No Cure For Love (13 page)

‘Thanks,’ said Paula. ‘You can set the table now, if you like.’

Sarah did so, and before long they all sat down to dinner. Cathy and Jason wanted to go in the front room and watch television while they ate from their laps, but Paula said no, they watched too much of the idiot-box as it was. She looked at Sarah when she said ‘idiot-box’ and Sarah didn’t miss the dig. But that was Paula all over; she had given too much away in an unguarded moment, and now she had to go on the offensive.

The children sulked for about thirty seconds, then they started humming the theme music of
Good Cop, Bad Cop
. Paula told them to shut up. Sarah laughed. Her father continued to pick at his food in silence, leaving most of it. Paula shot Sarah a long-suffering glance, as if to say, ‘See, he’s even off his food now. What am I to do? How can I cope with all this?’

It was hot in the dining room and Sarah felt a bead or two of sweat trickle down the groove of her spine. Had Paula turned up the heat for her benefit? It would be just like her to do that, and then complain about the bill. What little conversation they had over the meal was halting and banal, yet fraught with the tension of the unsaid, the unexpressed. She was beginning to feel like a character in a Pinter play.

As she ate, she began to think that there might be some kind of home or special clinic where her father could go and be well cared for. God knew, she could afford it. But she knew without asking that any such suggestion would be met with extreme resistance. Where she came from, you looked after your own.

After a Marks and Spencer’s apple pie with custard, which Sarah declined, and some general chat about what a lousy summer it had been, Paula sent the children off to bed and announced that she had to go to work. Sarah did the washing-up alone, with only the sound of the wind whistling around the kitchen window for company.

When she had finished, she returned to the dining room and saw that her father was still in the same position at the table. He had one of his stamp albums open in front of him and was turning the stiff pages slowly.

Sarah could only stand in the doorway and gaze, held frozen by the emotion of a memory that leapt unbidden into her mind. She must have been five or six, at the cramped old pit house in Barnsley, and for the first time her father beckoned her over after tea to come look at his stamps. Even then he had spent hours at the table just looking at them, chain-smoking Woodbines and sometimes drinking a bottle of beer.

Sarah could remember the smells as if they were yesterday: the acrid cigarette smoke, the malt and hops of the beer, the lingering odour of dripping, bacon or kippers. And she had stood beside him – he with his arm loosely around her shoulders – and looked into what she could only describe as windows into bright new worlds. Small windows with serrated edges, or tiny screens onto which colourful images were projected. None of the stamps were very valuable, she thought, but the bright colours, the proud heads of monarchs, exotic birds, other animals and majestic ships and planes that decorated them enthralled her.

And now here he was, in a different, much larger house with any number of rooms to choose from, in the same position at the dinner table, poring over his collection. From where she stood, Sarah could see the flashes of colour.

In her mind, she could hear the memory of his voice as he told her the stories of the stamps, of how ‘Suomi’ meant Finland and ‘Deutschland’ meant Germany, who they had fought in the war, of how far away and how hot were the places like Gold Coast, British Guyana and Mauritius, and how the brightly coloured birds with the long feather tails, the macaws and birds of paradise, depicted on the stamps, really did live in those places. One day, she had vowed then, she would see them. Her eyes burned with tears as she watched him labouring to breathe over the images.

Her father looked up and frowned. ‘What’s up, lass?’

Sarah wiped her forearm over her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’ She grasped the back of a chair and steadied herself. ‘Still a bit tired. Must be the flight.’

‘Like a drop of brandy?’

‘No, no. I’m all right, really, Dad. Don’t bother.’ She rubbed her eyes again, this time with the backs of her hands.

He jerked his head. ‘It’s in that cabinet over there. I wouldn’t mind one myself.’

When she was a child, there had always been ‘medicinal’ brandy in the house, and the one time Sarah had been given a drink, after the shock of falling off her bike and spraining her wrist, she had hated it. She had tried it since, however, and didn’t mind the taste too much now.

She found the brandy and two glasses. She poured generous measures and put one in front of her father, then sat down with her own. He looked at his glass, smiled and said, ‘Hand slipped, did it?’ then took a sip.

An awkward silence followed. Sarah didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to ask him about his emphysema – no more, she imagined, than he wanted to talk about it. Finally, her father broke the silence: ‘Doing all right, then, are you, lass?’

‘Yes.’ Sarah cradled her glass in both hands and looked into the dark amber liquid. ‘Yes, I’m doing fine.’

‘Being ill like this . . .’ He paused. ‘It changes you. Puts things in perspective. Know what I mean?’

Sarah nodded. She didn’t know what to say. Had he forgiven her?

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Well . . .’ Then he shifted in his wheelchair, probably from embarrassment. As Sarah knew too well, he wasn’t a man given to easy expression of his feelings. Well, no men were, really, but some were better than others.

‘So what’s Tinseltown like?’ he asked.

‘I . . . I don’t really . . .’ Sarah felt stuck for words. She had almost said she didn’t live there, but of course she did. What on earth could she be thinking of? ‘It’s all right, I suppose,’ she went on. ‘It’s warm most of the time. I miss the change of seasons. The snowdrops and daffodils in spring, the leaves changing and falling in autumn. I mean, I don’t mind living there, but it’s so . . .’

Lonely, she almost said, but she didn’t want to expose herself, certainly not to her father.
Let’s bury Daddy in  the sand!
She shivered. Besides, isolation was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Seclusion, no complications. And the beach house was where she had begun to find herself, begun the reconstruction of Sally Bolton. Instead, she simply said, ‘Impermanent.’

‘You’re not planning on staying there?’ her father asked.

Sarah shrugged. That wasn’t what she meant at all, but she didn’t think she could explain it to him.

‘Do you still live by yourself?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous? We see things on the news. Muggings, gangs, riots and fires and suchlike.’

Sarah shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I’m working at the studio a lot. It’s safe there. They’ve got very good security. And it’s very quiet where I live. By the sea, like this.’ Except for the maniac on the hill watching me through binoculars, she wanted to add. ‘You should come and visit,’ she said, not realizing until she had spoken that he probably couldn’t travel very easily.

His lips formed a smile that his eyes didn’t echo. ‘I doubt I could survive that there smog,’ he said.

Sarah laughed. ‘Oh, come on. You’d probably be better off than the rest of us, what with your oxygen and all. Besides, it’s not so bad these days. There’s a lot of emission controls.’

He grinned, showing crooked black and yellow teeth. ‘Aye, who knows? Maybe one day. I’d like to see all them stars on the pavement there before I die. Ronald Colman. Greta Garbo. Charlie Chaplin. Jimmy Stewart. I’ve always wanted to see those.’

Sarah was surprised. ‘I’ll take you,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you them. I didn’t even know you liked movies.’

He shrugged. ‘Used to go to t’pictures a lot when I was a young lad. Before I met your mother and went down t’pit. Never had time for owt like that when you were a kid, though. I were always on some bloody awkward shift or another. That or sleeping.’ He paused and took several deep breaths of oxygen before going on. ‘And there weren’t no videos and the like back then. It’s a lot easier now. I can’t get out and about much these days so I watch at home. Paula’s a good lass, she goes and fetches them for me. Old ones mostly. Black-and-white. They’re still the best. You can keep your sex and violence.’ He looked directly at Sarah as he spoke, and she blushed and turned away, remembering the row they had after he’d seen her do a nude scene in a Channel Four film. The beginning of the end. ‘Nay,’ he went on, ‘I hadn’t time for t’pictures back then, had I? Your mother, though . . . now that were another matter.’

They fell silent for a moment, Sarah contemplating the times when her mother took
her
to the pictures. More stimulus for the budding actress. All kinds of memories came rushing back. She remembered the first film she had ever seen, when she was five or six – Walt Disney’s
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
– and how scared she had been of Cruella De Ville.

When she next looked at her father, his eyes were closed and his chin rested on his chest. At first, she thought something terrible had happened to him, but she could still hear his struggle for breath and the slow hiss of oxygen.

Slowly, Sarah crept upstairs and picked up the envelope. She had been in two minds about it all evening: half afraid of opening it and morbidly curious about the contents. Now, while her father and the children slept, while Paula was at work, she opened it and slipped out the two pages. Then she read the words with mounting horror:

My Darling Little Star,

Oh my Love, if only everyone could see what I see. Patterns of the most delicate intricacy. Patterns of Spirit stripped of Flesh and Muscle. Sometimes I see Fountains of bright Blood gushing across a hundred television screens at once. Sometimes I hear you speak to me over the Electromagnetic Waves, telling me what I must do to prove my Love.

Don’t you know who I am, my Little Star? You are the Detective now. Look into your past and find me. I am there, the dark Shape in the Shadows of your Memory. Find me, my love. Speak to me. Love me. Let me free you. Tell me you Know. I will rescue you. I will win you back from Them and we will look into each other’s eyes over the candlelight and hold hands beyond the Flesh for centuries through the Mirrors of the Sea where none can live but us.

Tell me you accept my simple Offering. Now do you see how I can provide for you, how I can Honor you as no one else can? With your Love, there can be no Fear. With your Love, there will be no Limits.

But you must not think I enjoy causing pain. No, that is not it at all, that is not my purpose, surely you can see? The boy wanted Death. Every night he cruised the Boulevard looking for Death, for someone who would deliver him to his Destiny. The Boulevard of Death. I put him to sleep like a kind Anesthetist before I performed my Operation. My Knives were sharp. I spent hours sharpening them. I was gentle when I bent over him. He didn’t feel a thing. Please believe me.

The disentanglement of Spirit from Flesh has a Scent and an Aura all of its own, my Love. One day I will show you, let you Smell and Taste it with me. We will disentangle our Spirits from our Gross Bodies and entwine for ever, cut away the wretched excess. I will bury my head between your Milk White Thighs and drink the Blood and Baptize myself with your Menses. Outside our Skins we will know Eternal Love.

I must stop now. I am Weary and my Heart aches for you, my Love. Darkness falls and more Visions await me.

I am Yours, your Loving and Adoring Servant, unto all Eternity,

M.

Outside, Sarah could hear the waves crashing against the sea wall and the wind gusting and moaning about the rooftops. A shutter was banging somewhere. Inside, she was aware of the loud beating of her heart. My God, she thought, he
did
do it. She
had
seen the heart with her name in it drawn in the sand. It wasn’t an illusion. But
who
was he?

Down the street, the wind whipped a tile from someone’s roof and sent it smashing to the ground.

15

Arvo drove up the Coast Highway on Saturday morning with the top of his tan convertible open and the Allman Brothers singing ‘Statesboro’ Blues’ on the radio. The ocean breeze ruffled his hair and forced its way deep into his lungs. He needed it to blow the cobwebs out of his mind and bring him back to life.

Last night had been a bad one, starting when he found that
I Married a Monster from Outer Space
had been delayed by a late-running hockey game, leaving him with only the first ten minutes of the movie.

As a substitute, he had dashed out and rented
Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks,
which was every bit as much of a turkey as the guy in the rental store had warned him.

He had woken just after four in the morning with a dry mouth and a pounding head, courtesy of the Scotch and Sam Adams chasers he had drunk after the leftover pizza. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep again, mostly for thinking about the Sarah Broughton case. He had arranged to meet Stuart Kleigman in Santa Monica for lunch, but first he wanted to take a look at the crime scene.

The backs of the houses that faced the Coast Highway were nondescript. Mostly, they were simple flat-roofed rectangular boxes of varying heights and widths, some beige or white stucco, some wood-frame. Some of them had high windows facing the road, but most presented a blank façade. Because the houses were close together, the narrow gaps between them had been closed with high chain-link fencing.