Then, catching our breath beneath the arching whalebones high upon the West Cliff, where we can see the harbour and the still-busy streets below quite clearly, Faruk points to a black speck moving along one of the distant arms on the granite harbour walls, which stretch out into the sea, ready to gather troubled craft into the safe waters of the River Eske. ‘You said she was cloaked, didn’t you?’ he asks Teresa.
But Teresa is already feeding a coin into a mounted telescope and tilting it on its gimble as she focuses on the figure on the harbour wall. ‘It’s her,’ she says.
‘Are you sure?’ I say.
‘It has to be,’ she snaps and sets the pace as Clive, Faruk and me tumble down steep pavements and then race each other along the bank of the river, to where we can see the monumental stonework of the harbour. Diesel and Lauren remain behind, in case we’re wrong and she turns up there. And so Diesel is able to watch through the telescope as Teresa and the Horsemen mount the harbour wall and run towards the distant cloaked figure, which stands now with back towards us, looking out to sea and reminding me of some DVD that I watched with Mum, years ago.
By the time we are anywhere near, I am choking for breath but determined to keep up with Teresa. I don’t want to be seen as someone who has let Ros down in any way. Faruk and Clive have fallen a little way behind, but they’re still close enough to get the same jolt I do when the hooded figure swings towards us – and we’re staring into the bone-white visage of Death himself.
I look into the eyes of Death and Death looks unblinkingly into my eyes and Death speaks first. ‘Stee-fuckin’-rewth, mate.’ His bony hand clutch at his presumably stilled heart. ‘You could scare the pants off a bloke doing that! I nearly had a flaming heart attack! What the bloody hell do you dickheads think you’re doing?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, recovering myself. ‘We thought you were someone else.’
Australian Death gives a hollow laugh. ‘Too many people do, mate,’ he says and he turns once more towards the sea.
It’s a half hour later and we are climbing the path to the cliff walk. Diesel and Lauren, still watching through the telescope on the West Cliff, are sure they’ve just seen Ros struggling up here. She’s long been out of view but they reckon that if we hurry, we might just catch her. For goths, the path leads to only one place, Esmerelda’s Lookout. There is a legend that in the first years of the nineteenth century, a local girl of good parentage had a fling (a dalliance they would have called it) with a handsome officer of the Royal Navy, who served on the frigate HMS Typhoon. His ship patrolled the Eastern coast and often put in to Whitby for supplies.
Whether he intended to marry Esmerelda or whether she was only a sailor’s plaything was never established, but when Esmerelda, as she wrote in her diary, found herself ‘quick with child’ she began to watch for his ship from this lonely spot on the cliff walk. Only his return and their speedy marriage could save her reputation, could save her, in fact, from being rejected by the whole community. Esmerelda waited and waited.
For weeks she was seen on this cliff top, a lone figure who stood for hours in all weathers, awaiting the return of her lover. But Esmerelda wasn’t to know that the captain of HMS Typhoon had received a signal while at sea, ordering his ship to join the fleet at Spithead: Britain was once again at war with France. Esmerelda waited and waited, with the child growing bigger inside her and her predicament beginning to show. And then one day, the lonely figure was seen walking up the hill towards her cliff-top lookout but no one saw her coming down. Esmerelda was gone, never to be seen again.
I learn all this from Teresa as we hurry up the path, hearing the incoming tide crashing upon the shore far below. Teresa says Ros has always been fascinated by the story and has visited Esmerelda’s Lookout many times before. It’s her hope and mine that she is only paying the place one more visit and has nothing more dreadful on her troubled mind. The place is a well-known tourist spot for moody Goths, but none is there now and nor is Rosalind. We look about, down towards distant trees and back towards the town but we can see no sign of her. Teresa sends Faruk in one direction and Clive in the other. Then she finds something in the grass, a single black glove. ‘Oh, God,’ she’s saying. ‘Please, God, no.’
She goes towards the edge of the cliff.
‘I can’t look,’ she says.
But I do. I stand on the edge of the cliff with the wind blowing hard and a fine salty spray slapping my face and peer down upon the shingly shore below, which is fast disappearing under the racing tide. At first, I can’t make out much, just a lot of black stones, half-submerged by swirling water. But at least there’s no Ros and the faintest of hope begins to fill my veins – until I spot something ominous between two big rocks. It’s the shape of a black cloak, which is already being attacked by the fast-encroaching sea.
I point and Teresa screams.
I don’t remember deciding to descend the cliff but I do, making quickly for a place where climbing down might just be practicable, if still dangerous. This isn’t something I would have attempted in any other circumstances. But I’m not thinking, I’m just seeing the stones slipping away under my feet, concentrating on grabbing at handholds as I slip and stumble down a vertiginous slope towards the shore below. I won’t know that I have cuts to my face and hands until much later. Now, bruised and confused at the bottom of the cliff, I can just hear Teresa shouting from far above me, but the noise down here drowns all but the top notes.
I stumble over wet shingle and then wade knee-deep in swirling water, pushing against the force of the tide, until finally I can see the lumpy, sodden cloth bundle only yards ahead. I’m calling Ros’s name but the bundle lies inert, all but submerged by the water. I struggle on and can now see, with heart-stopping certainty, the familiar death’s head brooch, the one that Ros wears on dresses but must have been using now as a clasp for her cloak. It’s her, I say to myself, my heart sinking fast. I so don’t want to lift the cloak and find Ros’s body, drowned or smashed by the fall. I don’t want to do this, but I see now that it has to be done. And so, steeling myself for the worst, I kneel in the water and lift the heavy hem of the cloak.
She is not there. The cloak covers only another black rock. But there’s small relief in that. The cloak is Ros’s, I’m sure. And if the cloak is here but Ros is not, then the inescapable and terrible conclusion is that she has already been swept out to sea. However, I search the narrowing strip of shore beyond the sea’s reach, scan the dark and choppy waters on which I can make out nothing but the occasional breaking wave and then, with dragging reluctance, begin a difficult and painful climb back up the cliff. It seems to take hours, my hands hurt so much and my mind is in turmoil over what on earth I am to tell her best friend and protector, Teresa? But, after slipping and sliding and eating considerable amounts of dirt, I make the top, where I roll over, dead beat, upon the grass, and then slowly, very slowly, get to my knees, hardly daring to look up at Teresa, who will immediately know the worst from the look on my face.
But it’s Teresa who speaks first.
‘Well, bugger me,’ she says. ‘If it isn’t Yorkshire’s very own Spiderman.’
This is not the reaction I’m expecting. Nor was I reckoning on the peel of laughter that rings in my ears as I stagger to my feet and see Faruk and Clive with Teresa, all looking like they’ve tremendously enjoyed the spectacle I have just provided. Faruk is already playing back the footage on his iPhone for Clive. But I’m surprised I notice such insignificant details, when there is a much bigger surprise awaiting. There’s Teresa, grinning at me like an idiot, a very pretty idiot, and with her, dressed not in her black gothy clothes, but in a light-coloured summer dress and a cardigan, and wearing no makeup, gothy or otherwise, is Rosalind. Rosalind Chandler, the girl who was dead and washed far out to sea, as far as I knew, only minutes ago. ‘I don’t understand,’ I say.
This is so unnecessary. The look on my face – which Faruk caught with his phone, that look of total, brainless bewil
derment which has since proved such an amazingly popular image with the readers of Smeg!! – said all of that and more.
And as we all walk back to town, having called Diesel and Lauren with our news, I hear that Ros has had what is called an epiphany, a revelation. She had it on the way to Whitby. A bit like St Paul’s on the way to Damascus, only this was about her goth image. What she realised was that in Whitby, she was no longer different, she was just a goth among goths. Even the townsfolk were used to goths in Whitby and were as likely to say, ‘Morning, rotten weather we’re having!’ to a corpse in a top hat smoking a big spliff as they were to Mrs Ryan, who wears a greasy apron and only smokes kippers.
She had to change, she thought. It was time to end it all, she had said, meaning her phase as a goth. In Whitby she would better stand out dressed as she is now than she would in her run-of-the-mill scary stuff and when she had left the hotel, it was only to find a shop which sold clothing which wasn’t black. And there could be no more symbolic place to put her past as a goth behind her than at Esmerelda’s Lookout, where she had cast her cloak and various other items, into the sea.
I watch her as she walks on ahead, with Teresa. She looks so different, though still attractive, with her dark hair brushed out and her quite nice legs on show, but I am not at all convinced that this is the girl I have spent so much time and energy pursuing. Her mood, I’m glad to see, has lifted entirely and the girls are chatting about a ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ boy who had helped her find her purse when she had to retrace her footsteps to the Lookout, just now. I hear that Ros has arranged to meet him for a drink later this evening. This is news that would have sent me plunging into my own bleak mood only yesterday, but not tonight. I am just so relieved that Ros is okay and that I did my bit to make sure of it. And, I think, I’m also kind of pleased with the look Teresa gave me when I finally reappeared at the top of the cliff.
Everyone is talking at once and I can hardly hear a word. ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ I’m saying, loudly.
Faruk is telling Diesel about my exploits earlier this evening.
Lauren is talking to Clive about the shops she’s found here in Whitby.
Ros is laughing at something Teresa has said and I think it might be about me as she keeps casting quick looks in my direction. We’re sitting at a table in a pub garden. The sun has set and the beer garden is lit up by colourful hanging lanterns. Between the toilets and the door to the kitchen, I can see the tiny lights of a ship, far out at sea. I’m excited by everything that’s going on around me, by having all my best friends together at the same time in one really cool place and I’m exchanging grins and glances with Teresa while trying to talk to my dad on my mobile.
‘He’s done what?’ I say, suddenly brought to earth as I grasp what Dad is saying.
He’s telling me that GD has broken his leg. It’s not a bad break, Dad is saying, but he’ll be stuck at home for a while and might need some shopping doing.
‘How is Nana?’ I ask him and learn that she took a turn for the worse and had to go back to hospital. She seems better now, I’m so relieved to hear, though the doctors want to keep her in for a spell.
But it’s okay, I can help. I don’t have exams to worry about now and I’ll happily make time to do GD’s shopping and I’ll look in on Nana at the hospital whenever I can. I’ll take her some flowers from her garden, she’ll like that. And now Dad’s telling me to enjoy myself but not to do anything he wouldn’t do (there’s no answer to that) and something about how much Roger admires his garden. He comes over to ours quite a lot now, apparently and talks a lot about his ‘fiance’ – the one he hasn’t yet met. I pocket my phone and we eat our dinners, pub lasagne with chips and salad (no chips for the girls) and it’s all so very nearly perfect.
In fact I think it would be perfect, a memory I could treasure forever, were it not for the sad and secretive gaze I see Lauren giving Diesel, when he’s looking somewhere else. I wonder what’s on her mind and think I see trouble brewing there, but I’ve no idea what it might be. Meanwhile, Teresa has leaned over the table and asked for a word with me, in private. We say we’re just going to look at the sea and because it’s a moonlit night, our departure is accompanied by some not unexpected catcalls and whistles.
When we’re alone, and we do indeed have the kind of moonlit view and warm, balmy evening that backdrops the stomach-turning slushy bits in so many rom-coms (or so I’m told), Teresa says, ‘I have some bad news for you, BJ.’
I hate it when people say this. Why can’t they just come straight out with it and then you know the worst there and then, without this horrible wait?
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Ros. I’ve spoken to her about you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve asked her how she feels about you. I hope you don’t mind too much. I said you might be interested in her.’
‘I see,’ I say. I wish she hadn’t done that. Soo embarrassing.
‘The thing is, BJ,’ Teresa continues, ‘I asked her and she’s said that she’s not interested in you at all. In fact she finds the idea quite funny. She says you’re just so not her type.’
‘Not her type?’ I say. I’m amazed, or maybe the word is appalled, after all the effort I’ve put in, trying to make sure I was her type. ‘But I’ve read Kerouac and Kafka and I know she reads them because I saw them in her bag.’
Teresa tries to suppress a laugh, but can’t quite do it.
‘Oh, Brian,’ she says. ‘Those were my books. Ros was taking them back to the local library for me – it’s on her way home. I hope you enjoyed them, anyway.’
‘I’m not sure, now,’ I say.
‘Ah, well,’ Teresa says. ‘At least it’s only incompatibility. Nothing to do with you having her stomach pumped.’
‘That’s a relief,’ I say. And maybe everything she’s just told me is a relief too, I’m not sure. The way Ros has changed and learning her real feelings about me is all a lot of stuff I need to sort out in my head. I can’t say that I feel particularly upset, though, which must be a good thing. Not with Teresa standing so close to me, here by the moonlit sea, my senses completely overpowered by her proximity and her perfume.
‘But hey, never mind,’ she says, turning towards me and, totally unexpectedly, resting her long, slender wrists, which smell of jasmine and honeysuckle, on my caped shoulders. ‘You’re still my hero.’ And then she seems much closer, in fact she is much closer and then our lips meet, hers warm and wet and tasting of cherries, mine of chips and cheap grease paint, I suspect, but we are kissing, Teresa Davenport and me, Brian Johnson. It’s a sight seen countless times along the seafront at Whitby, just one more girl kissing one more vampire, but it’s special for me and, as I feel Teresa’s tongue dart into my mouth, I think it might be special for her, too. And when she has finished eating me alive, she says, oh, so memorably, ‘Come back to my room, later. There’s something I want to show you.’
CHAPTER 18
Love Hurts
Roger is sitting on the compactor in his red Speedos, telling me how he met Poon Tang at the airport. He’s completely given up on trying to pronounce her real name now and Pao-Pei will, in Laurel Gardens at least, forever be Poon Tang. He is as happy as Larry, probably much happier; I doubt if this Larry ever went about with such a goofy grin spread across his chops. By the side of Roger, said Larry would be a miserable character, incapable of raising a smile or enjoying a chuckle. Roger Dyson is where happiness is at, right now.
He looks like he hasn’t got a care in the world and any menace I might have imagined about him has vanished completely. He doesn’t give a monkey’s about Clive’s failure to score at Whitby, despite his footing of most of the bill for our trip. ‘Clive will sort himself out when he’s good and ready,’ Roger says.
‘You can lead a horse to water,’ I say, unwisely.
‘Like I said before,’ Roger says quickly. ‘No whores.’
I have never seen him like this, grinning away
as he sits in the sun, one hand down his Speedos, scratching his balls. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone quite this happy. It’s unnatural. And all because of the delightful young lady in a blue and pink sarong who has just now served us with long glasses of ice cold beer. She is as striking as her photographs. Tall, lean and angular, not much of a top deck, I notice, but that doesn’t worry Roger, who professes to be a leg man anyway. And Poon Tang has legs, he says, which reach all the way to the ground. He watches her bottom jiggle under the silk as she sashays back to the house, casting a last quick smile over her shapely shoulder.
‘I can’t tell you how that woman has changed my life,’ Roger says. ‘Life without her was meaningless, empty. But now, it’s as if the sun has come out and chased every grey cloud from the sky.’
Ee-yuk, I’m thinking, this man is in love.
He tells me how Poon Tang has taken over the house, deep cleaning the kitchen and sorting all the other forgotten places too and how her cooking is ‘just out of this world’. He tells me that it’s an added bonus that Clive and Poon Tang get on like a house on fire. But I’ve seen that already, when they got off the bus outside the bungalow earlier on, giggling like a pair of schoolgirls. Clive has talked of no one else since Roger drove down to Heathrow and picked her up, last week.
Poon Tang has taken over Clive’s room for the time being; Clive sleeps on the sofa in the living room. This is in accordance with a custom which Poon Tang insists on maintaining, which is that a betrothed couple mustn’t share a bed until a month before the wedding. After initial resistance, Roger has gone along with his beloved’s wishes and is only glad that he doesn’t have to wait until after the wedding itself.
‘She is a paragon of womankind,’ Roger says. ‘She is more beautiful, much sexier and far superior in every respect to any other woman on God’s earth. She is, you know. And she’s mine, Brian, all mine. Can you believe that?’
I’ve become a little bored with loved-up Roger and my mind has drifted somewhere else. I might just be thinking of someone who outdoes Roger’s Poon Tang on all these counts and several more. But Roger interprets my distraction in his own way and says, ‘But don’t get me wrong, son. Your mother is a lovely lady too and your father is very lucky indeed to have her. The gorgeous Violet is a wonderful woman. It’s just that she hasn’t got that little extra something which I think my Poon Tang’s got. You know what I mean?’
Losing It Page 22