Desire Line (16 page)

Kim folded and unfolded the five pound note without passing it on immediately. ‘They're knock-off, sort of. You couldn't afford to smoke if you had to pay the tax'n everything, y'know, could you?'

‘You said you'd seen my daughter.'

‘Yeah. Redhead like you? She's the spit of you.'

‘It
is
Eurwen.'

‘Yeah, that's right. But not your height.'

‘She's going to be taller—'

‘I don't think I know 'er other name, she never said.'

‘It's Meredith.'

‘Could be.'

She was unwrapping the new cigarettes but kept the note between her fingers making the operation difficult. Then it had to stop as Sara grabbed both her hands and said, ‘If you've really seen her, where and when? Please. I'm her mother. I only want to make sure she's safe. I only want to… find her. To talk to her.
Please
.'

‘Let me get another fag out will you? How come you lost touch? You, was it?'

‘Yes… I suppose so.'

‘Where d'you live, then?'

‘Do you mean when we lost touch? Um, down… south.'

‘I thought you sounded London. Straightaway, last night, London I nailed you. So you've come all the way up here to find 'er?'

‘Yes.'

‘God, you're putting the work in, I'll give you that. Or you're feeling well-guilty.' Kim scratched the crown of her head through the wool of the hat and finally, she took off the huge glasses to reveal swollen eyelids and crusted lashes fringing blue irises. But inspiration came bubbling up behind them. ‘Y' boyfriend was it?'

‘I don't have a boyfriend.' Two could play at this. ‘There's been no one since her father left us.'

‘Oo-oo, Sister Sara!' Kim hooted. But it was a good answer, another test passed. The cigarettes open, Kim chose to eat cake, raspberry jam settling into the corner of her mouth. She nibbled another morsel, delicate as a duchess. ‘Your Eurwen, she's close with that Meg, yeah?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm surprised she don't know where she is.'

‘She doesn't. So, Kim, when did
you
last see her?'

‘Meg? Last night. You were there.'

‘You know that I mean Eurwen.'

But a cigarette became a necessity now: getting it out, tapping it, getting a light from one of the old men. ‘Ta, much!' When she blew her first exhalation away from Sara the smile was condescending. ‘Might be best if… when we meet up next, I just told her you was here, looking.'

‘Don't you dare do that!' Everyone in the tight space seemed to turn, to fix on her, though a moment before a child uttering wordless shrieks remained unattended.

‘And don't you fucking shout at me!' Kim responded. ‘Who d'you think you are? '

She jumped to her feet and shoved and wriggled her way to the door and was gone. Sara was about to set off in pursuit when, ‘Oi! Sara!' a voice said.

It was Harvey. One big raw hand was thrust through the hatch, close enough to catch her sleeve if it wanted to. ‘Money, love. What d'you think I am? A fag factory?'

By the time Sara was at pavement-level, Kim was nowhere though pedestrians were few and the length of the street visible in both directions. To return was an option and demand to know from Harvey – with accompanying bribes or threats – where Kim might be found. But it was not, not really.

Sara's rooted there, dazed, a passenger come up from the Tube into the wrong street. Surely she can't be afraid of losing her way in Rhyl? A step into the road and SkyTower rears over the roofline, its cabin near the apex, a landmark. But she cranes in the opposite direction for— Hat Woman, I name her. If I were superstitious I'd label her Sara's unlucky charm. Here she is at her own game. Having attached herself to Sara, with their business obviously unfinished, she runs out. A woman of that age playing hide and seek! And winning. Sara's certainly the loser. Instead of home, she makes for town and it swallows her up. On the plus side by a trick of the light Rhyl looks almost inviting today. Not exactly picturesque, but the effect makes her linger in front of battered, ornate shopfronts with their reminders of a past allure – a bit like Hat Woman.

I wish I could tell her, Drift
along while you can. Focus on the family coming towards you. That clumping boy and his mother, behind is the father, bobbing and twitching his way through the foot traffic like a fighter. A little girl shelters among them. Blonde and smiley, her stubby fingers are grasping for anything within reach, a display of apples, a revolving barber's sign. She even gropes for the black fur of a giant dog. Their general shabbiness says they're out of funds and luck. But they're laughing. The father gives the son a playful push. The mother seems going to intervene but they settle it with a grin as the child begins a war dance, wants to be hoisted level with their faces. Choose them and share the pleasure, I encourage her. You haven't got long.

Does she, doesn't she? She puts a hand out and it's to the nearest wall and to hold herself up. Then a small thing happens. One second she's drag-footed, the next she stares into a shop window and heads inside. Back out again almost as quickly, it's with a small wrapped package— so small it could fit into her shoulder bag and the transfer's half-complete when she steps back against the shop doorway and shakes out a silk scarf by its corners. It balloons from her hands in the breeze, making a passer-by side-step as the material turns into a live thing, look, it's trying to escape and soar up and away from the woman that grips the tassels. The scarf's design of turquoise and peacock blue with silver edges will blaze out in this strong sun like stained glass. And I know who this is for because I know those colours and who'll always choose them given the chance. So a welcome home gift, a connection with the missing even though Eurwen's never touched it. Sara has picked by instinct. Easy for her and more like slipping into another self than remembering a fact. Outside time, mother and daughter are one and the blue-green silk goes slithering round the neck, drawing the girl to the grown version of herself who stands holding both ends. In a drowner's grip. I decide to let her go for now— with the fiction running through her head of everything healed and Eurwen's slotted back into a remake of their old life.

Sara's Sundays are a work-day for me. I thread through West Rhyl's loiterers and pass the abandoned fairground site, its furthest point— where my own head should be full of what to do with it, for it. Once it was a tourist town's powerhouse—

—but Sara and Eurwen have unbalanced my mood. You're wrong Kailash, I must have a heart or which organ is registering Pain of Regret now? In this place especially where past and present are like cut and paste. What's gone? Brash flower beds and the Golden Horses carousel, helter-skelter, rowing boats, hot dogs, palm-readers, minature golf, ice-cream,
Strike It Lucky!
and Rhyl rock. And the Ferris Wheel brooding above the shabby roundabouts right up till the moment the last pound coin was extracted from the last punter. I know, thanks to a photograph of Eurwen, craning out from her cradle at its summit, not scared, in fact a picture of relish. As background that great symbol of human fortune, the Big Dipper, is about to descend. Listen carefully and you can make out how halfway down the metal carriage will morph into an old rickety Water Chute boat that caused Rhyl's first ever funfair death, long before a certain famous murderer got a job on the Dodgems and made his play for the screaming girls—

Long before I'd meet Sara here.

When a sudden impact comes from the direction of the river and the bridge, I turn my back on the desolation and clamber up the embankment for a sight of the water or the traffic or anything but this. Over in what's left of the harbour I think I can recognise a familiar character, a retired seaman called William Jones at work. He's repairing, he tells me, a fishing dory. There'll be the usual bits of metal, wood, ropes and sheeting about, mainly gash stuff waiting for someone to summon up the effort to shift it. But round William Jones it's ship-shape (not that I can see from here but I've been up close) with everything to hand. If I had time I'd go over to watch. I've become a bit obsessed actually. A dory is an exotic craft to be holed and sunk in the estuary mud— then salvaged with enormous effort according to Jones. He made a good story of finding the half-buried craft thirty metres upstream. How he hosed the hull out at low tide and attached empty barrels he calls camels, working always against the clock to fix them way down and float it off. But worth it. When he finishes and fits this last piece, this
strake
, then the bow and stern will both rise well above the line of the
gunwale
in a characteristic shape that's elegant
and
practical. I know all the nautical stuff thanks to William Jones who's made impressive progress since I got him the off-cuts he needed. Still struggling with his workplace, though, the silt sucking at the waders every turn. I'd like the rest of the morning on that hull with him, do something productive instead of this self-pitying idleness. Irony's only one of the concepts I never mastered – my education got going late, there are big gaps – but it might be operating now. Just when I've the tools assembled for Project Sara, personal weakness gets in the way and I could leave her be, easily jump ship. Switch horses. My hands are feeling the metal of the plane and spoke-shave, and the give of the grain to its blade as the teak I gave William Jones surrenders another red curl.

My face imagines the breath of wind that has bellied out a blue-green square of silk.

Chapter 11

October 3
rd

Since she ran away, Sara found she noticed Eurwen more: how the hooded-eyed expression had become habitual, her default setting. How the lips…
God!
she could draw and colour the mouth, wider than her own, a pure shade of peach and slightly open when she is unaware of being observed. Ready to mock though or more likely, to contest… But this spiteful, perfunctory summing up is halted in its tracks. Sara ‘sees' herself arrested in treachery, for that is what it is, and, thunder-struck, stalls halfway across the room in which she was making for… who knows, anyway?
Of course
this isn't the sum total of her daughter. What of Eurwen's instant return to humour after yet more of their ‘words'? No sulking! And the gift of time given with such a good heart to
Gramps Geoffrey and Frau Fleur
, Eurwen's own inventions, new characters that she managed to coax out of an elderly couple and sustain through play. To personalities Sara treated as complete and fixed, Eurwen proffered the chance for surprising themselves and they had taken it up with gratitude.

And what of Eurwen's preternatural feel for the sufferings of the voiceless and her passion to defend them? And its corollary, her absence of self-love?

Sara sinks down into a chair, palms pressed to her eyes, hiding, sobbing.

Lack of resolve was a physical burden as she moved around Josh's house later the same day, nearly convinced that in the next room Eurwen was wrenching a comb through the unruly mane… pulling on the boots she seemed to want to live in, summer and winter. Always on the threshold of departure she could still be clutched at, not quite out of reach. Yet.

Everything Sara wrote down re: Eurwen would be in the present tense from now on. I know because I've got her personal effects however risky that might be (for me I mean). So for example I can read off, ‘October 3
rd
. Very late or early. Through the wall I strain to hear Josh turn in bed, to receive ‘the comfortable words' of his proximity at least in a silent house. Even the little clock he has lent me in lieu of my watch barely ticks but still counts out my errors… for example a conviction at each waking up I need to weather just a day, one more day that will bring us close. Tomorrow we'll hold each other: touch, smell, listen to, see… tomorrow. Whereas in fact time is not the problem, time is a construct and means nothing. The
place
is at fault. Eurwen is here in the minute that begins
now
, my minute that I'm wishing away. But elsewhere.'

October 4
th

Those beetles were back, crawling across her chest and into the valley of the breasts, so lifelike you expected to see the silk twitch and a pair of black antennae emerge from between buttons, the shiny carapace pushing after them, a squeeze… But she'd had no drink for five days which was a working week for some. This morning, soon after Josh's departure, a huge Red Cross-type parcel seemingly for the intellectually deprived was delivered. From dependable Fleur. She carried it into the living room and sat on the rug, tearing at the brown tape with her nails… and found books. A brace of paperbacks, Blackwell's labels still attached, were Ian McEwan's
On Chesil Beach and
William Boyd's
Restless.
She scanned their covers. Oxford novels… naturally… poor Fleur. The home connection should have made them welcome, so why did she fling both away and watch their flight across the room as if a scorpion lurked in the pages? And when they came to rest, did the grimace they'd provoked remain? She shook her head, knowing too well.