Creatures of the Pool Read online

  I see that she can’t bear to think so. She doesn’t need to add “I liked her, Gavin. I think she’s right for you. Don’t fall out with her over this, will you? We don’t want to lose anyone else.”

  “I hope we haven’t lost anyone.” This leaves her comment ominous, and so I ask “Just what did they say?”

  “He made such a scene over something that didn’t exist that the library had to call someone to take him away. That sounds like drugs, doesn’t it? And the way he’s been behaving about water.”

  “Come on, you’d know if he was taking any drugs.”

  “He has changed, Gavin. Some of the ideas he’s been having recently I can’t follow at all. And some days I’ve hardly seen him. Suppose he’s been going out to take something? Then I wouldn’t know.”

  “You’ve only started thinking like this since the police came, haven’t you? Don’t let them get to you. You’re tired, that’s all.”

  “You look as if you are, Gavin. I don’t want to tire you out when you’ve got so much to do.” With some pride and more doubtfulness she adds “I did ring up the radio station to ask if anyone saw where his bike might have been taken from. That was before the police came.”

  “And had anyone?”

  “They’ll give my number to anyone who rings.” She has started to let herself look hopeful when she glances upwards. “What’s that?”

  I’ve been hearing the soft regular sounds for some time. I thought it was raining again, but the sky is suppressing its downpour. “It’s upstairs,” my mother says. “It’s in his room.”

  “I’ll see.”

  I hold up a hand to forestall her, but she follows without bothering to be quiet. From the hall the sounds suggest that someone’s pacing on tiptoe upstairs. I grab the unsteady banister for extra speed and run up two stairs at a time as noiselessly as I can to switch on the light in my father’s workroom.

  It’s empty apart from the desk and the clutter that covers and surrounds it. There’s barely a path between stacks of books and papers from the door to the chair in front of the desk. The room is silent, not least because I’m holding my breath. Then the noise emerges from hiding, and I see movement. Several words of a print-out on top of a pile of books swell up as if they’re being magnified for my attention, and then they spread into a stain, blackening the page.

  Another drop of water starts to dangle from the ceiling. As I step forward it elongates and detaches itself. Surely I’m hurrying, and only lack of sleep makes me feel as oddly sluggish as the drip looks. It wins the race and splashes on the page, turning the words in the midst of a description of a hunt into soggy nonsense. I seem to glimpse a reference to some fluid transformation of the hunters’ quarry, no doubt a legend, as I snatch the unstable pile out of the way. “All right,” I tell my mother. “It’s just—”

  “It isn’t,” she cries and lurches into the room. “Help me.”

  She stoops with a groan to gather more than an armful of my father’s research and staggers onto the landing. She’s heading for their bedroom when she falters. “Where’s it coming from?”

  “It’s been raining so much that it must have collected under the roof.”

  She darts to the stairs and teeters on the topmost while she swings around to watch me. “We need to take everything down.”

  I’m close to grabbing her to steady her. “Shall I take some of that for you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I can manage.” She demonstrates by tramping down several stairs, faster than I think she intended. “You bring his computer,” she says.

  She’s pressing her cheek against the top of the pile to hold it tighter if not from displaced affection. While I can’t grasp her concern for his ideas so soon after she was criticising them, I shouldn’t judge her when she’s so anxious. I disconnect the various leads on the computer tower and hug it as I make my careful way downstairs. The metal feels clammy, unless that’s me. My mother has dumped her burden in a corner of the front room. “Might the damp get to it there?” I wonder.

  She drags the stack a few inches away from the walls and stands up panting. “I must need someone else to do my thinking for me,” she says, “I’m in such a state.”

  I plant the tower beside the television and dodge her on the landing as she returns with another rickety stack. I grab the computer monitor and plod to the front room, where the accumulating clutter reminds me of my previous visit—I could fancy that my mother is willing the disorder to magic my father home. Soon she resorts to piling books and papers in the hall. “They’ll be all right there for now,” she assures me or herself. “I don’t mind where they are so long as they’re safe.”

  Is she applying the same thought to my father? I run upstairs in an attempt to head her off from carrying too much. As I lift another stack, the latest drip catches my wrist. It’s larger and thicker than I would expect, and retains a shape like an amoeba on my skin until I set off downstairs, at which point it trickles onto my hand, extending tendrils towards the gaps between my knuckles. This maddens me, and I almost sprawl headlong in my haste to get rid of the papers before the water can reach them. “What’s happened to you?” my mother cries.

  “Just wet,” I say and hurry to rinse my hand and wrist under the bathroom tap. I use soap as well and towel my skin vigorously, which only aggravates the tingling I wanted to assuage. We finish clearing the workroom, and the mocking sound of an irrepressible drip follows us into the hall. My mother releases a protracted sigh and leans on the creaky banister while she rubs the small of her back. “Thanks for being such a help,” she says. “Do you want to make me a promise?”

  “What about?”

  She seems disappointed by my wariness. “Don’t have an upset with your girlfriend over us. We’ve enough to worry about,” she says, and upstairs a drip punctuates the end of her sentence as if she has called the water forth.

  Chapter Sixteen

  STRONG MATERIAL

  As I tramp down Folly Lane or rather Islington, away from my parents’ house, the weight of the sky laden with darkness appears to press layer after layer of the cityscape into the river. The students at the university halfway down the slope have gone home for the summer, but delegates at a conference on the history of seaside resorts are converging on a campus theatre opposite the Collegiate, which looks more like a stage set than ever. In the middle of the eighteenth century Liverpool was a seaside resort, bringing actors up north to entertain the holidaymakers while the London theatres were shut for the season. I’m struck by the notion that everyone was enticed here by water. Quite a few of the delegates are anticipating some of that and carrying umbrellas. As the sun glares through a crack in the darkness I seem to glimpse the blossoming of one before its shabby owner vanishes around a corner.

  Thirst is making my throat feel as rough as my skin where I wiped off the drip. I’m alongside London Road now, and I imagine drinking from the Moss Lake stream that fed the Pool. The thought brings an image of silhouettes lapping at the Pool or raising handfuls of it to their faces. The vision is lit by a moon, but I can’t distinguish how many of the drinkers are human, nor whether the forms rising to meet them are their reflections. The image is so vivid while it lasts that I could think my thirst is giving me a fever.

  Two hundred years ago I would have seen stalls in the Welly Market ahead, between St George’s Hall and the old law courts. I assume the nickname originated with the well around which the market flourished until outbreaks of violence led to a ban, and perhaps Wellington kept the name alive. He’s perched on a towering column beside a fountain, where children are dancing around the inside of the stone bowl as if they’re performing a ritual to summon up water. The sight exacerbates my thirst as I trudge down Shaw’s Brow, where a lunatic asylum faced whatever was to be seen on the heath—“lights which belong on the marsh,” according to one inmate, who also spoke of hopping figures lit by them or from within. The asylum was demolished by the time Shaw’s Brow became William Brown Street
. The library halfway down the slope contains a cafeteria, but my thirst can wait until I’ve had a few words with Lucinda.

  The automatic doors wince aside, and the lift carries me up to Local History. Lucinda isn’t behind the counter or among the tables mounted with microfilm readers. She isn’t in the inner room, where tables are overlooked by token shelves of books. The counter is staffed by a plump youngish man in a pinstriped suit and narrow rimless glasses. His round face surmounted by pale cropped hair seems determined to appear older than its years, with a pallid rectangular moustache to compensate for its paucity of eyebrows. No doubt he’s preparing to unleash a query as sombre as his expression until I say “Where’s Lucinda?”

  “She’s quite busy just now.”

  “Can you let her know I’m here? I need a word.”

  “What about, please?”

  “She’ll know, or if she doesn’t she soon will.” When this fails to shift him or his expression I say “So can I see her?”

  “She’s nowhere you can go, I’m afraid.”

  She must be in the stacks. “Then you’d better tell her I’m here.”

  “And who would you be?”

  “Say Gavin.”

  “Gavin…”

  “Meadows,” I resent having to tell him.

  “Ah.” Even more meaningfully he adds “Yes.”

  “Yes what?” I say fiercely enough for several readers to frown in my direction.

  “You were here the other night, weren’t you? And your father was. I hope there’ll be no repetition of the incident.”

  “I wish there would,” I blurt and have to explain “If it means he shows up. We don’t know where he is.”

  Perhaps the librarian thinks I’m bidding for sympathy, because he owns up to no emotion. “So are you telling her?” I rather more than prompt.

  “About your father.”

  “She knows about him. About me.”

  “I’ll be dealing with it.”

  Presumably he means when more staff appear, since he can’t leave the library unattended or contact her by phone. “I’ll catch up on my reading till you do,” I say.

  Even once I’ve given him my reader’s ticket that Lucinda made, he’s in no hurry to release the barrier that admits me to the inner room. Beyond it a few readers are poring over books and maps that they’ve requested. More in search of distraction than for research I make for the shelves and find a book of local curiosities. It’s published by Philip, Son & Nephew, the bookshop where my mother worked. The author is Richard Whittington-Egan, a local journalist who wasn’t averse to embellishing his material. Here’s “Cylinder of Horror,” which confirms the tale of the Victorian corpse found in a tube on a bomb site. A librarian returns from wherever she has been, and another wheels a trolley out of the stacks, at which point their bespectacled colleague leaves the counter without glancing at me. As I wait for his reappearance or rather Lucinda’s I read about a Liverpool wrestler called Malleable Mal. He became a legend of the Stadium, which was built over the site of St Paul’s Churchyard off Tithebarn Street, a short walk from James Maybrick’s office and close to Cross’s Trading Menagerie (“Largest Trading Zoological Establishment on the Earth—Send for Requirements—No Species so Rare that It Cannot Be Obtained”). The wrestler’s detractors called him Flabby Mal, apparently because of his fondness for smothering opponents by falling flat—no, hardly flat—on them. He never lost a match, since no amount of twisting and wrenching his limbs could force him to submit, while he seemed able to slither out of any hold and bounce back from the severest forearm smash. He ended his career as half of a tag team, though his partner Brutal Bertie refused to share a dressing-room with him, supposedly because he found the sight of a naked Mal too repulsive. The public only ever saw Mal fully clothed or, in the ring, dressed in a rubbery white fabric from his neck to his wrists and ankles. As a boy Whittington-Egan saw him wrestle, and describes Mal’s body as resembling “tripe wrapped up tight so that it wouldn’t burst in a housewife’s bag of shopping.” After Mal’s retirement the young journalist set out to track him down, but the only address he could trace proved to belong to an abandoned cellar near the oldest dock. Shouldn’t the man with the narrow glasses have returned by now? I leave the book on the table and make for the counter. “Excuse me, what’s happened to your colleague?”

  The younger and taller of the girls turns with a ready smile. “Which one would that be?”

  “Whatever his name is. The fellow with the windows.” When squinting between two pairs of my fingers fails to signify him I say “Glasses, what there was of them.”

  Perhaps my father could make this funnier, but her amusement has begun to look dutiful. “He’s gone home,” her workmate says.

  “Can someone else help?”

  The younger librarian is still amused. It may be her natural state, though I suspect it would change if my anger broke loose. Antagonising the staff might waste time or achieve worse, and so I say “I’ll fill in a slip.”

  Part of the problem may have been that the staff visit the stacks only to fetch books, and I’ve thought of one—the work of the local occultist my father was discussing with Lucinda. I take a squat elongated boxy catalogue off the shelf once I’ve managed to dredge up the name.

  Strong, John. The form of the listing makes him sound like a wrestler, but he’s the author of Glimpses of Absolute Power. Did he publish anything else? Presumably not, since the neighbouring pages refer to other authors—and then I notice marks on the back of his solitary page, like the faint reflection of another entry. The traces of print are unrelated to the next listing, and they aren’t the reverse of his. Nevertheless when I hold the catalogue up to the overhead light I see that the first of the mirrored words are Strong, John.

  The rest of the traces are even fainter. They’ve begun to twitch, or my eyes have, by the time I decide that the next words are “Unpublished papers.” I would fill in a request slip if I could decipher the classification number. Instead I take the catalogue to the counter. “Excuse me, can you tell me what this is?”

  The tall girl settles her amused gaze on me before saying “A catalogue.”

  I could easily find her humour infuriating. Several readers are disturbed by a loud hollow knock—the sound of the catalogue striking the counter. “This,” I say and dent the wad of pages with my finger.

  She eases the catalogue away from me and starts to read the entry opposite the traces of print. “Not that,” I protest and point at them. “There.”

  I feel as if I’m trapped in an unbearably lethargic dream as she makes to turn the page. “There, where I’m showing you,” I don’t quite shout, poking at the page again. “Here, on the back.”

  When she leans forward to examine the sheaf, two translucent drops dangling from her ears sway as if the earrings are about to fall. “It’s this,” she says, indicating the adjacent entry. “It’s some of the ink.”

  “No, it’s from something else that was there.”

  Her colleague joins in peering at the sheaf and jabs a stubby finger at the opposite page. “It’s from that, no question.”

  The entry is for Strong, Johanna. Unreported rapes: thirteen case studies from Liverpool’s docklands. The book is published by Liverpool University Press, but none of this convinces me. “I’m sorry, you’re both wrong,” I insist, “and I want to know—”

  “Let me.” The elder librarian slides the catalogue towards her and underlines the reversed words with a clipped fingernail. “Johanna Strong,” she reads as if she’s dealing with a child. “Unreported, you can see what else it says for yourself.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” I say, recapturing the catalogue. “For a start, that’s not rape.”

  “May we ask what makes you say that?”

  I feel accused by both of them—her colleague is abruptly unamused—and so I say “Can’t you spell?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t appreciate the relevance. If you’d kindly—”

 
“That doesn’t say rape. It would be epar, don’t you see? This says papers. Unpublished papers by John Strong.”

  The tall girl parts her lips, but it’s her colleague who says “May we know your name?”

  “Gavin Meadows. Pool of Life, that’s me, and yes, my father was asking about this. One of you told him it didn’t exist.”

  She doesn’t quite look at the tall girl as she murmurs “I think you’d better call—”

  “No need to get security. I’m just asking about your stock like he did, for God’s sake. Asking you to do your job.” I pick up the catalogue but refrain from brandishing it in case it resembles a weapon. “Lucinda knows about it,” I tell them. “Where is she?”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. Now could you please give me—”

  “I’m keeping hold of it. I want to show her.” I gesture with the catalogue at the door to the stacks, and the pages flap wide. “I’ll wait till she comes out,” I announce.

  “I’m sorry, that won’t be—”

  The woman falls silent as I turn on her, waving the catalogue. I’ve noticed what I should have seen at once. Between the inner edge of the page for John Strong and the one for Johanna is a torn scrap of paper. “Tell me you can’t see that,” I say, no longer knowing how loud. “Someone’s ripped a page out. Who did that? When? What for?”

  Well before I finish, the women are looking at each other. “Call security now,” the elder woman says.

  I stalk across the library, past readers who flinch as I flourish the catalogue. I hammer with it on the door to the stacks. “Lucinda, you’re in there,” I yell. “Come out. We have to talk.” She hasn’t responded when a uniformed guard appears behind the counter. “All right, you win. I’m going,” I inform him and drop the catalogue on a table with a thud that resounds through the room. I grab my ticket from a box on the counter and vault over the barrier to march through the lobby and down the stairs. As I emerge from the building, leaves in St John’s Gardens start to twitch, and the trees shake. The sky sets about delivering its darkness, and if I had any thoughts worth the name they would be drowned by the storm.