‘No wonder you’re so scared of the sea.’
‘Anyway, deep in the throes of my anxieties about being Tom, I decided to check through all my old transcripts. Come to think of it, that was only four days ago – how extraordinary! It feels like a lifetime away. Anyway, I was searching for those glimpses into other lives that I told you about.’
‘Your fishermen, yes, go on.’
‘And they included a puzzling little vignette of myself as a boy gazing out of a very high window.’
‘And you think that might have been Sam seeing the view from your bedroom!’
‘As you know, the place used to be an alms-house for the families of fishermen lost at sea. It occurs to me that Sam’s family might have been billeted here for a time after his father was drowned. Which might explain why I decided to buy my house – and why I felt compelled to choose that particular bedroom.’
‘So who was that T.H. omee you were going on about then? And what about all that business with tobacco tins? Because that Sam never smoked, did he? My Tom was forever giving him a hard time about it.’
Mary stubs out her cigarette and collects up her carrier bags. ‘Come on,’ she says briskly. ‘Let’s go and have another look.’
‘I did find something about a tobacco tin,’ Mary says, squatting by the box in her consulting room and leafing through papers. ‘It’s in here somewhere. I marked the places where I went off-piste with Post-its.’ Then she straightens up: ‘There! See what you make of that.’
Laura takes the sheaf of typescript and starts to read: ‘“She’s gone down to the kitchen with the bairns to find out what’s happening about tea, if she’s supposed to make it or if they do and what time and that.”
‘You’re right – that could easily be when they first arrived here and they’re not quite sure how things are organized.’ She reads on: ‘“So I take my chance to look in his ditty box again. I wrapped ticking round it to quiet the rattle and not draw attention, so now I unwrap it and open it up. And there’s that photo where she’s looking like an angel, sat still for the camera. How’d they ever get her to sit that still?
‘“Now I’ve got his bakkie tin out and it’s popped open just like that, easy as blinking. And there’s his roll of Sweet Virginia and his papers, and his box of matches, little scattered wisps of dry bakkie. The smell’s that sweet, like toffee almost. And all the while I’m listening out for Mam coming back up the stairs, because I don’t want her seeing and getting upset.”
‘He keeps saying “his tin”, doesn’t he? And why is he trying to hide it from his mother?’
And all at once Mary understands. ‘T.H.! Thomas Heron. The letters scratched on the tin – they must be the initials of Sam’s father. Don’t you remember, that day in the library? All those Thomases?’ She beams at Laura. ‘It all fits in: Sam told Annie that his mother was being pestered by the man who checked her nets. That’s what those lads in the pub were talking about that evening with Tom. About how one day Sam decided to confront him.’
She snatches back the transcript and leafs back to a previous page. ‘They said he’d had a few drinks to give himself some Dutch courage, didn’t they? Right, now listen to this: “I’m feeling qualmy, like the beer’s sloshing around in my belly.”
‘Then he says: “I hear her voice saying something from inside, and it comes back to me, this great whoosh of anger and I reach up to check my knife’s there.”
‘That must be the knife I remembered! And now this: “So I’m trying to sort the buttons, but I’m so spitting angry my fingers won’t work, and I’m just ripping them open, and his tin’s come out of my pocket and’s clattering onto the boards.”’
She holds out the typescript and stares at it, as though she can’t quite believe it. ‘That’s the bit I kept seeing, the tin clattering to the floor.’
‘So you were Sam, and Ben was Annie. No wonder you’re so fond of the lad.’
‘Then Sam came back as Miss Turnbull and we met again.’ Mary sinks down onto the pouffe as the information settles in her mind. Then: ‘I wonder who I was between Sam dying and Peggy being born.’
‘Maybe Miss T. had a secret sweetheart we don’t know about,’ says Laura. ‘And it’s you and Ben who’ve been the real soulmates all along.’
The phone rings suddenly, deafeningly, in the little hallway. It’s Ian, slightly peeved that Mary hasn’t called. ‘Don’t you ever check your answerphone?’ he asks. He wants to film an interview about her findings so far – ‘uncontaminated’, as he puts it, by the results of the expedition to search for Annie’s remains.
‘It will be our first formal interview,’ he says. ‘The crew’s arriving this evening. So you’ll be on camera, talking to me. Are you OK with that?’ He wants her down on the Fish Quay – ‘to give a bit of atmos’ he says, whatever that is – first thing tomorrow morning.
‘Will Hester be there?’ Mary asks nervously, as an uncomfortable jolt of adrenaline surges through her.
‘Not at this stage, no – though I’ll send her the transcript and no doubt she’ll have some comments to make.’ At least that’s something less to worry about, she thinks. ‘You won’t be facing her until all the location stuff’s in the can. Once I’ve done a rough edit, I’ll get you up to London for a proper studio session.’
‘What do you want me to wear?’ she asks. ‘Shall I fish that top out of the washing basket again?’
‘Don’t worry about that. There won’t be any continuity issues if we’re not in your consulting room.’
When she replaces the receiver she notices that there is indeed a red light blinking on her answerphone. ‘I seem to have a message,’ she says, gesturing helplessly at the machine. ‘Laura, help me. Do you remember how it works?’
‘See that button where it says “Review Messages”? Press it. Go on, it won’t bite.’
There are three messages: the two from Ian that she already knows about – and one from Mr Skipper, sounding typically polite and hesitant.
‘Hello, Doctor? Sorry to bother you, only I need to have another one of them remembering sessions. I been thinking about that Flo and how it was a bit muddled, like. Only it’s coming a bit clearer now, so I wanted to talk to you, if that’s all right. Anyway, you know where I am. When you can spare the time, like.’
‘How strange. I wonder what that’s all about,’ Mary says vaguely. Then, turning back to Laura. ‘So, which of my wonderful new outfits do you think I should wear to be on the television?’
Chapter Fifty-Nine
2007
Ben rolls over and opens his eyes. The rising sun’s sneaking into his room, a thin pink stripe high up on his cream wall – Dad’s ordered some new maroon blinds, but they haven’t come in yet.
He closes his eyes again; he’s had a terrible night. He kept sort of half waking up, then lying there not knowing where he was, and staring round his room, trying to get used to it: the big orangey squares on the walls from the street lights down below, bleached out by the moon’s pale blue squares trundling slowly across them.
Now it’s light and here’s that bright pink stripe of sun, getting wider and yellower, until he can see it through his closed eyelids and he knows he’ll never get back to sleep. And now he’s hungry too, but Dad won’t be up for ages, so he decides to nip out on his own and go down the Seamen’s Mission for a sausage bap.
It’s weird going down the Fish Quay these days, since all those sessions with the doc. He keeps half expecting it to be like it used to be: totally buzzing, with towers of herring barrels everywhere – but it’s just a few old blokes drinking Stella on a bench and nine or ten boats moored up. The Mission’s open, though, and they’re buttering a squillion baps, but the sausages aren’t ready yet, so he has bacon again instead.
He wanders along the river past Clifford’s Fort, munching and chucking bits of bread for the gulls. This is the beach where the cobles used to be, but it’s all smashed up old polystyrene fish boxes now, washed up by the tide, and ca
r tyres and that; Q tips and crisp packets all mixed in with the seaweed. And where the roads are now is different too, plus there’s the car park and public loos, so he can’t work out how it used to be. Chucking his bag in the bin, he starts to walk back home, but when he gets there, instead of pressing the entry code, he keeps on walking and, after a bit, he finds he’s got to Seymour Street.
It’s still only six-thirty, and there’s no one around, so he peers through the letter box of number 59, to see if the old lady who lives there now has cleared up that litter tray, which she has. So then he pushes open the letterbox of number 60, where old Skip lives, but there’s a bristly thing there that stops him seeing in. And he’s just going to walk away, when he hears the whistle of Skip’s battered old kettle, so he knows he’s awake.
‘I didn’t know if you’d be up,’ Ben fibs, watching old Skip pour out ready-mixed tea and Carnation milk into two chipped enamel mugs.
‘I can never stop in bed,’ he says, ‘and this early light’s good for my painting.’
The Push and Pull pub picture’s leaning against the wall, unfinished. On the easel now is a painting of a woman’s face. Ben stands in front of it; the face looks sort of familiar, like maybe he’s seen her in a dream or something. ‘Who’s that?’ he asks.
‘That’s me mam, just before she died.’
He’s painted a gash of bright red lipstick on her face, and her head’s tilted up and sort of sideways, as though she’s just about to say something angry. Except there’s half a smile there too, somewhere, maybe around the eyes, so it looks like maybe she’s teasing, but means it at the same time.
‘Did you talk to your father about that White Lady Reef, then?’ asks old Skip. ‘Only I’ve looked out my old books if he wants them – if he can make any sense of them, that is.’
‘Can I see?’ asks Ben.
‘Ooh, I don’t know about that.’ The old bloke sucks his teeth doubtfully, but Ben knows he’s joking. ‘Go on, then. They’re out on that bench there. Ought to lock them up probably.’
‘Dad’s got his on a load of DVDs,’ Ben offers. ‘He got a safe put in Nana’s flat for them, but he won’t tell her the combination.’ He giggles. ‘She’s really narked about it.’
‘Skippers used to keep them in a big walk-in safe down the fish cannery in the old days. Massive combination lock, night watchman, the lot. Paid a monthly fee. I always gave mine to Miss Turnbull; told her to hide them for me.’
There’s a page marked with a squashed Rizla packet. ‘That’s the reef, on the right there,’ says old Skip when Ben opens it to have a look. ‘See, there’s branches coming off of it, and gaps through. Them’s what makes the currents so clever.’ He points a yellow-stained finger. ‘I reckon Tom would’ve rowed to here, see? Then drifted up along here,’ he says. ‘You tell your da.’
‘Can you take me?’ Ben asks suddenly. Why didn’t he think of this in the first place? Because there’s no way Dad would be seen dead puttering about in a dinghy. ‘I want to go down with the metal detector.’
‘What about that BBC man?’
‘I want to go down first.’
‘Why’s that then, Paul’s lad?’
‘I don’t think he’s going to look properly,’ Ben says. ‘But it’s not just that.’ There’s a silence while he wonders how to explain. ‘You know when Ian was here,’ he begins, ‘and we were reading Miss Turnbull’s diaries? And he just plonked down on her bed, so her handbag slipped onto the floor, and kicked her slippers out the way? Then he just sort of grabbed all the 1967 diaries and went off with them without even asking?’
Old Skip nods. ‘So you don’t want him doing that with your Annie.’
Nana’s at the flat when Ben gets back, and she’s all excited because they’re filming down on the Fish Quay, and she’s going on and on at Dad to take her down with him because he’s ‘a friend of the director’. And Dad’s going, OK, OK, though you can see he doesn’t want to.
Then in the middle of all that, the phone goes and it’s Ian again. Which totally freaks Nana out when she realizes, so she starts doing that annoying mime thing that people do when you’re talking on the phone and they want to talk to you at the same time. Then when Dad turns away, so he can’t see her, she starts whispering, really loud – ‘Paul! Paul! Ask him if I can come and watch!’ – so Dad has to flap his hand backwards to try and shut her up.
Ben hangs around for a while, to see whether Dad is going out on that film recce after all. But it sounds like they’re talking about some other filming in a few days, because Dad’s saying, OK and are you sure and see you on Monday then, and he’ll make sure the lads are all there. Which means Dad’s not going to look for Annie, and the Ian bloke’s fobbed him off by promising to film Wanderer pretending to go off fishing instead. Which means Ben has to go by himself.
He slips into the spare room where they keep all their diving gear – the wet suits hanging up in the en-suite shower like hollow black people, the air tanks in the bath. The Aquapulse’s on a shelf in the wardrobe. He shoves it in his diving bag with his fins and that, his torch and spare batteries, his diving knife and mask, his suit and weight belt. At the last minute he remembers the thirty-metre line – just in case, though he doesn’t think he’ll have to go that deep.
‘I’m just off swimming, OK?’ he announces from the hall when he’s ready.
Dad’s scrolling through names on his mobile. ‘OK, buddy,’ he says without looking up. ‘See you later.’
‘Have you had any breakfast?’ calls Nana, like she always does. Then, not waiting for an answer: ‘Paul? When are we going down the Fish Quay?’
‘Did you bring your book?’ Ben shouts to old Skip over the noise of the outboard as they head out past the Priory and turn north towards Whitley Bay. The sun’s high and there’s a little breeze flicking the surface of the water, so it’s all fresh and glittery, like tinsel.
‘Don’t you worry, Paul’s lad,’ he shouts back. ‘I had a good look before I came out.’
It’s too noisy to bother talking, so Ben just sits trailing his hands in the water and practising his breathing exercises. He’s excited, that’s the trouble, because it’ll use up too much oxygen; so he’s making himself calm down by doing that colour-meditation exercise, that katabasis, where you go through all the rainbow colours, really trying to concentrate, and relax a bit more with each colour. So you start with red, which is an exciting buzzy colour, which is how he feels right now; then you go to orange, then yellow; and each time you switch colours the excitement calms down a bit more until you get to blue and violet, which are the most relaxing. His freediving book called the bluey shades ‘the colours of the unconscious’ and says katabasis is like going down into the underworld.
The weird thing is that’s exactly what happens in real life when you’re diving. So at the surface you can see all the colours, but as you start going down the reds and yellows start to go and everything looks greeny, even the orange stripe on your fins. So even that deep – which is hardly deep at all – you have to use a torch to see what colour things really are. Then when you go deeper, the green starts to go too, and things start turning blue, which is why the sky looks blue, because it’s deep into space.
So anyway, he’s doing his katabasis exercises, and by the time he’s finished, they’ve arrived. Well, not exactly arrived, but old Skip’s cutting the outboard and pulling it up out of the water so it won’t snag on the rocks, and is getting the oars ready. Ben peers over the side, trying to see the reef, but the sun’s bouncing off the ripples, dazzling him, so it’s impossible.
‘How do you know where we are?’ he asks.
‘I look at the church, the dome, the lighthouse. The lamp-posts help a bit, I think. The trees. You have to tell your mind where you want to be, then let it work it out by itself.’
Turning down Ben’s offer of help, the old bloke rows silently for a while, then lets the boat drift – then, at some sign Ben can’t see, drops the anchor over the side. ‘T
here you go,’ he says, looking pleased with himself. ‘Time for a cuppa before you start?’
‘OK.’ Ben doesn’t really want one, but it seems rude to say no.
‘They were good friends, them two lasses, weren’t they?’ says old Skip, handing over the first cup. ‘That Annie and Flo. Always linking in, nattering away.’
Ben takes a scalding sweet gulp. ‘Until Tom started messing around,’ he says.
‘Ay, he came between them right enough.’ The old bloke extracts a packet of squashed fly biscuits from his anorak. ‘That Flo never had another friend like Annie, you know. She had her bairns, of course, but it’s never the same, is it?’
Ben hands back the cup and Skip unscrews the thermos for a top-up. ‘She chose wrong, I reckon, choosing him,’ says the old bloke.
‘But Annie should’ve said something,’ says Ben. ‘I mean, Tom was trying it on with her all the time. If she’d said something, maybe Flo would have chucked him.’
‘Ay, well, maybes it were too late by then. Maybes she were already pregnant.’ The old bloke coughs and spits over the side. ‘I reckon she weren’t properly in her right mind back then, what with the baby on the way, and how he was getting about Annie. I reckon a part of her hated Annie for that.’ He stares off out towards the horizon as though in a kind of dream, then sort of wakes up. ‘Anyways,’ he goes, looking back at Ben. ‘If she were here now, I reckon she’d have wanted you to know she were sorry.’
Ben nods. ‘They were always linking in, weren’t they?’ he says, remembering.
‘Ay, nattering away.’
‘What’s that then?’ Skip asks, watching Ben strap on his weight belt.
‘It helps me stay under,’ Ben explains. ‘If you’re not weighted, you have to keep finning and expending energy to stop yourself floating to the surface.’
He’s nearly ready; just the Aquapulse to sort out. He’s used it loads of times before, but always with Dad there to help put it on. There’s an earpiece and a strap in case you drop it. He switches it on and a slow bleep-bleep starts up behind his left ear.
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