Creatures of the Pool Read online

  I’ve changed the ringtone yet again. “Excuse me,” I say and halt beside a stone lion that looks as if it’s ignoring the railway tunnel beneath its feet. The caller’s number is withheld. “Hello,” I demand, “who’s this?”

  “Isn’t it you?”

  Presumably Lucinda means this as a joke, but I’m not in the mood. Before I can say so she wonders “Have I done it again?”

  “I don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “I thought I might be calling while you’re on a tour.”

  I can think of only one reason why she would. “Is my father there?”

  “Not this time, Gavin. I’ve got other reasons to want to speak to you, you know.”

  How awake am I? I’ve had no chance to tell her “He went off somewhere yesterday and we haven’t heard from him since.”

  “Oh, Gavin, I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be that much, I hope.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “I’ve a few stories for you about the police. Keep an eye open for him,” I say, and to my party “I shouldn’t be long,” even if I don’t know this until I learn “Why were you calling?”

  “Is that the river?” I’m about to tell her that she heard a wave of pigeons rising from the paved plateau when she says “I was going to ask if the names out of the book are some kind of joke.”

  I blink at the quartet who are watching me with various degrees of interest or patience or neither. “Joke,” I say but don’t invite.

  “And who’s Waterworth?”

  “He’s one of your lot. Employed by the council, not the libraries.” I slap my forehead, making Moira Shea cry out on my bruised behalf. “You mean an account book,” I say. “I don’t use one.”

  “I know. Not that kind of book. I don’t expect he’ll realise.”

  I turn away from my party, to be confronted by the building in which Virginia Woolf’s uncle went mad. I’m surely not that close to knowing how he felt as I say “Which book, then?”

  “Broadbent.”

  I shut my eyes, because I’m staring so fiercely at the pillars in front of the Hall that they appear to stir like trees in a wind. “Who?”

  “R. J. Broadbent. Annals of the Liverpool Stage, 1908.”

  At once I realised where the names I listed came from. The book was part of my research for this very tour, and they’re all connected with Liverpool theatres. The book has never been reprinted, but will the names seem as obviously historical as I’m starting to find them? “Try not to worry about it or Deryck either,” Lucinda says. “I expect he got carried away by his research.”

  I’m trying to be reassured by this when she says “Was he on his bicycle?”

  “He should have been.”

  “People might have noticed it, mightn’t they? You could put it out on the radio if you need to, but I hope you don’t.”

  “I’d better get back to my routine. Will I see you later?”

  “I hope so.”

  As I pocket the mobile, Moira Shea looks ready to be sympathetic. “Was that your girlfriend again?”

  I wish Waterworth’s man weren’t hearing me confess “It was.”

  “Say there’s no trouble between you. You’ve already got enough with us.”

  “You’re no trouble.”

  “We weren’t meaning to be. We didn’t know about your father. You ought to have put us off and gone looking for him.”

  “I don’t want to keep letting people down.”

  “How have you been doing that?” says the straight-lipped man.

  “His tour went a bit wrong the other night, that’s all, and he’s giving us this one for nothing.”

  “I wanted to come when there’d be less murders,” Gerry says.

  “I hope I haven’t been too savage this time, Mr Shea.”

  He stares at me before declaring “I’m no Shea.”

  I can only move us onwards, though the slim girl has planted a foot by one paw of the petrified lion to flex her leg. “Aren’t you taking that?” the straight-lipped man says. “You’ll have them thinking it’s a bomb.”

  I look back to see the abandoned bag of umbrellas. “I’d have brought them,” the girl says.

  She isn’t helping any more than Moira Shea and her companion did. I grab the handle and shove the bag past the statue. To our right, where buses swing past a trio of derelict cinemas that may dream of lighting up their screens, we could visit the site of St James’s Hall, in which Florence Maybrick of Alabama was made to feel at home by the American Slave Serenaders, “the only combination of genuine darkies in the world.” I spare Gerry the reference, and I don’t know whether the chamber of horrors in the waxworks on the ground floor ever featured the Ripper, although the pale gleeful inhuman faces of plunderers boarding a wrecked boat became famous for giving children nightmares. Instead I lead the party past the Empire Theatre, which is offering Aristophanes in Scouse, opposite the Hall. When the theatre was the Alexandra, Henry Irving played Prospero in a production of The Tempest so vigorous that the auditorium was flooded, some said from beneath. Beyond it, at the foot of the Everton slope, the Adelphi Theatre—Delly to its friends—was known for local plays. One bill included The Bride of Everton; or, Liverpool in the Olden Time and a curtain-raiser, Led by a Light; or, The Marsh Maiden’s Suitors. The Delly was built as a circus, sometimes flooded by the upper reaches of the Pool. An unsigned reminiscence in the Liverpool Porcupine, a Victorian satirical journal, suggested that some of the circus performers “took more to the water than they did to the ring.” I’m making for the site, past the old law courts at the top of the hill where the library stands, when my pocket recommences chanting about love.

  “I have to take this,” I announce, because the display shows my parents’ number. “Hello?”

  “Gavin? You’ll be busy, won’t you? Have you got just a few moments?”

  “As long as you need,” I say, because my mother isn’t as calm as she’s trying to sound.

  “I won’t take much of your time. I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do.” Nevertheless she seems to have taken me at my word, since she falls quiet until I’m close to prompting her. “The police have found something,” she says, and then there’s another silence.

  Chapter Fourteen

  GANGLAND WAKE

  When I tell the taxi driver on the rank in Whitechapel where I want to go, he lowers his stout head to peer at me. “That where you live?”

  “I’ll just be visiting.”

  He gives his head a shake that would disarray his hair if he had any. “Wouldn’t, mate.”

  Is he one of the drivers who won’t accept a fare unless they think the distance makes it worth their while? “I’d like to all the same,” I tell him.

  His shrug resembles the preamble to a fight. “Your funeral.”

  At once I remember why he would prefer not to take this journey, but I’m not about to be deterred. I’ve already had to conduct my party back to Derby Square, since I couldn’t risk cutting another tour short, and take the bag of umbrellas to my flat, where no message was waiting. I climb into the taxi before the driver can change his mind.

  The taxi swerves away from Whitechapel but not my memory of it. It speeds up Stanley Street, past a seagull pecking at an abandoned Frugoburger in the lap of a statue of Eleanor Rigby on a bench, and veers into Victoria Street towards the Haymarket, where the end of Dale Street used to house the Mechanical Exhibition Rooms, renamed the Penny Hop. The place exhibited working models—the Storm at Sea, Napoleon the Fortune-Teller, Neptune and His Brood Rising from the Pool. Why am I bringing this to mind while I have no audience? We cross the tunnel entrance and follow Islington towards the ridge, where my mother is staying close to the phone. As the house comes in sight the driver says “Who’s going to do it, do you reckon?”

  The question unnerves me until I grasp what prompted it—hordes of red-shirted football fans marching beneath the dark afternoon sky down to the Liverpool grou
nd. I feel as if I’ve become trapped in the past as well as in anxiety, because the crowds seem as unreal as a dream the landscape is having. I don’t even know which team is playing Liverpool, and I can only tell the driver “I’ve no idea.”

  “Aren’t you from round here?”

  “Very much so. I’m just not interested in football.”

  He stares out of the visor of the mirror as if I’ve revealed I’m worse than foreign. I might wonder by way of retort whether he’s aware that Thomas de Quincey had an opium reverie up here that transformed the waters of Liverpool into an enormous consciousness. The spectacle of the red horde tramping past a disused library near where he had the vision makes me yearn for the past as the taxi swings inland.

  Along Breck Road the uniformed matchgoers thin out like the highest reach of a stream, clogged by shoppers and gossips bunched in front of dozens of small shops. A pub is advertising the Scouse alternative to Toad in the Hole, a sausage casserole called Frog in a Bog. Past Anfield the road broadens and grows domestic with houses before it crosses Queen’s Drive, the wide avenue that describes an arc through much of outer Liverpool, linking the riverside at Bootle—the farthest reach of High Rip violence—to Aigburth, close to another stretch of waterfront and the house where James Maybrick died. Beyond Queen’s Drive is Norris Green, across a roundabout under a bridge. Goods wagons clank overhead like links of an enormous chain, but this isn’t where my father called from; there’s too much traffic, and the acoustic isn’t hollow enough. I try not to be distracted by the memory as the taxi ventures into Norris Green.

  A grassy strip planted with trees divides the long straight road lined with houses, the public face of the suburb. Soon it’s interrupted by a crossroads, the left branch leading between two crescents of shops with signs as faded as old photographs or displaying ghosts of letters stolen from their names. All the shops are shut out of respect, however enforced, for the funeral of a teenage gangster shot by another suburban gang. The driver swings the taxi across the intersection into the other half of the estate.

  Mounds in the roadway—not ancient graves but hindrances to speeding—slow us down at once. We’re surrounded by boxy twin houses with steep red roofs pulled low over their bedroom windows, and I could imagine that the dark sky is weighing the roofs down. Many of the houses have sprouted ornamental lamps or stained-glass porches or acquired windows meant to seem antique, but others are boarded up. Another four streets radiate from a roundabout, and they’re all as deserted as wasteland. The only sign of life is a thickset dog that glances up nervously from licking its wounds beyond the elaborate wrought-iron gate of a front garden flattened by concrete, but I’m more concerned with the roundabout. It’s apparently the one across rather than around which my father’s bicycle was ridden like a machine tougher than it is, buckling the wheels.

  The rider still managed to pedal several hundred yards into Swinebrook Crescent, where he abandoned the bicycle in the middle of the road, presumably to obstruct the police car that was chasing him. Most of the crescent is derelict, although a few windows among all the tinned ones are defiantly curtained. The houses face a semicircle of grassland that may have been intended to recall a village green. It’s overgrown now and occupied by dozens of seagulls, some of which raise their wings at our approach as if they’re claiming the territory. We’re miles from the sea, and I can’t help feeling that, just as the gangs have regressed to savagery, the green is reverting to a marsh. As I wonder if this underlies the streets the driver says “Which house?”

  “Can we drive around there while I see?”

  I peer at the houses as the taxi coasts forward. If we’re being observed from the occupied properties, the watchers are staying unseen. Several of the sheets of metal nailed across front doors have been wrenched loose. Perhaps the cyclist fled into one of the reopened houses, but how does this help? Did I fancy that visiting the area might give me some insight into my father’s activities? I’ve seen no reason why he would come anywhere near. I feel less awake than ever, so that the deserted estate has begun to resemble a dream of habitation. Eventually the driver says “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  He brakes so abruptly that my head rediscovers its ache. “Better pay up and get out.”

  “Sorry, do you think I’m here for something illegal?” When he only stares at me in the mirror I protest “I’m looking for my father.”

  “Make your mind up. Don’t you know where your own dad lives? That’s no way to treat your family.”

  “Of course I do, and it’s not here. His bicycle was stolen and this is where it ended up.”

  “They use them for deliveries.” No doubt the driver has drugs or guns in mind. “Stolen where?” he says.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Funny way to do it if you ask me.”

  I’m afraid he’s about to insist on my leaving the taxi. “I think I’ve seen all there is to see,” I tell him.

  He sends the taxi out of the crescent with a screech of wheels. The seagulls rise as if the wilderness has heaved them up to circle shrieking overhead. They might almost be signalling our presence to the crowd that confronts us on our way back to the main road. The funeral and its aftermath must be over, because the streets are suddenly full of people, most of them using mobile phones, even the drivers and cyclists. All of them stare at the taxi, and every pedestrian turns to watch it pass. Stones clatter against both sides of the vehicle, and then one cracks the window behind my head. I fumble for my mobile, gasping “Shall I call the police?”

  “Leave it. They’re not interested,” the driver snarls and accelerates over the speed bumps, almost thumping my head against the cracked window.

  He keeps glaring in the mirror at the damage or at me as he leaves the estate behind. He doesn’t speak while he retraces the journey, and I don’t until the taxi turns along the ridge of Everton. “This is fine,” I say.

  “What’s fine about it?”

  “It’s where my parents live.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be looking for one.”

  I might have offered to pay for the damage, but I’ve had enough of his suspicion. I hand him exactly the amount on the meter and wait for him to release the door. Once he finishes thinking about it I emerge beneath a sky as black as the cab. The wooden For Sale flag shivers in a wind as I open the gate with a clang of the latch. The colours of the house—bright red walls, yellow door and windows, orange curtains framing nets—seem determinedly cheerful, positively forced. So does the floral dress that my mother is wearing again, though surely not all the time since my last visit. Is it tighter on her? Perhaps she has been eating for comfort; she looks almost bloated. She blinks past me at the taxi that’s belatedly departing, and then she watches me approach between the rockeries, on which I’m taken aback to see weeds. Her face is owning up to so little expression that I’m apprehensive before she speaks. “I don’t think they’re looking for your father any more.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  WATERED DOWN

  The kitchen is resolutely bright as well. The fluorescent tube is switched on, and much of the small room gleams white—the walls and the cupboards on them, the cooker and the refrigerator, the round table and its rounded chairs. Although the sun is behind black clouds above the river, the kitchen feels as if it’s lit up in the middle of the night, and I imagine my mother waiting sleeplessly in here, gazing down the slope towards the giant birds perched at the Pier Head while she yearns for the sound of the gate. On her way along the hall she says only “You’ll have a hot cup, won’t you? Kettle’s on.” I hope she’s trying to contain her anxiety rather than too distracted to concentrate, and so I don’t speak while she takes two Cavern Not Tavern mugs from the cupboard beside the tinny sink. I manage to keep silent while she’s handling the kettle and then a bottle of milk. Once she replaces that in the refrigerator I risk asking “Why do you think they’ve stopped?”
r />   She hands me a mug of coffee and sits at the table to sip while she ponders her answer. “They seem to think it was him on the bicycle.”

  “You’re joking,” I protest and am dismayed to see her lips begin shaping a smile in response. “I mean they must be. That was never him.”

  “They said the man fitted his description. They didn’t see his face.”

  “I don’t care what he looked like. Why would he have been running away from the police? I’ll bet they didn’t tell you bicycles round there are used for guns and drugs.”

  “They did actually, Gavin.” She looks apologetic as she says “I think they think that’s why he was there.”

  I’ve run out of expressions of disbelief. I take a gulp of coffee and demand “They’re accusing him of what exactly?”

  “Of buying something like that, and that’s why he ran off.”

  “They said that to you?”

  “Pretty well. They gave me that impression,” she says, looking sorrier than ever. “They did say he’s been behaving strangely lately.”

  “How can they know that?”

  “From someone at the library, apparently.”

  I open my mouth and shut it again, feeling stupid as a fish, before I say “Someone.”

  “They didn’t tell me who. I’m sure it couldn’t have been your girlfriend.”