Williams Desire Line

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910901-08-3
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

A freak tidal surge hitting a Welsh seaside town leaves devastation and three locals drowned. Yet when a fourth body is found in the debris it takes time for it to be identified as the respected Oxford writer Sara Meredith. A celebrity, an icon to an entire generation - what was she doing in such an unlikely place? And how had it ended in her death? These mysteries overwhelm the lives of people Sara has left behind: estranged husband Josh, their volatile teenage daughter Eurwen and someone else - a stranger. Is this stranger now the only person who can reconstruct Sara's last few weeks, frame-by-frame?

Gee Williams was born and brought up in North Wales and now lives in Cheshire with her husband. A widely-published poet and a dramatist as well as writer of fiction, her work has appeared in disparate places: from The Sunday Times to The Pan Book of Horror. Many of her scripts have been broadcast by BBC Radio 4. She has won both The Rhys Davies and The Book Pl@ce Contemporary Short Story Awards, was Poetry Review's New Poet, Summer '97, short-listed for The Geoffrey Dearmer Award and (with Sol B. River) short-listed for the Race in the Media Radio Drama Award 2001.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Williams, Gee

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Our event started towards midnight with a north-westerly thieving anything unstructural. Rhyl’s flat and mainly lowrise, meaning not much would get in its way. Home being three rooms on the ground floor of a good brick house, all I could do was put my faith in the long-gone designer, an incomer called Thorp. Architect, inventor, engineer, his bizarre death alone (June 1914, from radiation sickness!) is worth a search. But at least he knew how things fitted together when he was alive. So lying on my back, able to trace the roof’s flexion through each rafter all the way down to my own ceiling joists was fine by me. My earliest memories – I’d be three or four – were of the same sort of house, Rhyl’s knee-deep in them. But this was at the Sorry End of town, the Quay Street end in fact, ROSEMONTin glazed terracotta above a rotten porch, Perspex taped into punched-out leaded glass. I learnt useful tips about buildings there, how you can put them on like a coat, feel out the seams as the slates get tested over your bedroom and the pendant on the landing sways—

I slid from under the quilt and sprinted upstairs to see if my landlord Libby Jenkinson who occupied the rest of the house was feeling nervy. A widow-more-than-once was how she introduced herself to me when I turned up to view, and Number 8 Gaiman Avenue is her only asset. ‘I’m OK,’ I could just about make out. She’s an ex-smoker, her voice throaty, nearer a cough than speech. The next sentence didn’t carry then she followed up with, ‘I’ve known worse.’ No point in shouting I bet she hadn’t, that to me it was already starting to feel pretty serious. Either I was right or she was, but down in the hall again, with my palms laid flat against an original front door, I could touch the growl.

Following Libby’s brush-off, pride made me go back to bed. Several times I was tempted to shout up to her, Can we upgrade that to more thanpretty serious? Actual damage was going on out there in a Force 7 – and rising. What was most vulnerable? The brain starts ticking them off, my Quay Street warehouse or that vandalised snookerhall right on the front? Another prime target would be the scaffolded hotel near multi-occupancy housing. Work stopped months ago and I’d sent alerts to Rhondda Jones at Borough about it but she hadn’t even— when she should’ve at least— a surprise! I must’ve dozed off because suddenly I’m watching naked Tess cross a bedroom that’s fantastically detailed, right from the architectural sketches pinned above her head down to the ‘skull’ in the walnut veneer of the wardrobe. Now— now she’s indicating a constellation of small moles, my own recent discovery, she’s just noticed across her left perfect breast— but dawn broke with Violent Storm Force 11. At first I resent how Tess is threatening to evaporate. Then I’m awake to an unbelievable racket even Libby wouldn’t be claiming she’d known worse than.

Still groggy with afterimages, I opened the curtains. My single bed’s lined up in a rectangular bay window so no effort. Parking’s only allowed on the opposite side which means craning your neck gives nearly the whole avenue before curvature cuts off Number 57— and it’s all present, so far, and empty how I like it. Built environment good, people bad. Without them the villas were ageless and reassuring, all in grey shades to my sense of vision since they faced north. More downstairs lights were on than usual though nothing much was up save flying bits and pieces— and this dull rolling noise from nowhere, from out of the air, it seemed, one of those non-mechanical dins that rises and falls with a beat you keep thinking you’ve mastered but haven’t, and flatters you is about to run down anyway. Doesn’t. And I might say this isthe moment. I’m stalled at my window, tired but wired over setbacks out there in the town and then suddenly I get an intuition about deeper trouble, closer to home. I can even convince myself it happened. Yeah, Yori, you knew. Because a fitting to start this story would be right here. Right now.

Shiver.

Bring up music.

Yori’s eyes narrow and he downs one pill and then a second that he’s had concealed in his hand.

Cutaway to—

—but sorry to disappoint. I left my streetgazing to do stretches and lunges so the few kinks were soon out of a body in Grade A condition and if I couldn’t stick with the rest of the routine, it was because my attention was on a regional bulletin we actually featured in for once. Through into the kitchen where I did take my morning meds but really I’d come in to zap soup while the power lasted. A degree under boiling’s best for miso and since my father cooked for me in the early years and his flavours took root in my mouth, salt’s my sugar which is why I always eat Japanese for choice and this wants just a drop of soy— I froze at the coastguard’s update.

‘It’s breaking higher and higher up the seawall,’ he bellowed like a sports commentator.

Another voice cut in with, ‘the tide’s still way off its peak. Across the River Clwyd, yes, we can get you that shot. Here it is! That’s Beacon Point. You can see the dunes washing away.’

The Point’s a bulbous nose of land that curls round and pokes into the rivermouth and is the harbour’s only protection from where most weather came from. I couldn’t not look. One local landmark that side of the town, the Blue Bridge, appeared on screen as usual a toy version of Sydney Harbour’s. (Dorman Lang built them both in the 1930s). Ours is in foam up to its belly now. The latticework once meant as homage to the next-door funfair is turquoise brash against a gutter ice sky, morning traffic at a crawl as Rhylites with jobs in better areas tried to get to them. But no one was risking the white footbridge just visible, edge of shot. Something to be grateful for.

Libby was stirring. She’s very short but heavy. You know it. She came clomping down in her fleece suit, hair flat, blotched mature face with overnight creases. The smell of bed was on her that would’ve embarrassed me once— but I’m over it. ‘What d’you reckon on the latest, love? Are we safe?’ Then she was in. She lives to get inside. I maintain the place spotless and most of what’s on show – a chesterfield with rows of dust-trap bellybuttons, a tub-chair I don’t use, plus the unmatched items of wood furniture – are all her castoffs. I don’t put her intrusions down to nostalgia. Libby’s never described any rosy scenes from married life when she was able to spread out through the whole of Number 8. The opposite. One husband was ‘always sodding off someplace’, the next ‘a bit of a whiner.’

‘You mean from getting flooded? We’re at least half a kilometre from, um—’ Gaiman Avenue was uptown Rhyl in both senses. Hard as it is to believe this is where wealth used to holiday and its afterglow lingers in good houses along properly-laid roads. Hoping but not sure about the next bit I said, ‘Yeah, should be safe enough.’

‘There’s good.’ She scanned my walls but no new artwork was up for her to critic. She had to make do with wrinkling her nostrils at a soup breakfast. My theory is I was accepted as her tenant by getting mistaken for a Thai. Years ago she went to Bangkok on holiday using the first ex-husband’s money, and fell in love with ‘out there’. Which makes me an imposter – which of course I am. But further confessions would be out of place here. To be rid of her I gave up the last of my loaf.

Back in Rhyl mass departures were underway from both West and East Parades, also Sydenham Avenue, Marlborough, Osborne, Balmoral, Lake and North— and anywhere else in the beach vicinity. Most terraces actually fronting the sea were four storeys, some later apartment blocks more than that, but from the helicopter they seemed to have shrunk. It’s hard to believe what you see when everything’s familiar and yet a movie’s showing. I was That’s the old Coliseum Theatre! and I walked across there yesterday. Fascinated by a floating van about to hit the wall of BeltBusters I finally came to and got messaging the people from work that in theory I supervise. Unless contacted by Emergency Planning (and we all knew we wouldn’t be since we were not Borough) they could take the day off I told them. Many systems were out already. Trying to speak to Tess would connect me with nothingness. And who else? Though this is my town, I’d been away for most of my twenty-nine years and back for less than a couple. There was nobody— which was fine, how I wanted it. I’ve edited down. The mutant growth of contacts made at university in Bristol – even at the time they felt like another person’s – has been starved of updates. Particularly one ex-lover and fellow student, Kailash, now reduced to messaging from wherever her travels took her. It would make Libby mad with envy to see what she’s sending. Here’s orchard road from floor 19 singapore savoy you SHIT! crappy where u r? hope you you ICON DELETED! I get a glimpse, a nanosecond, of gleaming towers before the scene combusts. Still mad then, Kailash? I guess so. But it was...