Diving Belles (26 page)

It had been a long time since the droll teller had thought about any of the old stories, even longer since he’d told them. ‘Give it here then,’ he said, putting on the shirt. Meg got hold of good quality. He could already taste it; a few bottles would pass the time.

‘An hour,’ Harry called after him.

What was the point in an hour? The droll teller used to tell stories that lasted weeks, spinning them out night after night, weaving everything together. They used to beg him to keep going; the pub would stay open till morning. They would give him a warm bed and more food than he could eat.

The couple watched as he got closer. He caught a glimpse of himself in a shop window, knew there was something of the scarecrow about him. It had been a long time since he’d been to that woman’s, the one who let him use the bath. She had kind hands and soap that smelled like summer. He’d let himself slip more and more, feeling like something was coming to end, that finally, somehow, things were ending. He tried to smooth his matted hair and beard as he walked over the cobbles.

Tourists usually looked bored, as if they felt they had to do things and see things but were just waiting for them to be over. The two people at the bottom of the road looked desperate for the tour to start. He was almost half an hour late – anyone else would have left by now, secretly glad they could browse round gift shops instead. The woman got up from the wall as he approached.

‘You here for the tour?’ the droll teller asked them.

The woman nodded. She looked relieved. ‘We didn’t know if it was still going ahead,’ she said. ‘With us the only ones.’

Her hair was dyed red-brown like conkers. She smiled at the droll teller and a web of lines appeared around her eyes. The man’s hair was solid and black and his shirt was tight across his belly. They looked as if they had just had a good, big breakfast, lots of butter and coffee. The woman reached into her bag and the man reached into his pocket. They both brought out wallets at the same time.

‘It’s still on,’ the droll teller said.

‘Do you want this now?’ the man asked, holding out money. ‘Or at the end?’

‘I’ll take it now.’ The droll teller folded it carefully into his pocket then pushed it in deep. He’d had a note whipped out by the wind once.

‘Can we get a receipt for that?’ the man asked.

‘I don’t think we need a receipt,’ the woman said.

‘Is it possible?’ he asked.

‘I don’t do receipts,’ the droll teller told them. He was sick of this already.

‘Forget it,’ the woman said. ‘We don’t need one.’ She shook her head slightly at her husband, then brushed something off the sleeve of her coat. They were both dressed up smartly, strong perfume mixing with harbour smells. The man’s shoes were long and shiny as cars. They didn’t look comfortable, unlike the droll teller’s boots, which were worn in just right from the miles and miles of walking he used to do. He’d found them on a beach one winter.

He turned right down an alley and the couple followed him. Rows of whitewashed cottages backed on to each other; there was only a narrow gap. A few bins were out. Most of the cottages were empty year round, except for a few weeks in summer. He’d squatted in a couple of them, found them cold and stale. He could see the blue flames of a gas heater in one window. He’d always been drawn to hearths and fires. They used to keep the fire going all night at the pubs and houses he visited, if the story he told was good enough. They could get through a whole tree. He’d had his own camping stove once but someone had stolen it. There was no point looking for another one now. His boots creaked like gates. He walked slowly and now and again he would let out a long breath through his nose which whistled quietly, like a breeze through a gate.

‘We’re going to end up at the mines, aren’t we?’ the woman asked. ‘For the last story?’

‘The last story,’ the droll teller said. A black cat jumped up on a wall, its body fluid, like water gathering back into water. Black cats. He automatically looked at his palms, at the lines printed there, but there seemed to be too many. There were thousands of lines, crossed and re-crossed over each other.

‘The tin mines. I think it said on the poster.’

There was a story up there somewhere. ‘Beware you who go to the mines at night . . .’ the droll teller said slowly. ‘Who said that?’

The couple glanced at each other.

‘I don’t know,’ the man said.

‘More words come after,’ the droll teller said. He could see the words but he couldn’t put them in any order. He stopped trying. The music from his favourite TV programme started playing in his head.
When life is hard, I know that you’ll be near me
. He led them through the network of alleys.

After a while the woman said, ‘This is a lovely area.’

‘We had to come down anyway,’ the man told him. ‘We thought we’d stay on a few extra days.’

‘No point hurrying back to an empty house,’ the woman said. She laughed and it echoed off brick.

Why were they telling him all this? He hated it when people talked about this place when they knew nothing about it. Did they sit hour after hour watching drenched palm trees in the churchyard? Did they know how to avoid the kicks and the sticks if they strayed into the wrong area? Did they know the difference between how the streets sounded now, with all the traffic and the building work, and how they had sounded before? Did they have to force themselves to get up, day after day after day here?

‘Day after day,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Day after day after day.’

September always had clear light and big, mackerel skies. The droll teller could smell cold, wet clothes from a washing line, and inside a house, someone was calling, plates were clattering, cupboards slamming. He had no idea where they were, needed to get his bearings. It was happening more and more. He wondered how far they were from the main square. He saw a set of steps leading down to a basement. They reminded him of something – what was it? He stopped. They all stopped and looked at the steps. There was a story associated with those steps, he was sure of it, some kind of ghost in this alley.

‘See those steps?’ he asked. ‘A hundred years ago, on a dark and stormy night, there was a murder there.’ He thought about the details. They would want it short and easy, they would want a storm. ‘A woman, Jane Lyons, had been cheating on her husband. Whenever she could, she would sneak through the streets to that house there and meet with her lover.’ It was coming back to him now. ‘Her husband became suspicious. He was a violent man, a drunk, and one night after she left the house, he hid and followed her. He confronted her. There was an argument and he threw her down the steps and she died there, at the bottom.’ The couple looked down at the spot, half expecting blood. ‘And to this day, people swear they still see Jane Lyons hobbling around, her back broken, searching for her lost lover.’

Even as he was finishing, the droll teller realised that he’d used a plot from a soap he’d watched at Hoban’s a few weeks ago. A husband had discovered his wife’s affair and killed her by pushing her down some stairs. It had been a good episode. Hoban’s chair had cracked when he’d leaned back on it. He’d fallen asleep and when he’d woken up there was a coat over him.

He looked down at the steps, shook his head, muttered something about roofs, or shoes. The shoes were important: he could see a shoe snagged on a hawthorn bush somewhere; he could see a tree with ribbons tied on it, small yellow leaves, but the right story wouldn’t come, the parts wouldn’t join up. So, he had let the stories slip away. They weren’t buried anywhere. He thought they might have been buried somewhere. He realised now why the world had become flat and empty. Things were ending. He felt, what did he feel? Scattered perhaps, stretched thinner, relieved.

They went out of the alley. The droll teller picked at his fingernails, which had a layer of something growing under them. It was moss, or maybe algae, wet and dark green. He’d had it under his nails for about fifty years but he was sure it was getting worse. He tried to dig it out but it stayed fixed.

‘Isn’t this where we just came from?’ the man asked.

The droll teller looked around. He’d taken them back past the first meeting point. The harbour wall was in front of them, a steam boat on the horizon. ‘This is the route,’ he said.

The man and the woman glanced at each other once, shrugged. They weren’t holding hands. They didn’t walk next to each other; they left a gap, as if they were making room for someone else. The droll teller used to be able to see exactly who the lost person was, standing in the empty spaces people left for them. This time he hardly noticed.

They were walking up a long, residential street. The town had spread back from the harbour; the roads got wider and the houses got bigger. Reuben Gray, who was out messing with his car, called to the droll teller as they passed, but the droll teller didn’t turn around. He pretended not to have heard. He didn’t want anyone to give him away and a lot of people lacked subtlety. He’d known Reuben’s grandfather: he’d been the first person in the town to own a car. He and the droll teller had rolled down the cliff in it, and crawled out of the window with one broken finger each. Reuben’s grandfather said that only two events flashed through his mind as he was rolling, and they weren’t the ones he was expecting. He wouldn’t say what they were. For the droll teller there had been none at all, only a sudden stillness and quiet.

The woman looked at her watch and then announced, ‘She should have landed by now.’

Her husband nodded. ‘She will have landed.’

The woman looked at the droll teller. ‘Our daughter, Lily,’ she said, as if he had asked. ‘She’s gone off teaching and backpacking in Indonesia.’

‘My wife thinks it’s dangerous,’ the man said. ‘It’s not dangerous.’

‘For a year,’ she said. ‘A whole year.’

‘Everyone’s doing it now,’ he said. ‘It’s not dangerous.’

Their voices spilled out suddenly, falling into an old argument.

‘You’re more likely to be killed by a donkey than in a plane crash,’ the droll teller said. Something Harry had told him. He stopped and looked at a small scrap of wasteland behind the houses. There was a ‘land for sale’ sign up, a huge gull perched on top. Gulls would steal anything off you if you weren’t careful. The earth was trampled and there were nettles and sloes at the edges. He could taste rust and flint, could feel something sharp digging in behind his shoulders, some old, distant pain, maybe not even his own. He tried to dredge something up but there was nothing.

The couple hovered behind him, looking where he was looking, expecting to be told something. They scoured the ground for clues. There was a heavy silence between them now. The man lifted his arm up, as if to touch his wife’s back, let it drop. He put his hand in his pocket, looked at his wife’s back.

‘Nothing here,’ the droll teller said. He trudged ahead, feeling an immense tiredness. He wanted a long rest, to lie down somewhere very quiet. He could still taste rust, like blood in his mouth. The sharp pain nestled in between his shoulders. Not his pain; he didn’t want it. He tried to shake it off.

Since when had there been so many houses? All these houses and streets seemed to have appeared overnight, hundreds of them. The droll teller tried to picture what had been there before but he couldn’t do it. Things had happened there, before the houses were built. He had been at the very centre – now where was he? He skirted the edges of the development, trying to find a way through, guessing each turning before he found the small town square and knew where he was again.

There was a statue of a man on a horse in the middle. The droll teller hadn’t been into the square for a long time. The shops had changed round. No more blacksmiths. No more video shop – Mick had disappeared. He’d heard that Mick had last been seen wading out into the sea, although someone else had said he’d moved to another town with cheaper rents. There was a Chinese takeaway by the hardware store. The droll teller had a huge craving for Chinese takeaway – fried rice, sweet and sour sauce, the kind that made your heartbeat change its rhythm. He also craved the cider they used to sell on the stalls around the square, and that stew, so thick you could almost cut it, and older tastes that he could barely remember – saffron maybe, or another, richer spice that you couldn’t get hold of any more.

The couple went up to the statue and looked at it, walked all the way round. The statue commemorated a local soldier who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars and been made a general. The thing was, the droll teller had met the man and he had been a real arse so he didn’t want to talk about him. He had a cruel face, you could see it there in the bronze.

He ignored the statue and glanced around the square. He used to wake up there a lot after heavy nights, with people walking past him as they went between stalls and shops. They used to move him into the shade while he slept, but as years passed, no one moved him, and his face would blister in the sun.

A leaf skidded past him, and then another, and then the droll teller saw more leaves piled up in drifts. They were oak leaves, turned copper, from an oak that used to stand in the middle of the square. He looked away and when he looked back the leaves had gone. He thought he could smell gas lamps and hear the hiss of them. Over there: a small hand waving out of the pub window; over there: a man in a black coat, handcuffed, howling like a storm wind. He could hear the storm wind and the howling, and it took him a few seconds to realise that it was still the same quiet, clear day it had been before.