The Alembic Valise (6 page)

He had waited in the car as Seraphim had gone into the building; a dull light was visible from the half open door. But after a few minutes, feeling constrained sitting in the overheated car he got out to have a stretch. He then heard raised voices and walked closer to the source. It was two men arguing, and then a name from the past uttered by an emotion-choked voice emerged from the boathouse – ‘Electra’. Deacon turned away and set off walking into the fog. Walking, until eventually he arrived home. The flat was cold because the timer had shut off the heating hours ago. He flicked the thermostat on and the boiler coughed into life, and then stood in the kitchen still wearing his damp overcoat as he waited for the kettle to boil. Beginning to warm up he hung his coat on a hook inside the kitchen door then went to run a bath.

Half an hour later, wearing a dressing gown over his pyjamas he took the rest of the tea, which he had earlier put into a flask and went to the living room. From behind the sofa he pulled a battered case and gently removed from it a small bodied acoustic guitar. Then for a while he drank his tea whilst cradling the guitar on his knee. One of the candles on the heavy oak table began to crackle so he snuffed out the unsteady flame. Switching on a small table light at his side he was surprised to see his own reflection in the glass of framed print on the wall.

He took a blue glass tube from the table, slipped it onto the ring finger of his left hand and began to play a slow haunting blues. When the second candle began to burn low he lay down his guitar, blew out the candle and turned out the light. As he passed the kitchen he paused and reached into the pocket of his coat that was still hanging there. He took out an A5 size poster that he had picked up from the foot-well of Seraphim’s car. It advertised Sophie’s talk about the causeway and there was a picture of her above the main body of text. He put on his reading glasses, studied the creased piece of paper then placed it carefully on the kitchen table before finally going to bed.

Joel felt a soft ache in his shoulders from having rowed, yet again, up to the Gate. He had scanned the embankment from the sundeck of The Val before setting off, and had seen nothing to suggest that he was going to be door-stepped by the press. But why take the risk? So he had decided to row up to the Gate. The intention had been for he and Sophie to confront Dave; an intervention. It was not going well though, because Dave seemed intent in getting shit-faced before lunch, and Sophie was still busy in the kitchen.

Dave paused and reached for his glass of Peroni. The beer looked good, the tall glass beaded with silver droplets that caught the sunlight. Joel was tempted to join him although it was not yet lunchtime. Enticing food smells were wafting up from the kitchen below, which Joel found equally distracting. But it seemed that maybe Dave was on the verge of disclosing something important. Right here, right now, as the saying goes, sitting on the terrace with the sun beating down upon them and last nights fog just a memory.

“Do you know what the nidus is?” asked Dave whilst lighting a cigarette from the burnt down end of previous one, which he then flicked over the railings into the brown water below.

“Greek for nest?” volunteered Joel.

“It is the dark cradle where a tumour grows. It is the locus of an infection. It is also the nest where the cuckoo lays its tainted egg. Have you ever thought about the cuckoo? Sure it is parasitic but you cannot really call it evil. Although once hatched it will kill all the other fledglings; then all that is left is the alien presence. Nature is kind however, as the feathered couple can try again next season. The same is true for humans I suppose. Anyway what I am trying to say is that some secrets can be bad for your health when they are hidden, but they can be even worse when they come out.”

Joel rubbed his shoulder again and tried to concentrate. He had slept badly and was in reality more focused on the imminent return of Mai than Dave’s elliptical exposition on mankind’s dark unconscious.

When Joel explained about the police being more worried about crazed level nine gamers trying to kill him, than suspecting him of anything, Dave exclaimed, “Holy fuck!” and began to laugh.

He was still laughing when Sophie finally showed up a few minutes later. She looked from Joel to Dave and then back at Joel, who attempted an eyebrow shrug but as he was wearing his aviators it was unlikely she could see this. Dave wiped the tears from his eyes and looked up at his sister.

“Level fucking nine,” he said.

Deacon had woken in the mid morning and formulated a plan for the day. Instead of going to the day centre where he ran an art group he walked towards the river. Soon he found himself passing by the causeway; he stopped to read the information board, and then walked down onto the apron of shingle. For a while he stood and watched the river water running over the stones, and listened for voices from the past. But he heard nothing save the occasional honk of geese and the jets passing along their flight path to Heathrow.

Hearing footsteps he turned and saw a small boy in yellow wellingtons, followed by a woman carrying the child’s scooter. Without even glancing at Deacon the boy walked into the shallow water and defiantly stood there with his mittened hand on his hips.

“Watch out for deep mud, called the woman.

Deacon walked back up the causeway and along the path to the Gate. He entered the bar, it was cool and shaded but he could see doors leading to a terrace and beyond that the glint of the sun on water. Nobody paid him any attention as he crossed the room and stepped out onto the terrace. He stood at the edge and took in the views. The Gate was positioned on the apex of a large sweeping bend in the river, to the east the city, and rolling meadows to the west.

Deacon saw that he was on the middle tier of the Gates three terraces. He looked down and saw a dozen tables with pale yellow tablecloths, the edges of which moved slightly in the breeze.

He shivered and realised that it was the wrong time of year to eat outside. There was in fact only one table being used. The tables must be for hardcore smokers only, he thought. In fact there was a guy down there smoking. He was expounding about something and jabbing the air with the hand that held the cigarette and Deacon was shocked to recognise the timbre of the man’s voice as one he had heard the previous night at the boathouse; a tormented voice that had called out his dead sister’s name. He then leaned forward to look more closely at the smoker’s companions.

Sophie was sitting with her back to the river, facing Joel and her brother.

“Dave, we are just concerned about you,” she began.

“Yes, and in my own oblique way I have for the last ten minutes been addressing this in my conversation with Joel. Until he told me about level nine, and that is so darkly funny that I have to admit I became a little hysterical.”

“Well that’s good, you explaining things,” said Sophie as she glanced across at Joel.

“Dave was saying we all have dark secrets that haunt us,” said Joel. “Is that right, Dave?” he added helpfully.

Dave had now adopted the ‘face palm’ posture. He finally raised his head and looked slowly from Sophie to Joel. “Look we all have our demons. I thought I had laid most of mine to rest and over the years had learnt to live with the remaining ones.”

“So what has happened?” queried Sophie

Joel smiled at Dave in a way that was intended to be encouraging, although he had no idea what his friend was going on about. He was going to speak when he heard a gasp of surprise from Sophie.

In the foyer of the Gate a board displayed information and reviews; here Deacon had discovered the identities of two of the three people he had observed on the terrace: Dave and Sophie Trulock, brother and sister who together ran the Gate; it was her lecture the previous night; it was his voice in the fog arguing with Seraphim. From this revelation there followed a number of questions, all as opaque as last night’s fog. Maybe now he was on the threshold of discovering something about the events that had led up to his sister taking her own life. Moving slowly as if overcome by a great weariness, Deacon left the Gate and walked to the nearby park where he sat on a low wall.

Everything had changed after Electra’s death. The family had been split apart and so had his life. It was as if someone had taken a blunt knife, roughly sawn through the fabric of their shared reality, and cast the two halves aside: Creating a divide as deep and profound as the one that Electra had cast herself into from the vertiginous parapet high above the Avon Gorge, on the day of her eighteenth birthday. Every year on June the sixth, he made a pilgrimage to the Clifton Suspension Bridge. There was a sad symmetry to the fact that she was born and died on the same day.

Opening his eyes he saw the child he had encountered earlier on the foreshore, approaching on his silver scooter, his Wellingtons now streaked with black mud. He stopped and smiled shyly. Deacon smiled back, and the boy scooted off towards his mother. After a few minutes he stood and tilted his head back to feel the warmth of the winter sun on his face, then began to walk away from the river.

Joel had now succumbed and was drinking beer with Dave. They were still outside on the terrace but Sophie had withdrawn to the warmth of her kitchen leaving her brother and her ex-lover sitting in the sun. They had finished their lunch and Joel was looking for an excuse to leave because he was excited to be seeing Mai tonight and did not want his day to degenerate into getting wrecked with Dave.

Dave was silent as Joel worked the oars against the ebbing tide. Progress was slow but within twenty minutes they were pulling the skiff onto the concrete apron outside the boathouse.

“Come inside.” Dave called out over his shoulder as he started to unlock the door.

“Well I,” Joel began.

“Look I can talk now we are here. Come inside and I will explain some stuff.” Dave began to wind up the large shutter that covered the front of the building.

“Let’s get some light in here. Just look at that Ducati.”

Once upstairs Dave went around the large studio room pulling up all the blinds. Then took two bottles of beer from a small fridge and threw one to Joel. He settled himself down on the couch facing the big window that looked out over the river, pulled a packet of Rizlas from his pocket and put his feet up on a leather footstool. Joel sat down in a battered brown leather armchair; it was placed at ninety degrees to the sofa, but still commanded an excellent view.

“So, do you know what a pathogenic secret is?” asked Dave

“Freud?” replied Joel.

“Well done. In fact I think it predates Freud but he adopted it. It is the dark secret that Freudian analysis seeks to find, and bring kicking and screaming out into the noonday sun. Anyway, the pathogenic secret is much more than just a bad memory or a negative experience that we can forget or somehow ‘get over’. It is damage that must be healed or it will rot within us, poisoning our lives for all eternity. In cultures where shamanic healing is practised, the secret is often seen as a serpent or a stone that must be expelled or exorcised.”

“I never knew you were into this stuff,” said Joel waving away the proffered jazz cigarette.

As Joel listened and gazed out of the window he began to feel a sense of foreboding. A dozen or so brightly coloured canoes were passing by in a line, like a row of ducks following their mother. He stood up to open a window, noticing that Dave was looking at him strangely.

“Hey are you alright? You look like you are having a minor white-out.”

“Suddenly need a little fresh air, that’s all,” said Joel opening the metal-framed window to the maximum of it’s limited travel. “Maybe I am having a paranoia attack on your behalf. I think I might have a condition, paranoia by proxy. What do you think?”

“Hmm maybe,” chuckled Dave.

Joel carried on standing by the window.

Lorna Z took the same route home from school every day. If it was raining it was a two-bus journey to the mansion flat in Chiswick where she lived with her father. But when the weather was fine she preferred to walk the first part of her journey. Every time that she crossed the bridge, whether on the bus or on foot she looked towards the cluster of boats where she knew Joel lived.

Today the sun was shining so Lorna was walking. Last night she had gone with her father to the Gate to listen to Sophie’s lecture about the causeway, and afterwards had met and talked to Sophie and was still aglow from being included in the adult world of ideas and creativity. Also on her mind was the fact that her father had that night gone on a mission of some kind with Joel, about which he had remained tight lipped, thus allowing her imagination to fly in a thousand speculative directions.

As she reached the centre of the bridge she saw that someone else was looking towards the same area that interested her so much and as she drew along side she recognised the man. He had been at Sophie’s talk but something was different; his hair was no longer in long braids.

She thought it would be ungracious to pass by without saying something and seeing him switch his gaze from the group of moored houseboats, to the swirling currents that contorted the surface of the water around the stone piers of the bridge, she broke the silence.

Lorna now felt able to ask the question she has wanted to ask from the start. “Do you know Joel Barlow? He lives down there and I saw you looking at his boat just now.”

When Deacon replied in the negative she spent the next few minutes telling him all about Joel, and her father’s escapade in the fog with him the night before.

After a few moments Deacon asked, “So what is so important about the blue boat?” He shaded his eyes from the sun as he tried to pick it out from the other boats. Realising as he did so that this Joel must be the guy who was on the terrace at the Gate earlier in the day, and who he had seen numerous times in the embankment gardens. He really wanted to know about what or whom she had seen the previous evening at the Gate, particularly if she saw his father or Seraphim, but felt that it was inappropriate to ask. So he listened while Lorna unleashed a tide of information.

And as he listened it occurred to him that Joel was somehow central to this bright child’s universe. He was also shocked as well as intrigued by the fact of Darren Shah’s recent death beneath the bridge where they now stood, because he knew, better than most, that such events can have a destructive resonance that is not lessened by the passage of time.

Joel had taken advantage of a pause in Dave’s confession to propose a continuance on the next day. As it was he would have no time to row back to the Val and get changed. So he asked Dave to help him drag his skiff up into the boathouse and then called a cab to take him to meet Mai at the hotel where she was staying. Dave seemed happy enough to resume tomorrow, and while Joel waited for the cab to arrive he watched as the motorbike was wheeled outside and Dave set to work oiling and polishing.

“You going to be alright?” asked Joel.

“Of course, you know me, always merry and bright. I left my mountain bike here last night so I can cycle back when I am done here, which will probably do me good, no worries.”

That night Joel took Mai to his favourite restaurant. They ate Lebanese food; Joel became a little drunk and afterwards they took a cab back to Hammersmith. Descending the steps onto the embankment Joel saw that two police motorbikes with flashing blue lights were parked on the path ahead. As they approached they could hear indistinct voices rising above the background static of the police radios. A policeman in a yellow fluorescent jacket came towards them.

“Are you Joel Barlow?”

When Joel nodded the policeman continued.

“You are wanted for questioning regarding the attempted murder of David Trulock. Please can you accompany me to the police station?”

Dave laid in a darkened room, attached to a system of tubing and monitors, a large comedic bandage around his head. He could not hear the voices, footsteps, traffic noise or even the soft beeping of the heart monitor because he was fully occupied within his own inner floating world where, high on the plateau, he was performing his dance. He swung the wooden staff in a complex pattern of movements, marking out and honouring the four cardinal points of the compass, chanting as he did so. It was still an hour before sun up, but by then he would be ready.

Just beyond Dave’s field of vision the women were preparing a final meal for him. He could smell the wood smoke from the fire that they crouched around. Soon he would depart and follow the winding path down the mountainside until he reached the ‘field of stones’ where he would face his first ordeal. Feral gangs of boys would pelt him with broken biscuits, Bourbons.

Joel had been at the police station for two and a half hours before they managed to find and interview the minicab driver who had picked him up outside the boathouse and driven him to meet Mai.

Detective Z and DC Sharma were both out of town at the retirement dinner for the chief constable of an adjoining force and the duty officer, on discovering that Joel had also been questioned over the Shah death, thought he was on to something. Especially as Joel was the last known person to be with Dave, and his fingerprints were all over the weapon used to bludgeon Dave about the head, an oar.

The minicab driver had to confirm that when picking up Joel from the boathouse, he had seen Dave cheerfully polishing his beloved motorcycle, fully conscious and unbludgeoned at that point in the timeline before Joel was allowed to leave the confined interview room. Mai was waiting for him and they went out into the night and quickly found a black cab. Sophie called to say that Dave was stable for the moment, and all they could do was wait until he woke up before assessing if there was any neurological damage.

After watching for a while as the alligators basked in the sun at the water hole, Dave had circled around the edge of the forest clearing and was now lying face down in the dirt. He reached out for his wooden staff and found it gone. Damn! He thought. I must have left it in the knitwear section of the department store when I was trying on robes. Damn and blast!

He peered through the thin grass at the huge leathery creatures a dozen yards away and his mouth went dry as he realised he would have to wrestle them with his bare hands. Then a thought came to him and he reached down into the folds of his newly purchased robe and felt his trusty dagger nestling in its sheath. A wave of profound relief swept over him.

In a moment he was on his feet shouting his challenge to the armour plated denizens of the waterhole, who raised their sleepy heads and blinked at him angrily. Dave advanced; and as he did so a tiny part of his brain spoke up.

“Alligators can weigh up to one thousand pound. They have forty pairs of pointed teeth that are arraigned along a pair of jaws that exert a pressure of roughly five thousand pounds per square inch, that is two and a half US tons. They can run on land at thirty miles an hour over short distances... and I am about to do battle with two angry specimens, on their home turf; armed only with my dick. Have I really thought this through?”