Obsession, p.1
Obsession, page 1
Dedication
For Richard and Jean, with love (it’s all a bit like life, really)
Acknowledgements
I have to thank Peter Caradine and synchronism for help with the first section of this book. While I was writing the early chapters, his programme “Turn Back the Clock” on BBC Radio Merseyside was devoted to the events of 1958, and he was unfailingly helpful when I asked him for information I needed.
Old friends were helpful as ever, John Thompson especially, and Jack Sullivan and Robin Bromley gave me a room in New York in which to write several chapters. Dr Anne Biezanek advised me on medical matters, and my Norfolk friend Jay Ramsay helped me with the setting.
But it is Sylvester Stallone, the writer, director and actor, whom I must thank for the idea. Had he not made his boxer character accept a favour without knowing what the price might be in Rocky III, you would not be holding this book now. I hope he will forgive me for having paid less attention to the remainder of his film than to the flood of ideas I experienced.
THEN: 1958
Chapter One
Twenty-five years later, when Peter realised at last what they had signed away, he had still not forgotten that afternoon: still remembered the waves flocking down from the horizon to sweep up the fishing boats, the glass of the classroom windows shivering with the wind, chalk dust drowsing in the September sunlight, his throat going dry as he realised that everyone was looking at him. “Well, Priest?” Mr Meldrum said.
Peter stood up quickly, the folding seat bruising his thighs. “Sir?”
The teacher tugged his black gown over his thin shoulders. “I said,” he said with a hint of impatience, “you ought to be able to tell us about that.”
Chalk dust clogged Peter’s throat as he tried to think what that might be. The teacher’s voice had jarred him out of reliving the day on the common, reliving it as though that could make him have failed to persuade the others, Steve grinning skeptically and scratching his dimpled chin where he was growing a beard for the summer, Robin biting her pale lips and looking doubtful, Jimmy’s heavy-lidded eyes almost closing as he questioned him… “Courage,” someone whispered behind him in the classroom, and Peter realised that the whisper wasn’t meant to hearten him, only to remind him what Mr Meldrum wanted to hear.
The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled… Of course, they were discussing that today, having read it aloud round the classroom, Steve stumbling over the last line of his verse, and Mr Meldrum had said that Peter should be able to tell them about courage. Just now courage felt like one of Peter’s headaches; it wasn’t knowing you had to protect your grandmother because you were fifteen years old now, it was doing it though you wished you were somewhere else, anywhere at all. Mr Meldrum wouldn’t want to hear that, or anything else; his stare made it clear that he hadn’t been asking, only commenting. Peter held on to his chipped inky desk and felt trapped, betrayed by himself, and then he heard someone whistling in the corridor.
Peter reached behind him to make sure the seat didn’t squeak as he sat down unobtrusively, but all at once he couldn’t move. The whistler had begun singing “Luck Be a Lady”, off-key. It was Jimmy.
Just because he was happy, that needn’t mean— Peter felt Steve’s stare, but he wouldn’t have responded even if he had been able to move his pounding head on his throbbing neck. Jimmy stopped singing in mid-phrase as he opened the door, as if he’d just remembered where he was. Mr Meldrum turned, chalk dust whirling as his gown flapped. “Good of you to drop in, Waters. I hope you’ve some reason to be cheerful other than having taken half my period for lunch.”
Someone sniggered in case he’d meant to make a pun about falling in water. Jimmy looked as if he was trying to seem abashed, but his round good-humoured face with its small mouth wasn’t made for it. “My dad’s won first prize on the football pools,” he said.
Both he and Peter heard Steve gasp. Jimmy glanced at Steve, then quickly at Peter, and the expression he’d been trying to suppress in front of Mr Meldrum—an incredulous grin at his good news—froze before it could quite take over his face. “God,” Steve muttered, and Peter’s headache spread down his neck into his shoulders. It was true, then. There was no more room for pretending. Peter had only one thought, so intense that it felt less like thinking than like part of the ache his head had become: he wondered how he would ever dare go home.
Chapter Two
That spring of 1958 it had hardly seemed to stop raining, even in East Anglia. Peter spent the weekends in the shop, his mother shooing him from place to place as she dusted the buckets and spades and toy windmills, the postcards of Seaward and the comics and sixpenny remainders, the tins and packets of food on the shelves, until sometimes he wished he were still small enough to huddle under the counter, out of the way, and she would dust his face for grimacing. He liked helping in the shop, liked the smells of firelighters and soap powder, liked serving customers and carrying the morning papers, fattest on Sundays, down to the hotels on the East Promenade. Most of all he liked unpacking deliveries, especially of books or magazines.
That Saturday towards the end of March the carton was of remaindered American magazines. “Weird Tales for weirder people,” his father said, twitching his nose to send his thick glasses back up to the bridge. “Here’s one for you, Bernie: Curse of the Eyeless Heads,” he called to Peter’s mother, and pretended to read the rest of the contents page: “Eyes of the Headless Curse, Heads of the Curseless Eyes, Less of the Curse-Eyed Heads…”
“Less of the lot of them if I had my way.” She looked up from arranging sweets in tiers on the counter and wiped her hands on the Queen’s face on her apron. “I wouldn’t give you sixpence for a hundredweight of them.”
“Better than getting a fat bum and a fat head sitting in front of the telly, my dear.”
“The day one of those machines comes into my house I go out the door. Go on, Peter,” she growled, seeing him watching, “find something to read if you must, but don’t show it to me.”
He found a couple that were new to him and read out the advertisements to make her laugh: “Man! Be Big”, “Throw Away That Truss”, “I Need 500 Men”… His father found “Learn To Mount Birds”, which had her holding her sides and trying to be solemn when a lady came in to buy rubbers. “Children’s rubbers, for school,” the lady said, staring as if she thought Peter’s mother wasn’t quite all there.
When the lady had left with her packet of erasers Peter’s father switched off the lights in the window. The rain had stopped, the sky was clearing. “I’ll go and see granny, shall I?” Peter said. “She might want some shopping.”
“That’s a good boy. She’ll be glad to see you.” As Peter went out, toggling his duffel coat, he heard his mother saying “We ought to keep an eye on her just now.”
Rain streamed down the gutters as he climbed the gentle slope, past shops on first-name terms—Tommy’s Pets, Frank’s Fish and Chips—and white pot-bellied terraced houses faced with stones from the beach. In the unexpected sunlight the red post-boxes with their spiky crowns and the street-corner benches with their memorial plaques looked freshly painted by the downpour. The slope grew steeper once he’d crossed a few streets. He climbed above the houses, scrambled up the clay steps to the common and stood panting.
Seen from here, the cape on which Seaward was built looked like a ship forever surging forward into the North Sea. The disused lighthouse on the tip was the figurehead to which the common rose. Grass lay flat as cat’s fur on the common, a few trees leaned backwards with their branches outstretched, away from the almost constant wind.
Peter walked across the half-mile of common to the northern edge. Below him streets sloped to the lesser hotels. The cliff curved round to Seaward Forest, which stretched inland to the museum and the village that had grown up around the mansion the museum had once been. The road from the village forked at the far end of the common from the lighthouse and led down to opposite ends of the promenade. He held the handrail as he climbed down the stone steps to the first of the streets.
Most of the white Georgian houses were divided into apartments. More and more people were retiring to Seaward. At the foot of the slope, beyond several hairdressers and a poodles’ beauty parlour, a band played a Viennese waltz under the iron and glass roof of one of the Victorian shopping arcades on the North Fork.
A stray dog was cocking its leg against a bubble car parked on the corner of the street where his mother’s mother lived. A van that looked vaguely official except for cardboard number-plates stood outside the house whose ground floor she rented. Peter was looking forward to hearing stories of her Victorian childhood, eating her scones with a cup of hot sweet tea, listening to her old 78s, ballads that sounded like growing old: “Just a song at twilight…” The front door was ajar, and he walked in.
He took his comb out of the breast pocket of his blazer and stopped in front of the hall mirror to rake his hair back from his high forehead. His grey eyes stared back at him from his oval face. Apart from his protruding ears and his long chin that was almost the same shape as his forehead, he supposed he didn’t look too bad. He knocked a phrase of an old song on his grandmother’s door next to the mirror and went in.
The first thing he saw was his grandmother standing against the far wall, beyond the mahogany table with its folding leaves and matching straight-backed chairs whose seats made the room smell of leather; a hand over her mouth. The man whose hand it was glared back over his shoulder at Peter and brandished a knife in her face, a knife with a curved black blade that tapered to a sharp point. It was a fragment of one of her records, all of which lay broken beside the overturned gramophone. Her father’s paintings had been pulled off the walls, leaving patches like plaques. So much Peter saw before someone flung him the length of the room.
He crashed into the rocking-chair and fell against the dresser. A willow-patterned plate fell from the top shelf, barely missing his temple, and smashed at his feet. He crouched off balance, his left elbow a blaze of pain where it had struck the chair, and wondered if his arm was broken. The man who’d stepped from behind the door had already followed him down the room in one quick movement. His face was pinched and mottled, his clothes were grubby; Peter could smell his sweat and shabbiness. There seemed to be no expression on his face.
“Do yourself a favour, son,” said the other man, who was thin and shabby too, but older. “Pretend you never saw us and tell your old mum here to, for the good of her health.”
Without warning she lashed out at him, buried her nails in the hand over her mouth, scratched his face with her other hand, just missing one eye. Peter was as shocked by her violence as by anything else that was happening, and terrified for her. He tried to regain his balance before the younger man could notice, though his heart was pumping so hard he was afraid he might faint instead.
The other man grabbed the old lady’s mouth in his fist. Peter heard the back of her head smack the wall. At once she kicked the man in the shins with her heavy shoes and ducked out of his way. Before she reached the window and threw up the sash she was screaming at the top of her voice. “Help! Robbers! They’re trying to kill me! Police!”
The younger man glared at Peter as if he wished he had time to finish him, and then he ran for the door, digging a set of car keys out of his pocket. “Stop them! Stop thief!” Peter’s grandmother cried as the other man hobbled out, and Peter wondered why she sounded more terrified now they were leaving. Of course, she was afraid they would come back.
He had to stop them. He lunged at the open window, pushed her aside and clambered out. He almost lost his footing in the muddy flowerbed, but slithered onto the garden path and was out of the gate just ahead of them. He wrenched at the sliding door of the van with the cardboard number-plates and heaved himself into the driver’s seat—a moment ahead of the thought, both panicky and ludicrous, that perhaps this wasn’t the thieves’ van at all.
But it was. He just had time to grab the door and hold it shut as the driver dragged at the outer handle, his face reddening. Peter had to wedge his body between the seat and the dashboard and hold on to the door with both hands. He could do nothing when the passenger door rattled open and the older man vaulted in.
“Give it up, son,” he hissed, and punched him on the back of the head. It felt as if he’d used both fists and all his weight. Peter’s forehead slammed into the nearside window, which splintered. His hands were letting go of the door, he seemed unable to stop them, but as the driver reached through the opening to drag him out, Peter’s hands—somewhere in the distance, beyond the pain that was pumping up his head like a balloon—clenched on the steering wheel. The thieves wouldn’t move him while he could hold on.
He dug his nails into his palms when the men tried to bend his fingers back. That pain was hardly noticeable beyond his swelling head, which felt close to bursting. The deserted street seemed utterly unreal, even when his grandmother ran out, still screaming for help, and began to pull the driver’s unkempt hair. As the driver let go of Peter’s fingers Peter saw, miles away at the end of the street, a policeman crossing.
He jammed the heel of his free hand against the button in the centre of the wheel. The horn blared, so loudly he was afraid it must drown his grandmother’s cries. The policeman shaded his eyes and stared towards the van, and Peter released the button so that the policeman could hear what she was screaming. But he was already running towards them.
The thieves scrambled away from the van, up the slope towards the common. A young man dashed out of a house and gave chase, as if the appearance of the police had been a signal or at least an indication of who was in the wrong. Peter heard shouts and a whistle up on the common, and closed his eyes. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you, the swine? God forgive them,” his grandmother cried, until he managed to find her hand and lower himself from the van. Leaning on each other, they groped their way into the house, and were sitting on the couch, trying to recuperate, when someone knocked on the hall door. Peter’s grandmother screamed as the two men came into the room.
They were from the ambulance a neighbour had called. “I’m all right,” Peter said, touching his enormous skull and finding little blood. “It’s my gran,” he said and, standing up, fell to the floor. It seemed easiest to lie there and let the men load him onto the stretcher, carry him into the ambulance and out again into the hospital. His parents kept appearing in the distance by his bed to tell him the police had arrested the men, thugs, animals, savages, and that he had concussion, that was all, just lie still now. Some days later he was home with no more pain than aspirin could deal with. It wasn’t until he found that he was sleeping on a camp bed in the box room that he remembered his grandmother had come to stay, because she was afraid to be on her own. He didn’t mind, though he wondered where some of his magazines had gone. Everything seemed all right now, if distant. He would be fine so long as his headaches stayed that way.
Chapter Three
Jimmy was trying to be fair. He wrote slowly and precisely, giving himself time to think. You couldn’t blame Macmillan for having Eisenhower’s missiles on British soil, not when Russia had invaded Hungary, but the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had the right to march to Aldermaston, it was British to let them march. You could understand their fears of fallout, especially now Russia had put Sputnik and a man into space, but where would the space race end? You might think there were more deserving places for man to concentrate his powers. Still, everyone was eager to spend now that rationing was over and hire purchase opened up, and you couldn’t stop them going abroad for their holidays even if it hurt Seaward. Look at the examples they were being given: J. Paul Getty spending millions on paintings he never looked at yet making guests at his manor pay to use the phone, Lord and Lady Docker driving about in a gold-plated Daimler upholstered in zebra skin because “mink is too hot to sit on”; no wonder everyone talked about “when I come up on the pools” and crime was on the increase. Jimmy tried to think how to round off his essay, but he still had Sunday for thinking. He went downstairs to the Nosebag.
Jessie Elsey and two other girls were sitting in the café with its round tables and red- and-white checked tablecloths, its chairs that looked like giant chocolate novelties. The girls were sucking the last of their milk shakes loudly through straws, but now they stopped to whisper. “There’s Jimmy Waters,” one hissed.
“Jimmy waters the lawn,” a girl with her beehive in a headscarf giggled.
“Jimmy waters his bed.”
“Jimmy pees in his bed,” Jessie Elsey spluttered as if that were a brilliant improvement. He had to ignore them: customers were always right, even girls, silly giggling secretive creatures he’d never heard talk about anything worth hearing. He was glad when his mother came bustling out of the kitchen. “Anything else, young ladies?” she said briskly. “Thanks, Jimmy, I can manage just now.”
“I’ll go round to Pete’s, then.”
“Don’t be late for dinner. Stop by the theatre on your way back and bring your father if he’s there,” she said, almost casually enough.
The Nosebag was tucked among the small hotels at the far end of the North Promenade from the lighthouse, but people crossed town for his mother’s cooking. Hotel awnings striped like deck-chairs gleamed opposite the long thin cliff-top park, sailing-boats bobbed on the steely sea, seagulls wheeled through the May sunshine. Jimmy walked past the growing hotels until they gave out on the curve beneath the lighthouse. Bowling greens and tennis courts and Crazy Golf were laid out in the shelter of the point, and there was Steve Innes.
