Desire Line (22 page)

—Or would pretend to know because this Kim, who was she? Information from a doubtful source could prove more mischievous than ignorance. Consider John Cane's assertion that Thomasina (she who had lost him his wager) was none other than Orlando Tansley. Not a girl, not
her
peerless girl, but an effeminate wastrel and swindler hung at Newgate's Debtor's Door, the year preceding the slander. How conveniently! Because he existed, Tansley, one of three unfortunates in
View of an
execution before the Debtor's Door of Newgate
,
the famous 1809 engraving by Fisher Nuttall. But no record of any Oxford connection has ever come to light nor any Tansley accomplishments bar criminality. So entirely preposterous, yet the fiction dogged Thomasina and was one of the first things Sara set out to dispel. A lack of corroborating facts must always require
Quo bono
? being asked. In Thomasina's case, John Cane… or now
Cunning, parasitical, every-cruel-tag-Josh-could-attach-to-her Kim Tighe.
Kim benefited, she reasoned, not materially (it was natural for Sara to discount a small sum) but in melodrama and the chance to star… which she has stupidly provided. Self-disgust broke out more powerfully than ever. Why begin to analyse now in excusatory mode, a woman she despised? So it seemed. After fear came fear's fishy aftertaste, humiliation; she had been made a fool of and it was with gritted teeth she set herself to record the next incident.

Out again with the Eurwen leaflets she was high on hope, courtesy of the day's opening shots of vodka:
Excuse me… this is Eurwen Meredith. Have you seen her?
No one refused. They said
nope, don-think-so,
sorry love.
Two teenagers laughed in earshot, a young man whose earthy smell registered just too late to have her veering away, muttered incoherent sentences to himself rather than her. But no one refused. At the crossing of a side road she spotted a cluster of middle-aged women, the Holy Grail. When she called out they changed course; their small, dumpy leader, straining coat belted tightly though it was mild, said, ‘What's up?'

‘It's my daughter.'

An Eurwen was passed from hand to hand: ‘Na-a, you save your papers love.'

Haven't, no. What about you, Shirl…? Oh, it's a sod when they do that… She'll turn up. I'll bet she does. Luvly mum like you!
For a few seconds before moving off they stood and enclosed her in their half circle, a female bastion. Then she was aware that, subtly, without meaning to, they freed themselves from her distress and she was grateful they hadn't extended the conversation to become tedious, sickly. Instead, without needing reference to any etiquette, they had done just enough. She felt very tired. The midday turned drear above and cooler below and a tumbledown wall on the corner of Westbourne Road was something to make for, her face welcoming the onset of drizzle as excuse to give up. Her ankles ached from hard slow walking and a hollowness in her chest warned she would need drink the instant she was inside Josh's house, well before thought or speech… or anything.

And suddenly there was Kim. Kim was smiling at her from a billboard.

She blinked and looked again. The collapsed wall she perched on seemed to be in defence of some sort of builders yard though no bigger than a suburban garden. A padlocked, tumbled-down shack at the far end was the sole indication of business premises. The predominant usage was as dumping ground for the extinct funfair only a street away. Remains of grotesque mechanical arms, other obscure contraptions and a cup-and-saucer roundabout with deep vessels into which toddlers could be strapped, all were stacked or spread. And propped jauntily against a giant cup was the billboard advertising Palace of Pleasure, a painted blonde in a red bikini reclining on her elbow, one leg bent while the other pointed skywards in an ecstatic stab of flesh. Kim's calves and thighs were scrofulous with weather but the familiar smirk remained or a girlish version of it. ‘I was painted once, me, could of bin a model,' she had bragged. Pitiable now, the idealised Kim… cushioned in scrap.

Fireworks!
A crack and whoosh returned her to Westbourne Road. She pulled up her collar and made for the bridge, a rattle of shots following her out of town.

But fireworks were going off every evening as soon as the light faded. ‘A whole bloody month of this!' was Josh's response. On consideration, Rhyl did have an especially rowdy feel as she had walked it, as though Carnival were just around the corner, something to look forward to, a relief from yearlong Lent. But the hard-eyed children begging at the back of the Queens Market, their hideous Guy slumped like corpse, did not look safe to try Eurwen's picture on.

‘You didn't give them anything?' Josh wanted to know.

‘Of course not,' she lied. Guido Fawkes lay racked and broken at their feet… one of them had worn a death's head mask and could have been a girl behind it. Another's thin boyish face was daubed livid. Bonfire Night, All Hallows' Eve, the Druidic
Samhain
and the Romans'
Feralia
seemed blended, a brew to salve every lack and loss. Or just something to anticipate for this bunch of wild uncared for children that would come to no harm. As she focused on the eggs she was cooking and their yielding to heat, she was about to say more… maybe a mild disagreement with his attitude? But sirens sounded back across the river and his phone went off as the first golden solids caught at the spatula.

Hours later a burnt scent still filled the downstairs rooms. When he returned it was left to Josh to clear away the aborted meal. From the kitchen he shouted: ‘Just kids having fun out on the game reserve.'

Without even Polly Reith's pamphlet open as prop he had surprised her staring at a blank television and inert long enough for one curled leg to crumple when she jumped up. She wore jeans still, though was half-ready for bed in a pyjama top, an intimacy interrupted or thought better of. Yet she had waited up, sobered by the suspicion he had gone to
her.
Then his expression as she staggered caused something to snap. ‘The game reserve. That's what you call it?' she asked, supporting herself in the arch.

‘Cher-rist Sara! The state of you.' His hair had grown in the time she'd been here and needed a trim, needed to be brushed impatiently out of his eyes. He pushed past. ‘I'm getting a shower!'…and there it was, now it didn't matter, the time and date on the kitchen wall. Five to ten on October 25
th
. The Feast of Crispian, she mouthed. This day in 1415 Welsh longbowmen turned back the French knights' charge and won The Field of Agincourt for King Henry V.

Quickly she went and gathered her new, warmer clothes. That she owned the wool thing she was about to get into was a novelty, also this jacket with its nylon whisper. But both pulled on easily enough and she made it outside while the water was still thundering in the pipes overhead.

It's the vodka
–
that's what she should have realised. When she thinks she sees danger, she's looking in the wrong place. Alcohol makes her imagine the children are squinting through slitted lids as she edges past them
–
and just visible, gleaming like citrines, are their rodent teeth.

Night had taken over the streets: it was their time, what they were best at. Sara made for the lemonade glow. At the front door of an arcade a mini roundabout-ride was being watched by two teenage girls. ‘Na, don't know 'er. You, Col? Na, me neither.' The tot that belonged to them shrieked with fear as he circled on his plastic pony to
Ghost Riders in the Sky.
Beyond this vivid little drama, acres of chortling gaming machines stood unused.

‘He's not really enjoying it, is he?' Sara said.

Eurwen's picture could not do what slight criticism managed instantly. ‘He wanted to go on,' the tall one answered, looking her in the eye. Squaring up.

‘It'll stop in a minute,' the other explained. Small, more placatory, her nails combed through shockingly bright hair, not Eurwen's colour but a chemical carmine. ‘It's rubbish. And you don't get long.'

The story of Rhyl. Sara retreated into a collision with a heavy-set man. He, at least, examined the picture, frowning an already deeply-creased brow to signal effort. ‘Na— sorry. Oi— Colleen! Get that babby 'ome. It's too bloody late to be in 'ere with him.' To Sara he said, ‘You look wrecked, love.'

‘I'm… very anxious.'

‘Step into the office a minute. What made you come in 'ere looking? Plays the slots, does she?'

‘No. I'm not sure.' Trailing behind him, she noticed the trodden down heels of his shoes and the holed socks. His office was tiny: a desk, a chair both piled with paper, walls covered in imitation wood onto which he pinned Eurwen's picture next to a calendar. October featured a spotted puppy in a bed of autumn leaves. ‘I'll ask around— that's all I can do, yeah?'

‘Thank-you.' A bed of leaves.
When had October come, or gone?

He gave her a long speculative look. ‘Wait a sec.' The desk drawer opened. Down, out of sight, she heard the bottle cap unscrewed and when he passed the mug across it was near-half full. She would never have taken him for a Drambuie-man. ‘You'll be glad of that. Give it an hour and it'll be brass monkeys out there. Get it down you.'

‘Yes.' Sweet… sticky as myrrh. ‘Thank-you again.' Her feet dragged as though in the man's old shoes, fingers made contact with the freezing glass of the outside door a split second before her eyes told her they would. The cold was something to embrace not shrink from, though, now eased into that best of all drink-induced states, physically armoured, but mentally diamond hard, more lucid than she had felt in days…
On the blue, number twenty-two-oo!
came an amplified voice from further along the Promenade.

Waiting out the traffic to cross to The Sky Tower, each vehicle added to the surrounding brilliance. And once at the structure's foot as though the spot were designated for that very purpose, she saw
everything
… and it was stunning. Her eyes swam and, rather than spoil the effect it was intensified to an almost unbearable degree, ripples of dazzling energy. Overhead may be a no-colour but down here vibrancy and pattern became a cipher and its message hugely benevolent: pleasure and forgetting. Tears ran the separate lights each softly against each until she lost the knowledge that these elements were mundane through pure visual sorcery. Part of her held onto the daytime map with its blots, that burnt-out hotel and an abandoned site she knew intimately, glimpsed through shuttering, overrun with growing weeds but still unclean; it could never revert to natural because trash lay waiting for the frost, for a chance to bloom again in naked squalor. But this night real Rhyl stepped forward, a small enamelled
resort
,
tendering two centuries of
panem et circenses
. Ah-h!
You're the girl!
thumping
from
bars and basements, Eurwen had heard it, seen it, exactly this with the ears and eyes Sara had given her, not minding the cold, breathing out, ‘
Stun-ning!
' as a wisp of silk.

I
understand
, Eurwen. Complete comprehension at last. This existential joy has eluded me always… but for you? Your luck has turned and the coins are raining down in a silver shower.
Stunning, huh Mum?

Eurwen had first run
to
Rhyl. And she was here still: the certainty urged Sara to her feet. At any moment around the next corner
she
would be; Eurwen no longer avoiding, not needing her
spa-c-ce
, instead lingering to be caught up… just as the last time they had walked through Oxford's covered market and Sara had taken her arm.

OK, now they'll we're think gay! and you're the fem, Mum!
But Eurwen had not pulled away. That slim freckled forearm, sinewy with lugging buckets and pony fodder, was strong enough to fend her off in a single flick. Instead the latent life let itself be trapped by a mother's elbow and could be pressed under the heart.

‘A scarf, what about that scarf? I see they are wearing them tied so that—'

‘Put it in the charity box, Mum. The drawers are full of scarves.'

Her first week she had been told to ‘Keep off the Lakeside after dark
.'

Josh was laughing. She told it to Josh and he'd laughed into ugly new lines and nearly killed a… a
Murcott
, still laughing. But all was quiet enough. She didn't intend to go as far as they had done then. The first seat would be best, close to the road and safe yet with a…
nice view
(she had to suppress her own snigger), a rather
lovely aspect
. This did force her to laugh aloud. Every light in the town must come down here eventually, settling on the surface to provide a spectacle to buffet the senses. And not lonely at all: people passed behind her, people who had no idea she was there, whose conversations could be eavesdropped on, a donated sentence or two, a homily from each.