Thin Air (12 page)

Finally, Dex came into the
world. ‘Little Chris,’ Julie breathed, reaching out with her gnawed
fingers to touch the photos.

‘Chris,’ Jay said. She felt as
if she was looking into a tomb.

He rarely smiled for the camera.
By the time he was at school, she could see in his face the promise
of the man he would become. Julie explained that she had taken most
of the pictures. By this time, Ted had faded away completely. Jay
imagined that Cora’s withering indifference had erased him from
existence, but Julie said that he’d taken up with another woman in
Crowston and moved away. They’d not seen him since. Dex had been
about six when that had happened. ‘We never fought, me and Chris,’
Julie said. ‘He was good with me.’

‘But not with others?’ Jay tried
to keep the sharpness from her voice.

Julie shrugged. ‘Well, he used
to wind Gary up something chronic. He wasn’t as naughty as some
lads, but somehow he was always in trouble. I reckon people just
didn’t know what he was about.’

‘What about his mother? Did she
encourage him in his music?’

Julie uttered an explosive
snort. ‘What? She didn’t give a toss.’ She sighed. ‘Mum tried, she
really did, but the trouble was she just wasn’t very good with
kids. We were no angels, believe me. Chris could be a little
bugger. He didn’t belong here. It was good for him he got away and
got into the music and all that.’

‘Couldn’t have been that good
for him, Julie, could it?’ Jay said dryly, looking into the woman’s
eyes.

Julie shrugged again, looked
away. ‘Want another fag?’

She offered a box and Jay took
one, proud she didn’t even falter at the lethal charge of nicotine
and tar that lurked within it. Julie went out to the kitchen to
make more tea, leaving Jay to look through the rest of the Dex
pictures alone. He’d been a misunderstood poet struggling to exist
among people who interpreted his sensitivity as strangeness. The
photos dried up round about the time Dex reached his teens,
although there were a few black and white shots of his first band;
Dex now recognisably a performer, staring moodily at the camera
from beneath a hectic fringe. Photos of Julie’s young family were
even more scant. It seemed the family had lost the urge to record
their history. As she leafed through the last few pages, Julie’s
daughter came to stand uncomfortably close to Jay, leaning against
her legs like a dog. She was an unnaturally silent child. Jay
thought most children had the presence of sharp needles and a noise
that pierced even more sharply. She flipped back through the album.
‘Do you remember your Uncle Chris?’ she asked.

The child looked at her with a
disturbing expression of incredulity. ‘I was a baby,’ she said
gravely.

After a snack of cheese slice
sandwiches, Jay said she’d like to look round the town. ‘You can
come back later, if you like,’ Julie said. ‘We could go for a
drink.’

Jay had hoped Julie might give
her a guided tour of Torton, take her to places that Dex had
frequented as a young man, but then she had the children to think
about, and Jay shrank from asking them all to accompany her. Like
Cora, she was not that good with children. ‘That’d be great,’ she
said, hiding her disappointment. ‘I’ll come back about eight. Will
that be OK?’

‘Yeah. I’ll get a
baby-sitter.’

Julie stood on the door-step
with Kylie to wave Jay off. The fans had gone now, although Jay was
keenly aware of Julie’s neighbour watching them from the
living-room window next door. It was clear that Jay’s visit was a
real occasion for Julie, despite her initial wariness. She said
good-bye as if they’d known one another for a long time.

Driving away, Jay felt
disoriented. It didn’t seem possible that Dex had come from this
place. There was so much about him she hadn’t known and yet when
they’d been together she’d have called him her closest friend.
She’d never known him, that much was obvious now. He was
disappearing more for her all the time.

Back at The Ship, Jay reserved
her room for a further night. She tried to call Gus at home and on
his mobile, but on both occasions was greeted only by
answer-phones. She’d have to call him later. It was a bit odd that
he hadn’t tried to get in touch with her, but perhaps that was for
the best.

After a quick drink in the bar,
Jay explored the town. Not that there was much to see. In the dusk,
she wandered down to the grim sea-front, where old vessels rusted
in the brackish water. Gulls wheeled forlornly in the grey sky and
the wind tasted of salt. Jay stood on the promenade, gripping the
iron railings, staring out to sea. What was the point of this? Dex
had been a fairly ordinary council estate boy. Could the answer to
his disappearance be hidden here? It seemed unlikely. Recent
pressures had brought that on. Yet she had discovered he’d run away
before, albeit without vanishing completely. Julie seemed a nice
woman, although rather sad and lonely. Why hadn’t Dex kept in touch
with her, included her in his life? Julie’s life, to Jay, was
terrible. This whole town was terrible; depressing, run-down,
fading away. No wonder Dex had fled from it.

Rhys Lorrance
was with his mistress for the afternoon, in an upmarket hotel in
the West End. She had already commented on his quiet demeanour and
asked what was bothering him. Part of him didn’t want to say. He
was naturally secretive, but that wasn’t the reason he kept his
silence. What he had to say might sound paranoid at the very least.
But she was persistent, and eventually the story came out. In the
event, he was relieved to talk.

Dex, his disappearing star, was
stalking him. When the episodes had first started a few weeks ago,
Lorrance had just been angry. It had happened at his country home,
on a Sunday evening. He’d been in his study, enjoying a glass of
brandy and listening to some CDs on head-phones, when he’d noticed
a movement beyond the dark windows. Glancing round, he’d seen a
dark-clad figure walking up and down in a strangely obsessive
manner outside the house. Believing this to be an intruder, he’d
torn off the headphones and marched over to the window, upon which
he rapped with his knuckles. The figure stopped pacing and turned
to stare at him, at which point Lorrance’s heart nearly stopped. It
was Dex; unkempt and manic.

Lorrance took a step backwards.
Surely it was impossible that Dex was out there, but unable to tear
his eyes away from the apparition beyond his window, he could see
that the intruder was incontrovertibly Dex. ‘You said you’d never
come here again!’ he said aloud, loud enough for Dex to hear.

Dex’s expression didn’t change.
He looked neither menacing nor friendly, but simply watchful.

Lorrance began to undo the
window locks. ‘What are you doing here? Where have you been?’

Dex began to retreat onto the
lawn, stepping away from the light.

Lorrance flung the window open,
shouted ‘No!’ but Dex had already disappeared into the garden.

Lorrance felt shocked and
unnerved; shocked because Dex had apparently returned to society,
and unnerved because if this was an ordinary return, wouldn’t Dex
have just rung the front doorbell or waited to talk to his
erstwhile mentor through the window?

Lorrance didn’t mention the
episode to anybody, especially not his wife, Samantha, who
presently came into his study asking what all the noise was
about.

‘Bloody dog on the lawn,’
Lorrance told her. ‘Had to see it off.’

‘Oh.’ Samantha frowned, perhaps
wondering how the fragments of sentences she’d heard her husband
call out related to the presence of a stray dog.

Lorrance knew he wasn’t a man
given to delusions, so didn’t question the reality of what he’d
seen that night. If Dex had appeared outside his house, then it had
happened, and that was that. What Dex was up to was another matter.
Why show himself like that, then run off again? Perhaps he really
had lost it, gone completely mad.

Lorrance waited for Dex to
appear again, but for some time there were no further visits to the
house. Occasionally, driving through London, Lorrance would catch
sight of a still, scrawny figure in the buzzing crowds. It often
looked like Dex, but Lorrance couldn’t be sure. He refused to
consider that what he was seeing might be a ghost. Lorrance didn’t
like to believe in things that he couldn’t grab hold of and
control, but after a couple of weeks, he felt he had no choice but
to calmly consider that he might be the victim of a haunting. The
thought amused him slightly.

Then he had to change his mind
again. After lunch on Saturday afternoons, Lorrance generally took
a walk round his estate, to survey the results of his own success.
The ornamental lake was ringed by yellow-haired willows, rapidly
balding as the season advanced. The gravel paths were all raked,
the shrubs neat and tended by Lorrance’s staff of gardeners. An
oriental summer-house, thicketed with tall stands of bamboo,
resided on a small, man-made hillock. Here, Lorrance liked his wife
to take her tea on summer afternoons, when she would wear soft
white suede, her pale hair cascading over her bare cinnamon arms.
Now the summer-house looked bleak and empty, its door was locked
against intruders. The garden was closing in on itself for the
coming onslaught of frost and dark, but still Lorrance saw beauty
and grace in its contained landscape. He crossed a cropped lawn,
pimpled with conkers, and passed beneath the outflung arms of the
horse-chestnuts. He could no longer see the house. Ahead of him was
the boundary to his land, a high, undulating wall; its peaks topped
with grey stone pineapples, its valleys with smooth copings. Beyond
it rose a hill, partly forested. The hill seemed to cry out for a
marker of some kind; a triumphal arch, a tower or a statue. The sky
looked immense behind it, owing to the fact the horizon was not in
any way obscured by trees or buildings. Any monument would look
stark and mysterious against it. Lorrance imagined a statue of
himself up there, surveying his lands below, still watchful and
protective long after his physical body had left this world. He was
aware that this idea was deeply egotistical, but was still secretly
thrilled by it. As he walked through his gardens, he often thought
about that statue, because he was sure he’d have it one day. He’d
even made sketches of it as he talked on the phone in his office.
The main obstacle to his dream was the fact that the farmer who
owned the land wouldn’t sell it. But Lorrance knew that eventually
he’d get his own way. The farmer was old, and his sons and
daughters, when they inherited the farm, would be more amenable to
change.

Most Saturdays, Lorrance would
open the narrow gate of wrought iron in the wall and climb up the
hill. Then he could look back at his house, and imagine Samantha
curled up on the sofa there, reading the Saturday supplements, a
cup of Earl Grey tea on the table beside her. She was as precious
to him as any of the other embellishments to his domain, and that
was not a mean judgement. The nearest Lorrance came to experiencing
pure, sweeping love was when he stood on that hill, drinking in the
scene below him.

On that day, however, someone
was already occupying his space. He could discern a tall figure, a
coat flapping around them, standing on the hill, looking down. It
took him only a few seconds to realise it was Dex. He didn’t appear
remotely spectral; there was a definite heaviness about him.
Lorrance opened the iron gate roughly and began hurrying up the
hill. He was not as fit as he used to be, and by the time he
reached the crest, was breathing harshly. Dex still stood here, a
half smile on his face, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of
his coat.

‘Just what the hell is all this
about, Dex?’ Lorrance demanded, fighting the urge to droop, brace
his hands against his knees. Light boiled in specks before his
eyes.

‘You know,’ said Dex, in his
flat, northern tone.

‘It can be forgotten, all of
it,’ Lorrance replied. ‘Come home.’

‘Oh, I’m home all right,’ said
Dex.

‘What do you want?’

‘None of us want to be
forgotten. None of us. Not in the way you’d have it.’ Dex turned
round and walked across the top of the hill. Wind blew strongly
here, its voice a hissing yodel.

‘Dex!’ Lorrance went after him,
but his legs were aching, his chest was tight. A curl of his
immaculate hair had flopped down onto his brow. He saw Dex
disappearing down the opposite slope, which was crowded with trees.
Dex was younger; his loping strides devouring ground. Lorrance
could not catch up. ‘Little bastard!’ he said.

Since then, Lorrance had been
acutely conscious of the dark outside each evening. He was sure Dex
was concealed in it, watchful, perhaps vengeful. What did he want?
Surely not the truth.

Lorrance’s mistress uncoiled
herself from the bed, shaking out her long red hair as she strolled
to the window. Outside, traffic hissed in the wet on The Strand. He
had told her, but so far she’d said nothing.

‘Well, there you have it,’ he
said again.

She turned to observe him. ‘What
has Dex got on you?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Absolutely
nothing.’

She nodded, smiling thinly.
‘Then you should go to the police. He’s harassing you.’

Lorrance’s hesitation was brief,
but perhaps enough to give him away. ‘I don’t feel that’s an
appropriate course. I’m not sure it’s a good idea for him to come
back.’

‘In that case, you’ll have to
put up with it, won’t you, or take the law into your own hands.
You’re so good at that, Rhys. What’s the problem?’

He couldn’t say. ‘He’s got the
tapes, though. They would be useful.’

‘Well, as he said himself, he
doesn’t want to be forgotten. Perhaps he’ll give the tapes to you.
Perhaps that’s what he wants in his sick, delusional way.’ She
paused a moment. ‘Actually, this makes sense of something.’