by Graham Joyce
“What’s it got to do with them?”
“You’d be surprised. Look, it’s not my area. I can refer you to a mental health practitioner.”
“Right. You’re shuffling me along.”
Now it was his turn to sound cross. “Look, I’ll prescribe some mild sleeping pills. But it’s not going to become a habit, so don’t think it is. I’ll give you four.”
“Four? Four pills?”
He looked over the top of his spectacles at me then scribbled on his pad at superspeed before tearing off the top copy. “Cut out the drink altogether. No coffee, either. Take one an hour before bedtime and then go for a walk before turning in. That’s what I do when I have trouble sleeping.”
I thanked him and got up to go. As I was leaving I heard him say, maybe to me, maybe to the closing door, “We’re all anxious. What is there not to be anxious about?”
I GOT BACK in time for lunch at the canteen. Before I went in to eat, one of the holidaymakers tugged at my sleeve. He wanted me to line up with his family for a photograph. The man held up his Instamatic and I quickly slapped on my happy face for them.
It was one of the features of being a Greencoat. The holidaymakers always wanted you to be photographed with them. I might as well have been dressed up in a cuddly bear suit for all they knew of me. Would my smiling face define the holiday for them? Would I help to fill in a hole in their memories? Even people whom I’d never spoken with pulled me into their snapshots. I often wondered what they would think when they reviewed these photographs, maybe years later. Would they only see the bright smile? Or would they recognize a troubled young man behind it all. But the photograph was a detail in a holiday story, where I was a theater prop, a bit of scaffolding on the stage. I crossed from my story briefly into theirs and back again.
I joined Nikki and Gail in the canteen queue and we all filed past the hatch to get our steak-and-kidney pie.
“You all right then?” Nikki said when we sat down. “Pinky said you had to go to the doctor.”
“No secrets there, then?”
“Have you got the clap?” Gail said.
“What?”
Gail covered her mouth with her fingertips. “It’s what everyone says around here. Whenever you say you’re going to the doctor, I mean.”
“You haven’t, have you?” Nikki said.
“No, I bloody haven’t.”
“So why the doctor?” said Nikki.
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “It’s getting me down.”
When Gail rose from the table to get her dessert at the serving hatch, Nikki waited for her to move out of earshot, touched the back of my hand with a long fingernail, and said, “I could make you sleep.”
I didn’t know what to say. I think I colored.
“You sure you’re all right?” Nikki said.
“I’m fine,” I insisted.
THAT AFTERNOON I used the public telephone in the kiosk outside the theater to phone long-distance. I don’t know, maybe it was something the doctor had said about feeling guilty about my parents. I had a pile of coins in my hand ready to force them into the spring-loaded slot whenever the rapid-pip signal demanded to be fed.
“You haven’t forgotten us, then,” said my mother.
“Who are you?” I joked feebly.
I answered the usual questions: where did I shop, how was I managing with my laundry, did I know that Tesco had a giant-size box of washing powder on offer at half price. I squirted another coin into the trap and then she passed me on to Ken. I asked him how business was and he told me that he’d had to lay off a couple of men who had been with him a long time. I was sympathetic. I knew the men. When a country moves into recession, construction is one of the first things to be hit. I expressed the hope that they would find other work and my dad said that they hadn’t much chance of that what with all the wogs taking up the jobs.
I admit I overreacted. I heard myself calling him some names—interrupted when I had to shove another coin in the box to complete the list I had in store for him—and to his credit he just took it. Somehow we salvaged the conversation and turned it to safe things: football, the drought. He asked me if I needed any money. I told him I was fine.
“Ken, can you put my mum back on the line?”
When she came back on, I immediately said, “Mum, why did my dad come here?”
There was a long silence at the other end. Then she said, “What is it you think you are doing there, David? What do you think you’re doing in that awful place?”
“I’m working,” I said. “I just want to know why he was here. I have the photograph. I know he was here.”
I heard a muffled conversation at the other end, then Ken spoke again. “You’ve upset her, David.”
“Then we’re all upset,” I said callously.
“David,” I heard him say, “David.” But his voice was overridden by rapid pips in my ear. I had some more coins in my hand, but in the few seconds I had before cutoff I said, “I’m out of change, Ken. Tell Mum I love her.”
“David—”
The line went dead.
AS I PUT the receiver back on its cradle I became aware of another man standing a few paces away, waiting, as I thought, to use the phone after me. I stepped aside so he could get to the kiosk, but he held out an arm to obstruct me. “Can I have a word?”
I recognized him. It was the man who had nodded to me outside the pub the time I’d spent the day in town with Nikki, after seeing the lion. I’d met him originally, with his head of black hair swept back and fixed in place with Brylcreem, at the National Front meeting. It was John Talbot, the man that DC Willis had revealed was Terri’s brother.
“It’s about Terri,” the man said.
“Oh yes?”
“You know she’s my sister, don’t you?” This man was taller and rough-featured, but there was a resemblance, though not one you would have seen if he hadn’t mentioned it. “She’s gone missing.”
“Yes, the police came here asking about her.”
“Police,” he spat. “Useless.”
I nodded.
“Did you tell them anything?”
“Anything? I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t know anything about what’s gone off?”
“Gone off?”
“Yes. Something’s gone off.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“It’s not like her. She’s left everything. I smell a rat.” He looked at me hard. I had the notion he was saying to me that he was looking at the thing he could smell. I had to summon all my willpower not to look away. “The only people she had anything to do with here was Colin and you.”
“Me? Have you spoken to Terri about me?”
He nodded. Then he wagged a finger in my face. “There’s something not right here. Not right.”
I shook my head slightly. I was trying to model my features into an expression of concern and bafflement at the same time.
“You’re a friend of Tony’s, aren’t you?”
“Tony? The Tony here at the resort? The children’s entertainer?”
“You know who I mean.”
“Well, yes. I mean, yes he’s a friend.”
He took a step away from me. He was still tapping his finger at the empty air. “Be assured I’ll be back with more questions. Be assured.”
Then he turned and left.
I WAS FALLING APART. Isolated. I had to know that Terri was all right and that Colin hadn’t done something terrible. But I was also reexamining my feelings for her. It was clear she’d misled me about a great many things. She hadn’t actually lied outright, but by cleverly editing any information she had given me, she had painted a partial picture of herself. Colin’s story of rescuing her from prostitution didn’t match up with hers, and for some reason I believed Colin’s version. She hadn’t even told me she had a brother. Just as Colin had led me down one garden path, so she had led me down another. The garden of hate and the garden of love, and I found
no succor in either.
Meanwhile I had to go round organizing these trivial and inconsequential—not to say silly—activities when all the time I felt like some kind of horrific dragnet was closing in. That night I was on the roster to run the lights in the nightclub. Normally I stayed sober while I was still on duty, but drinking took the edge off my anxieties and stopped certain thoughts from bubbling to the surface. There were three acts on that night: Tony put them onstage and took them off while I dealt with the lights. During the first interval I sat on a high stool at the bar with Tony when Nikki turned up looking like she was dressed for the London Palladium Royal Command Performance.
“Look at that mantrap,” he said, tapping my thigh.
She was stunning. She wore a short black cocktail dress, opaque black tights, and black heels. She had a white flower—maybe it was a gardenia or a magnolia—pinned in her hair, which was tied back. I don’t think I’d seen her face made up before that night. So pretty was she that her natural look served her beautifully on most occasions, but here she was looking like a cover girl from a magazine. Heads turned all over the small room. If she saw it, she made out she didn’t.
She made a beeline for Tony and he received her with great theatricality, kissing her on both cheeks, hamming it up for the many eyes—male and female—tracking her movements. He loved it. After all, they were the celebrities of this tiny holiday resort world. She stepped over to me and gave me a peck on the cheek, drawing me into their aura. I found her a stool and Tony made an extravagant gesture of ordering sidecars, a cocktail I’d never even heard of.
While we fussed around and Tony made sure she got to sit between us, the cocktails arrived in glasses sugar-frosted at the rim and with tiny paper umbrellas. I know it was a small holiday resort on an unfashionable stretch of English coastline, but the way people stared at us made me feel like I was in a Hollywood VIP lounge amid star company. Somehow inside the club we had become spotlit by the effects of glamour. I don’t know what was in the cocktail, but I drank it too fast and Tony ordered up another round.
Luca Valletti was topping the bill, and after midnight when he came on to do his set, I was already feeling a little woozy. I’d noticed that Luca had stayed in his dressing room when he might have been expected to join us out front at least for a few minutes. Tony, whose tongue had also been loosened by the alcohol, or perhaps excited by Nikki’s show-stoppingly glamorous appearance, said some unprofessional things about his Italian coperformer. He described him as aloof and stuck-up, whereas I didn’t blame him for being distant after the way Colin had roughed him up.
Anyway, I had to stay focused to finish my lighting job. Luca soared through his repertoire and like the pro he was, he gave the audience a few words about what each song meant to him personally. “It means a few extra quid,” Tony whispered in my ear as he was passing. My Fair Lady had recently had a revival and Luca sang “On the Street Where You Live,” but before going into it he affected a cockney accent to repeat a little bit of business from the stage play. It got a laugh anyway. His beautiful tenor lit up the room.
When she mentioned how her aunt bit off the spoon,
She completely done me in.
I managed to operate the lights without mishap, despite being a little tipsy. When it came to his barnstorming “Autumn Leaves,” I opened with green and gold gels, subtly diffused the colors, and closed out with red and gold at the end. I did it perfectly—to my own relief—but something strange happened on the penultimate line of the lyric. Luca looked at me, poised at the side of the lighting rig. I don’t know what he saw. Maybe I was way overfocused on him, trying to make sure that my tipsiness didn’t screw up the operation of the gels. Maybe I was staring too plain hard at him. But he failed to hit a note.
I’m not sure whether the audience even noticed. But when you’ve heard a singer repeat the same song in rehearsals and in performance several times over, you notice it immediately. It didn’t matter. The boozy audience rewarded him with rapturous applause. The Italian tenor took his bow and left.
Unusually, Luca didn’t come over to say good night to Tony, Nikki, and myself at the bar. Normally he made a point of thanking me for the lights, and thanking Mike on the piano. Mike the Beatle-haircut pianist came and had a drink with us, and when I got a moment I said, “Did Luca miss a note?”
“Luca never misses a note,” Mike said. Then he arched his eyebrows and put a finger to his lips as if to say Shush!
I remembered the sleeping pill I’d got from the doctor. It was a Mandrax. The doctor had told me to take it an hour before turning in to avoid tossing and turning in bed, so I swallowed it discreetly and washed it down with a sidecar and a glug of Federation ale.
We stumbled out of the club. Mike and Tony said good night and kissed Nikki extravagantly on both cheeks, leaving me alone with her.
“Night’s young,” she said. “Shall we go and sit on the beach?”
“It’s two in the morning,” I said.
“But it’s a beautiful evening. And it’s cool and fresh for a change! Don’t be a party pooper.”
The fact was I didn’t want to go back to my bed. I was still nursing a dread of what nightmares sleep would bring. What’s more, Colin never seemed far away. I felt like he was waiting for the moment I dipped below the surface of sleep.
We went up the seawall. Nikki as usual wanted to go down onto the sand. She took off her sling-back heels and held the straps between her fingers.
“You’ll wreck your tights.”
“That’s a point,” she said. She dropped her shoes and without taking her eyes from me she hitched up her skirt and slid her tights down her tanned legs, stepping out of them. She opened her handbag, stuffed her tights inside, and then laced her elegant fingers back through the straps of her shoes. “Come on.”
We picked our way down through the sand. I was stumbling a bit. We got away from the lights of the resort and settled down near the water’s edge. Though it was a balmy night the temperature had cooled by a degree or two, and the sea was in a more aggressive mood. The waves were foaming, and they were rearing and whipping at the shore. Once again I saw that wrinkle of phosphorescence and it gave the illusion of white snakes rearing and spitting. It was exciting and alarming and it said that the weather was changing.
I recalled Tony on one of my first days at the resort saying, “We’ve had the party and it’s time to pay the cabbie.” But the voice I heard in my head was Colin’s gravelly cockney accent, not Tony’s. I felt woozy.
“You okay?” Nikki said.
“Sure.”
“It’s a bit chillier this evening, isn’t it?” She wriggled closer to me and when she’d got comfortable she opened the clasp on her handbag and produced a half-pint bottle of vodka. I remember thinking that I’d just taken the Mandrax and that I shouldn’t. I was already light-headed from the cocktails and beer I’d drunk in the nightclub. But when she unscrewed the cap and offered me the bottle, I took a swig anyway.
What happened next?
I lost my soul, that’s what happened next.
Imagine a giant advertising billboard with a photograph of what happened next. Now tear off, at random, three tiny fingernail strips, thin fragments, and carry them away with you as the rest of the photograph goes dark. Now lay them out on a lawn and try to figure out all the bits that go in between.
That’s what I’ve got. I’m a dog howling at the moon. I’m a lion tamer trying to control the waves. I’m staring at a little boy who is holding hands with a man in a sparkling blue suit at the water’s edge.
I don’t know how much of Nikki’s vodka I drank, but I suspect that I was hell-bent. People say, “Oh I’ve no idea how I got so drunk. Really.”
But there is a gap in my memory, and then I have my head up inside Nikki’s dress and I am removing her knickers with my teeth. She is laughing. And then I am moving across the sand on all fours, barking like a dog and I look up and see the moon and howl. The howl is so fierce it frigh
tens the moon. It goes behind a small cloud. For a moment I am a werewolf, all blood and sinew.
I know there is a big chunk of time missing, because in my next torn fragment I am stark naked and standing next to the tide, shouting at the sea. The mood of the sea becomes worse, angrier. The surf boils and the waves whip and slap at the sand and retreat fast. It wants to get me. It wants to strike me, but it is afraid of me. I know it is afraid of me. The sea hisses and a huge wave coils in the air and paws at me but I duck away from its claws. It has become a lion. The sea has become a lion like the one I saw in town. It roars, it hisses, it spits, it growls, but it can’t come any nearer. It bares its teeth and arches its back, but I dance backward as it lashes another watery paw at me and now I know I can control it. I have magical hands. If I raise my right hand in the air a wave moves up, up, higher following the movement of my arm as if on a string until I am ready to slap it down hard. I can do the same with my other hand. I can conduct the sea, like a man with a baton before an orchestra. No. I am a lion tamer. I have tamed the watery deep. I will put my head in its mouth.
I hear Nikki come up behind me. She’s also a little drunk. “What are you doing?”
There’s another breach in time. Now the sea has gone quiet again. It is perfectly calm, like oil. I am standing at the water’s edge and looking at a man and a boy. They gaze out to sea with eyes of clear glass. The man’s suit is blue and it darts with watery phosphorescence. The suit is beautiful, alive, quivering like the scales of a fish. The man and the boy hold each other’s hand. Their faces are dark, but their teeth are blue in the eerie light. Slowly the man begins to dissolve. His form becomes like wet sand and he slowly melts into the sand itself, and the boy starts to cry. The man liquefies in front of me, leaving only an empty suit. His glass eyes are the last thing to go. The water laps at the empty suit, almost as if feeding on it, until the suit itself is covered by wet sand. The boy lies on the sand, crying, scraping at the residual form with his fingernails.
Nikki is behind me, trying to pull me away. “David, it’s just a log,” she says. “Just a log.”
