by Matthew Crow
‘What’s in the bag?’ I asked as Ross stood up.
‘What bag?’
‘The bag you had.’
‘There was no bag.’
‘What was in it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean?’
‘Yes, you do.’
Ross sighed. ‘Spying? Really, Claudette?’ He tried to push past me but I stood firm in my tracks.
‘I won’t let you go,’ I said and he smirked and shook his head.
‘Look. The bag’s gone. You can’t really stop me now, can you?’ He took a half-smoked cigarette from his pocket and pressed it to his lips. He struggled with a lighter that clicked three empty sparks before he gave up and threw both the lighter and the stub of a cigarette into the distance.
‘So cool, Ross,’ I said. ‘Why are you getting rid of things for Dan Vesper?’
‘Because when he asks you to do something you do it.’
‘Was it anything to do with Sarah?’ I asked and Ross’s face turned white.
‘Don’t get involved,’ he said. ‘Please Claudette.’
His voice was becoming more panicked and suddenly I felt myself pity him the way you pity a dog that has wrecked the front room because it had nothing better to do.
‘Did Dan know Sarah?’
‘Look, he didn’t take her, if that’s what you think. But you know how it is. If people found out they knew one another it wouldn’t look good.’
‘How well did they know one another?’ I asked and Ross shrugged. ‘How well do you know him?’
Again he shrugged and looked to the ground.
‘I just started doing some flyering for his club night, that’s all,’ said Ross.
‘You seemed thick as thieves,’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Wouldn’t understand what?’
‘What it’s like having nowhere to go,’ he said, as he made his way past me. ‘At least Dan gives you what you need. Gives you money, a place to stay. You think your life’s so hard, Claudette, but you don’t know shit.’
‘I know Dan doesn’t give anything without taking twice as much back,’ I said, following him across the rocks, up onto the pier and back along the shore.
‘Why do you care so much?’ he asked, as I met his pace and we walked awkwardly side by side.
‘Because I want to know what happened to Sarah. Don’t you?’ Ross stopped in his tracks.
‘Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,’ Ross said knowingly as a bus came into view in the distance while he fished a torn ticket from his back pocket.
‘What was in the bag, Ross?’ I tried one last time, gently.
‘Honestly? I don’t know.’
‘Then tell the police.’
The bus hissed to a stop before lowering its deck for the prams and wheelchairs.
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘Ross,’ I whispered, as an old lady fiddled in her coin purse for the right change. ‘Who took her?’
‘Sarah?’ he said, going to step on to the bus. He turned and looked at me then, with an odd smile, a smile that was proud and kind and sad all at once. ‘She’s wherever she’s supposed to be. And you should leave her there, for her sake and yours.’
And with that the doors sighed closed as the bus pulled away.
10
The Darkroom
The next day I walked past the Mariners six times in an attempt to spot or be spotted by Dan Vesper. His replies to my texts first shortened, then became spaced out and eventually stopped altogether. It felt like he was pulling away. Either he was on to me, or he no longer had use for me. Either way I couldn’t allow it.
After half an hour he was still nowhere to be seen so I gave up and walked along the beach feeling useless, having made no progress. With days as empty as mine and expectations so universally low, a failed task had the ability to cloud proceedings like a drop of ink polluting an ocean.
I went to text Donna but the words just wouldn’t come. I didn’t know what exactly I wanted from her. I certainly wasn’t in the mood to see her. I just felt the need to remind her that I existed.
In the end I decided to go and bother Jacob at the café instead.
‘He’s not here,’ said Deb, acting all harangued and put out despite a distinct lack of customers. ‘Never is here when I need him, he’s a cheek to ask for paying if you ask me.’
‘OK. I hope the rush dies down for you soon,’ I said, gesturing to the empty tables. Deb mumbled something about me being a cheeky little so-and-so before sighing and clanking a metal canister of milk against the bench.
‘Said something about the pier. Can’t say I was listening properly. Took his camera with him. You don’t go getting him into bother now,’ she warned me as I closed the door behind me.
Jacob had taken up temporary residence underneath the pier, arching out over the darkest patch of sea like a half-built cathedral, its dark wooden slats ridged with barnacles and spangled black from saltwater. He was sitting in the damp sand, the water edging menacingly closer and closer to him, as he craned his neck back in odd angles, taking photographs.
‘Updating the ’gram?’ I asked, making my way over.
He didn’t look up, didn’t stop what he was doing, but he must have known it was me as he smiled. ‘Just trying to capture the moment.’
‘All the college kids come down here with their little tripods – finding the beauty in darkness or some shit. It’s well hack.’
‘There really are no original ideas left,’ he said as I lay my bag down on the sand.
‘Well, this is nice,’ I said, staring up at the base of the pier. Mouldy rope hung down from the boards in loops, like some dishevelled mummy.
‘I like it,’ he said. ‘It’s like the staring at the bones of the town. It’s peaceful.’
‘It’s depressing as fuck down here,’ I said eventually. ‘It always feels cold, even in summer.’
‘It’s depressing as fuck up there,’ he said. ‘I tried taking a photo from the pier and some kid called me a nonce and threw a beer can at me.’
‘Them’s my people,’ I said with a shrug.
‘You want to go somewhere?’ he said then.
I shrugged. ‘I want to go anywhere but here. I hate it so much.’
‘We can go back to my place?’ he said with a wan smile. ‘I can show you my darkroom?’
‘Sold,’ I said.
We snuck in up the back stairs of the café so that Aunty Deb didn’t suddenly feel Jacob’s services were required up front, and navigated our way past open boxes of napkins and spilled sugar sachets that lined the rickety staircase.
‘Wow, it’s even more depressing behind the scenes,’ I said, steadying my foot on a loose floorboard. I paused to pick flaking paint from a patch on the wall. Jacob took my hand and hauled me past a pile of stacked menus.
‘Such is life,’ he said, as he fiddled with a shoddy lock and opened the door to his space.
‘Just to reiterate,’ I said, as I made my way inside and was confronted with the sparseness of the old stock room he called home. ‘I’m not here to shag you. I really am just keen to see your photographs.’
Jacob was quiet for a moment and then laughed once with an exhale.
‘Good,’ he said, and locked the door behind us, leaving the key jutting at an angle. ‘I thought you might be after me for my money.’
Minimalist is what they would’ve called it in the lifestyle supplement of a Sunday paper. A rail of clothes, a desk, a futon against the back wall and several strung-up clothes lines pegged at intervals with freshly developed photographs.
I took in his photographs one by one, displayed and grouped in semi-themes. There were pictures of the beach in daylight and by night. There were shots of individuals, some of whom he’d even managed to pose. Mostly they were close-ups and obscured angles of sights most of us walked past a dozen times a week without stopping to pay heed. There was the rotting wood of the far pier, taken so closely th
at the gaps in the wood looked like canyons from the sky. A stack of rope and a neon sign with three letters bust out. A burnt-out ice-cream van and a weather-beaten Missing poster. Two magpies chatted on a memorial bench as the tide drew out before them.
Click.
‘Stop it,’ I said, as Jacob began making wider circles around me, dipping in and out of the hanging photographs, snapping my picture as he went.
‘Why?’ he asked as his lens sealed again, like a lizard’s eye.
‘Because this precise moment in my life isn’t one I want to suspend forevermore,’ I said, reaching a fresh line of photographs. Jacob cooled his enthusiasm and relaxed his camera around his neck. ‘I’d sooner minimise all evidence.’
‘That’s a shame,’ he said.
I looked closer at the photographs taken in the aftermath of Sarah’s disappearance. Mostly they were of police procedurals – the evidence hunt, the fresh tents on empty beaches – but in all of them there was a crowd; a gathered chorus narrating the sorry state of affairs.
‘I like these ones,’ I said. ‘The crowds. They’re good. You should see if the newspapers want them,’ I said and he laughed and moved closer to me. I could feel his body at my shoulder.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
I leaned right in to the photographs, as something caught my eye. In each photograph, always in a different place, seldom in a different pose, was a little girl slightly removed from the action.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked, as Jacob made his way towards the cupboard at the back of the room.
‘Dunno,’ he shrugged.
She was mostly out of frame, incidental really, but once I’d noticed her she was all I could see. In each picture there stood a girl, her face blurred but her stance unmistakable, observing the entire event of Sarah’s disappearance like a ghost.
‘It’s the school holidays, could be any number of kids.’
I stared closer, trying to will her into focus.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it’s the same girl. In every shot. In every crowd she’s there. What kind of a kid spends their time doing that? What kind of kid spends their time alone, just watching?’
Jacob held up a key and pointed towards a locked door. ‘You want to see the darkroom?’ he asked, ignoring my question.
‘Why not,’ I replied.
I reached out my hand in the pitch black, and touched Jacob’s now-familiar shape as the door closed behind us and all light disappeared. Total darkness is a rare and frightening thing. It wasn’t just the absence of light that made me uneasy. It was the absence of myself. In those moments between the door sealing shut and the warm glow of the red light being turned on, it was like I myself had disappeared, not the room around me.
‘You all right?’ he asked, as my breathing slowly returned to normal.
The red light gave a warm dreamy quality to the room around us, made all the more strange by the wires in the walls humming their gentle tunes.
‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘I just didn’t think it would be that dark.’
‘Needs must,’ he said, clipping and teasing film into shallow pools of water. ‘This is where the magic happens.’
I watched as outlines began to haunt the glossy blank paper, emerging slowly like a mirage in a desert.
‘Have you always done this?’ I asked, fascinated by the process as a figure began to emerge on a park bench on the green overlooking the promenade.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I dunno why, really. It’s just… people are never still enough to really get a real look, you know? In an unguarded photograph, it’s like you can see the real person. They can’t turn away, can’t hide. They’re as real as they’ll ever be.’
As the figure in the pictures became clearer, my skin grew cold. The outline was familiar, though it was only once the chemicals and the waters began to calcify its features that I recognised the stranger as a gradually sharpening image of myself.
‘Did you know Sarah Banks?’ I asked, as my mind began to cloud.
‘No,’ he said, distantly. ‘No, I never knew her exactly. But I met her not long after I moved here. I actually photographed her one night…’ he went on, and then stopped as his watch began to bleep and he peeled a photograph from its pool with plastic tongs before hanging it to dry.
The red light began to suffocate me as my insides turned to ice. Slowly I edged backwards, feeling for the wall with my heel, my hand behind me while Jacob continued, oblivious.
‘Sarah?’ I said, quietly, as I felt my way blindly across the back wall of the small room, watching myself slowly appear in an alleyway on my first day out of hospital.
‘I saw her on the beach one night and asked if she’d let me take her photograph,’ he said, like it was no big deal.
‘And what did she say?’ I asked, watching in alarm as my own image started to form in the developing tray, my face unaware it was being captured tight by the camera lens.
‘She charged me twenty pounds,’ he said with a laugh, as I felt my way towards the door handle just as Jacob turned to see me.
‘No!’ he yelled, and shot forward, slamming the door behind us.
‘Jacob, I have to go,’ I said, pressing myself to the door. ‘I don’t feel good. It’s this place, it’s the dark. Let me out, please.’ I tried, fumbling for the handle.
‘It will ruin everything,’ he objected, pressing himself against me and sealing the door in the process. ‘Oh shit,’ he said.
His hand was still firmly against the door as he turned and we both saw the photograph of me emerging beneath the shallow pool, staring out towards the waves. The image he had taken was not just unguarded, it was oblivious; the lens capturing me at my most vulnerable, unaware I was being observed.
‘Claudette, it’s just a photo, I didn’t even think. I’d forgotten I’d even…’
I worked to prise his fingers from the door handle, feeling my breath quicken.
‘I thought you looked interesting,’ he tried. ‘Sad, but interesting…’
‘Jacob, let me go!’ I said, driving my heel down his shin.
He doubled over, releasing his grip from the door as light flooded the room. I scrabbled at the lock of the bedroom door before hurling myself down the backstairs half-blind, sending menus and supplies flying as I leapt down three steps at a time before dashing onto the promenade and vomiting onto the sand below.
I walked shakily but determinedly through town, taking sharp corners as if to outrun my own thoughts. Having only skimmed the edges of Sarah’s world, I already felt like it was drowning me. I could not begin to think how stuck she must have felt there in the middle of it all.
And so I walked.
I walked until my legs felt like they were burning. Then I walked further still until I became numb to any sensation other than that of pure movement; the sense of being thrust towards something, away from something else. I became so hypnotised by motion that before I knew it dusk had settled and I’d run out of dry land. I was standing on the edge of the old fishing quay. The day had disappeared without me. This happened a lot, I found.
Light is fleeting.
Light moves fast.
It’s darkness that lingers.
The fishermen hoisted giant, stinking ropes onto the clapped-out boats and pulled tarpaulin sheets over their tools. The boats all had names like mistresses and bodies like wives – Crystal, Blue Rose, Dynasty Belle, Diamond Di – all curled in fancy fonts that had faded beneath the rust and the dents.
‘Got a nice bit of cod you can have if you like, love?’ said one of the fishermen as he made his way up a metal ladder onto the quay.
I was awake and conscious but my soul still hadn’t recovered, so that when I opened my mouth to reply no sound came out. Instead I just shook my head and turned back and began retracing my steps.
It was dark by the time I made it onto my street.
‘Now then, Claudette,’ Ross said. He and two of his friends from the year below circled me with their bikes as I made my way towar
ds my house.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked.
‘We’re going to teach Darvill a lesson,’ said the taller of his friends, shaking a can of spray paint that he blasted into the air.
‘It’s an upstairs flat, how are you going to manage that?’ I asked.
‘We’ll just do the downstairs flat and draw an arrow pointing up, duh,’ said the second boy in a voice that hadn’t quite broken yet.
‘Come with us,’ said Ross.
‘I’m fine for revenge vandalism, but thanks so much for the invite, boys, it really boosted my self-esteem.’
‘Your loss,’ he said, wheelie-ing off into the distance before I yelled for him to stop.
‘Ross,’ I said. ‘What do you know about that new boy, Jacob?’
‘The posh one?’ he asked and I nodded.
‘Not much. Think he might be gay or something. That’s about it. Why?’
‘He had pictures of me,’ I said, and Ross and his friends shared a knowing look.
‘Oh yeah?’ he asked, one eyebrow raised.
‘Don’t be a dick. Pictures he’d taken of me, out and about, without me knowing.’
‘He’s probably just a creep.’
‘He had pictures of Sarah, too,’ I said, and regretted it immediately as Ross’s face clouded.
‘How?’ he asked, edging his bike towards me as I shrugged. ‘Where?’ he demanded.
‘On the beach,’ I said, feeling a sudden narcoleptic fug drench my body, no longer keen for Ross’s limited input on the subject.
‘No,’ he said, growing frustrated. ‘Where were the photos?’
‘In his room, the old stockroom, above the café,’ I said and Ross nodded, turning his bike from me.
‘I wouldn’t worry about him,’ he said, ‘he’s nobody.’ He pulled off into the distance. ‘Oh and by the way,’ he yelled back to me, ‘someone saw you hanging around the Mariners today.’
‘Who?’ I asked as loudly as I could without drawing the attention of our neighbours.
‘That’d be telling,’ Ross said, showing no such concern. ‘There are eyes everywhere around here, Claudette. Nothing stays secret for long.’
