The Disappearance Boy (26 page)

He’d organise the rest of the day’s rehearsal so that it didn’t require him to touch her too much, he decided, and then get Reg to walk her home early. Things were temporarily strained, he’d admit that, but very far from impossible. Yes, they only had one more week to get the act finished, and sending her home early would lose them a couple of hours, but no point in spoiling the ship for a ha’porth, and so on.

At four’clock, Pam and Reg walked up the Queen’s Road in silence. They both knew that there was nothing much useful that could be said out loud – not today, not while they were both still so raw – and simply concentrated on getting themselves home. They said their goodbyes on the usual corner. Reggie asked her if she wanted to take the money, but she said that she didn’t want it in the same room as her, and would he please keep it for a day or two; she didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, she said, knowing it was in her bag. As she let go of his arm, she offered him a conciliatory squeeze just above the elbow, and a thin smile, but that was all.

10

Reg stood and watched her walk all the way to her front gate, keeping his eyes on her until she was hidden by the laburnum tree. Jamming his hands into his pockets, he discovered a packet of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper that he’d bought himself at lunchtime, and realising how hungry he now was, he set off to find somewhere to sit and eat them.

He found a park, found a bench, opened the greaseproof packet – but then, deciding that a cigarette would be more like it, folded the sandwich back into its wrapping and stuffed it into a bin. Two speckled birds came and tried to get at it while he smoked, and he watched them, but didn’t chase them away.

He stayed on the bench for hours – until his tobacco tin was empty, in fact.

When the park bell came for sunset, he walked for a bit, not really looking or caring where he was going, and only stopping occasionally to watch the street lamps coming on across the town. At one point he crossed a railway bridge, and passed an odd-looking white-and-green-tiled factory which smelt of soap. Knowing that he was exhausting himself, he eventually decided to turn around, and limped up a long elm-lined avenue that he hoped would lead him back to a main road into town. Through the black lace of the branches, a bright spring moon was now rising.

Still, he couldn’t think straight.

A passing bus pulled in in front of him, but Reggie decided to save his fourpence, and let the bus ring itself away from the stop without him. He was sure he remembered from the map in the back of his guidebook that somewhere up ahead would be the station – then he could head straight down the Queen’s Road and cut through North Road to the front and his bed.

However, when he got to the next junction, Reg faltered, and paused for thought; and then, instead of choosing to head left towards the great curving glass roof of the railway station and thence to the top of the Queen’s Road, he turned right. Two more turns and ten minutes later – he was limping slowly now – his route brought him back into the very same street of dilapidated white-faced villas where he had left Pam some five hours earlier.

The lamps were all lit now, and he went and stood under their usual lamp post, staring at the house and imagining her lying alone and sleepless in her bed in the room at the back. There was a second street lamp right across from Mrs Brennan’s front door, and it was close enough to the laburnum tree to be fusing its heavy load of blossoms into a single, shimmering blaze. Even from his vantage point on the corner, Reggie was drenched in its perfume. He breathed it in. Rank, heady; foxlike. Warm …

I think he was intending to stand sentinel and watch all night, as if that might help prevent some harm that he couldn’t even put a name to, but then, as he stood there, letting the perfume and the night and his tiredness take hold of him, he realised that next to Pam’s bed wasn’t where he needed to be tonight at all. He knew the cemetery gates would be locked by now, and he knew how high the surrounding wall was. He knew he’d sworn he was never going to talk to his mother again, and knew how much his left foot was hurting, but none of that seemed to matter. He had to.

11

The leap up the cemetery wall from the top of the stolen dustbin took all of Reggie’s skill, but on the third try, his fingers found their grip. He’d swung his jacket up ahead to try to protect himself from the worst of the broken glass, but even so he felt something come through the tweed and tear at the palm of his right hand. He gasped, swore, gritted his teeth, gasped again with the pain, and hauled. A second blade burnt his right leg as he swung it up and over, stinging the meat on the back of his calf. He took a deep breath, and let himself fall. After he’d dropped, he picked himself and inspected the damage. His trousers were ruined, with a neat wet slice where the glass had caught him, and the palm of his right hand had been opened. In the moonlight, the blood was black. After flexing his fingers to make sure they were still working, he shook the blood off as best he could, and bound the already-throbbing hand up with his handkerchief.

Everything looked different in the dark, and it took him a while to get his bearings in the thickly wooded lower part of the cemetery. Using the slope of the hill to guide him, he picked his way through the leaning black graves and columns until he found a path he recognised. Then it was up, along the wall, under the bay trees and out onto the open grass.

He’d never seen the stones by moonlight before. They stretched away from him in pale, orderly rows, each one attended by its own bright shadow – as if they were hospital beds, Reg thought, with each sheet turned down by a black, attendant nurse. But if it was a hospital, it was a very peaceful one; no voices called out as he passed, and he deliberately stepped off the path and onto the grass so that his feet wouldn’t wake anyone up. Everything was edged with silver, and the names on the stones had been freshly inked. When he arrived at Doreen’s, he instinctively spoke in a whisper.

‘Hello my darling.’

All around him, the moonlight was smoothing the turf into a blanket, and for once he knew he needn’t worry about her being cold. He gently ran the back of his damaged hand across her name, tracing its letters with his aching knuckles. Then, without thinking about it, he knelt down, reached his arms around the stone, and kissed it.

In January, of course, a stone can take the skin off your lips – but not in May. After a day of sunshine, it gives you back the warmth of your own mouth even after dark. The effect is always strange, and it was now for Reggie. He shifted his position so that he could get both of his arms around the stone more comfortably, and rested his cheek against its hard edge – to him, it felt like a pillow. He closed his eyes. Hugging the stone closer, he pulled his knees up almost to his chin.

That’s right; if the stone
had
been a bed, he would have climbed right in and held her, all night.

People who think they have never had it – or who fear they have no right to it – often ask themselves what possible proof of love there can be. Of course, for the rest of us there are kind actions, shared moments, histories of glance and touch – but this is Reggie, remember, and he has had none of that in his life. For him, love hasn’t ever been a verb, but only ever the most abstract of nouns, and out here in the moonlit silence of this cemetery especially his imagination has no use for the cruel nonsense of rings or white dresses or red silk roses. He’s touched on some of the things men will do to shy away from or scrabble towards love, but he has never felt it course incontrovertibly though his body.

But now – trust me – with his eyes closed and his arms full of warm stone, lit only by the moon, he does.

Trust me.

Only flesh can speak to flesh. Without any warning except the slightest prickling at the back of his neck, Reggie feels something which is as close as a voice in his ear, and as tangible as a change from hot to cold. Indeed, a change of temperature is exactly the first thing that he is aware of. A hand, warmer than the stone he’s holding, places itself gently on his shoulder.

He’s not sure at first if he’s got that right. He doesn’t open his eyes, but closes them tighter – and holds his breath. The pressure of the hand, fugitive at first, becomes definite. Gasping out loud, Reggie feels a second hand join it on his other shoulder. They press, warming him. Whirling, staggering, he stands – his eyes still closed – and now he wants to cry, because there are suddenly two arms wrapped close around him and pressing into his back, holding him as firmly as he has just been holding the stone, whether he wants it or not. The sensation isn’t elusive, but absolutely real; as his mother holds him, she is pressing herself gently into his chest, resting her face on it, and he can feel the warmth of her body as he now reaches out and folds his arms carefully around her in reciprocation. To his surprise, his mother is slightly shorter than he is; her face dips gently into his breastbone, so that his lips can almost feel her hair. As he cradles her, and she hugs him, her warmth floods him. People say
she went through me
, and they’re right; she is inside him, too. Their breaths rise and fall together.

Reggie doesn’t want ever to be let go – he can’t imagine it. He doesn’t want this ever to end, but of course – eventually – gently, and slowly, it must. The warmth doesn’t pull away, or vanish, or evaporate; he doesn’t feel abandoned, or bereft. Just before she goes, he feels her fingers graze his cheek, and that is enough. He stands still for a very long time, and only then does he slowly open his eyes. The stones – those silent witnesses – are still sleeping as peacefully as they were before, still all laid out in their pale hospital rows. Very far away and over to his right, he can hear a night train picking up speed as it leaves the town.

He stands there for a very long time.

Not wanting to wake them, but needing to thank them all the same, Reggie whispers the stones a quiet, collective
Goodnight
. He gathers himself, but isn’t quite ready to leave. He waits until he is, and then gently – gently – turns himself away. This bit is quite hard; after just a few steps on the gravel, he stops and turns round, wondering if he mightn’t just go back and curl up against the stone for the rest of the night, sleep with it as his pillow until the dew comes and drenches him – but he knows that that would be to trespass on his mother’s rest, and he turns again and continues down the path. It’s only when he gets to the metal gate that he realises that his face is wet with tears, but he doesn’t mind. The gate clicks shut behind him, its voice quietened for once; he remembers to gently tap his knife with his bloodied hand; and now he taps and drags his mismatched feet in their distinctive rhythm down through the trees. It’ll be a few hours before they open the big black gates of the main entrance, he realises, but he’ll be happy to just sit quietly on a grave and wait till they do. The cut on the back of his leg is starting to sting, and he knows he should get some of Pam’s Dettol on that, and see to his sliced hand with some hot water and plasters, but all of that can wait. As he reaches the gate, he settles down to sit and wait, and soon he hears the first birds just beginning to sing.

Thank you.

Pamela heard him coming up her corridor, and considered saying she just needed a minute – but Reg lurched into her dressing room without even knocking. His up-all-night eyes took in the newspaper cuttings lying crumpled in the spilt powder and then locked onto hers, staring. Did he have a fever or something? And what the hell had happened to his hand?

‘You just can’t see it, can you?’

‘What? What can’t I see?’ replied Pamela, dabbing at her eyes – and then, trying to make a joke of it, trying to look affronted, as if someone had given her a lovely little piece of new jewellery and she’d somehow mislaid it amid the litter of her disarranged dressing table, silly empty-headed little tart that she was. ‘What can’t I see, Reggie?’

‘The way out.’

12

After that slightly rocky start, the week went as well as could have been expected. Much to her credit, Mr Brookes thought, Pam seemed to have pulled herself together.
The show
, as she put it on the Tuesday morning as she climbed into the apparatus to start drilling her quick change once again with Reg,
does have to bloody go on, after all
. She certainly wasn’t looking her best, which was a bit of a worry with regards to the opening, but on the other hand she wasn’t making any scenes or asking him to talk things over. In particular, she didn’t ask him if they were going to keep on seeing each other, which was a relief; he’d had enough of that bloody carry-on with the last one, thank you very much. He did have to be a bit careful when it came to manhandling her at certain points in rehearsals, obviously, especially when she was blindfolded and tied, but he could manage that. After all, everyone knew they got a bit moody in the early weeks, so it was only to be expected.

To his surprise she’d even been perfectly professional when he gave her the address he’d arranged for her to visit, scribbled down on a page torn from his notebook. Commendably, it seemed to be a point of pride with her that she wanted to get everything over and done with as soon as she could. He’d assumed that she’d want to leave getting herself seen to until after the opening of the new show, but after rehearsal on the Thursday she came and asked him if he could arrange things for Saturday afternoon. That way, she said, she could take advantage of the Sunday off and get back to work on the Monday. It had cost him another two quid for the short notice to get her the appointment – and there’d be her taxi fare there and back on top of that, because the place was right out on the edge of town, and she’d have to go as soon as they’d finished work – but he didn’t mind. As she herself pointed out, the sooner this whole thing was off her mind, the better.

There were only a couple of properly tricky moments between them. A few times, he’d pushed her a bit too far, and there’d been tears – once, for instance, when making her repeat her frock-parading on her entrance, and then again with their business when the Gentleman offered his Lady the diamond ring. As he always did at this stage of rehearsals, he was talking the story though out loud while they worked, marking in the punctuation points for the percussion from the band and counting her moves where required. As he worked the produce of the jewellery box he’d stupidly used the phrase
He lets you know he’s got something for his very special girl
right in her ear, and obviously – obviously – that had been the wrong thing to say. She’d pulled away, asked him if he minded if they took a break for a moment, and then walked off, rummaging in her bag so that he couldn’t see her face. However, it was obvious that she was crying, and next thing he knew he was having to ask Reggie to go and get her out of the downstairs Ladies with a cup of tea before they could continue.