Creatures of the Pool (13 page)

The younger and taller of the girls turns with a ready smile. “Which one would that be?”

“Whatever his name is. The fellow with the windows.” When squinting between two pairs of my fingers fails to signify him I say “Glasses, what there was of them.”

Perhaps my father could make this funnier, but her amusement has begun to look dutiful. “He’s gone home,” her workmate says.

“Can someone else help?”

The younger librarian is still amused. It may be her natural state, though I suspect it would change if my anger broke loose. Antagonising the staff might waste time or achieve worse, and so I say “I’ll fill in a slip.”

Part of the problem may have been that the staff visit the stacks only to fetch books, and I’ve thought of one—the
work of the local occultist my father was discussing with Lucinda. I take a squat elongated boxy catalogue off the shelf once I’ve managed to dredge up the name.

Strong, John. The form of the listing makes him sound like a wrestler, but he’s the author of
Glimpses of Absolute Power.
Did he publish anything else? Presumably not, since the neighbouring pages refer to other authors—and then I notice marks on the back of his solitary page, like the faint reflection of another entry. The traces of print are unrelated to the next listing, and they aren’t the reverse of his. Nevertheless when I hold the catalogue up to the overhead light I see that the first of the mirrored words are Strong, John.

The rest of the traces are even fainter. They’ve begun to twitch, or my eyes have, by the time I decide that the next words are “Unpublished papers.” I would fill in a request slip if I could decipher the classification number. Instead I take the catalogue to the counter. “Excuse me, can you tell me what this is?”

The tall girl settles her amused gaze on me before saying “A catalogue.”

I could easily find her humour infuriating. Several readers are disturbed by a loud hollow knock—the sound of the catalogue striking the counter. “This,” I say and dent the wad of pages with my finger.

She eases the catalogue away from me and starts to read the entry opposite the traces of print. “Not that,” I protest and point at them. “There.”

I feel as if I’m trapped in an unbearably lethargic dream as she makes to turn the page. “There, where I’m showing you,” I don’t quite shout, poking at the page again. “Here, on the back.”

When she leans forward to examine the sheaf, two translucent drops dangling from her ears sway as if the earrings are about to fall. “It’s this,” she says, indicating the adjacent entry. “It’s some of the ink.”

“No, it’s from something else that was there.”

Her colleague joins in peering at the sheaf and jabs a stubby finger at the opposite page. “It’s from that, no question.”

The entry is for Strong, Johanna. Unreported rapes: thirteen case studies from Liverpool’s docklands. The book is published by Liverpool University Press, but none of this convinces me. “I’m sorry, you’re both wrong,” I insist, “and I want to know—”

“Let me.” The elder librarian slides the catalogue towards her and underlines the reversed words with a clipped fingernail. “Johanna Strong,” she reads as if she’s dealing with a child. “Unreported, you can see what else it says for yourself.”

“It’s nothing like that,” I say, recapturing the catalogue. “For a start, that’s not rape.”

“May we ask what makes you say that?”

I feel accused by both of them—her colleague is abruptly unamused—and so I say “Can’t you spell?”

“I’m afraid I don’t appreciate the relevance. If you’d kindly—”

“That doesn’t say rape. It would be epar, don’t you see? This says papers. Unpublished papers by John Strong.”

The tall girl parts her lips, but it’s her colleague who says “May we know your name?”

“Gavin Meadows. Pool of Life, that’s me, and yes, my father was asking about this. One of you told him it didn’t exist.”

She doesn’t quite look at the tall girl as she murmurs “I think you’d better call—”

“No need to get security. I’m just asking about your stock like he did, for God’s sake. Asking you to do your job.” I pick up the catalogue but refrain from brandishing it in case it resembles a weapon. “Lucinda knows about it,” I tell them. “Where is she?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. Now could you please give me—”

“I’m keeping hold of it. I want to show her.” I gesture with
the catalogue at the door to the stacks, and the pages flap wide. “I’ll wait till she comes out,” I announce.

“I’m sorry, that won’t be—”

The woman falls silent as I turn on her, waving the catalogue. I’ve noticed what I should have seen at once. Between the inner edge of the page for John Strong and the one for Johanna is a torn scrap of paper. “Tell me you can’t see that,” I say, no longer knowing how loud. “Someone’s ripped a page out. Who did that? When? What for?”

Well before I finish, the women are looking at each other. “Call security now,” the elder woman says.

I stalk across the library, past readers who flinch as I flourish the catalogue. I hammer with it on the door to the stacks. “Lucinda, you’re in there,” I yell. “Come out. We have to talk.” She hasn’t responded when a uniformed guard appears behind the counter. “All right, you win. I’m going,” I inform him and drop the catalogue on a table with a thud that resounds through the room. I grab my ticket from a box on the counter and vault over the barrier to march through the lobby and down the stairs. As I emerge from the building, leaves in St John’s Gardens start to twitch, and the trees shake. The sky sets about delivering its darkness, and if I had any thoughts worth the name they would be drowned by the storm.

I ought to phone the police as soon as the door shuts behind me—if the mobile in my sodden pocket has survived the downpour, surely I can—but I’m desperate for a drink and a shower. I gulp handfuls of water from the tap between peeling off my clothes in the bathroom, and then I climb into the bath. The shower aggravates my confusion; the onslaught of water does, and the idea that I’m using it to wash away water. As I perform the slow ritual dance that it entails, a sentence I leafed past in Whittington-Egan drifts back to me. It was in one of his rants about uncommon sex, a subject that appeared to fascinate as much as it disgusted him. He spends an entire chapter in deploring gay men or at best pitying them for their failure to conform, but I wish I hadn’t been so quick to pass over the next chapter, where I read “As late as the nineteenth century, the detestable vice known as ‘frogging’ was rife in the cellars of Whitechapel.” He meant the street in Liverpool, and perhaps that was all he could bring himself to write about the practice. The Internet may be less reticent about the meaning of the term.

As I reach for a towel I’m troubled by the reflection in the steamy mirror. I wipe away the condensation in time to see a trickle of moisture run down my face. I could almost think my bruised forehead is exuding the fluid—and then I realise what’s troubling me. Was my mother too worried about my father to notice the injury? I mustn’t blame her, and I should be doing more on their behalf. I towel myself fiercely and grab the mobile from the floor outside the bathroom and redial the police.

An operator takes the occurrence number in exchange for a generous helping of silence. I’m about to ask whether anyone’s there when a familiar but hardly friendly voice demands “Yes?”

“Is that Constable Wrigley?” Since this earns no answer, I offer “Constable Maddock?”

“Something like that.” As I wonder if I’ve demoted them he says “What’s it about this time?”

“The same as last.” In case he thinks I mean Whitechapel I add “My father.”

“We said we’d let one of you know.”

“Is that what you’ve been saying to my mother?”

“Yes, her.”

“That’s not the way I heard it.” When this falls short of provoking a response I say “She thinks you don’t think he’s worth looking for.”

“What else does she reckon she knows?”

“That you’re treating him as some kind of suspect, which is ridiculous.”

“Why’d we give up looking if we think he’s one of those?”

I ought to have wondered about that. Is my mother more confused than I realised? Rather than admit the possibility to the policeman I say “I thought that’s why you think he was in Norris Green.”

“So why do you reckon he was?”

“I can’t see any reason to assume he was at all. We don’t know where his bicycle was stolen from, do we?”

“If it was pinched why didn’t he report it? He’d got his mobile on him.”

“Maybe it doesn’t work where he is.” I’m even less happy to have to suggest “Unless he was attacked and they took the phone too.”

I remember the shrill clink that put a stop to his last call. Was he hit with the brick? I imagine my father lying somewhere, surely no worse than unconscious. Could the assault have damaged his brain? Perhaps he’s wandering the city,
having forgotten where he lives and I do, if he hasn’t taken refuge somewhere. Perhaps he doesn’t know who he is. These feel like dreams I’m trying not to have in case they come true, visions that hardly seem to belong to me, but of course the idea itself is no more than a dream. In an attempt to bring myself back to reality I ask “Where is the bicycle, by the way?”

“We’re keeping it for evidence.”

“Fingerprints, you mean?”

“Something like that.”

I assume he’s saying that detection has become more sophisticated. “Have you followed up the messages you came to hear?”

“Thought you were at home,” he says so triumphantly that I feel observed and uncomfortable with my nakedness. “Trying to keep out of the wet, are you?”

This is followed by a rush of static I could mistake for a wave on a shore. Is he on a mobile somewhere in the open? “The messages,” I prompt.

“Still looking.”

Since he conveys no enthusiasm I’m provoked to say “How hard?”

“How hard are you after?”

“As hard as we ought to expect.”

“You’ll be seeing us when we’ve got something to give you.”

With this he’s gone, apparently washed away by static. I hurry to the bathroom for my towelling robe, and then I head for my workroom. I’ve already checked that there are no messages on the answering machine, but I’ve yet to look on the computer. All the new emails are impersonal, and can’t distract me from remembering the names I sent Waterworth. Perhaps he’ll think they’re simply British.

The Frugoget search engine reveals that frogging can refer to ornamental lace or the corruption of a text, neither of which helps. My gaze wanders to the window, outside which
the night has overtaken the dark of the storm. Raindrops are still trickling down the glass and the windows opposite, so that I can’t tell whether anything is moving in the dimness of the office. When I strain my eyes I seem to glimpse at least one large figure writhing deep in the gloom, as if performing a sluggish dance that appears to involve changes of shape. As I grip the sides of the desk and lean forward, eyes stinging, my mobile strikes up its band.

I straighten up, and the dancing shapes sink into the darkness and vanish. I interrupt the ringtone before it can go on too much about love. “Where are you?” I want to know.

“Just outside,” Lucinda says.

“Then come up. We need to talk.”

“Let’s, but you come down. I know where’s best.” Through a rush of static, unless it’s a wind along the street, she says “We’ll go to our place by the river.”

Slamming the door of Lucinda’s car dislodges rain from the roof, so that half a dozen ropes of water wriggle down the windscreen. Beyond them, at the end of the street, a dim blurred figure appears to swell up before vanishing towards the river. Lucinda gives me a tentative smile and reaches out a hand but, observing my mood, doesn’t quite touch me. Instead she drives along the street and turns downhill.

This takes us past the oldest theatres, all of them unnamed—one in Cockpit Yard, another along the Old Ropery, a third in Drury Lane, where a popular eighteenth-century play would end with “a procession of a human sacrifice after the manner of the ancients.” Theatre audiences, especially sailors, were so liable to grow violent that an armed soldier would be stationed at either end of the stage to keep order. During a riot at the Drury Lane theatre an actor costumed as an aquatic creature was shot, though one report insists he was a member of the audience and the cause of the disorder. Some of these streets no longer exist, and a fountain constructed of dozens of pivoting buckets stands where a theatre once stood. The buckets are dormant though dripping with rain, and somebody homeless or drunk is squatting under them. I lose sight of the bulky glistening shape before the car swings onto the Strand opposite the Liver Building, where the metal birds perched on the pair of clock towers are rigged like masts. Histories of Liverpool suggest that Coleridge had the ancient Liver Bird in mind when he conceived the albatross. He certainly visited Liverpool, and we may imagine him deep in a reverie on the Birmingham
coach—the “lousy Liverpool,” as it was known, on which he did indeed catch lice. One biography suggests that he imagined more of the
Ancient Mariner
in Liverpool—the slimy creatures from the sea, the nameless dweller in the ocean with power over all the creatures of the water—but why am I swamped by these thoughts? They must be conjured up by Lucinda’s silence and mine, but they feel as if I’m not thinking so much as being employed to think.

Since Victorian times there has been a walk upriver from the Pier Head, but building work has cut off the route. Lucinda drives along the dock road, which used to be divided by an overhead railway that was torn down more than fifty years ago. Several boys ride their rearing two-wheeled steeds along the central reservation, pedalling towards Aigburth. Another demolition has exposed the location of the first dock, where an animal is prowling amid the debris. Most likely it’s a dog, however it defeated the high fence. Perhaps it swam along the river; the whitish form, which elongates as it leaps several feet, looks wet, and there’s no water in the dock. I lose sight of it as Lucinda steers the car off the main road, towards the warehouses surrounding the Albert Dock.