Creatures of the Pool (37 page)

Her mouth widens with a smile, but I’m not quite able to respond. We’re opposite the churchyard, where a policeman has just clapped a hand over his mouth as he recoils from stooping to some object. The next moment drops spatter my forehead, and I have the thoroughly unwelcome notion that they’re from the water that has burst through the grave. Or are my brows exuding them? I stop short of imagining they’ve welled up from my brain as Lucinda retreats beneath the bus shelter and I recognise the start of yet another downpour. It isn’t only because we’re too close to the graveyard and its exposed contents that I say “Aren’t we going in your house?”

Lucinda looks away from the swarm of police in the churchyard. Wistfulness, if that’s what it is, has resurfaced in her eyes. “Come on, then,” she says. “You’ll have to see.”

As I follow Lucinda up the garden path, which resembles a track through a marsh rather than between the halves of the small lawn, something starts to flap at my back. It puts me in mind of some undefined but vast shape that has awakened in a dark place. The sound gives way to pattering, an amplified version of the onset of the rain. The police are erecting a tent to conceal the remains in the graveyard. Lucinda glances towards it and hurries to unlock her front door.

The wide high-ceilinged hall is white as innocence. At least, the walls would be except for the afternoon darkness, which appears to have soaked into the turfy green carpet that extends along the hall and up the stairs. Pots of ferns are lined up along the skirting-board of the party wall. I’ve seen those before, but not the photographs that decorate the hall and climb beside the stairs as if they’re striving towards the skylight. As I realise that all the photographs were taken underground, Lucinda says “I want to see.”

When she runs upstairs I have a sense of her ascending towards the light. She’s in the front bedroom by the time I realise that she means to look into the churchyard. I hurry after her, not only in case she finds she would rather not be alone with the view. Another sound besides her soft footsteps is audible in the room—a surreptitious lapping of water.

I’m halfway up the stairs when the skylight begins to vibrate. I could be gazing at the underside of an aquarium. As soon as I reach the landing I see what I heard in the bedroom. A water bed draped with a leafy quilt, from beneath
which a pair of pillows peeks, occupies a good deal of the floor. The vibration of my footfalls sets it in motion again as I join Lucinda at the window.

Two policemen are struggling to raise the tent against the downpour, and I’m reminded of a giant umbrella. The pool around the tottering obelisk has grown turbulent with rain. Surely that’s the only movement or at least the only source of any, however restless the glistening bones appear to be. That’s just water surging over them; they can’t really be putting on translucent flesh. I’m grateful when the tent hides them, even if I might have liked to be sure what was happening to them. The sight of the policemen stepping well back doesn’t help. “Poor things,” says Lucinda.

As I retreat from the window the water bed stirs again, and I could fancy that it’s eager to be used. I don’t need to be reminded that I’m in not just her house for the very first time but the bower of her bedroom, and being teased by a faint perfume from the army of cosmetics on the Victorian dressing-table. Their twins float low on the surface of the oval mirror, which shows me shambling across the room against a backdrop of ferny wallpaper. I wait beneath the inundated skylight until Lucinda emerges from the room, and then I say “So are you going to tell me?”

“What would you like to know, Gavin?”

This only makes me aware how little I’m sure I would like. I gesture at the subterranean photographs, which appear to be coming obscurely alive with shadows of rain. “Why are you doing this?”

“How about a book?”

“How about one? Which book?”

“Yours, I hope.”

She’s trying on a smile, but I feel as if she’s referring to a development that has escaped my consciousness. “I’ve got nothing to do with any book.”

“I was thinking you could write one. I hope it wasn’t just my dream.”

“Don’t start talking about those.” Even if Lucinda hasn’t, I’m certain someone has kept putting dreams or rather the subject of them into my head. Somewhat less sharply I add “What kind of book?”

“About Liverpool. That’s what you’re all about, Gavin. If you aren’t going to be able to do so many tours you should publish everything instead, the history and all your stories. You never know, it could help revive your tours.”

We’ve been descending the stairs like the leaders of a stately ritual procession through animated adumbrations of water. I’m distracted by the photographs, which seem to form even more of a labyrinth than the tunnels they depict. Perhaps that’s simply in my head. As Lucinda takes another step down and turns yet again to me I’m reduced to protesting “They aren’t my stories.”

“If they’re the city’s that’s better still, isn’t it? It made you and they’re part of it just like you.”

I’ve begun to find her eagerness unsettling, and I have to say “I’m not sure how I can use these pictures when I wasn’t there.”

“We’ll get you down there, don’t worry. I just thought I should take them while I could,” she says and gazes up at me from the hall. “Do you think you might like my dream, sorry, my proposal a little bit?”

“More than a bit, and forget what I said about dreams.” I take hold of her shoulders, murmuring “You understand if my mind’s elsewhere at the moment. I only wish I knew where.”

“You will, I’m certain.” She puts more reassurance into resting her soft grasp on my hands, then glances past me at an almost shapeless noise—another onslaught of rain above the stairs. “What would you like to do now?” she says.

The sense of water revives my thirst. “I wouldn’t mind a drink,” I croak.

“Will it be all right from the tap?”

“I’m not my father.”

I follow her past subterranean vistas to the kitchen. It’s brimming with water or at least with liquid shadows, which crawl over items—cupboards, a table and chairs, kitchen equipment, a stone sink—so pale they might have forgotten what sunlight is like. Beyond the window a garden and the backs of houses are yielding most of their shape to the rain on the glass. Lucinda fills a pair of tankards inscribed
LIVING LIVERPOOL
from the tap, which delivers with such spirit that it wets her hand. While I gulp she sips and then refills my tankard as I ask “Did you get any pictures today?”

“A few before we had to run for it. I haven’t had time to print them out.” She fetches her handbag from the foot of the banisters and produces a small black Frugo Digital camera. “See what you make of them,” she says and switches on the screen.

Her hand must still be wet from the tap. I wipe the camera on my shirt before examining the miniature images, which show yet more tunnels stretching into darkness. I assume they’re in geographical sequence, unless Lucinda looked back to take some of the photographs, but they add to my sense of an indefinable labyrinth, whether Williamson’s or in my skull or both. Most of the tunnels have arched brick roofs, but some passages are roughly triangular. A few of the photographs include explorers leading the way or glancing at the camera, their faces blanched by the flash. They’re the only signs of life, although two successive images produce an illusion of some other movement in the dimness. I toggle between these and then zoom in, none of which clarifies the impression. “What were you taking there?” I have to ask.

Lucinda sips from Living Liverpool and tilts her head. “One of the side tunnels.”

“Yes, but what were you trying to catch?”

“Just the focus. I wasn’t sure I’d got it first time.”

“Then what did you think you were seeing?”

“I couldn’t tell you, Gavin. Someone thought they heard
water and that rather distracted me. They were all for getting out, and we did.”

I zoom in closer—too close for clarity. Zooming out doesn’t help either. In the first image, the long narrow triangular passage seems to end at a wall glistening with moisture and pallid with lichen that has never seen the sun, but in the second the passage leads only into darkness. Did the flash fall short of the depths on that try? I needn’t imagine that the first image shows a body—even part of one—that shrank from the light like a snail into a shell before the flash could work again. I’m even less happy to wonder if it had already started shrinking—in which case, from what size and shape?—by the time the flash caught it in the act, and so I’m glad when the blackbird in my pocket twitches awake and starts to sing. The phone doesn’t identify the caller, and I can only blurt “Hello?”

“Who’s that?”

“I know who I am,” I tell him with all the conviction I can summon. “Who are you?”

“You first.”

I manage not to clench my fingers on the keypad. “Gavin Meadows. Satisfied? Your turn.”

“Were you in here before?”

“In where, you—” Barely in time I control the explosion of language enough to say “Is that Frugone? Then I was.”

“Gerry here.” He pauses long enough for me to wonder if he’s the salesman I approached, and then he says “I’ve got your information.”

“Go ahead. Go ahead.”

His hesitation makes me repeat the plea, which he uses as an excuse for another silence. At last he says with some pique “It was from Brookland Street near the docks.”

“What’s there?”

“How should I know? I’m just telling you what you asked. That’s your fifty quid’s worth.”

“Well, thank—”

By now he has departed with an electronic bleep that sounds like censorship. Perhaps he’s afraid of being overheard. Lucinda holds out my tankard in case I need a drink. My voice has indeed grown hoarse. As I take a gulp she says “Was it good news?”

“It has to be. It’s where my father sent his last text from.”

“Oh, Gavin, where?”

“Brookland Street. It’s somewhere by the docks. Have you got a street map?”

I’m at her back as she opens the door to the front room, where I glimpse leaves sprouting from far too many surfaces in the restless dimness. She switches on the light, revealing that the leaves are printed on the cushions of a suite as well as on the wallpaper. A table squatting in front of the settee is piled with volumes of old maps of Liverpool. As Lucinda stoops to them she says “These are for your book as well.”

She selects a volume and turns to the index. She’s leafing through the maps when I see from the cover that the latest is no more recent than James Maybrick. “Here it is,” she says. “The site of, well, that may not still be there.”

I don’t know why this should make me nervous to ask “What?”

She rests a fingertip on the page as she holds up the book, then moves her hand away. Her finger hasn’t left a mark on the page; the grey not quite oval stain beneath the short narrow street bridged by a railway is a dock. “Just a church,” she says. “St Cuthbert’s church.”

As Lucinda’s car reaches the top of the hill, having emerged from the garage near the houses, a last sweep of the windscreen wipers shows me the churchyard. Just a few inches of the tent are visible above the wall. Two policemen flank the gateway to bar the inquisitive, specifically a woman with two hounds straining at their leashes as if they’re eager to hunt the denizens of the graveyard. The policemen remind me so much of guards that I could imagine they’re enacting some historical memory. I lose sight of them as the car starts downhill, and I try to leave the stirrings of history behind as well.

The rain has stopped, but clouds are lingering or reforming above the river. There’s no reason I should fancy that they’re waiting for us to arrive at the street near the dock. I’m already sufficiently troubled by wondering why we’re bound there, but where else can we go? Brookland Street passes under a railway bridge, which sounds like the location of my father’s last call. The church was mentioned on the phone-in after his appeal, but how significant is that? Like the request slip he filled in, it could be a clue that seems to lead only to another random dead end in the labyrinth of my search. The thought prompts me to grope in my pocket for the slip.

Suppose it has grown as illegible as the page of John Strong’s notes? It isn’t, but I have to wait while the car descends the hill to Pembroke Place. Traffic lights halt us outside an old infirmary that the university has taken over, and I flourish the slip. “That’s why I was in the stacks.”

Lucinda accords it barely a glance before concentrating on the road. “All right, Gavin, I believe you.”

I wave it in front of her. “Does it look familiar?”

“Don’t do that unless you want us to have an accident.” She pushes the slip away, although the lights are staying red, and gives it another blink. “I deal with them every day,” she says.

“You don’t at the moment, and you know what I mean.” When she accelerates as the lights drop to green I say “My father wrote it. It’s his request for John Strong’s papers. It proves they exist after all.”

“How does it?”

We’re passing the School of Tropical Medicine. My mouth has grown dry again, and my forehead prickles as if the school has released a fever. Once upon a time these symptoms of disease were feared by people who lived here, close to the upper reaches of the Pool. I swallow and croak “One of you took it in the stacks.”

“That doesn’t really prove anything either, does it? We don’t assume people make requests up.”

“He didn’t. I saw it in the catalogue.” I don’t know whether I’m flapping the slip for emphasis or from frustration as I insist “And this was on the shelf where they brought the papers from.”

“Was there a gap? There wasn’t, Gavin, was there? I looked.”

“You couldn’t have looked too hard if you didn’t find this. Why was it there if nobody brought him anything?”

“Maybe they left it to try and avoid an argument.”

I feel as if not just the dark clouds but the shops on both sides of London Road are shutting off light from my mind. I could wish they would give way to the old mills and cottages and the view of fields beyond. For a moment, as a shaft of light between them finds the car, the landscape seems to have reverted, but the clouds have released a sunbeam along
a side street. As the library comes into view beyond the Welly Market I say “More like they wanted to start one.”