‘Goodnight, my darling,’ he whispered, and switched off the lamp at her bedside. He paused at the door, turning back for one last glance. She had not moved. He started out, pulling the door partially shut behind him.
‘How long you gonna wait, cocksucker!’
He whirled around. Julia lay exactly as she had been, breathing steadily and deeply, not moving. Yet the voice had been hers, or almost hers. Not the tone. The tone made all the difference.
‘Darling?’ he said, his voice catching in his throat, nearly making him gag. ‘Julia?’
She did not stir.
Could he have imagined it? Was the voice in his head, not in the room? It was possible. Anything was possible. That was the one thing of which he was sure by now. After all that had happened, the fact that he should start hearing voices was hardly a surprise. He started out of the room once again.
‘Come back here, you fucking jack-off!’
Again he spun around. This time there was no doubt. Those words had been spat across the room at him, not something he’d imagined. Nor was the sight that met his eyes imaginary.
Julia sat facing him on the edge of her bed. But this girl was no longer his daughter. There was a smile on her lips that was more like a sneer – an expression of mockery and teasing, fearless superiority. As he watched she leant back on her hands, shifting her weight so that her pelvis was thrust towards him in a way that was blatantly and lewdly sexual.
‘What’s happening?’ he demanded, his voice unsteady. ‘Julia?’
The girl on the bed laughed at him. ‘Forget the kid, big boy. You’re talking to me.’
He took a step towards her. ‘Get out. Get out of my daughter. Get out.’
The girl looked up at him and sniggered. ‘What’s the matter, Pops? Upset that I got into your daughter before you did?’
Without realizing it, he had raised his hand and was on the point of smashing it across her face. She showed no fear, did not even flinch. Something in the cold, detached amusement of her gaze brought him back from the edge. He remembered Joe Sawyer that first day at Niagara Falls. He’d had exactly the same reaction when Melanie had spoken to him through Julia. Slowly, Tom lowered his hand, trembling, to his side.
‘Get out, you bitch,’ he said, his voice low, his lips stretched tight over his teeth. ‘Go back to hell, where you belong.’
Her eyes did not leave his, but she gave no sign of even hearing his words, let alone heeding them.
‘You need a drink, baby. That’s your problem – you know that? You’re not going to remember anything without a drink.’
‘What am I supposed to remember?’
‘Why everything, of course.’
She contrived to give ‘everything’ a suggestive edge, with a lift of the voice and a mock-innocent widening of the eyes.
‘Just tell me what you want, damn you. Tell me what you want me to do.’
‘Remember that night.’
Her sarcastic gaze was unflinching and unafraid, and there was no doubt what night she was referring to. He felt defeated and powerless. When he spoke, his voice was hollow.
‘I don’t remember anything about that night.’
‘River and Pike – remember?’
‘I don’t know what you’re—’
‘You need a drink. Then you’ll understand a lot of things. Now fuck off out of here.’
He watched, dumbfounded and yet horribly fascinated, as she swung her feet up on the bed, settled back, and pulled the quilt demurely to her chin. Keeping her gaze on him, but without expression, she closed her eyes. A moment later, the still form of his daughter lay there, sleeping as she had been when he first came into the room.
Tom stood for some time, paralysed by indecision. Part of him wanted to wake Julia up and challenge her with what had just happened; another part of him felt sure she would remember nothing. If he were to go downstairs right now and tell Clare, she would believe him, of course, but believe what– that he’d hallucinated? Probably not: she had more confidence in his mental stability than that. But what would she make of the suggestion that he take a drink?
A drink? Was that even conceivably the answer? The only way to reconnect with what he had forgotten?
Remember that night. River and Pike. What did it mean? It rang a bell – but what bell, where from? He was still turning the words over in his mind when he found himself already halfway downstairs. He had left Julia’s room without being conscious of doing so. What now? To his right he could see the light on in the small room that Clare worked in at home. She was preparing some figures for a meeting the next morning. She had told him she would be busy for about an hour, so he decided not to disturb her. He would think this thing through by himself. He headed for his own office at the back of the house.
36
It was more than an hour before Clare finished her work and came out to join him. When she didn’t find him in the living room or kitchen, she headed for his office. She smelt the liquor even before she entered the room, and pushed open the door unable to believe her senses. Tom was seated behind his desk, with an almost empty whisky bottle in front of him and a glass in his hand.
‘For God’s sake don’t look like that,’ he said. ‘It’s not the end of the world. Nothing to get into a state about. I’m doing this for a reason.’
‘Why? What reason?’
She watched in disbelief as he took another sip of the neat whisky. She noticed how he held his glass, as though afraid of losing it, defying anyone to part him from it. His words were not slurred and his eyes seemed to focus on her easily enough; nonetheless, he was a different man from the one she had left earlier that evening. A switch had been thrown somewhere inside him. There was a defiance in his eyes, challenging her to say all the things he knew she would be bound to say.
Instead she just looked at him sadly, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I can’t help you, Tom, not if you do this.’
‘I know you can’t help me,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking you to. I’m trying to help myself.’
‘Not like this.’
‘Yes – like this.’
With a gesture that spoke volumes about the rage she could sense building inside him, and which he was struggling to contain, he snatched up the bottle and topped up his glass.
‘Just tell me what you’re trying to do.’
‘I’m trying to remember who I was when I was drinking.’
‘Why?’
‘Why the hell d’you think?’
She saw his hand tighten on the glass, and feared that he was either going to break it or fling it across the room.
‘Just tell me what’s happened,’ she said, ‘what’s happened in the last hour. Something must have.’
He took another drink, greedily, like a man who just had to get the stuff inside him.
‘Tom, stop. Just stop. Getting drunk won’t help anything. You know it can only make things worse.’
‘Try to understand. I have to do this.’
He finished his drink, put down his glass, and pushed himself to his feet, sending his chair skimming back on its rollers until it hit the wall. He swayed slightly, steadying himself with the knuckles of one hand on the edge of his desk.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, fending off with a forbidding palm the attempt she made to help him, ‘the old skills are still there – like riding a bike. I’m fine.’
He took a deep breath, then straightened up with the stiff determination of an old soldier preparing to go on parade one more time and started for the door.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out.’
‘No, don’t go out, Tom.’ She moved to head him off, but he pushed past her.
‘If you go out, I’m coming with you.’
He ignored her.
‘Is all of this just an excuse to drink?’
She had hurled the question at his retreating back, surprising herself at the harshness of it, and the bitterness of its tone.
He turn
ed to look at her, but only to acknowledge he’d heard her. He continued into the hall and reached for his car keys on the table where he always left them. She moved quickly to get between him and the front door. He wasn’t going to push her aside so easily this time.
‘You’re not driving! If you go out of here with those car keys, I’m calling the police.’
He hesitated. Then his gaze went past her to the stairs. She followed it. Julia stood at the top, wiping her eyes sleepily.
‘Daddy . . . you didn’t come up and say goodnight to me.’
Was that really his daughter, he asked himself? Or someone else pretending to be his daughter?
‘Yes, I did, honey. You were asleep.’
She looked at him uncertainly. He dropped the keys he had just picked up back down on the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly to Clare. Then he opened the front door and went out into the night.
‘Where is Daddy going?’
Clare turned. ‘Don’t worry, darling. There’s something he has to do. He’ll be back later.’ She started up the stairs. ‘Come on, now – off to bed, you.’
37
It only hit him as he pulled the door of the house shut behind him. Perhaps it was a reaction of the night air on the bottle of Scotch he had consumed. Anyway, it proved that the ghostly presence he had faced an hour ago was right – the alcohol might well have dislodged things in his memory that nothing else would. ‘River and Pike’ suddenly did more than ring a distant bell. It started to sound familiar.
He walked for over fifteen minutes, but still could not place the reference exactly. Eventually, when he felt the exercise beginning to clear his head, he stopped in a liquor store and bought himself a half-bottle of Scotch. He brown-bagged it and sipped at it discreetly as he walked some more.
Then he got it. A doctor had sat on the edge of his bed and told him he was going to die if he didn’t change his ways. In passing, he had told him that he had been pulled out of a ditch at some place called River and Pike. The reference had even featured on his medical discharge. As a location, it still meant no more to Tom than it had then. He recalled that he’d thought vaguely about visiting the place where he had almost died, but he had never got around to it. He had met Clare by then. Drink and drugs were part of his past. The future was Clare. He had planned to make a fresh start with a clean slate, and he had done so.
Clean slate? He shuddered at the implications of those two words. True, he had indulged himself in the fantasy of starting over, free of the past. For a time he thought he had succeeded. But you can never be wholly free of the past and of the things you’ve done there. The past is always with you. There was nothing for him to do but face it. He had gone too far to hide his head in the sand again. One step at a time. Just like getting sober. Now he was getting drunk again, and visiting his past – one step at a time.
He needed a cab, but he had to walk another few minutes before he saw one with its light on. He knew from experience that cab drivers did not stop for guys drinking from bottles, bagged or otherwise, so he slipped it in the pocket of his jacket. Luckily, he still had the trick of looking sober even when he was far from it, and getting in the back before the driver smelled his breath and heard his slurred speech.
‘Where to?’
‘River and Pike.’
He saw the driver screw up his face in the mirror. ‘River and Pike? Where the hell’s that?’
‘I was kind of hoping you’d know. Don’t you have a map or something?’
If the driver had one, he didn’t seem to want to use it. He just scratched his chin, deep in thought. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, ‘I know it. Outside of Albany. Death Valley, right?’
‘Death Valley’s out in California, for God’s sake.’
‘No – it’s just what people started calling it when they shut the mills down in the fifties. Used to be Grover’s Town. Still is, except nobody around there calls it that.’
He slipped the car into gear and pulled out into the light traffic.
‘Is that where they had a music festival ten years ago?’ Tom asked.
‘Yeah, that was the place. Plenty of space and not too many neighbours to worry about the noise. They had some good bands. Pity they never did that again. Were you there?’
Tom gave a sour laugh. ‘So I’m told.’ He felt in his pocket for the bottle and took a swig. He caught the driver glancing at him warily in his rear-view mirror a couple of times. He knew that look of old.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ Tom said, and this time emptied the bottle. He thought about telling the driver to stop at the next liquor store, but suspected that if he did he would lose him.
‘You’re not going to get sick and throw up back there, are you?’
‘Depends on your driving,’ Tom said.
‘I don’t like people to throw up in my cab.’
‘Can’t blame you for that, friend. I’ll try to keep a grip.’
They drove in silence. Tom watched the night pass by, only vaguely conscious of where they were. It interested him that there was a coke quality to this high. Memory, he supposed. It was always alcohol and coke back then, one cleaning up after the other, then more of the other taking you on to some new place. The association was still there.
‘How far the hell is it?’ he heard himself saying after a while. ‘Seems like we’re taking a long time getting there.’
‘Hey if you’re accusing me of taking advantage of you being half—’
‘I’m not accusing you of—’
‘Because the sooner you’re out of my cab the happier I’ll be.’
‘All right, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.’ He peered out of the window into unbroken blackness. ‘Where the fuck are we?’
‘Nearly there.’
The driver swung the cab left, bouncing over what felt like rough ground pitted with holes, and came to an abrupt stop. Tom could see neither lights nor movement outside the cab windows. He wondered briefly if he’d been lured into a trap and was going to be mugged by some confederates of the driver waiting there.
‘That’s thirteen-fifty.’
It took an effort for Tom to make his eyes focus on the clock, but it looked about right. He pushed open the cab door.
‘Hey!’
‘Wait there. I want to take a look around.’
‘And I want thirteen-fifty.’
All Tom could see were the low, dark outlines of what he took to be abandoned warehouses. Further over, a line of yellow sodium lights on concrete posts wound away into the darkness, their trail visible far beyond any illumination they may have shed. The view in this direction seemed almost equally desolate, though more lights were grouped in the distance in a way that suggested signs of life.
Are you sure this is River and Pike?’
‘We’re on River Drive. The lights you see up there, that’s Pike Way.’
‘Jesus . . . it’s a total wasteland.’
‘There’s talk of yuppies moving in some parts, but Beacon Hill it ain’t. Is there something special you’re looking for?’
‘I don’t know . . . I just want to look around . . .’
‘Did you hear me? I said thirteen-fifty.’
‘For God’s sake!’ Irritated, Tom reached into his back pocket, rocking unsteadily with the movement so that he had to shuffle his feet clumsily to keep his balance. Using the reflection of the cab’s headlights, he fished out a twenty-dollar bill and thrust it into the driver’s outstretched hand. ‘Now just wait here while . . .’
Too late, he realized his mistake. The driver floored his accelerator and roared off into the night, oblivious of Tom’s angry obscenities. Moments later, he still stood on the same spot, swaying gently in the sudden silence. He seemed to be standing in some faint penumbra of light, though he couldn’t make out where it was coming from. He looked up at the sky, which was covered by the same thick blanket of cloud that had been there all day.
Ahead of him, River Drive, f
ar from running alongside any river, rose out of the darkness alongside a disused railway track, from which the rails and sleepers had long since been removed. In their place now was scuffed gravel and wild grass. A light wind was little more than a restless presence, occasionally gathering enough strength to whip a scrap of paper or a plastic bag across Tom’s path. He glimpsed a furtive movement out of the corner of his eye, but, when he turned, saw nothing. It could have been a dog or cat, or some less domesticated creature.
He began to wonder what exactly it was he’d been hoping to achieve. Clearly he was not about to make any remarkable discoveries, and nothing he could see around him triggered even the vaguest memory. He wondered where exactly he had been found, not that he any longer thought the knowledge would do him any good.
A noise behind him, like the creak of some ghostly carriage wheel, made him spin around – which made him lose his balance and fall. From this position, propped up on one elbow, he saw a lamp suspended from a cable stretched over the street. It was the source of the dingy light he had been standing in. Another breath of wind rocked it again, and he heard the same sound that had alarmed him.
He struggled back to his feet, brushing himself down and discovering a slight graze on his right hand. He took out a handkerchief and wiped it clean, then took stock of his surroundings once again. Looking up what the cab driver had said was Pike Way, he found he could see buildings behind the lights now. Most of them were two storeys, maybe three here and there. It was impossible to know which were abandoned and which were simply closed for the night. Then he saw one that might, conceivably, be a bar. He started towards it.
A Memory of Demons Page 14