Walkers (11 page)

Her eyes were strangely blank, like
the eyes of a fibreglass model in a fashion-store window; as if she were
talking to him, but wasn’t thinking about him at all. He remembered that look
in Andrea’s eyes, in the last few months of their marriage.

‘What does this mean?’ Henry asked
her.

‘ I
don’t understand.’

‘Well, does it mean that you’re
still alive? Does it mean that you’re a ghost? Or does it mean that I’m going
mad?’

She smiled. She had such a
beautiful, sad smile. It looked to Henry like the kind of smile that might have
touched the lips of Annabel Lee or Lenore or any one of Edgar Poe’s limpid
loves, in the kingdom by the sea.

‘ I
am your own creation,’
she said, and touched him, although he felt
no touch.
‘lam
here to remind you of what you must do. Springer will see to it.’

‘You know Springer?’ asked Henry,
baffled and still very frightened.

The girl lifted her shawl over her
head. It came up in a curious snaking way, like a film being run in reverse.
She said, as softly as before,
‘I know
Springer now.’

‘You scare me,’ he said.

She smiled that smile.
‘Then you are only scaring yourself.’

‘But you said you were here to
remind me what to do.’

‘I am, and you will know it when Springer mentions it.’

Henry didn’t know what else to say.
The girl moved towards the door, still smiling at him. Then she opened the door
– and even though he could have sworn afterwards that she opened it no more
than an inch – she disappeared out of it, as quickly as smoke disappears, when
it is blown by a sudden draft.

Henry looked over towards the
window, towards his large glass of vodka.

‘Something’s happening,’ he said to
himself, out loud. Then, ‘I’m frightened.’ Then, after a long pause, ‘God help
me.’

I
n spite of the heat of the day, the
sea-fog closed in early that afternoon along the north beaches of San Diego
County, and by six-thirty the world was prematurely gloomy and almost
unbearably humid. Cars travelled slowly along Camino del Mar with their lights
on, an endless funeral procession rolling through the fog. Speed restrictions
were in force on Interstate-5, and coastguards advised small boats to stay tied
up in harbour until the fog had lifted.

Susan was feeling better, almost
light headed. She took a shower, and then she put on her white low-waisted
dress with the red and yellow and green splotches on it, and blow-dried her
hair while she watched her portable television.

Her grandmother knocked on her
bedroom door and came in before Susan could invite her. She stood watching
Susan for three or four minutes, waiting until Susan had switched off her
hair-dryer, and then she said, ‘You wouldn’t be going out tonight, if it was up
to me.’

‘Grandma, I’m absolutely
fine
now,’ said Susan, tweaking her hair
with styling-gel to give it that fashionable raggedy look. ‘I was just feeling
faint this morning, that’s all. I’m not sick or anything.’

‘Well, you make sure you’re not too
late. I’m responsible for you – just remember that.

If anything happens to you, it’s me
who has to answer for it.’ She paused to pick up Susan’s discarded tee-shirt,
grunting with the effort of it. Then she said. ‘This man, too, I’d like to know
more about him. Picking you up in the street like that.’

‘Grandma,’ Susan sighed, with
concentrated seventeen-year-old impatience. ‘He works for the
San Diego Tribune,
he’s the nicest
person ever, and we’re only going to Bully’s North for something to eat. I
promise, promise, cross my heart and hope my eyes will drop out, that I shall
be back by nine-thirty, alive and well and unraped.’

‘You don’t have to talk like that,’
her grandmother protested.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Susan, primping up
her hair, and pouting at herself in the mirror. ‘But I
can
look after myself. I’m not a child anymore.’

‘If only you knew,’ her grandmother
told her.

‘Grandma, I can drive a car, I can
almost vote, I can almost get married without consent.’

Her grandmother looked resigned.
‘All right, go. Your mother was the same. You’re a good girl, Susan, I know
that. Untidy as all fall down, but good. Well, at least I hope so.’

The phone rang. She heard her
grandfather answering it. He said, ‘Yes, okay,’ three or four times, and then
he put the phone down again.

‘Who was that?’ asked Susan. Most of
the phone calls were for her.

‘Your friend Daffy. She said not to
forget to call her when you get back from dinner tonight, and tell her all
about it.’

‘Hah! Did she think that I
wouldn’t!’

Her grandmother came closer, and
watched her putting the finishing touches to her lipstick. ‘Are you going to
have your picture in the
Tribune?’
she
wanted to know.

Gil meanwhile had been up in his
bedroom for almost an hour, shaving and combing his hair and trying to make up
his mind whether he was going to dress up suave and elegant or whether he was
going to go for the Rambo look. He dressed and undressed four times – each time
becoming increasingly bad tempered – until at last he settled on a pair of
dove-grey cotton slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt and a charcoal-grey
Italian-cut jacket. He sprayed on
Signoricci
eau-de-toilette
and accidentally squirted himself in the left eye, so when
he came downstairs he was holding a wadded-up handkerchief against it.

‘You’re crying already,’ his father
teased him. ‘You haven’t even said
hello
to
her yet, let alone goodbye.’

Fay shushed him, and asked Gil,
‘What did you do?’

Gil said, ‘Aftershave,’ and blinked
furiously. ‘Is it bloodshot?’ he asked his parents.

‘Bloodshot? You look like the
teenage son of Dracula,’ said Phil Miller, cheerily.

‘No, he doesn’t!’ said Fay. ‘Your eye
looks a little watery, that’s all. Have you splashed some cold water into it?’

‘It’s okay,’ Gil told her, waving
her away. ‘I’ll get over it.’

‘I’ll unlock the door for you,’ Phil
offered.

They walked together through the
darkened store. Phil laid his arm around his son’s shoulder, and said, ‘Have a
good time, won’t you? But, you know, don’t forget about the precautions, if it
comes to that.’

‘Okay, Dad.’

Phil unlocked the store door, top
and bottom, and let his son out into the street. He stood on the sidewalk for a
while, his hands on his hips, inhaling the fog. ‘Be careful how you drive,
won’t you? This stuff looks like it’s getting thicker.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘And don’t drive drunk, you
understand me? If you have too many beers, get somebody else to drive you home
– or call me. I’d rather be woken up by you telling me you can’t drive than by
some cop telling me you’re dead.’

‘I got you, Dad.’

Gil jogged across the street to the
parking-lot, where his Mustang was waiting. He folded back the sheet of blue
yachting plastic which he used to cover the seats and then vaulted into it. He
started up the engine, switched on the lights, and pulled out of the
cinder-surfaced parking-lot in a long slithering skid. He blasted his two-tone
horn, waved to his father, and then disappeared into the fog in the direction
of Del Mar.

Phil watched him go, and then shook
his head. Kids. But he knew that Gil wasn’t crazy, not like some of the boys
who hung around the beach. Some of those kids would surf when they were high,
and ride their motorbikes right off the road and on to the sand, even when
families were sunbathing there. Some of them would speed all the way along
Camino del Mar, which was intersected by over a dozen side-streets, and run
every stop sign from Jimmy Durante Boulevard to Carmel Valley Road. Five boys
had been killed last year, head-on collision.

Phil went back into his store,
closed the door, and locked it.

Henry meanwhile was already walking
along Camino del Mar towards the restaurant.

He wore a grey turtle-neck sweater
which made him look greyer than ever, and a black-and-white hound’s-tooth
jacket. His head was thumping, and his tongue felt as if it was lying curled up
in his mouth, as hairy as a Persian cat. He was carrying a copy of
The Revolt of the Masses,
by Jose Y
Gasset, with the spine missing, and also a copy of his own pamphlet,
The Necessary Evil.

His hallucination this afternoon had
badly shaken him, even though he was now quite convinced that it had been
caused by nothing more than too many glasses of undiluted vodka. He had almost
decided not to meet Paul Springer at all, but to call up the restaurant and
make some Byzantine excuse. However, by five o’clock he had begun to feel a
little more composed; and the more he thought about meeting Paul Springer
again, the more the idea appealed to him. He was also vain enough to want to
hear what somebody else thought about
The
Necessary Evil,
which he had always considered to be one of his most
original pieces of work.

He had walked along the beach
promenade, partly to see if the beach was still cordoned off, and partly (he
had to admit it) to see if the wet-footed girl was anywhere around. The police
lines around the beach were marked by flashing amber beacons; they winked
through the fog like hopeless messages. There was scarcely any wind, and the
surf sounded flat and clattering as the tide came in. He was passed by two
gasping joggers and a rotund woman walking her pet Weimaraner, but there was no
sign at all of the girl.

I
am your own creation,
she had told him.
If you are scared, then you are only
scaring yourself.

He walked up one of the narrow
sloping side-streets to Camino del Mar. In one of the houses close to the top
of the street, a man and a woman were shouting at each other in Spanish. In the
room next to them, a television was blaring out
Galeria
Nocturna.
When he
reached the corner, Henry dropped a quarter into the newspaper-vending machine,
and bought himself a copy of the
Tribune.
He shook it open with one hand and read the headlines.

‘North Beaches Closed by Jellyfish Threat,’
was the main banner. Henry skimmed through the
front-page story, and recognised it for the blatant cover-up that it was.

Lieutenant Salvador Ortega must have
been working overtime, he concluded.

The story said: ‘Police and
coastguards today cordoned off several miles of north county beaches from La
Jolla to San Elijo Lagoon after the body of a young woman was washed up at Del
Mar, apparently having been stung to death by jellyfish.

‘The young woman – who was probably
attacked while she was enjoying a nude midnight swim – has not yet been
identified. Police say she was “blonde, beautiful, and well-proportioned” and
that she wore a silver chain around her left ankle.

‘Lt. Salvador T Ortega, in charge of
investigating the girl’s death, warned that there could be ‘scores more’
jellyfish swarming off the beaches. He has called in marine biologists from the
Scripps Institute to assist in identifying the deadly creatures.

‘They could be “sea-wasps” –
scientific name
chironex fleckeri –
which
are usually found off the coast of Australia, but which may have migrated to
Southern Californian waters. Sea-wasps can kill a human being in eight minutes.
Bathers and surfers were warned this afternoon that...’

Henry folded up the paper, and
tossed it into a trashcan without breaking his stride.

So, Salvador had successfully
managed to persuade the media that the beaches had been closed off because of
jellyfish. Well, he supposed that Salvador was not to blame. Jellyfish at least
were explicable. There was nothing explicable about those eels.

Just as he reached the entrance to
Bully’s North, he was surprised to see Gil’s yellow Mustang turn into the
entrance; and then, as he reached the doorway, he saw Susan Sczaniecka arrive,
in her splotchy white dress.

He waited by the doorway without
opening it. A middle-aged couple pushed past, and the woman frowned at him for
getting in the way. From inside the restaurant he heard laughter and the
clinking of glasses. A man came out and, standing next to Henry, said loudly to
his companion, ‘We can lease for half that. Why do you want to buy, when we can
lease?’ Up above his head, green neon flashed the name
of Bully’s North.

Susan Sczaniecka came up the steps
towards the doorway, and it was obvious that she didn’t recognise Henry at all.
She must have been very shocked this morning by what she had seen down on the
beach. Probably, all that she could remember with any clarity were the body and
the eels.

Just as she passed him by, Henry
said, ‘Susan?’

She stared at him. Her face was
blank. Then she suddenly realised who he was. ‘Oh,
hi!’
she said, breathlessly. ‘I didn’t recognise you! You look so
much smarter now!