Desire Line (30 page)

‘When did she die? When—' struggling now, ‘—actual day?'

‘Why does it matter?' Particularising the date must be a Japanese thing, I guessed. ‘They're not sure. Soon after she left the house, Josh's I mean. I mean, where else could she go? In Rhyl. What they
can
tell probably isn't enough to decide cause of death— so they're not saying how long they think she's been dead, just a long time. Nothing about any injuries— it's a skeleton. Thirty years in the water! I bet all the changes happen fast and early on. Then less and less once—' Talking to him was the first time I'd thought about what I was saying. The flesh. Gone. Sara, quick and clever and maybe a good woman as Tomiko said, and more important than any of it, Eurwen's reflection. Younger than Eurwen
but the flesh gone—

—first the white freckled skin gets peeled back from her arms like Grace Kelly's elbow-length gloves, then the face starts to flow into soft focus, into nobody's, and that's even before the crabs get under her ribs. Break in at any time, I felt like saying to the screen. ‘You'll find the story's everywhere because of who she was. Still very interesting to a lot of people.' Tomiko nodded extra respect. ‘Dr Sara Meredith and this town, they think it's a meekfreak combo. Like some Royal caught in the kebab queue.' Nothing. ‘Students from Bristol I haven't seen since I left have started messaging.' Tomiko wasn't intending to join them. ‘And Charity Weiksner's right in there as family spokesperson. They're making do with what they can get. Have you caught any of this? Or her?' Tomiko indicated no on all counts. To be honest Geoffrey's other daughter was ageing well. Olive-skinned and intelligent and mannish— very Geoffrey apart from the colouring. We'd had no further contact once Fleur died and I found I didn't appreciate her staking a claim, (which she could only do because Josh and Eurwen were yet to be tracked down). Now it was all that My Tragic Sister stuff— ‘Oh and I've got a bunch of Sara's possessions he gave me, left in the house after she went. Most were. So what do
you
think happened? Because, you know, something doesn't add up.'

Tomiko examined his garment's streaks and blotches. He'd been kneeling over his work like a floor scrubber but Japanese must be the best-made people with never any sign of cramp in him despite days hunched like this and in his hemisphere it was near the end of his shift. When he jumped back up the paper came with him only to be crumpled and thrown out of shot. The hand picked out a fresh ink stick from somewhere. ‘Bamboo thicket—' he said, then a couple of words I missed that might've been English and to me or Japanese, to himself, and then, ‘snake', he finished.

‘OK.' This was a new one. We exchanged a few more sentences, me smiling to cover my ignorance and anticipating Tomiko's explanation but the ink stick poised mid-air, the bamboo-thing and the snake caused enough of a mix-up for him to disconnect before I was ready. Of course, as far as he's concerned he
has
explained what happened— many times over. He told it as a story.

One version of ‘Burning Girl' goes, ‘There was an artist who travelled to another country. When he came to a certain place, the lodgings were cheap and he stayed. Though the town wasn't handsome, the mountains behind and the shore made up for it. But the young man had no friends and wanted his home. One day he was sketching by the harbour and a beautiful girl asked to see his work. She had red hair. It lit a fire even icy eyes couldn't put out. But he had been taught to be respectful of women and the last he saw of her was throwing crumbs to the birds. That night the young man dreamed he was sitting with his paints and brushes when the girl walked toward him out of the water. Her skin was white as bird feathers. She touched his forehead and he cried out, branded.

‘Each day he waited. Sometimes she came. His own home faded, too faint to pain him. Finally, they ran away from the father's anger and the mother's sadness to be together. But a dishonourable life can't stay happy. The artist begged to go to her parents and make peace. What else could they do? ‘Nothing' and ‘Later' she answered. And Nothing stayed Nothing but Later turned into Too Late.'

I'll stop there because it was
Nothing to do
finally sent Tomiko back to Japan. And cats.

When I was born the three of us went off to Rosemont to live with Jay and Neil— again. Neil of the toad skin who worked in a paint factory, who painted floors with the leftovers and who dealt in
anything
. Eurwen's chosen refuge. Tomiko got work at the local college and despite their differences my parents were ‘happy enough'. Then came the day Tomiko walked up the tiled path and found four-year-old Yori sitting on the doorstep. There's me, pleased with life, eating cat-food out of a dish and their disagreement started over Eurwen's negligence. She'd been trying to feed a stray tabby and hadn't noticed my interest in the bait, or even my whereabouts. She did explain, laughing – she always laughed when
she
told the story – that cats are fussy eaters. They don't eat rubbish. ‘Now if it had been
dog
food—!' Though it took a while, the end was with Tomiko leaving.

But I had my own problems. I could boast that back from Ireland and walking round in the early hours with Josh like a weight tied to my foot, I saw it all. I bet in future an old Yori will be saying, ‘Faced with the ruins of Rhyl— that's how it started, Sara's story. She'd been
here
of all places.' I find what would become a favourite bit and let my eyes skim over,

On the landward side Victoriana gave way to shabby hotels.
Someone
had a keen sense of irony: Westminster Towers, The Chatsworth, Buckingham House… outside which a family waited… hoisted a child onto the hip and stepped toward the kerb meeting my look with her own… a severed head…. zombie-zone segued into single-storey burger-bars… according to Eurwen should lead to the fair…

Instead, backed onto the most extensive area of dereliction yet, there is a lone, rotting pub, a shipwreck cruelly named The Schooner. It remains plastered with its own doomed attempts at survival and these inducements to become thriftily unconscious, (Double Vodka and Red Bull Buy One Get One Free
!)
for some reason are what
caused me to pull over.

I don't have trouble slotting in behind Sara's eyes even if what she's seeing had either been swept away, (the Chatsworth and The Schooner for example) or evolved into— how could I break it to her? In the case of vampires and ghouls on the billboards, into a lot
lot
worse. Un-describable. Unimaginable by Sara. Rhyl makes money where it can now. If, with all her own troubles, she ever bothered to speculate, did she think our prospects were
bright?
What's that grandmother? It's thirty years on and the soft sheen along our famous front isn't just reflections off the sea? Not any more. Rhyl's slick moving-pavement filled with soft-spoken visitors, all in paid work, is the wonder of the coastline. And those personalised helicopters dropping down beside the Lake are piloted by sleek, clean Rhylites cured of their colds, anger, unwanted pregnancies and all bad habits. Yeah, absolutely. Or sadly, no, grandmother. There's a limit to what A can do. We've got better bones and teeth and skin with fewer wrinkles. But it can't fix the stray cat problem in Kinmel Bay post-Wave. Nor the poor families that Sara had been struck by as she drove in and every day after, groups that were female-strong, haunting the burger-bars, then left without transport. Only the olde-worlde alcohol ads she describes (they come across evil as Hitchcock's smoking villains) place Sara's writing firmly in its time.

Anyway I got going on her story not by interrogating the dead but the living. When I threatened Tomiko, ‘I want to find out about her. We'll leave it till tomorrow, if you like,' he flinched. Then counter-attacked, ‘Work well.' Nice closing line. I had every intention of working well. Better than well. So watch out. After I'd drunk tea and eaten vacuum-packed oatcakes bought on the ferry, I stowed away the surplus clothes then searched for Eurwen's letter –
Dear Dad on TV it says Mum's in Rhyl
– and I called Tomiko again and got him. He hadn't budged. I read the whole thing aloud. He pretended his attention was down on the paper but the ink stick between his fingers didn't twitch. I said, ‘Did Sara know about me?'

Something rare happened— he shook his head.

‘Never?'

‘No.'

‘When you—
hang on!
Josh smacked you. I mean you come from Eurwen with this letter and he hits you? Just because of who you are?'

‘Eurwen is very young.' He still won't look to camera. ‘More young than—' He needs to explain it to the floor. ‘And fathers different. Then.'

Jay's radio had started broadcasting ‘Fears are growing for Oxford writer Sara Meredith and today an appeal goes out for her daughter Eurwen to—' Of course Rhyl's Romeo and Juliet had been with Jay and Neil Rix all along but the sudden fuss sends Tomiko straight to Josh. The instant Eurwen's letter is understood, the carrier is attacked by yes, a pretty different sort of father. I'm surprised he was let off lightly with a head injury that gets stitched by a police surgeon. Hence the scar and no complaint ever made. Tomiko checked here to give me a grin that was like all his grins, not self-mocking, not bleak or cynical but as seen – satisfied. Apparently he had an unusually thick skull, he bragged. I don't know if he meant for a Japanese or for anybody but it was probably the God of Luck's only part in the entire episode. And that included them making me. ‘He look for Sara then, baby not mattering. Not much. Everybody look. Eurwen is on TV asking. The professor and wife there. Important people. Everybody.'

‘Got that. But—'

‘So
work!
' For the second time this Sunday morning, Tomiko explodes into a shoal of carp and swims off.

It was good advice because my non-working self is trash. I took an afternoon recce of a town where nothing is being fixed or moved or set aside to be saved. I wasn't the only
ICON DELETED
round here. Someone had dumped an unsorted mass of broken ceramics, shredded plastic, sodden lath-and-plaster and household waste straight off the seawall. A huge pile – a small truckload – which in half an hour the tide will be distributing up and down the beach. Seething I call Borough before I move on as far as Blue Bridge— and it produces my first ever conversation with William Jones. He's a disabled, Welsh old man I've never spoken to before but I know him by sight. It's a small place. He said ‘
Bore da
', which I could manage to return with
a chi,
my Welsh and Japanese running about neck and neck. After testing out my origin – Butterton Road area, Rhyl gets me a long stare— he gave his name and pointed to the boat he'd salvaged. ‘It's ‘bout twice as knackered as I am,' he says, rasping a square stubbly chin with fingers that are all callus. The boat, maybe five metres long and high sided, is tipped awkwardly in the mud below us and plastered with gunge. Like it's been shot and threshed around. It's not a patch on
The Cariad,
also down there but broken-backed and destined to be written off for insurance. But William Jones' treasure was simply and superbly constructed once, even I could tell that. ‘Clinker-built of teak,' he agrees. ‘In Portugal,' he says, ‘for certain, though how it's here is— well, guess if you like.' He shrugs. The bridge shut, William Jones can lean on the metalwork without cars whizzing past behind him and shifts his weight from crooked aching leg to aching leg. I keep my back turned also because upriver Avonside is in sight, the houses with gaping sockets and open mouths, waiting for the bulldozers. Fast, ragged cirrus is throwing shadows across the estuary and you keep wanting to look up for the big carrion birds passing over. Down with us is virtually still and we talk, we follow the tenders out to the windfarm by eye and it ends with him making a pitch for the wood he needs— for free. ‘Just offcuts! Nothing to you is it? I've seen you round, some sort of manager, eh? You've got the access to things—'

He sucks in wind-burned cheeks that remind me of Josh's. All these old men, they're like a committee overseeing me and for some reason I allow it. Even Glenn Hughes however old he is, a good example— if Omar, polite and a better employee had turned up on Wave Day he'd never have got in, let alone moved in. This William Jones is clever and only spoke for what he'll get out of me but I promise his
couple of lengths
if they're there to be found because his failing legs in thigh boots are grimy to the knees, drying as we stand. He's only just struggled up from the harbourside, from a project that's hopeless unless I help. I mean,
teak?
And he's already tried, he laughs. ‘But there's bugger-all pickings left. And I'm the best bloody picker there is.'

Suddenly a wild idea – he's Sara's finder! ‘There were bones washed up.'

He's about to tap his screen and write me off but shakes his head, stares into the river channel, serious again, ‘Heard they found some poor woman from years back. She was lovely too. Pity.'

I understand why I'll provide him with teak even if I have to buy it myself. ‘I wouldn't want to fall in there.'