Desire Line (27 page)

It was nearly midnight when your father rang and told me, gently as he could I have to say. I shouted cruel things back at him which I regret very much now. He said, ‘That's it', as though I could turn myself off at command. But I'm so hurt and scared for you and the stupid wrist that I broke is aching and I am on my own in the kitchen with the floor tilting under me. I remember sliding down the wall and just staring around. In here for a reason, Josh's second sentence, the one after ‘Sara, it's me', had wiped the tape. Back up in the sitting room an empty vodka bottle on its side solved the enigma. I had been looking for its twin. Then I woke on the sofa still and the news he had delivered was debatable for only a moment.My daughter has run away, again. I was someone with two hundred miles to drive. I must pull myself together and
get going
.

The first accident was victimless. I misjudged a left turn whilst still in Oxford, just trying to join the Banbury Road. The VW bucked and the bumper scraped on a post or something. Oddly the incident put heart into me or the adrenaline surge woke me up at last. With vigilance, I made it safely to the motorway and at one stage my confidence grew to the extent that I was able to negotiate the whole business of services and buying petrol. Then came a second accident, on real roads again when somewhere in Cheshire I met an agricultural machine. The noise of our contact was horrendous but stopping did not occur to me. Only when I had to pull up at a filthy public lavatory, I thought to check the damage since I was out. There were several lacerations and paint missing in a new deep gully across both front and back doors. The car seemed to have escaped the clutches of some giant beast.

Because Rhyl is approached through suburbs the sole warning of coastline is via increased luminosity ahead. Suddenly I am on the Promenade. One side it is all tall houses, on the other cast iron railings painted a vile orange and acres of sand; the sea is almost an afterthought out on the horizon. What I ought do is stop, attempt to get my bearings but the urge to cruise, scanning the crowd, proved irresistible. Teenage girls were everywhere, redheads, even, cavorting, laughing, bodies miming their inner lives. None were you. Victorian terraces gave way to shabby hotels… outside one of which a family waited, two young women, an older woman, twin toddlers and an obese man on crutches… all so dishevelled, exhausted. They stared at the slowed car and then a child was hoisted onto a hip as the matriarch stepped towards the kerb, her hand reaching out. I felt bathed in their disappointment as I accelerated away in the direction of the arcades. The crude monsters painted across their length seemed fitting to my mood. A pair of plaster caryatids held their own severed heads. You understand? I could feel for no one save myself… then the zone became single-storey burger-bars and rock sellers, before soaring up to a giant pub plastered with inducements: Double Vodka and Red Bull Buy One Get One Free
!
I ought to be seeing Ocean Park now, a Ferris wheel and a Big Dipper, both of which you had mentioned. There was a photograph: your hair is a red blur as you're caught rocking in a jazzy cradle. But instead of a fairground, I find an artist's impression of a block of flats on a giant billboard.

I parked and for the first time since leaving Tackley Close, checked my watch. Where had nearly eight hours gone? And where was the rest of this town? Ahead the road turned into a steel bridge over a wide inlet edged with trees that seemed to say, ‘This is it, this is as far as it goes.' I turned the car on a piece of wasteland with a wonderful sea view… and prepared to do it all again. Rhyl had failed. I should have been discouraged but the reverse was true: messy, hectic, it was also small. If you arrive on a mission and that mission is to find somebody, then
small is good
.

Really desperate for sleep, climbing into bed again I dropped the journal and somehow the necklace and wristwatch went flying across the boards, much heavier sounding than they ought to be and more of them. But next door Josh wasn't asleep anyway. Drawers are opened and rammed shut. Through the fibrewood wall that cuts the bathroom out I hear him enter— and throw up repeatedly. Then there's the sort of groan that forces you to see him sinking down, shattered.

I kill the light. The wrong time ticks by on Sara's watch somewhere.

So she drank. For me with an attitude that's part draw and part disgust (basically like many Japanese I can't do alcohol) this stood out. Why did she? Why would someone like her need to—? No one had mentioned it and, Rhyl-schooled, I could think of a lot more charming faults – Sara
drank
. And she's here, somehow. (In the dark I could be instantly home). Good weather will mean the attractions are open. The arcades rattle and blare at her. Inside the Seaquarium the water's clear as a tropical lagoon. It's one of those where fish swim over and around the paying customers and the flick of the sharks keeps catching the eye. But this being Rhyl, across the road on the main Promenade will be a burnt-out building in a crumbling terrace. Props bridge the gap so the survivors can lean on each other's shoulders—

— I'd expect to dream about Sara, or those closer to me. Not this familiar sight that's been popping up since I was dragged away aged eight. Here's the town. But from above, as a map of blue sea, yellow sand and the built up quadrant showing as crisscross streets. Melting tarmac and grey slate roofs in white heat. Non-existent shadows mean midday and height of the season— what Rhyl's made for. I take it in, identify familiar landmarks, the attractions, the church,
the pubs—
but here's the difference, black specks are swarming past my shoes like ants, thousands of them. Except they're human holiday makers in the sort of numbers we used to get once and all buzzing round with the dynamics I bet I could calculate down to the last footfall. And I'm a giant! Do what you want, Yori. Stride over the river and sort out the Foryd. Sweep Quay Street with one swipe. Only I'm a statue, have to be. A small movement will crush hoards and though I could grab SkyTower and reposition it like a tent peg or drain Marine Lake with my cupped hands, I'm trapped. And out at sea the rumble of thunder is heading my way—

Notes

 
*
 I've moved it. Probably a mistake. Probably a bigger mistake not to take it out altogether. It's a story that makes Tomiko look bad.

Chapter 18

Up and active before me Josh, with a face extra raw from a bad shave, was in clean clothes and clunking plates in the kitchen. While I'd skipped my stretches and lunges altogether. He acknowledged my (ironic) salute by nodding, no hint of a man about to unburden himself as he butchered the soda bread. I thought I detected changes in the way he held himself though, the last twenty-four hours showing like new ailments piled on. Then he nudged a jar along the tabletop to slide and stop directly level with me, a familiar trick and one he hadn't done since I grew up.

‘D'you want something frying?'

I took the toasted oval from the flat of his outstretched hand. ‘This is enough.'

‘You still don't have butter.' It wasn't a question. ‘Just jam without bits. Dig in!'

He always used me as cover for his own sweet tooth. Come on Yori, don't cry. (
His
eyes were particularly bloodshot this morning, I noticed). Your mam doesn't mean it! We'll get ice-cream. With a Flake in? Megs doesn't want one so we can have hers
.

‘How's Meg?' Naming Sara's replacement was something I instantly regretted.

But, ‘She's fine,' he said. ‘The driving ponies are all the thing now. Keeping her busy. She was here— Christmas, yeah, she dropped in.' He cuts more bread, letting the thin slices peel from the loaf, before stacking them much as I'd tidied papers last night. Crumbs get swept up and thrown through the open door. But he hasn't properly looked at me once. Back when we were grandfather and grandson we reached a sort of accommodation, despite everything being wrong and difficult and abnormal. Eurwen wouldn't act the daughter or the mother. Tomiko went home leaving the gap to be filled by Josh— whose own wife had vanished into Rhyl thin air. Most of the time he must have wished all our roles switched around with child-again Eurwen, wife Sara, Yori, un-created, but he hid that as he shined my shoes, walked the tideline looking for anything interesting to a small boy, made toast and jam when my mother forgot. Domestic Grandfather is a lot more pitiable than stricken Arsonist Grandfather.

He joined me at the table, not eating. ‘Go on. Apple-and-sloe!' he encouraged. I detested marmalade, he knew and few things connect or repel us the way food does. Planted into an Oxford Thick-Cut-taking household, I decided it was a practical joke being played by grown-ups. Frank Cooper's? Brown jelly with gristle! Time after time and meaning no harm, Fleur or Geoffrey offering, Marmalade, Yori?

It's gross!

Then a simple no, thank-you will suffice.

But that was an age ago. I said, ‘Sara just turned up— did she? She wanted to get Eurwen home to Oxford and away from Tomiko. Away from Rhyl.'

‘What? We-ll.' Don't bother me it implied. ‘What you're doing back there's a mystery. You've got your whole life ahead of you. You want to get out. You want to—' he shrugged. ‘It's done for.' His mug of coffee was for staring at as well, too much effort to drink. And he wasn't putting it on. I could tell by those eyes he kept rubbing he'd had no sleep as I'd been busy not crushing ants in Drift Park.

‘But Sara can't have liked the idea.' Josh drew back the corners of his mouth baring his good teeth. It didn't stop me. ‘Eurwen ran off instead of facing her. Must've been something behind that— maybe a poor Japanese?' The word just hung. He gave no sign of receiving it. In a couple more seconds it was plain he wasn't going to rise and I didn't try another shot because self-disgust had come on. I'd never picked a fight with Josh. Now, the day after bringing news of Sara's death, here I was. Wealth and family and occupation and place of origin should've been left alone. Or started on
and finished
, as it had been at Pryorsfield that day Fleur and Geoffrey responded to my father's bow from across the world with their own unused, creaky versions. Too deep from Fleur, about right from Geoffrey (who always was stiff as the oak Pryor carved on his own staircase), both translated as ‘respect'.

Probably my new notion was juvenile. Too late.

‘You don't know what you're on about,' he said, quite quietly so I missed what was grinding away underneath. ‘A Japanese? Sara wasn't like that.'

‘OK.'

‘
Yes
, OK!'

‘Do you want to tell me about her, then?'

‘No I fucking don't! Christ— what a fucking stupid thing to say! I'm meant to describe the best bits of her, am I? You'll have had that from His Lordship anyway. Yeah? By the bellyful. All those years stuck in his bloody castle, him making out like I was the serf that nabbed the princess and then couldn't wait to bring her down. Fine, you keep thinking that. Fine by me. Or d'you want the well-she-was-no-saint herself version? You and me we sit here and share all the— the— what she put me though and I get to feel better? Well you can just fuck that.' His blotched face was now almost unrecognisable as my grandfather's. ‘Because from the first time I saw her I— I—' but it wouldn't come out, the word and he shook his head in frustration. ‘And till the day she died I'd have licked the dogshit off her shoes.'

My breakfast rose up in my throat. ‘Yes.' Safer than nothing.

‘Yeah, so fuck that,' he repeated.

Yeah,
kuso
that, Josh.

The plan had been to stay the weekend and my big concern how to fill two whole days. Despite
kuso
that, I could've stayed. Once I took an Early Delft dish into an Oxford garden and reduced to powder with a stone— but it was the exception. I've had long practice at holding my anger in and any small job the cobalt blue house needed— we usually shared one while I'm here— would've seen us through. That picket gate visible from the stool I'm on, was ours, and the stain would take a recoat. Since I was a child Josh and I'd done things together, dragged a lizard home, tried to fix a door. My arrival yesterday flashed into my head, the blue paint fragments in the rainwater runnel along the front wall.
The render's friable as Stilton cheese— there'll be patches to the north side worth checking on.
At the same time, rapid retreat was tempting. This decision I'll want to go back and do differently but I record it as a just a change of mind. No thought. I said I needed to be off. Josh nodded. I said, a not-planned visit after all, blah-blah, and he grunted. Wiped the table. I said, work, etc, Forward Rhyl under threat, and you can imagine what it's like with the clear-up. Later in the year maybe? More my normal time—

Not to be taking off in a huff, I walked Josh's strip of grass with him. Hardly a garden, I stumbled on the rocks in the ‘lawn' and pried loose hangnails of varnish on our gate and commented on his apple tree, very ancient and gnarled, silver with lichen and fresh into blossom.
Should've pruned the bugger at the back end, too late now.
We looked up in unison. I thought the open hand shape reaching for the sky was much better for the neglect. ‘You can do them after the fruit's set.'