Desire Line (23 page)

‘I'm not doing that for nobody, not me— I told him fuckin' straight.'

‘So next week she's in again
and they say they'll have another go but they tell the family straight they're not giving much for her chances. Hardly worth bothering. So no she says.'

Finally: ‘Won't come back here… well I don't think so anyroad. Got better things to do.'

Nothing after this though she waited. But there had to be a last reveller to walk home with a decisive summing up. Someone had rebelled at last: good for him or her. Or was gone away from Rhyl already… or had rejected one last try, having exhausted the very dregs of optimism: such a relief. It was enough to make her sigh and snuggle down into her alien clothes, letting peace and the smoothness of the scene filter through her veins until it combated the cold, drove off the need for a next thing, whether action or event, movement or speech. Finally, even those
particular
thoughts were quietened that had plagued her like moths fast inside a lamp. Her phone chirruped and the temptation was to pitch it out there and enjoy the splash, throw it as far as she could. Instead, ‘Hello?'

‘Sara! Where are you?'

‘I'm here. Watching the water. Josh.'

‘Where the fuck's here?'

‘Here. Josh, listen… listen. It's very… polished… and peaceful.' The alliteration was a trap and caught her tongue. ‘Pestil… pest-il-lent Murcotts… nowhere to be seen! Anyway I think you made it all up, about… wanting trouble when they… all wedding rings and… bars of chocolate.
You
came looking… Yes?' But it seemed an age ago. ‘Now no one's here at all. Won't come back.
Got better things to do
.
Never much of a chance anyway. Remember?' Ought he to remember?

‘Eh? Yeah, yeah… 'course I do. Why don't we keep talking, huh? Sara! Hey,
Sara!
Describe to me how you feel.'

Strangely she couldn't think of anything significant. ‘I'm very… calm. I know that.' Out from the blackness a duo of light blades came slithering towards her, eating up the ripples like live things.

‘OK. What else?
What else Sara?
'

‘And tired.' She would have tried to continue if only to please him but now a series of novel sounds, scrapes and crunches and then some dry thing snapping, distracted her. Maybe not that close, going away in fact… or were they coming closer?

‘Tired? Are you? Sit down then. You just sit there. Don't move!'

‘Really, really tired. I'm so-o sorry Josh. I can't find an answer… to tell you. I have to go.'

‘Sara!'

When the dark figure loomed at her back if she were aware, it went unremarked by Sara, giddy but determined, dragging her reluctant body upright and forward. There was neither lip nor discernible edge to the lake or none her toes could detect in the new cheap shoes beginning to rub.

II

Shade

The List's always being maintained by somebody so it can look like the people on it are still active centuries later, works in progress.

The Vanished. We love them better than The Here.

Welsh chieftain Owain Glyndwr and minor league writer Ambrose Bierce are never coming back nor lunatic Lord Lucan, yet they've plugged into a way of staying famous. Go with plenty of style and a lack of witnesses and you join the tribe of the mythic. That's your payback the world over. In France, for instance, they worship vaporised intellectuals and favourite is Louis Le Prince who not only beat the Lumière brothers to inventing motion pictures by years but was way ahead of all the other competitors, including Thomas Edison. Yet guess who went on to patent the process? This leaves Le Prince's small-but-massive achievement as a frustration. Watch his few frames of loaded wagons crossing an urban bridge.
Please.
Only the second film ever made— but blink and you miss it. A restless-footed man squeezing an accordion will be Le Prince's next subject and if he'd stayed around somebody could've asked about that. Of all things to record on silent film why choose a performer on a
really difficult
musical instrument? Is it a joke? The first ever prediction of the talkies? A Gallic metaphor? We'll never know. Both these clips play as if on a time machine because remember they're the second and third glimpses
ever
of the past. But best of all is Le Prince's first attempt. A dead woman walks in an English garden. She's his relative and in just over a week, and before the film is seen by anyone outside the family, she'll die. Of natural causes. I've watched it over and over and every time an odd thing strikes me – she steps
backwards
out of shot. No obvious reason for it. But in that instant the camera becomes predator and this solid woman upholstered in clothes, nineteenth-century style, seems to deflate. Like she has a premonition and is sneaking away, avoiding notice. Just as the figure behind the lens will soon do. September 16
th
1890 Le Prince boarded a train for Paris and never got off and wherever he went, the secrets of the world's first cinematographer went with him.

Alfred Hitchcock, you made use of every one of these motifs but never provided a solution for Le Prince. What a movie that would've been!

My own subject Sara Meredith, (b. Sara Althea Severing, 1968, Oxford, England) was an historian who arrived in a certain seaside town and never left. She featured among the UK's missing for nearly three decades and for most of them also on the wheressara? site, hosted from the Virgin Islands by an American named Charity Weiksner. All the known facts about Sara were here, plus Sara tributes, Sara theories and every nervy interview Sara ever gave— have a look, see if you agree she'd rather be anywhere else. And of course Sara sightings. These go right back to her disappearance in 2008. The best (May 9
th
2010) has her coming from ‘a Eucharist service', a Sara-like shape on some tourist snap of Salisbury Cathedral. One illegible line entered in their Intercession Book, same day, was ‘almost certainly by Sara'. Another year she popped up in Florence, among crowds leaving the Uffizi as the light fades. It's billed as, ‘Our only vid but fully checked out!' (Who by?) Yet you have to give credit. Sara was known to love the city. The recent authentication of
St Francis Tended by Doves
as by Bellini had brought his fans flocking and made it extra smart as choice of venue for a faker. But a believer of Charity Weiksner herself, among others – I'd guest into the wheressara? community from time to time. Just out of curiosity, just in case. I wasn't tempted to clue them my identity. I preferred to enjoy in private a following that seemed to swell – and swell.
Sara
really was
a work in progress
. Female students from Munich to Manila added courses of brick. Abused, low-status women testified to turning their lives around under Thomasina Swift's banner. Sightings dried up and the tributes substituted. Frequent updates and moderating meant crazies with this lost one in their cellars got hustled out of Saraville automatically.

The day her body was identified the site went down.

Here's a lighter note to finish up. Only in Britain would The Missing Top Ten include a horse. When national characteristics come into play a bay colt easily takes the lead, our equivalent of Louis Le Prince. Shergar won the 1981 English Derby by a record ten lengths. Then he was kidnapped by the IRA from his stable and a perfect animal's never seen again. My mother never had much interest in history but when I was a child she did tell me Shergar's story.

Chapter 17

Three weeks after she came ashore, and less than twenty-four hours since I found her ghost waiting in Gaiman Avenue, I've fled Rhyl. Or it looks like it and I'm content with that for now. The instant Sara Meredith was known to be deceased, I'd merited a personal visit from the authorities. Unpleasant, even if you manage to be out. Having organised leave of absence – suspicious otherwise – from a Forward Rhyl not far off deceased itself, I'm tucked into a seat aboard the Sealink morning ferry out of Holyhead to Dublin with someone else's drinks containers already rolling round my feet. Just passed Salt Island's conical 1821 lighthouse (probably the second oldest in Wales), the good/bad/ugliness of a failing seaport at the tip of nowhere is behind us. We're aimed into a big swell under a roof of boiling cloud, though aimed sounded too positive. Hopping is more like. The
Stena Coole Park
was Dublin-bound in a series of ungainly, mistimed splats. Even spray hitting the curved glass failed every pattern test. Up to eye-level, then barely above the sealing strip then it was washing the whole pane as though we'd dived. I hate planes— and boats almost as much. I should've been doing this in summer at least when strong light gave the surface proper edges, made shapes and fins for a half-Japanese to sketch and keep his attention off any messages routed direct from belly to brain. The ALL-NEW ANTI-SICKNESS DRUG!! TRANKIJEN!!! sold me in the port cafeteria, as replacement for my effective discontinued brand, didn't work for me. Nor did shutting my eyes. Nor did trying not to think about who I'm going to meet.

Like Trankijen, this journey wasn't what it seemed for me. For a start mine isn't a random flight but a familiar one, being the
n
th time I've taken a train and then boarded a boat (the testing bit) before picking a car up for the four-hour slog north west to Josh Meredith's home. In Co. Mayo now. I've known him,
thought
I've known him, known
of
him, and tried to get to know him, in that order, throughout my life. And usually the trip's something to look forward to because we don't meet often enough. Also – I may as well own up – because my destination is Westport. Laid out by Cassels and the great James Wyatt it's a masterpiece and that rarity in Ireland, a model town. Each return tells me something new about developing a coastal site for habitation, how any vista should include a glimpse of water, a bridge or at least one mountain, so adding value to the other elements. There are streets in Westport that are pure planner's erotica—

—such as this, inviting South Mall. Trees along it
and
with a river diving under in a grey stone channel. I've come in via the N5 for speed but am cruising now through the pocket, busy centre. Small-scale shops and numerous bars and offices and houses are spruce in multi-colours and new combinations of strawberry and cream, silver and jade. (Always cheerful as they can make it— also
wrong
today.) The Jester is one building I can pick out straight away, being a public bar inset into a pair of villas that lord it over the street. Lemon and lime livery is being finished off on the pub frontage half— redoing your property is, as Josh says, the local obsession. Something to be proud of OMP. Respect to Westport.

Reluctantly I follow the CARROWBAUN sign to where Westport will thin out and already I can feel my anxiety rising another notch. Just to be perverse, the heavy cloud I've travelled under suddenly splits and late-afternoon sun catches the fresh grass along verges that replace pavement here – and makes me notice the samey white coats on many newer homes. So the house I'm after really stands out in cobalt blue. It definitely isn't new – the front was rendered when Westport was first Georgian-ised but low eaves give away a cottage past, that and opening straight onto the road. I've always admired Josh's choice of solid and workmanlike. But this year – the Year of Rhyl's Great Wave, the Year of Sara's Comeback – I park and knock, different moods fighting it out inside me. Impatience to get what I've come for over and done with looked like winning.

He was quick with the door. ‘Hello, Josh.' I hadn't noticed the chill till bowing my head gets me a cold hand on the back of the neck. At this last moment it occurred to me I usually had a gift – Welsh cakes or the sticky fudge he liked and couldn't get in Ireland – and today I was here worse than empty-handed.

‘Yori! Get in!' He backed into a hallway wide enough for only one not-fat person at a time but beyond there was a flicker in the gloom and I smelled the familiar wood smoke. The room he lived in had a fire lit, something Josh did every day apart from the summer months, at five. ‘You on your own?' he said over his shoulder. ‘What about bringing a girl here sometime? I know that girl from uni wasn't – in the end – but there's another, yeah? Bound to be.'

‘That project might be on hold.'

He laughed.

A couple of grown men in a space less than twenty square metres, we were awkward. He did raise an arm as if about to— but the gesture fizzled out. At least, ‘You're looking fit,' he could say.

‘Yes.' He wasn't. His hair was still thick enough to stand cropping, the scalp barely visible, and he was dressed as ever in wrinkle-free khaki pants and a half-zip tan baselayer open at the neck. There were sports-shoes showing bare feet through. He was a figure from my past and loomed over me just as he used to, sinewy and spare. Pretty good so far. Except time had riddled him, unchecked, like a disease. Much worse than I remembered. I had the weird notion I was back home after one of those faster than light trips they're saying now will work, you're still young and then you find everyone else is ancient. ‘I'm here, anyway.'