Creatures of the Pool Read online

  “I’ll see if he’s written anything down. He wants to show me what he’s been putting together.”

  Lucinda turns away to shower her back. “Can I come?”

  “Any special reason?”

  “Ready for your shower?” As I rise to my feet she sets about watering me. “I’d like to try and make my peace with him,” she says. “I expect I’ll be seeing him again.”

  Perhaps she feels that our visiting my parents ought to mean more to me, but I’m unsure how much it should. I do my best to compensate for my reserve by taking my time over towelling her, and then I say “I’m afraid all there is in the fridge is historical pizza.”

  “How historical?”

  “Last night’s.”

  “I hope it’s seafood.” When I confirm that it’s her favourite she finishes towelling me and rewards me with a quick kiss. I’m dressing in the bedroom when she reappears. I thought she was consigning pizza to the microwave, but she’s wearing the slightly schoolgirlish outfit she wore to work: white blouse, black dress with shoulder straps, flat shoes. “I won’t be long,” she says.

  “Where are you going?” I demand, having almost snaggletoothed my zip.

  “Just to bring my car in if you’ll give me the control.”

  She watches with unblinking patience in the dressing-table mirror while I pull open several not too tidy drawers until I find the remote that opens the street door to the basement garage. As I hand her the control I wonder “Aren’t you getting wet all over again?”

  “The rain’s taking a breather. I’ll only be round the corner.”

  I meant her clothes, but before I can say so she’s out of the apartment. I finish all the dressing I intend to do tonight and am padding barefoot to the kitchen when I notice that she has left her underwear on the rack. I can’t help panicking as I run to open the window beyond the pine and steel and granite rectangles of the kitchen. It shows me the junction where a street slopes towards the river, but no sign of Lucinda, unless that’s her shadow protruding around the corner. The pavement is still streaming with rain, so that I’m unable to put much of a shape to the hidden figure or even to be sure of the size of its fluid outline. In a moment Lucinda’s green Spirita swings around the corner and, having hesitated outside the garage entrance, vanishes underground. When I glance back at the intersection the shadow has been washed away—has retreated out of sight, at any rate. I shut the window and lay slices of pizza on plates, and then I seem to wait an unnecessarily long time for the sound of a key in the lock. Eventually I open the door to the outer corridor and hold my breath until I hear soft footsteps on the stairs.

  Chapter Four

  A SPRINGHEEL LEGEND

  “Look at the masts,” says Lucinda.

  I’m put in mind of the skeletal towers the landscape is sprouting to unite us all through mobile phones, and then I realise she means the windmills bristling in the sea. We’re on the ridge of Everton, which overlooks the mouth of the river. I should have thought of the past; that’s my job. We would indeed have seen the masts of ships on the Mersey even before the first dock was built at the narrowed entrance to the drained Pool, and in time the riverbank would have been strewn with the rib cages of ships under construction. The slopes below us would be scattered with the towers of mills and the smoking stumpy conical chimneys of potteries and limekilns. They stood beside rudimentary roads up which horses and carts laboured, together with the occasional carriage and stagecoach to London. Most of the streets were still crammed between or around the first seven thoroughfares that grew up near the Castle, but as the town spread towards Everton and the neighbouring ridge of Edge Hill, the streets multiplied without growing much straighter or wider. The burgeoning streets were pinned by more than a dozen church spires. Towards the edge of the settlement we might see women trudging the ropewalks, which were longer than many of the streets, as they twined hemp to make ropes for ships. I have a sudden image of humanity breeding on the surface of the buried Pool and the drained marshes, increasing faster than the maze of cramped streets ought to be expected to contain—in the last three decades of the nineteenth century the population of Liverpool increased by two hundred thousand—until whole families were packed into each unsanitary house little better than a prison and eventually into the cellar too. Up here the gentry hunted along the ridge on horseback, which might suggest a more refined form of savagery that presumed to rise above the sort that infested the diseased streets. I’m reminded that the mysterious Joseph Williamson of Edge Hill turned up at his wedding in hunter’s attire and rode off to the hunt as soon as the ceremony was over. I’m distracted, which must be why my brain is seething with the past when it doesn’t need to be. We’ve just parked outside my parents’ house, and I’m disconcerted to find it’s for sale.

  It belonged to my father’s parents. It was where he spent his youth. When they died he persuaded my mother to move into it and sell the Kensington semi where they’d brought me up. They didn’t need the space now that I was at university in Durham and wouldn’t be moving back into our old home. He was able to cycle downtown to the art gallery where he worked until retiring last year, after which he seemed happy just to be close to the heart of the city. My mother found she liked this too, all of which is why I’m thrown by the sale board standing guard in the small neat garden. The house is the end of a terrace of six that survive from a longer Victorian stretch. Lucinda gazes past it at the latest threat of a storm, which darkens the bay as if it’s muddying the water, and says “Aren’t we going in?”

  By now she may think she’s the problem. “Of course we are,” I say and climb out of the Spirita.

  The small two-storey house is painted as red as a university. The front door and windows are bright yellow. Between the gathered orange curtains the windows display enough nets for a fishing expedition. When I open the gate the latch emits a clang that calls my mother to the front door as Lucinda follows me along the short path between rockeries. My mother’s large reddish face framed by cropped greying hair seems to grow even rounder with a smile as she holds out her arms from the dress I always call her floral wallpaper outfit, if only to myself. Her arms are still plump and surely no more wrinkled than last time I saw them. She keeps up the smile and the gesture when she notices I’m not alone. “Who’s this?” she cries.

  “Who is it?” my father demands.

  “It’s us, Mr Meadows. Deryck,” Lucinda responds, and slips past me on the stone border to take my mother’s hand. “I’m Lucinda.”

  “Well, I’m sure I’m glad to meet you.”

  My mother gives me a blink that hints at reproof, but she’s not the only one who has been kept uninformed. “Since when has the house been for sale?” I want to know.

  My father hurries out of the front room with a haphazard armful of books and magazines and sheets of paper. “It’s the damp. It gets to your throat,” he croaks as if to demonstrate.

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a selling point.”

  “They can have a damp course put in if they want.”

  As I wonder why anybody wouldn’t, my mother says “Come in, you two. It’s still drier in than out. I’m Gillian.”

  A series of hollow boxy clatters fills the narrow hall as my father runs upstairs. I could almost fancy he’s fleeing the intrusion, but he dumps his burden somewhere and is down just as fast. “I didn’t get the chance to tell you, Deryck,” Lucinda says. “I’m in a little place on top of Edge Hill.”

  “Sounds like you’re near the tunnels.”

  “Nearer than I thought. They’ve found another one and they’re clearing it now.”

  I feel as if she and my father are reminding me of my job. In the early 1800s Joseph Williamson employed dozens of workmen to excavate a labyrinth of tunnels under Edge Hill, and nobody’s sure why. After his death the tunnels were found to extend for at least a mile, but the explorers retreated for fear of becoming hopelessly lost in the dark. Since then many of the tunnels have been blocke
d by debris. Recently the Friends of the Tunnels have devoted themselves to reopening the labyrinth. I’ve yet to work out how to include the tunnels in a tour. “About time they left well alone,” says my father. “They want to remember how old Joe the Mole used to carry on. Half the time he’d no sooner have a tunnel dug than he got his men to brick it up.”

  “What are you saying that means?” Lucinda wonders.

  “Think about it,” he says, but to me, and tramps into the front room.

  The pile he took upstairs was just a sample of the apparent chaos. Books and magazines and photocopies and printouts are strewn all over the already crowded room, on the tapestried fat suite of furniture and beside it, around the television and the player heaped with discs of Westerns, on the dresser wherever there’s space between the best china, even on the mantelpiece, among the photographs documenting my progress from a round-faced baby to my present lanky popeyed big-nosed self. As he selects another armful by some principle I can’t fathom, my mother says “Well, I’m glad you’re clearing up after I’ve been asking you for weeks. Would everyone like a cup of tea?”

  “I’ll do it,” he declares and hurries to the kitchen with his burden, which he dumps on the table. He’s about to fill the kettle from a large plastic bottle out of the refrigerator when he turns on my mother. “You haven’t been refilling this, have you?”

  “I wouldn’t dare. It isn’t worth the trouble,” she assures him before murmuring “He’s got a thing about the tap water. It tastes like it always has to me.”

  “Nothing to boast about,” my father mutters and, having spilled a few drops from the bottle into his hand to touch his tongue to them, sets about filling the kettle.

  “This is just silly,” my mother says and strides into the front room, where she transfers all the material that’s occupying the sofa to my father’s chair. “Now you can sit down,” she says and asks Lucinda “Have you come to hear Deryck holding forth as well?” “I’d be interested to hear what he has to say.”

  “I wouldn’t take too much notice of some of it. I don’t know where he’s been dreaming up—”

  My father appears in the doorway, and his frustration homes in on me. “You could help.”

  “Tell me how.”

  “Saints help us, Gill, what have we brought up? Grab all you can carry,” he directs me, “and put it where you’re told.”

  However rough his mockery is, it isn’t far from welcome. I’ve been growing uneasy that since we arrived he hasn’t adopted a single playful voice. As I pick up a pile of books I’m disconcerted to feel how damp the carpet is; even the cover of the volume on the bottom of the pile seems to be. “I could too,” Lucinda says. “It’s part of my job.”

  “He’ll do,” says my father.

  “What job is that?” my mother asks Lucinda.

  “I’m in the central library.”

  “I used to work with books when there were more bookshops. Philip Son and Nephew. I was there for—” My mother’s wistfulness abruptly deserts her. “The library’s the council, isn’t it?” she realises aloud. “Careful what you say, Deryck.”

  “No need. I’m not a spy for them,” Lucinda says.

  My father’s impatience appears to have left the conversation behind some time ago. As soon as I straighten up with all the items I can risk carrying, he heads for the stairs. At the top he veers into the back bedroom. Around a desk bearing a computer, shelves and much of the floor are loaded with research. Last time I saw the room I was glad he was keeping his mind alive since his retirement, but now I’m seeing evidence of an obsession. “Put them anywhere there’s space,” he says and demonstrates, then lowers his voice. “Why’s she here?”

  I wonder if he means to hide his research from her—from any stranger. “Because I am.”

  “You’re stuck with her, you mean.”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that, no. Would you say you’re stuck with my mother?”

  “We’re both stuck with what we turn each other into,” he says and grimaces for silence as we hear footsteps on the stairs. He scowls downhill at the Collegiate, a Victorian Gothic building patched at the back with aggressively anonymous concrete. “There’s another place the city’s taken care of,” he complains. “Left it to rot till the arsonists got in. I’ve seen places on the stage look more real than that.”

  He pokes at the computer mouse with a plump stubby thumb, and his site fades into view on the monitor. It shows the oldest engraving of Liverpool, with a few dozen buildings clustered between the Castle and, closer to the river, St Nicholas’s Church. Just a couple of streets are distinguishable, leading virtually from the water’s edge to the wild slopes that rise to Everton and Edge Hill. The image dissolves into an engraving in which the streets have spread alongside the Mersey and the Castle has been ousted by a church above a dock that extends a pier into the river. The pier and most of the buildings apart from the church of St Nicholas fade away, erased by a photograph of the familiar waterfront around the Liver Building and its gigantic tethered birds, and then the skyline starts to crumble. In a few seconds only a wasteland remains, from which question marks rise like huge serpents slithering out of the earth.

  I have to be impressed by my father’s computer skills, which are certainly in advance of mine. We’re still on the home page when my mother and Lucinda look into the room. “We thought we’d bring you boys your tea,” my mother says, then notices the display on the screen. “If they’re going to play with their toys we’ll go down again, shall we? It’s a long time since I’ve had a really good chat about books with someone who knows about them.”

  “Is that your site, Deryck?” Lucinda says, handing me one of the four Don’t Knock the Dock mugs. “I’ve been wanting to see what was on it.”

  “Why?” says my father. “Watch where you’re putting that, Gill.” He moves his mug away from the keyboard and squints over his shoulder at Lucinda. “Where’d you hear about it?”

  “Gavin told me.”

  “You’ve been advertising it wherever you ride,” I point out to him.

  “I’ve got to change it after the stuff I’ve been finding out lately,” he says and presses his lips wide and almost grey as if he thinks he’s said too much.

  “Will it be a bit more balanced?” my mother hopes aloud.

  Perhaps he thinks that she’s suggesting he’s the opposite. As he continues to mum, invisible fingertips try the window beyond the computer—rain does, at any rate. It lets Lucinda change the subject as she gazes downhill under the blackened sky. “Do you think they saw Springheel Jack from here?”

  He’s another urban legend I’ve yet to incorporate in a tour—the leaping figure that was said to have haunted Victorian Liverpool and London. Some reports even suggested he could be the Ripper. He was rumoured to have appeared in Aigburth, close to where the Maybricks lived, and was last seen about a hundred years ago, springing the length of High Park Street on the slope below my parents’ house. “I know they did,” says my father.

  “Who?” my mother is anxious to learn.

  “My mam and dad. They were at this window. Saw him jump from one end of the street to the other like a frog, and they couldn’t even move when they saw him coming. My dad used to say he was glowing like the lights you see on marshes, and his eyes were too. He jumped over our roof and they never saw him again, but my mam screamed for an hour and couldn’t sleep for weeks. She said she felt as if he was trailing a fog behind him and left some of it in the house. Sometimes I think that’s what started me off.”

  As I conclude he means his interest in lost Liverpool history, my mother protests “Well, you’ve never said any of that before.”

  While he’s feeling informative I take the chance to remind him “You said you’d show me everything you’ve found.”

  “I can’t now,” he says, scowling around the room without looking at anyone. “It’s in a mess.”

  “I hope you aren’t blaming me,” my mother says. “I’m sure I
haven’t touched one single thing.”

  “Blame my head. There’s too much sloshing round in here.”

  Has he lost confidence since he retired? I want to restore it if I can. “The Frog Lane atrocities,” I say. “How about those?”

  “You’ve got me there,” he says and gazes at Lucinda. “Has he got you?”

  “They don’t ring any bell with me, Deryck.”

  Perhaps he has forgotten that he invited her to use his first name, because his stare doesn’t waver. “Penalty to you, Gav. You’ve turned up something your friend doesn’t know.”

  “If they’re going to bring football into it I’m leaving them to it,” my mother says, though surely she remembers I’ve no interest in the game. “Shall we go and sit down while there’s space?”

  Lucinda gives her a faint smile without otherwise moving as I say to my father “I’m sure you said last time we met you’d tell me about Frog Lane.”

  “When was that?” says my mother.

  As Lucinda and I agree on silence my father says “I went on one of his walks.”

  “Well, you never told me you were meaning to. I would have liked to have gone.”

  “It wasn’t planned,” I say. “We just—”

  I’ve blundered ahead of any useful words, and my nerves aren’t helped by the sight of Lucinda opening her mouth until she says “I know what I’d be interested in seeing.”

  “Let me guess.” Having closed his eyes so tight that they look capable of vanishing, my father says “The bottom of the pool.”

  His eyes seem to flinch as he blinks. My mother has switched on the overhead light, because the sky has grown so dark that it felt as if some chilly medium had begun to invade the room. “If you’ve got any pictures of that,” Lucinda says, “I’m sure we’d like to see.”

  “Not even any of the things they dredged up and didn’t tell the town about. Buried them instead, and quick.” Before I can ask about this he says “Go on then, let’s hear your request.”