The Disappearance Boy (13 page)

The metalwork gave out a strident warning creak as he pushed his way through it – that felt wrong, but as soon as Reg got clear of the trees and shaded his eyes to survey the view he knew that this was going to be more like it. The lack of obstructions and the way the paths stretched away from him in straight lines meant that up here he could see straight away if anybody was about. Now it was simply a matter of being diligent, and putting in the time, so he began to work his way along the first path, heading further out into the flower-starred grass.

It’s a strange business, talking to the dead – but if you’ve ever done it, then you won’t need me to tell you that.

Reggie had first done it when he was nineteen, on a wet Sunday afternoon in Wolverhampton. He’d actually wandered into the cemetery looking for something else entirely, following a young man in a raincoat who’d looked conspicuously over his shoulder at him from a nearby bus stop. Then, when he’d got no more than a couple of rows of stones inside the gates, he’d had to stoop to retie his left-boot bootlace, and had lost sight of his quarry while he was down there. He stood up, steadying himself on the nearest gravestone, and while he was searching for the vanished young man happened to look down and read the name and dates on the stone. The second half of the inscription – the date on which the grave’s occupant had died – was obscured by his hand, and he shifted himself so that he could read it. As if they’d been waiting for him to do just that, the letters and numbers spelt out the words
15 September 1930
. Not surprisingly, this stopped Reggie in his tracks, because that was the exact date of his birthday.

Staring at the numbers on the stone made him remember what he’d been told by the nurses back at the Home, that there’d been a death when he was born. As he stared – the young man in the raincoat now completely forgotten – he found his eyes drawn away from the carved numbers and down to the empty vase which lay on its side at the base of the stone. As he looked at it lying there, a hand gripped his throat. The vase looked as if it had been empty for some time. Didn’t this woman have any children? Didn’t they care? Not even really realising that he was doing it, much less why, he found himself mumbling to this stranger – words that were part apology, part appeal for information – and even wiping the rain off the top of her stone with his handkerchief.

That was how it had all started – accidentally, in other words – but now, whichever town ‘The Missing Lady’ took him to, finding a cemetery and visiting it had become as much a part of his routine as finding the library and a cafe for his breakfast. He didn’t always quite feel sure what exactly what it was that he was looking for when he went to one of these strange places, and sometimes he would be interrupted, or fail to find anyone who had the right sort of date on their stone – and even if he did, he didn’t always manage to put what he wanted to say into words. Sometimes – as you’ve seen – he would give up trying to speak, and just sit somewhere and close his eyes. Recently, he’d started dressing up for these visits, putting on a clean shirt and a tie and polishing his boots to a Sunday shine.

Why was this happening at this particular point in his life? I couldn’t honestly say. Perhaps it was just time.

That’s right; Reggie visits cemeteries in order to talk to his mother.

He was spoilt for choice today; bizarrely, there were two ladies with appropriate dates resting quite close together on the same tarmacked path. After spending some time limping backwards and forwards between the stones, out of his two possible choices – a Doreen and a Maria – he chose Doreen for his partner at this particular matinee. Her name felt warmer than the other one – more
touchable
. That feeling had come into his head as soon as he’d seen her stone, and as definitely as if he’d looked her name up in the big heavy dictionary at the library.

‘Hello again,’ he said.

His voice was tentative. It sounded as if he wasn’t quite sure of being remembered. The wind from the distant sea tried to embarrass him by ruffling his hair, but he smoothed it back. The dance of a lemon-yellow butterfly distracted him for a moment, and led his eyes back round to the sea. He squinted, shielding his eyes with his hand, and then returned to his task.

‘I actually thought about writing it all down for you this week – you know, putting it all in a letter and just leaving that for you to read later … but then if somebody found it, somebody who actually knew you – I mean, not you, but her,’ (he gestured at Doreen’s name on the stone), ‘that would be confusing for them, wouldn’t it …? They’d think some unfortunate had been up here and got themselves confused.’

His voice trailed away and his left foot shifted; then he stood up straight, like a schoolboy being reprimanded, and took his hands out of his pockets.

‘So anyway, I’ll just have to tell you the news out loud, won’t I?’

He hated the fact that it was always him who had to start the conversation, hated it – it set things up as if she were asleep, or poorly, with her eyes closed and her hands outside the crisp white sheets of a bed, which was never how he imagined her at all.

‘Sorry about not coming last week, but it’s all been a bit hectic. And the week before that, it was that woman with the daffodils, interrupting me again. You know I can’t do it properly if there’s anybody else around.’

He swallowed twice, and winced. The lump in his throat was a familiar enemy, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.

‘Hope you’re warm enough.’

As if the idea of his mother being cold made him angry, Reggie’s foot seemed to twist of its own accord; he kicked at the ground with the toe of his boot again. It was never easy, but today it seemed especially hard to get things going. He took a deep breath and plunged on, talking fast to help himself keep going, and with his eyes turned half away from the stone.

‘So anyway, quite a bit of news for you this week. The new girl is fine, no better than she should be if you know what I mean but we’re getting on OK. Pamela. Miss Pamela Rose – she’s never worked in this bit of the game before but she’s a worker, I’ll say that for her. Mr Brookes hasn’t said much since we opened, surprise surprise, but I think he’s happy. The houses have been all right, more or less. My digs are fine, the breakfast isn’t up to much, but there’s a place just back from the seafront where I’m going now in the mornings. Italians. The landlady carries on a bit, and the wallpaper keeps me awake sometimes. At night. What with the street lamp and everything coming in through the window. The air. Well, you know how it is. So all the usual really. All the usual … The stage-door keeper’s called Mr English, funny old bird, changes his cravat every week.’

‘The library’s lovely …’

He trailed off and stopped, and looked around at the sea. He squinted, like he always seemed to when there was too much light. His throat was hurting again, and after getting all of that out in a rush he seemed to have hit a wall. But Reggie was nothing if not determined; he kicked his boot at the turf again so hard that he scuffed it, and that gave him the excuse he needed to stop for a moment and collect his thoughts. Kneeling down, he spat in his handkerchief and started to polish the scuff out. He frowned with concentration – and just for a moment heard a voice talking somewhere in the back of his head, snapping out the phrase
Yes, that’s right, matron, all present and correct
. He looked down at his handkerchief, which had been clean when he set out and now was smudged with spit and grass cuttings and dubbin. That Sunday voice had been in his head earlier, when he’d got the handkerchief out of his drawer – and he heard it again now, clear and sharp as a clip on the back of the head, accompanied with the flash of a white headdress:
Got your clean hanky for church, Reggie?
… He folded the memory up with his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket. That nurse or matron or whoever it was in his mind wasn’t who he was here to talk to, and the old days on the stones weren’t what he was here to talk about. He got up – or at least he almost did, but something stopped him.

‘No,’ he said suddenly – and much more loudly, looking directly at the stone with a sharp, angry glance. Whoever he was answering, their question was obviously one he’d been asked just one too many times.

‘No, there’s still nobody special. I’ve told you that before.’

There was an awkward silence, which he tried to fill by clambering upright and kicking at a tuft of grass. He seemed to be sorry for raising his voice like that; when he spoke next it was still sharply and clearly, but much more quietly.

‘Not
yet
.’

Another silence. Clearly she hadn’t heard – hadn’t heard, or didn’t want to. His voice insisted:

‘I said,
not yet
. Honestly, that must be the tenth time you’ve asked me that …’

Silence, again.

The breeze that had been tousling his hair dropped a stray lock back across Reggie’s forehead, and he knocked it away again. He straightened himself up, screwed up his eyes at Doreen’s name for a final moment, and brushed his hands clean on his trousers. For whatever reason, that seemed to be the end of the conversation.

‘Right then,’ he said, in the determinedly cheery voice of somebody who has just been told that visiting time is over. Scanning the nearby graves, he spotted a china jug holding some blue Dutch irises; they didn’t look very fresh, but they’d do. Leaving the jug to its rightful owner, he laid the flowers out on the turf below Doreen’s stone in a tidy fan, then wiped his hands.

‘Cheerio then,’ he said, after a long moment of thought. ‘Best be off, I suppose. I’ll see you next Sunday – we’re going to be here for three weeks.’

Reggie reached up and patted the knife in his breast pocket, twice.

‘But then I expect you already know that.’

Bending down one more time to adjust the alignment of his flowers, he turned, and went – down the path, under the trees, out through the gate, down through the gloomy shrubberies and back down into the town via the Lewes Road. He walked fast, and clutched his flapping jacket to him like he always did, swallowing away the remnants of that bruising lump in his throat and keeping his head well down. Nobody who saw him could possibly have guessed what he’d just been doing.

8

Having been its only witness, I wonder what you think of this strange Sunday rigmarole of Reggie’s. I wonder if you’re thinking
Well yes I can see that he’s upset, and I can understand why he might be, but it’s all an illusion, isn’t it, talking to the dead? I mean, when you think about it, isn’t he doing exactly what Mr Brookes is persuading the punters to do fourteen times a week down at the Grand? Imagine that there’s a woman in an empty box
.

A woman Reggie seems to think can somehow give him the advice he needs. A woman he seems to think he can turn to to help him sort out his still-young and oddly angry life.

All an illusion
. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

9

Pamela, up at Mrs Brennan’s, was restless. As you do on a Sunday night, she was staring at the pool of light that was cast up from her bedside light onto the plasterwork rosette on the ceiling, and slowly smoking the last cigarette of the day. She’d tried reading a magazine, but now she was thinking back over the week, trying to sift the pictures into an order that would let her go to sleep. She couldn’t say she thought much of an April Sunday in Brighton, that was for sure. The piers had seemed noisy and cold – all that pointless shrieking – there was nothing she really fancied on at any of the pictures, and window-shopping for other women’s opinions of how she ought to look had never been her favourite way to waste an afternoon. For the first time since she’d arrived, she was missing the noise and arguments of Soho. She was thinking about Reg, too. That foot was hardly an attraction, obviously, but he was a sweet boy, and surely he didn’t
have
to be such a loner. His sort often were, of course. One of Madame Valentine’s girls was local, and was bound to know the places people talked about – the ones where the Reggies of the town went. Maybe she’d even suggest an outing for a drink together one evening. She’d have to be careful about asking around, though; she’d never had a problem with that side of things personally, but you never could tell who was going to be funny about real life, even backstage in a theatre.

As for herself and her new single life down here by the seaside, well, the smoke rising from her cigarette into the lamplight was making her think of the pink-and-orange smoke from the apparatus, and Mr Brookes raising his right hand. He was certainly quite a looker, this Teddy, if that clean-cut way of doing things was your style – and he had some lovely manners, too. On the Friday, they’d met on their way out from work, and he’d been all done up for a date in a clean shirt and tan gloves and a cashmere; after she’d signed out, he’d held the stage door open for her exactly as if she was about to step into a taxi or a posh restaurant. She’d even got a proper
After you, madam
.

She stubbed the cigarette out in a flowered saucer by the bed and told herself to stop it. Being alone in a single bed would do her just fine for the present, thank you very much. She’d enjoyed putting it about in her time, but now she was going to try the other thing for a while. She told herself to remember the way she’d suddenly felt when she’d walked on in that maroon dress for the first time, with the white gloves and the fur. She could get used to passing for a lady, she thought. Bruises aside, it rather suited her.

As Pam turned out her light and rolled over, Mr Brookes, in Hove, was already gently snoring. It was really only when he was asleep that the professional mask finally ebbed from the muscles of his face and now, with just a smudge of moonlight coming in through the curtains to catch them, they were for once unguarded. Even his hands were relaxed, and one lay fallen open beside him on the flowered counterpane. A bathroom light had been left on in the hall, and the pillow next to him on the double bed carried a few stray blonde hairs; he stirred and stretched, his body clearly enjoying the space in the bed. His limbs instinctively liked it when his overnight guests did the decent thing and got themselves off home before the morning. He smiled.