Dialogues of the Dead (4 page)

27 Chapter Four

THE SECOND DIALOGUE

It's me again. How's it going?

Remember our riddles? Here's a new one.

One for the living, one for the dead, Out on the moor I -wind about Nor rhyme nor reason in my head Yet reasons I have -without a doubt.

Deep printed on the yielding land Each zig and zag makes perfect sense To those who recognize the hand Of nature's clerk experience.

This tracks a chasm deep and wide, That skirts a bog, this finds a ford, And men have suffered, men have died, To learn this wisdom of my Word- - That seeming right is sometimes wrong And even on the clearest days The shortest way may still be long, The straightest line may form a maze.

What am I? You were always a smart dog at a riddle! I've been thinking a lot about paths lately, the paths of the living, the paths of the dead, how maybe there's only one path, and I have set my foot upon it. 1 -was pretty busy for a few days after my Great Adventure began, so I had little chance to mark its beginning by any kind of celebration. But as the weekend approached, I felt an urge to do something different, a little special. And 1 recalled my cheerful AA man telling me how chuffed he'd been on his return from Corfu to discover that a new Greek restaurant had just opened in town. 'In Cradle Street, the Tavema,' he said. 'Good nosh and there's a courtyard out back where they've got tables and parasols. Of course, it's not like sitting outside in Corfu, but on a fine evening with the sun shining and the waiters running around in costume, and this chap twanging away on one of them Greek banjos, you can close your eyes and imagine you're back in the Med.' It was really nice to hear someone being so enthusiastic about foreign travel and food and everything. Most Brits tend to go abroad just for the sake of confirming their superiority to everyone else in the world.

Down there too? There's no changing human nature. Anyway, 1 thought I'd give the Tavema a try. The food wasn't bad and the wine was OK, though 1 abandoned my experiment with retsina after a single glass. It was just a little chilly at first, sitting outside in the courtyard under the artificial olive trees, but the food soon warmed me up, and with the table candles lit, the setting looked really picturesque. Inside the restaurant a young man was singing to his own accompaniment. I couldn't see the instrument but it gave a very authentic Greek sound and his playing was rather better than his voice. Eventually he came out into the courtyard and started a tour of the tables, serenading the diners. Some people made requests, most of them for British or at best Italian songs, but he tried to oblige everyone. As he reached my table, the PA system suddenly burst into life and a voice said, 'It's Zorba time!' and two of the waiters started doing that awful Greek dancing. I saw the young musician wince, then he caught my eye and grinned sheepishly. 1 smiled back and pointed to his instrument, and asked him what its name was, interested to hear if his speaking voice was as 'Greek' as his

29 singing voice. It was a bazouki, he said in a broad Mid-Yorkshire accent. 'Oh, you aren't Greek then?' I said, sounding disappointed to conceal the surge of exultation 1 was feeling. He laughed and admitted quite freely he was local, born, bred and still living out at Corker. He was a music student at the university, finding it impossible like so many of them to exist on the pittance they call a grant these days and plumping it out a hit by -working in the Tavema most evenings. But while he wasn't Greek, his instrument he assured me certainly was, a genuine bazouki brought home from Crete by his grandfather who'd fought there during the Second World War, so its music had first been heard beneath real olive trees in a warm and richly perfumed Mediterranean night. I could detect in his voice a longing for that distant reality he described just as I'd seen in his face a disgust with this fakery he was involved in. Yorkshire born and bred he might be, but his soul yearned for something that he had persuaded himself could still be found under other less chilly skies. Poor boy. He had the open hopeful look of one born to be disappointed. I yearned to save him from the shattering of his illusions. The canned music was growing louder and the dancing waiters who 'd been urging more and more customers to join their line were getting close to my table, so I tucked some coins into the leather pouch dangling from the boy's tunic, paid my bill and left. It was after midnight when the restaurant closed but I didn 't mind sitting in my car, waiting. There is a pleasure in observing and not being observed, in standing in the shadows watching the creatures of the night going about their business. I saw several cats pad purposefully down the alleyway alongside the Tavema where they kept their rubbish bins. An owl floated between the chimneys, remote and silent as a satellite. And I glimpsed what I'm sure was the bushy tail of an urban fox frisking round the corner of a house. But it was the human creatures I was most interested in, the last diners striding, staggering, drifting, driving off into the night, little patches of Stimmungsbild - voices calling, footsteps echoing, car doors banging, engines revving - which played for a moment against the great symphony of the night, then faded away, leaving its dark music untouched. Then comes a long pause - not in time but of time -- how long I don't know for clocks are blank-faced now - till finally 1 hear a motorbike revving up in the alleyway and my boy appears at its mouth, a musician making his entry into the music of the night. I know it's him despite the shielding helmet - would have known without the evidence of the bazouki case strapped behind him. He pauses to check the road is empty. Then he pulls out and rides away. I follow. It's easy to keep in touch. He stays well this side of the speed limit, probably knowing from experience how ready the police are to hassle young bikers., especially late at night. Once it becomes clear he's heading straight home to Corker, I overtake and pull away. I have no plan but I know from the merriment bubbling up inside me that a plan exists, and when I pass the derestriction sign at the edge of town and find myself on the old Roman Way, that gently undulating road which runs arrow-straight down an avenue of beeches all the five miles south to Corker, I understand what I have to do. I leave the lights of town behind me and accelerate away. After a couple of miles, 1 do a U-turn on the empty road, pull on to the verge, and switch off my lights but not my engine. Darkness laps over me like black water. I don't mind. 1 am its denizen. This is my proper domain. Now 1 see him. First a glow, then an effulgence, hurtling towards me. What young man, even one conditioned to carefulness by police persecution, could resist the temptation of such a stretch of road so clearly empty of traffic? Ah, the rush of the wind in his face, the throb of the engine between his thighs, and in the corners of his vision the blur of trees lined up like an audience of old gods to applaud his passage! I feel his joy, share in his mirth. Indeed, I'm so full of it I almost miss my cue. But the old gods are talking to me also, and with no conscious command from my mind, my foot stamps down on the accelerator and my hand flicks on full headlights. For a fraction of a second we are heading straight for each other. Then his muscles like mine obey commands too quick for his m-ind, and he swerves, skids, wrestles for control. For a second I think he has it. I am disappointed and relieved.

All right, I know, but I have to be honest. What a weight - and a wait - it would be off my soul if this turned out not to be my path after all.

31 But now the boy begins to feel it go. Yet still, even at this moment of ultimate danger, his heart must be singing with the thrill, the thrust, of it. Then the bike slides away from under him, they part company, and man and machine hurtle along the road in parallel, close but no longer touching. I come to a halt and turn my head to watch. In time it takes probably a few seconds. In my no-time I can register every detail. I see that it is the bike which hits a tree first, disintegrating in a burst of flame, not much - his tank must have been low - but enough to throw a brief lurid, light on his last moment. He hits a broad-boled beech tree, seems to embrace it with his whole body, wrapping himself around it as if he longs to penetrate its smooth bark and flow into its rising sap. Then he slides off it and lies across its roots, like a root himself, face up, completely still. I reverse back to him and get out of the car. The impact has shattered his visor but, wonderfully, done no damage to his gentle brown eyes. I notice that his bazouki case has been ripped off the pillion of the bike and lies quite close. The case itself has burst open but the instrument looks hardly damaged. I take it out and lay it close to his outstretched hand. Now the musician is part of the night's dark music and I am out of place here. I drive slowly away, leaving him there with the trees and the foxes and owls, his eyes wide open, and seeing very soon, I hope, not the cold stars of our English night but the rich warm blue of a Mediterranean sky. That's where he'd rather be. 1 know it. Ask him. I know it.

I'm too exhausted to talk any more now. Soon. Chapter Five

On Thursday morning with only one day to go before the short story competition closed, Rye Pomona was beginning to hope there might be life after deathless prose. This didn't stop her shovelling scripts into the reject bin with wild abandon, but halfway through the morning she went very still, sighed perplexedly, re-read the pages in front of her and said, 'Oh hell.' 'Yes?' said Dick Dee. 'We've got a Second Dialogue.' 'Let me see.' He read through it quickly then said, 'Oh dear. I wonder if this one too is related to a real incident.' 'It is. That's what hit me straight off. I noticed it in yesterday's Gazette. Here, take a look.' She went to the Journal Rack and picked up the Gazette. 'Here it is. "Police have released details of the fatal accident on Roman Way reported in our weekend edition. David Pitman, 19, a music student, of Pool Terrace, Carker, was returning home from his part-time job as an entertainer at the Taverna Restaurant in Cradle Street when he came off his motorbike in the early hours of Saturday morning. He sustained multiple injuries and was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. No other vehicle was involved." Poor sod.' Dee looked at the paragraph then read the Dialogue again. 'How very macabre,' he said. 'Still, it's not without some nice touches. If only our friend would attempt a more conventional story, he might do quite well.' 'That's all you think it is, then?' said Rye rather aggressively. 'Some plonker using news stories to fantasize upon?' Dee raised his eyebrows high and smiled at her.

33 'We seem to have swapped lines,' he said. 'Last week it was me feeling uneasy and you pouring cold water. What's changed?' 'I could ask the same.' 'Well, let me see,' he said with that judicious solemnity she sometimes found irritating. 'It could be I set my fanciful suspicions alongside the cool rational response of my smart young assistant and realized I was making a real ass of myself.' Then his face split in a decade-dumping grin and he added, 'Or some such tosh. And you?' She responded to the grin, then said, 'There's something else I noticed in the Gazette. Hold on ... here it is. It says that AA man's inquest was adjourned to allow the police to make farther enquiries. That can only mean they're treating it as a suspicious death, can't it?' 'Yes, but there's suspicious and suspicious,' said Dee. 'Any sud den death has to be thoroughly investigated. If it's an accident, the causes have to be established to see whether there's any question of neglect. But even if there's a suspicion of criminality, for some thing like this to have any significance . ..' He held up the Dialogue and paused expectantly. A test, she thought. Dick Dee liked to give tests. At first when she came new to the job she'd felt herself patronized, then come to realize it was part of his teaching technique and much to be preferred to either being told something she already knew or not being told something she didn't. 'It doesn't really signify anything,' she said. 'Not if the guy's just feeding off news items. To be significant, or even to strain coincidence, he'd have to be writing before the event.' 'Before the reporting of the event,' corrected Dee. She nodded. It was a small distinction but not nit-picking. That was another of Dee's qualities. The details he was fussy about were usually important rather than just ego-exercising. 'What about all this stuff about the student's grandfather and the bazouki?' she asked. 'None of that's in the paper.' 'No. But if it's true, which we don't know, all it might mean is that the story-teller did have a chat with David Pitman at some time. I dare say it's a story the young man told any number of customers at the restaurant.' 'And if it turns out the AA man had been on holiday in Corfu?' 'I can devise possible explanations till the cows come home,' he said dismissively. 'But where's the point? The key question is, when did this last Dialogue actually turn up at the Gazetted I doubt if they're systematic enough to be able to pinpoint it, but someone might remember something. Why don't I have a word while you ...' '. .. get on with reading these sodding stories,' interrupted Rye. 'Well, you're the boss.' 'So I am. And what I was going to say was, while you might do worse than have a friendly word with your ornithological admirer.' He glanced towards the desk where a slim young man with an open boyish face and a sharp black suit was standing patiently. His name was Bowler, initial E. Rye knew this because he'd flashed his library card the first time he appeared at the desk to ask for assistance in operating the CD-ROM drive of one of the Reference PCs. Both she and Dee had been on duty, but Rye had discovered early on that in matters of IT, she was the department's designated expert. Not that her boss wasn't technologically competent in fact she suspected he was much more clued up than herself - but when she felt she knew him well enough to probe, he had smiled that sweetly sad smile of his and pointed to the computer, saying, 'That is the grey squirrel,' then to the booklined shelves: 'These are the red.' The disc Bowler E. wanted to use turned out to be an ornithological encyclopaedia, and when Rye had expressed a polite interest, he'd assumed she was a fellow enthusiast and nothing she'd been able to say during three or four subsequent visits had managed to disabuse him. 'Oh God,' she said now. 'Today I tell him the only way I want to see birds is nicely browned and covered with orange sauce.' 'You disappoint me, Rye,' said Dee. 'I wondered from the start why such a smart young fellow should make himself out to be a mere tyro in computer technology. It's clearly not just birds that obsess him but you. Express your lack of enthusiasm in the brutal terms you suggest and all he'll do is seek another topic of common interest. Which indeed you yourself may now be able to suggest.' 'Sorry?' 'Mr Bowler is in fact Detective Constable Bowler of the MidYorkshire CID, so well worth cultivating. It's not every day us