The Disappearance Boy (7 page)

‘No, Mr Brookes,’ she replied. ‘At this particular moment, I have no flippin’ idea who I am at all.’

‘Well, then, I’ll tell you,’ he said, gouging his words into the remaining space between their faces exactly, and ignoring the half-lit chaos around them.

‘You’re a girl in a million, you are. The one fucking girl in a million who can’t walk straight even
before
I’ve fucked her. So why don’t you sod off back to whichever agency it was I got you from and take your wan little tits with you? Your money’s at the stage door.’

Reg could see that she would have liked nothing better than to have signed off by raking her nails across his face, but she hesitated – and at that exact point, after a hurried bar’s rest, the band on the other side of the curtain launched into ‘The Sun in Old Toledo’, and the next act’s lighting blazed on up in the flies. The sudden overhead wash of pink and blue put the blood back into Sandra’s cheeks, and she almost managed a smile.

‘Well,’ she pronounced, tugging her fur up and dodging the stagehands who were coming on to clear the cabinet, ‘it’s been lovely working with you, and I do hope something comes along for you very soon, Mr Brookes.’

She kicked the satin of her falling ball gown out of the way, turned, took three strides, and then turned again at the wing, delivering her exit line over one still-bare shoulder like a real pro.

‘Like a lorry doing sixty miles an hour through a red light, for instance.’

A stagehand guffawed. Reggie wouldn’t have put it past Mr Brookes to lose it at that point – especially when the stage manager started hissing
Places please, everybody
, and tapping his clipboard at them – but all he did was stand there, still clutching that ridiculously empty glass, and watching Sandra stalk away. The stagehands set to work with a vengeance to get the cabinet offstage in time, and the two dancers of the Spanish speciality act dodged them in a swirl of ruffles and took up their places. The stage manager hissed again, and to Reggie’s astonishment Mr Brookes, still standing there, took the time to let his face melt into a wide, handsome and white-toothed smile – a real one. In desperation, the stage manager shouted into the flies, and the curtain began to rise. Mr Brookes turned crisply on his heel, and Reg lurched off after him, making it into the wings just in time. The lights got brighter, Carlita arched her spine into the cradle of Carlos’s well-muscled arms, and the band played on.

It was only when the curtain was down and the theatre was dark again that Reggie had time to think, and realised why his employer had smiled like that. He’d just got exactly what he wanted … And maybe it was the shadows on Mr Brookes’s suddenly cast-bronze face, or the way his dark red mouth had prepared itself for that smile with a quick, flicking wipe of his tongue – but Reg didn’t think he’d ever seen him look so bloody handsome.

His last packing-up job was to sort out Mr Brookes’s make-up. A smudge of black had somehow got onto the No. 7, but two deft flicks with the thin blade of his penknife and a quick wipe with a rag soon sorted that out. Once he’d got the greasy silver-papered sticks all in order, he cleaned his hands, then wrapped the sticks in a hand towel and carefully stowed them away in the bottom of the old biscuit tin that was their home – the mice had got at them once, and he’d had the devil’s own job to replace them. The mascara and Rachel powder and the two-pound glass jar of Pond’s Remover went in on top. Reggie glanced up into the mirror again as he collected that last item – the women here at work never really took all their slap off, did they, just plastered more on, especially if they were meeting someone after.
Good luck to each and every one of them
, Reggie thought, and snapped the lid on the tin. He breathed on the mirror, and then wiped it clean with his sleeve, momentarily grinning at his other, dark self.
Good luck to each and every bloody one of them, the bloody tarts
. All he had to do now was to check the label on the laundry bag one last time, double-check round the sink and under the furniture, and give one last final flick of the switch to kill the light bulbs.

Heading back down the corridor, he stooped to pick up a pair of damp wool tights that had slipped off one of the radiators. He lifted them to his nose, momentarily collecting a trace of coal-tar soap and sweat, and then draped them back over the radiator, straightening a leg that hung stubbornly crooked. He’d heard from one of the lads who’d helped him with packing the cabinet that the Rigolettos were being held over for an extension week, and as he rearranged the crooked leg he wondered if one evening next week he might even get the number 47 back over one night and pay to watch the act from out front for once. Treat himself – why not? He even started whistling their music as he limped on down the corridor – ‘The March of the Slaves’ it was called, apparently. Reggie was a lousy whistler, and knew it, but now that everybody else had gone home it didn’t really matter. He turned up the volume, and enjoyed making the concrete floor and white-tiled walls ring with his unapologetic noise.

Mr Gardiner was a Scot; the kind of man who was never without his regimental tie during office hours, and who believed in keeping people’s spirits up. He did this mostly by sharing a civil phrase or two with every single artist or artiste who passed through his door, no matter what their standing in the profession – and regardless of whether they returned the compliment or not.

On this particular Saturday night he was occupying the time before he could fulfil that duty with regard to the very last of his week’s guests by rereading a story on page four of the
South London Gazette
, a story which was headlined
STAR GUEST BURGLED THROUGH LOCKED DOOR
. He had just reached (for the third time) the paragraph describing how the victim had woken to realise that there was a man standing over her bed – the silly girl – when he heard Reggie’s tuneless approach; reluctantly, he folded his paper and laid it aside, reminding himself as he did so that professional standards in the theatre had to be kept up at all times.

‘Anything nice Sunday, Reg?’ he barked, opening his window and accepting the proffered dressing-room keys. His eyes briefly strayed back down to the photograph in his paper as he turned to find their places on his board of numbered hooks. Reggie tried not to smile. The woman in the photograph looked a bit like Sandra, he thought – blonde, with a big white fur.

‘Nothing special, Mr Gardiner. Might take myself off for a nice walk somewhere I thought. The river at Richmond or something. You know.’

‘Oh,
very
nice, Richmond,’ said Mr Gardiner, finally dropping the keys over their allotted hooks. Order had been restored. ‘Do give it my regards.’

‘I certainly will,’ said Reggie, crossing his jacket over his chest against the night and pushing open the stage door. ‘Well …’

It was always odd, saying goodnight at the end of an engagement.

‘Well, take care then, Mr Gardiner. Until next time.’

‘Take care, young man,’ barked Mr Gardiner, as the door swung closed and the cold air brushed his face for a moment. He congratulated himself quietly for not having alluded to the young man’s imminent lack of an engagement – that had been rather nicely handled, he thought – and then, as he put on his brown dustcoat and collected his bunch of locking-up keys, he found his eye caught by the folded paper once again. For a young lady who’d just had her jewels stolen, he thought, she didn’t look too put out at all, and since there was now finally no one left hanging about to hear him, he felt free to offer her his pennyworth of advice out loud.

‘Locks and keys, miss,’ said Mr Gardiner, doing up his last three buttons in time to his phrasing. ‘Locks … And … Keys. I think you’ll find that’s the motto of this particular story.’

As Mr Gardiner sets off on his nightly round, preparing once again to seal up his theatre in its own particular darkness and put it to bed with another week of sweat and laughs and deceptions all done, I think it’s only fair to tell you that Reggie’s statement about where he was thinking of heading the next day was a lie.
Misdirection
– you see, it really is that easy when you know how. It helps, of course, if your subject’s attention is already halfway up the garden path with a young lady at the Savoy, as Mr Gardiner’s had undoubtedly been at the time. Reggie’s sum-total experience of
The River at Richmond
was limited to having once seen that phrase stretched across the bottom of an old London Transport poster, revealed when he’d been watching a young workman clearing a hoarding before slapping up an advertisement; he’d no more actually been there than Mr Gardiner ever had. But he’d guessed correctly from the tone of their nightly goodbyes that a bracing walk along the Thames was exactly what an old stickler like Mr Gardiner would think was the proper way for a semi-unfortunate like himself to work off his surplus energies on a Sunday afternoon. It conformed to his views about what an otherwise nice young lad like Reggie
ought
to be getting up to in his spare time.

Funny, what people assume.

Reggie’s real plan for his Sunday is something quite different. Just like he did last Sunday, and the Sunday before that – ever since he discovered the place, in fact – he is going to get the first bus that comes along that will take him up to Clapham, and then on Clapham High Street he’s going to change onto a number 28, and then onto a number 3 to Dulwich. Getting off at the bombsite at the bottom of Gipsy Hill, he’ll then take the steep walk up to the gates of the Dulwich and Sydenham Municipal Cemetery, only stopping twice to lean on the wooden handrail to the right of the path and catch his breath.

7

He stands still, listening to the bell of a nearby church tolling for the service. Then he listens to it stop. He’s quite warm after his climb up the hill, but the day itself is cold – there’s a weak March sun struggling to emerge through some clouds over his head, and it hasn’t quite made it yet. He wraps his jacket across his chest. The graves over here on the far side of the cemetery by the railway are relatively recent, and Reggie stops occasionally, looks around, and then stoops to inspect one of the bunches of flowers laid on or by the still-white stones. Several times, he just stops and looks around anyway.

A small bunch of sugar-pink florist’s roses catches his eye – it’s the brightest thing here – and Reg kneels down to see if there’s a label attached to the cellophane. Just as he does this a young woman in a headscarf surprises him by coming round the corner of the gravel path, and as Reggie hurriedly stands up and brushes off his knees she gives him a brave little smile. Her coat is dirty, Reggie notices with some embarrassment. The bunch of daffodils jammed into the top of her basket is wrapped in newspaper, and the expression on her face makes her look as though she needs to hurry to get back to the house whose garden they came from and get everybody’s Sunday dinner on. Reggie returns her smile, keeping his teeth hidden, but the young woman doesn’t stop.

Reggie watches her go, and then moves slowly on down his chosen row of stones. Three doors down (so to speak) from the grave with the bunch of roses, he comes to a halt. Once again, he stops and looks around, apparently checking to see if anyone is watching him. He stares at the stone, and seems to be on the verge of saying something; he rests a hand on it. But that exchange of smiles with the young woman in the headscarf has evidently unsettled him, and he doesn’t stay long. He limps on (how odd; his limp seems to be more pronounced this morning – perhaps it’s the cold), and right at the end of the path he’s chosen he arrives at what seems to be his second destination, a black-painted cast-iron bench almost hidden within a stand of overgrown holly. This seems to be more like it, and he relaxes a bit. From here, he can see all the way down the path should anyone approach, but no one can easily see him. A train goes past on its way round to Blackfriars and Farringdon, and as its sound dies away Reggie gets out a tin of tobacco and rolls himself a cigarette. He lights it, and then drags on it – like a schoolboy imitating somebody he’s seen at the pictures, he cups it in his right hand as if protecting his fag from the still-chilly air. Then he looks at his watch. He exhales a wreath of smoke, and jams his other hand into his pocket; he leans back, and lifts his face to the appearing sun – the clouds have just parted properly for the first time. He even closes his eyes. With both his legs stretched out for once and his left hand thrust deep in his trouser pocket, he looks as though … as though, I suppose, he just wants to have a quiet moment alone with his thoughts. That’s what benches in cemeteries are there for, after all.

Two cigarettes later, the sun gives up and goes in again, and Reggie shivers and checks his watch. Hearing footsteps on the path, he quickly tucks his legs away under the bench, hiding his boot, and busies himself with rolling a new cigarette. The footsteps belong to a young man in a dark jacket, but Reg doesn’t look up as he passes. He hunches his shoulders, clearly willing whoever this young man is to walk on by. Only when the coast is clear again does he uncurl his legs and light his finished fag.

A cemetery is a strange place to spend a Sunday morning, isn’t it? – especially a morning when the displays of spring flowers are coming into bloom in all the parks of London, and you could easily have a taken a bus to one of them instead. A strange place to sit on a cast-iron bench with your Sunday-best tie on, smoking, looking for all the world as if you were waiting for some stranger to come and find you.

8

On his first day without work, Reggie spent the afternoon in the library, ploughing a solitary furrow through all the papers. He read (among other things) about how a florist in Kensington was preparing to fly eighteen boxes of white orchids in from the South of France
to meet the extravagance of the anticipated demand during the pre-Coronation Season
. I’d like to see that, he thought. On the Wednesday, he went back and went upstairs to the reference section, and looked up the entry headed ‘Coronation’ in his favourite encyclopedia – he’d been too young for the last one, after all, and wanted to get a better idea of what was actually going to happen on the day. On Thursday he did what he always did on Thursday, which was to check his mantelpiece money-tin. He reluctantly agreed with himself that he’d probably better not trek over to the Broadway that evening to treat himself to a ticket for the Rigolettos, and just went out for a good pavement-pounding walk instead. On Friday and Saturday he caught up with his darning, found a cake shop with a window display of special-occasion icing which he promised himself he’d return to after Mr Brookes had got their next booking, and had tinned fish for his dinner, twice. On the Sunday he walked to Clapham High Street to save the fare and only got the bus to his cemetery from there.