Creatures of the Pool (14 page)

They’ve been converted into apartments above shops and restaurants. One block houses the Tate Gallery, where a Dada exhibition is outraging sensibilities with the long-banned
Three Persons of God
, a trio of urinals. Lucinda drives around the warehouses and parks at the edge of the promenade, beside a ship’s mast rigged to the pavement. As I climb out I hear a soft but enormous lapping beyond the sea wall. Did I once imagine that the waves in the river were calling to those in the dock? I must have been young or asleep. Apart from the ripples there’s silence except for a radio presenter’s voice beyond an apartment balcony until Lucinda says “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“I’m not the only one who hasn’t been talking.”

“I didn’t want an argument while I was driving, Gavin.”

“So you knew there was going to be one.”

She locks the car and gazes wistfully at me across the wet roof. “Let’s walk,” she says and then frowns. “What have you done to your head?”

“Nothing.” I don’t want to be reminded of Whitechapel just now, let alone to talk about the incident. “It’s fine,” I tell her, though the question has quickened the ache in my forehead.

The promenade extends behind the warehouses. Beyond railings festooned with occasional lifebelts, a second fence composed of chains strung between cones is silhouetted against the restless water. Lucinda steps through a gap and sets off between the fences, towards skyscrapers multiplying around the Pier Head. She likes to walk close to the water, but there isn’t room for two abreast, and so I pace her on the landward side of the fence. The slopping of dark water below the promenade seems to pace her too. When she looks away from the advancing tide I say “Why didn’t you come out when I needed you?”

“Aren’t I allowed to be busy sometimes? Maybe even too busy to come as soon as you call?”

“Like expecting me to answer my mobile whatever I’m doing, you mean.” Before I’ve finished speaking I see how irrationally unfair this is, which only aggravates my anger. “I did a lot more than call,” I object. “You must have heard how important it was.”

“As a matter of fact I didn’t. I was on my break.”

“I’d have thought you’d have heard me wherever you were.”

“That isn’t something to be proud of, Gavin.” She halts and turns to the river, so that she appears to be confiding in it. “We did hear some noise in the staffroom,” she murmurs. “We thought it was more demolition work.”

When she doesn’t move I hurry to the next gap and tramp back to join her. She seems intent on the river, where innumerable ripples glint as if a vast underlying pallid mass is showing through the blackness. A buoy rocks in their
midst, and alongside the opposite bank a ferry ploughs through the reflected lights of Seacombe towards the bay, but the view is largely of wakeful whispering blackness. I feel as if I’m distracting Lucinda from it by saying “I’ll bet your colleagues had fun telling you all about it when you got back to the counter.”

“Why do you say that? It was no fun for anyone.”

“Tell me what they said, then.”

“No, I want you to say, Gavin. I want you to tell me what happened. What was it all about?”

She still hasn’t looked away from the water. I know she finds it peaceful at night, but now the river feels oppressively lulling. I could almost fancy that her speech has borrowed a surreptitiously hypnotic rhythm from the waves. My lack of sleep must be to blame, because I feel as if the insistent ripples are drawing me down, robbing me of balance, until I retreat to the gap in the barrier. “Let’s sit down first,” I call.

Metal benches are spaced along the promenade within the shadow of the wall in front of the apartments. I’m making for the nearest bench when I see another couple on the one next to the mast. Perhaps they didn’t want us to realise we were being overheard, since they’ve made so little noise. I move to a further bench and don’t speak until Lucinda is seated, an arm’s length from me but not touching. “Did they show you what I found?”

“You still aren’t telling me. You’re asking.”

“You should have listened to my father. There was an entry in your catalogue for the papers he wanted.”

“Gavin,” Lucinda says so quietly that it’s almost swallowed by the repetitions of the waves. “There wasn’t, honestly.”

“You looked, did you?”

“Certainly I did, when he came in, and there was nothing at all.”

“How about this time?”

“Gavin,” she repeats, and the water seems to. “Why would I look again?”

I’m distracted by the slopping of the river. I could imagine that the sound isn’t just beyond the promenade—that it’s to my left as well. At this distance I’m easily confused into fancying that the occupants of the other bench are making some of the noises. All I can distinguish is that they’re embracing with their faces pressed together, and I concentrate on saying “You could see the print on the back of the other page, and there was a bit left of the one somebody wants us to think wasn’t there.”

“Nobody else saw them, Gavin.”

“No need to keep saying my name.” Instead of this I retort “Who are you going to believe, people who won’t admit what they’re seeing, or me and my father?”

“My own eyes, Gavin. Please don’t go the same way as Deryck.”

The couple on the other bench must be anticipating a downpour. As far as I can see they’re waterproofed from head to foot in shiny black material that even covers much of their heads, concealing their ears. Could it be some kind of fetish? This might help to explain the passion that thrusts their faces together so fiercely that they appear to have flattened, merging the heads into a single roundish mass. I attempt to ignore the illusion while I say “That’s exactly what I will be doing.”

“Why would you want to do that?” She sounds worse than disappointed. “You’ve got your tours,” she says. “They’re you.”

“I’ll have time for both. I’ll make time. If the police can’t do their job, it’s up to me.”

“What are you saying they aren’t doing?”

“Finding him. Seems as if too many people can’t be bothered looking at evidence.”

I turn towards her, not least to lose sight of the couple on the bench. Of course I didn’t glimpse the substance of
their heads clinging stubbornly together as the figures moved apart. It could only have been a lingering kiss, and the loud wet noise came from the river, not from their features stretching like rubber masks before the faces separated and sank back into place. “Shall I tell you what I think?” says Lucinda.

“I hope you always do.”

She gazes at me, but I’m wondering what she sees beyond me as she murmurs “How much sleep have you been losing?”

“About as much as my mother, I’d imagine. No, probably not nearly as much.”

“I’m off work tomorrow. You catch up on your sleep tonight and if there are any calls I’ll take them.”

“You think I’m imagining things, is that it?”

“I’m not blaming you, Gavin. Nobody should.”

I’d be more provoked to argue if it weren’t for the Whitechapel incident—for the way the memory has begun at some indeterminate point to resemble a dream I can’t shake off. Surely I’m not imagining a copious splash in the river behind me, even if Lucinda doesn’t look away from my face. “Shall we do that, then?” she says.

“If you’re sure you don’t mind. I mean, thanks.”

As I stand up I’m confronted by an empty promenade all the way to the bench by the mast and beyond it too. Unlike its neighbours, the bench looks wet. “Did you see them?” I blurt.

“What, Gavin?”

“You mean who,” I insist, pointing at the bench. “The couple who were there.”

“I was looking at you. I didn’t see anyone else.”

Rather than argue I trudge to the car. The radio beyond an open window is bringing “Criminal Record” by Rachel and the Rehabs to an end. I’m still behind the apartments and walking over the buried mouth of the Pool when I falter. “What’s that?”

“What now, Gavin? I can’t see—”

“Not see,” I protest. In a few seconds the radio presenter repeats the information. “That’s it,” I almost shout. “That’s what my father meant by stones.” The trouble is that I’ve been brought so nervously awake that sleep seems more remote than ever.

As we enter Calderstones Park two adolescent girls in anklelength white dresses greet us with a wreath each. My head prickles, less with the flowers one girl has placed there in imitation of her own adornment than from insomnia. She and her friend produce more wreaths from the cardboard boxes on either side of the avenue to await the next newcomers, and I notice that the boxes originally contained bottles of Frugorganic spring water. We’re advancing between trees decorated with drops of this morning’s rain when Lucinda blinks at my preoccupied frown, which feels weighted by the wreath. “I hoped you’d sleep,” she says.

Eventually I did, which is why it’s now the afternoon. Once we left the bath that she insisted would help me relax I lay awake for hours, sleepless with attempting not to betray that I was and unable to yield up my vigilance to her. I couldn’t help trying to imagine how she would answer the police or my mother if they called, or suppose my father did at last? Suppose he distrusted her too much to speak? The idea felt dismayingly close to distrusting her myself, and all this felt like an uneasy dream I was having without benefit of sleep. At some point I lost consciousness, but this doesn’t seem to have done me any lasting good. “You did your best,” I tell Lucinda. “And you’re here. Maybe you’ll spot something I miss.”

The avenue leads to a green shaded by trees, recalling the ancient woodland that once surrounded much of Liverpool. Among the trees dozens of robed figures are celebrating Druid Day. In the distance actors are performing a play
beside a solitary goal for football practice. Children have tied ribbons to some of the trees, around which they dance with the colourful tethers. A woman in a pointed hat topped with streamers is telling fortunes at a picnic table as she gazes into a bowl of water. A girl similarly garbed is leading people with forked sticks in their hands across the green, and I wonder if she has mistaken what the druids were supposed to have meant by divination. I’m reminded that a stream used to start from the park and join the river miles away, close to James Maybrick’s house. It’s dry now, or has it gone underground? It has nothing to do with why I’m here. I need to find whoever spoke to my father.

I can’t see any park officials. A sign directs us to the Calder Stones, which are housed in a roundish but angular building opposite the green. They’re half a dozen brownish irregular lumps of rock, some of them incised with obscure symbols. At least one of the rocks is almost my height. Though they’re arranged in a circle, not everyone thinks they’re druidic. Historians have concluded they belonged to an ancient tomb, and the circle was constructed just a couple of hundred years ago, during the druid revival. I peer through the reinforced glass of the locked door at the stones, one of which sports a mark like a large misshapen handprint, and wonder why my father would have cycled all the way here, twenty minutes’ drive from the city centre. I’m noticing more blurred marks that suggest some bulky person has been fumbling wet-handed at the stones when Lucinda says “Excuse me, do you work here?”

She has accosted a man in muddy trousers and a shirt as green as much of the park. Once he admits to the connection she says “Do you happen to remember a gentleman on a bicycle? When would it have been, Gavin?”

Although it seems much more remote I have to say “Two days ago.”

The thick-limbed man looks ready for amusement. “What am I going to remember about him?”

“He’s a lot like his son.”

Lucinda indicates me, which apparently fails to recall my father. “Maybe you remember the bicycle,” I say.

“Doubt it.”

With by no means all of my frustration I say “It has a slogan on the frame and a web address.”

“Oh, that one. Him.”

The man is openly amused now, but I manage not to react to it. “You talked to him, then.”

“You want Davey. He was telling us about some old—” The man thinks better of continuing and produces a mobile from his pocket. “You’re wanted by the stones,” he informs someone, and advises us “He’s on his way. Don’t go anywhere.”

He retreats into an ornamental garden, where the shade beneath the shrubs is darkened by patches of lingering rain, and vanishes towards a greenhouse. My forehead is prickling with the wreath now, and I hang the flowers on the nearest tree while several garlanded suburbanites gaze at me as if I’ve forsaken a halo. I’m awaiting Davey when I wonder if I should have recognised someone across the green, and I hurry back down the avenue. The large robed man booming and gesticulating in front of the football net is indeed the leader of the Histrionic History troupe.

They’ve acquired an extra player. Before I can identify which of them is unfamiliar, Lucinda calls “Where are you going? He’s here.”

Beside her is a new green-shirted man as brawny as his workmate but untouched by mud. His tattooed arms and rolling gait put me in mind of a sailor. He halts near the fortune-teller and watches my approach. “No mistaking him,” he says.

Perhaps I look as if I need Lucinda to explain “For Deryck’s son, he means.”

“So you remember my father. Was it you that told him to get off his bike?”

“He never moaned to you about that, did he?”

“He didn’t have to. I’m the person he was calling.” As my aching forehead loses its grip on a frown I say “Why did he need to get off when the stones are locked away?”

“They weren’t. Open to the public once a year.”

“That must be why he came,” Lucinda says. “Did he take a look at them?”

“More than one of those, love. More like a feel and a snog. We had to tell him to stop. Maybe he was trying to make out the stuff that’s carved on them, but he was bothering the public.”

I’m unnecessarily reminded of the marks on the stones. “He’s the public too.”

“Do you know if he found anything?” Lucinda says.

“Nothing we could make any sense out of.”