Undercurrent

by Frances Fyfield

  Henry lurched towards the tiny toilet which served the remoteness of the top two floors, inconveniently situated between the two on a half-landing, just so everybody had to travel up or down a flight. Travel broadens the mind. Fuck travel. And you know what, Francesca, you know what I did when my father died? I went out and bought another shawl, not for me, just a kind of talisman to remind me I'd once been generous. Bought it here to give you, and yes you are right about the expense. In Boston, they cost a small fortune.

  He retched and delivered the roast lamb of a dinner almost whole and entire into the bowl of the toilet. Lav, lavatory, ladies, gents, netty, the heads, the loo, the bog, but NEVER the rest room. W hy do you call it that? Ancient questions on an Indian patio. We call it the rest room because you can take a rest in it. What? In a loo? Nobody rests in a loo.

  Henry rested. Flushed the bowl, wrapped his gown around him and let his head rest against the ice-cold wall of the narrow room. This was wine and travelling and getting bummed out everywhere and it had nothing whatever to do with grief. He wasn't having anything to do with grief. Grief as in mourning? Grief. He had a poor stomach, was all, and yet he was here, sobbing like a crazy boy coming down from drugs, sobbing maybe because he needed more, sobbing for his father and the words of a poem she had sung him on an evening full of fireflies. When there is no place, For the glow worm to hide, Where there is no space for receipt of a fly; Where the midge dare not enter, Lest herself fast she lay, If Love come he will enter, And soon find out his way.

  Sentiment, bloody sentiment. He knew the sobbing was loud and uncontrolled; he would have fled upstairs if there had been any prospect of an embarrassed eavesdropper, even the damn dog.

  Henry had manners, even in extremis, which was more than he felt he had witnessed in the English he had admired from afar for so long. Finally he moved, stiff with cold, made sure the place was left clean in his wake, another automatic response, and clambered into his high bed.

  The fire they had lit in his room had died, leaving a faint, residual warmth. The fur hot water bottle comforted his feet. He had a dim memory of looking down that stairwell and seeing the same shawl draped over the bottom post. He took the shawl he had bought out of his bag and draped it over the covers. It seemed pale and insignificant beside the silk.

  It was the wine did it. Just that one glass too many. Enough to wake her, make her restless, prowling round her rented room, dreaming without regret of the house she had once had and then looking at her handwriting, looped sloppily over the page, filling it with self-pitying rubbish and a memory of poetry learned in school and related to cousin Francesca in the holidays. Always seeking approval; anything to please. Always listening to Francesca, the fountain of wisdom, even when Francesca said, stay with your husband, Maggie; he'll get over his infatuation and men need forgiveness.

  They may need it, she remembered shouting, but they don't necessarily deserve it, do they?

  Yours left, didn't he? He left because he couldn't stand the image of himself in his horribly flawed child, so what qualifies you to give advice?

  Maggie did not want to think about Francesca. She did not want to think of Francesca's crossing the road to punch the boy who had thrown a firework at her, or Francesca lending the right clothes for the occasion and saying she looked marvellous even when she didn't. Or Francesca encouraging her to take the exams, or Francesca leading out the kids from the primary school where she taught.

  Nor could she bear to think of Francesca's devotion to neurotic Angela Hulme and her adopted daughter, or of all the mess and the shame and the obligations Francesca had left behind. Maggie wanted to dwell on her own fractured life and reach a point where she could start to mend it, without creating a whole new set of complications as she was doing now. She also needed to sleep a whole night from start to finish and not wake up in the middle with a raging thirst and an unaccountable desire for a bath.

  Or to find she could not get into the loo because the man was locked inside it sobbing. Maggie listened for a long time, troubled and disturbed by his misery, wanting to knock on the door, but waiting until the sound became controlled before she returned quietly to her own room, draped the shawl over her nightdress, grabbed a towel and went the long flights downstairs.

  Timothy was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, staring into space. Clean plates were marshalled next to him. Maggie had watched the laborious, washing by hand process; she had even helped, and she marvelled at the industry this impoverished pair put into the creation of an elegant and eccentric lifestyle. It was comfortable to live here but humbling to contemplate the effort it took, she thought a trifly sourly, surprised to see him there at all, especially with a cigarette.

  Tim didn't usually allow himself such luxuries: all luxuries were saved for others or the dog.

  'Any hot water?'

  'A bit, maybe. I used most of it for the dishes.'

  'Damn.'

  He waved the cigarette. 'Vicar left them.' She sat down. 'Good party?'

  'Oh yes. Until someone started talking about Francesca.

  Seemed to upset the paying guest. And Peter and me, too.'

  'Damn. Ah well. He had to know. Jumping the gun a bit, but at least the discovery looks accidental.

  Is it very wrong to use him like this?'

  'No. Yes. No. I don't know what you have in mind, you haven't said, so I doubt if you know.'

  DAMN Francesca. If only people would stop talking about her. Francesca and Harry, her boy, the ghosts at every feast. She made unwilling conspirators of them all.

  'It's like cookery,' Tim said. 'All experiments are fine. As long as they work. But you shouldn't use people for ingredients.'

  'No,' she said, slowly. 'Not unless they volunteer.'

  The light woke him. A unique kind of light he had never seen before, but had somehow imagined as peculiar to the sea and part of the reason why he had craved to live close to the ocean. It made nothing of the fear of being enclosed. A lake was not the same. He could always see to the other side and that limited it in his imagination. Lakes and rivers were for respectable traffic from bank to bank, not for the risk of being lost without bearings, without sight of land, drifting with the current.

  It was only the sea which was suitable for high endeavour and escape.

  The sky which glowed outside was luminously white. It pressed against the windows and the glass seemed to bulge inwards in meek resistance. It forced his eyes open; it was like white smoke, thick, dense, unyielding, almost brighter than sunlight. For the second morning in succession, Henry got out of bed and went to look.

  Nothing. A vast expanse of nothing, the intensity of the light hurting his eyes. He looked at his watch: 0700 hours. Not early by the standards of a hard-working commuter, but all life, all movement, was dead. Until he heard the rumble of the sea and the more specific sound of an engine.

  Discernible in the mist, a rubbish cart was at work in the road below, thump, crump, the engine revving, ready to move, a clang of metal. Henry could make out the squat machine and take a guess at the colour. Some kind of municipal green. It moved on, stopping a few doors down.

  Henry looked ahead and then right, turning his head deliberately to make sure there was nothing he missed. There was nothing to see. A dense fog of sky, descending all the way to earth, no contours, no landmarks, no visible life, no nothing. He squinted and peered to see if the pier would appear out of the heavenly white murk, but there was no sign of it. The scene invited him to walk into a pleasant and mysterious oblivion. There was a little excitement as he put on his clothes and searched for the hat before he remembered it was lost and he had not replaced it. Forgot to take the daily dose of vitamins and minerals, or think how he might get back in if no one else was awake, tiptoed downstairs and out the front door before the dog could bark, determined to know what it was like to be out in this, with no one else alive.

  The air filtered into his throat like a prickly thistle, so raw and sharp it made him
gasp. From upstairs, the white mist looked warm. The cold was intense until he started to walk, and then it was damp rather than freezing. He knew exactly where he was going, but he was not sure why, which seemed the way it was in this town. This was a different world, everything about it surreal.

  He walked briskly. Gradually, the outlines of the seafront houses became less obscure; he could recognize the occasional front door and dripping leaves in windowboxes muted into pale shades by the mist. He crossed the road without looking left or right. No need; no sound, but he could see the beginnings of the pier. Even the noise of the wallowing sea was muted by the weight of the mist.

  Henry liked that. He loved to be without barriers or walls; no sense of distances, nothing to close him in. The monument of the fisherman, melded gloriously with his fish and his boat, looked like a guardian of the gate.

  Henry walked on. It was suitable weather to be on an edifice like the deck of a ship. Eyes adjusted to anything, to extremes of light as well as dark, and the more he looked and the less the damp air raked his throat, the more he could see. Sinister things, like the signs attached to the stubby little lampposts, black with white lettering. RISK OF DEATH. NO JUMPING. NO DIVING. There were less prominent signs on the bins attached below. Litter, please place here. Before you jump. A green umbrella and a picnic box lay abandoned on one of the benches.

  He needed to see those fishing platforms which flanked the caff at the end. Needed to, needed to, needed. . . He remembered them from yesterday, thinking how much Dad would have liked all that, how he would have chatted to those ageless anglers who grinned and got out of the way, careful to look before they cast. He needed to see what it was really like. See if the mist made soft.

  Looking over the locked gate which led to the platform on the left of the caff, he could see that the tide was far higher than when he had been here last. The slurry sea looked as if it was oiled beyond the breaking of a wave, smooth on the surface but churning and boiling beneath like some giant, artificially quiet, industrial-strength washing machine doing serious business and resenting interference.. The whole edifice was closer to the water than he remembered: the legs seemed shorter, the sea so close it splashed up through the broken boards.

  He was close enough to see the dimensions and the mist was beginning to break up and swirl like spun sugar. The missing boards, visible by the gaps they made, like missing teeth in a mouth, were obvious in their absence, but none of the boards were uniform in size, any more than a canine to an incisor. As the mist cleared in a teasing way, and then rolled back in gorgeous wisps, wreathed around the iron rail he clutched for support, he could see that the floor of the platform was a patchwork of wooden boards, metal boards of different age and size and colour, replaced and repaired only as time and weather dictated. There was a sign: KEEP OUT.

  How would an average five-year-old boy manage to slip through one of these gaps? The five-year-old boy he had once been himself could not have slipped through these gaps with any degree of ease; his skinny shoulders would get in the way even if his hips and fat tummy could make it. He would have to breathe and wriggle to go willingly, which was possible in the course of a game. You would do anything in the course of a game or a dare when you did not want to look a fool. Even so, it looked a struggle to wriggle like that, with the sea almost tickling the ankles and wood splinters but yes, a boy could do it. A boy was like an eel, with a skin immune to the feeling of a graze.

  Especially a boy who came out here to play on a morning like this, only when it was warm, not cold like now. Prancing out from a nearby house, running down the length of the Titanic, saying, I dare you!, on a summer's day. Yeah! You go first, you older boy, then I must. The presence of an iron railing would be no barrier at all. Henry had done that, grabbed the swinging rope off the forbidden oak tree in someone else's back yard, swung into terrifying space without a single scream. Got his bruises, all right. Would have been an awful father himself, because he would have mollycoddled his own son from doing any such damn thing, just like his dad didn't, and for all that, he was still timid.

  He could see it. Clutched the iron rail, forced himself to look down. The distance was small, but the sea was immense. The abiding fears of his life ranged from awe when faced with open spaces and the far more acute, claustrophic fear of being enclosed. Claustrophobia was the bane of his life, the devil which sat on his shoulder, trained into submission only most of the time. He could tolerate lifts and aeroplanes through the application of logic and keeping his eyes on a page; he could sit in small rooms jammed with people and keep his eyes on their faces, telling himself it was temporary; he could enter a long tunnel provided he could see the other end; could kid himself the devil had died, and then there would be a panic so blind he could not even scream.

  He breathed deeply; the air no longer tore at his throat. He felt calm. There was an explanation.

  He breathed deep. It did not hurt. Nothing could hurt here. A child had fallen, tragically. The mist would bandage wounds.

  It muffled noise. He thought he had seen that same black dog trotting ahead and disappearing, but apart from that illusion, had not seen a single living soul in the fifteen minutes which had got him so far, and he did not hear her, either. He was in the frame of mind where he could tell himself he was the only soul on a small planet, looking at a place where a child had slipped, until the last second when he sensed her approach. Turned and saw her coming towards him out of the mist. A long-limbed, swift walking person with a pale shawl round her head, striding towards him with a determined step. He looked around, wildly, like a cornered rat in search of a shelter. The footsteps, and the shape, came on.

  Her to the life, with the baggy khaki trousers and the slouching coat and the air of authority.

  Francesca. You've got to go home, Henry. How can you get satisfaction from being a novelty? If you want to know what you are, Henry, you have to go home.

  The very soul of aristocratic womanhood was striding towards him, almost breaking into a gallop, the sort of woman who had always intimidated him until he met Francesca. Taller than he remembered. He wanted to run, but on this little road out to the sea there was nowhere to go. He also wanted to laugh at the reversal of tactic: the day before he had been chasing her and now she was advancing on him like a ghostly witch.

  He had a sudden impression that she was going to walk straight through him and hover above the platform. And then the spectre was beside him, standing too close for comfort, staring at him.

  She had Francesca's colouring, at close quarters, a lopsided version of her features, nose, eyes, mouth, younger than he would have imagined, older than he dreamed, and a voice which bore slight resemblance. She had highlighted, curly hair with nothing sleek about it; she was statuesque and groomed, her coat matched her shoes, she was completely different.

  Francesca resisted the camera; it made the last image of her all the more memorable. He was frightened of this appalling facsimile, but when she spoke, she only sounded anxious, flustered and shy.

  'ah God, Mr Evans. You had me worried there. What the hell are you doing out here?'

  'Who are you?'

  'I'm Maggie. You sounded so upset last night, all that sobbing. . . 1 thought. . . well I thought you might be going to jump. You're not, are you?'

  'Of course not.'

  The resemblance to Francesca was passing and fading into nonsense. This face was pale, hers had been as brown as a nut. The voice was so harshly different. His recall of the face might be flawed, but this woman was bigger and surely taller. He could never forget standing next to Francesca and the top of her head being level with his cheek. It was only the stride and drifting shawl. The hair, brownish gold, tinted, grew from a different and bigger head.

  'What are you doing, then?' she demanded, stridently.

  He felt faintly hysterical, reminded of his own long suppressed sense of the ridiculous. This long-limbed woman was seeming to suggest that anyone on the pier without company must be contempla
ting suicide. As if there was nothing else to do, such as fish, take pictures of the mist, wait for the caff to open, contemplate. He was about to bark back a wisecracking response about this being a free country, until he remembered that his motives for being here were dubious by anyone's standards, including his own.

  'I came to see where that child slipped through the boards and drowned.'

  She gazed at him hard, hesitated, and then nodded, resolved on something. Her shoulders seemed to slump in relief and a brief look of annoyance crossed her face. Then she shrugged. The slightest movement made her hair move. She had plenty of hair.

  'This side. They mend each platform, every other year.'

  She led the few steps across the concrete width of the pier until they leaned over the black painted railings on the other side. The boards twenty feet below were smooth and wet, solid, pale and complete. The sleeve of her coat touched his.

  'There were holes in the boards last year. The boy got out of the house by himself, must have annoyed her. And he didn't slip. Postmortem results showed he was pushed. ah, he may have slipped initially, but then he was shoved the rest of the way. Really shoved, no messing about. His shoulders were dislocated and his ribs cracked. Someone pushed him through the hole. He was alive and bleeding by the time he hit the water.

  Then he drowned, but not right away. He bled a lot. The fishing boat picked him up, even though no one had raised the alarm. It was this time of the morning. She lived in the flats near the castle.

  Quite a change from the castle where she used to live. Francesca must have gone straight home, after she'd done it.'

  'No,' he said. 'That is crap. Complete and utter crap.' He was looking at the churning water, listening to the sound of it, imagining the ice cold of its embrace. Hitting the water, hurt and terrified. The woman was leaning closer, speaking loudly into his ear, enunciating clearly and slowly.

  'Yes. Francesca was quite adamant about what had happened. She confessed, Mr Evans. She insisted. The boy had cerebral palsy, spastic hemiplegia to be exact. He was hell to take care of, she couldn't stand it any more. She told them how she did it. She pleaded guilty to his murder. She insisted.'