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Henry continues to the end of the row and glances behind him. The girl tips her head further over the barrier and a strand of waved hair slips loose from her bun and bounces against her cheek. He watches, transfixed, as with an almost hypnotic display of ease, she raises both arms to her head and clips it casually back into place.
‘Who is this girl?’ he mumbles under his breath.
He can’t understand it. He hasn’t even seen her face, and yet all he can think about is how intoxicating it must feel to be on the receiving end of such an intense gaze. Like looking into a lighthouse. Like dancing a waltz with the sun!
He doubles back along the front row until finally, somewhere between taking off his cap and smoothing down his hair, he comes to a stop beside her.
‘Wait!’ she cries, holding up her palm.
Henry freezes.
‘This is the absolute best bit! See the couple in the centre of the dance floor? They come here all the time. They dance for half an hour like they own the place, then they’re gone. I thought they might be partners in the romantic sense, too, but Daisy downstairs in the cloakroom said someone told her they’re twins. It’s all just rumours, though. Either way, they’re definitely professionals. Look how perfectly they’re holding each other! No one else can touch them!’
Henry turns and sees a handsome, dark-haired woman staring with queenly confidence into the fiery eyes of a swarthy, Mediterranean-looking male. Their bodies are pressed so closely together, you could barely thread a shoelace between them. As a couple, they’re flawless, incandescent. Henry hates them already.
‘Oh yes,’ he says, as the pair smoulder their way provocatively across the dance floor. ‘Not bad. Absolutely nothing intimidating about them at all.’
To his surprise, the girl responds with a hearty laugh.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he continues, cursing himself – inwardly – for his inopportune timing, ‘but is this seat taken?’
She turns her head and extends him an appraising gaze. She’s about his age – nineteen or twenty, twenty-one at most – with a peaches and cream complexion, a lively expression, and the most extraordinary liquid blue eyes he’s ever seen. Henry freezes a second time. Oh God, he thinks, she’s beautiful. What now?
She scans his eyes and casts a brief, sideways glance over his shoulder. In the interminable moment it takes for her to respond, Henry manages to convince himself that all she wants is a little peace and quiet to enjoy the dancing. Why else would she be sitting up here all alone?
Who or what, if anything, she sees or doesn’t see, he can’t be sure, but gradually her mouth softens into an irresistible smile.
‘The seat’s free,’ she replies. ‘Sit down. It’s so quiet up here today we’ve got the entire row to ourselves.’
Henry grins and lowers himself beside her. The second his buttocks hit the chair he’s overcome by a violent urge to face her, to win her over before he’s even learned her name. Instead, he does as she does, only with considerably less grace – pinioning his eyes to the dynamos on the dance floor, his hands clamped like barnacles to his knees.
‘Venus and Adonis,’ she says, after a beat.
Henry stares into the gaping void before him. He didn’t think it was possible he could feel any more affronted by this unbearably slick, depressingly accomplished couple if he tried.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ he replies. He turns mechanically to meet her gaze.
‘What?’
‘You’re not seriously telling me they’re called Venus and Adonis? If they are professionals – and with names like that, I pray to God for their sakes that they are – then Venus and Adonis have to be stage names. I mean, it’s a bit over the top, isn’t it? You do realise their real names are probably Shirley and Ken?’
The girl stares at him for a stunned five seconds, then bursts into a helpless fit of giggles. Her laughter is so infectious that soon Henry is laughing, too. In fact, the suppressed nervous tension that’s been building inside him from the moment he sat down quickly runs riot, and before long they’re both laughing so hard, they’re practically doubled over.
She leans towards him and, still giggling, holds up a thin, pink hand. ‘No! I’m not talking about the dancers. I’m talking about that… right there… the inscription engraved in the stonework above the stage. Can’t you see it?’
Instantly sobering, Henry follows her gaze. ‘Sorry?’
She leans a fraction closer. ‘Straight ahead of you… I asked Jimmy the doorman where it comes from and he told me it’s from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. I’d never heard of it, much less read it, but it made me laugh how it’s wound up here, in a dance hall. Must be a reference to the music, don’t you think?’
Henry sees it now; frankly, it’s impossible to miss when she’s pointing at it so prettily, the graze of her voice just inches from his face. He clears his throat and reads the quote out loud:
‘“BID ME DISCOURSE, I WILL ENCHANT THINE EAR…” Yes,’ he says, trying his utmost to compose himself, ‘I’d say it is. It might refer to the music, or maybe to a fellow music lover, like you?’
He peels his hand from his knee and holds it out towards her. ‘I’m sorry – you had me distracted there for a moment – I should have introduced myself. I’m Henry Applebee. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’
‘You don’t need to apologise.’ She gives him a dizzying smile. ‘Honestly, I haven’t laughed so much in ages.’
Henry casts an anxious glance at Shirley and Ken, who (to his immense annoyance) are still lording it over the dance floor. If that’s what he’s up against, then what he’s about to say next could quite possibly result in the most mortifying ten or fifteen minutes of his life…
‘Would you like to dance?’ he ventures, regardless. ‘I must warn you, though, I’m not much of a dancer. It’s the music I enjoy most of all.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t let them put you off,’ she replies. Her expression, her voice, are utterly forgiving, wholly kind. ‘Music lovers make the best dancers of all. My nan told me that. She had polio when she was a lass and she’s been weak in her legs all her life, but no one loves a tune more than she does. It’s worth dropping by for tea just to see her doing the rumba around her kitchen.’
Henry laughs, then remembers she hasn’t yet accepted his invitation.
She holds his gaze, her blue eyes appraising him once again. ‘I haven’t seen you here before. Are you stationed at Kirkham?’
His hand, still reaching towards her, starts to shake. ‘I am, yes. Actually, I just arrived today. From the Far East.’
‘You arrived today and you’re already at the Tower Ballroom? You really are a music fan, Henry!’
Henry grins. ‘Certified. Have been my whole life.’
‘Me too. Hook, line and sinker!’
She smoothes down the skirt of her dress. ‘How long are you here for?’
‘Forty-eight hours,’ he replies. ‘Then it’s demob for me.’
‘Oh.’ Her voice gives nothing away. ‘In that case, we’d better get moving.’
Henry glances back over the barrier. ‘There’s just one thing… If you expect me to share a dance floor with Venus and Adonis down there, could you at least tell me your name?’
‘Of course! But we have to be quick if we want to get downstairs before this song finishes. Come on, I’ll tell you my name on the way.’
She rises from her seat, and as she edges past him, the hem of her dress brushes against his knees. All at once, the possibility of holding her in his arms on the dance floor scatters Henry’s thoughts like bowling pins. His heart batters furiously against his ribs.
It is then, without warning, that it begins…
She takes his hand and everything around him starts to disintegrate. Henry feels his feet slide from under him as a sharp, violent jolt yanks him against his will by an invisible chain, back, far back along a dark, dank tunnel. The swell of music fades, and as the light from the glitter balls begins to dim, Henry finds himself struggling to retain the receding image of her face. He strains, forcing himself to stay present, but while sound and vision distort, the warmth of her hand and the touch of her skin remain both elusive, and at once, agonisingly real.
Henry’s body jerks and tenses. He’s in Kentish Town, in his bedroom, the only sounds the contented sighs and snuffles of Banjo’s nocturnal breath.
Willing himself back along the thin, dark tunnel, Henry silently repeats the words over and over:
Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up.
He keeps his eyes firmly closed. There is a moment’s grace, a final glimpse beyond the velvet darkness, and then, from far away, her voice:
‘Don’t worry, I’m not much of a dancer either, but I could happily watch everyone else dancing all day long. It’s nice to meet you, Henry. I’m Francine, by the way.’
4
The Glass Wall
KING’S CROSS STATION, LONDON, DECEMBER 6: DEPARTURE
Ariel
Ariel closed the basement door behind her and dragged her wheelie bag back up the concrete steps. She followed the zigzag of turns in reverse and retraced her steps to Finsbury Park tube station. As she neared the entrance, a crowd of commuters with misery splattered across their faces came pouring towards her.
‘Has something happened?’ she asked a woman in a camouflage parka and bright orange boots.
The woman sighed. ‘There’s a security alert at Victoria. The entire line’s been closed. Don’t even bother trying to get on the Piccadilly Line… the platform’s rammed. It’s total chaos down there.’
Ariel’s heart sank. ‘Are there any buses? I have to get to King’s Cross.’
‘Sure, if you’re willing to spend the rest of the day getting pushed around in a queue with everyone else here.’ She flicked her eyes to Ariel’s wheelie bag. ‘It’ll be a bun fight to get on them, though, especially with that. Personally, I’m calling it quits and going home.’
Ariel looked up and down the length of Seven Sisters Road. If taxis ever drove along it, they weren’t doing so today.
She checked the time on her phone. If she didn’t get to King’s Cross in the next thirty minutes, she wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of catching her train.
She stared back at the entrance to the tube station. ‘Sod it,’ she said, to anyone who cared to listen. ‘I’m going in.’
Tightening her grip on her wheelie bag, Ariel threw herself into the fray – one more nameless face (or so it seemed to her), caught up in the slipstream of the day, the rush hour crush eventually propelling her onto a heaving Piccadilly Line platform, its force pressing in around her, relentless, immense.
Five trains came and went before she finally managed to squeeze herself through the doors of a carriage which was already bursting at the seams. Her wheelie bag dug into her legs, as well as those of the strangers squashed up close and personal against her. ‘Sorry,’ she kept saying, over and over. ‘God, I’m so sorry.’
‘’S’alright, love,’ one man replied with a resigned grimace. ‘This is London. We can take it.’
Ariel gave him a nervous smile. All she could think about as the tunnel closed around them was that she wasn’t going to make it. No way was she going to make her train.
At King’s Cross, she spilled out of the tube train door and jostled her way through a scrum of commuters funnelling upwards into the mainline railway station.
The time on her phone showed 8:26.
‘Shit.’
She stepped off the escalator and paused to orient herself. A young boy with a freckled face and a mop of unruly hair crossed in front of her, tripping over his shoelaces, shooting her a curious stare. Hey, you look just like my brother, Isaac! she almost called out to him. But the crowd swept them onwards, the momentum carrying her all the way to the central concourse, where the boy disappeared from view.
Positioned high against the back wall, the electronic departure board displayed running updates on an array of trains bound for the north. Ariel scanned the screen until she found the one she was looking for:
Destination: Edinburgh. Departure: 9a.m. Status: On Time. Platform: Not Yet Allocated.
She glanced over her shoulder and spotted a Starbucks to her right. Weaving her way towards it, she placed her order at the till and moved to the end of the counter to collect her drink. Her hand slipped inside her canvas bag while she waited and wrapped itself around her phone. She toyed with it in the palm of her hand, then fished it out and saw that a message from Tumbleweed had just that second come in.
Ariel opened it. A close-up shot of a pair of bright purple running shoes – primed and ready for action in the middle of a sun-drenched field – filled the screen. As usual, there was no message; the rule was they always let the pictures do the talking. (‘Sounds like a cop-out to me,’ Linus liked to tease her, but then in her humble opinion, her father had always been overly fixated on words.)
‘Grande cappuccino for Ariel?’ A dough-faced barista slid her cup across the counter and winked. ‘Is that Ariel as in “brilliant cleaning every time”?’
‘Yes,’ she replied with a well-practised smile. ‘That’s me. I haven’t heard the washing powder reference in a while, actually. Lately, it’s either been Sylvia Plath or The Little Mermaid.’
A large, floor-to-ceiling window separated the interior of the coffee shop from the station concourse beyond. She dragged her wheelie bag towards it and turned her attention back to her phone. The implication of Tumbleweed’s message seemed to be that someone – she – was running.
But in which direction? she wondered. And towards, or away from, what?
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked her.
‘What am I going to do about what?’
For the past quarter of an hour, Ariel and Tumbleweed had been sitting on a stretch of gorse-covered cliff top; a long, rugged cummerbund of land which leaned, and eventually fell in jagged increments, to the sea. Behind them lay the billowy green contours of the Langland Bay Golf Course. Ahead, the bay itself, languid, flecked intermittently with wispy bursts of spray.
‘The package Estelle gave you,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you want to know what’s in it?’
Ariel shrugged. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. Not really.’
She clamped her arms across her chest and reminded herself to breathe. It was the previous November, two days since Estelle’s funeral, and all she felt was numb. Was this normal? she asked herself. Everyone had told her it would bring closure. Relief. It was, she’d discovered, a lie. To her, it felt more like the ceremony’s solemn finality had brought with it a kind of shutting down – a formal sealing in, in a way – of everything that was ransacked, and empty, and broken.
Linus, Ariel, Isaac: they were three now. It didn’t fit, would never fit, she was sure of it. The void in her heart was indescribable. The last thing she wanted to think about was the package when it was as much as she could do to reorient herself on solid ground.
‘You’re still in shock,’ Tumbleweed said. He leaned his long, rangy body against his elbows. Tossed a hank of straw-coloured hair from his eyes. ‘My bad. I shouldn’t have brought it up.’
‘This sucks,’ Ariel replied. She gave him a placatory smile. ‘Sorry.’
She hadn’t been out on the cliffs in weeks. Once, when she was small, Linus had brought her not far from where they were sitting now in search of lost golf balls. He told her he’d be able to sell them on for extra cash, though as it turned out, the payout was barely more than negligible. She’d trailed along behind him, stopping every few paces to gaze at the mountains of bright yellow gorse. It was only when she felt a familiar pressure building between her legs that she remembered where she was.
‘Daddy, wait!’ she’d cried. ‘I need the toilet!’
Linus turned and gave a carefree wave of his hand. ‘Hurry up, then! We’ll stop off at the loos by the tennis courts on the way home!’
Ariel peered to her right. The gorse was almost as tall as she was, its prickly fronds rising just inches from her chin. Beyond it, she knew the earth sloped away to the edge of the cliff and a dense outcrop of rocks below.
Her legs froze.
‘Daddy, please come back and get me! I’m scared!’
Linus’s reply, breezy as the air itself, floated backwards on the wind. ‘What’s got into you? Come on, pet. I’ll wait for you on the path.’
She watched him plough ahead, hands on hips; his easy Sunday stride. Ariel lowered herself to her knees and began to crawl through the thick, briery grass. Overhead, a scalding sun beat down onto her shoulders as a warm trickle of urine seeped between her thighs. She dug her fingernails into the earth, determined not to cry. When she finally reached the path, Linus (who was oblivious still) caught her by the waist and swept her playfully into his arms.
‘I wish it could change things,’ she said. She turned back to Tumbleweed and brushed the memory aside. ‘But whatever the envelope contains, it’s not going to bring back Estelle.’
Ariel felt a tear forming in the corner of her eye. ‘And there’s something else… I don’t understand why she’d ask for pen and paper and then not write a single word to Linus. Or Isaac. Or – or me.’
Tumbleweed draped his arm around her shoulders. ‘Oh,’ he said gently, ‘that’s what’s bothering you.’
She shifted her gaze to the distant demarcation where the sky dripped down to meet the sea. ‘None of it makes any sense. Freaks me out when people find stuff out after someone dies.’
‘Seriously?’ Tumbleweed raised his eyebrows. ‘Like what?’
Ariel shrugged. ‘I don’t know… Affairs. Secret lives. Debts. Stuff like that.’
She saw him suppress a smile.
‘Come on, that’s not who Estelle was. And anyway, if you want to get to the bottom of that enigma, all you have to do is deliver the package like she asked. Either that, or open it yourself.’
‘No way, Tee!’ Ariel recoiled so fast, Tumbleweed’s arm plummeted like a dead weight to the ground. ‘I’m not going to open it when she specifically asked me not to. It would be –’ she paused, searching for the right word – ‘disrespectful.’
‘Fair enough. So then you know what to do. You’ll deal with it when you’re ready, right?’
‘Right.’
She watched the setting sun burn a hole in the sky, the dying embers of a red-hot fire which sparked and flared, and eventually extinguished itself as it slipped, still smouldering, into the bay.
‘Aw sod it,’ Tumbleweed cried. He raised himself up off the ground and pulled Ariel to her feet. ‘In my experience, things rarely turn out the way we think, anyway. Sometimes, my friend, they actually turn out better.’
Ariel tossed the plastic lid from her cappuccino into the waste bin and stared through the glass wall. The commuters who up until now had been congregated in a dense mass beneath the overhead departure board appeared to be mysteriously drifting apart. There was no pushing or shoving; no obvious threat, whispered or otherwise, of genuine alarm. Instead, what she was witnessing was far more subtle; more like a slow, insidious peeling away…
She moved closer to the window and followed the rift to its natural conclusion. Hovering at the end of it, about halfway between the coffee shop and the electronic screen, was a well-dressed elderly gentleman, a small brown suitcase at his feet. Judging from the empty space around him, he was alone, and to her horror, he was bleeding profusely.
‘Oh my God!’ she cried. ‘That man needs help!’
A handful of customers standing alongside her raised their heads, stared for a moment or two, looked away.
The man was leaning heavily on his walking stick, his expression dazed. The collar of his shirt and the cuffs peeking out of his coat sleeves were a brilliant white. His shoes glistened. Everything about him – from his elegant woollen coat, to his smart grey suit, pale blue shirt and tie – was immaculate; everything apart from the jarring sight of blood pouring from his nose.
‘What’s wrong with everyone? Why doesn’t anyone help?’ she muttered under her breath.
Tear-shaped droplets of blood were now running down the man’s neck and seeping into the edges of his shirt collar. Several splashes landed on his shoes. On the ground immediately before him, a widening circle of liquid was slowly beginning to pool.
Suddenly, Ariel started.
Frank…
A revolving zoetrope of images began to rotate in rapid-fire flashes to her brain:
The wound – jagged, gaping – running along the back of Frank’s head…
The blood – creeping like a scarlet inkblot between his shoulder blades, trickling along the crease of his trousers, all the way to the shards of broken glass at his feet…
The child’s face – her own face – streaked with tears, a protective grip on her arm warning her there was no permissible way to intervene…
Grabbing the handle of her wheelie bag with one hand, her cappuccino with the other, Ariel pushed her way through the door of the café and ran. Directly ahead of her, the old man lurched from side to side, as though on the brink of falling down. Ariel sped through the crowd towards him, hot coffee sloshing over the edge of her cup as she moved, burning her fingers, staining her clothes, splashing messily to the ground.
When she reached him, the old man’s eyes – a pale, muddled grey – met hers and widened in surprise.
Instinctively, they both looked down.
‘It looks like a Jackson Pollock. I think the technical term is “drip painting”,’ he said, pointing at the pooling canvas with his stick.
His voice was warm, and, Ariel noted with surprise, unexpectedly calm.
She turned the name over in her mind. Pollock. Linus would know him, she was sure; and yet ironically, during her most memorable visit to a gallery – the National Gallery, as it happened – Linus hadn’t been with them.
She thought back to the endless rows of paintings and the cathedral-like dimensions of the rooms. Now, so many years later, her most vivid recollection was of Estelle’s disappointment at finding Van Gogh’s vase of yellow sunflowers permanently obstructed by the shoulders, heads and hats of tourists conspiring to keep it hidden, on one side or another, from their view.
‘Looks to me like the inside of my head,’ she replied. ‘When I’m having a bad day. A day full of demons.’ She drew her hair back from her face and leaned her head to one side. ‘It’s dramatic, though. Like an explosion of light and dark.’
She pulled an unopened packet of Kleenex from her canvas bag and pressed it between the old man’s fingers. He was a full head taller than she was, and, she couldn’t help noticing, impressively upright for someone who was obviously more than a little reliant on his stick.