Creatures of the Pool Read online

  The avenue leads to a green shaded by trees, recalling the ancient woodland that once surrounded much of Liverpool. Among the trees dozens of robed figures are celebrating Druid Day. In the distance actors are performing a play beside a solitary goal for football practice. Children have tied ribbons to some of the trees, around which they dance with the colourful tethers. A woman in a pointed hat topped with streamers is telling fortunes at a picnic table as she gazes into a bowl of water. A girl similarly garbed is leading people with forked sticks in their hands across the green, and I wonder if she has mistaken what the druids were supposed to have meant by divination. I’m reminded that a stream used to start from the park and join the river miles away, close to James Maybrick’s house. It’s dry now, or has it gone underground? It has nothing to do with why I’m here. I need to find whoever spoke to my father.

  I can’t see any park officials. A sign directs us to the Calder Stones, which are housed in a roundish but angular building opposite the green. They’re half a dozen brownish irregular lumps of rock, some of them incised with obscure symbols. At least one of the rocks is almost my height. Though they’re arranged in a circle, not everyone thinks they’re druidic. Historians have concluded they belonged to an ancient tomb, and the circle was constructed just a couple of hundred years ago, during the druid revival. I peer through the reinforced glass of the locked door at the stones, one of which sports a mark like a large misshapen handprint, and wonder why my father would have cycled all the way here, twenty minutes’ drive from the city centre. I’m noticing more blurred marks that suggest some bulky person has been fumbling wet-handed at the stones when Lucinda says “Excuse me, do you work here?”

  She has accosted a man in muddy trousers and a shirt as green as much of the park. Once he admits to the connection she says “Do you happen to remember a gentleman on a bicycle? When would it have been, Gavin?”

  Although it seems much more remote I have to say “Two days ago.”

  The thick-limbed man looks ready for amusement. “What am I going to remember about him?”

  “He’s a lot like his son.”

  Lucinda indicates me, which apparently fails to recall my father. “Maybe you remember the bicycle,” I say.

  “Doubt it.”

  With by no means all of my frustration I say “It has a slogan on the frame and a web address.”

  “Oh, that one. Him.”

  The man is openly amused now, but I manage not to react to it. “You talked to him, then.”

  “You want Davey. He was telling us about some old—” The man thinks better of continuing and produces a mobile from his pocket. “You’re wanted by the stones,” he informs someone, and advises us “He’s on his way. Don’t go anywhere.”

  He retreats into an ornamental garden, where the shade beneath the shrubs is darkened by patches of lingering rain, and vanishes towards a greenhouse. My forehead is prickling with the wreath now, and I hang the flowers on the nearest tree while several garlanded suburbanites gaze at me as if I’ve forsaken a halo. I’m awaiting Davey when I wonder if I should have recognised someone across the green, and I hurry back down the avenue. The large robed man booming and gesticulating in front of the football net is indeed the leader of the Histrionic History troupe.

  They’ve acquired an extra player. Before I can identify which of them is unfamiliar, Lucinda calls “Where are you going? He’s here.”

  Beside her is a new green-shirted man as brawny as his workmate but untouched by mud. His tattooed arms and rolling gait put me in mind of a sailor. He halts near the fortune-teller and watches my approach. “No mistaking him,” he says.

  Perhaps I look as if I need Lucinda to explain “For Deryck’s son, he means.”

  “So you remember my father. Was it you that told him to get off his bike?”

  “He never moaned to you about that, did he?”

  “He didn’t have to. I’m the person he was calling.” As my aching forehead loses its grip on a frown I say “Why did he need to get off when the stones are locked away?”

  “They weren’t. Open to the public once a year.”

  “That must be why he came,” Lucinda says. “Did he take a look at them?”

  “More than one of those, love. More like a feel and a snog. We had to tell him to stop. Maybe he was trying to make out the stuff that’s carved on them, but he was bothering the public.”

  I’m unnecessarily reminded of the marks on the stones. “He’s the public too.”

  “Do you know if he found anything?” Lucinda says.

  “Nothing we could make any sense out of.”

  The shrug that goes with this enrages me, but I manage to say only “See if I can.”

  “He wasn’t here, you know. He’d gone in the greenhouse.”

  “I take it you followed him.”

  “Somebody had to, the way he was carrying on.”

  Lucinda heads off my anger by saying “Could you show us where?”

  “It’ll have to be quick.”

  His walk isn’t. As he heads for the ornamental garden he reminds me more than ever of a seaman who hasn’t quite regained his land legs. I follow him and Lucinda until I’m distracted by a child’s shrill protest. “There’s someone in the water.”

  He’s by the fortune-teller, and just tall enough to stare into the bowl. “That’s me, sweetheart,” she tells him and the rest of her audience.

  “No, a lady.”

  She gives a laugh that does its best to stay polite. “I hope that’s me as well.”

  “The other lady. The one with the watery hair. She was talking to me.”

  “What did she say, Bevan?” his mother wonders, less to him than to the bystanders.

  “I don’t know,” he says and gives her a patient although supercilious look. “I couldn’t hear. She was under the water.”

  “Is she still?” the fortune-teller enquires.

  He cranes over the table and shakes his head. “You must have scared her off.”

  “I hope I’m not that scary.” This gives the listeners an opportunity to laugh and the mother a cue to usher him away as the fortune-teller blinks at the bowl. “Maybe I’m better at magic than I thought,” she tells her next customer.

  When I catch up with the park-keeper, Lucinda is saying “Did he have his cycle when you last saw him?”

  “Rode off on it.” As he opens the door to the greenhouse he adds “I told the police after it was on the radio about it.”

  I hold the clammy doorknob while Lucinda follows him in. The long narrow building is full of jungle, as if a strip of the landscape has reverted to one of its earliest states. Amid the mass of vegetation, leaves grow restless as condensation drips from the peaked glass roof. A path not much broader than our guide leads down the centre of the greenhouse, and he halts on the far side of a small bridge. “There you are,” he says as I step on the bridge. “You’re him. Stopped there and spouted, and then he went off.”

  I do my best to control my anger in advance. “Do you remember what he said?”

  “It came this way.”

  “What did?” Lucinda says.

  “You tell me.” With a stare that renders the directive literal he adds “He was looking down there when he said it. That’s all I know.”

  I gaze into the water where he indicates and see ripples reshaping my reflection. “Didn’t he say anything else?”

  “Said they must have too. Don’t ask me what. We’d had enough. Didn’t want him going on and on about stories we were supposed to know.”

  “Which stories?”

  “Old ones about round here. I just told you, we don’t know.”

  “There are some.”

  For a moment I think Lucinda is the speaker. The woman behind her is robed from head to foot in white, and her hair isn’t much less devoid of colour. She’s pressing her large hands against her thighs as if to keep them in shape. “Will you tell us?” says Lucinda.

  “What do you have in mind?�
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  A ripple under the bridge reminds me where my father stood. “Any about water,” I say or ask.

  “I like the one about the stag.”

  “Then I expect we will,” Lucinda says.

  “It’s the earliest legend we have, from when there was forest all the way down to the river. The story tells there was a stag the king’s huntsmen could never catch. They’d see it through the trees and then it would be gone as if it had sunk into the earth. In most versions it was by a stream, and in some a knight sees it turn to water.”

  “It goes to the water, you mean,” I say.

  “No,” the woman says and seems delighted to continue. “The stag turns into it. In the best version the knight sees its horns are a fountain, and then the sunlight shines through it and it’s transformed into a wave that vanishes downstream. Sometimes he follows it to the river, or in some versions he waits by the stream in the hope of seeing it again and eats only fruit that grows there and drinks only from the stream. We take that to refer to fasting in order to achieve a vision, but it isn’t clear when it dates from. Some commentators date it much earlier than King John, but there’s nothing in Baxter to support that.”

  “That’s William Baxter.” Once this is confirmed Lucinda tells me “Early eighteenth century. Wrote the Glossarium Antiquitatum Britannicarum. He thought he’d discovered that the lost Roman town that’s mentioned in Ptolemy was the earliest settlement around the Pool.”

  As I’m reduced to reflecting that my father might have made a joke of the initials of the title, Lucinda says “You were mentioning commentators.”

  “They say, not many of them, that there may have been a pre-Roman settlement.”

  “How’s that supposed to fit in with your stag?” I ask.

  “Just that if we’re talking about Mesolithic times the settlers would have had to travel a long way. The argument is they would have had to be led.”

  “Someone usually does that, don’t they? I wouldn’t call it new.”

  “In this case it was more like something.”

  “That’ll be the stag again, will it?”

  “Something of water. Maybe something older. There used to be a Christian tradition that the first settlers were brought to the Pool by an angel or a saint. In some versions it’s St Cuthbert. There was a dockland church with windows that showed him leading his flock, and the last window had him descending into the river. It was all destroyed in the blitz, sadly, but it sounds like a Christianised pagan tradition.”

  “Are you a historian?” Lucinda says.

  “I lecture at the university.”

  “If you’re a lecturer,” I’m provoked to ask, “why are you dressed like that?”

  “Because of my skin.”

  The little that’s visible does look odd—not just unhealthily pale, which may be an effect of the unseasonable weather, but coarse and moist, perhaps with the humidity inside the greenhouse. “Sorry. Sorry,” I say and turn to the keeper. “Did my father give you any idea where he was going next?”

  “Off to pester someone else is my guess.”

  I’m at the edge of my anger but succeed in saying only “Who?”

  “All he said was it was all fitting together.”

  That’s the opposite of my experience, but I’m not reluctant to leave the greenhouse. So much moisture has gathered on my skin that I feel close to steeped in it. “Where do we want to go now?” Lucinda says.

  I lead the way through the garden to the green. Children are listening to storytellers under the beribboned trees while the diviners straggle in the direction of the distant river. The actors have produced a giant egg from the football net where they’ve stored props. It’s a druidic symbol, but it reminds me of something else, and it isn’t the only aspect of the play that abruptly seems familiar. “Let’s see the show.”

  I haven’t time to explain my tone. I set off so furiously across the green that the fortune-teller’s customer sidles out of my way. He must have jarred the table, because the face I glimpse in the bowl of water squirms and appears to swell, especially the eyes. As I reach the far side of the green the egg splits jaggedly in half, pulled apart by two of the girls, to disgorge a multicoloured rubber serpent. The bulky actor and his female trio dance hand in hand around it, and the play ends to a small storm of applause, though none from me. As the players begin to gather up their props I call “So where do you get your ideas?”

  The leader of the troupe swings to face me while the girls grapple with returning the expanded serpent to its egg. “Why, it’s—” he says and then “Remind me.”

  “The competition.”

  “I don’t think I got your name.”

  “Your friend did.”

  “Which friend is that?”

  “Why, haven’t you got any?” This conveys my rage but little else. “Either Mr Waterworks,” I say, “or whatever her name is.”

  I mean the slimmest and least shaven of the girls—the only one who isn’t wearing a wig or doesn’t appear to be. For the moment the dance seems to have used up the energy she kept being unable to contain when she took my last tour. “Gavin Meadows, isn’t it,” she says. “Thanks for coming to see us.”

  “And I wasn’t even sent to watch.”

  The man cocks his massive head as though its weight has tipped it sideways. “I don’t think I quite—”

  “She does,” I say and turn on her. “Were you just keeping an eye on me for Waterworks or looking for ideas as well?”

  “Neither.” She shakes her head, setting off a movement like the start of a dance or of a bid to escape. “I was trying to make sure we didn’t copy you,” she says, “and nobody sent me but me.”

  “Then who—” At once I remember the man who seemed determined to be unimpressed. “The bastard,” I declare. “That’s who it was after all.”

  My profanity startles a couple of giggles out of the audience that has lingered for the encore, and somebody murmurs “Is he part of the show?”

  I assume this is intended as a joke, but it’s too much for Lucinda. “Try not to mind him,” she says to the troupe. “He’s lost—”

  “Don’t say I’ve lost my father. He’s lost at the moment. I haven’t lost him. Not lost as in lost, as in lost lost.”

  I’m babbling. I could wonder if she was about to say I’ve lost something other than him. The performers have begun to look as awkward as the audience, which is wandering away. I’ve had enough, above all of myself. “Forget it,” I tell anyone who should be told, and make for the car.

  Blackness as wide as the sky is heaving itself up from the river. The trees along the avenue seem to intensify the darkness, as does the throbbing of my head. I’m advancing almost blindly when Lucinda catches up with me. “Where now?” she says.

  “Home.”

  At once she looks worried. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “I’ll cope. I should have thought to bring a photograph.”

  “Of Deryck, you mean?” She peers at me in the gathering afternoon gloom and says “You just need to show people your face.”

  I don’t want to feel as if I’m trying to replace him. At least it will save time, and so I say “Then let’s go to the tunnels.”

  Chapter Twenty

  IN THE TUNNEL

  When we step into the visitors’ centre we’re confronted by a squat figure with a spectacularly protruding stomach. Beneath a stovepipe hat his face is grey and blind, as good as eyeless. I assume the statue is meant to suggest why Joseph Williamson was known as the mole of Edge Hill, but the appearance of a creature that has seen too little daylight is excessively convincing for my taste, and the motley clothes in which he’s dressed don’t help. The plump middle-aged woman in a Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels T-shirt behind the counter opposite seems bent on ignoring his presence, but she glances up at my approach, and then does rather more than glance. “May I help you?” she says as though she’s addressing someone in another room.

  “If this
looks familiar,” I say, indicating my face.

  She frowns at it—more accurately, continues to do so—before sidling from behind the counter. “Please excuse me a moment,” she says and retreats down a stone corridor into the museum.

  It isn’t very large. Most of the exhibits—clay pipes and china fragments and skulls smaller than human, all retrieved in the process of clearing the tunnels—are housed in glass cases on either side of the corridor. Beyond the blind figure that guards it, placards display information about him. As well as the apparently haphazard labyrinth of tunnels he built houses above them, and some of the rooms had no windows. During a period of thirty-three years he lived in at least eight of the houses, as if he was engaged in some kind of search, but after his wife’s death he made his home in a windowless cellar. He died of water on the chest, I read as I’m distracted by a muffled voice. Is it a religious broadcast? The voice seems to be chanting in an irregular rhythm, though if it’s on a radio, it’s so far off the station that I can’t make out a word. It’s beyond the tunnel entrance beside the corridor, but the door is locked. When I lean towards it the voice begins to sound as if it’s singing underwater; I could imagine someone drowned and celebrating the experience. The thought must be born of too little sleep, and I’m about to press my ear against the door when a man calls “Excuse me, may I help you? That’s shut.”

  He’s the woman’s age and rather bulkier, and looks determined to impress me with both. “Will you be opening it now?” I ask her as much as him.

  “I’ve just finished explaining to you that the tunnels are closed until further notice.”