Submersion (10 page)

4. Tristan

I get up before Agnes nearly every morning. I know she is awake – she always was a light sleeper, now more so – but still I creep around, minimising the noise I make. It seems wrong to make excessive noise in the first hours of dawn, whether the rest of the house is awake or not.

The rest of the house? It’s just back to Agnes and I and that big echo of our absent girl. And for the majority of the time, it’s just Agnes. I’m out with Jessie; when we aren’t searching the ends of our city and beyond for Elinor, we are back at the secret location where we have been working. So she is home alone, with her fears, her doubts and that cold veneer of sanity she wears like a mask. I wonder if she takes it off when I leave her by herself, much like the old war gasmasks we remove once indoors.

Somehow, I doubt it. Agnes is tough, resilient and, whilst it is unspoken between us, we know what has happened to Elinor. We know it in our blood; certainty flows through us like polluted water washes over our streets.

‘You cannot be absolutely certain,’ Jessie reasons, skeptical, yet he still insists on joining me on my excursions.

‘How else do you explain it, Jessie?’

He shrugs.

‘That platform was sabotaged, you know that. You pointed it out yourself,’ I remind him.

‘I’m not doubting that, but it doesn’t mean she was taken. It doesn’t mean
that
has started again, Tristan.’

‘Then the other explanation is that she is dead,’ I tell him, but neither of us will accept that. ‘But if she is dead, if there ever
was
any kind of accident, how come the girls I left her with that morning are not dead or missing?’

Whatever Jessie believes or disbelieves, his fatherly dedication to finding Elinor doesn’t waver.

On the initial days that followed Elinor’s disappearance, we abandoned our secret salvage job in favour of an expansive search of our local landscape. Using Jessie’s speedboat, we explored our city in full, motoring along the river-roads to the north, east, south and west, checking out every street, major building or landmark. We had no plan on that first day; we simply set off with determination and optimism. I had an unspoken hope we would simply find her, lost at the side of a road, sitting tired and hungry on a rock. Feeling had driven us, but only thought would allow us to search intelligently; only thought would get us closer to a result.

That first morning we ventured west, covering the last journey Elinor and I took: left at the top of Cedar Street, right at the crossroads, then winding along another street until we reached the now washed-away speedboat platform. Beyond this point, there were more boarded-up shops, restaurants and other commercial businesses, their colours faded with dirt, their purpose jaded with decay from all angles. All provided Elinor with a prosaic backdrop to the final part of her daily journey. Once the long terrace of abandoned business properties ended, the grounds of the school began.

In the past, St Patrick’s had been set in the middle of several acres of green land, surrounded by a perimeter of lush, evergreen trees. The trees had been hacked away years ago, following an infection that spread rapidly, taking the life from several of the species. In turn, the surrounding green belt had been flooded, and the setting for the school appeared somewhere between a lake and a swamp, with rotting tree stumps peering out of the water like upturned, decaying molars.  The school building itself was set right in the middle, perched at the top of a hill that had saved it from the damages of flooding.

When Jessie’s boat pulled outside the school, he cut the engine and we both stared up at it for a few minutes. There were places to moor around the entire circumference, but we weren’t stopping to get out – just to look. St Patrick’s had been his, Agnes’ and Esther’s school as children and I could tell from the still, searching look on his face that its façade still held him in some way. He wasn’t in awe or fear of what it represented, just brought to a standstill.

In the decimated landscape of our city, it had become an icon of relative beauty. A red-brick, three-story building, ten broad windows wide, with a great hall in its centre and a mound of lush, green lawn surrounding it, it did appear to gleam when the sun broke the clouds a little, rays catching the glass in the windows.
The hill was also one of the few places in the city where there were still a few trees - at least, trees that were living.

‘I was one of the lucky ones,’ Jessie eventually uttered, his eyes remaining on the building.

He could have looked my way, could have probed about my own school memories, but he refrained and I was thankful for that.

‘Come on, let’s keep going,’ I suggested and, after agreeing with a nod, Jessie pulled the boat’s motor into action and we sped away.

Once we were clear of the school and its surrounding, swampy lake, we hit what used to be our town centre. In the past, it had been a buzzing metropolis of commercial success.

At its centre was the Atrium, a sprawling, four-storied structure made of glass and steel, home to a whole range of different businesses – boutiques, electrical stores, perfumeries, bakers, book stores, cafes, haberdasheries, home-ware retailers; the list was endless. The first, second and third floors could be accessed by tube-shaped glass elevators situated in the middle of the complex, or by a series of steel escalators to the far left and right. From memory, the third floor was mainly restaurants and rest rooms, with a terrace which opened in the summer and was populated with chairs, little round tables and chatter, whilst staff negotiated their way through the shifting maze of furniture and clientele.

The grand front entrance to the Atrium led out to the high street; a grey-stone, vehicle-free precinct, which was initially occupied by large, warehouse sized premises – supermarkets, discount clothing and sportswear shops, furniture outlets. Yet, as you strolled further away from the epicentre, the buildings and businesses got smaller and more specialist. The supermarkets become family owned bakers, the furniture shops abandoned flat-packed items for antiques. Interspersed along the way were betting shops, cosy pubs and little cafes, all linking up the other businesses, as they reduced in size and commercial power, until eventually they all petered out, giving way to terrace upon terrace of town houses and flats, as the streets became fully residential.

The city centre that Jessie and I drifted into that first day looking for Elinor was an altogether different picture.

We began our journey at the residential end. Like the rest of our town, the tarmacked roads and stone-laid streets were submerged in a uniform of grey, still water. As a child, I remember the envy I held towards the people who lived in the slim, elegant, white-painted homes, with their five steps up to the glossy front door, their bars at the windows of the basements, peering up just below street level. How lucky their residents were to be so close to the action, so close to the glamorous lure of the day and night life the centre offered. Drifting through, so many years later, I took a childish, sour comfort in the fact their lives and homes were now as dilapidated as ours, their own hopes and dreams engulfed and washed away along with ours during the flooding. The much envied cellar rooms were now bowels brimming with fetid remains, spilling their sloshy contents onto the ground floors, causing further ruin at every rancid ripple; the glossy front doors were now swollen with damp, hardly fitting their rotting frames. Many of these once affluent homes were simply abandoned, owners having the means to take themselves out of the town to a future I knew little of, but rumour had it there was a future, somewhere, beyond my reach and the realms of my imagination. Although, there was still no proof, still no one returning to confirm and opposing rumours grew strong in absence of this evidence. But I still took comfort in the fact they’d had to leave, that, when the waters came, no matter your standing or riches, we were all in it together.

The commercial hub of the town had suffered no better. In fact, it had suffered worse. It wasn’t partly abandoned like the town-house terraces, it was completely deserted. Not a single business remained. From the family run establishments, to the standalone high street stores – all were boarded up. Some of the boarding was patchy, where looters or the homeless had fought their way in and the original boarding had been repaired, to prevent further damage. Some of the old shops and pubs had flats above, but even these were empty, residents scared away by the prospect of having their homes raided by shop looters, or quietly frightened into moving by the increased reality of isolation.

I thought I saw a face at the attic window of one the old flats; a man’s face, I think, pale, for less than a second, glimpsing out and then gone. Ghost-like. Above an old shop, windows boarded, entrance sealed with a thick metal door, chains and padlocks.

‘Did you see that?’ I asked Jessie and he shook his head.

We waited a second or so longer and I saw nothing further.

‘You wanna go in, check it out?’ Jessie asked.

I wasn’t sure, though. I couldn’t see any easy way in, to start with – with the lower windows boarded and the only obvious way in elaborately secured, I couldn’t see anyone easily getting out, either. And I wasn’t one hundred percent sure if I
had
seen anyone.

I shrugged, exhaled a long slow breath, fogging up my face visor a little.

‘If someone’s brave enough to live this end of town, well, maybe we should respect their privacy?’

Having weighed it all up, we were agreed we were done there and moved on through the streets of commercial decay.

The Atrium was the worst vision of this deterioration. What had been a sparkling jewel in the crown of this area was simply a broken, pale shell of its past. It had been left exposed to the elements, wind, rain and dirt getting into every open pore of the construction. Not a single pane of glass remained – all had been shattered by natural causes or stones of protest. The authorities had made no attempt to protect it. It was too big a job to start with – as it was all steel frames and glass walls and ceilings, the entire building would have needed covering up. So, they left it to rot at the hands of nature and whoever wanted to help themselves to the remaining rusting raw materials was welcome.

When we reached the dilapidated entrance, Jessie took us through it, gliding along the ground floor, searching the still water for a trace of Elinor, hoping we wouldn’t find any, not amongst this squalor, yet equally despondent when we didn’t.

The glass elevator had been completely obliterated and even its frame had been pulled away. But, at the far reaches of the complex, the steel escalators remained in place. Like rusting dinosaur skeletons, they reached high and proud, like museum pieces in the rusting relic of former affluence.

‘Do you remember it?’ Jessie asked, stopping the engine, letting the speedboat drift naturally. We both looked up at the steel frame above us and I knew he was thinking the same things as me – imagining the glass back in place, the vibrant shops trading, the crowds of people milling around. Traders in kiosks, selling newspapers, coffee, donuts, calling out jovially to passers-by; parents busy with buggies, gangs of teenagers swaggering through the crowds, and older people stalling the speed of the others with their sticks, walkers or electric wheelchairs, breaking up the crowds. Noise, colours, smells, filling up my head, painting over the leaden, remote stretch of sky above me.

Both Jessie and I have our origins in the city, but different paths led us to our present. Like my schooling, my childhood, teenage and early adult years were different to his and Agnes’. But we did share geography, even if our paths didn’t cross until the flooding.

‘Yes,’ I told him, still looking up. ‘There was a particular shop I frequented a lot.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. An old film shop – on the third floor, a real out-of-place shop that belonged on the outskirts. Didn’t fit with the look and feel of the rest of the Atrium.’

‘
Alley’s?
’ Jessie attempted, trying to recall the establishment’s name.

‘
Albert’s
,’ I corrected and suddenly I could see, smell, feel and hear the shop again in detail. Suddenly, the steel frame was no longer simply filled with grey sky.

Tucked away in a thin unit, between a burger bar and a takeaway pizza place, it was one of only a handful of shops on the top floor. Previous to its incarnation as a film outlet, it had failed as several other businesses – a nail bar, a retro collectables store and a craft shop, if I recall correctly. Then it stood empty for months, something I noticed as I frequently stopped by the takeaways sandwiching it, until a poster went up in the window, announcing
Albert’s Film Emporium
was
Coming Soon.

It had to be him, didn’t it?
That was my thought at the time.
It’s you, isn’t it?

It caught your imagination. The words on the poster spoke of something magical, something from a bygone era, a mystery from the past. In a way, it was. A week before it opened, another sign went up in the window –
Albert
was looking for an assistant. This was my opportunity to get in, our chance to reacquaint. So, I applied. I was between jobs at the time, in any case, and not really sure where things were going for me. The schooling I received hadn’t exactly set me out on a normal path or direction of any kind.

You?
he’d said, when I turned up to the interview.

Prior to that, I’d only spoken to him on the telephone, watching my tone, not wanting to give anything away. He should have recognised me, but that was Albert for you – always focusing too much on himself, much less on those around him.

Our big reunion,
I remembering say.
Good to see you, Albert.

I’d always called him by his first name.

You too, Tristan, my boy.

It was no surprise that he gave me the job. And so I became the assistant at
Albert’s Film Emporium,
working alongside the man himself five days a week, occasionally running the shop by myself.

So, what to describe first – the store or the man himself?

The store.

It was exactly what it said on the box – an adventure in cinematography. Part store, part museum, Albert’s narrow shop sold and showed films old and new. Out the front, shelves were filled with DVDs and videos, related books and magazines, and there was also a couple of locked cabinets displaying expensive collectables, rare trinkets of film memorabilia. Out the back, beyond the till and counter, behind a thick velvet curtain, Albert had set up what must have been the world’s smallest cinema. Three seats each side and just two rows deep, Albert showed old movies on old reels of film for private audiences; there was never a charge, just a small collective of people he hand-picked and invited. I was one of those people, obviously. So was Xavier.

Xavier Riley - an old foe I will come back to another time.

So what of Albert, the shopkeeper?

Well, Albert the shopkeeper was straight out of an old film himself. Just turned fifty, a short, stout, white haired man, with little round glasses and he wore a white apron when behind the counter. An old fashioned, storybook shopkeeper. And, to complete this character, he had a back-story, too. He didn’t have any family; no wife, children, siblings or cousins; he was a loner and he had a passion for film which he’d turned into a means of making a living. Although I knew that much of this wasn’t strictly true – but it’s how he played his life. He moved about over the years and at each new location, he had a new character, a new past and usually a new enterprise. This time round, he almost settled down - I worked with him at the shop for over five years. Our longest time together. I couldn’t say for certain why he stayed in this one place for so long – it wasn’t the typical pattern of events over the years, but it certainly was the nearest he had ever given me to certainty and security.