The Disappearance Boy (23 page)

Sunday tomorrow. What the hell was he going to say?

3

‘Well,’ he said quietly, digging at the turf with his toe.

After a week out in the open the postcard had blistered and spotted, so he picked it up and tore it into pieces. The paper left his hands wet, and he wiped them on his trousers. It was better to just come straight out and say it, he supposed.

‘I suppose you knew about it all along – about him and her, I mean. And about her … her story, I mean.’

There was no need to explain.

‘And I suppose you’re sure she’s taking good care of herself with him now, aren’t you, else you would have said something?’

He looked up briefly to see if he could spot that bird, the one that had been there before, but there was nothing.

‘Just have to trust you on that one, won’t I?’

The quiet was as thick as it had been in the cafe; then a sudden, thrown-knife screaming over his head brought back the sound of those lunchtime girls and their boys down on the beach, shrieking and pretending that they minded being chased. It was a flight of swifts, scything through the space where the missing lark had been. He straightened up.

‘Can’t say that I’m finding it easy, seeing them together all the time, but I’m managing. More or less. Friday afternoon’s session with the wedding dress was a disaster, like I expected – I’m going to have to replace those fastenings – and getting the change worked out in the apparatus is going to take for ever, I can see that – but the important thing … the important thing –’

The hand settled its familiar grip on his windpipe, squeezing, but he coughed it away. He needed her to hear this.

‘The important thing is that she stays all right. Even when he gets short with her over those handcuffs. Even when he takes her home. Even when she makes her smile look brighter than it is, thinking I won’t notice. It would really help me if you could promise me that she’s safe. But you can’t. Can you? Funny how things can change in just a week.’

He talked for another whole hour, stopping and starting, leaving long silences in which everything he
had
said seemed to unravel, and always coming back to the same point: was Pam going to be all right? When he was done, he walked back down the hill in head-down silence, forgetting even to pat his knife as he squeezed through the gate. A couple of young men in their shirtsleeves passed him as he turned out through the cemetery gates and headed back into town, but Reg didn’t even look up to see what they were like. He was too busy revisiting his week, trying to make it fit – the dress, the shoes, the stuck fastenings, those figures on the beach, the stone, the handcuffs, the screaming. He’d even forgotten to tell his mother that he’d see her next week.

4

Mr Brookes had sent the apparatus to a workshop just round the back of the Metropole, right close to where Reggie had stood and stared up at that high window during his long nocturnal ramble. According to the head flyman at the Grand this was the cheapest of the several workshops which the theatres in town and the seafront attractions used, and the cabinet had been there for a whole week now, locked away each night and patiently enduring having its secrets exposed and modified each day. There were now six new hinges on the doors, a removable hand grip for Pamela in the ceiling, a set of spring-bolts to achieve that dropping of the chain and padlock, and two new cunningly mirrored compartments to hide the veil and collapsable silk bouquet required for the reveal. Nothing about the work had proved too challenging, though the spring-bolts had taken some setting – when it came to metal, the man who ran the workshop knew exactly what he was doing. Mr Brookes was surprised by his skill, but he shouldn’t have been. After all, every seaside pleasure has it mechanics, its points of friction and purchase. Out on the piers every chained rifle, every sparking strip on a dodgem car, every one of the clicking locks that kept the Chair-o-plane passengers from spinning out of their seats into neck-snapping flight, even the gilded horses of the carousels – each with a precisely calibrated ring sliding round the pole that steadied its implacable, imperious, endless up-and-down – they all needed maintaining. As far as the man in the workshop was concerned, Mr Brookes’s adjustments to his engine of deception was just one more little job among many.

The work had been done on credit, and without anything being drawn or written down. When they’d shaken hands on the price, the man had grinned and said,
Honestly, anyone would think you were engaged in some sort of a bloody crime, the way you lot carry on about your secrets
.

Once the apparatus was back the rehearsals got harder. Reg had kept up a good front all through the previous week, laughing with Pam when he could, looking away when he had to – but now the presence of the cabinet was bringing the difficulty of the new routine home to them both.

The two trickiest passages were Reggie’s steel-fingered invisibility on the back and sides, and then the suffocating twenty-four seconds in which he and Pam had to achieve her translation from Lady to Bride. Releasing the black-and-red cocktail dress once the ropes and handcuffs were off and dropping the underdressed skirt of the bridal outfit were relatively easy in themselves, but became near impossible once they moved inside the cabinet. The surging fabric seemed to want to get itself into their eyes and mouths; hooks and eyes refused to respond; the heels of the red shoes developed a malicious habit of going for Reggie’s face as he worked to cram himself under the trap with the dress. He pulled and pushed as if he had a body to conceal, but it fought back, determined to betray its hiding place. Reaching ruthlessly round, through and over each other, they felt like a pair of second-counting lovers, matching every lift, pull and last-minute tug – and all the time that they were at work inside their locked room the jealous figure of Mr Brookes would be pacing up and down outside, calling out and counting impatiently, and then, breaking all the rules of the usual story, angrily telling them to do it again, and again, and again.

Reg had particular trouble with the diamond ring. The double to the one that Mr Brookes vanished out on the stage lived in his pocket, and it was his job to remember to pass it to Pam last thing before she hoisted herself on the handles and he dropped under the trap. However, the first three times they made the change, he completely forgot to do it. Mr Brookes shouted at him, but to no avail; twice more, when the bride finally appeared – panting, dishevelled, but otherwise complete – she was still ringless. The problem, of course, wasn’t in the timing, but in Reggie’s head. This time there was no lever for him to reach for and pull on the reveal, and his only function once he was under the trap was to wait; wait, listen – and think. Every time they ran the sequence, he lay curled in the dark, panting and counting and spitting as Pam’s heels ground and clicked over his head, trying not to breathe in her smell as the hot fabric pressed into his face and wishing – for the first time in his life – that he did anything at all in the world for a living except this; this hateful crouching in the dark; this twisting and hiding; this hateful, stupid, relentless trickery of his being invisible while she got served up to the world on a plate.

No wonder he forgot the bloody ring.

The week passed, as it must, and after ten days of rehearsals the act finally began to take shape – once, they even got as far as the final tableau, bride and groom united at last in a crash-bang-wallop parody of a church-step photograph. While they worked in the darkened theatre, gradually getting the hang of their new routine, the Brighton spring took gradual possession of the air outside and the light on the sea got brighter. The water seemed to rise in a glittering wall at the end of every single street Reg chose to turn down, and against that strange backdrop the swelling life of the town seemed determined to taunt and harry him. Everywhere he looked there were couples, arm in arm, hand in hand, mouth to mouth. On the streets, out on the stones, in the newsagents, under the lamp posts, even on the bloody postcards. Hate it as he might, they all seemed to be agreeing on one thing: this wedding was definitely going ahead.

Mr Brookes knew that getting people down from town was going to be tricky given the date of the opening, but at least one booker had been back in touch to say that he’d try. Nothing definite – but it was a start. And if the act went over well on the big night, who knew, things might soon be looking up. He was squiring Miss Rose just about every other night while they were rehearsing, just to keep things ticking over – always asking her if she fancied it discreetly, not in front of people, and certainly not in front of the limping wonder, and so far she’d always said yes. On the Saturday he’d even suggested that they might all go out together for an end-of-the-week drink, the three of them –
a proper family outing
, he’d joked – and she seemed to have liked that. Reggie had fussed about with that bloody boot of his, trying to keep it tucked under the table and almost taking the drinks over at one point, but the evening hadn’t been too much hard work. A slightly sharp conversation about Princess Margaret and her latest appearance out on the town had been a bit of a rocky moment – he’d wanted to know why the woman couldn’t just get married like her sister instead of parading herself around town with every Tom, Dick and Right Honourable Harry, and Pam had taken umbrage. But all in all, like the rest of his labours, the evening had definitely been worth it.

Pam?

Pam was working as hard as she’d ever worked in her life.

Editing herself into each of the four successive women in the act, she kept on waiting to recognise herself. Sometimes, when they did finally get her down to the last basque, she wanted to rip that off too, just to take a look in the pier glass and remind herself of what she looked like when she wasn’t wearing anything except her name. It seemed that Reggie had been right when he’d explained how hard rehearsing a new routine was, because you never knew whether what you were rehearsing was going to finally make any sense. You were always too stuck in the middle of it all to ever really be able to see anything clearly, he’d said, and she’d thought (but hadn’t said)
well, yes, but that goes for everything
.

The only thing she was sure of was that she couldn’t really blame anyone but herself, this time.

On the nights when she did go home alone, the bed felt strange, and she found herself having that stupid old dream of what it would be like to come home to find flowers waiting for her; lilac and roses, just for her.

5

Now that he was out of the pub and in the air, Reggie felt as restless as a cat. It wasn’t just the relief of getting away from Mr Brookes and his arm round Pam’s shoulder, or out of the brightness and din of a Saturday-night saloon; Reggie’s body was a creature of habit, and its muscles wanted to know why they weren’t just coming offstage. He shook himself, and looked left and right. The pub Pam had chosen for their family outing was well down in the Lanes, and the alleyways were dark, and beginning to empty. A trio of young men in drape-collared overcoats who looked like they might be looking for trouble passed him, and Reg discreetly patted his penknife as they walked by. If he ever found out that Mr Brookes was hurting her … He shrugged off the thought. It was no use worrying. No bloody use at all.

Laughter came out through the etched-glass door – high laughter, and a song.

Not knowing what else to do, he walked. His one-twoing feet led him up past the Meeting House, round some corners, and eventually down the same damp alleyway of black-shuttered shops that he’d been down the previous Friday night. Then it was round the top end of Hanningtons, round the back of the Theatre Royal and then eventually out halfway up North Road itself, one corner away from the Grand. Here he stopped, and rolled himself a fag. The raft of red, white and blue bunting which had been going up outside the theatre all through the week was now complete, criss-crossing between the lamp posts all the way down the street from the Queen’s Road to the bottom. The night air was haloing the street lamps, and as he looked down the sloping street the hundreds of little triangular teeth of fabric coalesced in the light to make a sort of ghostly, bleached ceiling; a pale, hovering canopy of wire and cloth. It was as if all his painstaking work on Pam’s basque had been silently scissored up, multiplied and hung out to dry in a still, eloquent mockery.

Chilled, Reg sucked his teeth. He definitely wasn’t going to go straight home tonight. He hadn’t enjoyed that pub full of starers and laughers, and he wasn’t looking forward to Mrs Steed’s roses, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any other options.

Despite what people say now – and despite what most of them assumed, back then – it is very far from the truth that everything was hidden away behind locked doors in the spring of 1953. It wasn’t – not in this town. Already, the laughter coming out through certain doors was getting less than discreet, and quite a few of those doors’ addresses were common knowledge to the town’s policemen and landladies and stage-door keepers. Even Reggie, for instance, who very much kept himself to himself, would have been perfectly well aware from the backstage gossip at the Grand that if his feet had led him right instead of left that evening, and then left and left again, they would have eventually brought him round to Middle Street, and there, halfway down on the left-hand side, he’d have found himself standing outside the saloon-door entrance of a pub called The Spotted Dog. This was just beginning to be known as the most notorious of those addresses, the one that even some sniggering local schoolboys had heard of – the place whose ‘colourful’ customers the girl from Madame Valentine’s troupe had warned Pam about. He could have been there in ten minutes. But if the Dog (as its customers always loyally called it) felt too obvious, if he’d asked around – if he’d asked, for instance, his cravat-wearing colleague Mr English – he could have easily found other places to which he might have headed that night; places where the customers might well have stared at him for his foot, but not because they wondered why he was there or what he was looking for. Heads might have turned when he walked in just before last orders on a Saturday night – they always do when a new face arrives at that time of night, whatever the decade – but trust me, he would have been welcomed.