Desire Line (11 page)

Nobody spoke. Next he tried, ‘The first thing'll happen, we'll get a new name. My money's on Backward Rhyl.'

‘It could've been worse.'

‘
Puh!
' A blob of saliva shot from between two rows of big teeth. ‘Worse? Even for Rhyl—
worse?
'

But it could, if the flood had reached the hospital, if it'd come in darkness— when even in daytime it did
this.
Still, I'd made my choice balanced on a wooden chair and Glenn wasn't going to tip me over by acting like he's not involved. I'll never understand him and the only way to deal with someone like that, someone who won't defend the side you're both on, is you don't just stick to your guns. You give them covering fire. ‘A lot's repairable and most of what isn't was waiting for the wreckers anyway. And at least there were only three deaths,' I said.

Our mystery dead person was still a footnote to any media mentions of us. Not even a gender had been released. (I was living in a lull – didn't know it). Glenn Hughes occupying my sofa, that was bother. He'd stayed. The night of the storm it felt OK to shelter the deluged-out. These things have instant payback. A third of the town is underwater and you have a loud, pink refugee
in your house – the upset's nearly gratifying. But next morning and the next, to have him pebbledashing the mirror, removing his yesterday's sweatshirt, bag of sweets and finally dirty socks before finding a seat— he was like a tomcat spraying its new home. I hate cats. Only the second night he picked up an image from my desk and wants to know, ‘Who's this then, Yori?' and when I answer ‘My mother', it's grinning and, ‘Still about is she?' like there was a chance for him.

‘Alive, yes. She moved away. After my father went back to Japan.' Not quite true but near enough.

Libby's ground floor wasn't designed for even a single man. Its sitting room I slept in, dining room I lived in and the shower room was a step outside the back door to an open porch for access— like the admired Muroa house in Tokyo but not meant. Also there was Tess. For the last few months on Fridays I cooked us a meal while she pretended to be interested. ‘
Yakisaba
— means fried noodles,' I'd say tasting, holding up a sample I longed to see her eat. ‘The pieces of fish are marinated tilapia. The little cakes are called
mochi
– white ones plain, green ones coloured with seaweed.'

Well I bet nobody'd guess to taste them!
is what she always said, which is fine, and afterwards we'd have dependable sex during which her face stays smooth, as do the generous lips you want to dance your fingers over. Tess-ss.

What she didn't know was I remembered her from school. A little girl with twigs for arms, always on the edge of things, poor-looking, trying to be invisible. I saw her though. And – me that bit
older
– I'd speak to her. She was too shy. I got
yes, no, I dunno.
But like the town's reward for coming back, here she was again, grown to a perfect Linda Darnell, not-shy, standing naked on Fridays – smaller breasts though – some Saturdays, an Art Deco statue in ivory and bronze. Impossible, now. Well, stopped. My private Hollywood star couldn't appear. Tess's home was off-limits as well, due to crowding because her backstory was filled out with a feckless parent and, worse, brothers. Of course away from wrecked Rhyl I could have rented us another flat. Or bought a house for Tess who'd grown up deprived and whose mother and half-brothers were always in scrapes over money and semi-illegalities, an entire house for Tess to ogle and touch the surfaces of— part of me saw it happening. A cottage in the hills, properly done up by English weekenders where I'd point out the garden through an original, five plank door— What d'you think, huh? But that needed the Yori Tess knew to explain how he was able to do it. A major reboot. Time consuming.

So instead of Tess, ‘Hiya!' from Glenn Hughes in the mornings, and, ‘race yer to the crapper!'

Only a couple of weeks and I found out all of his tastes without asking. I gave up trying to eat well, work at home, keep tidy, watch movies with proper attention, and, a continuing project, listen out for the things that made J.S. Bach Top Composer. What do you do when you find a tiger sharing your cave? Wear stripes. Even catching me talking to Tomiko would have Glenn joining in. I'm not recording here what with. Tomiko and I never referred to it afterwards. As I lugged the salvaged pieces of Glenn's life back to his drying out semi in Bank Street I smelled the river under all that detergent and kept quiet. The original quarry tiles had come out pretty well thanks to me, the new skirting boards showing only a slight warp already. ‘It'll be better in your own home again,' I said. But it's a case of live here, Glenn or I might have to kill you too. Except it couldn't be ‘too‘, because I wasn't counting my first victim back then. ‘As for the present, the poster I mean, there wasn't any need. And you're right, you shouldn't let Alice see it till you've got more things in.'

At least Alice wouldn't be coming home a widow and how close a call was that? Before he stumped off to check upstairs he surprised me with, ‘Any time I can do something back, I will you know, for putting me up,' which turned out to be a promise he kept. In return for houseroom, Glenn would go on to give me
three
presents over the summer. The poster I already had. An annoying mug from Spain followed and would end up my favourite— once I'd handed it on. (I'll explain another time.) As for Glenn's third favour, that changed everything.

But happy enough to eat an aubergine sideways, hot enough to boil a kettle on my navel, lucky enough to pick seven winning numbers on Casino Pigalle, I took the beach road home, 
the pretty way, not. I wanted to wallow in disaster and index its huge opportunities. They could make my revamp of good old Quay Street before The Wave more of a scab-pick— so attend to the plum sites, I told myself, now you get to see them and now actually moving from one to the next was possible. They were spread out in a chain from Foryd Harbour along two point five kilometres to Rhyl's untouched Edwardian east. All the way you have the sea on your left. On the right there was action and colour and amazing structures and people coming back to fill them, landscaping, sudden vistas, new and old, though all still in my head. An empty blue sky's thrown over the lot, making one of those days you lay down in the memory, warm, hardly a breath of wind so of course you treat yourself to a twenty-minute walk along Rhyl's ultimate desire line that has just, to use another technical planning term, had
the crap
rubbed off it.

With Glenn further behind at every pace and my plans branching fractal-like, I wish I'd stayed out the rest of the day. Back home Libby Jenkinson and her younger sister – I could tell you her name but not relevant – were sunbathing strapless on the front crazy paving. Flesh bulged above Libby's tight top the way excess sealant does. The sister was starved in comparison though sharing Libby's other traits of loud and over friendly. They were drinking from cans and shuffling away from the shade with chairs attached, giggling between themselves, girly and non-threatening. And when, ‘What you done now?' Libby wanted to know, it was still laughing and aiming her cider at me, slopping it. The sister tutted over the waste. ‘There's been somebody here for you. You've gotta contact the police— oo-o! He left a proper letter I had to sign one of them things for. It's sitting on the stairs.'

News of Sara was inside.

Chapter 8

Writing and reflection through writing had often allowed her to recoup what alcohol stole. A journal can be used to document and, in some fashion, constrain
extremis
… also to record small successes: cheap homilies, both, from an expensive therapist after Josh left. Absolutely, Dr Tilney… Tilson? Buying the notebook in the little general store in Sussex Street on a meandering walk this morning, had served as alibi for a Smirnoff purchase. In Oxford she was expert at entering run-of-the-mill booze merchants intent on something very specific, ‘a 2001 Meursault for my father? He's very particular about his Burgundy.' Usually a safe choice to be thwarted in, then swayed by the special offer on spirits, a sop to the retailer becomes almost a pleasantry. But as the afternoon came on she redrafted her letter to Fleur and lacking anything else, opened the book to find it a useless diary, its year unplanned and nine months of blankness already in the past. As a memory test she tried filling in names and addresses of acquaintances, though telephone numbers escaped her save Pryorsfield's, the Severings' family home. Then, scoring through the printed date, she wrote ‘September 23
rd
. 12.05 am. Josh rang' and recent events came easily at first. But a few sentences into 24
th
‘I'd read, after discovering I was pregnant, that in the giving of a name lies much of the receiver's futurity—' she fetched the Smirnoff. Stopping cannot mean stopped, she told the absent Dr Tilston, or perhaps it was Josh she explained to. You cannot stop as though pulling the communication cord. It causes damage, is not recommended. Experts agree. (Somewhere there would be an expert who agreed). With drink, no, with a certain dosage of drink, everything matters intensely. Another, and nothing does. Each day the hands shake a little more or less. Estimate well and there lies the key to contentment: now try and fit to the lock.

Sara was never going to fit the key into that lock, not here. Or now.

I own a poster of past Rhyl. Not a famous one, not the Jackson Burton you might have seen if you call up ‘Rhyl', with children on sand like icing sugar, the Pavilion behind them— or better, Douglas Lionel Mays' Punch and Judy audience that fetched a record at auction recently. Mine is a bit of an embarrassment, hangs above the veg rack and was gifted me by Glenn Hughes. I suspect he made it himself, it's his sort of thing and he's forgotten admitting to that little fakery business he ran twenty years ago in vintage ephemera. He's done a passable ageing job on my piece, graduated the fade and then put it in an old-fashioned tube. Added damage to the top right corner just where you might grab hold to take it down— all, so one day he can say ‘Y'know that poster I gave you that time—?' Bars of printed text prop up sepia roundels of vanished views. The Belvoir Hotel is fancy as a wedding cake, the elegant East Parade fountain hasn't been broken up yet, and parked under the pier are a convoy of horse-drawn wheeled sheds to bathe from. And so on. Central is a head-and-shoulders portrait of John Sisson, First Developer, the Father of Rhyl. Each morning I read, ‘Indisposed and Delicate as I am, I do not believe there is another place so good in the country… having visited the South of France, Spain and Mexico… I prefer the atmosphere of Rhyl to any of them.' A pity the writer's holiday was taken (as it admits) in 1848.

At 6 a.m. and ready for another day on Project Sara I don't let it bother me. Like a lot of projects this one's mutated as it goes along but I need to say it started harmlessly. I was very attracted by her better qualities, like her respect for parents, love for Eurwen, who I knew from personal experience wasn't an easy love, and doing good work. OK, she was a forty-year-old semi-famous woman and I was a younger half-Japanese but I kidded myself if we'd met
in ideal circumstances
we'd have got on. Am I wrong to?

Showered, I walk naked and chicken-skinned back into to my three-metre-long kitchen which contains a sink, shelving, a basic MultiCook and not much else, so reminding me of student days. Access is via a sliding door. A finger of yellow light poking through says Success Is Waiting! But the signals are everywhere. For example the alloy runners of the door into the living room are grit-free and move with the silkiness of the recently installed, something I can't usually get to happen even by rigorous cleaning. Tea scent is filling the kitchen but I repeat the action. Each time the panel of board vanishes noiselessly, leaving a crisp cutout in the wall through which Sara's shrine is on view. Along a tarnished silver chain, her moonstones, one detached, catch the sun.

September 27th

Two calls this morning, the first from Geoffrey: ‘You'll ring often from now on? But I feel I should I speak to—?' her father tormented her with a short intermission. Sara conjured him into being: the silver hair, raffishly curled to collar length but also neat and gleaming against a fresh Viyella shirt… now pinching the high bridge of his nose as forensic eyes focused two hundred miles to his north. ‘No? I'll bide my time then. For the present.' Their conversation finished with the professor softened as much as a man wrestling a huge annoyance could soften and Sara felt the nails in her palms gradually relent.

A decent interval while Fleur made sure he was study-bound, then the excessive precision of her: ‘It is just me, darling!' came as much more welcome. ‘I'll send the postcard at once. But I thought you may be in want of reading matter? Something you can't get there to help pass the time?'

‘I'm not in hospital, Fleur.'

‘Of course not. But what about work, then? Something that could perhaps—'

‘No. Really.'

Fleur gave up. It left Sara wishing she had prolonged the conversation instead of this lapse into vacancy, staring out at the river, a glass of orange juice cradled to her breastbone. No drink today, yet, hence the slight
crawliness
across the back and shoulders, as though a colony of small beetles continually searched for a way out of her clothes. She shuddered. Since Josh left, very early, she had gone through his room. This was perfectly permissible: as she'd begun to dress in a white bra and cotton briefs picked from the tallboy drawer, she realised her own pathetically few belongings had already been searched. The two items of underwear were neatly lined up together whereas her distinct memory was of throwing the briefs in on top of her only sweater. Her small empty vanity case had
just
budged from the wall.
I've stopped
,
she had announced to him in absolute sincerity… and he had looked for her hidden supply at the first opportunity.