Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (16 page)

‘Always lock the door,' Dr Villarossa instructed. She and the husband talked as if Sandra wasn't there. ‘Give her a little alcohol if necessary. It will do no harm now. You're doing an excellent job. Keep the curtains drawn; light may be harmful.' Downstairs the carpets were thick with dust. They passed through the sitting room. Dr Villarossa made no comment about the filth in the kitchen where she washed her hands. She shook the husband's hand in hers.

‘The time is almost come,' she said.

The movement of the train sent Frank's pen on strange jerks across the page. The other people on the train were mainly commuters, ashen-faced. No one else was trying to do anything, they just sat there, staring. Here and there a woman made a splash of colour, like some escaped tropical bird, glimpsed among the sparrows and starlings. Covertly, he watched them.

What would Katie Rumbold be wearing, he wondered, when she opened the door that led straight into his front room? The telephone would be disconnected and hidden in a drawer. The blinds would be down. The washing line would be under the cushion on the settee. Unnoticed, he would lock the door behind her. Should he serve her some wine and a light meal, chat a little beforehand? Or should he just grab her as soon as she came in? He closed his notebook and felt his lids sinking slowly over his eyes. Sleep. There was always, and would be in the end, merciful sleep.

Three weeks were left until the award ceremony on 9 May. Steadily it converged to a point, every minute of each day, as he wrote, cooked, slept, as the train rattled on down the line, past the sidings where Liz Meredith once used to live.

And across the city, Annie Purvis had returned to work after her sick leave. Her future was still uncertain, but things had moved on in her absence. Clare Moat was in care. Brian Farrar was on remand. She wasn't doing abuse work, but she was working hard and doing everything she was advised to do and it made her feel better. Once a week she went, because Mandy suggested it, to see a counsellor, a Dr Simpson. She always arrived early and waited in a conservatory smelling of lemons and damp. It was very hot, but the door to the garden, which she tried several times, was locked. The many potted plants were beaded with water and her skin felt the same.

She talked to Dr Simpson and fidgeted with the chain around her neck. The humidity reduced her to a state of almost vegetable content, yet at the same time it was not quite possible to relax when every wall was glass. Most of the conservatory ran in front of a sitting room with French doors opening into it and broad windows around which grew some kind of vine. She sat, keeping her back straight. Often the other Simpsons were preparing their evening meal and she could hear laughter from somewhere deep in the middle of the house.

She went there and sat in a glass house and cried a lot. She talked about work, because she knew that Sim didn't like her to do it at home, even though he had been marvellous when she told him what had happened. She wanted time to move on carefully, evenly, in the regular doses of the working day, passing forever through her fingers like beads. She lived in terror of dropping them.

Liz's restlessness carried her to the swimming baths. At the cinema, earlier in the week, they'd not been allowed in. You just can't, said the man behind the glass whose eyes were hidden each behind their own window––powerful lenses which made them so big they seemed to be hanging in front of his face rather than a part of it, images on a screen, holograms—You just can't take a baby into an over-eighteen film.

He's asleep, Liz had said, though she had been intending, once inside, to wake him up. Very few people had come to see
Damned in Space,
and it would be easy enough, in the dark, to pretend they were on their own. He ought to be in bed then, the man had replied. At this hour. Suppose he wakes up? He'd be terrified out of his wits, wouldn't he? No, he wouldn't, Liz had said. He'd scream his head off, asserted the man. I know he wouldn't, said Liz, because he wouldn't
understand.
She'd felt, as she said it, that she was betraying Jim. It's against the law, the man said. Suppose he was blind and deaf? Liz asked. I said, it's against the law; you're the deaf one, the man had said, looking over her shoulder at the customer behind . . .

She half expected the same thing to happen again at the baths, despite it being advertised as the morning for mothers and babies, but the woman smiled and Liz pushed through the turnstile, followed the arrows into the changing room.

She hoped Jim would take to the water. We've got to have something, haven't we? she thought. So we'll just see. We'll just see first if I can get into this . . . The costume was from Oxfam, the thick fabric of a former era, smocked in two panels down the sides. Room for two! Easy, she joked at Jim, easy as pie. She piled their things into the locker, fitted Jim with the swim diaper, then hitched him onto her hip and made her way through the showers and footbath. She pushed through the strips of opaque plastic that divided the changing rooms from the pool, out into the sharp tang of chlorine and turquoise blue that made her gasp. The swimming pool was set beneath a glass roof, with windows open all along the sides. She stood a moment, taking it in. There were two pools, the smaller of which was used for the mothers and babies.

About fifteen women crouched or stood thigh deep in the bright water, supporting their babies so that they appeared to float. In fact, one or two actually were floating, more or less of their own accord. Like another world, she thought at Jim. Is there water where you come from? Perhaps, she continued, you'll be able to swim straight away, underwater and all? She imagined him, arms by his sides, feet kicking, eyes open wide, a stream of bubbles coming from his nose.

The water was warm. It made her legs a very pale blue. Silly-boy, she mouthed at him, I like this, I like this, do you? She held him close to her as she sank down into a squat, lowering him gently up to the neck. The reflected blues made his eyes seem even more brilliant than usual. She crept slowly across to the other side of the pool without taking her eyes from his. She tipped him onto his back, feeling the water lift him slightly from her hands. She thought: if the world was underwater, if we lived at the bottom of a lake—whole cities—because of the tendency to rise, we'd have to sleep on the ceilings.

‘Excuse me,' a woman with a very fat baby tapped her on the arm. ‘I always like to do a couple of lengths in the big pool, don't you? If you mind Timothy while I go, I'll do the same for you.' Liz glanced at the other pool. A whistle had just blown for change of session, and all the swimmers were making their way towards the shallow end. She watched how they moved, the steady rhythm of the strokes, the heads dipping up and down. It was almost possible to imagine herself doing it, although she never had.

Soon the pool would be all but empty. She would never have thought of it on her own, but as she looked at the huge expanse of water, just moving and catching the light, her heart suddenly ached.

‘Okay,' she said to the woman. Suppose I can't? Suppose I sink, drown? Jim floated at her side, his head just cradled in her hand.

Carefully, the other woman slipped her baby into a blow-up seat and pushed him towards Liz. He really was very fat. ‘Timothy loves the water. I've done this before. He won't cry.' She launched herself towards the other pool. It was just a question of letting the water hold you up, Liz thought, watching her.

Despite his bulk, Timothy seemed in some way younger than Jim. He had fat cheeks and a dimpled chin, not such a huge head. Jim's eyes were wider, his face stiller, more like a grown up. He had more hair too. Timothy's mouth was busy, opening and closing. His whole face contorted with the effort of producing sound. His head twisted constantly, up, down, around. He patted the yellow arms of his blow-up seat. Meanwhile, Jim almost floated, moving his legs and arms, but not his face. His blue eyes slipped in and out of focus. Occasionally he blinked. For a second she took her hand away from the back of his head, lowering it just a little in the water.

‘Brrpt,' said Timothy, then, ‘omom.'

‘I don't much like Timothy,' Liz thought at Jim. ‘None of them are special like you.'

‘Okay?' The woman in the bathing cap emerged beside them, glistening, rubbing red-rimmed eyes. ‘I keep thinking to get some goggles, but it doesn't seem worth it for the amount of swimming I do.' She held out her arms, slipped one around each baby, and pulled them close. ‘What a pretty boy!'

Liz turned her back quickly and made for the side. Leaving Jim with a stranger was harder than she would have predicted but she made a point of not looking back.

Deliberately she walked along the length of the main pool, right to the deep end. Then she looked back down the expanse of blue. The figures of the mothers and their babies looked very small, and the sound of their talk was muffled, strange. She stood with her toes curved over the edge. The water lapped inches below them. She was aware of her heart beating frantically in her chest, and when she bent her knees and tried to fill her lungs with air they seemed to have shrunk. Silly-boy, she thought desperately, help! And then, before she knew it, she had dived into a shock of coldness, splitting the water cleanly with her outstretched arms.

She opened her eyes. It was very beautiful, the endless blue, the feeling of moving forwards under the momentum of her leap, the rushing sound in her ears. She pointed herself upwards, broke the surface, gasped and pushed down again. She was doing the breaststroke: there was nothing to it. She swam deeper, then followed the upwards slope that divided the shallow from the deep end. Something was lying there on the tiles, and she grabbed at it as she passed. A pair of goggles. She slipped them around her neck to give to the woman. Because this was something, really something.

She turned, paddled her feet to keep afloat and was gripped by a desire for speed. She propelled herself back up the pool, flinging her arms forwards as fast and hard as she could: a very free kind of freestyle. She grasped the rail and kicked off again, pointing herself like an arrow and using all her strength, though it didn't seem enough, or as if it could ever be enough, to go as fast as she wanted, which would always be faster, faster. The water's resistance, its thickness, almost angered her. She screwed her face tight as she flung herself through it, smashing it into spray—she would have liked to do away with it entirely, to be in the air, and she would have liked to be an engine, to be a spaceship launched at the Cape, shooting out beyond the confines of gravity and all the things of Earth, carrying a cargo of human beings, to whom anything could happen and would . . . Come on, she thought at the water, come on, I want to
move.

The woman was waving at her from the other pool when she reached the shallow end for the fifth time. She levered herself out and stood, suddenly heavy, on the narrow tiled strip between the two pools. The woman held Jim up so that he could see her coming. The brightness of his eyes and the paleness of his face all but made Liz gasp. Her legs shook as she made her way down the steps towards him and the woman in the bathing hat, grateful for the warmth of the little pool.

‘I found these,' she said, holding out the goggles. The woman smiled, accepting them, then passed Jim back to Liz.

‘Sorry to cut you short. I've got to pick my others up from school.' She hitched Timothy up out of water. ‘He was ever so good. Do you mind me asking—is there something the matter with his foot? Or is it my eyes? It doesn't look quite straight.'

Liz's heart flipped, but she smiled. ‘Born like it,' she said. ‘It's nothing much.'

‘Oh dear, what a shame . . . I'm sorry . . .'

‘They'll be able to straighten it later on,' Liz found herself saying. ‘But at the moment he's growing too much, you see.' She held him to her chest, sunk down, and kissed the middle of his forehead. The lying words had skipped out, just like Alice's. But it was all right. It was to protect them both. He would understand . . . The woman waved as she disappeared between the polythene strips.

Thanks, Liz thought at Jim, thanks Silly-boy, for teaching me how to swim. What a Silver Lining, to have you to show me how. To make me know.

She felt very warm afterwards, and the bus that carried them as far as the ring-road was peopled with dreams. They would move, quite soon, to somewhere warm by the sea, completely on their own. There, on the beach, as a reward for her efforts, Jim would initiate her one by one in the practices of the Zone, so that by the time he was full grown physically she too would have grown in other ways to match them. The price of abandoning human language—not just speech, but also the words that passed through her mind unbidden and the words people said on TV—would be as nothing, for she would learn telepathy, and the power to move objects by thought, and levitation, and how to overcome the need for air; she would be able to know what fish, crabs and whales, even the plants that waft at the bottom of the sea, thought and felt. They'd need nothing from outside, be beyond the need for food and drink. Slowly, perhaps, others would join them as they did at the railway carriages, which had been in a sense a rehearsal for this, as well as its beginning.

When she got out of the bus, Onley Street looked cheerful, almost foreign.

‘Hiya!' Alice called. ‘What's happened to your hair?' Don't spoil my day, Liz thought at her, screwing her anger into a kind of steadiness. Don't ruin my day. Don't—

‘Can't stay,' Alice said. ‘I'm off to a session. Counselling. We're going twice a week, and I'm taking every vitamin on earth. He puts them out for me at breakfast time. It shows he cares, doesn't it?' She waved and climbed into the car.

Wow,
Liz thought, closing her door. She unstrapped Jim and lifted him in the air, which seemed to bristle with light.