Submersion (24 page)

After the rowing between my parents, the crying and that awful noise, I stayed where I was for a long while. Not moving. I still heard my parents below, but they had become quieter, calmer; still talking, but in whispers. So, eventually I decided to creep downstairs, very slowly. Step by step. First down the attic stairs, then through their bedroom and then gradually down the next set of stairs - only I stopped half way. I saw my father – his face stained with tears.

‘Up to bed,’ he instructed, stern. I obeyed instantly and turned on my heel.

It was the last thing he ever said to me.

As I reached my parents’ bedroom again, I heard the slamming of our front door.

‘He vanished,’
I’d told Tilly earlier that day, and when I returned to it later, it was no less simple.

You see, I looked out into the street, through their bedroom window and he wasn’t there. In fact, bar the gentle rocking of moored wooden boats on the river road, the street was completely empty and silent – no sign or sound of anyone; no sign or sound of Father. So, he had walked out through the front door, but not appeared in the street…

‘Vanished!’ I repeated on our ride home, exclaiming the word as if it were accompanied with a tap of a wand.

Tilly was silent for a moment, and I wondered if she was a little disappointed. Old Man Merlin had been quite impressed by my finale, if I remembered correctly. Said it was
quite an unexpected outcome.
Tilly’s mute response suggested a different reaction. Yet it turned out she was just thinking and, rather than disappointed, she was simply not sure I was right.

Eventually, she spoke and what she said alarmed me. Why hadn’t I thought of that? It was a possibility, after all. Unlikely, yes, completely unlikely, because surely I would have noticed? But any less likely than vanishing into thin air as you crossed the threshold of your house into the cold night?

‘What if he didn’t leave the house?’ Tilly asked.

And then I was the silent one. Thinking, worrying.

When I got home, I took myself off to my attic room to mull over this new possibility in solitude.
What if he didn’t leave the house?
Thinking about it sensibly, it could have been that he didn’t leave the house at that moment – when the door slammed. I didn’t go downstairs to check, so I couldn’t be one hundred percent certain that he left at that point. But he didn’t leave at any other time, either. I’d have known. You see, I stayed awake. My perception that he had simply vanished made something else disappear – my ability to sleep. I stayed wide awake, watching the road as it got lighter, wondering if he might reappear, I guess. And I listened out. I’d heard Mother on the telephone to someone – a hushed conversation; I remember that clearly. But there was no more opening or closing of doors. Just that one harsh slam.

I did go downstairs one other time that night. Much later. Once it had been calm for a good while. I passed through their bedroom and Father wasn’t there. He wasn’t in any of the other living rooms, either. It was then that I came across the mess on the kitchen table. The coconut, smashed across the red cloth on the table, red and white curdled, dripping. He wasn’t there then. Just Mother, standing over the mess, shocked to see me.

Get back to bed,
she had said, an echo of what Father had instructed earlier. And I had obeyed and taken myself back up immediately.

No, it had definitely just been Mother in the house then; her stern glare had endured in my memory. No sight of Father. Yet, doubts were now nagging at me. Could I really be so certain?

What if he didn’t leave the house?
A possibility I couldn’t shake. And something else came back to me, something else I knew started after my father left.

Coming back down the stairs again, once it was light enough not to be in trouble, stumbling over my own feet as the sleep deprivation left me clumsy, I found Mother in the upper hallway. On her hands and knees, to her left was a bucket of soapy water and in her right hand was a scrubbing brush. So focused and vigorous was her scrubbing of the bare floorboards that she didn’t even pause as I stepped around her and entered the kitchen. The table was cleared of the mess from the night before.

It was over an hour later when she finally paid me attention and prepared me breakfast. I’m not sure exactly what she fed me, but it was probably some toast, a bit of cereal if we were lucky to have some. But I do remember what she said. I remember that clearly, without a single doubt.

You mustn’t tell anyone about last night,
she said, her eyes cold and serious.
It’s a secret, Billy. You mustn’t tell anyone. Do you understand?

And, at the time I had simply obeyed, even though I hadn’t entirely understood.  My five year-old self wasn’t sure if it was the possession of the exotic fruit or my father vanishing that was the issue. But I did as I was told and didn’t tell anyone – not until Old Merlin and Tilly.

Shortly after, Mother began working for Monty Harrison.

What if he didn’t leave the house?

Those words continued to nag at me.

If Tilly was right, where was he? Where had she put him? And, if he hadn’t left the house that night, had he left it since? What exactly had happened to him that night?

By myself, at the very top of our house, a sickening dread filled the silence around me, creeping under my skin, thickening and slowing my every breath.

‘Billy, dinner is on the table!’ Mother called out. My calm, cold mother, who didn’t like tears and hadn’t laughed since that mysterious night. The same mother who worked in secret for Monty Harrison. ‘Billy!’

Taking myself in slow steps down the two flights to our kitchen, I couldn’t shake the thought that he was still here. Under our roof.
What if he didn’t leave the house?

‘We’ve got sausages!’ Mother was announcing, as I entered the kitchen. ‘From Uncle Jessie,’ she beamed and it was like I was seeing a different version of her.

Oh – there’s something else I haven’t told you. The
Uncle Jessie
tag is quite significant. You see, that’s the final part of the tale of my father – he was Jessie Morton’s younger brother. Joe Morton.

‘My favourite,’ I announced, sitting opposite Mother, pulling a joyful shroud over my worried features, hoping she wouldn’t notice, wondering when I would get the first opportunity to search the house for clues of my father’s never leaving us.

PLAY

‘Tell me about yourself.’

A merry chuckle.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘You really want me to talk about myself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would a young girl like you be interested in an old man like me?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘No, not to me.’

‘Well, you’re a mystery. You live in this tall house, full of bits and bobs. You’re very old – I don’t know anyone else as old as you.’

Another soft, endeared chuckle.

‘And, whilst everyone refers to you as Merlin as a kind of joke, I think there’s some truth behind it all.’

A pause.

‘You think I’m a wizard?’

‘Are you?’

‘The truth, my dear girl, isn’t anywhere near as magical. And – what I am, the truth – well, it’s best you don’t know it.’

‘Why not?’

A second, longer pause, followed by a deep intake of breath.

‘Far too dangerous. Plus, once I’d told you, I’d have to kill you.’

Two voices erupt into sudden, giddy laughter.

PAUSE

              9. Agnes

The unravelling began with a simple act: I returned to work. Took the advice of a young missionary and took myself back to my life before Elinor disappeared.

A
lmost.

Had Esther known the source of this advice, she would have beamed with pride. Pride at me, her sister, finally succumbing to ways she had been promoting for so long; a little self-congratulation at having
turned
me.

But, of course, Esther wasn’t privy to that information. I continued to keep Reuben to myself; he was my secret.

It didn’t happen that quickly. I still wasn’t entirely sure if I was doing the right thing. I’d already tried to return, after all, and Reuben had stopped me last time. And now he was openly encouraging me, and more than that – he was suggesting I used my position to find Elinor. To break rules, to take risks and face potential danger. It wasn’t going to be easy, and I wasn’t sure I could do it – despite the underlying motivation.

So, I started with small steps. I started with a call to Jerry Carter, my boss.
Why don’t I come to you?
he offered, reaching out verbally across the crackle of the water-damaged line.
See you on your turf and take it from there.
I agreed; it was a good start and I didn’t even need to face the great river beyond my doorstep.

The day Jerry agreed to visit coincided with the day garbage was collected from our street. A monthly occurrence, the authorities arranged for tug-boats to trawl along our roads, dragging black bags of garbage that bobbed along outside our homes. The rule was that you couldn’t put your sealed rubbish onto the water’s surface until the morning of your collection. With no dry land in sight to hygienically store our waste, this caused issues for the vast majority of the other 29 or 30 remaining days. We were lucky. At the rear of our house, and at Papa H’s, Tristan had created a storage space – a kind of balcony beyond the living room window, made with a non-corrosive metal frame and boarded with treated planks. We’d put plastic containers here, which were covered over, storing both our rubbish and the unpleasant aroma it created. The old man at the Cadley residence was luckier still – he had a purpose built decked area to his rear. But not everyone had this relative luxury. Whilst Tristan had offered to create a similar set up for our neighbours, he couldn’t do it for free and not everyone could afford his price or even the materials to attempt it themselves. In these houses, they did what they could, but generally the black bags floated around in their lower quarters, attracting rats, decay and disease.

‘It’s probably that, rather than the authorities, that’s polluting our waters,’ Tristan regularly commented, displaying his distrust and dislike of our governing body in that one line.

In reality, we didn’t have to keep our rubbish for the entire month - the authorities encouraged us all to make our own regular visits to the dumping ground, further north. Jessie offered the services of his speedboat to our nearest and dearest – including Ronan, Papa H, Esther and my aunt and uncle, who had next-to-nowhere to store waste in their tenth-floor flat. He’d drop by most weeks and remove a load, meaning our output on
tug-boat day
was much less than some of our neighbours. But if you didn’t have a Jessie or a speedboat, your options were limited to taking single bags in your rowing boat -  or storing it up, creating your own little sewage outlet in your cellar or flooded ground floor. There was another option – you could sneak out in the night, and let your rubbish loose in the waters. But get caught – and there were plenty of snoops happy to report you to the authorities – and the punishment was severe.

On the day Jerry came by to see me, to discuss my return to the office, Cedar Street looked as if someone had done exactly that – emptied their garbage onto the still, shallow surface. Coming out into the street – head to toe in protective gear and on my way to Papa Harold’s – the sprawling mess was a shock to the eye. A swirling, kaleidoscopic vomit of peelings, packaging and other domestic debris. Evidence of legitimate remains swam in perfect synchronicity with black market contraband. Potato skins and apple cores bobbed alongside the palm-tree heads of pineapples and the emptied husks of watermelons. Milk cartons surfaced alongside wine bottles. Tissues, bones, plastic bags gravitated towards each other in small islands.

‘What on…?’ I gasped to myself, temporarily frozen by the anarchy of manmade flotsam.

Papa H was at his front window, looking out too. He’d have his bottom halves on, protecting his lower body from the waters, but nothing else. His bare face was up close to the glass; his expression was troubled. He didn’t like what he could see; feared the implications.

‘Come in,’ he mouthed to me, an invite and a demand in one.

‘I was on my way in any case,’ I shouted out loud, but I knew he couldn’t hear me through the mask and the pane. ‘Coming for your bags!’

Once inside, I shut his front door and pulled up my mask. It was mainly for show now, in any case. I didn’t fear the atmosphere half as much since Billy’s uneventful exposure. But I did fear the suspicions aroused if I was seen to break the rules. Neighbours could be your allies, but there were gains to be made for turning you in.

A year back, there had been an incident on our street that had unsettled the trust and harmony amongst us residents. Shelia Bacon – a widowed woman in her fifties, five doors along – who had been receiving and redistributing luxury goods from an unknown source (not Jessie, he confirmed at the time,) snitched to the authorities when she noticed another neighbour emptying a bag of rubbish into the flow of the river road in the middle of the night. Peter Ashworth was widowed like Sheila, but, aside from this act of desperation, was otherwise a law-abiding citizen. He was taken away one night by the authorities, a few days after Sheila reported him. Papa H witnessed this from his upper front windows; suffering from a bout of insomnia, a hassle of aggravated voices had drawn him to look out.

It was rare of the authorities to act this harshly, but everyone knew that they could – and would – and whenever they did, they were always unnecessarily cruel and harsh, ensuring we all noticed. Ensuring we all remembered. Another way we were all being controlled; another thing to fear.

Peter was returned in equally clandestine circumstances a month later, thinner, greyer. He hadn’t repeated the offence to my knowledge, but for her efforts, Sheila Bacon had been allowed to continue with her illicit trading, attracting no interest from the government whatsoever.

‘I’d be tempted to shop her myself,’
Jessie had said at the time, aware of the hypocrisy.

Standing next to Papa Harold a year later, a shallow carpet of water sloshing around our booted feet, I looked out and wondered just what had led to the current disruption.

‘Do you think it was Peter?’ I questioned.

‘Peter?’ Papa H retorted with his own question, his face puzzled. I wondered if he knew who I meant.

‘The guy across the road, arrested last year for-.’

‘Yes, yes, I know who you mean, but what makes you think he did this?’

I shrugged, thinking.

‘Revenge.’

‘Revenge?’ Papa H chuckled at my dramatic assumptions.

‘Against that woman who snitched to the authorities about his polluting the river with his rubbish.’ I gave the possibility some thought. ‘He rips open all her garbage as soon as she’s put it out. Any evidence of her contraband trading is revealed to the whole street again – there’s no way those in charge can turn a blind eye this time. Her crimes are too public. Maybe we’ll see her arrested later today.’

Papa H conceded to my theory with an affirming purse of the lips.

‘But you’re overlooking one important fact,’ he said, a smile creeping across his face, suggesting he was about to blow my ideas apart.

‘And that would be?’

‘It’s not just Sheila Bacon’s rubbish that has been strewn across our river road.’

I paused, thinking again, and solution came quickly.

‘So he’s making sure it doesn’t look too obvious, or he’s taking revenge against us all – no one came to his rescue, after all, no one showed him any support, and people still appear to be happy to trade with his archenemy,’ I proposed, determined that my theorem would withstand Papa H’s dismissal.

He simply laughed another small laugh and turned from the window, heading for his stairs to the first floor. If he had a different notion of what had occurred, we didn’t discuss it that day. Whilst he ascended, I got on with what I had come for: I put three black bags out to float on the road, in advance of the monthly tug-boat arrival. Once I’d joined Papa H upstairs, he’d made us both a cup of tea and changed the subject.

‘So,’ he said, pouring weak brown liquid into two old mugs, ‘what are your plans today?’

It was late morning by the time Jerry arrived at my house and any drama surrounding the apparently intentional spillage of waste had dissipated. The tug-boat workers had arrived and collected the bags that were intact. Then shortly afterwards, another crew arrived, with nets that trawled the waters, gathering up as much stray rubbish as possible. There were a few shouts during the operation, but no doors were knocked on, no questions were asked and no one was taken away. When Tristan returned home one evening, just under a week later, he would impart news that gave the incident a different twist.

Jerry Carter was a short, stocky man, who kept loose change and big, old-fashioned cotton handkerchiefs in his pockets. His belly spilled over his belt and he was often late, panting and sweating whenever you came across him. He had a general uncared-for and out-of-date feel about him, but he was a good man. He cared about those of us who knew and worked for him. As a consequence of all that, he didn’t quite fit in with his superiors. He was a relic of bygone days and values. Sooner or later, we all feared he would be replaced by a newer, slicker and colder model and that our work-lives would become a lot harsher and unbalanced. So, we lived for the moment with Jerry Carter as our boss – appreciating his fairness and flexibility, knowing we were all on borrowed time. This made my mission to exploit my position at work – and, more importantly, his position – all the more distasteful.

‘So, what’s made you decide the time is right for you to come back?’ was one of his first questions, sitting on a chair in my kitchen-living room.

I need to your help to break into the system and check where the government has taken my daughter,
I yearned to say. If I could get his assistance voluntarily, at least part of the moral issues would be resolved.

‘You can’t take that chance,’
Reuben had insisted, when I’d run this thought past him.
‘You don’t really know how far you can trust him. Friends turn on each other. You know that. Plus, if you play your cards as close to your chest as you can, it will leave you more options. You mustn’t tell him.’

‘I just need to get back to normal, that’s all,’ I told Jerry instead. ‘I can’t keep putting it off.’

He’d nodded kindly, understandingly, thinking his compassion would put me at ease, when in fact it had simply exacerbated my internal conflict. With every word, I was betraying him further, getting in deeper and deeper.

‘So, let’s agree a state date, and maybe just a few hours a day to begin with, eh? Small steps.’

‘Small steps,’ I agreed, thinking that as soon as I got back through that government office I wasn’t leaving until I had ransacked its files and archives for every little bit of evidence I could find. I wouldn’t leave until I had found her.

‘Small steps then,’ Jerry echoed, and set about defining the terms of my return.

He left after an hour and, as he rowed away, the river road was all but cleared of the debris from earlier. We had agreed I would return a week later, working shorter days to begin with and then we would
see how it went -
Jerry’s words.

I next saw Reuben a day later. He knocked about thirty minutes after Tristan had left – on another job with Jessie, I didn’t ask for the details. It was safer being ignorant, even if I still worried in the dark. As usual, Reuben wore his sharp black suit and tie, his crisp white shirt and the high polish on the toes of his shoes reflected like mirrors. I admired his effort and discipline, given that he still had to travel from lost soul to lost soul in the head to toe rubber-based suits every citizen had been issued.

‘People don’t like to let strangers into their homes,’ he reasoned. ‘But they like to let scruffy, dirty strangers in even less.’ He had a point.

As he knew about the meeting with Jerry, I thought he would be keen to find out how I had got on, but he didn’t. I mentioned it myself and he simply acknowledged it with a
good, good
– the kind of old-man phrase Papa H used when he pretended to listen, but was clearly pre-occupied with something else. I wondered if my appeal was waning. After all, I hadn’t exactly fallen for the charms of his faith, and wasn’t that the purpose of him visiting me? Maybe he had more deserving candidates floating aimlessly further along our street?

‘Is there something you want to talk about today?’ I offered, once teas were made and placed on the table. Up until that point, I had been prattling on, jumping from subject to subject – Jerry’s visit, Tristan’s work, an issue with the plumping at my aunt and uncle’s tenth floor flat – spending just a sentence or so on each, sensing no change in Reuben’s disinterest. ‘Is there something wrong?’