The Disappearance Boy (12 page)

‘Does your mother know what you do for a living, Reg?’

He must have been surprised by the question – even Pam didn’t really know where it had suddenly come from. But he didn’t particularly show it, and the pause before he answered her was very short.

‘Not really.’

His eyes flicked away from the mirror and down onto the floor. There was the suggestion of something in his voice that she hadn’t quite heard before, or at least not quite so clearly. Avoidance, perhaps, or defence.

‘Why d’you ask?’

‘I just wondered. Why’s that then?’

There was another pause, longer this time, and then Reg told her his story.

He didn’t tell her everything, of course. There were parts of the story he wasn’t really sure of himself, after all, so to keep things simple he just said that his mother was dead, and that most of the people who’d looked after him had been as kind as they knew how to be at the time. He didn’t mention The Home for Poor Brave Things by name (I wonder if he even knew it by that name himself) or the wet black stones of its curving beach, or the train. He tried to end his account of himself with a bit of a flourish, saying that he’d never really much minded where he lived anyway, and that this was a good job as jobs went so long as Mr Brookes was having a good day. It wasn’t a tale he’d told very often, and the clumsiness showed.

She was gentle, too.

‘And what about your dad then?’

‘Oh …’

The foot twisted.

‘I never knew him. And I’m not sure that my mum did either, if you know what I mean.’

The eyes flashed back up into the mirror on that one, and the grin was back in its twisted place – but only half back, as if to indicate that he knew that that old story wasn’t much of a joke really, not if you were on the receiving end.

‘I do, as it happens.’ The last thing he’d want was sympathy, Pam knew that; when she eventually smiled back, it was quite matter-of-factly.

‘Well, I’m sure she’d be proud of you. You’re very good at your job, and I like that. It’s always better when you know where you are with a … well, with a …’

The water from the towel dropped brightly onto the litter of her dressing table. She didn’t want to say
a man
; it could have spoilt everything. She squeezed the hand towel out again, and noticed that Reg had shifted his position slightly in the mirror, marking the beat of her hesitation with another downward flick of his eyes. But then he completed her thought for her.

‘When you know where you are with the other half of your act?’ he suggested, still looking at the floor. It was very quietly done, and she was grateful.

‘Exactly. Took the words right out of my mouth, Reg.’

She stood up and inspected herself. The combination of the black stockings and suspenders left over from the maid’s costume with her naked top half made her look like some sort of dreadful old-fashioned dirty postcard she thought, just the sort of work she hated, but then again, all things considered, not bad. Not bad at all – and at the end of a demanding double session. If you know what I mean.

She put one stockinged foot up on her chair.

Reggie really was staring now. Their eyes met in the mirror.

‘Well,’ she said, holding his gaze, ‘I suppose I’d better give downstairs a wipe as well if I’m going to keep myself respectable and fragrant for my public. So you’d probably better fuck off while I do that, if you wouldn’t mind.’

That restored the full grin, and seeing him framed in her mirror and smiling made Pamela realise how striking-looking the boy was, if and when he stopped moving long enough for you to get a proper look. He had lovely eyes when he shared them, and the sharp features all worked together somehow when his grin came out. They went with who he
was
– and she’d always been a sucker for strong shoulders on a man. The legs were a let-down, however, and the teeth were shocking.

Now it was her turn to be caught staring.

‘See you when you’re all nice and clean then, Miss
Rose
.’

He winked, and was out of the door before she’d even got half her laugh out. There was a lot more to that boy than met the eye, that was for sure. And what a story about his mum – she wondered if it was true that she was dead. They told the kids that sometimes, didn’t they, to make it less dreadful … She’d have to ask him some more sometime – after this week was over. She dunked the hand towel back in the bowl, looked up at Margaret Rose, laughed again, and unhooked her second suspender.

5

By the time she’d got herself changed it was late, and they were the last two out of the stage door. She’d done her best with a lick of powder, but had all too clearly just thrown her shabby man’s camel-hair coat over her sweater to go home. She looked as though she badly needed a drink.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Not so glamorous now.’

‘I’ve seen worse …’

Reggie was handing their keys over to Mr English and scribbling their names under
Out
in the book.

‘Bloody cheek. Thanks, Mr English.’

‘Goodnight, Miss. And welcome to the Grand Theatre, Miss, after your very first night.’

You silly old bugger
, thought Reg.
It’s not the bloody Palladium
.

‘Thanks …’ She was trying to make the words as kind as she could, but it was hard when you were this tired. ‘I’ll do my very best to keep your punters happy for you while I’m here, Mr English. Five to six tomorrow it is.’

When they got outside the town was already falling quiet, and the night growing chilly. Even up here on North Road, a good seven streets away from the promenade, you could sense the closeness of the sea. Pamela stopped for a moment in the alley to button her coat, and while she did it she raised her face to the night with her eyes closed, trying her hardest to let all the tension of the evening go. Then she breathed out, and slipped her arm through Reggie’s without even looking at him.

‘Walk me home, Reg,’ she whispered.

They set off together, his limping feet beating a soft one-two variation on the steadier rhythm of her heels as they headed down the narrow brick alleyway, the two sounds linked together like their two arms, their breaths just visible in the cold April air.

6

There was one very tricky moment with a dropped shoe inside the apparatus on the second evening house of the Thursday, but apart from that the rest of their first week went well. Mr Brookes seemed to think he was getting his six guineas’ worth, and some of Pam’s bruises began to fade. She even got her first few wolf whistles from the back of the circle. Reggie began to look forward to their nightly walks home together, and they soon became as much a part of his routine at the end of the night as wiping down the zinc panels inside the cabinet or checking the lead weights in the hem of the silver drape. There was an overgrown laburnum tree almost filling the front garden up at Mrs Brennan’s, and they got into the habit of saying their goodnights under the street lamp at the end of her road. Reggie would stand and watch her safely disappear round behind the tree – a tangle of black branches, just beginning to show the neat emerald stitches of its new leaves – before he turned and headed home to his bed of roses.

They didn’t ever talk much on these walks – they both seemed to enjoy a spot of quiet after all the noise and lights of work – but they soon became important to him. And to her. There always seemed to be a pair of catcalling sailors who would spot Pam as they made their way up the Queen’s Road towards the station, laughing and asking if she fancied making them miss their last train back to Portsmouth; sometimes she would laugh and shout back, sometimes just ignore them, but always she would squeeze Reggie’s arm, as if she was grateful for his protection.

Reg had planned to have enough time by the end of the week to finally go and visit his new local library. However, as part of his clearing up after the show on Friday he’d discovered that he was about to run out of the wire wool he used to clean the terminals on the smoke trigger, and by the time he’d dealt with that it wasn’t until after the matinee on Saturday that he had time to go and make his visit. He delivered the between-the-shows sandwiches (meat paste for Mr Brookes, mock crab and cress for Pamela) and then set off at a pace – the library was just down at the bottom of North Road as luck would have it, just next door to the Pavilion, and he was sure he’d have time to find what he was looking before before he was due back if he got a move on.

Reggie had been to a fair few municipal libraries in the course of his touring life – they were always one of his main sources of occupation when he was on the road – and so knew when he’d chanced upon a good one. The exterior had already struck him as promising when he’d been passing earlier in the week – the Indian-looking window frames reminded him of the Bradford Alhambra – but he was even happier when he actually got inside and up the flamboyantly tiled stairs to the reference library. The books were ranged along the walls of a splendid old high-ceilinged room that was as full of quiet as it was of light, and – for a Saturday – it was gratifyingly empty of customers. Up on the end wall, under the clock, he could see straight away that they had exactly what he liked most, which was a whole proper shelf-full of encyclopedias.

Pulling down the first volume of the set bound in heavy dark blue linen – the
Britannica
, his favourite – he rifled quickly through the small-print pages until he found an entry headed ‘Astronomy, Comparative’. The article itself was much too long to be a quick read, but three pages in he found just what he needed, which was a set of four white-on-black maps showing the constellations as they appeared at four different times of year. He quickly ticked off the names of all the shapes he recognised –
Cancer
,
Cassiopeia
,
Cygnus
– and then hunted for the one he didn’t. It didn’t take him long; there they were, on the chart for Spring, hiding right down in the bottom left-hand corner, just like they were up on the smoky ceiling out front at the Grand.

‘
The Pleiades
,’ he read. ‘
Named after the seven sisters of ancient mythology, they are one of the brightest stellar objects visible to the naked eye. Visible for only half the year, their appearance above the horizon has always been treated as an auspicious sign …
’

An auspicious sign –
he liked the sound of it, but was unsure of exactly what it meant; hefting the enclopedia onto the reading desk, he walked along the shelf to where the dictionaries were – he could always use a brand-new word, could Reggie.

‘
Betokening success
,’ the dictionary pronounced, much to his satisfaction. ‘
Giving promise of a favourable issue
…’

Looking up, he checked that he still had the whole place to himself, and then, grinning, filled the sunlit room with his voice.

‘Lucky For Some,’ he enunciated, letting the words ring just like Mr Brookes did.

‘Written in the Fucking Stars.’ The grin widened.

‘All that bollocks …’

Glancing up at the clock on the end wall, he realised that he had less than ten minutes before he was needed back at work. Restoring the dictionary and the encyclopedia back to their respective places – Reggie was never one to leave a book lying about open – he headed quickly back downstairs, swinging himself round the strange oriental-looking banister finial on the stairs in his hurry.

On his way out, Reggie stopped for a moment at a small table positioned just by the library door. Picking up one of the copies of a pocket-sized book that were stacked there in a pile, he looked briefly at the front cover – which showed a traffic roundabout decorated with blazing red and yellow flower beds – turned it over to glance in the back, and slid the book into his inside breast pocket next to his knife. He checked to make sure that the woman at the desk hadn’t seen him do it, then slipped out of the door.

7

There are six cemeteries marked on the fold-out map at the back of Brighton Council’s handily pocket-sized
Welcome to Brighton
guidebook for 1953 – seven if you include the Jewish burial ground off the Ditchling Road, and eight if you add the
chattri
commemorating the Indian servicemen who died in the Pavilion while it was being used as a military hospital during the First World War. It took Reggie until nearly four o’clock on that Sunday to find the right one of the eight for his purpose, but when he finally got there, it turned out to be perfect.

As its name suggests, the Downs Road Cemetery was out on what was then the farthest northern edge of the town, just where the new housing estates were starting to bite into the edges of the countryside proper. The overshadowed paths of its bottom section were old, and meandered around the kind of squat nineteenth-century brick-and-flint mortuary chapel that now looked more like a suitable setting for a second-rate horror film than for anybody’s grief. Further up the hill there was a more recent extension that had been laid out on what had previously been open downland, and up here there was light, and air. Connected to their older neighbours by a metal kissing gate let into a high wall, the gravestones in this extension were laid out in orderly straight lines, and along its northern and eastern reaches the smooth asphalt paths gridded stretches of still-untenanted grassland. On a breezy spring day like the one Reggie had chosen for his visit this unmown turf rippled silver and green, and from the slight rise in the centre of the graves there was even a view right across the town to the matching waves of the distant and glittering sea.

Once he had passed the big black gold-lettered sign with all the cemetery’s opening times on it and swung in through its impressive, brick-pillared entrance (the walls on either side were high, and topped with broken glass), Reggie limped purposefully through the blackened monuments that greeted him. When he got to the wall that sealed off the top of the old cemetery he thought he’d reached its limit, and not having found what he was looking for, was about to head off somewhere else – but some instinct for where things might be hidden made him follow the wall eastwards and through a thick stand of acrid-leaved privet and bay. That was how he found the gate.