one of its companions follows suit. Half of them I only hear, but the sounds are unpleasantly detailed. The figures take another lopsided step like the next move in a sluggish hopping dance, a ritual rooted in the history of the place, and then they falter. As the umbrellas jerk up in unison, spraying raindrops, I could imagine that I’m watching some nightmarish musical number. The lightning has already faded, and in a few seconds the umbrellas droop, revealing that some faces have eyes again while others are less immediately venturesome. The spectacle pins me where I am, one hand clutching at the queen’s chilly metal robes and finding no hint of security. I’m appalled to realise that however briefly the cordon was halted, I might have had time to dodge through it. I flinch at a belated peal of thunder, which seems to have used the delay to gather extra violence and which the loose circle of figures takes as a cue to advance in various ways as grotesque as they’re inexorable. The one outside the pub crouches over its umbrella to drag itself forward, which makes its misshapen approach seem even more determined. The scrape of the ferrule on the pavement as the ring of figures closes in sounds like eagerness rendered solid. It ceases as the umbrella swings up, and I hear a dilapidated flapping all around me. The noise makes me think of reptiles stirring in a cave as I bolt down the steps of the monument.
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