Creatures of the Pool Page 8

  “I am, as a matter of fact. My father worked for them.”

  “Doesn’t now.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Perhaps I just did, in which case I must seem as paranoid as I feel, but the man with the uninjured nose says “His old girl when we went to see her.”

  I find the thought that my mother was alone with them in the house at night—presumably before they found me in Whitechapel—so unwelcome that it feels like having failed to protect her, and I don’t need him to add “Must be lonely up there on her tod.”

  “Well, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To help find my father.”

  “We know why we’re here, Mr Meadows.”

  I won’t be daunted where I live. “As long as you’ve got my name I should know yours, shouldn’t I?”

  They consider this as if they’ve forgotten how to blink, and then the dented man says “Maddock.”

  “Wrigley,” says his colleague.

  “All right, let me play you the tape.”

  As I follow my wet footprints, which I’m furious to realise do indeed start and finish at the wet patch by the entrance, Maddock says “Must cost a packet to live here.”

  “What’s his game again?” Wrigley wants to know.

  “He’s an escort.”

  I carry on padding upstairs until I feel I’m trying to outdistance the sense of pursuit very close at my back, and then I swing around at the half-landing. “Who did you hear that from?”

  “Try looking in the mirror,” says Maddock.

  My forehead has recommenced throbbing by the time I realise what I told them in Whitechapel. “I said I give tours of Liverpool.”

  “Seeing to our image, are you?” Wrigley says. “See it’s all true.”

  I won’t bother to respond to this, not least because I’ve realised that in my haste I forgot to bring my keys. I feel as if the police and my headache left me unable to think. My rage is approaching the point at which it will explode into words, however carelessly selected, when I see that my door is ajar. That was thoughtless too, but at least I’m not shut out, and I follow the blurred wet tracks into the apartment.

  Wrigley bumps the door shut with his bulky shoulders. The policemen stare along the corridor, at or past the old views of Liverpool, until I move to stand outside my workroom like a butler. “It’s in here.”

  Maddock tramps past me, only to turn a scowl on me. “It’s not working.”

  “I switched it off to save the messages.”

  Wrigley adds his frown to the proceedings. “All right, give it here. We’ll take it and give it a listen.”

  As Maddock stoops to unplug the answering machine I protest “You can’t take that away.”

  He stays in his hulking crouch and screws his head around on its thick ridged stub of neck. “Who says we can’t?”

  “My father might call.”

  “He can if you don’t go out.”

  “How long are you likely to be? I’ve a tour this afternoon.”

  Both men glower at the prospect or at the inconvenience they apparently think I’m causing. Wholly as a ruse, and a feeble one at that, I say “Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?”

  They exchange a look, and Wrigley shrugs. “I could do with some water.”

  “Same here, out of the tap,” says Maddock.

  “Give me a minute and I’ll play you the tape.”

  As I make for the kitchen I feel more in charge, though my nakedness under the knee-length towel in the shape of a robe doesn’t help. I fill two tankards at the granite sink, and an afterthought is gurgling in the plughole when Maddock says “Can you see how this fucking thing works?”

  I hurry back so fast that water spills out of the tankards, splashing my feet and adding to the marks on the carpet. He’s hunched over the machine, his stubby fingers hovering over the keys. “I’ll do that,” I protest. “Take these.”

  Wrigley accepts both drinks and hands one to Maddock, who plants it none too gently beside the machine. As he wipes a scattering of drops off the keys he says “Tell me what I’m doing.”

  He has already switched on the machine. “Press R,” I resign myself to advising, “and then P.”

  “Ah and then pee,” Wrigley seems to feel required to convey or translate.

  “Not both,” I shout as Maddock jabs two fingers at the keys, because I’m afraid this will damage if not erase the tape. “Do what I said.”

  Wrigley lifts his tankard so deliberately that I could imagine he’s testing its weight as a weapon. Instead he takes a sloppy mouthful and wipes his chin. “That’s the stuff.”

  I’ve never known anybody so enthusiastic about a drink of water. I even feel its spray on my face. Meanwhile Maddock leans on the rewind button and barely waits for the small shrill voices to finish gabbling in reverse before he knuckles the key to play the tape. As it reiterates Moira Shea’s appeal for my father’s return he drains half his tankard while gazing at me. “Sounds like someone’s after you,” he says. “Don’t be letting a lady down.”

  “She’s on my tour this afternoon.”

  “Keep it shut,” Wrigley warns as my father begins to speak.

  I’d like to think the policeman is rebuking his colleague as well as me. My head throbs with the alternative throughout my father’s call. “So what was he supposed to be worried about?” Wrigley says.

  “I don’t know. If I did—”

  Maddock jerks a hand up as the machine starts clattering. “Is this buggered?” he says and reaches for it.

  “It’s fine. Leave it alone. Just listen.”

  Both men stare at me while my father tries to talk above the noise of the drill, only to be overwhelmed by the collapse of scaffolding. “Sounds like he was in someone’s way,” says Maddock.

  “I’d say no use.”

  Surely Wrigley is referring to the message, not my father. “There’s one more,” I blurt.

  As I fish out my mobile, a hiss of static announces Lucinda on the tape. “Just to say I’ll see you later,” she says. “Looking forward to our bath.”

  “Not that,” I interrupt or try to. Though I’ve no reason to feel guilty, the message and especially its continuation were just between us. I brush against Maddock’s unexpectedly rubbery torso as I poke the rewind key. “He’s here,” I say, brandishing the mobile.

  The room feels not just crowded but humid, and I retreat into the corridor before bringing up my messages and switching the phone to loudspeaker mode. The policemen don’t blink as my father shouts over the thunder of the train and is cut off by the clink of the brick. “That all?” says Maddock.

  “Tried calling him?” Wrigley contributes.

  “Of course I have, but I can never get through. I take it you have, tried, I mean.”

  “We’ve got his number sure enough.” As I pocket the mobile Wrigley says “If that’s the latest we didn’t need to come all this way. You could of brought it in.”

  “What about the first one? He might have told whoever he was speaking to where he was going next.”

  “You don’t know where he was to start with.”

  “It was somewhere he wasn’t meant to cycle, and he was looking at bones or stones. That sounds like a graveyard to me.”

  “Shouldn’t have been cycling,” says Maddock.

  “I know that. He said so himself.” Frustration drives me to plead “It’s worth seeing if I’m right, isn’t it?”

  As if at a signal I fail to identify, they lift their tankards to their large loose mouths, and I can only assume they resent advice about their methods. They gulp the rest of the water and thrust the tankards at me. “Tell your ma you’re waiting to hear,” Wrigley says.

  Is he warning me not to attempt any investigations of my own? If I hadn’t been considering it in the light of their behaviour, I certainly am now. “You can see yourselves out, can you?” I say to regain some authority.

  “We can do a lot more than that,” Maddock says. They leave m
e with a stare each, and he leads their heavy way to the door. I stand in my doorway until the backs of their almost neckless heads have jerked down out of sight, and then I follow the damp trail to the bathroom. I have to give my tour, and then I’ll decide where to search.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ANOTHER INTERRUPTED TOUR

  Of the people scattered on or around the steps that lead up to Queen Victoria—tourists, office workers taking a late lunch, lawyers or their clients due in court across the square—just two advance to greet the sight of my peaked Pool of Life cap. They’re Moira Shea and her male companion. “What have you been doing to yourself?” she cries.

  Even if I could bear to pull the peaked cap down, it wouldn’t hide all of the bruise on my forehead. “Knocked down in the street,” I tell her, suppressing the rest of the memory or rather spending time with it inside my head. “It was just about where someone brought up the atrocities.”

  “You don’t mean all that Ripper stuff again,” says her companion.

  “Some of us like it, Gerry. You ignore him.”

  Is the advice for me or about me? “Not the Ripper, no,” I say. “Frog Lane. You’ll remember somebody mentioned that business.”

  “That was you,” Gerry says as if he wants to laugh. “You said it was Whitechapel.”

  “Not the place, the atrocities. Did you see who that was?”

  They gaze at me until I fancy that’s their answer, and then Gerry says “It couldn’t have been your dad. He wasn’t with us then.”

  “Is he going to be now?”

  “I wish he was,” I say too fervently for grammar. “We don’t know where he is.”

  “I expect he can get a long way,” Moira says, “on that bike of his.”

  “So you didn’t see who mentioned the atrocities,” I say and raise my voice. “Anybody else for Pool of Life?”

  Two people step forward—considerably fewer than have booked. Perhaps the rest are daunted by the likely weather; the sky above the river looks pregnant with night and rain, which is why I’m wheeling a golf bag stuffed with six umbrellas, an assemblage I bought on my roundabout way here. One newcomer is a man whose wide dull eyes and thick straight lips appear to be challenging the world to alter their expression. By contrast the slim girl, who clearly isn’t with him, seems close to dancing with eagerness to start the tour. I might be more inspired by her if I weren’t trying to determine which if either of them is here on Waterworth’s behalf. Asking would seem paranoid at best, and so I call “Tour just beginning. Pool of Life.”

  An unshaven scrawny man in an expensive suit and tie looks tempted to use this as a reason to skip court, but that’s the most positive response. “Never mind, you’ve got us,” Moira says. “Blame the wet.”

  “Are we off to see the pool?” the slim girl says.

  “Maybe the one Jung dreamed about,” I tell her.

  “That’s when he saw the pool in all the rain and knew he was in Liverpool.” Since the others look blank she adds “It was where all the streets led in his dream. It was lit up with a tree on it and he thought the light was coming from the tree.”

  The straight-lipped man doles out a voice that’s little better than expressionless. “What’s that about?”

  “He thought it was him.”

  “Some of us think it’s about creativity,” I intervene. “There’s plenty of that here.”

  I don’t just mean where we’re standing, though it’s where plays were first performed in Liverpool—the earliest on record, at any rate. A Pace-Egg play was staged at Easter in the Castle, if staging isn’t too strong a word for drawing a circle with a wooden sword to contain the performance. St George and the Serpent was the title, and I wonder if the monster called Slasher was meant to have come from the sea, since Neptune was among the characters, along with Toss-pot and the King of Egypt and Beelzebub. By now the girl is eager to interrupt. “They think they’ve killed Slasher,” she contributes, “but they forget there’s still the egg.”

  Is this true? It feels like a dream she has planted in my mind. My lack of sleep distorts the image, making me imagine not an egg but a mass of spawn, and I do my best to expel the notion by continuing to speak. Strolling players were so popular in medieval times that one of the seven original streets of the town was named Juggler, although by 1571 the corporation was prohibiting the display of “monstrouse or straunge beasts, or other visions voyde or vayne.” On the other hand, four years earlier a theatre down towards the river doubled as a cockpit by order of the corporation “for further and greater repair of gentlemen and others to this town.” None of this enlivens the thick-lipped man, and I push my golf bag downhill away from the river.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if people think I’m selling the umbrellas. Above Lord Street the dark sky looks ready to collapse, and the tubular concrete tower that houses a radio station is supporting a cloud like the nest of a great bird. A few brave tourists flourish cameras on the upper deck of an open-topped bus that passes my party and turns left along North John Street, narrowly missing a phalanx of young mothers pushing buggies and impatient with the traffic lights. The south branch of the street was once Love Lane, leading to the custom house at the oldest dock, where yet another stretch of water was subsequently drained. The dock became Canning Place, where in 1840 creatures with too many limbs or eyes or heads or alternatively too few were exhibited. South John Street is presently a trail of rubble above which helmeted workmen perch on scaffolding that sketches an imminent mall, and I wonder if my father talked to any of them. Perhaps I should ask, but not now. Instead I conduct the party past the stores on Lord Street to Whitechapel.

  I do my best to douse the lurid flare of memory by turning to Paradise Street, formerly the Common Shore, across the intersection. Most of it is fenced off by builders, and shops and a pub have occupied the Royal Colosseum. Known to its friends as the Colly, it put on a play written by the stage manager, Prince’s Park and Scotland Road; or, Vice in Liverpool. Before its theatrical years it was a Unitarian chapel. Theatregoers had to enter through the old graveyard, and a vault was used as a dressing-room. Bones could be found in its depths beyond a flimsy partition, and some of them were used as props in plays. “That’s what you call recycling,” the eager girl says, stoppering a flask from which she keeps sipping water. “Trust Scousers not to let anything go to waste.”

  The Sheas, if that’s what they both are, seem dutifully amused, the straight-lipped man not at all. I lead the way along Church Street, past a block of shops that has erased Church Alley, the birthplace of James Maybrick. The narrow lane bordered the churchyard of St Peter’s, where his brother Michael became known as a precociously youthful organist. When the church was demolished about a century ago, the contents of some of the coffins were found to have turned to stone. How soon did James become jealous of his musical brother? The family lived in the alley until James was thirteen, and perhaps he was one of the children who had to be chased away from Joseph Williamson’s grave, whatever made them play some forgotten version of hopscotch on the slabs around it. Williamson died on May Eve in 1840, less than two years after James was born and a year before Michael’s birth. The mysterious builder was buried with his wife in a crypt of St Thomas’s Church at the far end of Paradise Street, less than five minutes’ walk from the Maybrick house. Two minutes would have taken James to Whitechapel or the Colly or the Liver Theatre, originally the Dominion of Fancy, on the upper floor of shops on Church Street. Might this have helped him develop a taste for playing roles? “Maybe he played with the bones,” Moira Shea says with a delicious shudder.

  I’ve let myself be diverted by Maybrick on her behalf. This isn’t my night tour, and I’m not sleepwalking, whatever Waterworth said. Beyond the site of the Liver Theatre, Bold Street leads uphill to the district where poets of the Beatles era dwelled and wrote and drank. Around the corner in Hanover Street is the Neptune Theatre, which sounds as if it ought to be beside the Pool. Other theatres were—at least,
beside the ground that supplanted it—which is why I guide my party past a stone eagle pinioned by a wire cage on the corner of a store to Williamson Square.

  Stalls like remnants of the vanished markets are selling football shirts and other symbols of Liverpool’s pair of teams. Children run through shivering arcades of water that the pavement raises like instruments of an aquatic ritual. Of the theatres and concert rooms that surrounded the square, only the Playhouse has survived. Its greatest rival, the Theatre Royal, had a pit approached through passages as good as subterranean and “choaked with a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” perhaps from the drained marsh. I can’t recall which theatre staged Water, Water Everywhere!, a comedy by a local Victorian playwright that included characters such as Captain Squelch and Mistress Trickle. Next to the Playhouse a shop full of aquariums has been replaced by the Fall Well pub, although the real well was farther up the slope of Roe Street. On our way to the site we would once have passed the Parthenon Music Hall, where in 1850 Daughters of the Deep was among the staged tableaux. The well was filled in at the end of the eighteenth century, and the Royal Amphitheatre was built opposite. Among its circus acts were the Guising Gorsutchers, a pair of Scouse contortionists so bonelessly supple that they used to challenge the audience to name shapes they couldn’t take. These days the theatre is the Royal Court, where one of the earliest productions was the 1888 Wraiths of the Well by a Liverpool writer. As I push my burden in front of the theatre I could imagine somebody is mocking me; he’s certainly shading himself with an umbrella as he disappears around a plinth behind St George’s Hall. Riots in theatres weren’t uncommon, and one in the Hall was caused in the 1860s by the Davenport Brothers from London, who claimed that spirits helped them escape from any bonds. Cries of “We’ve got spirits of our own” were heard, perhaps referring simply to enthusiasm. The straight-lipped man refrains from betraying any, and I feel as if I’m not sufficiently awake to engage his attention. The tour turns along Lime Street beside the Hall and opposite the station, which occupies Waterworth’s Field. The man doesn’t react to the name, and I manage not to suggest that the place must have been called after some wet character or somebody just worth a dunk. Less than two hundred years ago, when the street was Limekiln-lane, a cock would be turned loose in the field on Shrove Tuesday so that boys with their hands tied behind their backs could run it down and overpower it with their teeth. A bull was baited at the excavation of one of the first docks in some kind of primitive inauguration ritual. A cockpit in Cockspur Street became a place of worship, and a baited bull was once dragged into a box at the Theatre Royal to watch the play, but how does any of this fit together? I’m glad to be distracted when my pocket starts to sing about love, love, love.