The Disappearance Boy (10 page)

A courting couple passed behind him on the prom. The girl was laughing softly, and the boy looked ridiculously handsome in his open-necked shirt. Some music drifted towards them from somewhere, and for the first time Reggie turned round and looked at all the lights of his new town.

He scrunched up what was left of his chips in their newspaper, and threw them out on the beach for the shadowy, gathering gulls.

2

As it happens, Reg’s first impressions of the new girl were mostly right. She very much
could
take care of herself.

In 1953, women of all classes were expected to dress, walk and talk as if they needed looking after, and although Pam could manage a reasonable approximation of that approach to life if the professional situation required it, it wasn’t her mode of choice. The way she dressed, combined with that defiantly almost-bare face (just a lick of pale powder, a slash of dark red lipstick and invariably a cigarette), meant that few people were surprised when she came straight out and told them the kinds of thing that she mostly did for a living. She laughed often, and well – and not to impress. It was one of her trademark gestures, the ones her friends knew her by; shaking out her charm bracelet, rooting in that big red bag to see where her fags had got to this time and laughing, throwing back her head and tossing her unkempt hair out of her eyes.

That was exactly what she’d done when Mr Brookes had offered to buy her that second drink in the Golden Lion. Of course, she’d realised that he wasn’t being entirely straightforward with her, and had already guessed that this act he was trying to sell her a job in would involve more than just parading a couple of frocks. However, as she now told herself as she got dressed for work,
How hard can being made to disappear be?
She’d needed a break, and that was that. Keeping things going with bits and pieces at the London Camera Club and whatever else the modelling agency could get her was all very well, but six regular guineas a week would make a very welcome change. Almost a holiday, in fact. She was going to take the money, get some air, enjoy the fact that nobody down here knew who she was and see what happened.

There’d been a lovely new shot of Princess Margaret out on the town in yesterday’s paper, and as soon as she’d seen it she’d known it was just the right thing for sticking up on her dressing-room mirror – ‘Margaret
Rose
Windsor’, it said underneath, and the fact that they shared a name always made her feel better. Men were always looking up at Margaret in her pictures, never she up at them, and she liked that – it looked as though she had all the time and choice in the world. All the time in the world …

She clasped on her pearls and laughed at herself. Who was she trying to bloody kid? She was lucky if she got a bunch of lilacs from Berwick Street Market these days. She checked in her bag for change, and decided that she’d probably better pop back to that kiosk in the station for her fags before work – she’d find a more convenient place later, but at least she knew where that was.

She was lovely all over, was Pamela, but I’d say that the best thing about her was that smile of hers – the one she wore as casually and as well as that ever-present
eau de parfum
. It had a lovely gentle way of suggesting that it was probably the people around her who were the problem in life, not her, and it went with her everywhere. Even in the infamous contact sheets of her that were being passed around at the time – the one that showed her sprawled across a sunny bed in Berwick Street with just a cigarette for company, for instance, the one that the photographer who shot it swore he’d pass on to the soon-to-be-famous painter he knew from the French Pub, but somehow never quite did – her smile accompanied her in every single frame. It got wiped off occasionally, of course, but it always came back.

3

Mr Brookes had started very slowly. Reggie had come in early as instructed, and had got everything set up and ready to go on the half-lit stage – the costumes set out neatly on some chairs, the apparatus ready under its ghostly silver drape, the hand props all to hand as required. Then, working very methodically, and only going into as much detail as he thought wouldn’t frighten her off, her new employer had talked Pam through the whole act, showing her the frocks, the shoes and the new brunette wig he’d borrowed for her first, and then the ropes, which he briefly uncoiled and asked her to test so she could feel how soft and manageable they were. Then he’d uncovered the apparatus and opened it up so that she could climb up through it and get acquainted with all its doors and handles. He showed her the bolt and switch inside the trap which Reggie had to operate, and the battery for the smoke trigger down in its corner, and stressed the importance of not knocking into or disabling any of them; he demonstrated the trap, and the all-important concealed opening down at the front that she’d be sliding through. Now, however, the preliminaries were over. He’d deliberately kept a blanket over the steps, and when he pulled it off to reveal them he did so quickly, to get it over with. Pam stared, then crouched down and inspected their insides, feeling for the two metal struts that would eventually stop her from falling out as she was wheeled away inside them by the stagehands.

‘Bloody hell. What are you going to do to me to get me tidied away into that then? Chop me up?’ she said. ‘All right . . . don’t bloody answer me, either of you.’

They didn’t. Pam unclasped her pearls, and passed them to Reggie.

‘Just show me. And gently.’

‘Certainly,’ said Mr Brookes. ‘Let’s start with the breathing, shall we?’

In a life class or photography session – both of whose demands Pamela knew all about – the trick is to keep breathing no matter how demanding the pose. For box work, the breath has to be punched out and
held out
; being empty is the only way a girl can hope to get her knees pinned sufficiently high up onto her chest or her chin pushed far enough down on her sternum, at least for the kind of conceal Pam had to achieve.

Mr Brookes started by stepping right in close behind her. He reached round as if he was demonstrating one of those manoeuvres they used to have pictured on charts in doctors’ waiting rooms, and, without explaining what he was doing, pressed his fingers across her lower ribs. He told her to breathe out, and pushed her ribs in hard towards her spine as she did it; then he told her she had to hold her breath out until he got to the end of a slow count of six. When she’d got the hang of that, he stepped even closer in behind her to get a better purchase, and then he counted, and pushed, and counted, and pushed, raising the count for which she had to hold herself empty by one beat every time. In between the numbers he kept up a steady drip of information, explaining that as she pulled herself up on the hand grips in the ceiling for Reg to open the trap, and again before she dropped down through it to jackknife herself in under the steps, she would have to blast every ounce of breath out of herself, keeping herself hollow even when her lungs started screaming.

Reggie watched the proceeding closely, sitting on a chair and waiting to be called. Her pearls had felt slightly warm when he’d taken them, and he remembered reading somewhere that that meant they were real. He wasn’t surprised – you could see why people would want to buy this one proper presents. The fact that Mr Brookes had his chest pressed into her back seemed not to be bothering her in the slightest, which was a good sign, and only when the count for which she had to hold her breath out reached seventeen did she shift her position at all, lifting her hands up over her head and lacing her fingers through her hair to achieve the extra push she needed to get everything out. She was doing well, he reckoned.

Once Mr Brookes had got Pamela as far as being able to hold herself empty for a slow count of twenty-five, he removed his hands, and asked her to climb up into the cabinet.

‘I think we’ll mime the ripping off of your skirt for today,’ he said, passing his jacket to Reggie, and rolling up his sleeves. ‘Eventually of course you’ll be doing the drop in just your stockings, but the waistband on those slacks looks perfectly practical for rehearsal purposes to me. Better use the actual cap and shoes, though – you might as well get used to passing them out to our Reg through the back. And we’ll keep the apparatus doors open both at the back and the front for today, so that no one has to be working entirely in the dark.’ He paused here, and smiled. ‘Not at this early stage in the proceedings, anyway.’

Pamela allowed herself half a smile in response, and looked up over her head to locate the two looped hand grips hidden in the cabinet ceiling. Reggie positioned himself at the back and got ready to take her cap and shoes and imaginary skirt as she shed them.

‘All right then,’ said Mr Brookes. ‘On my count. Nice and deeply in to start with. And remember –’

The opposing zinc panels multiplied Pam into an infinity of hoisted figures, black and white on silver. She tried to avoid her own face, but couldn’t.

‘Yes?’

‘Remember that as soon as the doors click shut the rope round your wrists goes between your teeth, so that your hands are then free to deal with your ankles and shoes. So you might as well do this with your mouth full. Reg –’

‘Christ. Don’t want bloody much, do you?’

It took nearly five hours.

First she had to get the hang of lifting herself up on the straps right – that alone took twenty minutes – then the drop through the open trap, then the drop and curl and slide into the steps, then the whole thing together as one uninterrupted, breathless sequence. Then, of course, she had to stay jammed into the steps while Mr Brookes counted out the full length of time it would take the stagehands to trundle her safely into the wings. The first time she made it all the way through, Reggie handed out a woman white-faced with shock and effort, her heaving shoulders sheened with sweat – Pam had stripped off her black sweater barely an hour into proceedings, and was working in just her bra and slacks. She looked as though she’d been dug up.

‘Thanks,’ she said, tersely, taking Reggie’s proffered hand to steady herself after she’d uncurled. ‘Jesus. Well … so that’s what it feels like when you go all the way.’

She was still fighting to get her breath back. Reggie stared at the scrapes and bruises that were already writing the apparatus’s angry signature across her back and forearms; he’d been expecting them, but still, they were going to need taking care of later. There’d be others on her shins as well, where she braced her knees against the metal strut.

‘I hope the music’s nice and loud.’

Mr Brookes was only half looking at her, quietly looping and relooping a rope. It was Reggie who spoke up, filling in for Mr Brookes’s silence.

‘Why’s that then?’

‘Because,’ she said, scraping her falling hair back out of her face again, and sucking in her breath, ‘I do hate it when people can hear me scream while I’m working. And now …’

She blew what breath she’d managed to drag back into her lungs right out through her mouth, like a swimmer climbing back up onto the starting block. Turning to Mr Brookes, she somehow managed to both smile and grit her teeth at the same time.

‘Now I expect you’d like to see me do that all over again, wouldn’t you? As the lance corporal said to the bishop.’

‘I most certainly would …’ Mr Brookes’s hands paused, and he let his mouth curl around the words as if he was tasting them. ‘I would love to see you do that again.
Several
times.’

Whatever the thought was that was passing across his face, it went as soon as it had come; the hands went back to busying themselves with the ropes, and his working smile slid itself back into place as if the proverbial butter wouldn’t melt. The transformation was so quick that Pam wasn’t even sure if she’d seen the expression in his eyes and mouth darken or not – it was like that business he’d described with the scarf, making people think that they’d seen something, then straight away telling them they couldn’t possibly have.

‘But we’ll cross that bridge in the morning, if you don’t mind.’ The rope resolved into a coil, and was tossed across the stage. ‘The crew will be arriving for the matinee soon, and I’m rather a stickler for not being observed on the job, if you see what I mean. Now, Reg, do you think you might rustle us up a cup of tea from somewhere?’

They stopped a full hour before the crew and band started arriving for work every day for the rest of that week – Mr Brookes was indeed a stickler for ensuring that no one ever got to see the mechanics of his act. However, that still left seven hours’ work with the apparatus every day. By the time Pam and Reg moved upstairs that Saturday lunchtime to work on her costumes in a spare dressing room Pam’s forearms and shins were a map of bruises, and she’d used up nearly a quarter of a bottle of her
eau de parfum
to keep herself fresh while they worked. At the end of each session Reggie would boil up some tea on the gas ring in the laundry room, and she’d try to slap the blood back into her arms and legs while she was waiting. She could feel precisely where those two metal struts had pressed themselves into her skin, and for some reason it made her feel as if she’d been mauled by exactly the kind of man she’d taken this job to get away from, one of those Dean Street drunks who wouldn’t take fuck off for an answer – and to be honest, even after four days of practice, she still wasn’t at all sure if she was going to be able to do this. She hadn’t said anything, but the dark drop down from the handles into the bottom of the cabinet made her stomach turn over every time; ridiculously, it always made her think of a drop into dark water, and the floor always seemed to hit her feet too late, making her terrified that it wouldn’t be there at all. Keeping the ropes clenched between her ankles always made her feel as if she was going to totter over on her heels at any minute, and right in front of him – and these last couple of days, when they’d been running things, and he’d insisted on still talking her through it all the time, describing exactly what her drawn-up knees and stretched-out spine were meant to be doing, there was sometimes something about the sound of his voice that made her want to kick her legs, steps or no steps. She’d come here to get away from men telling her what position to take up next, thank you very fucking much …