Creatures of the Pool (23 page)

His ponytail wags at me like an extra rebuke as I follow him into the back room. Numerous computers, variously eviscerated, are laid out on benches against the walls. Some are connected to monitors, and Finbar leads me to a tower that’s lying on its back below a calendar of naked women rising from the waves. I think he means to show me something on the monitor to which the tower is hooked up until he points an accusing finger at the exposed innards. “How did that happen?”

The hard disc glints and dulls as I step closer. It isn’t a trick of the light; the disc is glistening with moisture, patches of which appear to shift within the metal and subside. “That’s what I was trying to save it from,” I protest. “It’s this insane weather.”

“Nothing crazy about rain. Only people can be that.”

I seem to have offended him in some unidentifiable way. As he takes a drink of water from a paper cup that was standing beside the computer I have to ask “Is everything lost?”

“There was something when I powered it up. Don’t ask me how that’s possible. Your web site, was it?”

“It wasn’t mine.”

“Some kind of aquarium, was it meant to be? Something was swimming, or somebody was. And some of them were climbing out, if you call that climbing. Maybe it’s the state it’s in that made them look like that.”

I’m not entirely certain that I want to learn “Like what?”

“Show him.”

Some of Finbar’s colleagues have left the counter now that they’ve finished or at least interrupted their discussion of last night’s local football matches. Though he looks unconvinced by the suggestion, he switches on the computer. For an instant the screen seems to flicker like an omen of a storm, but the impression vanishes before I can be sure I glimpsed it. “It was there,” Finbar insists.

“Maybe you were dreaming on the job again,” a workmate says.

I try to head off Finbar’s anger. “Will you be able to salvage anything?”

“Can’t say yet. We’ll be in touch, but it won’t be today.”

As I head for the exit he comes after me, draining the paper cup, which he flings into a bin. He’s bolting the flap in the counter when he says “I know what it looked like.”

I find I’m reluctant to ask “What?”

“I was just thinking it could be a swimming pool, but it was too rotten all around it. I think it was an old dock like the one they’re digging up.”

There’s no point in wondering until the information is retrieved, if it can be. A bus bears me towards the Pier Head and, closer, the building work that has uncovered remains of the original dock. As the bus swings across the carriageway into the bus station, it leaves behind the sight of workmen who have congregated beyond the metal fence to gaze at some object they’ve unearthed.

A breeze shivers puddles in the bus shelters. Beyond them Hanover Street has been reduced to a narrow lane by the wall around a redevelopment. Cars progress in single file along
the dusty lane to an unsignposted dead end. Side streets climb towards the Moss Lake as the rope walks did, but the only one that doesn’t bar the disorientated traffic is opposite the radio station, in front of which is a shelter that has never seen a bus. Inside the shelter three boys barely in their teens are smoking a version of the substance that gave the hempy girls their dreams. When the doors of the radio station part at my approach the boys turn their pale roundish faces to me, stretching their mouths and their eyes so wide that I could imagine I’m sharing their delirium.

In the performance space beyond the reception desk a folk group is singing a shanty about nymphs. “Can I speak to someone?” I ask the receptionist. “I’m Gavin Meadows.”

A burst of applause greets this, but the enthusiasm is for the folk group. “Who are you here to see?” the receptionist says and gives me a pretty blink.

“Someone from your phone-in. I’d like to get in touch with somebody who called.”

“I’m afraid we never give out numbers. You’d have to ring and ask them to get in touch with us.”

I’m about to object to the delay when I grasp that going on the air will let me advertise my tours and my number. “I will tomorrow,” I say while the folk group begins to sing about a maritime storm. As the doors creep shut, the refrain (“Sup water, lads, sup water—We’ll dream beneath the sea”) follows me, but I’m distracted by the sight outside. Three men with whitish faces loosened by age are waiting in the shelter, apparently trusting it to attract a bus. Perhaps their bulging eyes and moist grey nostrils and expressionlessly thin lips scared the boys off.

Hanover Street brings me to Church Street, and I’m abreast of the caged stone eagle when a glimpse beyond it stops me. I peer through the afternoon crowd to see a prancing shadow vanish into Williamson Square. Dodging through the crowd, I hurry along the side street, only to halt at the corner of the square with something like a laugh.

The bloated bodies are why the dancers look so spindle-legged. They’re dressed in puffy costumes that may be meant as a joke or a historical reference to one. The outfits seem close to misshapen, or the performers do—Tasha Bailey and her fellow thespians, of whom Nicholas Noble appears the most batrachian. They’re handing leaflets to anybody who will take one. “What are they trying to be?” I say rather more than aloud.

Noble stares at me and adopts an appreciative grin. “We’re Histrionic History,” he announces. “Just now we’re the Hop Troupe. I thought you were meant to know your history, Mr Meadows. They used to go round advertising the theatre before this place was built up.”

Does he mean while the area was a marsh? Surely that makes no sense, and I’m about to say so when a couple of middle-aged women beside me start to chant a Beatles phrase as if they’re counteracting his dive into whatever past he has in mind. They’re joining in with my ringtone, and they aren’t helping me to know how to react to the number in the display window of the mobile. It’s my home number.

The phone is still off the hook, but the note my mother left is on the floor. I finish hoping that my father has come back once my shouts to him and then to anyone fall flat in the empty house. The sight of my mother’s lonely chair standing guard beside the phone makes the place feel even more deserted. I put the note back on the table and then check for any calls. Nobody has rung since we abandoned the house. I hang up the phone and call the estate agent on my mobile, but no potential buyers have been in touch.

The house smells stale, close to mouldy. I leave the kitchen window open while I go upstairs. The buckets in the workroom don’t appear to have collected any more water, and as far as I can tell the stains on the ceiling haven’t grown. My parents’ bedroom is as forsaken as it was last night, and the bathroom is silent, without even the hint of a drip. I take my time over going down to shut the window, because the staleness hasn’t dissipated. As I return along the hall I grow aware of the cupboard under the stairs. My mother only asked me to check for phone calls, but perhaps the cupboard is the source of the smell. Grasping the rickety plastic doorknob, I pull the door wide.

Does it send a mouse fleeing into the wall, or just a trick of light and shadow? Obviously the latter, since the glimpse resembled a gelatinous member recoiling like a mollusc into the corner stained with moisture and dimness. The damp of which the cupboard smells doesn’t appear to have spread, though I don’t look too hard or too long. I shut the door and am laying the receiver on the table when I’m distracted by
marks on the stairs. They have to be blotches of damp, however much they remind me of tracks of various sizes and shapes or lack of shape. I must have overlooked them earlier because the light has changed. They aren’t enough to keep me in the house, and as I slam the front door I’m quite glad to see a bus.

The city sinks towards the river as the bus carries me downhill, so that I could imagine that the land beneath the thin pale sky is reverting to marsh. I disembark at Castle Street and head for Frugo Corner. On my way home the bagfuls of provisions my mother asked me to buy lend me a sailor’s gait. The merman above the threshold looks misshapen by the weather, as do the glistening contents of his cornucopia, or ready to assume new shapes. The bags thump and slither against my door as I let myself into the apartment. “Is that you this time, Gavin?” my mother calls or cries.

“It’s me all right. Who else came?”

“Someone making noises like you just did. They didn’t come in. Were they drunk, do you think?”

“How would I know?”

“They sounded as if they were trying to find their way in somewhere. I expect they live across the corridor.”

It doesn’t sound much like my cellist neighbour, but perhaps he’s had something to celebrate. My mother is sitting in the main room, surrounded by papers and books, and holding a magazine that’s little more than a pamphlet. “Was there anything at the house?” she says with an attempt at carelessness.

“There weren’t any calls, and I’m sure nobody had been there either.”

“I wasn’t really expecting anything,” she says but ducks her head as if it has acquired a burden. “Just put the bags in the kitchen while I finish reading this and then I’ll see to dinner.”

I unload the bags, which contain enough provisions for at least a week, into the refrigerator. I haven’t finished clearing
space in there when my mother waddles to the sink to gulp more than a glassful of water. “You should read that,” she says. “Or you could peel the potatoes if you like.”

She seems to have infected me with thirst, and I drain a mug of the water that wriggles and then pours out of the tap. It leaves me feeling bloated, though surely not as much as she’s begun to look. “I’ll help,” I tell her.

“Ham steaks and bubble. You always loved that. I hope you still do.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“How long has it been since I made your dinner? Remember when Deryck convinced you you’d hear it bubbling and squeaking when you put your knife and fork in? I had to tell him to stop. He had you not wanting to touch your food in case it did something it wasn’t supposed to.” As her reminiscence flags she adds “Or would you rather have fish?”

“Whatever’s best for you.”

“Let’s have that, then. The ham will keep. Fish is good for your brain, isn’t it?” She laughs, but not at this. As she consigns the gammon steaks to the refrigerator she produces the joke. “And I expect he’d say you need a bit of ham in your job.”

She’s doing her utmost to believe that our lives will return to normal. I sense that her behaviour and her conversation are determined not to acknowledge how desperate they are to bring my father back. I mustn’t shatter the pretence, and so I concentrate on scraping the potatoes until she says “I should have told you right away. Lucy says she’ll call back.”

“When?”

“She wasn’t saying. She doesn’t know where she’ll be. I’m glad she called, anyway.”

“Why did she, do you know?”

“Oh, Gavin, does she have to have a reason? She’d heard about you on the radio, or someone had. She doesn’t need to feel guilty about anything, does she?”

The parer catches on an eye of the potato in my hand, and I feel as if the conversation has snagged too. “I couldn’t say.”

I mean I’d rather not, but my mother says “I didn’t think so. I told her she shouldn’t. We don’t want any more of us splitting up, do we? I said I’d get you to call her, but she said you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Will she be somewhere you can’t reach her? Or maybe she’s at work and they don’t like her taking calls. I know she didn’t want you trying.”

“Then I won’t.”

“Don’t be like that, Gavin, not with everything else. You go and sit down now. Thanks for helping.” As she drops the potatoes in a saucepan with a series of knells like the notes of a gong too rusty to resonate she says “You could read that story and tell me what you think. Lucy might be interested in it as well.”

The magazine is lying on the armchair my mother has vacated. It’s the third issue of
Weird World,
published by Gannet Press of Birkenhead. On the cover a gleeful befogged skull hovers above a marsh. While the issue isn’t dated, my father has pencilled
1956
at the top of the contents page, which lists “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle” and two tales by authors I recognise as local, Eric Frank Russell and G. G. Pendarves, born in 1885 of a Cornish family that had been drawn to Liverpool. Russell’s contribution is “Vampire from the Void,” in which a voracious extraterrestrial lands in Liverpool, devouring its first victims outside James Street Station before feasting on drivers in the Mersey Tunnel. The victims are said to have “gone where the good niggers go,” and the brittle yellowed pages also emphasise the historical nature of the tale reprinted from a 1939 pulp magazine, but I don’t see why this should interest Lucinda or me. Or did my mother mean the story by Pendarves? The editorial says it was an unpublished story
found among her sister’s papers. The sister was a lecturer at the oldest—indeed, then the only—university in Liverpool, and the tale was based to some extent on her research.

It’s called “The Portrait of Jacob Williams.” He’s a Victorian engineer who builds a railway system under his home town of Vivilake. As the work progresses he spends more and more time underground, but is it his concern for security that keeps him there when his employees have finished their shifts? Some wonder what he finds to eat, while others speculate that he may have reverted to his ancestral state, since he’s said to have been born in a cellar and spent his childhood there. The workmen especially dislike the way his appearance seems to be taking on what they suspect is the family look. One day the excavations release a subterranean lake, and he’s among those carried away by the flood. All the bodies are retrieved except his, though a searcher swears he heard someone floundering beyond the limits of the lights. The diggings are bricked up, and Williams is largely forgotten by the time the narrator—his grandson—investigates his heritage. He has been inspired to do so by a painting of his grandfather, from which some of the paint is flaking away. On an impulse more narratively convenient than plausible he scrapes off fragments to reveal that sections of the portrait have been painted over. In the original the subject’s hands were slightly but unmistakably webbed, while his round eyes were far too large and his mouth unpleasantly wide. Worse, with every detail that’s exposed the narrator feels more as if he’s gazing into a mirror.