by Helen Slavin
I wish now they had hung onto me tighter. By sheer force of will they might have assisted me later. Like changing channels on the television so you don’t have to see the sex, hear the bad language, witness the violence. I couldn’t change channels. I was jammed on Red Hot and Dead.
I moved out of Zion Chapel and, in a feeble attempt at settling, took the lease on a basement flat/workshop/office. The basement office was in Old Town. It had to be. I was drawn there. It couldn’t be Dollyville or the sixties concrete nightmare of the old shopping precinct.
To be honest, anyone first going through the door would say it was a damp cellar and that to call it office space was fiction. I didn’t care. The second the letting agent opened the door and I got a whiff of mildew I felt at home. More at home than I had felt for a long time. There was nothing inside. Old floorboards, a dead pigeon in the grate. A smell of cats. Ancient newspapers littering the floor where they had just taken up a mouldering carpet that was sitting rolled up outside in the yard.
I signed the contract within an hour. I took it for a year at first. I had plans to buy eventually. Don’t ask why. It is one of life’s unanswerables. I haunted the basement, living like a troll those first few weeks. I spent evenings listening to the street, watching the feet go trip-trapping past or hearing footsteps and missing the passer-by.
At long last I realised it was not a passer-by. It was a haunter-in. She was always late for work. Hanging her chocolate brown scarf on a no-longer-extant hook. I think her dress was most probably a dull brown when she was alive. She was a maid. Scullery. Parlour. Whatever, she was always late.
What was I doing there?
Yes. OK. I’m lying. I know exactly what I was doing.
I was settling into a pit.
It was a newspaper advertisement that showed me my escape route and my way forward. All that lifesaving information in the For Sale columns.
I decided that finding the Lost would help me and perhaps help others along the way. It seemed this had been shouting in my ear for a long time only I had misheard it. Evan Bees was my first big hint. I should have gone out and looked for him. But then, I expected him to return. There is something of failure in the admission that he did not want to be with me. He wanted to run away. Abandon me.
I bought secondhand office furniture, quite ready to accept its ghosts. I cleaned up and then I paid a visit to the police station to talk to someone about setting up my ‘bureau’. It was only going to be on a local scale. You could check in with the police, the National Missing Persons Helpline. Then, when those possibilities were exhausted there would be me. The last resort. Pop in on your way out of the police station.
I was going to call it—did, in fact, call it—the LookOut. I was trying to convey that sense of hope and expectation. Being ‘on the lookout’ for someone implies their return. Missing Persons Bureau implies they are missing. Vanished. Gone.
The police station was built in the 1920s and was a red brick toytown-looking place. You half expected Noddy, Big Ears and Mr Plod to come out of the revolving doors. Inside it was rather cramped and painted gloss cream. The light shone in at strange angles through the tiny square panes of green glass and reflected off the gloss. Shards of light caught you in the eyes, startling and unsettling. I had to look at the desk sergeant cock-eyed to avoid the glare of the morning sun.
Not that he was the desk sergeant, not since he’d been shot in the town’s first ever bank robbery in 1932. They had never caught the three robbers who would all have suffered the death penalty. Hence Sergeant Laidlaw’s presence in his old station. Unfinished business.
As I waited for a living officer Detective Inspector Knight came out of a side door. He looked harassed.
‘I’ll be back at one Dixie. Dixie?’
He leaned past me, gave me a querying look as if I had perhaps eaten Dixie. Then, remembering me, said, ‘What do you want?’ which seemed to be his standard greeting. He gave me a hard stare and I was struck that he didn’t want to know what I had to say. He didn’t want a message. He was scared of me, still.
I mentioned my idea, finding the living as well as the Dead, only I didn’t put it quite like that. To my surprise he nodded and said, ‘Get the buggers off our backs.’
He said he’d put me onto one of their Community Liaison Officers. Take a seat.
What I got was Terry Adam.
He had me signed up and labelled as a crank after our encounter at, as he put it, ‘the Howard residence’. Still, credit to the man, he was patient with me. He let me look over some of the official paperwork forms that they fill in. Personally I think that they had overstocked and he was simply shifting the burden of recycling paper. He seemed very keen on his forms and reports and paperwork.
I looked over the form. It asked the bare minimum. You were left with a badly patched photofit of the missing person. In fact, you missed them utterly. It was no wonder they never seemed to find anyone. Not that I mentioned this to Terry Adam. He looked empty and hard and emotionless, as though if you leaned over and rapped on his head with your knuckles there would be a hollow sound inside, tinny and cold.
He mentioned my quest for Dad just before I took my leave and it made me edgy, as if he was looking right into me, like a narrow searchlight, someone shining a bright torch through your letterbox. It was not often that the living did this to me. Terry Adam reminded me of the name he’d given me, the counsellor, Dorothy Cromwell. He reached into a small drawer and got out her business card. Handed me a couple, ‘In case you lose one.’ And I felt rapped on the knuckles somehow. He said she was a good listener and might be able to help.
He had a quiet voice, insistently so. He didn’t seem to listen to anything I had to say, he just decided matters. He was not taking me seriously I could tell. He was not going to let me help him and he was not going to help me. Except in the way he saw fit. He knew that I was trying to cling to my bit of wood from the wreckage at this point, but Terry Adam, he seemed like the kind of person to look over the side and bash you with an oar.
Feeling bullied a bit, I did contact Dorothy. She was a good listener and she helped, if nothing else, to prepare me for what was going to happen when Evan was declared legally dead. Other than that she didn’t hold out much hope of ever finding my dad. After all I had no name. No contact of any kind.
She put some details of mine down on a form she had. She smiled, very sympathetic and rather patronising. I thought that Terry Adam had probably rung ahead and warned her that he was sending a crazy stalkerwoman to see her. Humour her. Do the paperwork.
It was my encounter with Pauline Dart that made me think of changes. Made me think what people needed. What they didn’t need was paperwork people like Terry Adam. I had only just got going. I had filled in a few forms, because I felt that was what people expected, that without the reality of a bit of ink and some dotted lines the world would tumble out of orbit.
Mostly what people had to say was, ‘He’s so tall, so fat and he’s so loud. Have you seen him? He goes around with that red-haired chap from the chippy.’
It was all dates and heights, the cardboard cutouts of the people. Until Pauline Dart.
Pauline Dart shook me. She came to the LookOut as her last stop. Pauline’s sister had gone missing nearly ten years ago after a broken relationship. She was legally dead, but Pauline was hanging onto her. Would not give her up. Pauline had paid a detective for two years to try and find her sister. The detective, a smartly dressed woman who gave breakfast brunch meetings to the local bigwigs and businessmen, had found nothing. She hadn’t really looked.
Pauline presented me with a box of keepsakes. She had gone through all her sister’s belongings over a two-year period and she had picked out what few things she felt were secret or unusual. She had chosen her clues.
There was a key, a Yale key that did not fit any locks that she knew, certainly none in her sister’s house. There was a ticket for a watch repair and the watch. It was something masculine and not familiar
at all to Pauline Dart. There was a pebble that she had looked up in the geology section at the university library. It was a particular kind of rock, only found on the Norfolk coast.
This was both puzzling and hopeful to Pauline. She couldn’t remember one instance when they had been to Norfolk, not as children, not as adults. Even when Pauline’s sister was married, before her divorce, they had never set foot in Norfolk. Pauline had held out a long time on the hope that her sister Fran was living somewhere in Norfolk.
The last straw with the lady detective had been an abortive trip to Cromer. Pauline had been unable to go and she felt that the detective had not looked quite hard enough. There were a lot of people living in Norfolk who had received strange telephone calls from Pauline Dart asking if they would help. Had they seen this woman, so tall, so dark, so thin?
There was a piece of gold gift ribbon from a box of Thornton’s chocolates. There was a button, black, polished, made of some shell rather than plastic. A foreign coin, a Dutch guilder. From when there still were Dutch guilders. The discarded head from an electric toothbrush. A tube of lipstick in a shade that was unusual for Fran. A pocket mirror with a painted, dragonfly back. A brown paper bag folded neatly bearing no markings except a small, pencilled addition 10+63+8 in the top corner.
Pauline had spent three months tracing the origins of that bag, discovering it was for greengrocery rather than sweets, or possibly a bakery bag. She had trawled shops looking at prices to find out what might have cost 10+63+8.
What Pauline Dart did was keep her sister with her. What she did was invent a secret life. A life still to be lived. A life where Fran was different and new and happy. Now Pauline was nearing the end of the shoebox. She was approaching the gates of grief, tall and squeaking. The gates that trap your fingers.
What I did was pick up the thread for her and keep spinning. She could get on with life, save her own marriage which had been creaking under the detective work, the obsessive compulsion. I asked her what Fran’s favourite colour was. How she brewed tea, or if she preferred coffee. I asked about sayings and foibles. The day-to-day. The details.
Who you are is not in your hair colour or the size of your feet. Who you are is in your rituals and your pet hates.
After Pauline left, the shoebox sat on my secondhand office desk. I realised that I had almost nothing of Evan. We were not, as I’ve said, great photographers. We didn’t travel much even for day trips and we never remembered the camera. Thinking, I couldn’t remember ever having one. My Mother was not a camera person much. It is a learned thing I think. Now it seemed I had moved away from Evan. I had kept nothing except my memories and my feelings.
As I looked through Pauline’s shoebox at the fragments of Fran, I was pierced by the thought that many of the memories I now had of Evan were his absence. The empty chair. The dried-out teacup. His space in the bed. And all these empty spaces had been lost to me as I became an empty space myself. The troll in the basement.
I dug out my only photo of Evan that night and I photocopied it onto a ream of white paper. The more I looked at the image the less familiar he became. His photocopied face took precedence.
By midnight I had drawn a beard and moustache on a few. On others I had drawn curly hair or pigtails.
Next morning found me cutting out hairstyles and hats from magazines and sticking them on Evan’s image. Manufacturing a new improved Evan, the Evan he might have wanted to be. A stranger.
Dig Deep with Arthur: earwig
I was raised by my gran. My parents were very much in love with each other. Besotted. Passionate. Intertwined. I was in their way. I cramped their style.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t resent this one bit. If you could hear my voice you’d know. All I’m doing is laying down some facts for you which I think are relevant. Facts and events that tell you why I searched for her. Facts that inform you as to why it was meant to be.
I nearly didn’t exist. In a legal sense. My parents, racked by the trauma of childbirth, didn’t register my arrival. There’s some time limit and then, young as you are, you go off the official list. You are a non-person. Don’t know what that entails. Being chucked out of public libraries, hunted down by crack squads of illegal-baby trappers.
My parents thought childbirth separated them. It was something, however much Dad got involved, that Mum had to do alone. I have no idea if you’ve ever had a child. All I can say is that Mum felt that since I was sucking at her breasts all day she did not relish Dad sucking them all night. I was the nadir of their relationship. If they could have been arsed to register me that is what they’d’ve called me.
Gran did it. Called me Arthur after my grandad. Took me home. Took me out of their way. Took me to her heart. A big, spacious, warm place to live. Get me?
Gran got me up and running quick. I could read and write before school, albeit in an old-fashioned hand taught to me by Gran. I could do mental maths, read a gas bill, check the electricity meter, change a fuse, translate bus and train timetables, cook, sew and knit. Gran had a set regime of life essentials, your kit to get you through.
Her theory was that she was already into her seventies and needed to impart a lot of practical knowledge fairly quickly in case she died sooner than later. Chiefly she taught me independence. Confidence. Unconditional love. Card games.
I’m not saying we didn’t have fun. That was on her list too.
Fairytales. Singing. Gran was Irish on her mother’s side and had a huge repertoire of alternately morbid and bawdy songs.
She taught me how to read people. How to listen to what isn’t being said. She called it earwigging.
Evan Bees, or Mark Harsfeld as he was calling himself at that point, was an earwigger’s dream. I worked out fairly quickly that the reason he didn’t say much was because he couldn’t make it up. The fiasco with his fake name (was he Mike or Mark?) told you that he couldn’t remember the lies he did tell.
He was asked by Andy if he’d always been an archaeologist. I was washing up. Andy was alphabetising his tinned food and Bridget was sniffing the mould on the various half-eaten pots of yoghurt in the fridge. They had been swapping stories about other jobs. Andy had worked in town planning and was single-handedly responsible for some hideous ring road encircling a new town in Hertfordshire. Bridget tried to give everyone a hard-on by talking about the time she’d worked as a stripper doing the rounds of the pubs and clubs of mid and South Wales to pay for her archaeology course at Aberystwyth. Back rooms and bare tits and beer. I told them about digging out a canal basin in Wolverhampton. My story was true.
Then Bridget homes in on Evan/Mike/Mark. Harsfeld. Take your pick.
‘What about you Mark? You always done this?’
‘I did research,’ is all he came up with, ‘after my degree.’
‘Into what?’ Bridget asked. I was laughing. Any idiot could have seen that coming. Bridget was now tipping the dregs out of three different wine bottles into a jug. She stirred it with a wooden spoon as she waited for the answer.
‘Post-grad stuff. Nothing exciting.’
Bridget licked her finger, poured herself a glass and offered some to Evan/Harsfeld/Whojit. He declined the offer and was attempting a getaway.
‘How boring exactly?’ asks Andy, alphabetising his soups by variety, a sub-classification under soups. ‘On the Richter scale eh? Bugs and grubs? Nematodes? I’ve got a mate who studies them for an organics firm. What was it?’
Evan looked anxious at this. Abandoned his mug of tea and the makings of a sandwich. ‘Carbon dating.’ His words reached us after his body had physically exited the space. Andy and Bridget instantly forgot him. I considered here was a man who did not want to visit his past.
I was wicked. In the hall leading to the bathroom I bumped into him. Not entirely accidental. When any one of us needed to hide the showers/toilets were the only privacy.
‘Which university Mark?’ all friendly, hail-fellow. I watched him bristle and squirm.
‘Edinbu
rgh,’ he said suddenly, like a gasp. Then he locked himself in shower room three.
I finished in the bathroom, using the disabled loo because it was more private. The others had doors that were too short somehow, you were visible from the knees down. As I headed back to my room I was thinking about the Roman latrines we had been uncovering. Communal. With a sponge on a stick for wiping your backside. As I turned I noticed that on the noticeboard was a leaflet. A Royal Day Out in Edinburgh.
After that I tuned in hard. No mention of parents. No mention of any relationships. No names to connect to his own. He managed one evening to tell us about some doomed fling involving an older divorced woman and a younger, inexperienced woman and how he’d been torn between the two and that the relationships had been broken off pretty much during his mother’s lingering death which he had sort of assisted by upping her morphine dose a couple of evenings.
Bridget was all consoling, gathering him to her bosom and stroking his hair. For once he did not pull away. Andy wanted to know if the two women had ever met, and was actually fishing for a threesome. Evan/Mike/Mark escaped into Bridget’s bosom. Hell of a hiding place.
I sat and considered that perhaps Evan/Mike/Mark’s real name might be Paul Morel or simply David Herbert Lawrence. I reflected how few books people have read.
He told them he’d been travelling. Been out of the country for some years. Had been ‘researching’ at Carnac in France.
Carnac my eye. He had been a vagrant, a tramp, it had been written all over him when he first arrived. He was hiding. He was lying. He was afraid. And this was the thing, he was afraid of himself. You only had to watch him twitch, to stare at his shadow as if it was following him, to know the truth. Evan Bees had been to Hell, not Europe.
It rained for about two weeks. When it wasn’t raining hard it was an intensive drizzling. We erected plastic tenting over the dig areas to try and limit the mud. Mud has no limits. It is a wild, sucking thing.
I was sheltering under the tenting with Evan/Whojit/D. H. Lawrence. I’d brought tea and no conversation. We were getting on well because I didn’t make small talk. I participated if he started up but I didn’t initiate. Not since ‘Edinburgh’ at any rate. You might say I was sly. After all, I was the one person who genuinely listened, who took in information. Whatever you told me I would sift and hold and catalogue.