At first she refused to meet me. Finally we agreed to take a trip to the Roxy, on the condition that I paid for both of us. The film was Countess Dracula, which starred Ingrid Pitt as the savage siren Countess Bathory, and was only very loosely based on historical facts, being aimed at pubescent males who saw their teachers as fanciable older women. I noticed with some satisfaction that several of my old classmates were seated near the front. I drew an odd comfort from the fact that, though they had stayed on at school to better themselves, they still enjoyed trashy movies. Personally, I was always disappointed by the lack of historical documentation in such films, and it was a mark of my immaturity that I never got used to the feeling.
Julia had lost loads of weight but was still wearing her old clothes, so she looked like someone who had been attacked with a shrinking ray. Deprived of any calorific pastime she was patently bored, and talked all the way through the film, about her biology exam, about a classmate who was pregnant, anything but the Countess Bathory. This time, though, I was determined not to get annoyed. After the film I suggested a walk on the pier. ‘But it’s bucketing down,’ she complained. ‘And I told Mum I’d be back for dinner.’ As we had arrived late at the cinema, I had not yet found an opportunity to raise the subject closest to my heart. I decided that it was now or never.
‘This won’t take long, I promise. There’s something I want you to see.’
‘I know what’s down there, Kay. A crappy ghost train, a pub, some dodgems and a helter skelter with mats that shed on you.’
‘This is something new. Suppose I told you that I’d made a discovery. Something right at the end of the pier that nobody else knows is there.’
‘Give over, there’s nothing to see. I’ve been there a million times.’ But still she followed me through the turnstile, her high heels skidding on the wet planks. It was raining hard by the time we reached the ghost train. ‘Everything’s closed,’ she said anxiously. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’
‘Listen to me, Julia, you know we talked about where we would go if we could leave here? If I told you I’d found a place, would you believe me?’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere you can only reach—from there.’ I pointed down at the chained-off fishing platform. The clouded sea was swelling up through the lower grille, lifting the strands of mildew-coloured seaweed that clung to the pylons.
‘I’m not going down there. It’s dangerous, look at the signs. You must be out of your mind.’
‘You have to trust me. No harm will come to you, Julia, I promise. I’ll look after you. Have a little faith.’ I held out my hand.
‘Really, Kay.’ She was serious now. ‘This is crazy. There’s nothing down there.’
‘You’re wrong. You can reach a place. It’s safe, I’ve done it loads of times, come on.’
Before she had time to consider the matter further I seized her hand and pulled her down behind me. ‘It’s fine if you keep hold of the rail.’
We had nearly reached the bottom when she hesitated. ‘I can’t, Kay. My heels—’ She looked down at the half-submerged grating.
‘Give me your shoes. Just do this one thing for me, Julia, and I’ll never ask you to do anything like this again.’ She looked at me, then reluctantly removed her shoes and clasped them in one hand. The rain-laden wind had moulded her shirt to her breasts. Suddenly self-conscious of her body, she pulled her coat across her chest with her free hand.
‘It’s okay, I’ve got you.’ I locked her fingers with mine. ‘Now, you have to look over there, right in the corner.’
‘I can’t see anything,’ she wailed, peering nervously forwards. ‘I don’t know what you want me to see.’ I realised with a shock that she was scared of me, and that I was forcing her forwards to the edge of the platform as the sea rolled around us.
‘Let me go, Kay, there’s nothing there!’ She was close to tears.
‘But you must be able to see it!’ I shouted above the rising wind. Conditions were perfect. I could always get to Calabash on days like this. I stared into the deep green gloom but saw nothing. The struts of the pier reminded me of the old pine forest where I had found the ruined temples. I became aware of Julia’s body, so close to mine that we were almost touching. Her hip brushed against the top of my leg. I gazed down into the turbulent darkness as it lifted and dropped around us, and willed our passing over into light. We would tumble through the maelstrom together, and emerge in a dazzling new world. I tried to feel the familiar ripples of nausea I experienced when the journey began. I squeezed my eyes shut and visualised the sparkling sea, the warm stone harbour.
But nothing was happening.
A heavy swell rose up over our feet, rocking the platform. Julia screamed. I saw now that I was holding her on the very edge, gripping her hand so tightly that it was white to her wrist, and that the next wave would tip us both into the icy water.
‘Let me go, Kay!’
Coming to my senses, I allowed her to drag us back. She was sobbing and stumbling towards the staircase, trying to wriggle free of my hand.
‘I’m sorry, Julia, I didn’t mean to—’
‘Get away from me!’
She broke free and fell hard against the steps, cutting her hand. She scrambled about on all fours, tearing the knees of her tights, dropping a shoe. It bounced on a lower step and fell into the water.
‘Please, just let me explain.’ I followed her.
‘Keep away!’ she screamed, ducking under the chain. I tried to grab her but she was too quick for me.
‘I just wanted you to see what I’ve seen,’ I shouted. ‘I wanted you to come with me!’
I watched her sobbing and hobbling off across the rain-lashed walkway between the rides, and suddenly I knew I had destroyed my truest friendship, and had perhaps lost something else, something far more precious than a friend.
Chapter 28
The Fear of Inheritance
I was sure that Calabash existed, so why had it not appeared? Because I had tried to bring somebody across with me? Paradoxically, I also knew that it could not exist because life there was exactly what I wished for.
So many doubts surfaced. I had frightened Julia into thinking that I was trying to kill her. From that time on she refused to take my calls; her mother always answered the telephone. Eventually she told me not to ring any more. And the Sultan had refused my request—how could that be if he was a figment of my imagination? Could my mind no longer be obeying me? I could not now return to Calabash as a neutral bystander, but was expected to aid General Bassa in his search for ‘scientific superiority’. Our discovery in the burial vaults had forced me to become a partisan. The good faith that had existed between myself and the Sultan had been compromised. If it had not been for the diplomacy of the Lord Chancellor, we could have ended with our heads on poles. Perhaps it was lucky that Scammer acted as his secret eyes and ears…
And there, right there, I knew that something was wrong, that a flaw existed in what I knew, some anomaly which would allow me to gain a foothold in solving the mystery of my imagination.
Dudley Salterton always told me that adolescence was a time of confusion. He got that part right. Still, I had continued to chronicle my alternative life in the notebooks I kept behind the wardrobe, including my discovery that a stranger had set foot in the kingdom, my tentative explanation of the circumstances of Eliya’s death, and my abortive attempt to take someone else across the divide. Events in Calabash were forcing me to take action. Each night I tried to work things out in the pages of my notes, and felt that I was growing closer to an answer. But before I had time to make any sense of these developments, real life intervened once more.
As another month passed without work, I was forced to join Cole Bay’s expanding dole queue. Although it had reached the top of my priority list, moving out of my parents’ house was not an available option, because even in a half-derelict coastal town, property rent was too high for my meagre pocket. March was the coldest month I could ever
remember, but the atmosphere in our house was chillier than any sleet-swept seafront. My mother had taken to addressing me through a medium, either Bob or Janine, and only spoke when circumstances demanded a practical reply. Requests for dirty laundry were placed with mealtime orders, and all casual banter was bypassed. Bob mooched about with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, staring from unfrosted patches of the lounge windows, whistling tunelessly and jingling the change in his pockets before offering to walk the dog. He missed talking to Sean about arterial roads. He was a mine of information about the fastest way to drive from Caterham, where his sister lived, to Orpington, where her daughter-in-law had moved to, and assumed that because Sean was a courier he shared an enthusiasm for the navigational possibilities of ‘B’ roads. I could not drive and was therefore impossible to engage in such conversations. Fresh wrappers from pink hotel soap piled up in the bathroom wastepaper bin as Bob spent more time with Doreen and her minibars.
On the last Saturday of the month I spent the afternoon at the Roxy, sitting through an excruciatingly unfunny Carry On film. As I twisted my key in the lock of number 14 an uneasy feeling filled the pit of my stomach. Like a dog, I could always sense when a storm was brewing. Or perhaps I could simply smell something burning.
She had been in my bedroom. The wardrobe was moved from its usual position, and my Calabash notebooks and all my Mesopotamia plans were gone. I found Pauline in the garden with her cardigan pulled about her narrow shoulders, standing over a metal wastepaper basket, watching the low blue flames.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, trying to sound reasonable, already aware of the answer.
‘This is the problem, this,’ she said, stabbing into the flames with a poker. ‘All this nonsense. Stuffing your head with rubbish, fairy tales and what have you. Dancing girls and flying machines. It’s my own fault. I let you read too many books when you were young. Now all of—this—won’t go away.’
‘What did you want to do that for?’ I shouted.
‘This is why you couldn’t study, spoiling your brain with this tripe. Bloody fantasyland, all of it.’
‘You’ve no right to touch my stuff.’
‘It’s for your own good.’
‘They’re just stories! They can’t hurt you.’
‘Can’t they?’ she shouted back, her sallow face contorting above the flames. ‘Ask your father. Ask him!’
‘Bob doesn’t mind me—’
‘Not him,’ she spat, ramming the last of my notebooks into the thin fire.
‘I don’t care. It’s all in my head, I can write it out again.’
‘Not under this roof you bloody won’t,’ she said, and that was the end of it.
I waited until she had gone in, then ran back to the makeshift brazier and tried to salvage some pages from the ashes, but she had been thorough. My hard work was gone, all of it. Defeated, I went back into the house and pretended to watch television with Bob, who was slumped in front of a programme about baboons, wisely keeping his head down. Not him, she’d said. Not him. My real father.
‘I was wondering when that would come up,’ said Bob in answer to my question. He thought for a slow minute, then sighed. ‘I can show you, perhaps that’s the easiest way.’
We went out to the car and drove in silence for five miles or so, beyond the edge of town. Bob turned into a side street away from the shore and pulled the Hillman up in front of an ugly Edwardian house with tall narrow windows.
‘Your dad was originally from London, but his family moved up north somewhere when the war broke out, and he came down to live with his aunt. Phillip was a clever man by all accounts, too clever for around here. But after they were married your mother didn’t want to move, so they stayed on in Cole Bay.’ This much I knew already, but there was something bad coming, because Bob wouldn’t look at me. ‘He wasn’t a very practical man, your dad, couldn’t change a fuse, she said.’ That’s funny, I thought, changing a fuse was the one practical thing I remember him doing. I had always thought he was so sensible. Things can get turned upside down when you’re very young.
‘Your mother had to sort out everything. He had his head in the clouds. They had some very hard times. Sean was little and you were coming along. She was always finding him positions—a desk job on the council, administration—but he had, well, a breakdown.’ Bob looked up as if expecting to see his predecessor at one of the darkened windows. ‘Do you understand? He lost his grip. He couldn’t stay at home. They put him in there.’
I stared up at the grim slate roof, the tiny attic windows. ‘It’s horrible. You’d never get better in a place like that.’
‘He was none the wiser. Couldn’t remember the names of his visitors. They used to give patients a test: name who’s on the throne, who’s prime minister, what day of the week it is. Ten questions. He couldn’t manage them. In a world of his own. It killed her to see that he didn’t know who she was. She’s frightened, that’s all. Scared you’ll take after him if you don’t do some growing up. You’re the dead spit of your father. She sees him in you. You have to understand your mother, she’s not—well, she’s not a happy woman, the way things have turned out for her. Sean’s gone off to God knows where, hardly a card from one week to the next, he won’t be told what to do, you’re all she has left.’
I had never thought of Pauline like that. I had never imagined that we were the cause of her anger. I thought of something Julia had once said, about bad genes predominating. I pressed up against the railings and tried to see into the shadowed rooms, but all I could see was a reflection of myself staring in, scraps of bright cloud at my back like drifting ghosts. I forced myself to look away. The lawn needed cutting. The building looked abandoned. ‘How could she let him stay here?’
‘I don’t think she had a lot of choice in the matter. He’d become very unstable, a danger to himself. The doctors had him on tablets for years, all sorts of experimental trials, but they didn’t really do much for him.’
I suddenly had a terrible thought. ‘He’s not still here, is he?’
‘God, no. When he died, your mother felt you were still too young to properly understand. She meant to tell you, of course. It was never the right time. And you with such a mouth on you.’ He exhaled wearily. ‘They were going to turn the place into flats but, I don’t know, fire regulations.’
‘All this time. I wish she had told me.’ But she couldn’t have, of course. She still felt bad about having him put away. Perhaps she had just married Bob so that we would have a father again.
‘Pauline said it was the worst day of her life when she had to sign the papers.’ Bob turned back to the car. ‘Come on, son, it’s getting cold.’ He caught my eye across the roof. ‘Probably best not to say anything about this.’ That was how it always was in our family. We would hold in-depth conversations about proposed motorway routes before we touched on anything remotely personal.
I felt as though I understood my mother a little more, and felt sorry for her. But it hadn’t set things right between us.
Chapter 29
Sealing the Door
That process didn’t start until a few days later.
I was walking along the esplanade one Sunday evening. The pavements were slick with rain again, and the streetlights had just come on. The Roxy had these special Sunday double-bill matinées when they paired up old films, and they had posters showing for The King and I and South Pacific. I was just about to pass the entrance when something made me stop, and it was a good job I did because there was my mother coming down the steps, looking up at the sky and tying a plastic rain hood around her hair. I saw at once that her face was streaked with tears. She blew her nose briskly into a Kleenex and stepped out into the rain. I was surprised to think that Pauline’s heart was touched by the thought of romances in faraway places, but suddenly I knew that she had sat alone in the dark mouthing the words to all of the songs. I had seen the dusty soundtrack LPs lying under the radiogram, but had never considered that they might belong
to her. This kind of behaviour didn’t fit the picture she had given me at all. Now the picture began to change, and it altered a little more on the day I finally left home.
I was surprised to find that all my worldly belongings fitted into three cardboard cartons. Surely I had managed to accumulate more than this during my sixteen years on earth? But the books were mostly from the library, and finally had to be returned, the records were borrowed from Sean, and the few remaining maps that hadn’t been destroyed fitted into an A2 folder. Also into the boxes went Sean’s flagged itinerary, which had not been updated for three weeks. In went the strange tapes of classical music Danny had given me for Christmas to ‘broaden my horizons’. In went the cuddle-some gifts Julia had bombarded me with at yuletides and birthdays.
It was Dudley Salterton’s booking agent, Mr Cottesloe, who started the ball rolling, just before my seventeenth birthday. A few days after my row with Julia I returned to the end of the pier, planning to cross over into Calabash once more, but something stopped me. It was now April, and the winds of change were in the air. Seagulls rode high above the helter skelter, looking towards the horizon as if waiting for summer to arrive. I secretly watched the shapely Katherine rolling candyfloss around her tub like pink spiderweb, flirting with the boys who hung around the stall. She was more beautiful than ever, but now she seemed aware of it. Her movements were choreographed for her admirers, her disdain for them exaggerated. Cottesloe saw me hanging around from the window of the saloon bar, and knocked on the glass with his signet ring.
‘You’re Kay, aren’t you? Old Dudley’s pal? Have you thought about getting yourself a job?’ Cottesloe’s spectacular stomach stretched his shirt over the top of his trousers like a water-filled balloon, and forced him to perch on his stool with his legs apart. He ordered me a bitter without asking me what I wanted.
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