The Disappearance Boy (17 page)

For some reason, Mr English forgot to turn off one of the light fittings up on his top-floor corridor on that particular Friday; in consequence, a thin strip of light was able to seep in under Pam’s locked dressing-room door all night long. Undisturbed, it worked patiently to rearrange the shadows which she’d left behind. It edged her now-dark mirror with a bevelled silver frame, and caught at her gilt-and-glass perfume bottle. Gently, it picked out the white cardboard and ghostly tissue paper whose job it had recently been to keep her new stockings a secret, and stroked the expensive sheen of her present from Reg. Up above the mirror, it made sure that the newsprint images taped along its frame stayed subtly and suggestively legible all through the long hours. The Princess’s trademarks all still gleamed, even in the dark – the elbow-length gloves, the shining hair, that famous, bold and still-unmarried smile.

On the back of the highest-up of these photographs, the one that Pam had clipped out of that
Argus
centre spread on her first day here by the sea, there was a story that she’d never turned the photograph over to read. Because the columns of print on the back of the clipping weren’t exactly aligned with the edges of the picture on the front, Pam’s nail scissors had cut some of the sentences in half, but the relevant details were all quite clear. A twenty-four-year-old down on a day trip from London had met a man on the pier, and only later discovered that he was not all that he claimed to be.
I cannot believe how foolish I was
, she told the court, in some distress.
When I think of how my mother warned me, I feel such a –

But apparently that twenty-four-year-old down from Mitcham didn’t think, and neither, when it came down to it, did Pamela. Later that Friday night, after two drinks at the Queen’s Hotel and one at the Bedford, she let herself be taken on to a members’ club just off the seafront, a place where Mr Brookes’s name had been left on the door. It was fun, and noisy, but actually quite tatty; it gave more of an impression of a crowded front room than of a club, with fishing nets around the walls and a record player tucked away in the corner. Over the sound of somebody playing ‘September in the Rain’ on a trumpet, she leaned forward while Mr Brookes told her all the details of this new act he was planning, the quick changes it would involve and the new prospects it could open up for her if she would only agree to join him in this exciting adventure. She nodded quite a bit, and smiled where appropriate. Then, having said she’d be delighted, she let Mr Brookes escort her back to his room in Hove in a taxi, and there she let him undress her and take her to bed.

Are you surprised? She was, slightly, even as she was letting it happen. She didn’t feel the scene was quite in character – not after all the promises she’d made to herself in this bracing seaside air. But then again, as she told herself while his well-practised hands were searching for the zipper at the back of her skirt – that nugget of metal which she’d been aware of all evening, digging into her under the slightly-too-tight grip of her belt – the whole of life is a quick-change act really, isn’t it? And never mind, because it’s always the same woman inside the outfit, whatever she’s wearing. It doesn’t
change
anything, what you’re wearing, does it? I mean, you’re still
you
, no matter what.

16

After he’d finished his Friday-night tidy-up, Reg didn’t quite know what to do with the rest of that evening. In particular, he didn’t know what to do with the time that he would normally have spent walking Pam back up the Queen’s Road to Mrs Brennan’s. He murdered some of it by going back upstairs and laying out all of Mr Brookes’s handkerchiefs for Saturday’s matinee – the boss liked to have a clean one laid out for him to put his watch and signet ring on as soon as he got into work – but he was still back down at the stage door signing himself out at twenty past ten. A pub had never much been his idea of fun, and he didn’t fancy a bag of chips, so that really just left walking.

Just as well you’re good at it
, he told himself. He wished Mr English goodnight, hugged his jacket tight around him as he went up the alley and then struck out left up North Road, turning immediately sharp left again at the very first corner he came to.

Most people who get the train down to Brighton choose to get lost in the Lanes at some point – there’s something about a tangle of disreputable alleys being hidden away right in the middle of the town that makes them seem to epitomise the place. Tonight, their maze of squalid corners just suited Reggie’s mood.

He headed into them with no particular destination in mind, and then just followed his feet, switching direction if he heard people up ahead coming out of a pub, dodging left and right whenever he needed to. He wasn’t, as you or I would have been if we had had that much on our minds, loitering; head down, he kept up his pace, relying on the jarring rhythm of his feet on the wet brick pavements to distract him from the pictures that he was trying to keep out of his head. He passed an alleyway of shops which had their black-painted shutters pulled down and padlocked; noticing that one of the locks looked broken, he stooped down and tugged. The lock held, but the shutter rattled. The sound made him think about all the packing and loading there would be to get done after the last show tomorrow, and of the train back to London. He tapped his pocket, twice.

The twists of the Lanes are disorientating even to locals, and when his feet finally brought him out onto an open street Reg had to stop and look around in order to work out properly where he was. The Clock Tower was just to his right, which meant that the front was away down West Street to his left. Twenty-five to eleven … For a few minutes he stood and stared at one of the damaged stone women decorating the base of the tower; she was lifting up the stumps of her handless arms as if she was trying to make some kind of a point, and he wondered if it was him she was trying to talk to. The sea was beginning to make itself felt in a dark and angry wind gusting up West Street from the front, and he definitely didn’t want to head right up towards the station and Mrs Brennan’s, so after a moment’s more calculation he crossed straight over – there was a dark westwards-heading side street that looked promising. As he was crossing the road the cold made him remember that he hadn’t eaten, and he stopped at the kerb to rummage in his pockets. A leftover shard of toffee was the best they could do, but he popped it into his mouth anyway, and set to work on smoothing its edges with his tongue.

First things first; maybe she was right. Maybe Mr Brookes did just want to talk to her about work. And if not, and if he did make a play for her, well, surely she’d be able to make a joke of it. She was good at that. Brookes would be in foul mood tomorrow for the matinee, but rather that than the other.

And as for work, well, after tomorrow something was bound to turn up, because it always did. Always.

The iron-railed side street he’d chosen for his route eventually led him out into a square lined with boarding houses and hotels. He watched the signs swinging in the wind – there was even a bloody
Sea View
again, reminding him that eventually he’d have to reverse his direction and head back to Mrs Steed’s before the front door got locked. But he was nowhere near tired enough for that yet, so he let the square lead his feet into its neighbour. This one was big, full of a lawn of black grass and tall, staring windows. He didn’t want anyone pulling back a curtain and watching him while he was trying to think things through like this, so when a dark lane-mouth invited him to duck out of the building wind he accepted its offer.
Story of my flippin’ life
, he thought, wrapping up his jacket again as tight as it would go.

By ten to eleven Reggie had stitched his route through the back alleys of the town as far west as the cluster of mews behind the Metropole Hotel. They were dark, and confusing, and he had to watch his step on the wet cobbles as the wind came knocking round the unlit corners. One rude buffet of air made him stop and steady himself, and he found himself staring up at a cliff of blackness.

The back of the Metropole is eight storeys high – eight storeys of brick and iron – and it reared up over him, sealing off the street and blocking out the clouds tearing across the moon with its fantastic pinnacled roof.
Bedtime
, thought Reg, as he stared up at the blank panes of all the windows.
And there must be hundreds of the buggers in there
. Right up under the crested roof, an eye winked open; through a small panel of frosted glass, one yellow light came on, barred by the steps of an iron fire escape.
Must be for the staff, right up there under the roof
, Reg thought. That was it; some young doorman, taking a late-night piss – or a young barman, unbuttoning his collar to get at the back of his neck before he turned in. Reggie stared up at the window and waited for the moment when the young man would go – when the light would click off again and restore the cliff to darkness. It did. He prised his eyes away, swallowed his last mouthful of toffee’d saliva, and turned, feeling the wind again. He didn’t know where he was heading now at all.

He’d been avoiding it all night, but now he could hear it roaring, and decided to get it over with. Ducking his head down straight into the wind, he grabbed the cold metal of the promenade railing with both hands and steadied himself. Squinting away to his left he could just make out a late-night taxi pulling up outside the Metropole, releasing four figures who formed themselves into couples and hurried inside, but everything else was deserted. The piers were dark, and the festoons of naked bulbs strung between the lamp posts along the prom were being rocked and tugged by the wind as they stretched away into the town – pearls, on a black sweater. He swore, wondering who the fuck they kept the lights on for on a night like this anyway. Then he made himself look out straight ahead, at the sea.

The water seemed to be boiling. As he watched, the foam on the breaking waves turned the same filthy white as the broken arms of that woman on the tower. They gestured, and grabbed, rushing towards him, their black hands seeming to want something more than the wet stones they were plucking and dragging and throwing angrily aside. A great shaggy head of water drew back, then crashed up the beach, unleashed. Reggie let go of the rail and stepped back – he’d forgotten it could be this close. This angry, and this black.

Christ, but he was cold.

Suddenly furious with himself, he grabbed his jacket and spun round, ducking his head back down. He turned east, stabbing his boot into the asphalt so hard that it almost made him tilt over – and talking to himself all the way, shouting, telling himself in no uncertain terms to stop thinking and get off home and upstairs before he froze to bloody death. Above him, the ropes of pearls swayed in the wind, looping from lamp post to lamp post all the way along his journey home.

When he got to Fitzroy Place he crawled into bed with all his clothes on, and tried for nearly an hour to imagine the warmth of somebody else’s body in there with him, but the chill of all that foaming, tearing darkness seemed to have got right inside him, and he couldn’t do it.

17

‘Well, come on in if you’re going to, Reg! Don’t stand in the bloody corridor.’

He winced; he forgot that on these concrete floors his feet sounded different to other people’s. He should have knocked straight away like he’d planned to, instead of standing there wondering how he was going to start the conversation. What had happened with Mr Brookes? He shifted himself from boot to boot, opened the door, and decided to get it over with. He made the word a question.

‘Morning?’

It was only half past eleven, but Pamela was already sitting in front of her mirror, stripped to her bra and knickers and half made up. She was wearing a pair of clip-on pearl earrings which Reggie had never seen before, and brandishing a handful of shell-pink swansdown that was turning the room hazy with talc.

‘So has he told you?’

She narrowed her eyes in her mirror as she said it, assessing the effect of the powder as it settled in a fine shawl across her naked shoulder. What did she mean?

‘Told me what?’

The talc was new as well, he realised – stronger-smelling than usual; hyacinths instead of her usual roses-and-sugar.

‘Come on – I haven’t seen him yet this morning. Told me what?’

The darting powder puff stopped, and her eyes locked onto his. They were shining, but red – had she been crying, or was it just the powder?

‘He’s only bloody got us another bloody booking, Reg. And by the bloody seaside.’

Reggie thought she was going to turn round and kiss him; her eyes were wide now, and their brightness was flooding straight into her powder-blotched mouth.
Thank Christ for that
was his immediate, private thought – Mr Brookes really had taken her on the date to talk about work.

‘What? Where? Not Morecombe bloody Bay – and please don’t tell me I’m going back to Weston-super-Mare, I hate fucking sand.’

‘Here!’

She changed her mind about the kiss, and the swansdown swooped back to its work. Reg stared, thinking fast. They’d been lucky to get three weeks out of the Grand as it was – did she mean they were coming back for a summer season? What about between now and then? Or did she mean that Clements was giving them an extension? That wouldn’t make any sense …

‘But everybody in this town’s already bloody seen the act. We’ll get the bird –’

‘No, silly.’ She said it as if it ought to be obvious, smiling as you would at a child; her hands dumped the swansdown in a cloud of powder, and stretched an imaginary placard across her mirror. ‘
Coming soon, our very own Grand Coronation Special
. Mr Clements is already getting them printed.’

Still not getting the response she wanted, she spelt it out.

‘Third billing in a brand-new show, Reg; single spot, second half, same money – and four new costumes. Opening on the big night itself.’

Now it was Reggie’s turn to look wide-eyed; the second of June was three weeks on Tuesday.