She hands over the phone like she can’t wait to get shot of it. Ben sort of hovers to see if the old bloke needs help too, but he’s into it straight away.
The doc looks jittery. She digs into her cardie for her tabs, then shoves them back again. Then she says she’s going up to the house to get her notebook and rushes off without finishing her bap. When she comes back down ten minutes later, all pink and out of breath, she’s got one of her shawls on instead of her cardie, and has done that thing with her eyeshadow.
Ian’s waiting outside 59 Seymour Street when they get there, pacing up and down, jabbering into his Blackberry and smoking furiously. His bike’s chained to a streetlamp with a chain as thick as Ben’s wrist. It’s probably got one of those sat nav homing gizmos fitted too, that give off a signal when they’re stolen so the police can track it down.
When he sees them, he high-fives Ben. ‘Hey, Ben, my man!’ he says in a mock American accent. ‘I thought we’d lost you.’
‘You have. I mean, Dad doesn’t know I’m here.’
‘So where’s these diaries then?’ Ian goes. Ben had been vaguely hoping that Ian would try persuading Dad to change his mind, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to. In fact it looks like they’ve all being getting on fine without him, which makes him feel really sad, plus it seems so unfair because it was him that started everything off in the first place.
Old Skip fishes out his bunch of keys and sorts through till he finds a little gold Yale, which he hands to Ben. ‘You do it, lad,’ he says and Ben understands that it’s because he doesn’t want to be the one leading the way in through ‘her’ front door.
They all crowd into the musty little hall and Ben pushes open the door to Miss Turnbull’s bedroom. And now he knows exactly what the old bloke feels like, because it seems wrong, all of a sudden, to have these strangers tramping into her private space, stirring up her still air with their busy bodies. But it’s too late to stop now, so he pulls the plastic suitcase out from under the bed and snaps the clasps open.
The Ian bloke’s in there straight away, like you’d expect, squatting down in his khaki shorts and going wow and fantastic, clicking away with his stills camera. The doc’s standing back a bit, as though he’s a kid opening a pressie she’s given him, which is pretty much how he’s behaving actually. As if the diaries belong to him now. Which makes Ben want to push him away and close the case and shove it back under the bed.
He catches old Skip’s eye and the old bloke shrugs. ‘Leave it, lad,’ he says quietly. ‘Like I said, it’s time.’
‘I’ve got one of the 1967 ones,’ Ben says, handing it over. ‘The bit we found where it says about Annie is marked with that Metro ticket.’
Ian plonks himself on the bed with his knees apart, like it’s just any old bed. And Ben wants to say, ‘Look, this is the bed she slept in, right, the old lady who wrote that diary you’re so interested in.’
They all watch him flicking through the notebook, reading bits to himself here and there, and he’s so wired there’s practically steam coming out of his ears. ‘So this is that old woman Lord Jim was talking about, right? The one who was always praying for his immortal soul. Fucking hell! This is like the bloody Missing Link.’
‘I’m glad you think so,’ says the doc, but she doesn’t look it. She looks sort of nervous and narked at the same time.
‘I mean this will be fucking fantastic telly. What with the link to old Skip’s paintings. Right, mate?’ he says to Skip. ‘Your studio’s down there, I assume? The place where you keep your paintings. So I can do a pan from your studio down the hall to this room, can’t I? Fucking A. Couldn’t be better.’ Then, ‘You couldn’t rustle us up a cup of tea, could you, Skip mate? With all this excitement, I’m as parched as the bottom of a parrot’s cage.’ As though old Skip’s his servant, thinks Ben, and we’re all just here to give him what he needs.
But even though Ian is totally bossy and selfish, Ben can’t help admiring the way he just goes for what he wants. Like now, where someone else might be chatting away politely while the tea’s being made, he’s just ignoring everyone and reading the diary.
He’s read the confession bit, where Lord Jim dies, and now he’s working backwards to see if Annie’s mentioned again, which she isn’t, as Ben’s already checked. But maybe he didn’t look hard enough, because it seems like Ian’s found something, because he’s gone all stiff, like a dog on a lead when it sees a cat up ahead; and he’s turning the pages really slowly, reading every word, then flicking back again just to make sure. Then, after a bit, he holds the diary out to the doc.
‘Here’s a section you ought to look at,’ he says. And there’s a look on his face Ben doesn’t quite get, as if all the excitement’s drained out of it and he’s really worried about something.
The doc reads out the bit he’s pointing to: ‘Davy arrived then, so we had to leave off and I sent them out of the kitchen so I could do the floor. When I was done I had a quick cup of coffee and went round the lass’s house.
‘It was a nice sunny day, so we took a picnic to the beach. Her mother’s keen to get her in the water this year, but I can’t see it myself. She’s brought her a copy of The Observer Book of Sea Life, so we took that along and spent a while peering into rock pools.’
Ian’s peering at her face. ‘Does that ring any bells?’ he asks.
‘It depends,’ says the doc. ‘Let me check.’ And she zooms off down the hall with Ian hot on her tail. What on earth are they on about, Ben wonders, following them into the kitchen, where old Skip’s squeezing out teabags and lobbing them into a black bin liner overflowing with crumpled Stella tins.
‘What was the name of your landlady, Mr Skipper?’ the doc asks. ‘Only I’ve a feeling I might have known her when I was a little girl.’
‘Miss Edith Lillian Turnbull she was called, but I always called her Miss Turnbull. Like a mother to me, she was.’
‘Miss Turnbull,’ goes the doc; and for some reason she looks really shaken.
Anyway it turns out that old Miss Turnbull used to be the doc’s childminder or nanny or something, because her parents were GPs, so they had to work during the summer holidays. So they paid the old lady to look after her. Which is totally amazing, because that means that old Skip and Dad and Laura and the doc are all associated with this one house in Seymour Street, if you count the upper and lower flats as one house.
‘Do you remember coming here?’ Ian asks, and the doc shakes her head.
‘I didn’t even know where she lived. She just used to turn up on the front doorstep at ten every morning and hang up her coat in the hall. She could have dropped from the sky like Mary Poppins for all I knew. I remember she always used a hanger instead of a hook and draped her scarf around it as though the hanger was a very thin neck. Then at four o’clock on the dot, she’d take her coat off the hanger and off she’d go.’
‘And you never followed her?’
‘No. Why would I?’ But she looks really worried, as if she can’t trust her own memory – though Ben can’t see why on earth it’s such a big deal.
She turns to old Skip. ‘You don’t recall a little girl visiting the house that summer, do you?’ she asks. ‘She’d have been about ten, but probably looked younger. Small and skinny. Long dark hair held back with a hair band.’
The old bloke shakes his head. ‘I knew she’d got the job, like, but I never clapped eyes on the bairn. But then again, I’d have been off out on the boat most the time.’
‘So she could have come here without you knowing it.’ Ian looks at the doc, as though he’s asking her a question. And it’s suddenly like they’re the only two people in the room, and they’re having this secret conversation.
She shakes her head. ‘All I can say is that I have absolutely no recollection of being in this house,’ she says, like she’s apologizing for something.
‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ says Ian, and he seems really rattled, even more than the doc, which is saying so
mething.
‘If I never came here, I don’t see how I could possibly have known—’
‘I mean it’s fucking Bridey Murphy all over again, isn’t it?’
‘That case was never properly resolved. You do realize that, don’t you? They blew that new evidence up out of all proportion. The fact that she had Irish neighbours as a child didn’t disprove anything.’
‘Look, I need time to think about this. Let me have a proper look at the diaries, then we’ll talk, right?’ Ian crams a custard cream in his mouth and stands up. ‘All right if I borrow these for a few days?’ he asks, though he’s telling really, not asking, because he’s already slipped all the 1967 diaries into his backpack.
It seems very quiet with him gone – like when the TV’s been blaring and you hit the mute button.
‘What was all that about?’ Ben asks.
The doc sort of slumps back in her chair. ‘Ian’s worried that I might have been putting ideas into your head,’ she says. ‘And into your father’s head, and Mr Skipper’s. He thinks I read all these diaries when I was a little girl and made everything up.’
‘But I was going on about Annie for years before I met you.’
‘I know, Ben. But that’s what this documentary’s about. To find out whether reincarnation exists. Unfortunately all the evidence is hearsay. That’s when you have to rely on what people heard other people say.’
‘What, so me talking as Annie and Dad being Jimmy, that could all be made up?’ Ben tries to digest this. ‘But that’s nuts! Why would we make all that up?’
The doc sighs. ‘It’s complicated, Ben.’
This must be what Ian was telling him about, Ben realizes suddenly. The kind of thing all the doc’s critics have been going on about. ‘So you need some proper proof,’ he says. ‘Like a knife or a body or something.’
The doc smiles, but it’s a sad sort of smile. ‘That would be ideal, yes. But these events happened well over a century ago. And our last living witness died out in 1967 with Lord Jim.’
‘But we’ve got his diaries!’
‘They’re Miss Turnbull’s diaries, Ben, not Lord Jim’s,’ she reminds him. ‘So we’ve only got her word for what he told her.’
‘Well I believe her,’ Ben says stoutly. ‘And I believe Annie and Flo and Jimmy and all them.’
‘So do I, Ben,’ says the doc. Then she sort of pulls herself together and turns to old Skip, who’s started clearing away the tea things. ‘How very strange and delightful to discover that you knew Miss Turnbull,’ she says. ‘She was an important role model for me. At a time when I was feeling somewhat alienated and lost, I think she rather saved me.’ She smiles, remembering. ‘She taught me that one didn’t always have to do what people expect of one.’
‘Ay,’ says old Skip, ‘she was a one-off, was Miss Turnbull.’
‘I think she became rather fond of me,’ says the doc.
‘When you went back to that boarding school, she was really sad for a few days,’ says Ben, recalling what he read in the diary.
The doc gets up and wanders into the old biddy’s lounge, with its swirly carpet and shag-pile hearthrug, then back into the bedroom. ‘You know, none of this is in the least bit familiar,’ she says. ‘But I suppose it’s just possible that she brought me here – if she’d left something behind, perhaps, or if Lord Jim needed something during the day.’
‘Did she ever talk about him?’ Ben asks.
‘Never – at least not that I recall. But from what we know about her, that’s not surprising, is it? She’d have done her utmost to prevent me from ever crossing paths with him.’
‘We could check by looking at the diaries.’
‘Indeed. Unfortunately Ian’s snaffled the relevant volumes – which I should have predicted really.’
They wander back down the hall to Skip’s bit of the flat. Closing the door to Miss Turnbull’s lounge, Ben feels like apologizing for disturbing her.
‘I still can’t believe Ian was Annie’s mam,’ he says. ‘Because she was always, like, thinking of other people’s needs and he never does, does he? And he’s got all those kids, right? But he never says a word about them. I mean, normal grown-ups, right, if they’ve got kids, they’re always comparing you with them, telling you what year they’re in at school and what their hobbies are and that.’
‘Reincarnation’s not like genetic inheritance, Ben,’ says the doc. ‘The resemblances between generations operate according to different rules. Take your father, for example.’
‘Dad’s nothing like Lord Jim.’
‘Exactly. But they are on the same spiritual path. And you and Annie are different too, but you’re walking together, in some sense, through the same landscape.’
‘Like holding hands.’
‘Yes, that’s a very good analogy.’
Ben has a think. ‘I’ve got to make Dad agree to be hypnotized again,’ he says.
Chapter Forty-Eight
2007
Paul’s been off on the boat, but he didn’t dare go far – not with Ben still in a huff with him. He thought he’d try them prawn beds again, that got hammered a few year back, and got a canny haul; nothing to shout about, but enough to keep the lads happy and cover his costs. He kept calling the lad’s mobile, but he never answered. So he got on to Nana and nagged her into going round twice a day, and to keep banging on his door till she gets an answer – and to call him straight away if she doesn’t.
He keeps thinking about what that Laura creature said – about kids topping themselves – and wondering if he’s been too hasty, hauling Ben away like that. He’s thinking maybes one last session might be alright, to let the lad say goodbye and that, draw a proper line under the whole thing, before they go off on holiday. So that’s what he’s decided.
When he comes in, Ben’s in the kitchen mixing a strawberry Nesquik, and he actually says ‘howay’, which is a relief compared to the silent treatment he got before he went away. Maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder or something.
‘Howay, lad,’ Paul says, slinging a load of late sun brochures on the coffee table. ‘See if there’s anything there you fancy.’
Ben sort of shuffles them around for a bit, even opens a few, so at least he’s making an effort. So now Paul’s thinking that maybe they can start painting his room tomorrow, do something together before he has to go off again.
‘What do you want for supper?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. Anything.’
Paul opens the fridge, hoping Nana might have got in something they can eat, but it’s hopeless as usual. Would it kill her to get in a steak and salad once in a while? Couple of decent lamb chops; maybe a pack of broccoli and new potatoes?
‘What about Chinese?’ he calls over his shoulder.
‘All right. If you want.’
Popping a couple of Diet Cokes, they sit on the sofa together and look through the menus. Ben’s got a yellow highlighter to mark the dishes they want – which is pretty much what they always have, give or take a tub of crispy seaweed.
‘There you go,’ says Paul, handing Ben the remote. ‘Check out the viewing options while I call this in.’
After he’s put in the order, he listens to the messages on the land line. There’s two from old Bing, on about some crab pots he wants shot of – then that doc comes on the line saying something about an ‘accidental meeting’ with Ben and Mr Skipper.
‘Accidental my arse,’ he growls as he hangs up. ‘Ben! What’s all this about? I thought I said to stay away from that witchdoctor and her hangers-on.’
‘I went to the library to look up where Lord Jim lived,’ says the lad, looking a bit sheepish. ‘I thought if I could find out a bit more about him, maybe you wouldn’t be so, I don’t know, like upset and angry and stuff.’
So that’s why he’s being so friendly all of a sudden. ‘You’ve no business checking him out. I told you before, that pervert’s got nothing to do with me.’
‘But I just wanted to—’<
br />
‘I don’t care what you “just wanted” to do. You’re not doing it any more, right?’
‘But we found some diaries.’
‘Oy! Read my lips. The subject’s closed.’
Ben opens his mouth like he’s going to give him some lip, then shuts it again and walks out the room. Just like that. One minute they’re side by side on the sofa, chatting about holidays and Chinky chow, next thing you know he’s back in his burrow again. Hearing the key turn, Paul wishes the lad had given him an earful. At least they’d be talking. The way it is now, they could be living on different planets.
He wanders over to the window to stare out at the river, at the ferry over the far side setting out from South Shields. Maybe he should get a proper girlfriend, instead of just a Saturday night casual; someone to, like, be there in the room with him and the lad, nattering on the way lassies do. So it’s not always just the two of them, in each others’ faces all the time. Someone who’d do a bit of decent shopping for when he gets back, maybe even cook a Sunday lunch now and then. Say what you like, Nessa was always good at that sort of thing. ‘Catering’, she called it. Weird the things you remember.
Sprawling back on the sofa, he scrolls down and clicks on to some cable channel where they’re showing three old episodes of Top Gear back to back. Even Paul reckons that might be a bit too much of a good thing.
When the Chinese arrives, he puts Ben’s on a tray with his pop and a fork and bangs on the door to say it’s on the floor outside. Like a fucking prisoner, he thinks, except the key’s on the wrong side.
He’s just got his all spread out in front of the TV, with the Kikkoman and a couple of cold Stellas, and a length of kitchen roll on his lap, when the bell goes again. Probably the delivery lad realizing he’s given him too much change, he thinks, getting up and opening the door. But it’s that BBC bloke.
‘What are you doing here?’ Paul says.
‘Look, I’ll only be a minute.’
‘You’ve got a fucking cheek.’
‘I completely understand how you feel – and I agree. If it’s any consolation, she had me totally convinced too.’
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