Desire Line (29 page)

—and ‘She drowned', I'd wanted to say to Josh and get agreement. It'll be just a case of finding the right spot, toppling over and giving up. Result? Loss of self, whatever that felt like. But I hadn't dared. (I should be calling Eurwen now, having a real conversation not a made-up one.)
Nothing
isn't acceptable, grandfather. I'm here intending to walk the length of sea-meets-land, for instance, while I reshoot the whole film of you and her. She was hard-going and a drunk, jealous when sober but—
but,
I tell him, you don't look out at the moving acres of
that
and only bother about the rubbish the tide leaves. You loved her. You killed her— or I did.
You're
sorry? Me too and – and this is a bit macabre – I'm also worrying about the thing with the molecules that made up Julius Caesar's last breath. Maybe you know it? A lesson in numbers, well probability really, and Geoffrey's favourite tale. I bet Sara'd been taught once how, inhale and you've a molecule of the ex-dictator's dying gasp in your lungs. Right now. Statistically. Those are the odds and better than Casino Pigalle ever offers. And it'll work for anything, air, water, anything,
*
which means the normal sized waves breaking down there against the concrete each have a taste of my dead ancestor.

See that, Josh? (I'm speeding us forward.) There's the rancid remains of Seaquarium, where you took Eurwen as a little girl. She loved it but ‘wanted to let all the fish go'. Then those stretches of cleared ground let you see SkyTower ahead, still here! The skirt of huts is the clean-up crew's rest area, floodlit to prevent vandalism. I jog on but then have the urge to halt and lean out on a bit of surviving cast iron and smack my lips on brine. Another wave, Josh! Another grain of Sara just made landfall. And why not? Tomiko's hand is what I recorded Quay Street with before it washed away. Part of me's still in Westport with you as right here, right now, my brain sprouts plans for a vacant lot that even in Sara's time was taboo.

My feet have brought us to Rhyl's black hole. And even Josh has run out on me. I'm on my own.

The board fence put up after The Wave has already been breached with lollipop-shaped holes hacked out. I stop at one, listening against Rhyl's wet white noise. We
must
be a ghost town like they claim— there's not so much as a rattle. The only drop-ins tonight apart from gulls are oldies, asleep in their beds but riding the Waltzers, young and reckless again. The Ferris Wheel Sara expected was already scrap by she gets here, gone the way of the first wooden Roller Coaster you could hear halfway to Llandudno— and the rest. Britain's oldest funfair had boasted every rickety ride you could want and every thrill, every promised beauty, every sleazy side-show and freak-show and their hangers on. Wonderful. Human life in miniature. This is a place you can't make, it has to grow, Glenn Hughes will tell you, Ocean Beach, a Pleasureland for a world short on it. Rich kids, poor kids, teenaged lovers, couples so vintage they remembered bathing machines still used as changing huts or thought they did. One size fits all. Then we let run through our fingers. Thirty years on and they've tried their best with gradients in dual planes to lake, river and beach, the finest empty lot in Wales. And every scheme crashed.

I'm scared of the dark and there's not even passing traffic this end of town, the bridge still shut. I'm scared of Nothingness. Started early with Tomiko. He had his alibis, so OK, but missing
Kochi
he filled the dark with
onyudos
and
kashas
and
satoris
and every other subspecies of monster. ‘Pear Tree Spectre', that was a good one, eh Yori? And don't forget dear old
‘
Cobra-Demon That Eats Boy's Ears'
and how it had you pissing the bed.
Right up till I step inside I pretend I'm going to turn and walk off fast instead of stooping through into the void, feeling my way.
Why?
Yori's not saying. Above it's black overcast, underfoot
very
spongy ground. Deprived of one sense you have to rely on others. I ‘see' by memory and nose and lack of echo the vast space stretching ahead, heaped with debris. Further on, across a deserted Wellington Road and beyond there's plenty more of the same, till your imagination takes a startled plunge into Marine Lake (one plan I'd heard was to use spoil to fill it in) and throughout, the overwhelming reek is from pulverised buildings, brought in over the last couple of weeks and spread a metre thick, caustic as lye. I blink with it and teeter forward— then I do brush an object, a good solid flat something, maybe a chunk of Victorian stonework. I clutch on till the shooting stars in my eyes finish. You're meant to clap three times to the
kami
of any location to get on its good side. I managed once and then had to pee, legs spread just where I was— another insult to all the discounted, conned, defrauded and poor that loved the rides.

And now Josh had left me, suddenly Sara's here, jostled along with them.

Links. Outlines. Patterns. Sound. Tightness round the heart. ‘Sara's here' didn't pop up in words. On the rubbish-stench and the ammonia of my own piss, an extra Big Bad wafted up, a certainty. (Not that I believe in ghosts. Or half of me doesn't. But try telling it to your teeth, Yori! Hear the clicking? That's fright music.)
Sara's here
. Part of her always was and what's left has come home with you, Yori. Before the water made bones of her there was a woman chasing the child who loved the Wheel who became the girl coaxing ducks off the lake with bread – as sketched by a young Japanese that taught her, ‘Three clap-hands to the
kami!
' Because if you came to Rhyl you came here.
**
Then all you had to do was wait.

At 3 a.m., late spring in Rhyl, 2040, about where Sara ran aground I sat on a pile of trash and called Eurwen and even though a warm wind still blew from the south, I shivered. When I say we hadn't spoken in years it implies somebody's mistake. A fall out plus brooding results in a final flare-up. Then you get the weight tied to a foot, hers or mine. Wrong. Never over-generous with words, Eurwen's muteness came on gradually.

Having dropped me off with
her
grandparents, Geoffrey and Fleur – thanks to bunching up of the generations they probably seemed like mine as well – Eurwen roamed. OK. She couldn't live with us so didn't. It was almost a relief. And thanks to Fleur I had a lot more communication with a vaguely-familiar Japanese man on the other side of the world than my own mother for the next two decades.

It did me no credit revisiting this as an adult. I got punished. Eurwen made me wait. Then VoiceOnly should've meant a soft reintroduction, neither of us needing to overact. Apologies for waking her first. Not asleep, she corrected. Dead air was her background while the gulls would be pinpointing my location. I finished my story and could feel her thinking hard. I tried a round up with, ‘It is her. I've been to see Josh— that's why it's late. Just back from Ireland. It seemed right to tell him first. Maybe you don't think so?'

‘Mm.'

‘But I didn't wake you, at least?'

True to form, she ignored questions. ‘I knew it would be a shock when— no,
if
we did finally know. But it seems unbelievable. Yet I'd decided she was dead. She may have gone but she wouldn't have
stayed
gone,' she clarified. ‘So it's astonishing
and
half-expected both together. You didn't know her.'

‘No.'

‘And what did
he
have to say? And how did he—' she was able to answer herself at least. ‘Badly, of course.' But her tone had already given the game away. Another ear was listening. I knew whose.

I said, ‘I could come and see you.'

‘You should. Yes. Not now though. I'm about to move.'

Goodbye Eurwen. Never really lost, always there if you kept looking. She actually sounded very close for once.

Notes

*
Honestly? I'm wrong. It doesn't— only works for air. Next morning I realised my mistake. Volume of Atmosphere v Volume of Sea? No contest. Geoffrey would have expected better from me, even tired and distracted and Trankijenned. Me not him.

**
Appendix A

Chapter 20

Libby Jenkinson in a black and sulphur one-piece was at my door next morning like some mad wasp. I was wearing just pants. It earned me a loud coarse whistle, Glenn Hughes style. Why've I let myself got fond of her? Why haven't I moved? Do I think this is what
I
deserve? Before she can start on about so what happened to your holiday etc I get in, ‘Back late— no bread. Never have butter.' Usually it didn't stop her asking.

Her weekend make-up threatened to shatter. ‘Got my own, so—' she gave me the finger, ‘to you Yori. It must be a laugh a minute down them council offices.'

‘Forward Rhyl isn't run by—'

‘Right.' She walked straight ahead, pushing past. Libby has no embarrassment setting. Her little bright eyes darted round my living room that had been her dining room. Not that I could ever see a table set with china and the candles lit. Across the yard was an outhouse with Mr Jenkinson's tools laid out on a homemade bench and a mechanism in bits that he'd been fixing and wrappers from chocolate bars he seemed to have lived on. I still didn't know his first name. ‘God you're massive tidy,' she said, a Tess line. Something else was brewing, I could tell. ‘Oo-oo, hang on what's this then?' She was over at the desk that had been shielded from the door. When I didn't answer she chose Sara's little watch to paw, giving the necklace only a brief poke. ‘Lady pressies? I hope they're not for the one came last night— no night before last, I mean.'

‘
Who?
'

‘I dunno.'

‘A woman?'

Libby thought for a moment, puckering her mouth for me to notice it. It took another dry look before she convinced herself the question was genuine. ‘A she. Never seen her before.'

‘Wanting what?'

‘I wasn't going down there, was I?' Exasperated, though that should've been me, Libby pushed at her fringe with fat fingers. All the heavy rings clinked, the Jenkinson's and pre-Jenkinson's. ‘It was well late and she's banging on the front door. I didn't like the look of it to be honest— I just opened the window and asked what's up and she kept knocking.
Ru-ude!
'

‘And definitely not a person you know?'

‘
No.
Head covered. Ignored
me!
So I shouted you weren't here and she went off.'

‘But she walked like a woman?' I tried.

‘Ah-huh.' Libby's attention was usually short but she stayed with it ‘Prob'ly bladdered,' – while she took another inventory of my possessions. ‘What happened to all your pictures you took down?'

I shrugged. ‘I'm doing better ones.'

‘They weren't that bad. I'll have to go'n buy milk then. Anyhow, good to see you back, love,' she finished, leaving me puzzled by both my late visitor and Libby's out-of-the-blue swerve into niceness. Like someone had propelled her there.

Or scared her.

Speak to Tomiko? Also try to contact Josh and check on his mental state, though Josh often cut himself off from every form of messaging and now was bound to be one of those times. Talking to Tess – much better. The Casino Pigalle lightboards were back up so I told her how I'd walked from the station in the early hours past three Linda Darnells – all
you!
– bodies hairless as geishas, nude apart from their flickering numbers, all with the same invite, Hi Yori! Wanna play me? I've only played CP the once to shut Glenn up but that's all it takes. Now every board in the entire world can go Hi Yori! Wanna—? No, I told it, I'd rather play Tess.

Thought you'd be longer in Ireland, Tess prodded me. You could-of come round. But she liked it I'd rather play Tess, I could tell. It got me out of trouble. Never happened with Kailash that way. (Stupidly I have the odd flicker of regret over Kailash just because of that sort of thing, not being able to get out of a fix easily, never measuring up. I crave salt.)

Tomiko, then. He exists nine hours ahead and I'm lucky. My father's basic model Japanese face with the marked forehead materialises looking straight at me, his visible upper body this morning, his evening, in a smudged shirt. ‘I'm very sad for,' came the response to what I had to tell him, outdoing Sara's husband and daughter. ‘A sharp knife in here. She is dead.'

‘
Yes.
No doubt.'

‘A good woman—'

‘But you never met her!'

‘She was your grandmother.
A good woman
,' he said.

‘Of course.' I thought I understood though it would turn out I hadn't. In my defence I hadn't read more than a page or two of the journal, remember. It was still in my pack in the bedroom. His reaction seemed pretty genuine after Josh's and I let it go.