"Hello David," she beamed. He kissed her wind-brightened cheek and said:
"Can we go inside somewhere? I can feel the onset of hyperthermia."
Diana laughed her loud laugh and pulled him by the crook of the arm towards the pub at the end of the pier where- Weaver was horrified to note- karaoke played ALL DAY UNTIL MIDNIGHT. To his relief, the stage was deserted as was the pub. It was the hiatus between afternoon and evening with only three other people in the place; pisshead in a trilby propped up the bar and a young couple in a booth who seemed to be in the throes of relationship turmoil. Weaver ordered a gin and tonic for Diana and half a pint of lager for himself. They retreated to a corner as far from the few inhabitants of the bar as they could manage.
"So, how are you, David?" Diana asked and took his hand in hers. She had a maternal air about her even though there was less than ten years between them. "Was it terrible in that hospital?"
"No," he told her truthfully. "It was a sad place really. I felt like one of the lucky ones. There are a lot of messed up people out there. People with real problems."
"And your problem isn't real?"
"Well-" he shifted awkwardly and sipped his lager. Diana knew him well enough to know that opening up was hard. She smiled reassuringly.
"I don't even know what my problem is," he said and looked out of the spray-flecked window. "I know that hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia and so is having visions but this doesn't feel like something that's coming from inside my head." He shook his head in frustration.
"You know that I have different ideas about this kind of thing," Diana said and took her scarf off her head revealing her spiky red hair. "I also know that you don't go along with my weird ideas so I won't go into it too much."
Weaver shrugged. Anything was better than thinking that he was going mad.
"You've always carried something around with you, David. From the first moment that Paul introduced us I could sense a presence around you-" She held a palm against his objections. "I know that you don't believe in the spirit world but looking at your work, I'm not sure that that is true any way." Weaver thought of Nirvana IV, currently hibernating beneath a white sheet and conceded the point. It was true. Some of his work did lean towards the spiritualistic but it certainly wasn't in keeping with any particular philosophy. Not really. "The point is, David, you carry a darkness around with you that goes way back."
He sipped his beer. "You know about the boy that died, don't you?"
Diana nodded. He’d told her a little about his childhood. An explanation after a bad dream.
"It was that boy that appeared to me in my bathroom after the screaming voices came."
"What were the voices saying?"
Weaver hesitated and drained his beer until the glass was empty. He felt like another one or perhaps something stronger. He had told no-one about the details of his vision, if that was what it could be called. Diana was a friend, more than a friend in fact. They had been lovers way back, in his early days on the south coast when he had been green and idealistic. She had told him from the outset that they would split up soon after they had slept together and, despite his protestations, knew that she was right. Within weeks the sexual aspect of the relationship was done and they became friends.
"It started off as a kind of wordless chant," he began and soon found that talking helped, made it easier. He told her everything. The painting. The bust-up with Paul. The breakdown in the patisserie. His experience that afternoon.
"Stick it in your eye?" Diana frowned. "What does that mean?"
Weaver shook his head. "No idea. That I'm fucked up probably." Diana leaned over and kissed his forehead.
"Let me get you a proper drink," she said and headed to the bar. Upon her return, Weaver took a large whisky from her with thanks and winced at the first burning sensation as it hit the back of his throat.
"The boy- Grant- was never found. They dragged the river but to my knowledge he never turned up."
"Do you think that this has some bearing on what's happening to you?" Diana asked.
"I don't know."
Diana thought for a moment. "You know, rivers are strange aren't they?"
Weaver looked at her blankly.
"Stretches of water that run alongside our lives as they have done for millennia. They sustain us and provide us with means of survival but are a constant link to our own mortality."
"How's that?" Weaver wondered.
"Drownings, floods, suicides, watery graves-"
It's the undercurrent, y' see, Weaver thought and shuddered. Those words seemed to further rake the bed of his mind's pool causing other memories and associations to stir there before settling back in to the murk.
"The river Meas- the river that runs through my home town has figured in my dreams before," he said.
"Well that's hardly surprising considering all that happened," said Diana.
Weaver shook his head. "It's more than that."
"How?"
At key points in his life, no matter where he was, the river had ran through his subconscious, appearing in his dreams, his thoughts and, now he thought about it, his artwork.
"I dream about it sometimes," he said.
Diana nodded. "Can you remember any of them?"
Weaver looked across the bar. The thundercloud had dispersed above the young couple. Weaver had noted their improved body language and watched them now as they roused the karaoke DJ from his newspaper.
"The night that my mother died I dreamt that she was floating above the river, slowly sinking towards the water. In the dream I tried to call to her but- as happens in dreams sometimes- I couldn't make her hear me."
Diana looked at him kindly. He coughed awkwardly and went on.
"I knew you see- in my dream- that, if she touched the water, she would die. I woke up to the sound of the telephone ringing and my Auntie Susan telling me that my mother was dead."
Diana squeezed his hand. Years had passed since her death but the memory had stirred his emotion making it keen and vital somehow worse than the old wound on a rainy day that grief became after many years.
"Perhaps the dream was your subconscious way of preparing yourself for her death," Diana offered. "Was she sick for very long?"
Weaver blinked at her. "No it wasn't like that," he said. "We didn't know she was going to die. To us, it was very sudden. I had no idea consciously or otherwise."
The muffled PA system kicked in and Weaver dimly heard the DJ announce that Andy and Alison were going celebrate their love with a rendition of something about losing that loving feeling. Diana winced at him and he grinned back ruefully. "It was your idea to come here," he said.
Andy gazed deeply into Alison's eyes and crooned that she never closed her eyes any more when he kissed her lips. Andy kissed her. Alison didn't close her eyes. Weaver looked away from the stage with the difficulty of a man trying to avert his gaze from a road traffic accident.
Diana sipped her G and T and looked at him seriously. "Given your experiences I find your unwillingness to accept the existence of –" She waved an arm vaguely. "-of other aspects of existence very surprising. How can you experience phenomena of that kind and not believe that there is more out there than we understand?"
Weaver considered. "It's not that I don't or won't believe in that kind of thing, Diana," he said. "I just don't want to think about it. It makes me feel uncomfortable."
"But you're going to have to face up to it, David," Diana said. "There is no doubt in my mind that you are carrying something around with you from when you almost died-"
"Did die. Briefly, any way" Weaver corrected.
Diana gesticulated expansively. "Well even more so, then. A boy gave his life so that you would live. Paranormal or psychological the fact remains that you have something to exorcise. Either way you're haunted."
Andy sang that Alison had lost that loving feeling.
Weaver drained his whisky and immediately wanted another.
"So what do I do?"
Diana smiled and shook her head. "You need to do what's right. For you."
Weaver sighed.
"I'll try and forget about it, then."
Diana arched her eyebrows at him. "I don't think that will happen, do you?"
Weaver shrugged but suspected that she was right. He might try to forget but things had a way of resurfacing. The river won't let you forget, he thought and shuddered. The river remembered everything.
He watched the happy couple leave the stage arm-in-arm and decided to drink more.
Interlude (1)
The River (1)
Upstream Downstream
The river wound its way through the town before curving back on itself; the tail of a sleeping dragon looping the central areas of the town and lying dormant along side the dwindling outskirts before winding back in a wide U marking the north boundary where the town met the village of Ramsey (an enclave that, while geographically
linked to Measton, may as well have been separated by mountains and oceans such were the attitudes of the respective residents). It was intersected at three points: the rusting hulk of the railway bridge marked the end of the town proper to the east, the riverside abodes and splintered jetties increasingly scarce as the river oozed through miles of unspoiled countryside; at the opposite end of the town lay the Abbey bridge that spanned the river at its widest point and ushered motorists in and out of the town from the eternally winding country roads; the old bridge in the centre of the town joined (some would say divided) the upper and lower parts of the town, geographically and economically. To the north of the bridge the old part of the town; Cotswold stone buildings dating back to before the dissolution of the Catholic Church formed the nucleus of the east end of the High Street; regency era facades formed a neat straight cut through the upper part of the town leading to the larger more affluent homes of the High Street business community, retired landowners and moneyed families, their wealth dating back to the industrialization of the town in the early nineteenth century. This gave way to acres of countryside, interrupted only by the A road that led to the neighbouring town of Rennick, some ten miles away. Behind the high fronted facades of the High Street buildings, narrow cobbled streets known as The Shambles led on to post World War II housing estates- grimy, narrow two-up, two-down residences that, in several streets, had attained a fashionably chic desirability for the upwardly mobile, while others were dilapidated and abandoned, graffiti-daubed wooden boards covering the long-ago broken windows. These streets halted abruptly as the market garden agriculture of the town stubbornly held its line. The greenhouses and neat strips of cabbage, beans and spring onions were separated from the s-bend of the river only by an unclaimed stretch of common land, its long grasses and weeds bearing the well-trodden pathways of dog walkers and fishermen that wound inexorably towards the river path.
The river was the only constant.
Generations had come and generations had gone but still it coursed its way through the land, a sluggish life blood cutting through the flesh of the town.
And it remembered everything.
Memories lay in the shelved riverbed and moss-clotted veins etched into the riverbanks. The earliest settlers had left traces of their existence in the very water itself, as had every generation that succeeded those shepherds and fishermen. Ancient waters had mingled with the residue of dye from the cotton mills and the industrial waste of contemporary times. Coins bearing the head of Caesar were washed clean again and again by the eternal tide before returning to the liquid mud for another generation. A wedding ring bearing the inscription, D and B Always caught the light of the afternoon suns rays as it rolled along the riverbed before resting at an angle against a child's long rusted push scooter. The history of man's mortality was represented along the river's four mile journey through the town. It was a liquid graveyard, a resting ground for the restless victims of expiration or victims of Fate; it was the watery sleeping-place of those that had perished in the water through their own misadventure or at the hands of others.
It remembered everything.
It remembered the boy who had rested on the river's edge and eaten of the insane root leading him to behold heavenly visions leading to the coming of the monks. It had carried their heavy cargo on rafts in order to build the Abbey, colossal but temporary as it was removed only a breath in time later. The stones had tumbled into its waters and there they remained long after it was torn apart and the tunnels filled with rising waters. The monks had buried their treasures and shameful secrets in those tunnels. They were long forgotten by all but the river.
It remembered everything.
Men with swords and spears had fallen into the depths, their lifeblood turning the river red before, like everything else, it was diluted by time and water. It remembered the piles of bodies that were cast into its depths; the black pocks on the skin testimony to disease before it ran by high funeral pyres that sent fireflies skipping across the skin of its surface before turning to ash and alighting on the water.
It remembered everything.
It was the town's conscience and the shameful secrets of generations lay in its darkest recesses without blessing, acceptance or curse.
*
Dorothy hurried through the trees, holding a scarf against her head to keep the wind from snatching it away. It was April in the Year 1908 and the weather was typical. March winds, April showers, she chanted under her breath as she skipped over a muddy puddle in the dirt track. As if responding to her invocation, tiny drops of rain made ever increasing circular patterns on the filmy surface of the puddle. On either side of the track blossom trees nodded like knowing washer-women at the passing figure sending pink and blue confetti in her wake.
He'd told her to be there at four-thirty and it was almost that now she judged, thinking of the Town Hall clock that she had passed on her way.
She felt exhilarated.
Having managed to get by Mrs. Pelham, the head house keeper, she’d sprinted across the rugby field until she found the shortcut through the woods that she and only a few of the other service staff shared with the boys. That had brought her out on to Greenfield's Road and she had slowed to a fast walk. Many of the travellers that passed along this way were parents of the boys and she did not want to risk undue attention. They were a bunch of toffee-nosed busy-bodies the lot of them, especially the mothers, with nothing to do but mind everyone else's business. One word to Old Pelham and she'd be back at home again with her father's wrath and the strap to remind her that good jobs were hard to find these days. He'd know. He hadn't worked for as long as anyone could remember. Her mother and older sister never had problems getting jobs though. Toffs always needed maids. But the truth was she actually liked this job.
Like all of the other girls, Dorothy had left school at thirteen and gone into service. Her first job had been as a scullery maid for the Jackson family and she’d hated it so much she’d cried herself to sleep for the two weeks that she had managed to keep it. Up when it was still dark to clean grates and light fires, scrubbing brass work as the toffs had sat down to a leisurely breakfast as though she wasn't even there. Having to bob a curtsey whenever Sir, Madam or either of the little Misses came along. Even at her tender years, she knew that it was a load of tripe. Just because the Jacksons had money. The job had come to an abrupt end. The housekeeper had said that the Jacksons had decided that they had too many staff and, as she was the most recent to enter the house, she would be the one to leave.
That was tripe too.
Young Miss had seen the stifled glee on Dorothy's face as she had tried in vain to squeeze into her older sister's ball gown. The red-faced fury on Young Miss's face had been too much to bear. Dorothy had bobbed a curtsey and left.
Dorothy could well imagine the lisping plea to Mama about Dorothy- the bad mannered scullery maid- but she hadn't cared. Even her father's strap did not change that. And then the job at the Grammar School had come along and everything had changed.<
br />
She had worked at the Grammar for three years when she met him.
At first it had been strange to clean up the scattered mess left by those boys. In common with the Jacksons, the boys carried with them an air of priviledge, an expectation that someone would "do" for them without question of hesitation but the fact that they were boarding away from home ensured that they did not have the same awful superiority of the Little Misses. Without Mama to encourage that constant remote, high-nosed awareness of position, the boys were pleasingly open and friendly. They quickly formed attachments to the staff at the Grammar; Dorothy's older colleagues became mother figures, while she and several of the other girls became sisters to laugh with and tease. She soon became Dotty to many of the boys and was happy with her nickname and the warmth that went with it.
The River Dark Page 9