Back to Chapter Five | Part One
It was ten minutes later that the doorbell rang again, making me jump. I was sitting at the kitchen table (again) and drinking a strong cup of coffee (again). It seemed as if I had spent most of my life sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. I was still trying to get over the shock of seeing Mrs Moore transform from puppy to werewolf before my eyes, still trying to deal with her personal attack and attempting to convince myself that I had misheard her. It was not an easy task – I could still feel the expectorated hiss of her words in my ear. When the doorbell pealed out, breaking the silence like a howl in the night, my already shaking hands jerked hot coffee over the front of my dressing gown, scalding my chest.
I approached the door cautiously, as if expecting it to fly into splinters as a rabid Mrs Moore came bursting through, foaming at the mouth and baying for my blood.
I hesitated by the door and frowned. This was becoming ridiculous. I took a deep breath and scowled defiantly. If it was Mrs Moore again, I’d let loose with a string of obscenities that would leave her shell-shocked, and then I’d slam the door in her face, hopefully connecting with her colossal nose in the process. If Mr Moore was with her, he’d get some too. In fact, the mood I was working myself into, even if it were the Archbishop himself on the other side of the door, come to bless the house, he was liable to get an earful of profanity and a boot up the backside.
I wrenched the door wide open exactly as the bell rang out again.
“What?” I snarled, thrusting my face forward like a Jack-in-the-box from hell.
Rachael, the object of my affection and desire, took a startled jump backwards, a shocked look on her face. Unfortunately, she was wearing roller-blades. After a few frantic seconds of scrambling for balance and windmilling her arms wildly, she landed flat on her arse with a drawn-out ‘o-oh s-h-i-i-t!’ and a bone-shattering thud. A beach towel flew out of her hand and landed in the gutter.
I gaped down at her in amazement. She stared back up at me.
“Um...” she started, as a blush slowly worked its way up her neck and over her face. I followed her gaze down and realised, to my horror, that not only was she looking right up my dressing gown, but also that a rogue breeze had blown it open, and that my privates were flapping around for all to see. I squealed like a girl and hastily pulled the dressing gown closed.
“I uh... I tried calling first”, Rachael said in a small voice as she struggled to her feet, “but the phone was engaged”.
“I was on the ‘Net”, I told her dumbly, clutching at my dressing gown, horribly aware that I had just given the woman of my dreams a worm’s-eye-view of my bollocks. Things couldn’t have been worse had I then turned around and let one off in her face.
‘Do something, moron’, said the alien in my head, ‘or say something. Anything’ll do. Just stop standing there with your mouth hanging open like a gormless prat’.
“Shit, I’m sorry, Ray”, I said, suddenly coming to life. I hurried forward and retrieved her beach towel from the gutter. “I didn’t think it would be you”.
“Who were you expecting?” she asked dryly as I handed her the towel. “Satan Incarnate?”
“Something like that”, I muttered, gesturing her into the house.
She glided into the kitchen ahead of me and lowered herself carefully into my recently vacated chair, stretching her legs out in front of her. She was wearing very short denim cut-offs and a peach-coloured top that stopped short of her belly-button. White bikini straps were knotted around her neck. It was all I could do to stop myself from drooling.
“Is this a bad time?” she asked cautiously. “Only when you yanked the door off its hinges you looked ready to go ballistic”.
“Just had a nasty little visit from Claire’s parents”, I told her. “Coffee?”
“Something cool, if you’ve got it. What do you mean Claire’s parents? What the hell do they want from you?”
“Amy”.
Rachael looked around, as if expecting Amy to jump out from under the sofa. “She was here?”
“Nope. Is blackcurrant squash okay, or d’you prefer water?”
“Blackcurrant is great”, Rachael said, frowning. “I don’t get it. Why would Claire’s parents come for Amy if she wasn’t here?”
I told her what had happened as I poured out her drink.
“She didn’t!” she exclaimed, when I quoted Mrs Moore’s parting shot.
“She bloody well did”.
“No wonder you looked prepared to go nuclear when you opened the door. Are you going to tell Daryl?”
I put her drink on the table in front of her, and sat down in the chair opposite.
“Good question. D’you think I should?”
Rachael pursed her lips and stared ahead of her, pondering the question. Eventually, she said,
“I don’t know. You know how he can fly off the handle at the drop of a hat”.
I nodded. When Daryl got angry he tended to go berserk, and things got out of hand.
“I’ll play it by ear”, I decided after a short silence. “I mean, I don’t think they meant to kidnap her and hide her away forever. They just wanted to take her out for the day. I hate keeping things from Daryl, but I can just picture him roaring round to their house and all hell breaking loose. None of them need that right now”.
“Probably better that way”, Rachael agreed. She raised both arms above her head and, cupping her elbows in her hands in an awkward Indian-goddess position, arched her back and stretched with a satisfied sigh. Watching her, my hormone levels shot through the roof.
“Anyway”, she continued, “the reason I popped in. Colin’s at work for the day, and I’m to the beach to get some colour. I’m way too white for this time of the year, but I hate going to the beach alone. Care to join me?”
“Colin’s at work? On a Sunday?”
Rachael shrugged. “He’s been clocking up overtime like nobody’s business. Working on some breakthrough accounting program, or something. Anyway, you coming or not? Please say yes. Go on. You know you want to. Pleeeaaase. Pretty pretty please”. She looked at me through fluttering eyelashes, and pouted comically.
Me and Rachael together alone on the beach for the day, her in a white bikini to boot?
“Hmm”, I said, pretending to think about it. “Sandy or rocky?”
“Sandy”.
“Whitesands Bay?”
“Sunshine Bay”.
“Fair enough. Paddle boats or sausage ride?”
“Sausage ride”.
“Frisbee or beach ball?”
“Neither”.
“Tsk. Ice lolly or ice cream?”
“Both”.
“Sounds good to me”, I said, rising out of my chair, “I...”
‘Amber at one’, supplied the alien in my head.
Shit!
I scrunched my eyes closed in frustration and, slapping my forehead, fell back into my seat as if an invisible hand had pushed me down.
“Shit! I can’t come!” I groaned, “I’m meeting Amber at Soldi’s in an hour and a half! How could I forget?”
“Huh?” said Rachael, disappointedly. “Talk about anti-climax. Who’s Amber? New girlfriend?”
“No. Charlie’s old girlfriend”.
Rachael arched her eyebrows quizzically.
“Tell you what”, I said suddenly. “Come with me to Soldi’s, and then we’ll go to the beach after”.
Rachael hesitated.
“Oh go on”, I whined. “You know you want to. Pretty pretty please?”
“Okay then”, she replied, after a short pause. “But why are you meeting Charlie’s old girlfriend?”
“I’ll fill you in on the way there”, I told her, bouncing out of my chair. “Just give me ten minutes to dress up”.
I practically danced up the stairs, singing ‘Rachael In A White Bikini’ to the tune of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ under my breath like a complete loonie, and got into the shower.
A cold shower.
***
Soldi’s was Serenity’s most popular cafe, most famous for its ridiculously large ice creams; mint and chocolate flavour in particular. Rachael and I ordered one to share while we waited for Amber to show up. The waiter, straining under the weight, plonked the huge daffodil-shaped bowl down on the table and sullenly ordered us to ‘enjoy it’. Obviously not too pleased with having to work on this bright Sunday afternoon, and relying on the taste of the ice-cream rather than good service to maintain the popularity of the place.
I kept an eye on the door as we shamelessly slurped our way to the bottom of the bowl, working our way through a diabetic’s nightmare of chocolate chips, hundreds and thousands, wafers, biscuits, sponge fingers and umbrella-shaped chocolates on white candy-cane sticks. The place was packed with tourists and locals pigging out big-time, and I didn’t want Amber to walk in and not see us. I wasn’t even sure that I would recognise her – I had only seen her once before, after all, and that had been seven years ago, and even then I had only caught glimpses of her as she had propelled Charlie’s wardrobe out of the window and into the street on a trail of insults. I guessed that the best thing to do was just look out for someone who seemed to be looking out for someone.
I was glad that Rachael had come too – not only so that I could store every sentence she uttered in my memory bank to replay and pathetically misinterpret as signs of true love later, but also because I wasn’t quite sure of what I was going to say to Amber. All I had told her over the phone was that I was a friend of Charlie’s, and that I needed to talk to her about something important, preferably face-to-face. In retrospect, I suddenly realised how thoughtless I had been – having seen the news footage of Charlie’s car being dragged out of the reservoir, she was probably going to turn up today expecting to be told that Charlie had been found dead and bloated in the depths. She had probably been at her wit’s end all weekend, fighting back tears and stifling heart-wrenching sobs, pacing around her house, anxiously wringing a handkerchief in her nervous little hands. Okay... maybe not wringing a handkerchief, but definitely upset. I needed Rachael there to explain things gently, woman to woman. I was sure that she was better than me at that sort of thing.
“Is that her?” said Rachael suddenly, staring through the glass doors.
I looked up to where she was pointing. Soldi’s had an open-air section, separated from the street by a row of neatly trimmed hedges. The tables were shaded from the burning sun by huge red umbrellas, and a petite blonde girl was standing in their midst, her eyes darting from table to table.
She was wearing a blue T-shirt and a short white skirt, and had a white jumper knotted around her waist. And she was absolutely gorgeous – long, straight hair tied back in a ponytail, from which a few strands had escaped and were wafting playfully in the breeze. A small freckled nose. I couldn’t see her eyes from where I was sitting, but I guessed they were blue. They just had to be.
Oh... and legs to die for.
“Could be her”, I said, rising out of my chair. “Better go and check”.
“Try to stop drooling first”, Rachael teased, licking the last of the ice cream off the back of her spoon and looking up at me with a mischievous glint in her eyes.
I blew her a raspberry and headed towards the door. Amber, if indeed it was Amber, was wearing white canvas shoes and as I approached I spotted a tiny tattoo on her ankle – it looked like a black and yellow stripy star, but I guess that from that distance it could have been anything.
I was no further than two feet from her, my arm already outstretched to gently tap her on the shoulder, when she raised a hand and waved to a young man sitting at a corner table. Confused, I froze in mid-step, a little like Elmer Fudd when it eventually dawns on him that that ‘wascally wabbit’ has, once again, made a fool of him.
Obviously not Amber then.
The girl turned her head and looked at me. I was right – her eyes were blue, but unlike any blue eyes that I had ever seen before. They were the dark blue – almost violet – of a lagoon on a perfect day. The mystical cobalt blue found in the short span of time between sundown and dusk...
I gradually became aware that I was staring at the poor girl like a depraved pervert. Lowering my arm, I blinked and tried frantically to find something remotely intelligent to say.
“Um...”
Today was definitely not going my way. In the short span of three hours I had been insulted by Mrs Moore, flashed Rachael, and was now behaving like a buffoon in front of the most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on.
The most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on then inclined her head to one side, gave me a dazzling smile combined with a small, playful shrug, and waltzed off to where the young man at the table, obviously the boyfriend, was watching me with a smug smile on his face. He was probably thinking that I had been about to ask his girl out on a date. Come to think of it, she was probably thinking that too. Feeling acutely embarrassed, and uncomfortably aware that people from other tables were watching me in amusement to see what I would do next, I turned abruptly...
... and almost crashed right into someone who had come up behind me. Someone sitting at a table nearby actually clapped. I looked around for a piece of rope with which to hang myself.
The tall, skinny girl I had almost bowled over had raised her hands protectively. Now, lowering them slowly to her sides, she spoke.
“Joey? Joey Bishop?”
I gave her a feeble grin.
“Hello Amber”, I said.
***
Amber fiddled with a plastic coffee stirrer as Rachael and I explained all we knew about Charlie. When we finished, there was a short silence, during which I lit a cigarette and Rachael drained her coffee cup. Amber skimmed the froth off the top of her cappuccino with the stirrer and sucked it pensively. Tearing open a sachet of sugar, she emptied it into the cup and stirred slowly. We waited expectantly for her to speak. When she finally did, she said, “So what do you think happened to the car?”
She had an incredibly quiet voice, so quiet that we had to strain to hear her over the sound of afternoon chatter and dessert spoons clinking against the rims of ice-cream bowls. As a result, I found myself repeating the last words of her infrequent questions, just to make sure that I had heard her correctly.
“The car? Not sure. I think that maybe it was stolen, then dumped”. I shrugged. “Then again, maybe I’m wrong. I really don’t know for sure, but it’s the only thing I could come up with”.
“So why didn’t he report it missing?”
“How d’you know that he didn’t?” I said, feeling very Sherlock-esque. Or Holmesian.
“It would’ve been mentioned in the news”, replied Amber calmly, carefully placing the stirrer in her saucer. She took a sip of her coffee and daintily patted her mouth with a napkin. To see her, you would never imagine that this was the same girl who, seven years ago, had bombarded Charlie with profanity from a second storey window in a screech worthy of Broom Hilda.
“I mean”, she continued in her soft whisper, “I’m sure the police would have preferred a headline that read ‘Stolen Porsche found in reservoir’ rather than ‘Porsche found in reservoir and we don’t know anything about it”. She smiled a small smile at her joke. I mirrored it, mainly to encourage her to talk on.
She didn’t.
I sighed, and said, “So when did you see him last?”
Amber reached forward for her coffee cup. Lifting it to her lips, she took a long pensive sip, eyes rolled upwards to show that she was thinking about it. She was a sweet enough girl, but at that moment I just wanted to reach out and throttle her. Rachael too was getting impatient.
“We’re really worried about him, you see”, she pressed.
The cup made its way slowly back down to the saucer. Amber serenely reached for the napkin again. I found myself wondering if she was mainlining tranquillisers.
Behind her, the goddess with the blonde hair and the midnight blue eyes walked past, probably on her way to the bathroom. I followed her with my eyes. The tattoo on her ankle wasn’t a star after all, but a tiny angelfish.
“Last Tuesday”, said Amber, finally.
I jerked my eyes back to her face.
“Last Tuesday?”
She nodded.
I glanced at Rachael, who was looking at me with raised eyebrows.
“And...?” I persisted.
Amber reached into her handbag and produced a pack of cigarettes – a foreign brand, the extra long, extra thin kind. Extracting a cigarette and delicately placing it in her mouth, she rummaged in the bag for her lighter. I thrust mine forward roughly, almost setting fire to her eyebrows. She took a deep drag, and exhaled softly.
“And?” I said again. “What did he want? What did he say?”
I could hear the clacking of Rachael’s blades as she tapped her feet impatiently under the table.
The same sullen waiter that had served us our ice cream came over and leaned across the table to retrieve Rachael’s empty cup.
“Would you like anything else?” he asked in a bored monotone.
I violently murdered him in a dark alleyway of my mind as Rachael impatiently, and quite rudely, waved him away as if swatting a mosquito. He gave her a dirty look and retreated.
The Angel Fish girl walked past again, on her way back from the bathroom. She caught me staring at her and gave me a flirty little wave and a grin. Turning bright red, I hurriedly looked away and focused on Amber.
“Well?” I said, as patiently as I could.
Amber placidly tapped her cigarette on the rim of the ashtray.
“Well”, she said, “you can imagine how surprised I was, him showing up on my doorstep after all these years. We hadn’t seen each other since breaking-up, you know?” She looked at me then, and I realised that she was actually waiting for an answer.
“I know”, I told her. “So...”
“So I let him in, of course. We had had a bad break-up... you remember?” She paused.
“Yes. Go on”, I said through clenched teeth.
“But it was such a long time ago, and the past is the past, so I let him in”. She sighed and brushed her fingers through her short blonde hair. “We chatted for a while. It was strange. It wasn’t Charlie”.
“Huh?” I said, as Rachael demanded, “What d’you mean, it wasn’t Charlie?”
Amber frowned. “Well, you know Charlie. Probably more than I do. You know how quick and alert he is. Always so sure of himself. Always coming back at you with a witty comment, or some strange expression...”
“Charliespeak”, I said.
Amber smiled. “Yeah. That’s a good word for it. Charliespeak. Only that day he seemed... different. Confused”.
“Confused?”
“Like he was having trouble focusing. He asked me three times if I still gave piano lessons, for example. I’ve never taught piano in my life. Can’t even play the piano”.
There was a short silence while we absorbed this strange information. I lit another cigarette, my mind racing. She was right – this didn’t sound lie Charlie at all. I almost asked her if she was sure it had been him after all, then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Of course it had been him. Even after seven years’ absence you would still recognise someone you had been in a steady relationship with.
Rachael broke the silence.
“So what did he say?” she prompted. “I doubt he showed up after seven years just for a chat. Did he say why he had come?”
Amber nodded. “It was just small talk for half an hour, but then I had to go out. I had a lecture at three – I’m doing my final year of law at Uni, you see – and I told him I had to get ready, and he said, ‘Well, I guess this is goodbye then’. Those were his exact words. Then he hugged me”. She shivered, as if a ghost had walked over her grave.
“That was it?” I asked. “He just left?”
She shook her head, and reached again for her cigarettes.
“No. You don’t understand. The way he said it. It was so... so final. As if I was never going to see him again. And when he hugged me, I hugged back. It was like... it felt as if...” She lit her cigarette. I noticed that the hand that held the lighter was shaking. She took a long, deep drag of the cigarette, and exhaled a cloud of white smoke.
“It was like hugging a skeleton”, she said flatly, her eyes moving slowly from Rachael to me and back again. “I felt that if I had hugged him any tighter, he would have broken”.
“What happened next?” asked Rachael softly. I would have asked myself, but I was momentarily speechless.
Amber swallowed, and rubbed her eyes with the palm of her hands.
“Well, I was pretty shaken. I asked him if he was okay. And he actually grinned. It was like the old Charlie – my Charlie – had suddenly popped up from wherever he’d been hiding. He said he was fine. He said he had just come to say goodbye because he was leaving and didn’t want to leave any loose ends behind. We had broken up because he wasn’t ready to commit, you know? He was restless, wanted to see other girls; I wanted commitment, maybe even marriage. He was scornful of marriage – I don’t blame him – his father wasn’t exactly a perfect role-model for family harmony. I think he was even cheating on me, towards the end...”
She looked at me then, and I kept my face carefully blank. Charlie had told me as much himself, in a cloud of remorse one night at The Eye In The Sky in Capeville.
Amber shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter now anyway. I loved him, or at least I think I did, and I think he loved me too, but I moved on pretty quickly when he moved out. Being in a relationship with Charlie was much like being in a relationship with a poltergeist – you only knew he was there because you woke up to find things moved from where you had left them the night before. We had good times together... of course we did... great times, in fact, but he needed his freedom. I don’t think that a person like Charlie could ever settle down. We were only twenty-one, but I was trying to grow up too fast, and he was like Peter Pan, wanting to be a child forever. So he broke up with me. I was hurt and angry at the time – livid, in fact – but I realised pretty soon after that it was the best thing for both of us. We were both too young, and going nowhere”.
“If it’s any consolation”, I said truthfully, “he spent months agonising over whether he had made the right choice. He used to talk about you a lot”.
Amber smiled. “It’s nice of you to say so. But, as I said, it doesn’t really matter now. The past is the past. I’m in a steady relationship now, have been for a year – and we’re getting married next May”.
“Congratulations”, said Rachael and I automatically.
“Thank you”, she replied, and actually blushed prettily.
“So”, I said, after an appropriate pause, eager for her to resume her story. “He said he was leaving. Did he say where he was going?”
“No. Leaving the island, I guess. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. I just got the impression that, wherever he was going, he wasn’t coming back”.
“And then?”
“He said he was sorry for the way things had ended between us, that it was his fault, and that he hoped I could forgive him. It seemed important to him that I forgive him. Like he wanted to start again with a clean slate. At one point he actually mentioned that he was tying up loose ends before he left”. She paused, and looked at me pensively.
“Do you know if he was in some kind of trouble? With the police, or something? Something that would make him want to leave the island quickly?”
I shook my head slowly.
“I wouldn’t know. But it sounds a bit too ‘Hollywood movie’ to me. You know... the sort of thing that only happens to other people, or on the news. And I don’t think that Charlie was the sort of person to get mixed up in that sort of thing anyway. Do you?”
Amber thought about it.
“Not really. But extraordinary things do happen to ordinary people. Charlie wasn’t the sort of person to just disappear into thin air without saying a word either, was he?”
“True”, I conceded. Charlie was just Charlie, for Christ’s sake. A good friend who walked with a limp and spoke in a funny way. The guy I shared my house with, who enjoyed watching action films and reading stories about The Saint. Not a mysterious, sinister figure with a deeply buried past and a hidden agenda. Not some criminal mastermind on the run, heading for the Mexican border with the law hot on his tail. This was so unreal. I looked around just to remind myself that I was in Soldi’s cafeteria; surrounded by people drinking coffee and eating toasties, with Oasis in the background, begging Sally not to look back in anger; rather than in a smoky, dimly-lit tavern somewhere on a city’s outskirts, with a briefcase full of dollars by my side and a cigar-chomping barman fondling a sawn-off shotgun behind the counter.
“Anyway”, Amber continued. “He just stood there, asking me to forgive him, so I laughed and told him that of course I did, it was seven years ago, for crying out loud. And he said, ‘No, be serious’. So I told him again, without laughing. And he smiled, as if he was relieved. Then he gave me a number, told me to call if I ever needed anything...”
“My number?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I wasn’t going to phone. After seven years...” she tailed off, and shrugged, “... well, Charlie belonged to my past, and I was happy to leave him there. But when I saw his car on the TV, well... I guess I just had to know that he was okay”.
“Why would he give you the number?” Rachael mused. “Do you think he means to come back home?”
“I thought about this all afternoon and way into the night on Friday, after you called”, Amber said, gesturing towards me with her head. Why did he give me the number to a place he had left over a month earlier? And I still don’t have an answer. Maybe he is coming back. Maybe he made a mistake – as I said, he was disorientated, confused. Or maybe he just wanted us to get in contact with each other. I just don’t know”.
“So you forgave him”, said Rachael, getting back to the story. “And then what?”
“Then he left. He asked me to give Rebecca a kiss for him, and left, just like that”.
“Rebecca? Who’s Rebecca?”
Amber took another drag of her cigarette and pounded it out in the ashtray, half unsmoked. She folded her arms, leaned back in her chair, and fixed me with her shiny green eyes.
“I have no idea”, she said.
***
So we didn’t go to the beach after all, and I didn’t get to spend what was left of the afternoon ogling Rachael in her white bikini. My mind was reeling, too full of questions, and I gave myself a splitting headache trying to make sense of the whole story. After saying goodbye to Amber, promising to keep her informed if we found anything out, I dropped Rachael home. She looked exhausted, as if Amber’s story had drained her. I watched her glide gracefully to her front door, roller-blade wheels spinning, and then drove off, hooting the horn as a goodbye as I left. When I got home, I dry-swallowed two Aspirins and lay down on the sofa with my eyes closed, my head throbbing. I stayed that way for a long time.
That night, as I lay awake in bed, I made a promise to myself to find out all the answers. When Charlie came back, I would ask him everything.
When.
Not if.
Because I knew, as sure as I knew that tomorrow would be yet another hot summer day, that Charlie would be coming back, sooner or later.
I was, after all, another loose end.
***
Showing posts with label Weatherwax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weatherwax. Show all posts
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Fiddles and Violins | Chapter Five | Part One
Back to Chapter Four | Part Two
Even Frank Sinatra had regrets, and no matter that they were too few to mention, he still saw fit to point out the fact. The funny, or perhaps the sad, thing about regrets is that more often than not we are sorry about the things that we didn’t do as opposed to the things we did. ‘If only I had…’ is so much more powerful than ‘What if I hadn’t…’. ‘I wish I hadn’t…’ is nothing compared to the emotional storm that ‘I wonder if I had…’ can create.
We walk around as if we’re going to live forever. If only we could see the future, if only we knew exactly how much time we had left on this planet, we would have no regrets. We would pack each day with all the things we always promised we would do ‘someday’, and save ourselves the despair of looking back when it’s one minute and an eternity too late with hopeless feelings of dreams unaccomplished.
If only we could see the future.
I don’t think that Charlie had any regrets, in the end. Or maybe just too few to mention.
But that comes later.
***
Jerry had woken up this fine morning to find a woodpecker drumming holes into his matchstick furniture. In his quest for food for the baby bird, he had angered Tom, who was now chasing the brave mouse around my TV screen, brandishing an axe and sporting a bump of colossal proportions on his head which he had received minutes before during a series of mishaps involving a stick of dynamite and a piano. The whole adventure was accompanied by the music of a symphony orchestra.
It was ten o’ clock on Sunday morning, and I was killing time. There was a popular cafeteria in Serenity called Soldi’s, and I was meeting Amber there at one o’ clock. Until then, I had nothing much to do and three hours in which to do it.
It occurred to me that I was lonely. Most people woke up on a Sunday morning to a family breakfast followed by a day at the beach. Me, I woke up to Tom and Jerry on the tube. For a brief moment I entertained the idea of getting a pet for company, then watched as Tom annihilated an entire house in the space of a minute and thought better of it.
Daryl had taken Amy to the beach for the day. He had invited me to tag along, but I had declined. I considered phoning Rachael, just for a chat, but then I pictured her spending a lazy morning in bed, probably lying in Colin Dot Com’s arms as he snored away in peaceful oblivion, and decided not to.
I sighed, and contemplated switching off the TV and doing something constructive. Perhaps even having a shower and getting dressed. Or, more importantly, I had some sales reports that needed typing out that I had been putting off for weeks. I had some bills to organize – telephone, water, electricity, TV license and my Internet subscription. And, speaking of the Internet, I hadn’t checked my email account for days.
It was this last thought that finally got me out of the armchair. Clicking off the TV and banishing Tom and Jerry into somebody else’s living room, I headed up to my room and flicked on the computer. The hard drive hummed into action as I sat myself down into the swivel chair in front of the desk and waited for the start-up screen to appear.
It was an old computer – a Pentium II Celeron model which felt like it was running a fever if left on for longer than fifteen minutes at a time. I’d bought it second-hand and it had been immediately rendered redundant when the Pentium III system had appeared on the market the very next day. It was good enough for me though – I wasn’t exactly Bill Gates when it came to computers, and things like RAM, WAV files and gigabytes sounded to me like a futuristic episode of Mission Impossible, and not a reality of daily life. Besides, a computer in every household was screwing up my sales repertoire - why should kids nowadays be interested in a plastic and cardboard version of Captain Badass’ Tower of Doom when they could flick a switch into cyberspace, stride into the actual tower and beat the living crap out of the evil Captain in virtual reality? Why buy make-believe walkie-talkies when the Internet gave you the option of chatting to someone halfway across the planet in real-time? I had wandered into a chat-room once, by mistake, and left with the impression that the majority of the people who visited these sites were sexually frustrated morons with one brain cell whose only purpose in life was to repeat the phrase ‘NE HOT GIRLS WANNA WISPA PRESS 69’ ad nauseum. From that day on, I had only used the computer (Cybersaurus, as Charlie had once laughingly referred to it – he himself being the owner of an ultra-modern laptop) for Word documents and to send email, mainly because it saved the price of a stamp. While most people had the world at their fingertips, I got to mine via my front door.
The start-up screen finally popped up – a garishly coloured picture of a cartoon bunny straining under the weight of a huge chocolate egg. I had downloaded the theme last Easter and never gotten around to changing it. A few more wheezes from the hard drive and various icons began to appear. I double-clicked on my Internet connection shortcut and listened as the modem screeched, chattered and boing-boinged to itself. Then I logged on to my email account.
Forty-three messages.
I deleted the junk mail – promises of instant wealth; a university diploma; Madame Nora offering to tell my fortune; a product that would guarantee me bringing any woman to orgasm every time; a new car; a free mobile phone; and a multitude of other stuff that I didn’t want, need, or couldn’t afford.
Six messages remaining.
I frowned to myself as I clicked open the first message – a polite notice from my email provider saying that my inbox was full and could I please remove some of the unwanted mail. I complied, and deleted the message, smiling at the irony of it all. In my mind, a metaphorical penny was teetering on the edge of a cliff, waiting to drop…
Five messages.
I clicked open another message – a forward from someone or the other, which turned out to be a joke that I had first heard about eight years earlier, and hadn’t found funny even then.
Four messages.
What had I been thinking about? A half-formed thought was struggling its way to the forefront of my brain, waving for attention. The penny wobbled precariously.
A message from an old acquaintance… long time no hear, how ru, etc etc.
Three messages.
Was it anything to do with the Easter bunny? Last Easter? Didn’t think so.
The next message was a picture from the summer before; me and Charlie and the camera’s owner (couldn’t remember his name) at The Eye In The Sky, directing peace signs and huge grins towards the lens.
Two…
Something to do with Charlie? Probably. He was on my mind a lot lately. The penny took a deep breath…
One…
Forward this email to ten people in the next ten minutes and a cheque for $142,000 will fall into your lap. This is not a hoax! What have you got to lose? My friend, who is a top attorney, claims that…
Charlie.
Lap.
Top.
The penny dropped, sending the sands of time shooting backwards seven years up the hourglass…
***
Charlie snapped the display case closed, and that was when I realised that I had been holding my breath. I think that was the first time I had ever seen a real gun before.
“Wow”, I said, eventually. I think that that was also the first time that I had ever said ‘wow’ out loud and meant it.
“Yeah”, said Charlie, and I couldn’t help noticing the bitterness with which he said that one word. “Impressive, isn’t it? The German 8mm PPK with deluxe nickel finish and composite checkered grips. Or, as I like to call it… the Birthday Gun”.
“Is it real?” I asked. I half wanted him to open the case again so that I could grab the gun and sneak around the house in a fantasy world, crouching behind door-frames and bursting into rooms doing a James Bond style gun ballet and screaming things like “Everybody freeze!”
Charlie nodded. “Most of my dad’s collection was. He had about fifty-six in all. A couple of replicas, but mostly real. I sold them all, except for these three”. He gestured over to the other two boxes. I had completely forgotten about them.
“How come?”
Charlie shrugged. “What do I need fifty-six guns for?”
“No, I mean, how come you kept these three?”
He sighed, and took a deep breath. “Like I said… unsentimental value. My dad paid more attention to his precious gun collection than he ever did to me and my mother. This one…” he patted the box on his lap as he spoke, “… he bought on my thirteenth birthday. I waited up for him to come home. When he finally showed up and came through the door with a huge smile on his face and this box in his hands, I was so excited that I rushed up to him and grabbed the box. I thought it was my birthday present, you know? What it was, though, was a slap around the head and a snappy ‘Be careful, you stupid little prick!’ before he disappeared into his study”. Charlie laughed, but it sounded more like a bark than anything else. He turned his head away then, quickly, but not quickly enough. I looked down at my feet uncomfortably and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. It occurred to me that although Charlie hadn’t brought many possessions with him, he had walked in through the door with enough emotional baggage to fill all the storage space I had.
“Turned out that he had completely forgotten that it was my birthday”, Charlie continued in a low voice, so low that I wasn’t quite sure whether he was talking to me or to himself. “The next day I came home from school to find a birthday card on my pillow. It had ‘Sorry it’s late!’ printed on the front, and thirty pounds in the envelope. “To Charlie, love Dad”. It wasn’t even his handwriting, it was his fucking secretary’s”.
Sighing deeply, he lifted the case off his lap and placed it carefully on the other two. There was a long silence, and I was just wondering whether or not it was appropriate to leave the room and leave him to his own devices when he looked up at me. His eyes were sparkling, but the hurt look that I had glimpsed in them a minute ago had faded, as if some demon had been exorcised.
Then he simply said, “Um… thanks for listening”.
“No problem”, I replied, and in that moment the tension seemed to dissolve out of the room. The brief silence that followed was companionable as opposed to uncomfortable. Violins to fiddles.
Charlie reached over and dragged the black carrying case that he had taken out of the cardboard carton over to him.
“Now this”, he said with a smile, “is my pride and joy”. He grinned, and added, “and you’ll be glad to know that there is no emotional tale of woe attached to it”.
I must’ve looked relieved because he chuckled before unzipping the bag and pulling out the sleekest laptop that I had ever seen – not that I had seen all that many. It looked as if it had been designed by a superior race in the year 3000, and then transported back in time to the here and now. It looked as if it could go even faster than the Porsche parked outside. It made my own Cybersaurus look like a cave drawing.
Charlie patted the computer lovingly.
“Don’t know where I’d be without this. I’ve got my whole life in here. Diary, scheduler, organizer, contacts…” He then reeled off a whole lot of technical details that I couldn’t make head or tail of, but it was that one sentence that returned to nudge my memory seven years later…
… I’ve got my whole life in here…
***
I stared blankly at the computer screen, my mind elsewhere. Had Charlie’s computer been there two days ago when Daryl and I had been searching his room? I couldn’t remember seeing it, but then again we had stopped looking as soon as we had found Charlie’s old address book with Amber’s phone number in it. There was a possibility that he had left the computer behind. In which case I could have a poke around and see how up-to-date Charlie had kept his life.
Leaving Cybersaurus switched on, I made my way to Charlie’s bedroom. Daryl and I had left the balcony doors open, and the curtains waved a gentle hello as I walked in.
In all the best shows, once the hero has had the brainwave that will solve everything and save millions of lives, everything that follows is relatively simple. If B.A. Barracus needs an old ‘Best Of David Essex’ LP in order to add the vital finishing touches to the armoured tank that he’s building, then Hannibal Smith will inevitably find one lying in the corner of an old abandoned military warehouse. Having had what I thought was a relatively good idea myself, I half expected the laptop to fall into my open arms from the heavens - with a chorus of ‘Halleluiah’ – as soon as I walked in through the door. Unfortunately, a quick glance around the room revealed that the laptop was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, real life had never watched ‘The A-Team’.
Determinedly, I marched over to the nearest cupboard and yanked open the doors. Charlie’s assorted bit and pieces stared back at me indifferently… a wooden pig that he had brought back from a holiday in Amsterdam, a couple of hardback books, a pile of CDs, a Sony Discman attached to a pair of computer speakers, three packets of Golden Virginia tobacco, a yo-yo, a pack of cards, at least a dozen packs of Rizla skins… no laptop. This was obviously the cupboard that should’ve been marked ‘Miscellaneous Crap’. I picked a CD at random, slipped it into the player, pressed ‘play’ and resumed my search.
With Men Without Hats’ ‘Safety Dance’ serving as a soundtrack to my hunt, I moved on to the next cupboard, then the wardrobe, then the top of the wardrobe. Nothing. Getting increasingly frustrated, I pulled open the first drawer in a chest of three, which would have produced excellent results had I been searching for Charlie’s boxer shorts and socks, but proved useless in the quest for the laptop. The other two drawers were equally disappointing.
Completely disheartened, I stood in the middle of the room and spun around in a complete circle, just in case I had missed the black carrying case the first time round. No such luck.
The green address book was on the bed where we had left it, still open on ‘A’, Amber’s name the first on the list. Underneath, in pencil, was ‘Amy’s birthday’, followed by the date, and under that was ‘Alan – mechanic’ and a telephone number. The rest of the page was blank.
Suddenly curious, I sat up and, picking up the book, flicked forward to the Bs. A blank page. The Cs were also devoid of any names or addresses. Daryl and Claire were listed collectively under D; E was empty. I leafed through the whole book… my name under J, Rachael under R. Someone called ‘Spook’ under S, ‘Tony’s’ under T, and that was about it. On the very last page, under the heading of ‘notes’, was a weird list of numbers and odd words – ‘Vid 0528’, ‘Templar’, ‘Spook’ again, V7834’, ‘HBB 803’, ‘tupperc@elemail.com’… this last one was Charlie’s email address, and I knew that HBB 803 was the Porsche’s registration number, so I assumed that the others were a collection of those names and numbers that tend to accumulate throughout adulthood… PINs and membership card numbers. Feeling ridiculously like Hercule Poirot, I deduced that 0528 was Charlie’s video rental membership number. 7834 was possibly a Visa PIN.
Sighing again, I tossed the book aside, where it bounced off the pillow and onto the floor.
And I absolutely one hundred percent knew what was going to happen next…
I would lean down to pick up the book and, in doing so, inadvertently glance under the bed. And there, in true Hollywood style, would be the laptop, just waiting to be found.
Because I hadn’t looked under the bed, had I?
It had to be there.
Otherwise, there was no justice in the world.
I leapt off the bed like a lemming and landed on my knees, cracking the left one with a painful thud. Ignoring my complaining kneecap I crouched down and peered under the valance.
There, in the gloomy dwellings of imaginary sotto-letto monsters, was a rectangular box. I grinned.
And another.
And another. The grin faded.
Charlie’s guns.
There was no justice in the world.
Rubbing my knee, I struggled to my feet and, dejectedly limping over to the CD player, cut Men Without Hats off in mid-boogie.
Back in my room, I sat at my desk and stared unseeingly at Cybersaurus’ screen, where the Easter Bunny screensaver was lobbing chocolate eggs in my general direction with electronic chortles of almost lunatic enjoyment. I nudged the computer mouse, and the bunny vanished, to be replaced by my email inbox. I directed the cursor towards the sign-out button, clicked and logged off. The sign-in screen came up. I pointed the arrow at the ‘close’ button, then hesitated, my finger hovering over the mouse.
Not really thinking, I clicked in the box labeled ‘User Name’ instead and typed ‘Templar’. In the password box, I typed ‘spook’. And pressed ‘log-in’.
It was a Hollywood moment. With a crescendo of trumpets and a drum-roll, Charlie’s inbox leapt up onto the screen.
There were no messages, which, if nothing else, confirmed that Charlie was still alive and checking his mail. I clicked on ‘Show Folders’ and, after a reluctant wheeze from the hard-drive, a margin with a list of folders appeared on the left of the screen. I leaned forward and opened the ‘Sent Messages’ folder, my eyes practically drilling holes into the monitor.
Empty.
I clicked on ‘Trash’.
A list of unopened junk mail popped up. Nothing useful here, unless Charlie had wanted to buy a Super-Ab-Maximiser at half the usual retail price.
Feeling part hacker and part interfering old busy-body who steamed open other people’s correspondence before it even hit the mat on the other side of the door, I clicked on ‘Archived Mail’. Five messages scrolled down. The first, dated two months earlier, was titled ‘FWD: Bluemoon’ from someone called Teenie. I opened the file, and after a short wait was rewarded with a short cartoon of Count Dracula mooning me while a handful of bats flew around singing Blue Moon in high-pitched squeaks. Closing the file, I returned to the main page and quickly glanced down the list.
A couple more forwards from Teenie, no doubt every bit as entertaining as the Bluemoon file.
A virus warning from someone called Tigerfeet, entitled ‘This is NOT a joke’ and dated a couple of weeks later.
The final message was from someone called Hippo and was called ‘RE: Query’. What struck me, however, was the date.
The third of May.
That was the day Charlie had left. The day he had stuck his note to my kettle and disappeared.
I clicked on the file. The hard drive whirred and hummed. Then it made an all too familiar sound, rather like a robot clearing its throat. I ground my teeth in frustration and slammed a fist into the side of the monitor. I knew what that sound meant. Muttering and swearing under my breath, I sat back and waited for the inevitable window to pop up.
Connection terminated. Would you like to reconnect?
And then, downstairs, somebody rang the doorbell.
***
I stomped down the stairs like an angry three-year-old, pausing on the bottom step to readjust my dressing-gown. As I passed the mirror in the hall I made a feeble attempt to pat down my hair, which looked like the offspring of a hedgehog and Bozo the clown, into something which looked less like the offspring of a hedgehog and Bozo the clown. The doorbell rang again.
“Okay okay, I’m coming”, I muttered, and opened the front door.
It was Mrs Moore. I didn’t recognise her at first, because she appeared to be smiling, which was something that I had never seen her do, or thought her capable of. I blinked in the sunlight. It was definitely her – hair pulled back in a bun so tight that it could deflect bullets, and wearing a long black dress so perfectly ironed that it would have cracked rather than creased. I would have been less surprised had it been the Beatles, complete with Yoko Ono and a yellow submarine.
“Um… hi?” I said eventually, unable to keep the nonplussed tone out of my voice.
“Good morning, Joseph!” she sang cheerfully. She looked me up and down, and her smile was replaced with a look of concern. “Oh dear. Are you ill?” she asked sympathetically.
I pulled my dressing gown tighter around me.
“Er… no no. I had a late night and a lazy morning, that’s all”, I mumbled. “Er… would you like to come in?”
“Oh no, dear. Gavin is waiting in the car…” She gestured over her shoulder, and I noticed Mr Moore double-parked across the street in their midnight blue Renault. He was leaning out of the window, wearing a white shirt and a black tie, and he waved brightly as I looked. Feeling slightly dazed, I waved back feebly.
“So we’re just here to collect Amy”, Mrs Moore finished.
“Uh… collect Amy?”
The smile was back in full force, only now my eyes had adjusted to the bright sunlight and I realised that it was about as real as a jester’s greasepaint mask.
“You see, we’re going out for Sunday lunch, and we thought it might be nice for Amy to spend some time with her grandparents. We realise that it’s been less than a month since Claire… passed on…” Her eyes clouded over then, and she lowered her head. But not before I had caught a glimpse of, not sorrow, but anger… an anger so intense that I had to make a conscious effort not to step back into the house and slam the door in her face. Then she looked up again, and the mask of sweetness was back on, like a glass of orange squash hiding a deadly dose of cyanide.
“… but life must go on”, she continued, “and it’s unhealthy for the girl to stay in moping all day while her father is at work”. She looked at me expectantly.
I retrieved my cigarettes from my dressing-gown pocket and lit one slowly, trying to buy time until I could think of exactly what to say.
“Mrs Moore…” I started, but she interrupted me before I could say anymore.
“Don’t worry, Joseph. We phoned Daryl at the restaurant and he said it was perfectly alright. We’ll drop her home later”.
“Mrs Moore”, I repeated slowly, “Amy isn’t here today”.
The smile evaporated. There was a few moments’ silence, during which her eyes bore through me like a Black and Decker special.
“I don’t believe you”, she said eventually. “We know damn well that you baby-sit Amy on Sundays while her father is at work”. She spat the word ‘father’ out as if it were a rotten oyster.
I took a deep breath.
“Mrs Moore, Daryl hasn’t been to work since the funeral. He was given three weeks’ bereavement leave. So you couldn’t have phoned him at the restaurant”. You lying bitch, I added mentally.
She scowled at me, the cyanide coming to the surface. Then she suddenly leaned forward, and for one awful moment I thought she was going to raise her red-painted fingernails and rake them down my face in a frenzy of raw fury. Instead, she spat in my ear, “It’s past eleven o’ clock, you fucking little shit! Go and get dressed!”
I blinked in shock as she turned on her heel and headed towards the car, practically vibrating with rage. Mr Moore – Gavin – saw her approaching and opened the car door, as if to get out. Mrs Moore raised a hand, and he froze, one foot in, one foot out.
“Mrs Moore?” I called out weakly.
She stopped, and turned slowly to glare at me.
I swallowed.
“It wasn’t Daryl that killed Claire”, I said softly.
She glowered at me for what seemed like an eternity, then suddenly whirled around and stormed towards her husband like Beelzebub in a black dress.
I stared at her receding back for a second, then stepped back into the house, gently closing the door behind me.
Forward to Chapter Five | Part Two
How often are we to dieEverybody has regrets.
Before we go quite off this stage?
In every friend we lose a part of ourselves,
And the best part.
Alexander Pope
Even Frank Sinatra had regrets, and no matter that they were too few to mention, he still saw fit to point out the fact. The funny, or perhaps the sad, thing about regrets is that more often than not we are sorry about the things that we didn’t do as opposed to the things we did. ‘If only I had…’ is so much more powerful than ‘What if I hadn’t…’. ‘I wish I hadn’t…’ is nothing compared to the emotional storm that ‘I wonder if I had…’ can create.
We walk around as if we’re going to live forever. If only we could see the future, if only we knew exactly how much time we had left on this planet, we would have no regrets. We would pack each day with all the things we always promised we would do ‘someday’, and save ourselves the despair of looking back when it’s one minute and an eternity too late with hopeless feelings of dreams unaccomplished.
If only we could see the future.
I don’t think that Charlie had any regrets, in the end. Or maybe just too few to mention.
But that comes later.
***
Jerry had woken up this fine morning to find a woodpecker drumming holes into his matchstick furniture. In his quest for food for the baby bird, he had angered Tom, who was now chasing the brave mouse around my TV screen, brandishing an axe and sporting a bump of colossal proportions on his head which he had received minutes before during a series of mishaps involving a stick of dynamite and a piano. The whole adventure was accompanied by the music of a symphony orchestra.
It was ten o’ clock on Sunday morning, and I was killing time. There was a popular cafeteria in Serenity called Soldi’s, and I was meeting Amber there at one o’ clock. Until then, I had nothing much to do and three hours in which to do it.
It occurred to me that I was lonely. Most people woke up on a Sunday morning to a family breakfast followed by a day at the beach. Me, I woke up to Tom and Jerry on the tube. For a brief moment I entertained the idea of getting a pet for company, then watched as Tom annihilated an entire house in the space of a minute and thought better of it.
Daryl had taken Amy to the beach for the day. He had invited me to tag along, but I had declined. I considered phoning Rachael, just for a chat, but then I pictured her spending a lazy morning in bed, probably lying in Colin Dot Com’s arms as he snored away in peaceful oblivion, and decided not to.
I sighed, and contemplated switching off the TV and doing something constructive. Perhaps even having a shower and getting dressed. Or, more importantly, I had some sales reports that needed typing out that I had been putting off for weeks. I had some bills to organize – telephone, water, electricity, TV license and my Internet subscription. And, speaking of the Internet, I hadn’t checked my email account for days.
It was this last thought that finally got me out of the armchair. Clicking off the TV and banishing Tom and Jerry into somebody else’s living room, I headed up to my room and flicked on the computer. The hard drive hummed into action as I sat myself down into the swivel chair in front of the desk and waited for the start-up screen to appear.
It was an old computer – a Pentium II Celeron model which felt like it was running a fever if left on for longer than fifteen minutes at a time. I’d bought it second-hand and it had been immediately rendered redundant when the Pentium III system had appeared on the market the very next day. It was good enough for me though – I wasn’t exactly Bill Gates when it came to computers, and things like RAM, WAV files and gigabytes sounded to me like a futuristic episode of Mission Impossible, and not a reality of daily life. Besides, a computer in every household was screwing up my sales repertoire - why should kids nowadays be interested in a plastic and cardboard version of Captain Badass’ Tower of Doom when they could flick a switch into cyberspace, stride into the actual tower and beat the living crap out of the evil Captain in virtual reality? Why buy make-believe walkie-talkies when the Internet gave you the option of chatting to someone halfway across the planet in real-time? I had wandered into a chat-room once, by mistake, and left with the impression that the majority of the people who visited these sites were sexually frustrated morons with one brain cell whose only purpose in life was to repeat the phrase ‘NE HOT GIRLS WANNA WISPA PRESS 69’ ad nauseum. From that day on, I had only used the computer (Cybersaurus, as Charlie had once laughingly referred to it – he himself being the owner of an ultra-modern laptop) for Word documents and to send email, mainly because it saved the price of a stamp. While most people had the world at their fingertips, I got to mine via my front door.
The start-up screen finally popped up – a garishly coloured picture of a cartoon bunny straining under the weight of a huge chocolate egg. I had downloaded the theme last Easter and never gotten around to changing it. A few more wheezes from the hard drive and various icons began to appear. I double-clicked on my Internet connection shortcut and listened as the modem screeched, chattered and boing-boinged to itself. Then I logged on to my email account.
Forty-three messages.
I deleted the junk mail – promises of instant wealth; a university diploma; Madame Nora offering to tell my fortune; a product that would guarantee me bringing any woman to orgasm every time; a new car; a free mobile phone; and a multitude of other stuff that I didn’t want, need, or couldn’t afford.
Six messages remaining.
I frowned to myself as I clicked open the first message – a polite notice from my email provider saying that my inbox was full and could I please remove some of the unwanted mail. I complied, and deleted the message, smiling at the irony of it all. In my mind, a metaphorical penny was teetering on the edge of a cliff, waiting to drop…
Five messages.
I clicked open another message – a forward from someone or the other, which turned out to be a joke that I had first heard about eight years earlier, and hadn’t found funny even then.
Four messages.
What had I been thinking about? A half-formed thought was struggling its way to the forefront of my brain, waving for attention. The penny wobbled precariously.
A message from an old acquaintance… long time no hear, how ru, etc etc.
Three messages.
Was it anything to do with the Easter bunny? Last Easter? Didn’t think so.
The next message was a picture from the summer before; me and Charlie and the camera’s owner (couldn’t remember his name) at The Eye In The Sky, directing peace signs and huge grins towards the lens.
Two…
Something to do with Charlie? Probably. He was on my mind a lot lately. The penny took a deep breath…
One…
Forward this email to ten people in the next ten minutes and a cheque for $142,000 will fall into your lap. This is not a hoax! What have you got to lose? My friend, who is a top attorney, claims that…
Charlie.
Lap.
Top.
The penny dropped, sending the sands of time shooting backwards seven years up the hourglass…
***
Charlie snapped the display case closed, and that was when I realised that I had been holding my breath. I think that was the first time I had ever seen a real gun before.
“Wow”, I said, eventually. I think that that was also the first time that I had ever said ‘wow’ out loud and meant it.
“Yeah”, said Charlie, and I couldn’t help noticing the bitterness with which he said that one word. “Impressive, isn’t it? The German 8mm PPK with deluxe nickel finish and composite checkered grips. Or, as I like to call it… the Birthday Gun”.
“Is it real?” I asked. I half wanted him to open the case again so that I could grab the gun and sneak around the house in a fantasy world, crouching behind door-frames and bursting into rooms doing a James Bond style gun ballet and screaming things like “Everybody freeze!”
Charlie nodded. “Most of my dad’s collection was. He had about fifty-six in all. A couple of replicas, but mostly real. I sold them all, except for these three”. He gestured over to the other two boxes. I had completely forgotten about them.
“How come?”
Charlie shrugged. “What do I need fifty-six guns for?”
“No, I mean, how come you kept these three?”
He sighed, and took a deep breath. “Like I said… unsentimental value. My dad paid more attention to his precious gun collection than he ever did to me and my mother. This one…” he patted the box on his lap as he spoke, “… he bought on my thirteenth birthday. I waited up for him to come home. When he finally showed up and came through the door with a huge smile on his face and this box in his hands, I was so excited that I rushed up to him and grabbed the box. I thought it was my birthday present, you know? What it was, though, was a slap around the head and a snappy ‘Be careful, you stupid little prick!’ before he disappeared into his study”. Charlie laughed, but it sounded more like a bark than anything else. He turned his head away then, quickly, but not quickly enough. I looked down at my feet uncomfortably and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. It occurred to me that although Charlie hadn’t brought many possessions with him, he had walked in through the door with enough emotional baggage to fill all the storage space I had.
“Turned out that he had completely forgotten that it was my birthday”, Charlie continued in a low voice, so low that I wasn’t quite sure whether he was talking to me or to himself. “The next day I came home from school to find a birthday card on my pillow. It had ‘Sorry it’s late!’ printed on the front, and thirty pounds in the envelope. “To Charlie, love Dad”. It wasn’t even his handwriting, it was his fucking secretary’s”.
Sighing deeply, he lifted the case off his lap and placed it carefully on the other two. There was a long silence, and I was just wondering whether or not it was appropriate to leave the room and leave him to his own devices when he looked up at me. His eyes were sparkling, but the hurt look that I had glimpsed in them a minute ago had faded, as if some demon had been exorcised.
Then he simply said, “Um… thanks for listening”.
“No problem”, I replied, and in that moment the tension seemed to dissolve out of the room. The brief silence that followed was companionable as opposed to uncomfortable. Violins to fiddles.
Charlie reached over and dragged the black carrying case that he had taken out of the cardboard carton over to him.
“Now this”, he said with a smile, “is my pride and joy”. He grinned, and added, “and you’ll be glad to know that there is no emotional tale of woe attached to it”.
I must’ve looked relieved because he chuckled before unzipping the bag and pulling out the sleekest laptop that I had ever seen – not that I had seen all that many. It looked as if it had been designed by a superior race in the year 3000, and then transported back in time to the here and now. It looked as if it could go even faster than the Porsche parked outside. It made my own Cybersaurus look like a cave drawing.
Charlie patted the computer lovingly.
“Don’t know where I’d be without this. I’ve got my whole life in here. Diary, scheduler, organizer, contacts…” He then reeled off a whole lot of technical details that I couldn’t make head or tail of, but it was that one sentence that returned to nudge my memory seven years later…
… I’ve got my whole life in here…
***
I stared blankly at the computer screen, my mind elsewhere. Had Charlie’s computer been there two days ago when Daryl and I had been searching his room? I couldn’t remember seeing it, but then again we had stopped looking as soon as we had found Charlie’s old address book with Amber’s phone number in it. There was a possibility that he had left the computer behind. In which case I could have a poke around and see how up-to-date Charlie had kept his life.
Leaving Cybersaurus switched on, I made my way to Charlie’s bedroom. Daryl and I had left the balcony doors open, and the curtains waved a gentle hello as I walked in.
In all the best shows, once the hero has had the brainwave that will solve everything and save millions of lives, everything that follows is relatively simple. If B.A. Barracus needs an old ‘Best Of David Essex’ LP in order to add the vital finishing touches to the armoured tank that he’s building, then Hannibal Smith will inevitably find one lying in the corner of an old abandoned military warehouse. Having had what I thought was a relatively good idea myself, I half expected the laptop to fall into my open arms from the heavens - with a chorus of ‘Halleluiah’ – as soon as I walked in through the door. Unfortunately, a quick glance around the room revealed that the laptop was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, real life had never watched ‘The A-Team’.
Determinedly, I marched over to the nearest cupboard and yanked open the doors. Charlie’s assorted bit and pieces stared back at me indifferently… a wooden pig that he had brought back from a holiday in Amsterdam, a couple of hardback books, a pile of CDs, a Sony Discman attached to a pair of computer speakers, three packets of Golden Virginia tobacco, a yo-yo, a pack of cards, at least a dozen packs of Rizla skins… no laptop. This was obviously the cupboard that should’ve been marked ‘Miscellaneous Crap’. I picked a CD at random, slipped it into the player, pressed ‘play’ and resumed my search.
With Men Without Hats’ ‘Safety Dance’ serving as a soundtrack to my hunt, I moved on to the next cupboard, then the wardrobe, then the top of the wardrobe. Nothing. Getting increasingly frustrated, I pulled open the first drawer in a chest of three, which would have produced excellent results had I been searching for Charlie’s boxer shorts and socks, but proved useless in the quest for the laptop. The other two drawers were equally disappointing.
Completely disheartened, I stood in the middle of the room and spun around in a complete circle, just in case I had missed the black carrying case the first time round. No such luck.
The green address book was on the bed where we had left it, still open on ‘A’, Amber’s name the first on the list. Underneath, in pencil, was ‘Amy’s birthday’, followed by the date, and under that was ‘Alan – mechanic’ and a telephone number. The rest of the page was blank.
Suddenly curious, I sat up and, picking up the book, flicked forward to the Bs. A blank page. The Cs were also devoid of any names or addresses. Daryl and Claire were listed collectively under D; E was empty. I leafed through the whole book… my name under J, Rachael under R. Someone called ‘Spook’ under S, ‘Tony’s’ under T, and that was about it. On the very last page, under the heading of ‘notes’, was a weird list of numbers and odd words – ‘Vid 0528’, ‘Templar’, ‘Spook’ again, V7834’, ‘HBB 803’, ‘tupperc@elemail.com’… this last one was Charlie’s email address, and I knew that HBB 803 was the Porsche’s registration number, so I assumed that the others were a collection of those names and numbers that tend to accumulate throughout adulthood… PINs and membership card numbers. Feeling ridiculously like Hercule Poirot, I deduced that 0528 was Charlie’s video rental membership number. 7834 was possibly a Visa PIN.
Sighing again, I tossed the book aside, where it bounced off the pillow and onto the floor.
And I absolutely one hundred percent knew what was going to happen next…
I would lean down to pick up the book and, in doing so, inadvertently glance under the bed. And there, in true Hollywood style, would be the laptop, just waiting to be found.
Because I hadn’t looked under the bed, had I?
It had to be there.
Otherwise, there was no justice in the world.
I leapt off the bed like a lemming and landed on my knees, cracking the left one with a painful thud. Ignoring my complaining kneecap I crouched down and peered under the valance.
There, in the gloomy dwellings of imaginary sotto-letto monsters, was a rectangular box. I grinned.
And another.
And another. The grin faded.
Charlie’s guns.
There was no justice in the world.
Rubbing my knee, I struggled to my feet and, dejectedly limping over to the CD player, cut Men Without Hats off in mid-boogie.
Back in my room, I sat at my desk and stared unseeingly at Cybersaurus’ screen, where the Easter Bunny screensaver was lobbing chocolate eggs in my general direction with electronic chortles of almost lunatic enjoyment. I nudged the computer mouse, and the bunny vanished, to be replaced by my email inbox. I directed the cursor towards the sign-out button, clicked and logged off. The sign-in screen came up. I pointed the arrow at the ‘close’ button, then hesitated, my finger hovering over the mouse.
Not really thinking, I clicked in the box labeled ‘User Name’ instead and typed ‘Templar’. In the password box, I typed ‘spook’. And pressed ‘log-in’.
It was a Hollywood moment. With a crescendo of trumpets and a drum-roll, Charlie’s inbox leapt up onto the screen.
There were no messages, which, if nothing else, confirmed that Charlie was still alive and checking his mail. I clicked on ‘Show Folders’ and, after a reluctant wheeze from the hard-drive, a margin with a list of folders appeared on the left of the screen. I leaned forward and opened the ‘Sent Messages’ folder, my eyes practically drilling holes into the monitor.
Empty.
I clicked on ‘Trash’.
A list of unopened junk mail popped up. Nothing useful here, unless Charlie had wanted to buy a Super-Ab-Maximiser at half the usual retail price.
Feeling part hacker and part interfering old busy-body who steamed open other people’s correspondence before it even hit the mat on the other side of the door, I clicked on ‘Archived Mail’. Five messages scrolled down. The first, dated two months earlier, was titled ‘FWD: Bluemoon’ from someone called Teenie. I opened the file, and after a short wait was rewarded with a short cartoon of Count Dracula mooning me while a handful of bats flew around singing Blue Moon in high-pitched squeaks. Closing the file, I returned to the main page and quickly glanced down the list.
A couple more forwards from Teenie, no doubt every bit as entertaining as the Bluemoon file.
A virus warning from someone called Tigerfeet, entitled ‘This is NOT a joke’ and dated a couple of weeks later.
The final message was from someone called Hippo and was called ‘RE: Query’. What struck me, however, was the date.
The third of May.
That was the day Charlie had left. The day he had stuck his note to my kettle and disappeared.
I clicked on the file. The hard drive whirred and hummed. Then it made an all too familiar sound, rather like a robot clearing its throat. I ground my teeth in frustration and slammed a fist into the side of the monitor. I knew what that sound meant. Muttering and swearing under my breath, I sat back and waited for the inevitable window to pop up.
Connection terminated. Would you like to reconnect?
And then, downstairs, somebody rang the doorbell.
***
I stomped down the stairs like an angry three-year-old, pausing on the bottom step to readjust my dressing-gown. As I passed the mirror in the hall I made a feeble attempt to pat down my hair, which looked like the offspring of a hedgehog and Bozo the clown, into something which looked less like the offspring of a hedgehog and Bozo the clown. The doorbell rang again.
“Okay okay, I’m coming”, I muttered, and opened the front door.
It was Mrs Moore. I didn’t recognise her at first, because she appeared to be smiling, which was something that I had never seen her do, or thought her capable of. I blinked in the sunlight. It was definitely her – hair pulled back in a bun so tight that it could deflect bullets, and wearing a long black dress so perfectly ironed that it would have cracked rather than creased. I would have been less surprised had it been the Beatles, complete with Yoko Ono and a yellow submarine.
“Um… hi?” I said eventually, unable to keep the nonplussed tone out of my voice.
“Good morning, Joseph!” she sang cheerfully. She looked me up and down, and her smile was replaced with a look of concern. “Oh dear. Are you ill?” she asked sympathetically.
I pulled my dressing gown tighter around me.
“Er… no no. I had a late night and a lazy morning, that’s all”, I mumbled. “Er… would you like to come in?”
“Oh no, dear. Gavin is waiting in the car…” She gestured over her shoulder, and I noticed Mr Moore double-parked across the street in their midnight blue Renault. He was leaning out of the window, wearing a white shirt and a black tie, and he waved brightly as I looked. Feeling slightly dazed, I waved back feebly.
“So we’re just here to collect Amy”, Mrs Moore finished.
“Uh… collect Amy?”
The smile was back in full force, only now my eyes had adjusted to the bright sunlight and I realised that it was about as real as a jester’s greasepaint mask.
“You see, we’re going out for Sunday lunch, and we thought it might be nice for Amy to spend some time with her grandparents. We realise that it’s been less than a month since Claire… passed on…” Her eyes clouded over then, and she lowered her head. But not before I had caught a glimpse of, not sorrow, but anger… an anger so intense that I had to make a conscious effort not to step back into the house and slam the door in her face. Then she looked up again, and the mask of sweetness was back on, like a glass of orange squash hiding a deadly dose of cyanide.
“… but life must go on”, she continued, “and it’s unhealthy for the girl to stay in moping all day while her father is at work”. She looked at me expectantly.
I retrieved my cigarettes from my dressing-gown pocket and lit one slowly, trying to buy time until I could think of exactly what to say.
“Mrs Moore…” I started, but she interrupted me before I could say anymore.
“Don’t worry, Joseph. We phoned Daryl at the restaurant and he said it was perfectly alright. We’ll drop her home later”.
“Mrs Moore”, I repeated slowly, “Amy isn’t here today”.
The smile evaporated. There was a few moments’ silence, during which her eyes bore through me like a Black and Decker special.
“I don’t believe you”, she said eventually. “We know damn well that you baby-sit Amy on Sundays while her father is at work”. She spat the word ‘father’ out as if it were a rotten oyster.
I took a deep breath.
“Mrs Moore, Daryl hasn’t been to work since the funeral. He was given three weeks’ bereavement leave. So you couldn’t have phoned him at the restaurant”. You lying bitch, I added mentally.
She scowled at me, the cyanide coming to the surface. Then she suddenly leaned forward, and for one awful moment I thought she was going to raise her red-painted fingernails and rake them down my face in a frenzy of raw fury. Instead, she spat in my ear, “It’s past eleven o’ clock, you fucking little shit! Go and get dressed!”
I blinked in shock as she turned on her heel and headed towards the car, practically vibrating with rage. Mr Moore – Gavin – saw her approaching and opened the car door, as if to get out. Mrs Moore raised a hand, and he froze, one foot in, one foot out.
“Mrs Moore?” I called out weakly.
She stopped, and turned slowly to glare at me.
I swallowed.
“It wasn’t Daryl that killed Claire”, I said softly.
She glowered at me for what seemed like an eternity, then suddenly whirled around and stormed towards her husband like Beelzebub in a black dress.
I stared at her receding back for a second, then stepped back into the house, gently closing the door behind me.
Forward to Chapter Five | Part Two
Friday, November 03, 2006
Fiddles and Violins | Chapter Four | Part Two
Back to Chapter Four | Part One
Charlie’s room.
I hadn’t been in Charlie’s room at all since he had gone. Sure, I had stuck my head round the door once, twice or thrice, just to see if he had turned up out of the blue again, half expecting to find him lying on his bed in his customary position, roll-up dangling from his lips, ashtray balanced precariously on his chest, a frown of concentration on his face as he read a book. ‘The Saint’ had been his all-time favourite – he had all the books, all tattered and with cracked spines and yellow pages. “It’s because they’re out of print”, he had told me once, when I had pointed out that his collection was far from pristine. “The only place to find Leslie Charteris nowadays is at a car-boot sale”.
“Who’s she?” I had asked.
“He, you philistine. He, not she. He is the genius who brought Simon Templar to the world. What you, the unlearned, would call an author”.
He had tossed a book over to me – The Saint in the Sun, or something – and said, “Read this. It’ll add a modicum of sophistication to your otherwise uncultured life”.
The book was probably still in my room somewhere, buried under a clutter of everyday life which seems to accumulate no matter how often you promise yourself to clear up as you go. I had never even opened the front cover, and for some strange reason, as Daryl and I walked up the stairs towards the abandoned room now, I felt slightly guilty.
I hesitated as I reached the door. I had this insane picture in my mind of opening the door only to find Charlie’s skeleton lying on the bed, complete with still-smoking tailor-made clenched between his teeth, the ashtray stuck at an angle in his rib-cage, bony fingers clasped behind his skull. As I approach, heart screaming like a freight-train, the sunken bloodshot eyes roll towards me, the jaws grind open, the roll-up falling through the ribs and onto the dusty sheet below, and the skull, in a raspy voice, says “Pray Until Something Happens” as the sheets begin to smoke before catching fire and Charlie disappears in a funeral pyre of roaring flames…
I blinked and shook my head. I’d read way too many Steven King novels.
“You alright?” said Daryl.
I nodded and pushed open the door, which completely failed to creak ominously as was conventional in all the best horror films.
As we stepped into the dimly-lit room, it occurred to me that I had hardly been in here at all since Charlie had moved in seven years ago. In the house, the living-room had been our hang-out place, our get-together place, our chill-out room. Our bedrooms had been our own little slice of privacy.
There was an over-powering smell of stale cigarette smoke in the room, combined with that dusty, empty smell of a room that has been unused for a while, as if the air was frozen in time. I noticed an ashtray on the bedside table, a heap of dog-ends piling up into a miniature mountain. Charlie has smoked like there was no tomorrow, but this was a lot, even by his standards. He must have been up all night before he had vanished the next morning. I found myself wondering why he had been unable to sleep.
There was a swishing sound as Daryl pulled the curtains open, and bright sunshine came streaming into the room through the glass balcony doors. I was thankful – the room was instantly transformed from a shrine, or a tomb, into an ordinary bedroom again.
“This place needs some fresh air”, Daryl commented as he swung the doors open, letting in a cool breeze. Charlie had been chuffed when I’d given him the room with the balcony.
“This balcony is just great for watching life go by”, he had said. I had replied that my room, with the terrace, was just as great for watching my own life go by. In slow motion.
“There’s a story behind everything in here”, I whispered, partly to myself, as I looked around the room. I hadn’t meant to whisper, but sometimes things just come out that way.
“Huh?”
I gestured around the room, trying with one wave of the hand to include all the posters on the walls; the ridiculous lamp on the bedside table, shaped like a boot with an arm coming out of it, the hand holding a torch; the rusty tin ashtray with the legend Cinzano emblazoned on it in red; the Garfield soft toy in white shorts dotted with red hearts; the assorted photos pinned up on the cork notice-board; the chocolate mousse stain on the carpet; and even the neatly-made bed with three legs, the fourth corner held up by a large section of oak branch with ‘Jason loves Rebecca’ carved into the bark that we had found one day while scavenging for firewood up in Franklin’s Grove. The bric-a-brac of someone’s life.
“There’s a story behind everything in here”, I repeated in a normal voice. I turned to face Daryl with a grin. “Do you remember trying to get that bloody bed up the stairs when he first moved in?”
Daryl mirrored my grin and nodded. “And that goofy lamp”, he said, pointing to the object in question, “from the La Vallette market”.
I looked around the room again, and walked up to the notice-board. There were glossy photos all over it – pictures of me and Charlie at The Eye In The Sky, a popular rock bar in Capeville, a picture of Claire beaming into the camera with Daryl behind her, giving her ‘rabbit ears’ with his fingers, another of us all at the beach, with Amy on Charlie’s shoulders waving a bucket and spade.
“Do you realise”, I asked, grimacing at yet another photo, one of me after a night of heavy drinking, butt-naked on the floor with a paper Coca-Cola cup covering my privates and as pissed as a newt, fast asleep with a dumb grin on my face, holding a sign with ‘Fucked’ penciled on it by Charlie. “Do you realise that almost everything in here was bought after he met us? There’s nothing in this room that belonged to Charlie before… well, before us”.
Daryl nodded and sat down on the bed.
“Well, you know what he was like. He used to buy anything he wanted, and then instantly forget about it. The guy was loaded, Joey. He didn’t even have to work, for God’s sake! Well, not to make a living, anyway”.
“True”, I admitted as, in my mind, I travelled seven years back into the past…
***
“So, what do you do?” I asked Charlie. We were out on my terrace, smoking and drinking beer. Well, I was drinking beer, and Charlie the teetotaller was pouring Coke down his throat. That morning had been the morning of the Hollywood movie break-up, and we had just got back from Olive Hill, having collected Charlie’s clothes and other odds and ends from a less than pleased Amber. We were taking a breather before getting Charlie’s new room in a liveable state.
“About what?” Charlie asked smartly, gulping down another mouthful. It was only the end of spring, not even summer yet, but the temperature was already soaring.
“About earning a living, wisearse”.
“Oh, this and that. Whatever takes my fancy, really, when I get bored”.
“You mean you don’t have a job?”
“Nope”.
“Um… nope, you don’t mean that, or nope, you don’t have a job?”
“I don’t have a job”.
Then how the hell are you going to pay the rent? I wondered silently.
“You’re not worried about the rent, are you?” Charlie said, casting me a sidelong glance.
“No, not at all”, I lied, “I was just wondering how you managed”.
“Don’t need a job”, he answered, “I’ve got an inheritance. My living’s already been earned for me. How did you think my father bought the Porsche? Coupons? He was… well, let’s say he was rather well-off. I was born with a silver ladle in my mouth”.
“Ladle?”
“Bigger than a spoon, but not quite a bowl”, said Charlie. “How about you?”
“I was born with sod all in my mouth”.
“I mean, what do you do for a living?”
“I um… I sell toys”, I told him. I hated telling people what my job was – it sounded so Willy Wonka meets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I waited for the usual ‘Really?’ of disbelief.
“Cool”, said Charlie, and that was it.
We drained our drinks and flicked the remains of our cigarettes over the terrace and into the empty plot below. Charlie struggled out of his deckchair with an exaggerated groan, and stretched his legs.
“Well, I’m going to wardrobe my robes and cupboard my cups”, he said.
I smiled at his odd way of speaking. I was beginning to realise how he did it – he would take a perfectly innocent noun and turn it into a verb. In other words, he would Charliefy it. Parts of speech meant nothing to him. Shakespeare would have flipped in his grave.
I took the empty bottles down to the kitchen and then climbed the stairs again and joined Charlie in the bedroom. He was on his knees in front of a large cardboard box, extracting the contents one at a time and placing them on the floor beside him with exaggerated care. The box had ‘This Way Up’ printed upside-down on it in red. It was the only thing of Charlie’s that Amber hadn’t lobbed out of the window. Probably because it was too heavy.
I cast a curious eye over the assorted bits and pieces that Charlie was laying out. There were two large ice-cream containers which rattled and clicked as he moved them – “My badge collection”, he told me proudly soon after, “four hundred of them. Give or take a couple”.
There was a teetering pile of about two dozen CDs – ranging from Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp to the slightly more obscure Primitive Radio Gods, who I’d never heard of. There was a battered Sony Discman which looked as if it could have been the first CD player ever invented; his collection of Saint novels; a couple of out-dated diaries; a picture frame containing a photo of a much younger Charlie, without the pony-tail, in a navy T-shirt with ‘My Other T-Shirt Is Yellow’ printed across the chest; a tangle of Walkman headphones; and an orange desk organizer. A sleek black canvas carrying case. And several large, varnished wooden boxes, decorated with metal clasps and brass corners. They were rectangular in shape, and rather flat. They looked like the kind of boxes you could buy really expensive cigars in, provided that the cigars were sixteen inches long. And they looked heavy, as Charlie used both hands and grunted as he lifted them out of the cardboard box.
“My father’s pride and joy”, he told me, noticing my inquisitive look. “And the only things I kept. Everything else I auctioned off before selling the house”.
“How come you sold the house?”
“Because I’m twenty-one and single. What the hell would I do with a sixteen room converted farmhouse with a swimming pool, a five car garage and several acres of land?”
I said nothing, my mind conjuring up all the wonderful things that I could do if I had a sixteen room converted farmhouse with a swimming pool and so on.
Charlie sighed, and swiveled round on the floor to face me, his arms stretched out behind him, hands palm down on the carpet.
“Besides, I hated that house. It was way too big. It was ridiculous, really”. He sighed again, then continued, “My father worked so hard to have a dream-house that he never got to enjoy because he was too busy working so hard to have a dream-house that he never got to enjoy… etcetera etcetera etcetera. One of life’s stupid little vicious circles. I never really knew my dad. Do you have any idea how much it sucks, to live in a huge house with every luxury at your fingertips except for the one thing that you really want?”
I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t asked about the sodding house. It had just been a polite question, and I hadn’t been expecting any sentimental skeletons to come dancing out of closets. I wasn’t very good at handling outpourings of emotion. But Charlie looked as if he needed to get it off his chest, so I gave him what I hoped was an understanding look, and waited for him to go on. Which he did…
“So, when my dad died last year, I was quite shocked to find that I didn’t really miss him at all. My mother, yes, but not him. I loved him, of course, but for me, he had been long gone. I was used to him not being there”.
Charlie paused to remove the rubber band that held his hair back in a pony-tail. He shook his head, letting his hair fall forward to curtain his face.
“Must get a haircut”, he muttered, “pony-tail gives me a headache”.
He brushed a stray hair from his face and, reaching across for his tobacco pouch, started expertly rolling a cigarette.
“Anyway”, he continued, lighting the roll-up and puffing out a cloud of smoke, “the house is gone, the company taken over, the fucking pointless ornaments and shit that were supposed to make up for his absence have all been flogged off to the highest bidder, and the ghosts of the past are buried. The only things that are left of him are a pocketful of vague memories, the Porsche outside, and…” he waved a hand over the lustrous boxes by his side, like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat – “… these. Call them unsentimental value, if you like”.
He fixed me then with his icy blue gaze, inviting me to ask the question he knew was coming.
“So”, I asked, as coolly as possible, “what’s in the boxes?”
Unfolding his legs, Charlie reached over and lifted the smallest box onto his lap. He flicked open the clasps and turned the box away from him, then slowly, no doubt for dramatic effect, he lifted the lid.
The second thing I noticed was that the box was lined with midnight-blue velvet. The third was the gold print in the lid which simply read ‘Made In Germany’.
But the first thing I noticed was the gun itself, nestling in the blue crushed velvet and gleaming like moonlight on a guillotine’s blade.
***
Forward to Chapter Five | Part One
Charlie’s room.
I hadn’t been in Charlie’s room at all since he had gone. Sure, I had stuck my head round the door once, twice or thrice, just to see if he had turned up out of the blue again, half expecting to find him lying on his bed in his customary position, roll-up dangling from his lips, ashtray balanced precariously on his chest, a frown of concentration on his face as he read a book. ‘The Saint’ had been his all-time favourite – he had all the books, all tattered and with cracked spines and yellow pages. “It’s because they’re out of print”, he had told me once, when I had pointed out that his collection was far from pristine. “The only place to find Leslie Charteris nowadays is at a car-boot sale”.
“Who’s she?” I had asked.
“He, you philistine. He, not she. He is the genius who brought Simon Templar to the world. What you, the unlearned, would call an author”.
He had tossed a book over to me – The Saint in the Sun, or something – and said, “Read this. It’ll add a modicum of sophistication to your otherwise uncultured life”.
The book was probably still in my room somewhere, buried under a clutter of everyday life which seems to accumulate no matter how often you promise yourself to clear up as you go. I had never even opened the front cover, and for some strange reason, as Daryl and I walked up the stairs towards the abandoned room now, I felt slightly guilty.
I hesitated as I reached the door. I had this insane picture in my mind of opening the door only to find Charlie’s skeleton lying on the bed, complete with still-smoking tailor-made clenched between his teeth, the ashtray stuck at an angle in his rib-cage, bony fingers clasped behind his skull. As I approach, heart screaming like a freight-train, the sunken bloodshot eyes roll towards me, the jaws grind open, the roll-up falling through the ribs and onto the dusty sheet below, and the skull, in a raspy voice, says “Pray Until Something Happens” as the sheets begin to smoke before catching fire and Charlie disappears in a funeral pyre of roaring flames…
I blinked and shook my head. I’d read way too many Steven King novels.
“You alright?” said Daryl.
I nodded and pushed open the door, which completely failed to creak ominously as was conventional in all the best horror films.
As we stepped into the dimly-lit room, it occurred to me that I had hardly been in here at all since Charlie had moved in seven years ago. In the house, the living-room had been our hang-out place, our get-together place, our chill-out room. Our bedrooms had been our own little slice of privacy.
There was an over-powering smell of stale cigarette smoke in the room, combined with that dusty, empty smell of a room that has been unused for a while, as if the air was frozen in time. I noticed an ashtray on the bedside table, a heap of dog-ends piling up into a miniature mountain. Charlie has smoked like there was no tomorrow, but this was a lot, even by his standards. He must have been up all night before he had vanished the next morning. I found myself wondering why he had been unable to sleep.
There was a swishing sound as Daryl pulled the curtains open, and bright sunshine came streaming into the room through the glass balcony doors. I was thankful – the room was instantly transformed from a shrine, or a tomb, into an ordinary bedroom again.
“This place needs some fresh air”, Daryl commented as he swung the doors open, letting in a cool breeze. Charlie had been chuffed when I’d given him the room with the balcony.
“This balcony is just great for watching life go by”, he had said. I had replied that my room, with the terrace, was just as great for watching my own life go by. In slow motion.
“There’s a story behind everything in here”, I whispered, partly to myself, as I looked around the room. I hadn’t meant to whisper, but sometimes things just come out that way.
“Huh?”
I gestured around the room, trying with one wave of the hand to include all the posters on the walls; the ridiculous lamp on the bedside table, shaped like a boot with an arm coming out of it, the hand holding a torch; the rusty tin ashtray with the legend Cinzano emblazoned on it in red; the Garfield soft toy in white shorts dotted with red hearts; the assorted photos pinned up on the cork notice-board; the chocolate mousse stain on the carpet; and even the neatly-made bed with three legs, the fourth corner held up by a large section of oak branch with ‘Jason loves Rebecca’ carved into the bark that we had found one day while scavenging for firewood up in Franklin’s Grove. The bric-a-brac of someone’s life.
“There’s a story behind everything in here”, I repeated in a normal voice. I turned to face Daryl with a grin. “Do you remember trying to get that bloody bed up the stairs when he first moved in?”
Daryl mirrored my grin and nodded. “And that goofy lamp”, he said, pointing to the object in question, “from the La Vallette market”.
I looked around the room again, and walked up to the notice-board. There were glossy photos all over it – pictures of me and Charlie at The Eye In The Sky, a popular rock bar in Capeville, a picture of Claire beaming into the camera with Daryl behind her, giving her ‘rabbit ears’ with his fingers, another of us all at the beach, with Amy on Charlie’s shoulders waving a bucket and spade.
“Do you realise”, I asked, grimacing at yet another photo, one of me after a night of heavy drinking, butt-naked on the floor with a paper Coca-Cola cup covering my privates and as pissed as a newt, fast asleep with a dumb grin on my face, holding a sign with ‘Fucked’ penciled on it by Charlie. “Do you realise that almost everything in here was bought after he met us? There’s nothing in this room that belonged to Charlie before… well, before us”.
Daryl nodded and sat down on the bed.
“Well, you know what he was like. He used to buy anything he wanted, and then instantly forget about it. The guy was loaded, Joey. He didn’t even have to work, for God’s sake! Well, not to make a living, anyway”.
“True”, I admitted as, in my mind, I travelled seven years back into the past…
***
“So, what do you do?” I asked Charlie. We were out on my terrace, smoking and drinking beer. Well, I was drinking beer, and Charlie the teetotaller was pouring Coke down his throat. That morning had been the morning of the Hollywood movie break-up, and we had just got back from Olive Hill, having collected Charlie’s clothes and other odds and ends from a less than pleased Amber. We were taking a breather before getting Charlie’s new room in a liveable state.
“About what?” Charlie asked smartly, gulping down another mouthful. It was only the end of spring, not even summer yet, but the temperature was already soaring.
“About earning a living, wisearse”.
“Oh, this and that. Whatever takes my fancy, really, when I get bored”.
“You mean you don’t have a job?”
“Nope”.
“Um… nope, you don’t mean that, or nope, you don’t have a job?”
“I don’t have a job”.
Then how the hell are you going to pay the rent? I wondered silently.
“You’re not worried about the rent, are you?” Charlie said, casting me a sidelong glance.
“No, not at all”, I lied, “I was just wondering how you managed”.
“Don’t need a job”, he answered, “I’ve got an inheritance. My living’s already been earned for me. How did you think my father bought the Porsche? Coupons? He was… well, let’s say he was rather well-off. I was born with a silver ladle in my mouth”.
“Ladle?”
“Bigger than a spoon, but not quite a bowl”, said Charlie. “How about you?”
“I was born with sod all in my mouth”.
“I mean, what do you do for a living?”
“I um… I sell toys”, I told him. I hated telling people what my job was – it sounded so Willy Wonka meets Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I waited for the usual ‘Really?’ of disbelief.
“Cool”, said Charlie, and that was it.
We drained our drinks and flicked the remains of our cigarettes over the terrace and into the empty plot below. Charlie struggled out of his deckchair with an exaggerated groan, and stretched his legs.
“Well, I’m going to wardrobe my robes and cupboard my cups”, he said.
I smiled at his odd way of speaking. I was beginning to realise how he did it – he would take a perfectly innocent noun and turn it into a verb. In other words, he would Charliefy it. Parts of speech meant nothing to him. Shakespeare would have flipped in his grave.
I took the empty bottles down to the kitchen and then climbed the stairs again and joined Charlie in the bedroom. He was on his knees in front of a large cardboard box, extracting the contents one at a time and placing them on the floor beside him with exaggerated care. The box had ‘This Way Up’ printed upside-down on it in red. It was the only thing of Charlie’s that Amber hadn’t lobbed out of the window. Probably because it was too heavy.
I cast a curious eye over the assorted bits and pieces that Charlie was laying out. There were two large ice-cream containers which rattled and clicked as he moved them – “My badge collection”, he told me proudly soon after, “four hundred of them. Give or take a couple”.
There was a teetering pile of about two dozen CDs – ranging from Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp to the slightly more obscure Primitive Radio Gods, who I’d never heard of. There was a battered Sony Discman which looked as if it could have been the first CD player ever invented; his collection of Saint novels; a couple of out-dated diaries; a picture frame containing a photo of a much younger Charlie, without the pony-tail, in a navy T-shirt with ‘My Other T-Shirt Is Yellow’ printed across the chest; a tangle of Walkman headphones; and an orange desk organizer. A sleek black canvas carrying case. And several large, varnished wooden boxes, decorated with metal clasps and brass corners. They were rectangular in shape, and rather flat. They looked like the kind of boxes you could buy really expensive cigars in, provided that the cigars were sixteen inches long. And they looked heavy, as Charlie used both hands and grunted as he lifted them out of the cardboard box.
“My father’s pride and joy”, he told me, noticing my inquisitive look. “And the only things I kept. Everything else I auctioned off before selling the house”.
“How come you sold the house?”
“Because I’m twenty-one and single. What the hell would I do with a sixteen room converted farmhouse with a swimming pool, a five car garage and several acres of land?”
I said nothing, my mind conjuring up all the wonderful things that I could do if I had a sixteen room converted farmhouse with a swimming pool and so on.
Charlie sighed, and swiveled round on the floor to face me, his arms stretched out behind him, hands palm down on the carpet.
“Besides, I hated that house. It was way too big. It was ridiculous, really”. He sighed again, then continued, “My father worked so hard to have a dream-house that he never got to enjoy because he was too busy working so hard to have a dream-house that he never got to enjoy… etcetera etcetera etcetera. One of life’s stupid little vicious circles. I never really knew my dad. Do you have any idea how much it sucks, to live in a huge house with every luxury at your fingertips except for the one thing that you really want?”
I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t asked about the sodding house. It had just been a polite question, and I hadn’t been expecting any sentimental skeletons to come dancing out of closets. I wasn’t very good at handling outpourings of emotion. But Charlie looked as if he needed to get it off his chest, so I gave him what I hoped was an understanding look, and waited for him to go on. Which he did…
“So, when my dad died last year, I was quite shocked to find that I didn’t really miss him at all. My mother, yes, but not him. I loved him, of course, but for me, he had been long gone. I was used to him not being there”.
Charlie paused to remove the rubber band that held his hair back in a pony-tail. He shook his head, letting his hair fall forward to curtain his face.
“Must get a haircut”, he muttered, “pony-tail gives me a headache”.
He brushed a stray hair from his face and, reaching across for his tobacco pouch, started expertly rolling a cigarette.
“Anyway”, he continued, lighting the roll-up and puffing out a cloud of smoke, “the house is gone, the company taken over, the fucking pointless ornaments and shit that were supposed to make up for his absence have all been flogged off to the highest bidder, and the ghosts of the past are buried. The only things that are left of him are a pocketful of vague memories, the Porsche outside, and…” he waved a hand over the lustrous boxes by his side, like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat – “… these. Call them unsentimental value, if you like”.
He fixed me then with his icy blue gaze, inviting me to ask the question he knew was coming.
“So”, I asked, as coolly as possible, “what’s in the boxes?”
Unfolding his legs, Charlie reached over and lifted the smallest box onto his lap. He flicked open the clasps and turned the box away from him, then slowly, no doubt for dramatic effect, he lifted the lid.
The second thing I noticed was that the box was lined with midnight-blue velvet. The third was the gold print in the lid which simply read ‘Made In Germany’.
But the first thing I noticed was the gun itself, nestling in the blue crushed velvet and gleaming like moonlight on a guillotine’s blade.
***
Forward to Chapter Five | Part One
Fiddles and Violins | Chapter Four | Part One
Back to Chapter Three | Part Two
***
Forward to Chapter Four | Part Two
Sleep is the watering place of
The soul to which it hastens at night
To drink at the sources of life.
In sleep we receive confirmation…
That we must go on living.
Abram Tertz
Everybody feels better after a good night’s sleep. Sleep is medicine for the mind. No matter how terrible or traumatic the events of the previous night are, no matter how emotionally fucked up and physically drained they leave you, upon waking you discover that whatever it was has been filed away neatly in the archives of the mind labeled ‘it could have been worse’. Because, let’s face it… it could always be worse.
By the morning, we have resigned ourselves to the fact that what has happened cannot be changed, that we just have to go ahead and deal with it. It is in sleep that this process of self-healing begins.
Besides, I was one hundred percent sure of one thing.
I knew that Charlie was still very much alive.
***
There were six messages on the answering machine when I went down for my breakfast the next morning – six messages which must have been left for me the night before while I was out with Rachael and that I had been too shattered to check for when I got home. Switching on the kettle, I hunkered down by the telephone and pressed the play button. After a few seconds of static, a very quiet female voice filtered out through the small grey speaker.
‘Charlie? Pick up if you’re there’.
There was a pause, during which I could hear an indistinct male voice droning on in the background. I made out the words ‘…stated today that if…’ and realised that the voice was coming from a television set. The news. I knew what was coming next, even before the female voice continued.
‘… I guess you’re out then. Look, I… um… I was just watching the news and there was your car… at least, it looked like your car… I’m just calling to see if you’re okay. Call me back when you get this…’ There was another pause, then… ‘It’s Amber. Bye’.
Click.
“Nine hours and eight minutes”, came the robotic monotone of the recorded time-check function.
The second caller was Daryl. His voice sounded urgent.
‘Joey? Give me a call when you get in, will you? Doesn’t matter what time. It’s important. About Charlie’. Pause, then ‘bye’.
The kettle clicked off at the same time as the message. I straightened up and crossed into the kitchen as the machine said “Ten hours and twelve minutes” in the same flat and indifferent tones. I poured hot water into my mug and watched it turn black as the third message started.
Someone breathing – deep, slow breaths, as if waiting, anticipating. Tinny music in the background. It was a tune I recognised but couldn’t place.
Click.
“Ten hours and thirty… one minutes”, came the recording.
I hated it when people didn’t speak. Why bother waiting for the beep if you weren’t going to leave a message? I stirred my coffee and waited for the next…
The same sound of someone breathing. The same tinny music. The same song. I stopped stirring and stood like a statue, listening, trying to make out the words. Whoever it was hadn’t waited long between one phone call and the next.
Click.
“Ten hours and thirty… two minutes”.
I put my coffee down on the kitchen top and crossed back over to the telephone. I watched suspiciously as the neon yellow display switched from four to five.
‘… the way the camera follows us in slo-mo…’
Click.
“Ten hours and thirty… four minutes”.
It was a Paul Simon song – I couldn’t remember the name but I had it on CD somewhere. Something about days of miracle and wonder.
The machine reached the last message. I was not entirely surprised to hear the last strains of the same song coming through the speaker.
There was a clicking sound, as of a door opening. Then came a voice, a male voice, muffled and far away. It said one word. It didn’t belong to the caller – it sounded as if it was coming from across the room. A sharp intake of breath. Then…
Click.
“Ten hours and thirty… five minutes”.
I pressed play again, and skipped forward to the last message.
Paul Simon humming as the song faded.
The click of the door.
I closed my eyes and held my breath.
‘Calling?’
The intake of breath, as if the caller had been surprised, as if whoever it was hadn’t heard the door open, hadn’t been expecting anyone to walk in… I pressed the repeat button.
‘The Boy in the Bubble’. That was the name of the Paul Simon track.
Click went the door.
That one word.
The startled breath – not, I realised, because the caller had been surprised, but because he had inadvertently left his name on my machine.
I opened my eyes and frowned.
Not ‘Calling?’
Colin.
***
I was just about to leave the house – had, in fact, already started reaching for the front door – when, on the other side, somebody rang the doorbell, startling twelve kinds of shit out of me. I blinked, my heart thudding in my chest as if an insane drummer had taken up residence there, then lowered my arm slowly. It would be Colin, I was sure, looking more like an angry bear than ever, a dark frown creasing his forehead and thunderbolts blazing in his eyes as he reached out and grabbed me by the neck, lifting me off my feet, pulling me forward until I was inches from those eyes, eyes that had the fires of hell burning in them, and bellowing ‘Rachael’s mine, Rachael’s mine, mine, d’you hear me, mine…’ And all the time, with every syllable, he would be slamming me from doorpost to doorpost, my teeth rattling in my head like bingo chips. And then Colin would draw back his mighty fist and ram it down my throat…
The bell rang again.
‘You sad, sad bastard’ said the alien in my head. ‘You know it’s not Colin’.
I reached out and opened the door.
‘Probably’, added the alien.
It wasn’t. It was Daryl.
“Thought you’d already left for work”, he said, stepping past me and into the house. He turned to look at me, and his eyes rested on my face.
“You saw it too then?”
“Huh?”
“The news? Charlie’s car?”
“Oh”. I realised that Daryl had misinterpreted the dazed look on my face. “Yeah. Last night while I was out with Rachael. At Da Quiri’s”.
I followed Daryl into the kitchen and dumped my rucksack on the floor – I knew I wouldn’t be going to work today. Daryl pulled out a chair and dumped himself unceremoniously at the dining-room table.
“Coffee?”
“Sure. Strong. I’m knackered. Didn’t get much sleep last night”.
It showed. There were dark rings under his eyes and his hair was sticking up all over the place. I was about to toss in a wisecrack about him looking like shit when he added,
“Again. Bed seems too big”.
I handed him the coffee in silence. He cupped his hands around it as if they were cold and blew gently into the mug. A thin cloud of steam puffed out lazily and disappeared.
“Where’s Amy?” I asked as I poured myself a second cup in half an hour. What the hell – hyperactivity was the least of my problems.
“Round at Catherine’s. She’s taking her kids to the beach this afternoon, and Amy’s going with them”.
I dragged out a chair and sat opposite Daryl, carefully placing my coffee on the table in front of me.
“So… what d’you think?” I said, reaching for my cigarettes. With anyone else I would have had to clarify the question, but Daryl and I had known each other long enough to share the same frequency.
“I’m not sure. I know what I don’t think though. I don’t think he was in the car when it went under”.
“Neither do I”. I lit the cigarette and took a long drag. Daryl reached out and took the packet. I raised an inquiring eyebrow at him – Daryl had quit smoking the day he had found out that Claire was pregnant. He caught my look and shrugged awkwardly.
“What difference does it make?” he said gruffly. “We’re here today and gone tomorrow anyway”.
I found myself wishing that he would stop referring to Claire all the time – however indirectly. It made me feel uncomfortable and useless, not knowing what to say. I felt like shouting out ‘okay already! She’s dead! I know she’s dead. You don’t have to keep on reminding me, dammit!’ but I felt ashamed of the thought even as it entered my head. Instead, I took a deep breath, and started,
“Daryl. I’m not very good at this comforting of the bereaved stuff, but…”
I stopped there because Daryl was waving his hand at me as if swatting an invisible fly. My voice faltered as he spoke,
“You don’t need to give me a speech, Joey. Over the past two weeks I’ve had speeches up to here…” He touched the edge of his hand to his forehead to indicate exactly how many speeches he’d had to sit through, then went on, “You’ve always been there when I needed you, when Claire needed you, and when Amy needed you, and all I’m hoping is that you’ll be there still…”
“Of course I will”, I said. “You know that”. My voice shook a little as, unbidden, Rachael’s voice came back to haunt me from the night before… ‘you weren’t around… and I needed you, Joey… I needed you…’
Daryl smiled at me, a smile which encompassed a lifetime of friendship, ups and downs, happiness and sorrow, fiddles and violins.
“Then that’s all you need to say”, he said.
He plucked the cigarette lighter out of my unresisting hand and lit his cigarette. He took a deep drag and exhaled with a sigh of obvious satisfaction.
“Ten years of abstinence down the drain”, he said, studying the tip of the cigarette with a smile playing on his lips, “…and it feels gooooood”.
His eyes locked onto mine.
“Remember that time we went diving together last year?” he asked.
We were on the same frequency again.
I nodded.
“The blue van”, I said.
He grinned.
“Lachrymose Bay”, he said.
***
Lachrymose Bay was so called because of its shape. From a bird-eye view, it looked as if God, perhaps as a creative afterthought while creating the island, had taken a colossal teardrop-shaped pastry cutter and pressed down firmly, carving out an enormous chunk of rock to allow the sea water to flood in via the relatively narrow gap at the tapered end of the tear.
Lachrymose Bay was the official name for the inlet – the name found on maps of the island. The local fishermen, whose colourful fishing boats dotted the shoreline in a plethora of reds, yellows, blues and greens and whose prows were all adorned with the Eye of Osiris in order to keep away evil sea spirits, simply called it Martha’s Harbour. There was a story behind the name, as there is a story behind the namesake of every fishing village everywhere in the world.
Daryl and I had first heard the story from an old fisherman – who looked as if he had come straight out of a storybook, white beard, battered cap, pipe and all – one evening last summer. A born story-teller, his voice rising and falling as naturally as the sea he made a living from, he had effortlessly transported us back to the time of a 'young local lass' called Martha...
'... who was as beautiful as the rising sun, as innocent as a newborn and as pure as pure could be. Her eyes were the shape of almonds and the colour of the most luxurious dark chocolate, her hair was a silky cascade of ebony curls, her lips as red as cherries. Many a young suitor would lurk anxiously beneath her window, waiting for the day when a plant pot of fresh basil would appear on the sill, put proudly there by Martha’s mother, indicating, as was the custom in those days, that her daughter had come of age and was ready for marriage.
When the long-awaited plant finally appeared, the number of hopeful young swains vying for Martha’s attention under that window, declaring their wealth and crooning home-made ballads of love, was a sight to be seen. Yet it was a certain young man, David Allgood by name, who stole Martha’s heart and made it his own. A fisherman by trade, as had been his father and his father’s father before him, David often set out in conditions where no sane fisherman would venture, with waves towering fifty feet high and winds raging strong enough to bring the rain slashing down like lead pellets. He took no heed of his colleagues’ somber warnings, shrugging off their forebodings like a snake shrugging off its skin. There were those in the village who considered him a fearless young hero who laughed in the face of danger; others who thought he was a fool who would one day tempt the Fates too far and get his comeuppance, which was far overdue.
The day came towards the end of summer, a week before the wedding was to take place. The sky was dark and brooding as David made his way down to the water’s edge where his tiny boat was moored. Laden with fishing nets and lobster pots, and in a hurry to be off, David ignored, as he had done many a time before, the dire warnings of the other fisherfolk.
“Only a madman would venture out this evening”, they cried as he boarded his boat. “Open your eyes and see, the sea-bed is waiting hungrily for a fool to join it tonight! Are you sure that you want to be that fool?”
David threw back his head and laughed merrily.
“This madman will return”, he claimed, “and with a boat fair bursting with fish, I’ll wager”.
The fisherfolk shook their heads ominously, and muttered to themselves as they headed back to the safety of the local tavern.
“The sea loves a tragedy”, they told each other in doom-laden voices. “A week before the wedding too… he tempts the Fates too far”.
That night, all hell broke loose. The winds bellowed through the village with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding on its tail, tearing the roofs off houses and uprooting trees with malignant indifference. Lightning forked down from the heavens like the tongues of serpents as needle-sharp rain battered down and thunder roared. Waves rolled, crashed and broke on the shore – white foam spraying hundreds of feet into the air like the dying howl of some huge rabid beast. It was the cruelest, most vindictive storm in living memory, and young David Allgood was never seen again.
Martha – poor, beautiful, bereaved Martha – never fell in love again. Every day for the rest of her long life, she would go down to the shore and weep in sorrow for what could have been and never was. And, it is said, all the salty, bitter tears that rolled down her lovely cheeks and fell to the ground wore away at the rock little by little, eventually forming what today is known as Lachrymose Bay, a safe harbour for all fishermen caught in a storm.
So goes the legend of Martha’s Harbour.'
***
Lachrymose Bay, Daryl had been told by one of the waiters where he worked, was a veritable diver’s paradise, where the fish practically ‘throw themselves onto your harpoon and the octopi are the size of submarines’. Apparently, the fish followed the boats into the bay, feeding on a trail of guts and other scraps thrown overboard, and then were too fat, lazy and stupid to find their way out through the narrow inlet again. Our usual diving spot, along the coastline of Serenity, had been temporarily ruined by the construction of yet another waterside hotel, polluting the water with cement dust and other debris of human indifference, so we had decided to give it a try.
We got to the bay at quarter to eight, when the sun was disappearing over the horizon and the sky was as colourful as a handful of melted Smarties clasped in a child’s fist – faded reds, yellows, purples and blues. The moon was already visible, a pale spotlight which would grow brighter as the day got darker. It was still too light to dive – the fish would still be alert and any octopi that might reside in the bay would not yet have slid cautiously out of their hidey-holes to feed – so we stopped for a coffee in a small bar called ‘The Blue Grotto’. It was here that we met the fisherman, whose name we never found out (but would always refer to as Popeye), who told us the legend of Martha’s Harbour for the price of a beer. He had the air of one who had told the story a thousand times, and a sparkle in his weathered old eyes that revealed that he wouldn’t mind telling it a thousand times more.
The sea was as calm as a Sunday morning in spring as Daryl and I struggled into our wetsuits – mine purple and black, Daryl’s a neon yellow and black, both of them of the short armed, short legged variety known as ‘shorties’. The water was a warm twenty-four degrees Celsius, but after an hour or so the sea had a tendency to reach out with chilly fingers and grab hold of your heart, freezing you from the inside out.
We sat by the water’s edge and, pulling back the thick rubber of our harpoons, loaded them and tossed them into the water – twin splashes which turned into ripples and then back to a halcyon calm. Having put on our facemasks and flippers, we finally flicked on our torches and slid silently into the water like wraiths.
I flicked my torch off again as the water seeped through the neoprene of my suit, gently caressing me all over like a refreshing liquid massage. The moonlight glimmered and shimmered off the rocky seabed as I floated, enjoying the calm weightless feeling. This was how I imagined Neil Armstrong had felt when he stepped out onto the moon’s surface – alone in a magical, hypnotic world, millions of miles away from anything that mattered. I was nudged back into reality by Daryl, who had retrieved my harpoon from below. My thumb swiveled the dial which turned my torch on again, and the dancing moonlight vanished.
We paddled lazily along the coastline, our eyes following the torches’ beams as they swooped across the seabed, catching a movement here and there – the gentle waving of seaweed, the darting glow of small fish as they scooted forward to eat something, and then flitted away to avoid being eaten in turn. Crabs scuttled across algae-covered rocks. A moray stopped and glared at me with yellow-eyed malevolence, mouth agape, before winding off gracefully to some hidden nook. A small octopus, caught in the beam of my torch, faded slowly to the colour of the rock it was resting on, and gave me a nervous stare.
I dove down and prodded it playfully with my finger. In a tangle of tentacles, it glided a short distance and stopped again, the pigment in its skin turning it white, its mantle expanding as it tried to make itself look bigger. Without going up for breath, I followed it and poked it again. This time, the octopus opened out umbrella-like, let off a cloud of ink, and then, in one fluid, boneless movement, jetted away like a tiny, bullet-headed rocket. I followed its passage with my torch, fascinated, and that’s when I saw…
… it.
It stood on the seabed like a fossilized monster, a vivid blue, and my first confused thought was ‘shark!’ because, although it was too still, too angular, and so obviously not a shark, it was also so out of place and so big that I couldn’t see what else it could possibly be. It also seemed to be breathing, slowly, like a sleeping ogre, an effect which I realised, after a split-second of heart-pounding shock, was caused by the undulating seaweed belly-dancing around it.
It was the blue van.
***
“Must be an insurance scam”, said Daryl as we were packing up later that night. “Dump the van in the sea, claim it was stolen and giggle all the way to the bank, carrying large moneybags with dollar-signs printed on them”.
“You read way too many comics”, I told him, hopping on one leg as I peeled off my wetsuit, cigarette clamped between my lips.
Daryl grinned and poured us both a cup of coffee from the thermos we carried with us every time we went diving. At his feet, our neon yellow net squirmed and bulged as our catch inside tried to make a bid for freedom. The occasional tentacle popped out, feebly waving goodbye to the world.
“It scared the hell out of me when I saw it”, I told him, finally getting out of the wetsuit and stuffing it into a black garbage bag before tossing it into the back of the car. Wrapping a towel round my waist, I gratefully took the coffee from him and took a large gulp, burning my tongue and throat in the process. “It looked like it had been neatly parked there by a desperate valet who’d run out of options”.
Which, of course, was the whole point.
It looked as if it had been neatly parked there…
***
… whereas Charlie’s car looked as if it had taken the long route through Hell and back. The tyres had been slashed, the bonnet had been ripped off, the engine smashed to smithereens. Every inch of the car’s body had been dented, scratched and bludgeoned as if a gang of hoodlums with baseball bats and an incredible hatred for Porsches had been let loose on it. There was no way that being driven into the reservoir could have damaged the car that badly. Even David Allgood’s most violent storm in living memory wouldn’t have caused that much destruction.
Which meant that the car had been annihilated before it ever touched the water.
Which meant that it had been pushed into the reservoir, not driven.
Which meant that Charlie hadn’t been in the driver’s seat, and was not currently lying bloated underwater on a muddy bed amidst rusty tin cans and discarded refrigerators.
Even the legend of Martha’s Harbour was easier to believe than that.
***
“So what d’you think happened?” I asked Daryl, “another insurance scam, like the blue van?”
“What, Charlie?” Daryl shook his head. “Nah. Why bother destroying the car? Why not just dump it?”
A funny feeling came over me then, a feeling of unreality, as if we were two kids playing at cops and robbers, solving crime while the authorities stood around scratching their heads and muttering, “Those pesky kids…” under their breaths, the way they did in all the best Scooby Doo cartoons. I half expected some guy in a gorilla costume to come bursting in through the door and start chasing us around the house with outstretched arms and yelling ‘Gaarrgh!’ Then later, when he was booby-trapped and wrapped head to toe in rope, we would pull off the mask (it was always a mask) and Charlie would grin at us, that familiar sparkle in his piercing blue eyes and a roll-up clenched in his teeth, and he would say “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”
Jinkies.
“Joyriders then?” I said. “Stole the car, killed it for kicks, then scuttled it?”
Daryl shrugged. “Could be. I don’t know. Only Charlie knows, and he isn’t around to tell us”.
We sat in gloomy silence, punctuated only by the ticking of the kitchen clock as it chopped minutes up into seconds.
A sudden thought occurred to me. The hand holding my cigarette froze halfway to my lips, and I frowned.
“What is it?” asked Daryl.
“You know something?” I asked him. I stubbed the remaining half of the cigarette out in the ashtray and stood up. “Hundreds of people watch the news every night, but only you and Amber phoned”. And good old Colin dot com, I added silently, but I’m too hyped up to worry about that right now. That’s something I can freak out over later.
“Amber?” Daryl asked, puzzled.
“Amber. Charlie’s ex. From seven years ago”.
“Meaning what? That Charlie didn’t have any friends?”
“Yes…” I paused, then corrected myself, “well… no. Meaning that we were Charlie’s friends. You, me, Claire, Rachael, Amy… we were the people… I mean… we are the people that Charlie cared… cares about. He didn’t have anyone else because he didn’t need anyone else. He has no brothers or sisters, both his parents are dead…”
… then make sure you never get married… Charlie had told me the night I first met him when I had expressed clichéd sympathy on hearing of his father’s death. Much later, Charlie had told me that his mother had been quick to follow her husband to the grave… the shock of waking up one fine morning with a still warm corpse beside her in bed had been the ultimate blow to her already weak heart.
“… we were his friends, Daryl. And you know what else?” I didn’t wait for him to answer, nor did he attempt to. I realised I was getting angry – I wasn’t quite sure why, and I didn’t care. I snatched my packet of cigarettes roughly from the table and lit up yet another. The lighter flame danced as my hand shook. I pushed on relentlessly. “When he disappeared, when I found his note on the kettle that morning, I didn’t even bother to find out why, or where. I wondered, of course… we all did, but I never tried. I just went on with life, assuming that one day he would just turn up again and explain it all. But he didn’t, and he hasn’t, and I want to know why, dammit!”
“Easy”, said Daryl softly, and I realised I had been shouting. I slowly sat down again and took a deep drag of my cigarette.
“Sorry”, I mumbled eventually.
Daryl waved his hand vaguely in the air, indicating that my apology was unnecessary.
“So”, he said cautiously, as if expecting another outburst. “What are you getting at?”
I took a deep breath and tried to rearrange my thoughts. I was still surprised by my emotional explosion. Where the hell had that come from? I don’t think I had realised how much Charlie’s disappearance had affected me until that moment.
“What I’m getting at is Amber’s phone call”, I said after a while. “I mean… they broke up seven years ago, you know? And it wasn’t a friendly break-up…”
As I spoke, my mind flashed back to the first time I had met Amber. Well, perhaps ‘met’ is too loose a term, since all I had seen of her was an angry flushed face yelling abuse at Charlie from a second storey window as she had hurled his clothes down at him into the street below while he limped around pathetically trying to retrieve his worldly possessions from the gutter, begging her to be reasonable. It definitely hadn’t been a friendly break-up – it had been a break-up right out of Hollywood, right down to the grinning bystanders standing around and enjoying the commotion. Apparently, they hadn’t had the same idea as to where the relationship was going. Amber had dreams of marriage and children, whereas Charlie just had dreams. Dreams which, sadly, didn’t include her. Amber, I’d discovered, wasn’t a girl who took rejection well.
“What I’m getting at”, I repeated, returning to the present, “is that Charlie never told Amber where he was going when they broke up. Never left a number or anything. So how could she have called me last night unless…”
“Unless…?”
“Unless she’s seen Charlie again recently”, I finished, feeling more like Scooby Doo than ever. Elementary, dear Watson. It was Miss Scarlet in the conservatory with the lead piping.
Daryl nodded thoughtfully. His eyes were staring into space, and I could tell that he was considering my conclusions from every angle, looking for a chink in my reasoning.
“Unless he called her later after they broke up. Just to smooth things over”.
Daryl and his damned logic.
“Well yeah”, I said, deflated. “But it’s worth thinking about”.
“Okay”, he said eventually, “well done, Colombo. So now what?”
“We phone Amber, and find out what she knows”.
“If she knows anything at all”.
“Well”, I said, standing up again. “It’s a start”.
By the morning, we have resigned ourselves to the fact that what has happened cannot be changed, that we just have to go ahead and deal with it. It is in sleep that this process of self-healing begins.
Besides, I was one hundred percent sure of one thing.
I knew that Charlie was still very much alive.
***
There were six messages on the answering machine when I went down for my breakfast the next morning – six messages which must have been left for me the night before while I was out with Rachael and that I had been too shattered to check for when I got home. Switching on the kettle, I hunkered down by the telephone and pressed the play button. After a few seconds of static, a very quiet female voice filtered out through the small grey speaker.
‘Charlie? Pick up if you’re there’.
There was a pause, during which I could hear an indistinct male voice droning on in the background. I made out the words ‘…stated today that if…’ and realised that the voice was coming from a television set. The news. I knew what was coming next, even before the female voice continued.
‘… I guess you’re out then. Look, I… um… I was just watching the news and there was your car… at least, it looked like your car… I’m just calling to see if you’re okay. Call me back when you get this…’ There was another pause, then… ‘It’s Amber. Bye’.
Click.
“Nine hours and eight minutes”, came the robotic monotone of the recorded time-check function.
The second caller was Daryl. His voice sounded urgent.
‘Joey? Give me a call when you get in, will you? Doesn’t matter what time. It’s important. About Charlie’. Pause, then ‘bye’.
The kettle clicked off at the same time as the message. I straightened up and crossed into the kitchen as the machine said “Ten hours and twelve minutes” in the same flat and indifferent tones. I poured hot water into my mug and watched it turn black as the third message started.
Someone breathing – deep, slow breaths, as if waiting, anticipating. Tinny music in the background. It was a tune I recognised but couldn’t place.
Click.
“Ten hours and thirty… one minutes”, came the recording.
I hated it when people didn’t speak. Why bother waiting for the beep if you weren’t going to leave a message? I stirred my coffee and waited for the next…
The same sound of someone breathing. The same tinny music. The same song. I stopped stirring and stood like a statue, listening, trying to make out the words. Whoever it was hadn’t waited long between one phone call and the next.
Click.
“Ten hours and thirty… two minutes”.
I put my coffee down on the kitchen top and crossed back over to the telephone. I watched suspiciously as the neon yellow display switched from four to five.
‘… the way the camera follows us in slo-mo…’
Click.
“Ten hours and thirty… four minutes”.
It was a Paul Simon song – I couldn’t remember the name but I had it on CD somewhere. Something about days of miracle and wonder.
The machine reached the last message. I was not entirely surprised to hear the last strains of the same song coming through the speaker.
There was a clicking sound, as of a door opening. Then came a voice, a male voice, muffled and far away. It said one word. It didn’t belong to the caller – it sounded as if it was coming from across the room. A sharp intake of breath. Then…
Click.
“Ten hours and thirty… five minutes”.
I pressed play again, and skipped forward to the last message.
Paul Simon humming as the song faded.
The click of the door.
I closed my eyes and held my breath.
‘Calling?’
The intake of breath, as if the caller had been surprised, as if whoever it was hadn’t heard the door open, hadn’t been expecting anyone to walk in… I pressed the repeat button.
‘The Boy in the Bubble’. That was the name of the Paul Simon track.
Click went the door.
That one word.
The startled breath – not, I realised, because the caller had been surprised, but because he had inadvertently left his name on my machine.
I opened my eyes and frowned.
Not ‘Calling?’
Colin.
***
I was just about to leave the house – had, in fact, already started reaching for the front door – when, on the other side, somebody rang the doorbell, startling twelve kinds of shit out of me. I blinked, my heart thudding in my chest as if an insane drummer had taken up residence there, then lowered my arm slowly. It would be Colin, I was sure, looking more like an angry bear than ever, a dark frown creasing his forehead and thunderbolts blazing in his eyes as he reached out and grabbed me by the neck, lifting me off my feet, pulling me forward until I was inches from those eyes, eyes that had the fires of hell burning in them, and bellowing ‘Rachael’s mine, Rachael’s mine, mine, d’you hear me, mine…’ And all the time, with every syllable, he would be slamming me from doorpost to doorpost, my teeth rattling in my head like bingo chips. And then Colin would draw back his mighty fist and ram it down my throat…
The bell rang again.
‘You sad, sad bastard’ said the alien in my head. ‘You know it’s not Colin’.
I reached out and opened the door.
‘Probably’, added the alien.
It wasn’t. It was Daryl.
“Thought you’d already left for work”, he said, stepping past me and into the house. He turned to look at me, and his eyes rested on my face.
“You saw it too then?”
“Huh?”
“The news? Charlie’s car?”
“Oh”. I realised that Daryl had misinterpreted the dazed look on my face. “Yeah. Last night while I was out with Rachael. At Da Quiri’s”.
I followed Daryl into the kitchen and dumped my rucksack on the floor – I knew I wouldn’t be going to work today. Daryl pulled out a chair and dumped himself unceremoniously at the dining-room table.
“Coffee?”
“Sure. Strong. I’m knackered. Didn’t get much sleep last night”.
It showed. There were dark rings under his eyes and his hair was sticking up all over the place. I was about to toss in a wisecrack about him looking like shit when he added,
“Again. Bed seems too big”.
I handed him the coffee in silence. He cupped his hands around it as if they were cold and blew gently into the mug. A thin cloud of steam puffed out lazily and disappeared.
“Where’s Amy?” I asked as I poured myself a second cup in half an hour. What the hell – hyperactivity was the least of my problems.
“Round at Catherine’s. She’s taking her kids to the beach this afternoon, and Amy’s going with them”.
I dragged out a chair and sat opposite Daryl, carefully placing my coffee on the table in front of me.
“So… what d’you think?” I said, reaching for my cigarettes. With anyone else I would have had to clarify the question, but Daryl and I had known each other long enough to share the same frequency.
“I’m not sure. I know what I don’t think though. I don’t think he was in the car when it went under”.
“Neither do I”. I lit the cigarette and took a long drag. Daryl reached out and took the packet. I raised an inquiring eyebrow at him – Daryl had quit smoking the day he had found out that Claire was pregnant. He caught my look and shrugged awkwardly.
“What difference does it make?” he said gruffly. “We’re here today and gone tomorrow anyway”.
I found myself wishing that he would stop referring to Claire all the time – however indirectly. It made me feel uncomfortable and useless, not knowing what to say. I felt like shouting out ‘okay already! She’s dead! I know she’s dead. You don’t have to keep on reminding me, dammit!’ but I felt ashamed of the thought even as it entered my head. Instead, I took a deep breath, and started,
“Daryl. I’m not very good at this comforting of the bereaved stuff, but…”
I stopped there because Daryl was waving his hand at me as if swatting an invisible fly. My voice faltered as he spoke,
“You don’t need to give me a speech, Joey. Over the past two weeks I’ve had speeches up to here…” He touched the edge of his hand to his forehead to indicate exactly how many speeches he’d had to sit through, then went on, “You’ve always been there when I needed you, when Claire needed you, and when Amy needed you, and all I’m hoping is that you’ll be there still…”
“Of course I will”, I said. “You know that”. My voice shook a little as, unbidden, Rachael’s voice came back to haunt me from the night before… ‘you weren’t around… and I needed you, Joey… I needed you…’
Daryl smiled at me, a smile which encompassed a lifetime of friendship, ups and downs, happiness and sorrow, fiddles and violins.
“Then that’s all you need to say”, he said.
He plucked the cigarette lighter out of my unresisting hand and lit his cigarette. He took a deep drag and exhaled with a sigh of obvious satisfaction.
“Ten years of abstinence down the drain”, he said, studying the tip of the cigarette with a smile playing on his lips, “…and it feels gooooood”.
His eyes locked onto mine.
“Remember that time we went diving together last year?” he asked.
We were on the same frequency again.
I nodded.
“The blue van”, I said.
He grinned.
“Lachrymose Bay”, he said.
***
Lachrymose Bay was so called because of its shape. From a bird-eye view, it looked as if God, perhaps as a creative afterthought while creating the island, had taken a colossal teardrop-shaped pastry cutter and pressed down firmly, carving out an enormous chunk of rock to allow the sea water to flood in via the relatively narrow gap at the tapered end of the tear.
Lachrymose Bay was the official name for the inlet – the name found on maps of the island. The local fishermen, whose colourful fishing boats dotted the shoreline in a plethora of reds, yellows, blues and greens and whose prows were all adorned with the Eye of Osiris in order to keep away evil sea spirits, simply called it Martha’s Harbour. There was a story behind the name, as there is a story behind the namesake of every fishing village everywhere in the world.
Daryl and I had first heard the story from an old fisherman – who looked as if he had come straight out of a storybook, white beard, battered cap, pipe and all – one evening last summer. A born story-teller, his voice rising and falling as naturally as the sea he made a living from, he had effortlessly transported us back to the time of a 'young local lass' called Martha...
'... who was as beautiful as the rising sun, as innocent as a newborn and as pure as pure could be. Her eyes were the shape of almonds and the colour of the most luxurious dark chocolate, her hair was a silky cascade of ebony curls, her lips as red as cherries. Many a young suitor would lurk anxiously beneath her window, waiting for the day when a plant pot of fresh basil would appear on the sill, put proudly there by Martha’s mother, indicating, as was the custom in those days, that her daughter had come of age and was ready for marriage.
When the long-awaited plant finally appeared, the number of hopeful young swains vying for Martha’s attention under that window, declaring their wealth and crooning home-made ballads of love, was a sight to be seen. Yet it was a certain young man, David Allgood by name, who stole Martha’s heart and made it his own. A fisherman by trade, as had been his father and his father’s father before him, David often set out in conditions where no sane fisherman would venture, with waves towering fifty feet high and winds raging strong enough to bring the rain slashing down like lead pellets. He took no heed of his colleagues’ somber warnings, shrugging off their forebodings like a snake shrugging off its skin. There were those in the village who considered him a fearless young hero who laughed in the face of danger; others who thought he was a fool who would one day tempt the Fates too far and get his comeuppance, which was far overdue.
The day came towards the end of summer, a week before the wedding was to take place. The sky was dark and brooding as David made his way down to the water’s edge where his tiny boat was moored. Laden with fishing nets and lobster pots, and in a hurry to be off, David ignored, as he had done many a time before, the dire warnings of the other fisherfolk.
“Only a madman would venture out this evening”, they cried as he boarded his boat. “Open your eyes and see, the sea-bed is waiting hungrily for a fool to join it tonight! Are you sure that you want to be that fool?”
David threw back his head and laughed merrily.
“This madman will return”, he claimed, “and with a boat fair bursting with fish, I’ll wager”.
The fisherfolk shook their heads ominously, and muttered to themselves as they headed back to the safety of the local tavern.
“The sea loves a tragedy”, they told each other in doom-laden voices. “A week before the wedding too… he tempts the Fates too far”.
That night, all hell broke loose. The winds bellowed through the village with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding on its tail, tearing the roofs off houses and uprooting trees with malignant indifference. Lightning forked down from the heavens like the tongues of serpents as needle-sharp rain battered down and thunder roared. Waves rolled, crashed and broke on the shore – white foam spraying hundreds of feet into the air like the dying howl of some huge rabid beast. It was the cruelest, most vindictive storm in living memory, and young David Allgood was never seen again.
Martha – poor, beautiful, bereaved Martha – never fell in love again. Every day for the rest of her long life, she would go down to the shore and weep in sorrow for what could have been and never was. And, it is said, all the salty, bitter tears that rolled down her lovely cheeks and fell to the ground wore away at the rock little by little, eventually forming what today is known as Lachrymose Bay, a safe harbour for all fishermen caught in a storm.
So goes the legend of Martha’s Harbour.'
***
Lachrymose Bay, Daryl had been told by one of the waiters where he worked, was a veritable diver’s paradise, where the fish practically ‘throw themselves onto your harpoon and the octopi are the size of submarines’. Apparently, the fish followed the boats into the bay, feeding on a trail of guts and other scraps thrown overboard, and then were too fat, lazy and stupid to find their way out through the narrow inlet again. Our usual diving spot, along the coastline of Serenity, had been temporarily ruined by the construction of yet another waterside hotel, polluting the water with cement dust and other debris of human indifference, so we had decided to give it a try.
We got to the bay at quarter to eight, when the sun was disappearing over the horizon and the sky was as colourful as a handful of melted Smarties clasped in a child’s fist – faded reds, yellows, purples and blues. The moon was already visible, a pale spotlight which would grow brighter as the day got darker. It was still too light to dive – the fish would still be alert and any octopi that might reside in the bay would not yet have slid cautiously out of their hidey-holes to feed – so we stopped for a coffee in a small bar called ‘The Blue Grotto’. It was here that we met the fisherman, whose name we never found out (but would always refer to as Popeye), who told us the legend of Martha’s Harbour for the price of a beer. He had the air of one who had told the story a thousand times, and a sparkle in his weathered old eyes that revealed that he wouldn’t mind telling it a thousand times more.
The sea was as calm as a Sunday morning in spring as Daryl and I struggled into our wetsuits – mine purple and black, Daryl’s a neon yellow and black, both of them of the short armed, short legged variety known as ‘shorties’. The water was a warm twenty-four degrees Celsius, but after an hour or so the sea had a tendency to reach out with chilly fingers and grab hold of your heart, freezing you from the inside out.
We sat by the water’s edge and, pulling back the thick rubber of our harpoons, loaded them and tossed them into the water – twin splashes which turned into ripples and then back to a halcyon calm. Having put on our facemasks and flippers, we finally flicked on our torches and slid silently into the water like wraiths.
I flicked my torch off again as the water seeped through the neoprene of my suit, gently caressing me all over like a refreshing liquid massage. The moonlight glimmered and shimmered off the rocky seabed as I floated, enjoying the calm weightless feeling. This was how I imagined Neil Armstrong had felt when he stepped out onto the moon’s surface – alone in a magical, hypnotic world, millions of miles away from anything that mattered. I was nudged back into reality by Daryl, who had retrieved my harpoon from below. My thumb swiveled the dial which turned my torch on again, and the dancing moonlight vanished.
We paddled lazily along the coastline, our eyes following the torches’ beams as they swooped across the seabed, catching a movement here and there – the gentle waving of seaweed, the darting glow of small fish as they scooted forward to eat something, and then flitted away to avoid being eaten in turn. Crabs scuttled across algae-covered rocks. A moray stopped and glared at me with yellow-eyed malevolence, mouth agape, before winding off gracefully to some hidden nook. A small octopus, caught in the beam of my torch, faded slowly to the colour of the rock it was resting on, and gave me a nervous stare.
I dove down and prodded it playfully with my finger. In a tangle of tentacles, it glided a short distance and stopped again, the pigment in its skin turning it white, its mantle expanding as it tried to make itself look bigger. Without going up for breath, I followed it and poked it again. This time, the octopus opened out umbrella-like, let off a cloud of ink, and then, in one fluid, boneless movement, jetted away like a tiny, bullet-headed rocket. I followed its passage with my torch, fascinated, and that’s when I saw…
… it.
It stood on the seabed like a fossilized monster, a vivid blue, and my first confused thought was ‘shark!’ because, although it was too still, too angular, and so obviously not a shark, it was also so out of place and so big that I couldn’t see what else it could possibly be. It also seemed to be breathing, slowly, like a sleeping ogre, an effect which I realised, after a split-second of heart-pounding shock, was caused by the undulating seaweed belly-dancing around it.
It was the blue van.
***
“Must be an insurance scam”, said Daryl as we were packing up later that night. “Dump the van in the sea, claim it was stolen and giggle all the way to the bank, carrying large moneybags with dollar-signs printed on them”.
“You read way too many comics”, I told him, hopping on one leg as I peeled off my wetsuit, cigarette clamped between my lips.
Daryl grinned and poured us both a cup of coffee from the thermos we carried with us every time we went diving. At his feet, our neon yellow net squirmed and bulged as our catch inside tried to make a bid for freedom. The occasional tentacle popped out, feebly waving goodbye to the world.
“It scared the hell out of me when I saw it”, I told him, finally getting out of the wetsuit and stuffing it into a black garbage bag before tossing it into the back of the car. Wrapping a towel round my waist, I gratefully took the coffee from him and took a large gulp, burning my tongue and throat in the process. “It looked like it had been neatly parked there by a desperate valet who’d run out of options”.
Which, of course, was the whole point.
It looked as if it had been neatly parked there…
***
… whereas Charlie’s car looked as if it had taken the long route through Hell and back. The tyres had been slashed, the bonnet had been ripped off, the engine smashed to smithereens. Every inch of the car’s body had been dented, scratched and bludgeoned as if a gang of hoodlums with baseball bats and an incredible hatred for Porsches had been let loose on it. There was no way that being driven into the reservoir could have damaged the car that badly. Even David Allgood’s most violent storm in living memory wouldn’t have caused that much destruction.
Which meant that the car had been annihilated before it ever touched the water.
Which meant that it had been pushed into the reservoir, not driven.
Which meant that Charlie hadn’t been in the driver’s seat, and was not currently lying bloated underwater on a muddy bed amidst rusty tin cans and discarded refrigerators.
Even the legend of Martha’s Harbour was easier to believe than that.
***
“So what d’you think happened?” I asked Daryl, “another insurance scam, like the blue van?”
“What, Charlie?” Daryl shook his head. “Nah. Why bother destroying the car? Why not just dump it?”
A funny feeling came over me then, a feeling of unreality, as if we were two kids playing at cops and robbers, solving crime while the authorities stood around scratching their heads and muttering, “Those pesky kids…” under their breaths, the way they did in all the best Scooby Doo cartoons. I half expected some guy in a gorilla costume to come bursting in through the door and start chasing us around the house with outstretched arms and yelling ‘Gaarrgh!’ Then later, when he was booby-trapped and wrapped head to toe in rope, we would pull off the mask (it was always a mask) and Charlie would grin at us, that familiar sparkle in his piercing blue eyes and a roll-up clenched in his teeth, and he would say “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”
Jinkies.
“Joyriders then?” I said. “Stole the car, killed it for kicks, then scuttled it?”
Daryl shrugged. “Could be. I don’t know. Only Charlie knows, and he isn’t around to tell us”.
We sat in gloomy silence, punctuated only by the ticking of the kitchen clock as it chopped minutes up into seconds.
A sudden thought occurred to me. The hand holding my cigarette froze halfway to my lips, and I frowned.
“What is it?” asked Daryl.
“You know something?” I asked him. I stubbed the remaining half of the cigarette out in the ashtray and stood up. “Hundreds of people watch the news every night, but only you and Amber phoned”. And good old Colin dot com, I added silently, but I’m too hyped up to worry about that right now. That’s something I can freak out over later.
“Amber?” Daryl asked, puzzled.
“Amber. Charlie’s ex. From seven years ago”.
“Meaning what? That Charlie didn’t have any friends?”
“Yes…” I paused, then corrected myself, “well… no. Meaning that we were Charlie’s friends. You, me, Claire, Rachael, Amy… we were the people… I mean… we are the people that Charlie cared… cares about. He didn’t have anyone else because he didn’t need anyone else. He has no brothers or sisters, both his parents are dead…”
… then make sure you never get married… Charlie had told me the night I first met him when I had expressed clichéd sympathy on hearing of his father’s death. Much later, Charlie had told me that his mother had been quick to follow her husband to the grave… the shock of waking up one fine morning with a still warm corpse beside her in bed had been the ultimate blow to her already weak heart.
“… we were his friends, Daryl. And you know what else?” I didn’t wait for him to answer, nor did he attempt to. I realised I was getting angry – I wasn’t quite sure why, and I didn’t care. I snatched my packet of cigarettes roughly from the table and lit up yet another. The lighter flame danced as my hand shook. I pushed on relentlessly. “When he disappeared, when I found his note on the kettle that morning, I didn’t even bother to find out why, or where. I wondered, of course… we all did, but I never tried. I just went on with life, assuming that one day he would just turn up again and explain it all. But he didn’t, and he hasn’t, and I want to know why, dammit!”
“Easy”, said Daryl softly, and I realised I had been shouting. I slowly sat down again and took a deep drag of my cigarette.
“Sorry”, I mumbled eventually.
Daryl waved his hand vaguely in the air, indicating that my apology was unnecessary.
“So”, he said cautiously, as if expecting another outburst. “What are you getting at?”
I took a deep breath and tried to rearrange my thoughts. I was still surprised by my emotional explosion. Where the hell had that come from? I don’t think I had realised how much Charlie’s disappearance had affected me until that moment.
“What I’m getting at is Amber’s phone call”, I said after a while. “I mean… they broke up seven years ago, you know? And it wasn’t a friendly break-up…”
As I spoke, my mind flashed back to the first time I had met Amber. Well, perhaps ‘met’ is too loose a term, since all I had seen of her was an angry flushed face yelling abuse at Charlie from a second storey window as she had hurled his clothes down at him into the street below while he limped around pathetically trying to retrieve his worldly possessions from the gutter, begging her to be reasonable. It definitely hadn’t been a friendly break-up – it had been a break-up right out of Hollywood, right down to the grinning bystanders standing around and enjoying the commotion. Apparently, they hadn’t had the same idea as to where the relationship was going. Amber had dreams of marriage and children, whereas Charlie just had dreams. Dreams which, sadly, didn’t include her. Amber, I’d discovered, wasn’t a girl who took rejection well.
“What I’m getting at”, I repeated, returning to the present, “is that Charlie never told Amber where he was going when they broke up. Never left a number or anything. So how could she have called me last night unless…”
“Unless…?”
“Unless she’s seen Charlie again recently”, I finished, feeling more like Scooby Doo than ever. Elementary, dear Watson. It was Miss Scarlet in the conservatory with the lead piping.
Daryl nodded thoughtfully. His eyes were staring into space, and I could tell that he was considering my conclusions from every angle, looking for a chink in my reasoning.
“Unless he called her later after they broke up. Just to smooth things over”.
Daryl and his damned logic.
“Well yeah”, I said, deflated. “But it’s worth thinking about”.
“Okay”, he said eventually, “well done, Colombo. So now what?”
“We phone Amber, and find out what she knows”.
“If she knows anything at all”.
“Well”, I said, standing up again. “It’s a start”.
***
Forward to Chapter Four | Part Two
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