Creatures of the Pool (28 page)

“I hope that helps,” a voice calls—not the voice I’m expecting. I shut the door behind me and wait for a response. None comes, but it takes me some moments to wonder if the comment was addressed to me. “Lucinda,” I say, “where’s my mother?”

“I was going to ask you that, Gavin.”

Lucinda has appeared at the end of the hall. She looks doubtful and somewhat concerned, and not only those. As I go to her I see that my father’s computer tower has returned to my workroom, where the eye of the answering machine is lidlessly alert—the number of messages. Beyond the bag of umbrellas the trail of waterlogged research leads to the main room, where more of the contents of the boxes are scattered on the carpet. “Have you been looking at those?” I’m prompted to ask.

“A bit. I’m glad you’re back,” Lucinda says as if this follows, then seems to contradict herself. “I thought you might be Gillian.”

As we share a soft embrace that grows firmer I say “How long have you been here?”

“Twenty minutes?”

“And there wasn’t any sign of her? She didn’t leave a note.”

“I can’t see one, can you?”

“Then I don’t expect she’s gone far. Maybe she wanted something from the shops.”

Lucinda lifts her head from resting it against my neck and meets my eyes. “So long as she hasn’t gone because of me.”

“Did she know you were coming?”

“I didn’t say when we spoke.”

“Then it can’t have been you, can it? It wouldn’t have been anyway,” I add, ashamed of my clumsiness. “She’d like you to be here.”

“And where have you been?”

“Just to see an old friend of my father’s. Her mother did most of the talking but I don’t know how much was made up. I think I ended up as confused as she was.”

How eager am I to rationalise the incident on the train? It already feels like a waking dream, and what else could it have been in any world that makes sense? It’s even more absurd to think it wasn’t my own dream. I need to feel rational—not just feel but be. The newsreader finishes a report about flooding in Liverpool—the loop line beneath the city centre has been drained, but engineers fear this won’t last—and returns to the subject of my father. She repeats her headline and reminds me that he has been missing since last week, then adds that until recently he worked at the art gallery and issues a description that sounds disconcertingly like me. That’s all, not even a mention of his bicycle. As the newsreader forecasts further downpours Lucinda says “The radio was on when I got here.”

“Then she can’t be far away.”

“Shall I make dinner for the three of us?”

“If you could.”

It isn’t that I lack enthusiasm for the idea, but rather that I feel as if our embrace and our murmured conversation is trying to maintain a sense that all is or will be fine. As Lucinda turns towards the kitchen she says “Are those Gillian’s?”

She’s gazing at the table, which is strewn with bits of research. There’s the score of an early sixties hit, “The Froggy Hop” by Liverpool band Davy and the Divers, as well as their later ballad “I’d Swim the Mersey for You.” Next to these is a reproduction of Adrian Henri’s painting
Christ Feeds the Multitude in Paradise Street
, hardly a realistic depiction of the place, since the crowd is overlooked by posters for John West and the signs of fish and chip shops. Some of the beneficiaries of the miracle resemble the seafood they’ve been handed. Soon the street will be part of the Paradise Project, a development that sounded to my father like a
science fiction horror film. Beside the page are photocopies of John Lennon’s satirical sketch of a blackbird fly and his cover rough for
Sergeant Leper’s Bony Parts Club Band
, and I see what Lucinda had in mind; the image of misshapen Liverpool worthies is pinned down by my spare set of keys. “She didn’t take them,” I protest.

“She’ll ring then, won’t she?”

“You’d have heard if she did, wouldn’t you.” This prompts me to ask “Did you check for calls in case anybody didn’t leave a message?”

“I didn’t,” Lucinda admits, and I hurry to fetch the landline receiver from its stand. I’m keying the digits as I tramp back along the hall. The automated voice tells me I was called and pieces the number together. It’s among the ones I know best. The call was made almost an hour ago from my parents’ house.

I haven’t time to answer Lucinda’s anxiously enquiring look. I jab the key to connect me with the number and strain my ears to hear more than the repetitions of the distant bell. For a moment I think it has been interrupted, as if somebody is fumbling at the receiver, but then it goes on, and on, and still on. I don’t realise I’m holding my breath like a victim of drowning until my head begins to swim. The phone has been ringing for minutes now, and isn’t it simply delaying me? “Someone’s rung from the house,” I tell Lucinda. “I’ve got to go up.”

“I can’t take you.”

My brain feels close to incapable of absorbing any more complications. “Why not?”

“Won’t someone have to be here if Gillian can’t let herself in?”

“I should have thought. Can you call me a taxi?”

My father might have responded with the old joke, but she must realise the situation can’t be lightened that way. When she holds out a hand I feel frustrated by having to explain “On your mobile. I want to keep these clear.”

Once she has called a number she remembers Lucinda tells me “Ten minutes.”

That’s at least twice as long as I would have hoped. I’m sure that my mother was called to the house, but why hasn’t she rung to let me know what’s happening? In search of distraction I glance over my father’s notes about Hope Street, which was built along the edge of the Moss Lake. Some of the residents used to steal corpses from the graveyard that supplanted part of the lake and smuggle them in barrels down to the docks. In 1826 the practice was discovered when, according to a no doubt superstitious sailor, the contents of a barrel bound for Glasgow tried to get out, or perhaps he was just talking about some preservative. Before Hope Hall in that street became a theatre it was a chapel, where a sect conducted secret rituals in the basement until a journalist revealed the activities, supposedly designed to regain some kind of closeness to the ancient earth. The doorbell brings some relief from all this, which has set history jabbering in my skull again, and Lucinda is first to the intercom. “He’s coming now,” she tells a blurred voice and gives me a swift hug. “Let me know what’s up.”

A black cab is squatting opposite the merman. As I climb in, the latest rain starts to thump the roof like a soft but relentless pursuer. “Where you going?” says the driver.

Her voice is still blurred—thick with Liverpudlian and perhaps compromised by the looseness of her wide lips. She’s wearing a combat outfit that tones in with the camouflagepatched baseball cap yanked low on her broad head. She stares big-eyed in the mirror while I tell her the address, then seems to expand—at least, her shoulders do—as she crouches towards the wheel, muttering “Ever going to stop?”

She means the rain, which looks capable of washing away the streets or at least the sight of them. The windscreen wipers struggle to dash it aside, so that her ability to see ahead seems close to miraculous. The Victorian streets have been transformed into a liquid impression of massive architecture,
but the downpour slackens as we swing uphill beyond the edge of the old town at Deadman’s Lane. Last year a tenant of one of the houses dreamed so vividly that undiscovered victims of the plague still infested the muddy earth that he complained to the council. It seems I’m not the only one beset by history and whatever it breeds.

Sunlight cuts the clouds open above the bay as we climb the road to Everton. Off to the right is a bridewell still used by the police. Previously it was the site of the house of a man called Harrison, though some of his neighbours declared that he wasn’t a man after he invited them to share his diet, consisting entirely of insects. His guests said he belonged in the zoological gardens beyond the ridge. Dogs were often set to fight in the fields around the zoo, or to hunt anything that ran, and in its latter days the zoo attracted drunks who set animals free, unless they escaped. One large ungainly creature was seen in the nearby pits used for public bathing, though what kind of animal would have taken refuge there? More to the point, can nothing put a stop to the chattering of history in my bruised head? I feel as if it’s even invading my language. But the taxi is speeding along the ridge, and I have a reason to speak—indeed, to repeat it when the driver doesn’t react. “We’re there.”

The house is dripping as though it has been dredged up into the temporary sunlight. It looks repainted by the rain to help the sign attract potential buyers, and I’m able to hope that its cheerful appearance may be an omen of things within. Nobody comes to the door or the windows as the taxi backs up and halts outside the gate, however. “Can you hang on?” I ask the driver.

“Picking someone up?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

This is more inadvertently eloquent than I like. As I hurry along the garden path I feel as if the house is yet another of the places to which I seem compelled to keep returning. How disloyal is it to think of my parents in the
same context as Williamson or Maybrick or the High Rip or the Pool? Surely the weeds flanking the path and beginning to sprout from it can’t have visibly grown since my last visit, even given all the rain. I shove my key into the lock and push the front door wide.

Someone is or has been here. The hall is more deserted than last time; the armchair that was standing sentry by the phone has returned to the front room. The phone is on its hook, and the note my mother left is lying on the stairs. It flutters a little to greet me, but otherwise I’m met only by an intensified smell of damp if not of mould. “Mother?” I call. “Father? Anyone?”

The words drop like stones into an empty well. I glance at the taxi driver, who seems close to pressing her face against the window of her cabin, and then head for the stairs. Damp patches mark the carpet all the way up. Despite their irregularity, the trail could have been made by someone with wet feet. Perhaps their hands were wet too, because half a word of my mother’s note is distorted by moisture; it looks as if she wanted to be reassured that my father was sane rather than safe. I pray, however aimlessly, that both of them are both as I call “It’s me. It’s only me.”

Why am I nervous of looking in their room? I grasp the clammy plastic doorknob and ease the door open. At first the sunlight through the window dazzles me, and then I make out a dark shape, if it can be described as a shape, crawling towards me across the bed. It’s the shadow of a cloud that is lowering itself towards the river. Otherwise the room is deserted, and there’s no sign of life up here apart from a single drip that falls into the bath or into one of the buckets in my father’s workroom.

The smell that the house has acquired rises to meet me as I tramp downstairs. It puts me in mind of lightless places and of a reptile house at the zoo. There are even traces of damp on the telephone receiver—of moist fingerprints, at any rate, so blurred that I doubt they would be of use to the
police. Should I ring Wrigley or Maddock about the latest developments? My mind seems unable to focus on the situation. Once I’ve removed the phone from the hook I open the door under the staircase.

Nobody can be hiding there—certainly not my parents. Perhaps the patch in the darkest corner has grown, and the smell is stronger, but that’s all. If a shape appears to surge out of the corner as I close the door, it’s a shadow, and I refuse to look again. I need to concentrate on the rooms, though they feel drained of memory, more lifeless than museum exhibits. Mustn’t I phone the police? If I do, will they intensify their search or scale it down? I haven’t decided when I notice an item on the chair that was moved from the hall.

It’s the photograph my father scanned into his computer to use as the opening screen. He did indeed manipulate the image. My parents are still holding my younger than teenage hands, but he looks harassed; perhaps he’s nervous that the timer of the camera will be too quick for him. The object in the river at our backs is even harder to define, and the fog makes it look composed of water, but it must be one end of a vessel. I take it for the prow, because there are suggestions of a face—domed forehead, great round eyes, a mouth wider than the three of us. Would any ship have had a figurehead like that just a couple of decades ago? Perhaps it was part of some historical celebration, but then why can’t I remember it? I could fancy that my parents are trying to ignore whatever’s behind us and distract me from it, in which case they seem to have succeeded. I pick up the photograph, though it feels almost as damp as the scene it depicts, and lock the house. “Got what you came for?” says the driver.

I’ve no answer except to display the photograph as I resume my seat. Having twisted her head around on no great length of neck, she says “That your wife?”

“My mother,” I say and then catch up with her mistake. “That’s me in the middle.”

“And what’s that behind you?”

“You tell me.”

“How should I know?” She turns away, tugging her cap down as if the hairless nape of her neck feels exposed. “Looks like something I used to dream about when we lived by the river.”

I’m by no means sure of wanting to learn “What?”

Her eyes widen in the mirror—bulge, even—with some kind of disbelief. “It was a dream. I was a kid.”

The taxi swings towards the river, above which the tethered metal birds blaze like a brace of phoenixes as the clouds train the sunlight on them. I rub my fingers dry and take out my mobile. Her number has barely rung when Lucinda says “What’s happening, then?”

“My mother isn’t there.”

“Oh, Gavin, I’m sorry. Anything at all?”

“No, I mean she hasn’t come home.”

“I gathered that much, but is there—”

“My home. My home now. Where you are.” Is my brain so overloaded that I’ve lost control of language? “You’re telling me she isn’t there,” I manage to say without snarling.