Undercurrent

by Frances Fyfield

  There's a hairdressing salon, too, as part of the educational programme; there are some fine hairstyles. It looks like a regular salon, bit old-fashioned, with the difference that all scissors and implements, numbered and coded, go back into a safe, triple locked against the wall, at the end of the day. Just like the knives in the kitchen, displayed beneath bulletproof Perspex to show how the regime is only a distant relative to normal life after all, although the odd reactions to compliments are probably the same when I think of it. If ever I told Maggie she looked nice in the days of her metropolitan chic, she'd always tell me what a bargain it was. Tanya loves clothes in her own fastidious and possessive way, they had huge importance for her, because she'd once been dressed in rags, I suppose. Harry was too messy to notice.

  There, I was going to write a page without mentioning either of them, but since there will never be a day when I do not think of them, trying to evade it on paper is futile.

  I was trying to resist telling the story, but it has been gnawing at me, the fact that no one knows the truth, no one who is ever going to tell it, I hope, and while I thought I wouldn't mind that, I do. Each night I write a little of this, either resisting or avoiding the urge to write a literal description of what happened.. and at first I didn't do it in case someone found it. Now I know it would make precious little difference if they did; it would be my fantasy, but it grows and grows, this cancerous need to confess.

  It was the old rule in murder that the victim had to die within a year and a day of the crime in order for a charge to be made.

  This perpetrator has only to relive the facts on her own anniversary.

  A strange, garbled message from Edward.. I do not want anyone to pry .. I cannot have them adding up two and two to make five . . and yet... and yet, I wish they would.

  There, I have survived his birthday and neither kissed nor told. I hope it will last the week.

  FMC.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN.

  'The awful thing about loss of reputation,' Henry said, 'is the way it makes you feel a stranger to yourself.

  Like this can't be you with this dirty mark stuck to your forehead.'

  'A shouting match on a street corner hardly involves a loss of reputation. Henry,' she said sharply. 'Especially if you didn't have one to lose.'

  'Well a minor form of it, then. I certainly felt disgraced.

  Even you let go of me for a minute.'

  Maggie was silent, acknowledging the fact. 'I didn't mean to let go of you. I was going to hit her. She's neurotic.

  Everyone knows that.' Henry shook his head.

  'Nobody knows that I'm a guy who fights shy of kids,' he said. 'This kind of stuff sticks like shit on a shoe.'

  'It's a convenient accusation,' Maggie said, furiously. 'It justifies her in locking you in the castle and it makes sure you don't go near her again. It panders to the idea of the paedophile as bogeyman; it justifies her calling the cops and making up anything she wants.'

  'She wouldn't want to make her daughter tell lies.'

  'She wouldn't have to. It wouldn't have to go that far. She could get you brought in for questioning, stuck in a cell for an hour or two and--'

  'No, NO.'

  '... And then withdraw the accusation. The object would be achieved, wouldn't it? An hour of that and you and your claustrophobia would be gone.'

  Henry let that pass. They sat in the pier caff. Henry had watched her walk straight through the door with the unerring sense of direction of someone who came here often and always sat in the same place, away from the counter and the cosier area of the place. She would always sit in the spartan summer room, with bare Formica tables and big metal windows showing nothing but sea.

  The tide was high, lapping at the fishing platforms, echoing through the slats. Facing to the front, it felt like being in the prow of a ship, watching other ships and the endless theatre of the sky.

  With the sun casting arrows into the waves, he could believe the water was warm, welcoming, harmless. There was a large brown pot of tea between them, so strong it reminded him of the bitter tea of Ceylon. He wanted to say as much, but resisted it. It was for the English to discuss irrelevancies and set people tests.

  She had torn an empty sugar packet into several pieces, put her hands in her lap out of sight when she saw him watching.

  'I don't think you're right about what people think of Mrs Hulme,' he said.' They don't think she's neurotic; you do. They think she does great, with a beautifully turned out child, she doesn't complain. And they'd be right, too, wouldn't they? She does a terrific job with that kid. The kid's clever and brave and bright. I had a kid like that, I'd be protective, too.

  She's going to be a star, that kid.'

  'You wouldn't go round accusing others of imagined violations.'

  'I don't know what I'd do. I don't know who I'd love or hate or want to kill. I think I might do almost anything to protect, wouldn't you? Especially if I chose that child, had her on trust and knew what she'd suffered already.'

  'You're very forgiving. Henry. She locked you in the damned castle. And Tanya wanted to rescue you.'

  'I'm not forgiving at all about that. Or about her making up reasons for it. But I can't feel mad about how anyone behaves when they feel under threat.

  They're like that starling I found in the Runs, all mad and silly.'

  'And you got it out, did you?' He nodded. She looked at him, judging him, deciding on something.

  Go on, he urged her silently; be reckless, be honest.

  'Look, I don't know about the Francesca you knew once, but let me tell you about the one I met after the police took her in. She was colder than ice. She wouldn't let me look after her or interrupt the questioning, even when she went on saying one damning thing after another. She wasn't naive; she was trying to give them no alternative to a murder charge. They would have let her off with less, probably. To charge murder you must prove the intention to do serious harm.

  She gave them the proof. “When I went to look for him, I saw he had slipped through the boards and he was stuck. I considered what to do and thought this was the ideal opportunity to finish it all. I knew exactly what I was doing and I knew in these temperatures he wouldn't last long . . . the suffering would be minima l. . . it was quite deliberate..." And do you know, listening to her, I believed her at the time. There was regret, but only of the most intellectual kind, I mean regret that it had to be done.'

  'I read it,' Henry said tersely. 'I read the whole of it.

  The bit where she said where she was when she decided it was inevitable. When they were on that beach up the coast, in the summer before. The beach where they go from the nursing homes because you can get wheelchairs down, where she saw the cerebral palsy sufferers who go there in the vacation, thirty year-olds looking like old men, with their parents or nurses, still wiping bottoms and dribbles and carrying those skinny, twisted limbs into the sea.

  Some of them blind. How people would be kind and help, once, and then remember not to come back to the same place the next day. How she would be an old woman with an old child, picking up pebbles with one hand. She would rather be in prison, she said. I might still have a mind, she said.'

  'You memorized it well.'

  'Somebody had to. When you learn it like a text, you can see the whole fucking thing is full of holes. Completely acceptable as a thesis for a cause of death because it has its own logic and she was so convincing. Could be a true thesis, could be one entirely rehearsed. She was good at learning things by heart.

  Daddy taught her. But that boy didn't go out by himself.

  That's the weakness.'

  She stared into the remnants of the rust-coloured tea, her hands still in her lap. She felt as if she were being interrogated, complicit with Francesca and ready to defend her, sick of questions and yet resigned. This was, after all, what she had wanted.

  'Why wouldn't he?'

  'Francesca stopped other people asking about the details of how Harry behaved by first
giving a comprehensive account of what happened which effectively stopped everyone looking further and secondly, lying about the prognosis. No one questioned that either.'

  'I did. But only later.'

  He nodded approval. 'So you would know it might not have been anything like as bad as she painted it.

  He didn't have cerebral palsy in the worst form, had hemiplegia and a normal intelligence.

  He might not have turned into a cripple and I'll bet she was believing he wouldn't. But there was no evidence that he often ran out on the pier, no evidence of behaviour patterns. Tim and Peter could have helped, but no one asked them either. Angela pretended not to know, but of course she knew.

  It was all gone, along with her clothes and the books and all the evidence of whatever therapy she used with him.

  But I know that he hated the cold. The bad limbs feel the cold more, swell, sometimes, they made him less mobile, more embarrassed. I keep asking about the damn rain. Rain's cold. Granny says the door stood open most of the time, everyone welcome, but he never went out further than the door. So what persuaded him on a cold day? To go out without his jacket?'

  'Did he?'

  'Sure. No one found a jacket. A jacket might have stopped him slipping too far through the boards . . . stopped the grazes, maybe. His clothes kept him afloat for long enough ... you don't go straight down.

  A jacket adds weight. I should know.'

  'It was sunny,' she said. 'Like today. And no one found your hat, either.'

  He placed his hands flat on the top of the table, daring her to present her own. She stared at the square tips of his practical fingers and he gazed beyond her artificially tinted head towards the vastness of the sea.

  'So where were you on that morning, Mrs Lawyer?

  Taking the air while other folks got ready to take their kids to school? You're crazy about this pier at dawn and you might have been crazy about your cousin, too. I didn't tell you about the damned hat; you watched it go. You eavesdrop; you watch. It's what you do. You filter and distort facts. When you've got time left over from carrying around that damn load of self-pity you put on your damn back. What's a bit of hard fact going to do for you? Make your fake blonde hair fall out?'

  She rose to her feet to give the heels of her shoes better purchase on the floor and gave him a resounding slap with the palm of her hand. It left a red mark on his cheek, a ringing in his ears and the echo of nervous laughter from the counter. Then she turned away from him and brushed the wind tangles out of her hair with her fingers as if to announce this was not a proper argument and she had better things to do, merely a tiff. She looked like a furious princess sitting with the pauper and him being insolent, too. Sat back and crossed one leg elegantly across the other.

  Looking beneath the table with his head still crooked from the blow, Henry could see that one foot in a Cuban-heeled shoe was describing an irregular circle, as if her toes hurt. Not as much as his face.

  Totally unbidden, a pair of hands removed the teapot and replaced it with another in the interests of peace. Maggie nodded thanks; he remained still. She tucked one hand into the mass of her hair and leaned on her elbow, confidentially.

  'You do not kick a woman with a hangover. Henry.

  It simply isn't cricket. Were you saying something?'

  'Oh no, not at all. Just wondering what you would do to prove to me that you weren't a scheming liar with some hidden agenda. And a sad old conscience as big as an ice floe. Breaks the surface from time to time.'

  'I don't have to prove anything to you. And I don't really do lies. I don't know how. Evasions, maybe. My motives are entirely pure. Henry. It's the end result might be a bit sullied.' She had picked up her bag and shrugged on the coat. He followed her out of the caff. The two men at the counter were suddenly busy, not looking in their direction. She ran down the steps on to the fishing platform with the intact boards and again he followed.

  He had never been so far, only looked at it. Down below, with the caff resting on girders above their heads, they were in a different, shaded world. From a distance, the platforms looked as if they were built on afterthoughts, flying additions to give ballast to the end of the pier, with nothing beneath the building, but from here there was one continuous arena, guarded by waist-height railings, high enough to avoid any accidental falling, low enough to balance a rod. At one side, he noticed a purposeless set of barnacled steps going down into the sea. The height of the tide obscured most of them; they seemed disused. The area beneath the caff felt like a vast, open-sided shelter.

  'Before everyone became so safety conscious,' Maggie said, ever the tourist guide, 'when people came here just to see the damn pier, they ran boat trips from here, or the other side.' The undulating water lapped at the steps and the platform boards with calm curiosity. From the darkness of the shade, the sea ahead appeared luminous with sunlight, while inside and beneath, it made sucking sounds.

  He was following her again, to the near edge of the platform with the broken boards. 'I tell you what, Henry,' Maggie was saying, chattily, 'you don't trust me one teeny, weeny bit, so what about a nice medieval test? Either I'm a scheming liar and a bit of a witch or I'm not. Bloody well decide to trust me or I'll jump in.'

  'Oh, for Chrissakes . .. what would that prove?'

  'That I mean what I say.'

  He shook his head, prepared to laugh at her, grinning contemptuously until she threw him her coat and kicked off her shoes. She wore tight-fitting pants and a sweater and the laughter died as she placed one neat foot on the bottom rung of the railings, swung herself over and hung on to the other side, looking down at the water. The drop was about the same as her own height; she seemed to be considering it, holding on to the rail and looking down, judging the distance, wiggling her toes. Then she let go with arms outstretched and a banshee yell and dropped. He scarcely heard a splash; the water slurped and echoed, like an animal with appetite. Henry let the coat fall and ran to the railings.

  She hit the water on her back, star shaped, sank briefly and reappeared. He could feel the current and almost touch the swell. She was treading water furiously, shook her head to get the hair out of her eyes and then, as his eyes adjusted to the sun on the sea, she rose on the cusp of the swell and was swept beneath the pier. Henry felt a groan tear itself out of his chest: he peered down, heard the sucking sound of the mountainous water gurgling among the buttresses beneath, imagined the crump of a body driven against concrete.

  Which way would the current go?

  Would it take her out to sea, in to land? Would it merely sweep her beneath the lethal superstructure of this thing? Down here in this cavern, they were entirely out of view; no one from the caff would notice, yet, or was the constant shifting of the ocean a noise sufficient to deaden any other sound? Lifebelts? Where? Rescuers? Where? Jesus God, why did they all want to die Paralysis gripped and he did nothing, then at last began to shout and run in the direction of where she had vanished, dropping her coat, ripping at the buttons of his secondhand jacket with stiff, clumsy fingers. He saw a lifebelt and grabbed it; it wouldn't budge. And then, like some ghost, that damned black dog appeared and barked at him.

  Stood in front of him and barked. He followed it to the steps and tripped on his way, his yelling echoing back into the cavern, whipped away by the greater sound. The steps - he would go down the day trippers' steps and get into the water; anything better than nothing; the shoes would weigh him down: fuck the shoes.

  He ran, climbed over the locked gate at the head of the steps, stumbled down, feet crunching on shells. He could see the steps continuing below the clear water, an invitation into another world and another life below, the steps all crooked and wavy, distorted and oddly inviting if it were not for the cold. Stunning cold on his skin, the afterthought of a scientist: how long could one survive this? Four minutes? One? Two? His waist was lapped with ice; the weight of water shoved at his chest.

  Don't drown, not you; I couldn't bear it. And there was Maggie, hauling
herself up by the same railing he touched, gasping for breath. He grabbed at the other arm and hauled. They both fell backwards on the steps, barnacles sharp on his back, relinquished hold of one another and scrambled back up. She was shaking and flicking water from her fingers; he could not decide whether she was helping his progress or he hers until they both stood upright on the platform, breathing heavily. When she smiled a lopsided smile, his fury was uncontrollable. He grasped her hair in both hands and shook her until she rattled. A momentary lapse; he would have yelled instead but his voice was all gone. His hands fell to his side and he saw the water streaming from his clothes.

  'You crazy lunatic . . . You .. . you . . .'

  'Come on. Henry, before someone calls a fucking lifeguard. Come on.'

  Back to where they were, collecting coats, putting them on; she forcing feet into shoes, both of them striding back down the Titanic length as if it were perfectly normal to do it in a dripping trail of sea-water. Two fishermen, the only ones, stared. Maggie grinned at them; they winked, acknowledging some kind of joke, and Henry felt perfectly hysterical. The mark on his forehead was now a gigantic turd. They passed through the nondescript portals of the entrance and the notice sea temperature today is . .. and he shuddered. Her car was parked next to the hotel, bravely bearing a parking ticket. Inside it, heater full blast, he felt as if he had come out of the bottom of a pond. The only remotely gratifying thing was her hand trembling violently as she lit a cigarette.

  'Do you believe me now?'

  'I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to believe!' he yelled. 'Except you being mad as a snake. What kind of fucking trick was that?'

  'Language, Henry, you're becoming quite Anglo-Saxon.'

  She was smoothing her dripping hair with her free hand, making a face in the rearview mirror. She dropped the cigarette out of the window and started the car. He leaned over, twisted the key back so the engine stopped. She should stay still; no driving yet.