The Disappearance Boy (9 page)

‘Live and let live, I always say.’

Reggie smiled, hauling himself up the next step.

‘Mind you, no overnight guests. Not even cousins. No cats, no dogs, no birds. No use of the front door in either direction after midnight …’

She paused and wheezed, clutching the banister.

‘And no fried food in the rooms …’

The room turned out to be right up under the roof. The lino was bare; there was a bed, a chair, a mean-looking wardrobe and a small mirrored washstand on a chest of drawers. But it looked pretty much as clean as Mrs Steed claimed it was, and had a window, and that was quite good enough for Reggie. Baths were on Fridays, she said, and all damages were to be settled immediately; Reg assured her he thought he would be comfortable, pocketed his key and promised that he would sign her book on his way back down. Apart from the wallpaper, which was all roses, and hideous, there was nothing that he could see that was going to be too much of a problem, not for the few short weeks that he was going to be staying here at any rate. The air in the room felt stale, so the first thing he did was to try the window – the sash felt as if it had been painted shut, but Reggie applied his grip, and was soon rewarded with the loud crack of something giving way.

There it was again – that cold sea air, pushing its way into the room and demanding to talk to him, telling his London skin that he definitely wasn’t playing Wimbledon Broadway any more, not this week.

Reg leaned out, surprising a gull on a neighbouring roof, and almost shouted himself. The end of the grey-stuccoed street framed a sudden, shining, vertical slice of the English Channel, bright and hard under the April sun. He’d had no idea … He held on to the half-rotted window frame and cantilevered himself right out, far enough out for the breeze to properly catch at his hair as he craned his neck.
So Seaview it is after all, Mrs Steed
, he thought –
so long as you don’t mind getting a grip and craning your neck
. He filled his lungs, hauled himself in, and slid the window half closed, leaving the curtains to stir. Looking around, he decided that the room would do very nicely, five flights of stairs or not. At least there’d be no one walking over his bloody head – and there was a street lamp across the way, and the window ledge was wide enough to keep a bottle of milk on. He bounced a bit on the bed, and stared at some length at the wallpaper with its slow-moving riot of grey roses on a dull red background. They definitely weren’t going to help with getting up in the mornings, but he was sure he’d get used to them.

He kicked his case under the bed, and wondered why that smell of the sea was still bothering him.

Twenty past two. Blimey, time to head off for work already.

The Brighton Grand is gone now. The doors finally closed for business in 1955, and the building memorably burnt to the ground in 1961, but on the afternoon that Mr Brookes and Reggie and their new girl first arrived its facade was still making a reasonably convincing job of promising the pedestrians who passed it on their way up North Road a good night out. Plastered Italianate pillars divided up the windows of the first floor, a couple of gesturing ladies still flanked the pediment at the top, and either side of the front doors – grand affairs with ideas well above their station, all bevelled glass and big bright handles – two framed bills proudly listed the current show’s attractions in scarlet and blue lettering. These changed every two or three weeks – weekly in the winter – and this week, underneath headliners Lauri Lupino Lane and Madame Valentine’s ‘Nudes de Montmartre’, they announced by means of a pasted-on slip that third on the bill was one Miss Burstone, the Talented Vocaliste. This, Reggie guessed, was the act that had been hurried on to replace whoever had been injured, and who they’d be replacing come Monday. He couldn’t see the name of anyone he’d ever shared a stage with before – and certainly no Rigolettos – and running his eye down the rest of the names he couldn’t help but smile. The management – Mr J. Clements, Sole Prop – definitely wasn’t making its money by underestimating anybody’s taste. The Three Karloffs; ‘Ramena’ and her Exotic Dance; Suzanne De Wynter, Aerialiste Extraordinaire; Paquita and Pascale; George Truzzi; The Lovely LORRAINE; Mr Paul Clifford and his Orchestra – in other words, a few laughs, a couple of specialities, a touch of skirt and quite a bit of skin towards the top of the bill. It looked as though The Missing Lady should be right at home, so long as they could get her up and running in time.

They didn’t go in through those glittering front doors, of course – they carried on up North Road and ducked off to their left, going in the back way.

Round the back, every expense had been spared. The stage door itself was concealed at the end of a plain brick alleyway that led down the side of the building, and once inside, the bareness continued. The stage-door keeper here was called Mr English, and his window and pencil-on-a-string and board of keys all looked rather depressingly familiar. But he looked like he might be a nice old bird underneath, Reg thought, easier to thaw out than Mr Gardiner, and once Mr English had reached their keys down from his board and explained rather prissily who was going to be put where he offered to lead them down the sloping, concrete-floored corridor – its floor slightly ridged so that the pantomime ponies wouldn’t slip as they made their way from the street to the stage – and into the darkened wings. Then it was down three steps and round to the back of the metal pass door that led out into the auditorium.

They’re almost all gone now, these buildings, but if you’re trying to imagine what one of them would have been like to live and work in, then I suggest you start with the smell. It never quite goes away, in a theatre: breath, sweat, chocolate, clothing – and cigarettes, lots of them, in those days. The distinctive top note of a coloured gel which must have caught last night in a lantern frame; the scorched red silk of the lampshades on the front of the dress circle; damp chiffon and powder, from ‘Les Nudes de Montmartre’. The slight acidity of accumulated laughter – if laughter has a smell – something just rancid enough to fog the gilding and darken the engraved Stalls Bar mirrors, all of it mixed and thickened by a night spent locked in the dark and now just lingering in the drapes and the upholstery.

Here we go again
, thought Reg, sniffing.
Home from bloody home
.

‘Right,’ said Mr Brookes, rubbing and twisting his hands together. ‘Shall we?’

Leaving Reggie and Pamela together in the middle of the stalls, he slipped through a door leading out into the foyer. Reggie was familiar with this part of the get-in routine, and knew all he had to do was sit and watch and wait, but Pamela clearly wasn’t; as Mr Brookes headed off into the dark to find his way upstairs, she looked around as if she wasn’t quite sure why she’d been brought along. A stained-glass panelled door leading to the bar at the back of the stalls had been left propped open, and a single shaft of daylight was raking across the scalloped backs of the seats in front of them, barely penetrating the toothless mouth of the stage.

‘Not spending much on the paintwork, are they?’ she said eventually, eyeing the quartet of bare-breasted ladies who supported the boxes on either side of the proscenium. One breast was fissured. ‘Still, I expect it looks better with all the lights on. Funny old places these, aren’t they?’

Reggie had never really thought of it like that exactly, but he could see she had a point. In this lighting, the Grand wasn’t looking very grand at all. The upholstery on the back of the seat in front of him was greasy, and the swags of laurel leaves that draped the proscenium looked more black than gilt. The lingering smell of last night’s house only underlined the emptiness, and up above the rather-too-small chandelier that was supposed to top the whole thing off you could barely see a smokily painted midnight sky with a spattering of gold stars. The clouds were cracked and starting to peel. Reg squinted and tipped his head back. He could just about make out a constellation of stars that he didn’t recognise down in the left-hand corner, seven of them, all in one gilt cluster, barely catching the light. What were they?

‘I’ve played in worse,’ he said, still squinting. ‘Better, obviously, sometimes, but definitely worse as well.’

He’d have to look them up in an encyclopedia – not that there was much likelihood of there being time to get to a library this week. Why
did
Mr Brookes always insist on this get-in routine of using the girl to check his sightlines right up to the back of the gallery, when they could easily have had an hour off for lunch and a roam around instead? After all, it wasn’t as if a house like this was ever going to sell much up beyond the second circle, was it? – not at this time of year.

‘Reggie!’

He twisted round and up to see where Mr Brookes was calling from, but couldn’t find a figure to go with the voice up there in the darkness. He shouted back anyway.

‘Yes Mr Brookes?’ It seemed right to be formal, somehow, with the new girl here.

The voice came echoing down again over the serried ranks of empty seats, dark and direct and no-nonsense. Mr Brookes knew that all this place needed to come alive was a few paying customers.

‘Show Pam back through the pass door and get her to walk the reveal, would you, Reg?’

‘Yes, boss.’

Pam
, he thought, leading the way through the darkness.
Not Pamela, not Miss Rose: Pam. Doesn’t waste any bloody time, does he?

‘What does he mean?’ Pam was keeping her voice down as she picked her way behind Reggie along the row of seats – obviously she didn’t want her new employer to hear her. ‘Walk his what? Bloody hell that’s heavy –’

The pass door at the Grand was a serious affair, an eight-foot-high contraption of sliding metal. Though the stage side of it was blank and black, the auditorium side was scarlet, and had NO ADMISSION TO THE PUBLIC lettered across it in six-inch-high capitals. Clearly whoever had painted them had very pronounced opinions about the dividing line between the two worlds it served to keep separate. Reggie helped Pam to hold the door open, and she squeezed herself through.

‘Straight on from stage left,’ he said, keeping his voice down too, ‘and then hold centre two feet upstage of the footlights. He just likes to get an idea of what you’re going to look like before he starts working. Helps him feel in control. Just up those steps and then left and you’re on.’

Pamela peered ahead to see where Reggie was indicating.

‘Does it now? Well who am I to get in the way of anybody’s feelings? Right …’

Reggie let the iron barrier slide slowly closed behind her (it sighed, as if it was sorry to see her go; Persephone, returning to Hades), shuttering off her swinging backside as she picked her way up the three concrete steps to stage level. It would be just like Mr Brookes to bring a girl all the way down here to the seaside and then send her packing if she wasn’t up to scratch, he knew that. But time was short, and with that figure, he thought she stood more than a fair chance.

‘Is this it?’

She was shading her eyes as if it wasn’t darkness she was looking up into but a too-bright light. Her other hand was reversed on her hip, knuckles resting lightly on the bone, fingers curled, elbow and shoulder perfectly relaxed.
Well
, thought Reg,
that’ll show him
.

‘Mr Brookes? You there?’

‘Left a bit.’ The voice echoed down from somewhere right up under the painted stars. ‘Now right.’

‘Sounds like the rifle range at the fair,’ she laughed, obeying his instructions with a lazy cha-cha first one way and then the other. ‘Not going to bloody shoot me, are you?’

‘Not unless I have to. Right, that’s bang centre. Think you can remember that?’

‘Oh, I think so. I just need to line myself up with that door to the bar.’

She pointed to the back of the stalls. The half-light from the open door hid all of her nerves, and softened the lines of her hair and the black and white of her elegantly extended forearm. The gold charms on her wrist rearranged themselves, and fell silent; one pointing finger sketched in the thought that somewhere out there beyond the bar there must be a street, and people, and a normal working life. You could see that it was true what she’d said on the train about working in a floor show, thought Reggie. She hit every pose just right.

‘But then, it won’t be the first time I’ve done that of an evening.’

Her laugh rang out through her voice, and Reggie couldn’t help but smile back at her from out in the darkened auditorium. He remembered what Mr Brookes had shouted down the phone at him over the noise of that pub, and decided that yes, they had struck lucky. Rehearsals with this one might even be fun.

The walking done to his satisfaction, Mr Brookes told them he’d see them bright and early tomorrow morning. He then headed off to find Mr Clements’s office and introduce himself and clarify the arrangements for them rehearsing on the stage.

‘Nine thirty, Reg, and everything ready by then please,’ he shouted, as he disappeared back up into the darkness.

It was dark now; he could barely see the sea.

Replaying that scene with Pam onstage in his head, Reg smiled again. She was a bit smashing, he decided – apart from that one moment when they’d been getting off the train and he’d stumbled as he smelt the air for the first time, she hadn’t looked or stared at his boot once, not in the whole two days they’d now known each other.

It was funny about that air. It had made him shiver when he’d first realised why the smell and taste of it had been bothering him, but now that he’d had time for a walk and a think and a bite to eat he’d calmed down a bit. After all, that was all years ago – lying in a metal cot and hearing the stones outside the window and smelling the salt in the air.

Watching the moon slice the dormitory wall into a black world and a silver one.

He leaned against the railing, and peered into the dark. Somewhere out there, beyond one of those two blinking, misdirecting piers, the stones must all still be there, piled up under the windows, waiting for his staggering feet.
Seaford 12
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Miles
, the sign on the seafront had read – hadn’t that been the nearest town? But he never had been back, and he had no intention of even thinking about it now, whether the stones were five miles away from where he was standing or fifty – not even if there was a bus that went straight there along the coast. He was sure of that.