Creatures of the Pool (38 page)

“Why on earth should anybody want to do that?”

“Maybe to get rid of him. He didn’t make a row till he was told the papers didn’t exist, did he? So the question’s back to you. Why should somebody want him kept out of the library?”

“Do you want me to argue or drive?”

I’m tempted to ask why she can’t do both, but perhaps I’ve made her miss the direct route to the docks. We’re speeding down the concrete flyover that mocks the age of William Brown Street behind its back. Just ahead of the slope to the second Mersey Tunnel we veer left at Deadman’s Lane. Addison Street, it’s called Addison Street, the birthplace of James William Carling, who used to say the dead sent him dreams. Perhaps he meant the recently deceased Edgar Allan Poe, whose work Carling illustrated while he lived in Virginia at the same time as James and Florence Maybrick. He died in the workhouse on Brownlow Hill, close to a lunatic asylum and far too much else, and I’m glad when Lucinda interrupts the monologue of history. “I did find something to show you,” she says. “I can’t now.”

I won’t ask why. She drives along Leeds Street and turns right at Pinfold Lane—Vauxhall Road, which takes us deeper into High Rip territory. I stay quiet—even my mind does, thank God—while she drives into a side street that leads under a railway bridge towards the river. Graffiti glisten like bones dredged up in the dimness beneath the arch. The large ungainly letters spell KEEP OUT, but we’re back in the open before I’m sure whether the last word is TROGS or FROGS; there’s not much difference between them, after all. The little that remains of the narrow street takes us between a small industrial estate and a row of rudimentary houses to Great Howard Street, where Lucinda turns left towards the Pier Head. The vista is dominated by a glassy greenish skyscraper like a challenge to the past, but it’s still
distant when she steers left again. “See, you could trust me,” she says.

We’re in Brookland Street. The sign tells me so, and the double vowel eyes me with pupils that someone has added, spanning the width of each letter. The left-hand pavement is walled off by an edge of the industrial estate. To the right is a patch of waste ground inside a vandalised wire fence, which extends across the far end of the stub of a street in front of a bricked-up railway arch. Presumably the fence was intended to prevent trespassers from climbing onto the railway. “Thanks,” I say as enthusiastically as I’m able and climb out of the car.

The sky seems to sink to meet me, so that I could fancy its darkness is seeping into my head. Certainly the view in front of me—the waste ground scattered with debris and bristling with gloomy weeds—is no more illuminating than illuminated. A few jagged sections of mosaic must have belonged to the floor of the bombed church. A diagonal stretch of mosaic has been prised up, revealing an elongated patch of clay. At first I think only the age of the clay is troubling me, whyever it should, and then I see that it has preserved a set of tracks.

They can’t be footprints—not their actual shapes. They’re too varied, both in their sizes and their grotesquely varied outlines, which appear to be trying vainly to resemble the prints of naked human feet. Weathering must have distorted them, but I can see why the caller to the phone-in said the ruins were supposed to feature a demon’s tracks. Perhaps people thought the church was meant to hold down any lingering presence, but how does this help me find my parents? If my father came to examine the tracks, that was hours ago. I’m distracted by a blurred scrap of song, which at first I think is behind me on the docks, though it isn’t a sea shanty. It’s a feeble or faraway rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I stare along the main road, where the only signs of life are speeding vehicles, and the side street opposite, which leads to the dock road and its massive fifteen-foot
wall. “I don’t know where to go from here,” I complain. “What were you going to show me?”

Lucinda hesitates and then reaches in her handbag for the Frugo Digital. “I’m not sure if it’s any use just now.”

She searches backwards through the calendar before handing me the camera. The miniature screen displays a page of text from which long esses sprout like reeds in a marsh. I have to zoom in to identify the first page of Colquitt’s
Description of Liverpool.
Given that the book is less than two centuries old, the antique esses suggest that he was trying to fish for the past.

“Me to describe in verse my muse alarms;

Our native land attracts by secret charms;

Oft when remote from these salubrious shores

We wish to see our country and its stores.

Behold the Pool, where Neptune’s kin doth dream

Of antic life in marsh and secret stream…”

I have to scan back and forth to read all this. My efforts simply leave me more aware how wretched a poet he was. There’s no trace of the second couplet that my father copied down, and I thrust the camera at Lucinda. “You’re right, it’s no—”

“Look at the next one, Gavin.”

I toggle to it and peer closer. The afternoon twilight seems to intensify the lurid glare of the shrunken page, which is covered with handwriting—not my father’s. There’s virtually no space between the lines, and the letters bend so steeply to the right they’re almost prone, like a forest in a great relentless storm. As I zoom in I could imagine that I’m being drawn into the past, because despite the absence of elongated esses this is the first draft of Colquitt’s poem.

“Shall the muse now relate of Liverpool,

Seated near Mersey’s banks serenely cool?”

So the unpublished version is even worse, but part of the next line catches my eye. As I scan across the couplets they begin, though not immediately, to grow familiar.

“Subject to frequent rains though fit to trade,

And to receive large ships which here are made.

Behold the Pool, where Neptune’s kin doth dream

Of antic life in marsh and secret stream.

Nay, though the Pool be buried furlongs deep,

This stifles not the maggots of its sleep…”

I feel as though I’m close to one—as though the doggerel itself is one. The distant song drifts into my consciousness and prevents me from grasping my ill-formed thoughts. “You see, I’ve been trying to help,” Lucinda says. “I found that in the stacks.”

Her remarks and the photograph are distracting, but from what? She rests a soft hand on my wrist and murmurs “So do you see, if I’ve no problem saying that’s real—”

“Quiet a moment. Can you hear that?”

“I can’t. What—”

“Quiet. You’re not giving it a chance.”

She looks hurt as she takes her hand away to extend a finger across her lips. I don’t know if the wistful mime of muteness is intended to placate me or amuse me, but it’s simply another distraction from the sound of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” As the dogged performance recedes into the distance I’m growing surer that I don’t only recognise the song. I’ve also begun, however reluctantly, to suspect where it’s coming from, but it has retreated farther by the time I squeeze through the gap in the fence.

“What are you doing?” Lucinda calls, but that can’t delay me. Nor can the wire mesh that claws at my sleeve. I stride across the remains of the mosaic, which scrapes its stones together underfoot, to the railway arch. I’m yards short of it when the song recommences, having fallen silent as if the
singer sensed my approach. I don’t believe he can, because he’s on the far side of the wall of bricks inside the arch. He isn’t just beyond it; the hollowness of his voice betrays that he’s in some kind of tunnel—a long one, by the sound of it. He’s my father.

For a moment I think the bridge is somehow deeper than the arch, as though it has achieved a dream of becoming a tunnel. Or could the entire landscape be something else’s dream? I can’t let my half-awake fancies distract me; they feel as if the premature gloom is summoning too many elements of sleep. “It’s me,” I shout. “It’s Gavin. Don’t go away again.”

“What is it?” Lucinda cries through the fence. “What do you think you can hear?”

“I don’t think.” I mustn’t imagine that she’s trying to blot out my father’s voice, which fell silent as soon as I raised mine. “Quiet till I say,” I exhort her and stoop to the bricked-up arch.

Is the dimness hindering my vision, or are my eyes misbehaving somehow? I feel as if my senses are undergoing some adjustment by the time I distinguish a gap in the bricks at the bottom right-hand corner of the arch. Though it puts me in mind of a burrow, surely it’s a vandal’s work. I go down on my knees in the rubble and crouch to the gap. “Gavin…” Lucinda says more or less under her breath.

Perhaps I look as if I’m prostrating myself to a god I’ve rediscovered. My efforts don’t show me much; it’s far darker beyond the bricks. The ground within the arch appears to stir, and even if that’s just an effect of straining my eyes, I find it unappealing. I still have the camera. Holding it close to the gap, I set off the flash.

Something pale and encrusted with earth rears up beneath the arch and then retreats into the blackness. Despite the illusion
of movement, which almost makes me lose my balance, it isn’t alive. If I’m not mistaken, it’s a trapdoor. I poise the camera again and am waiting for the flash to recharge when Lucinda calls “Don’t waste it. Wait, I’ve got a torch.”

I needn’t visualise her leading me into the depths below the trapdoor with a flambeau in her hand. She hurries to the car for a flashlight, which she uses to hold back the ragged edge of the fence while she slips through. She halts some feet away from me on a weedy section of mosaic. “Gavin, you’ve got to tell me what you think you’re hearing.”

“I’m not just now.” When she only gazes at me I add “My father.”

“In there.”

“Yes, in there. There’s more to it than it looks like. I’ll show you. Take a look.”

Her sole response is to hand me the flashlight. I switch it on and poke it through the jagged aperture. I have to go down on all fours and then, not without some one-armed wobbling, move the beam in an arc before I can put the space beyond the bricks together in my head. The wall and its twin on the far side of the arch have enclosed a section of the street, where pavements strewn with rubble flank an equally littered stub of roadway. The object I mistook for a trapdoor is a raised flagstone on the right-hand pavement. I have to hold the flashlight by the very end of its rubbery tube before I’m sure that the blackness exposed by the flagstone isn’t just a square patch of earth. It’s a hole deeper than the beam can reach. “I knew it,” I blurt.

“What did you think you knew, Gavin?”

“See for yourself. You can’t see from there.”

As I rise to my feet, leaving the flashlight in the gap, Lucinda squats and crouches forward. I’m about to demand a reaction by the time she says “Children.”

“Where? What do you mean?”

“Children must have broken in, mustn’t they? Nobody else would do that.”

“Maybe, but they aren’t who’s there now.”

She waves the flashlight at the bricked-up darkness. “Nobody is, Gavin.”

“Not in there, below it. There’s a tunnel if you look.”

The beam alights on the raised flagstone and sinks into the beginnings of the depths. “I wouldn’t call that a tunnel,” says Lucinda. “You aren’t saying a grown person would try to get in it.”

“Yes, I am. They have. There’s room.”

“But why would anybody want to?”

“I’ll be finding out. Can I get through?”

As she stands up I see her eyes are moist. “I suppose you have to exhaust every avenue,” she says.

However grotesque my behaviour appears, it has to be right. I’m returning to all fours when Lucinda says “You won’t need the camera as well, will you?”

I hand it to her and go prone on the rubble, a position from which it feels unnatural to speak. “I’ll shout if I need to,” I tell her. “My phone isn’t going to work.”

I can think of nothing more to say, and so I crawl through the gap, hitching myself on knees and elbows over the rubble. Bricks scrape my shoulders until I crouch lower. My heel sends a piece of debris across the waste ground with a clatter and a clink, and then I’m through, shoving the flashlight ahead. Its beam slithers along the littered pavement and draws the walls out of the dark. As I wobble to my feet there’s a prolonged rumble overhead, and the bridge shudders all around me. The disturbance isn’t thunder or an earthquake, it’s the reverberation of a train, and only the unsteadiness of the flashlight beam shifted the walls. The resonance gathers under the bridge and fills my ears until I feel as if it’s undermining all my senses while I examine where I am.

It smells like a dungeon where the sunlight never enters—earthy and damp. The truncated sections of roadway and pavements resemble an exhibit in a museum, a sample of a street from some undetermined past. The museum itself
would be derelict, given the patches of lichen glistening with moisture on the walls. The raised flagstone puts me in mind of a grave, perhaps because it’s resting against a mound of earth. As I step forward the light pokes ever deeper into the square hole, which has roughly the same outline as the flagstone. I’m at the edge before I see exactly what’s beneath. The hole penetrates several feet of clay, below which is a tunnel scattered with fragments of brick that must have formed part of the ceiling. Propped more than a foot beneath the hole in the pavement, a ladder irrelevantly reminiscent of a window-cleaner’s stands on the floor of the tunnel.

As the rumble of the train continues to oppress my senses I wonder what the sequence of events may have been. Could vibrations from the railway have weakened the tunnel roof? Perhaps nobody knew the tunnel was there. If it wasn’t Williamson’s doing—there’s no record that he dug so close to the river—he’s rumoured to have had imitators. It isn’t so far from the site of the castle, from which a tunnel led to the Pool, and it’s nearer still to Exchange Flags, the stage James Maybrick trod while he conducted his business. That whole area is underlaid by passages and subterranean rooms, and how far may the burrows extend in this direction? Even the known tunnels under the city are said to be as numerous as the streets. I’m being distracted by the stream of consciousness that’s the history of Liverpool and by the thunder penned beneath the bridge. Did someone dig the hole because they heard sounds in the tunnel? Whatever they found, is that why the bridge—this one and no other along the embankment—was closed off? Did they neglect to make the hole safe, or was it reopened after the arch was bricked up? All of this feels like yet another secret the city is trying to keep, and I’ve resolved none of it by the time the train draws its tail across the bridge. As the rumble fades into the distance I hear the sound it has been concealing. It’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” farther off than previously but just as audible. My mother has joined in.