Barging in mobhanded. Trampling evidence into the carpet. Setting up blue and white ribbons. Noises in the press, Londoners. Cockneys on expenses. Day at the seaside.
‘Bloody mess, boy. Take my word.’
Stephen wasn’t listening, he revolved the narrowed base of his thick white cup against the saucer. Spill of weak tea. Squeak of protest. The bent copper liked the place, his choice. Stephen was easy. Cups rather than mugs, fine with him. A touch of class, his informant, the shamed DS, reckoned.
‘Old bugger was purely asking for it. Key in lock? Kids all knew, knew him. More cash than corduroy. Dressed like tramp. Bloody disgrace, man of the cloth.’
‘Anything of value?’
‘Druggies had him over. White goods, not worth fencing. Microwave his daughter gave him, never took it out of the box.’
A woman, walking past the window, the open door, took Stephen’s eye: purpose in her stride. She stood out. She knew where she was going. The rest of them, street flotsam, were unanchored, they floated. Stephen watched and didn’t listen, using the vision of this woman to detach himself from the copper’s drone. He pressed a dirty tissue into his saucer, stared fascinated, as it changed colour, soaking up the tannin spill.
‘Old sod like that, wants putting down. Asking for it, boy. Didn’t know if he’d shaved that month, scraped one side left t’other. Parkinson’s. Cornplaster dripping blood on dog collar. Odd socks. Piss-stained cricket flannels, pyjamas underneath. Give him his due, had some fair gear. Before the kids got in.’
‘Do you have a list?’
Stephen waited until the ashtray was full. The detective was fat but he didn’t eat. Or sweat. Cold grey skin under one of those calculated haircuts. Untrustworthy on TV: loud-stripe suit, Masonic ring, brutal slash of collar.
DS Krater, who kept cigarettes for professional purposes, non-smoker in his married days, was now addicted. He hated the taste, but liked the risk. Giving god the finger. His hairy digits were yellow as permanent bruises. The old tricks were second nature – shove the packet towards the child molester, then grab his wrist when he reaches out to take one.
The bent vicar, the one they’d chopped into segments and scattered over half of Sussex, knew Tollund. Both poofs, brown-hatters. Small town. Not enough talent to go around, shirtlifters relied on runaways, Balkan gippos. Stephen wasn’t prejudiced, he didn’t care what they got up to. There might be a story in Tollund. Krater’s homophobic rants were reflex, they didn’t mean much. By the standards of the force, down there, he was a liberal. He was talking to Stephen, wasn’t he? His former colleagues wouldn’t wipe their boots on him.
The others, the outpatients in the café, the freaks? Stephen couldn’t avoid the long mirror. Prime examples of the tattooist’s art, blue mermaids, dragons, barbed-wire hearts. Grafts and erasures. They held an absolute fascination for the displaced Londoner. Stephen saw these exhibitions as phantoms brought to life in the smoke of Krater’s cigarettes. Women, more sensitive, went in for removal, discarded lovers, names sandpapered from a fleshy forearm.
Thin gold necklaces, rings, piercings. Orange skin: part weather, part stain. An illusion of well-being, health – as you see them walking towards the marine parade. Dealers from the hill carried a cellphone in one hand and a packet of ciggies in the other. Dark glasses, collar turned up. One of them, Stephen believed, would have a cache of unrecorded Tollunds.
Seasiders spat at cancer. Down here, in all probability, they hadn’t heard the rumours. Cell damage. They smoked as they drank their tea. Smoked as they tweezered ice buns from the display case. Smoked as they passed water. They woke in the night and lit a fag. They smoked instead of breakfast. They smoked as they swam. Or jogged. Or cycled. Or went to the surgery, the school. They lit up every time they got behind the wheel. They dragged deep when they spoke on the phone. They didn’t share. They nursed a pack in the hand, spare in pocket.
But the thing that intrigued Stephen, on the coast for six months now, was the oddity of the couples. He couldn’t imagine how they got together. They didn’t fit, any of them, men with men, men with women, old with young. Midwives and garage-mechanics in desultory conversation. Pill-peddlers and Joan Collins matrons who flogged painted plates, sepia nudes in pine frames. One very dapper gentleman, seventy-plus, carnation in buttonhole, was escorting a black female body-builder in a leopard-print sheath, worn off-the-shoulder. Nothing made sense. Like Stephen and Krater. Different cultures, different origins. Different exiles. They both, if it came to the pinch, had East Sussex addresses. Neither of them belonged.
Krater shot a smalltime drug-dealer in his own bed. The wrong man. At the wrong time. When the council was going progressive, Euro-friendly: white paint and teams in orange jackets cleaning the beaches. Wrong house, wrong day. Head throbbing, breath like ullage. On early call after a weekend’s boozing. The nationals picked up on it. One-day filler on the inside pages.
‘Something and nothing, boy. Should have been sorted. Queer vicar, big house, takes in your average teenage psycho. Wants to teach him -about art. Gaff stuffed with portables. Strangled with the cord of an electric iron while he’s lying in the bath. Butchered like the Sunday joint. Blood all over. Kid tries to flog the paintings in Bohemia. Vicar keeps boat, over in Eastbourne. That’s where they find the torso. More prints than Fleet Street: oars, tarpaulin, arsehole. Hands and feet on Pevensey Levels, chewed up by sheep. Head still missing. Like the paintings. Nobody gives a flying fuck, tell the truth.’
‘What did the boy say, when you got hold of him?’
‘Sod all. Topped himself on remand. End of story.’
A hooded woman, old, twisted in the spine, dwarfish, stared in at the window. Hanging on the crossbar of a large, dirty perambulator. The infant, Stephen was horrified to notice, to notice himself noticing, was dead. Skull like a bunched fist. Close-swaddled in rags. Cholera case. The glass in the café window, the barrier between them, turned woman and child into an exhibit. The woman wasn’t looking at him, but at Krater, her lips mimicking the movement of the disgraced copper’s slack mouth, pursing to blow out spittle in place of cigarette smoke.
When Krater lifted his gaze, she turned away, moved off down the hill. Stephen, throwing a few coins on the table, got up to follow. When he came alongside, wondering if, despite himself, he would say something, he saw that the dead child was a doll. A doll that was propped up, staring at him, holes for eyes.
She progressed around the museum, among the seascapes. Provincial museums never fail to charm, bell jars of borrowed air: no expectations, no agenda, no obligation to inform. Time, in dusty columns, too lazy to advance.
Cora advanced, the sound of her heels (toes pinched and blistered) on the wooden floor, on soft linoleum, clicking against the metal trim of the rather pompous stairs. Culture for the edification of the unedified, the lost. The middle classes at a loose end, with children.
A woman, unevenly stained, hauled her partner in from the street. So that she could find a place in which to squat, pass water. And emerge, as Cora noticed, with talcum powder across her broad bottom, dark-blue denim – as if she’d been dusted for fingerprints.
‘Come on. Come on then, come on.’
The man, drawn on the leash of domesticity, was slow to respond; he had actually become interested, pricked by, this display of ration books, tickets, ribbons, tin badges. He tried to justify his queer enthusiasm for the cases of reserved, improved ephemera. But he knew better than to speak. His partner, cuffing one child, dragging another, was already returned to the fresh air.
The hall of paintings, upstairs, was deserted. The last visitors had tramped through, without pausing, completed their circuit, earnt their pit stop. Seaside places are big on memory, bits of wood dug from the sand, spars, fragments of pots rescued from the deep. Albums of dead sailors, faces peeled by experience, layers of wrinkles and ice-bleached whiskers. Piped and sweatered. Faces too strong for the technology.
Seascapes. Arty visitors to town: as a fishi
ng village, a resort. Essence lost or absorbed. An accident of geology, a break in the cliff, a harbour. The Cockney Turner takes himself out to sea, looks back, across pitching waves, green-and-black peaks. The yellow cliffs are a barrier. Minor romancers and journeymen set up their stools at prominent places and limn the picturesque, an ordered landscape of small craft, pulled up on the beach; two men at the cliff’s edge, sheep daring the drop.
Rossetti drew sickness. Lizzie Siddal twisting her pain against a hard chair. Lucien Pissarro nibbling at particulars, a church, found something worth retaining in the haze of light; a premature pass at pointillism.
Then: Keith Tollund.
Gay in all seasons. Quarters of creamy colour, honey you can lick. The man didn’t paint, he dabbed at the canvas, using face powder and dry cosmetics. He waxed seascapes, as he waxed his legs. He made them up, pretty as a picture. He crayoned them with yellow lip gloss. Combed waves to curve like eyelashes. Cora loved what Tollund did. Chalk and green crayon: sand, sea, air. Blues, yellows, chocky browns, rouged keels. Self-portrait in seaside boudoir, attended by sailors (pulling limply on tarry ropes). Toy yachts sailing across a Thirties bathroom. Just enough puff to fill sails, stiffen flags. The squadron flounces west like a chorus line. A cargo boat, twelve miles out, on the horizon, contradicts Tollund’s speculative meteorology with the direction of its black smoke.
A scene observed from his balcony. Soft muscle under brown-and-green sweaters, the bare backs of fishermen. Sand like brown sugar.
But the picture Cora wanted, the one that would identify Tollund’s room, the flat where he lived before moving to Bath for the final phase, was missing. Stolen. Mislaid. Loaned out and never returned. The collection in the town museum couldn’t offer anything better than a monochrome photograph in the catalogue: window frame, armchair, yachts in a rectangle. Three panels of salt-smeared glass: three seascapes. A perspective she could judge, read back from, an elevation. At least five floors up with south-facing view.
This was the hint Cora had been looking for, a coded inscription on which she could work. She would check out the west end of town, along the front, under the hill on which the vicar lived – that friend of Tollund who had himself been quartered and dispersed, decapitated. Murdered by a lad who might have reached out of one of Keith’s sketches.
A stiff climb, if you weren’t used to hills, if you lived in cities, riverside places. Cora sweated lightly. It was not unpleasant, this absence of underwear. She paused to admire the eccentric detail of some ghostly Edwardian mansion. They didn’t build on this hill, they colonised it. Parks, crescents, balconies, sloping lawns, azaleas. The favourite set-up for future exploitation, quacks and charity cowboys. Those who used seaside property portfolios to fund fantastic palaces in the neighbouring countryside.
The vicar’s house had been Cora’s first choice for the room from which Tollund painted his View from My Window. Tollund, in his cups, could have been patronised, offered living space, by the unworldly philanthropist. He was, by that period, overplaying his acquaintance with Eddie Burra, the runs out from Rye in the Roller. ‘The last time I saw him,’ the barman at the Royal said, ‘he was dressed as a Marseilles gangster with a burnt-cork hairline moustache and toes painted on his shoes. He was swigging vodka.’
The two dead men, vicar and painter, were characters at a Chelsea Arts Club ball, entities brought together by their secret life: as aesthetes. As extrovert inverts, lovers of boy flesh. All the vicar wanted was to be allowed to watch his guests bathe. Tollund had different tastes, but he let himself be housed – for a time – by the wealthy clergyman. Of late, the retired C-of-E functionary, denied preferment (which, in truth, he had never solicited, too well-born for that), had lost his faith. In the town. In his ability to give shelter and support to the right sort. Boys, just now, didn’t want to be taught how to sail, to handle ropes and rudders. They weren’t interested in visiting galleries or looking through his albums of fine-art postcards.
He let the wrong sort in. The kind that didn’t know how to use a bathroom.
Cora identified the house: a mausoleum, Bates Motel in Aberdeen granite. Stone like the absence of love, grey as unwitnessed ice. Colour hadn’t been leeched by local conditions, it never had colour. There were livelier properties in Kensal Green Cemetery. Keith Tollund, sprawled in his armchair, chopping-board across knee, had stolen colour – by fixating on sealight, making regular trips to Dieppe. The vicar’s mansion was god’s obituary.
The view from the top-floor window, Cora recognised, turning before she reached the crest of the hill, was nothing more than a traffic island, fork in the road, telephone box. Terminal farms where melting flesh condensed on dirty glass. Memory hutches. Language schools. Suicide hotels.
Youths occupied this lozenge of grass, trees like mutated weeds. Broad avenues – of potential escape – radiated out from the scabby island, which became, by default, a place to chill. A suspended bus shelter. A vandalised phone kiosk: every call an unpunctuated emergency, single parents with scabbed and weeping arms trying to explain themselves before the coins ran out.
A bit of a ruck was occurring. With the kiosk acting as bunker, into which the victim retreated. Cora was close enough to be offended by sound as well as sight of this ugly affray. Stupidity annoyed her.
A tall thin lad, baseball cap, sporting goods for non-sportsmen, was ranting, headbutting the panel. Leaving gobs of yellow-white spittle, which slithered thickly down. He turned away, whipping himself up, before his next assault.
‘Talk to me talk to me like that knock you fucking out, spark out cunt. Truth. Cunt.’
He kicked, harder than his soft shoes allowed, copycat karate. Pain devilled venom. He stumbled into the road, as into a lava stream. He hopped, blistered, onto grass. Charged again, blaspheming, at the kiosk. The shuddering victim.
What struck Cora, as she moved in on this futile episode of urban theatre, was that the gang with the loudmouth, the ones near him, waiting for a phantom bus, weren’t kids, but an orthodox middle-aged couple, man and woman, wearing the same shapeless, colour-uncoordinated leisurewear.
‘Kill you bitch you say you say you say that again kick your head in.’
The experience of the world for this dislocated trio came down to a traffic island and the capture of a phone kiosk, the only means of communicating with the outside, with other intelligences capable of giving judgement – or, at worst, listening to their complaints.
The object of the youth’s demented monologue, Cora saw, was a child, a young girl. Partner, possession? Incestuous lover? He was out of control, backing into the road, ignoring awkwardly swerving local traffic, smokers, without cellphones; cars grinding uphill, leaking oil, trailing exhaust pipes. He had to watch his step, onto the high curb, the slippery grass. He screamed at the cowering girl. Who was chewing on a strand of loose hair.
The older couple, at the edge of the island, one foot on the grass, one on the curb, kept their backs to the action, shamed by it. They stared down at a massive, ugly, unused church.
Cora touched the mad boy’s shoulder, and when he spun, disbelieving, mid-rant, she brushed the base of an outstretched hand against the ball of his throat. He jerked back, scalded, opened his mouth to scream and couldn’t, something blocking the airways, a knot of pain around which breath failed to find passage. He dropped to his knees, red-faced, humiliated by dry tears. She kicked him and he slumped, slithered, spark out, against the kiosk. Now the girl, trapped inside, head barely reaching the panel from which the phone hung, took up her defeated lover’s threnody, his screech.
‘Bleedin’ cunt. Mind your own bleedin’ business.’
She hammered the snotty glass, ranting, gesturing. But, even when Cora walked away, she wouldn’t step outside.
HEALTHY BOWELS? No problem in that department. Quite the reverse. Eyes: like looking out of week-old milk bottles. Ears clogged and sticky, nose broken. But bowels ticked like a German motor: Stephen X, age unknown: writer. Marine exile.
His walk, the colonnade. Wet suits for scuba divers. Yellowed wedding dresses. Black god franchises. Fast food. NO CASH KEPT ON PREMISES. The shops, beneath the hulk of the Ocean Queen flats, dealt in negatives, prohibitions -fear. They kept no stock beyond instantly forgotten memorabilia, concrete floors. Stephen releases a clutch of bad wind.
He had never, before this night, considered taking a drink at the Royal Hotel. Imposing facade, late breakfasters noticed when he crept out for his newspaper (London evening tabloid -of previous evening). More of a temple than a pub. Steps up from street, revolving door. Disconcerting reception area, woman behind desk, dim lights, panels of illusionist glass doubling the stairs, throwing back an atrium of wilted greenery.
Krater was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the bar. The street-level Palm Court, to which ordinary drinkers were admitted, was closed. The upstairs cocktail bar, fairy lights and heavy carpet, was defunct. Approximately-French chairs, Louis-something, faced the sea, occupied by couples who had slept together without being introduced. Stephen couldn’t begin to read them. An ominously benign woman of the Rosemary West type, teacher in provincial comprehensive, who had run away with a pustular and hormonal fifth-former (incapable of sitting still): twenty years on. The mute afterlife of a misconceived romance. So Stephen, ex-author, improvised. Even the drinks were out of kilter, lager and pink gin, rum-and-pep against repeat orders of stout. Smokers, of course. All of them. Even the ones in uniform, veteran bellboys, smoke leaking from cupped fists as they hung around the lift, hoping to pimp for the definitively de-energised.
Stephen hid, close to a pillar, and watched the window. This sea town, as he reported it to himself, fictional enactments of each lost day, was his cinema. A narrative of clouds and surfaces, uncalibrated evolution: he lived in what he saw. As long as he himself was unobserved. When his consciousness froze … that was the painting: window/frame. This was such a moment. A painting based on cinema, reflections, cigarette smoke, lights of passing traffic.
Dining on Stones Page 31