by Helen Slavin
‘Wait.’
My heart lurched into my mouth and started drumming in time with the rain. Then it was drumming in time with the knocking and with the tatter-tatter-tatter of Preacher’s feet as they hurried down the stairs. He missed the last step, skidded a little, banged his elbow on the door jamb.
I could have stayed where I was. I could have sat myself down on the stairs right there and not bothered. I could have gone back to bed and hidden under the covers until it was all over.
I followed him out.
As I reached the edge of the balcony, the rows of wooden panelled pews, I could see him moving through the floor of the church. He had skirted down the side of the pulpit, down the twisted stair and was skimming along the edge of the main pews. There were two aisles, one left and one right, that looked up at the double pulpit, the lower level with its open Bible for the reader. The upper level, right in front of the square-paned window, for the preacher.
I moved quietly now, glad of my bare feet. I stepped down the wooden stairs and moved as silently as I could along towards the pulpit stairs. As I reached out for the handrail I was startled by the knocking again and the sound of a woman outside, angry. I halted; Preacher reached the door. He opened it and as he pulled back so someone outside pushed in. He was nearly sent reeling.
The rain washed in and lightning illuminated two young women. Right away I recognised the woman I had seen breast-feeding the child in Zion Chapel. I saw the difference straight away. This time she did not have the child. This time she was great with child. Her round belly, rigid as a rock, was jutting out from her clothing.
She gave a cry, moved towards the back pew supported by her friend. She grabbed for the rail at the back of the seats, clung on and half stooped, working her way through her contraction. She could not speak. She did not groan. The wood groaned for her as if all her pain and noise were sent down through her white hands into the wood.
Preacher stood looking at them both, not even shutting the door. The rain was soaking the back of his clothes as he stood there. The woman’s friend turned and yelled at him.
‘Shut the door. You’ll not turn her out now.’
The door shut. The woman giving birth leaned against the pew, breathing hard.
‘Again,’ was all she said before bending, squirming, trying to find a place to stand that would ease the birth pains. There was a Mexican standoff going on between Preacher and the friend. Finally the woman giving birth simply let herself slide to the floor. The baby was coming out and there was nothing they could do.
Her friend was at her side now, pulling back her clothing to see what was happening, what needs must be done. Preacher tried to move away but Friend stopped him.
‘Nothing you haven’t seen before, Preacher.’
He stopped then, and she turned away. ‘All right Emma, all right now then…’
I watched from the pulpit. There was hardly a noise. The drumming of the rain and the whispers of the friend as she tried to help. Emma did not yell or groan. Instead she made odd, tight sounds like a strong man in a circus lifting a weight. You could hear every sinew of her body pushing at the baby.
Still, it wouldn’t come out. Friend’s whispers faded out. Instead she kept silent, her hand keeping contact with that bouldered belly, her face downturned, all her energies concentrated on the birth. There were odd slick noises, blood, shit. Friend was reaching in now, feeling for the baby. Her hands coming back out bloodied.
Then silence.
It was an hour-long minute afterwards. I thought it was the rain I could hear, still pattering. But it was Friend’s tears on the wooden floor. Friend crying. A thin gasping, her face downturned to Emma. She reached, pulled Emma’s skirts back over her belly.
Not once did she look at Preacher.
Not once did Preacher take his eyes from Emma’s body.
I think it was the next day that Sam came to tell me that he and Beth were having a baby. After my historical night I reacted badly. Sam took this quite well, assuming that my white-faced muttered congratulations were signal enough that I was jealous.
I was thinking that it is easy to be happy if you can obliterate everything that is going on around you. As Sam stood there, he was not grieving for Emma and her baby. He wasn’t thinking that maybe this year was a tough year for me, that this year they would declare my long-lost husband legally dead. No, Sam thought about Sam and Beth and their closed-in universe. How all the planets were in orbit around Sam. And I was a black hole sucking in everything and never being filled up.
I was still at the Spiritualist Church then. Still doing my party piece and reuniting lost soup tureens with their rightful inheritors. But I don’t know, the Emma incident with Preacher had opened something up. Something even more like a black hole, I think. People started to arrive that I couldn’t control. They wouldn’t wait in line for each to take their turn. I had to struggle along, pushing my way past them to get to the ordinary people.
‘GO AND GET HER.’
‘FIND HER. FIND HER.’
‘Listen to me. Are you listening? Listen to me.’
‘Why can’t you go there? Why can’t you?’
People who didn’t have Crown Derby or shed keys. People who didn’t seem able to string more than one sentence together. They all arrived with their separate, incoherent mantras.
How can I get her if I don’t know who ‘her’ is?
The platform at the Spiritualist Church was not the place for this. The congregation did not want to sit and listen to me try and figure out the verbal puzzles.
‘Snakes and Ladders. It is. Snakes and Ladders.’
‘Aubergine. Aubergine. Aubergine. Aubergine. Aubergine.’
It reached a stage where I stood on the platform and I separated them out. The congregation looked on as I simply said, ‘All family matters this side. You, you, you and you…wait this side. I will deal with you later.’
After the congregation had left I would sit down in the front seats and I would have them all come to me. I would try to sort things through with them: I need a name; I need information.
What I got was mysteries and puzzles. Sometimes it simply helped them to talk as if I knew what was going on.
‘Listen to me. Are you listening?…’
‘Yes. What is it?’
‘Listen.’
And that would be that. Except it wasn’t. For one evening I asked a question and it was only later that I found out the answer. The horrible truth. In the horrible truth I found my future. My reason. The way forward.
‘Who is she? Tell me who she is and I will find her for you,’ I said one night to a distraught lady in her late fifties. She had come on a couple of nights now and was distracted, winding her wedding ring round and round on her finger. The first two nights she came she had gone before I got through the family matters and the never-ending hunt for Jims. We had five Jims that night.
‘Can’t. Don’t know who she is. Find her. Find her.’
‘Do you know where I should look?’
She was crying now, very distressed, couldn’t speak for several moments, dried her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘He goes fishing.’
At which she broke down completely and sobbed.
‘Where does he go fishing?’
She got up then and, struggling to breathe through her emotion, was gone.
Did I say she was gone? I lied.
Next night. Congregation half asleep. Evening drawing to an end. Tea urn on. Marcia putting out cups. I was in the middle of a tedious domestic drama about a hedge which was going to be an eternal unfinished business since the dead husband and the living wife were never going to agree about it.
‘Chop the bugger down,’ someone shouted from the back and a laugh went up. I felt suddenly weary. I needed to sit down. I don’t know what it was, a lapse in my concentration or what, but the next moment I was utterly numb and she was speaking through my mouth. She had a deeper voice, anxious sounding.
>
‘Find her. Find her. Don’t know who she is. Find her. Find her. HE GOES FISHING.’ And she was gone again.
This time I was left on the floor, such was the energy she zapped into and out of me. I wondered if that is what it feels like to survive a lightning bolt.
The church was in uproar. Several people were crying and shouting. Marcia had knocked over a dishwasher basket of clean cups and they were smashed everywhere. I did not realise, but nothing like that had happened here before. In the past it had always been so civilised with the Dead meekly queueing and the living enjoying their tea and biscuits. Not once had they had a genuine voice from beyond. ‘Scared shitless’ is the phrase that best describes them. Mass exodus.
Only Marcia was sanguine, heading into the kitchen for the dustpan and brush. She was left to revive me, propping me up on her knee, offering her own personal mug brimful of hot tea with no sugar, just the way I liked it. We sat there for a good while, me resting against her, Marcia squatting down, legs bent under her stroking my hair.
‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Feeling better?’
I wasn’t really. I was feeling curious. Anxious. I felt this was an important message and I wasn’t getting it right. I wondered if it was to do with Evan Bees, if maybe I was the one I had to find to tell me that he was going fishing and could be found sitting under a vast umbrella on a riverbank.
I dreamt that night that I found him under that umbrella on that riverbank, only when he opened his mouth to speak it was full of bait. Worms writhing, before I woke up with a start. Then of course I imagined that was the message. He had been drowned whilst fishing. Fished out of the water. Eaten by a fish. Eaten by worms.
It worsened. For two days at the end of that week I ate nothing but Bourbon biscuits.
Then I happened to be driving past Goatmill. I hadn’t been there for a long time. I occasionally popped up there to have tea at The Glade and say hello to Atalanta, but I had stopped doing it quite so frequently. The nostalgia depressed me. It seemed to me then that I looked back on bad times and forward to nothing.
But as I drove past that afternoon I suddenly noticed the fishing sign. I had forgotten that the lake was fished. I had forgotten the men with their baskets and shelters and their coolboxes full of mealworms. The memory of it broke my dream. After the intensity of the past few days I felt that a walk around the lake would be a good idea. If it didn’t answer my question then it would at least make me feel wakened. It would clear out my thoughts if I didn’t find Evan there.
I might have guessed who I would find there if I had been in possession of a television. People denigrate television but in fact it is an informative little box. It informs you of all the doom and disaster from a local to a global level. If someone has died in a house fire round the corner from you, or if a thousand starving refugees have crossed a distant border, you can guarantee that television will bring you full-colour moving pictures.
Moving in the sense of not being static. Moving in the sense that in the wave of guilt and depression that sweeps over you at the misfortune of others you move your thumb and move to another channel. A channel where you can see earthquake victims being deluged by a gigantic mud-slide.
There was a dog barking. Barking and barking at nothing. His master, an older man with a pipe and a tweed hat, was talking quietly to the dog, trying to calm him and also puzzled at what was getting to him. The dog was barking at the lake, rushing to the edge and barking but not wanting to go into the water.
Bark. Bark. Bark. Other fishermen, dotted around the edges of the lake were getting bored of the noise. Bark. Bark. Bark.
When I saw her, I wanted to bark too. There was no way I could speak to her, not with the dog and the Fisherman sitting there, so I simply parked myself on a tree stump at the edge of the trees and waited. It was going to be near dark before they left. As he stood up, stretched and started to pack away his things the dog became a little more frantic. He had to drag it away, off down the path towards the carpark.
I stepped forward. She was just sitting at the water’s edge. She wasn’t wearing any clothing. There was nothing except for a clumsy necklace of bruises. She looked like a sepia photograph and she was disorientated, looked blankly at me, blankly at the water. In shock. Unable to communicate. I tried to talk to her but she simply looked at me. Shivered.
‘What’s your name? Can you remember?’
She shivered again, looked across the water to a patch of trees that screened the carpark. She pointed that way. Shivered once more.
‘How did you get here? Do you remember?’
Which was a question I should have kept to myself for she stopped looking blank then, and a memory flickered across her face. She took in a deep gasping breath, a shocked, disbelieving breath and her face folded into tears. She slid into the lake.
He goes fishing.
In the twilight now the fishermen had packed up, or were in the process of packing up. Folding umbrellas and nifty chairs into unfathomably small parcels. Clicking plastic lids on endless boxes of worms and gadgetry. They moved like fish through the encroaching dusk, green-skinned in their khaki pants and their waxed coats, some green, some brown.
He goes fishing. And at last I knew.
I made the telephone call from the next town. I had to be careful because they are in the process of installing CCTV so that your every move can be watched, whether you are a copulating couple in a bus shelter or a drug dealer at the bandstand. I was not going to be traced. I didn’t have any way to explain what I knew.
They would be scornful if anyone had listened as to how I knew. Talking to the Dead? Ha. Yeah. Right. Cross your palm with silver.
If I had been in possession of a TV I would have known that the missing girl had been on ‘CrimeWatch’ only the last week. I would have known that there was a special number to call. As it was I simply went to the library the next day and looked up the number of the local police station. Armed with my post-it note I walked to the next town. It isn’t any great feat. About three miles up the dual carriageway.
I enjoyed the walk, it was a cool evening. I liked to leave the car behind. I didn’t want the car to be seen. To be traced. Not cowardice. Just practicality.
I stood in the box and almost chickened out. The telephone seemed to ring out forever. My heart was pounding and pounding. Then finally someone answered, only I could barely hear them for the thrumming of my blood pressure in my ear. They spoke again, more carefully this time.
‘I don’t know her name. She is in the lake at Goatmill Country Park. He goes fishing.’
‘Say again?’ There were some muffled noises in the background. People scrabbling to pick up other phones. Scrap paper being found to write upon.
‘The missing girl. I don’t know her name. She is in the lake at Goatmill Country Park. He goes fishing.’
I spoke carefully and deliberately so that they could take down the details, enunciated clearly so that if it was taped and they played it back they would be able to hear me clearly. Then I put the phone down and walked away.
In the Land of the Giant, Brian: forest
They broke my boundaries today. After I have so carefully guarded my perimeters, set my fences. I find that it is all useless. Today the police came. They descended just like the fishermen, clicking open plastic boxes, reeling out lines, casting nets. They had divers, faceless in scuba masks, rubber skinned. Frogmen. Does anyone still call them that?
I had not known, and now wish I didn’t know, what it means to ‘drag’ a lake. They have a line tagged with hooks that trawl in the deep water until they snag on an object. An old boot. A rusting bicycle. A mermaid.
You half expect them to haul her out, feet first, like some hunted-down shark.
Weigh her. Measure her. Take photographs. By now the frogmen have slipped their skin and other men in white suits, crackling plastic skins anxious to be shed, take over.
We have been asked for our records for all fishing permits, the angling clu
b. I look at the cards in the index, all neatly filled in. It is hard to imagine that one of these people is this. Has done this.
There is almost nothing we know about each other is there?
Father figures
I DREAMT NIGHTLY that I was at the bottom of Goatmill Lake. I dreamt nightly that no one was looking for me. As you can see I was heading straight for Bourbon biscuit territory with a first-class ticket.
They struggled to find the Fisherman, as he became known. The policeman at the centre of the case was Detective Inspector Knight and he was tireless and tired looking. It seemed to me that his photograph or television image was always at the periphery of my vision. He haunted me. I knew, right at the back of my heart, that I could take the furrow out of his brow. But I didn’t. I was scared.
Brian was involved as they dredged through all the records of anyone who had ever fished at Goatmill—coarse, game, a stick and some string. They combed through the undergrowth with rakes and tweezers.
The town filled with investigative journalists all thinking that they could solve the insoluble and then write some stonking bestseller book, the kind that strains your back just looking at it on the shelf. They were vermin in the end, swarming over the town, picking over the rubbish.
Worst of all was the way that, unable to find the true culprit, they started to make the victim less victim-like. She was a slapper. She was a druggie. They made it up. I didn’t read the newspapers. I didn’t watch the television. But the information filtered through.
And then her mother came to a meeting. She sat at the very back in the seat nearest the door. She arrived after everyone else had settled down so that there was no staring or pointing.
She sat, said nothing, spoke to no one. When the tea break came she slipped out of the door before everyone got up and saw her. There was nothing for her, her daughter did not show. Marcia told me that the girl’s mother came only to my meetings.
The father’s hair turned white. It wasn’t just the trauma. It was the fact that dyeing his hair dark brown suddenly seemed unimportant. A tide of white hair began to wash down his head, starting at the roots like a polar ice cap, and as the days got colder and his daughter was further away so the ice spread, his hair whitening and whitening until one morning he was spotted in the barber’s and the last of the dark brown dyed hair had been shorn. He looked older. Wiser.
