Finding Davey (11 page)

They were astonishingly cooperative. It would be a cash sale, he assured the man.

“Cash, sir? Do you mean certified cheque?”

“Money. The minute the thing is finished.”

“You are aware of the cost, sir?”

“Look,” Bray said, getting good at lies. “My, er, brother’s away in Torremelinos. He’s wanted one all his life. I’ve got the money. You want a deposit?” Bray had no idea where Torremelinos was. He’d heard a lass mention it on the train, a place for holidays.

The new Scandinavian shed was erected the following afternoon, Buster so excited he had to be banned to the Lumleys’. Bray slipped the men a good tip. It had electric light, seven power points, a fan heater. He was astounded at the speed. It was actually delivered in parcels like a child’s toy kit. Three hours, and there stood the new wooden cathedral, with four windows, blinds and awnings.

That night it rained heavily. The following evening he carried the computer into its new home. Kylee and her sullen friend Porky arrived an hour late. Porky moved the phone point and Bray was
on line
in an hour.

“Won’t the phone people complain?” Bray asked. He had a terror of by-laws.

“Is he fucking real?” Porky demanded.

Kylee sat at the console. “Right, Bray. What’re we doing?”

“I want this web thing, please.”

Porky snickered, his insults a constant litany. Kylee did her complicated nail-varnish painting of the keyboard while Bray read each keyboard letter aloud, Porky smoking under the house porch meanwhile. Then they were off, the girl tapping and laughing. Astonishingly, the computer talked, actually said words as they appeared.

“Takes a fucking whole night,” she explained. “Porky learns me marker sentences. I tellt them. It’ll take dictation, and read out loud whatever comes up.” She was aggrieved, though. “We had to
buy
the talk programme. Bastards. You’ve to pay us.”

“Of course.”

“Here, Porky. That frigging git’s still on the TALO,” she told Porky.

“Fucking nutters.”

Kylee asked what Bray wanted his computer site to be called. He told her a name. It was one of Davey’s lesser KV characters. Choosing it had cost him sleepless nights.

“Queer fucking name, that. Secret, is it?”

Bray watched over her shoulder as the letters came up and he saw his designation for the first time. It moved him beyond words. He told Kylee to please leave it untouched, so he could get used to starting up unaided. He paid them, and sat down alone in the brand new shed after they’d gone.

Next day he went to George Corkhill’s workshop.

The workshop was busy. Two women, four men, two lads, and incredible noise.

“I expected it to be really quiet.”

“No such luck. See those?” Corkhill indicated the presses. “Four thousand pamphlets by noon!”

“Good heavens!” Bray followed him into the office. “Professional.”

“Craftsmen are, Bray.” George looked at his visitor. “The job?”

“I’m writing it now. Can I drop it by?”

“My house is next door. What’s the arrangement?”

“You print me one copy. I’ll pay you. If you can date the bill some months ago, fine. But don’t get in trouble.”

“How soon?”

“Less than a week? There is one thing, Mr Corkhill.” Bray had rehearsed, but now hesitated. “Might I ask that you keep all details to yourself, whatever my enterprise turns into?” He was too embarrassed to go on.

The printer smiled. “Never even heard of you, Mr Charleston.”

George showed him out among the machines. The workers all nodded and smiled. In Geoff’s car Bray felt refreshed, and drove home to the new shed where he logged on without trouble. He wondered if he should buy himself a motor, things going apace now.

Three evenings later he had an unexpected visitor. Mr Walsingham came knocking, in a blazing temper.

“I want to know what’s going on between you and my daughter!” he bellowed, elbowing his way into Bray’s hallway. “I followed her here, so it’s no use denying it!”

Bray was astounded at the man’s vehemence. “Kylee’s
busy. She’s in the shed. I’m just brewing up. Do go through.”

“Busy?”

“In the garden. Follow the light.”

Bray made tea and carried it to the new shed. Walsingham was standing shouting questions at his daughter, Buster worriedly making small dashes. Kylee was unfazed. She had blanked the computer.

“It’s a question of what’s right and proper!” Walsingham yelled as Bray put the tray down. “You and this
old man
! I won’t allow it!”

“What on earth do you think —?”

Walsingham rounded angrily on him. “This is between my daughter and me! She’s been due at her mother’s in London for —”

“Fuck London and fuck school,” Kylee said calmly. “I’ve got a job. Two hours a day.”

“Where are you staying? Tell me that!”

“At Porky’s.” She stood, stretched. “Nothing funny. This old geezer’s got a job on and knows fuck all. I’m showing him because your crappy college is fuck all use.” She almost smiled. “I’m a computer consultant! The only difference between me and you is I got a fucking job.”

It took another thirty minutes before Mr Walsingham was even partly mollified. Her implacability won in the end. Bray said nothing, listening as the child – she was nothing more – wore her father down with abusive insistence. They were still arguing when Bray interrupted to ask Kylee if he ought to shut the computer down, save money on the phone line. She was delighted.

“See?” she exclaimed. “He’s a fucking moron!”

For reassurance Bray added that his son and daughter were next door most evenings. Mr Walsingham hadn’t
made the connection between Bray’s surname and any dreadful news. Bray suggested that Kylee might come at whatever times Mr Walsingham wished. Kylee heard this with a sardonic glance.

“I think, Kylee, that you should go home after working here,” Bray concluded. “Instead of staying with your, ah, friend. Think how agitated your dad must feel.”

They settled for vague promises and Kylee left with Walsingham. Bray agreed to notify Mr Walsingham of Kylee’s whereabouts if she failed to arrive when expected. The arrangement was, she would be along every other evening.

In the new shed, all that space, he tentatively began, a stack of plain cards beside the console on the detestable plastic.

He penned
Abduction of children
, and switched on.

Four days later Bray finished
The KV Story
. Virtually Davey’s own words, the brief tale concerned the cloaked, lop-sided creatures he and Davey had made up, imaginations running riot. He used only three drawings of the KV folk with their angular outlines and skew-wiff headgear. They flew kites among straight-edged clouds. The dozen pages looked absurdly sparse.

He delivered it to George Corkhill’s house. The printer’s wife was as rotund as George was lanky.

“Don’t say it, please, Mr Charleston,” she said, smiley, when she took the parcel. “Incongruous, aren’t we? The long and the short of it, the old music hall act!”

Her homilies ran out in consternation. She knew. He nodded acknowledgement.

“The script is terrible, Mrs Corkhill. Please apologise.”

“He’ll be across in a minute.” She seemed eager. “Won’t you wait?”

“I’d best get on.”

On the way home, he ordered a small new car for himself. It looked too squarish for comfort, but as long as it was reliable he didn’t care. Geoff was pleased.

The following noon he rang Leonora the publisher. He was endlessly put on hold. Publishing houses seemed impenetrable, the secretaries offhand. Bray wondered if it was his manner. Too diffident in everything, except handling wood.

With twenty minutes still to spare, he sat in St John’s Square. These days he eschewed caffs and sandwich slots. Better have wedges of wholegrain bread he prepared in the morning. Apple and a banana, crushed in his tatty old briefcase. Dry bread with jam, salad cream made with grapeseed oil, lettuce, celery, cheese only twice a week and thinly sliced. Five pieces of fruit a day seemed hell of a lot, but easy once he got in the swing. Oranges were best eaten at home because of splash, and orange oils lingered on wood.

Every noon break he walked half an hour, even in rain, carrying a folding brolly, and took to wearing an embarrassing tweedy hat, determined not to catch cold. He couldn’t afford interruptions.

Publishers, though? During the afternoon he went to see Mr Winsarls. He had been sizing the owner up. The previous week he’d narrowly avoided getting caught staring appraisingly at Mr Winsarls as he’d gone by.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr Winsarls. Just a thought?”

“Anything, Mr Charleston.”

“About Gilson Mather, Mr Winsarls.” Bray noted the other’s surprise, and forged on, “The firm is London’s oldest, wouldn’t you say?”

“It certainly is, of its kind.” Winsarls often used silence as an affable prompt, the way his old father had encouraged visiting buyers. “We’ve often been approached by other firms, for mergers. Every one of which,” he quickly added, “I’ve refused.”

“Of course,” Bray conceded courteously. “Only, isn’t it time we reviewed Gilson Mather’s past work? Did a pamphlet, maybe?”

Bray hesitated, the way he’d practised.

“Published sounds so formal, Mr Winsarls,” he said reluctantly. “But our many personal buyers must constitute quite a list.” He resumed just as the owner made to speak. “A landmark, even, for an anniversary…”

He knew, of course. He had scrolled his way through Companies House lists. After today’s conversation he would make a historical summary. It would put his name on record, but so?

“Our tricentenary, Mr Charleston, take a lot of delving. Family vaults!” Mr Winsarls smiled. “My ancient aunties will need placating!”

“Oh, how is Miss Alice?” Bray put in as if reminded. “And Mrs Boniface?”

They discussed the Winsarls. The owner was pleased Bray remembered the ladies’ visits.

“You know more about Gilson Mather than the rest of us!”

“Hardly, sir. I was thinking more of our furniture.”

Mr Winsarls was taken in. “I ought to have known you’d concentrate on the craft!”

“Well, it is why we’re here, sir.”

He went to a different publisher’s on the way home – address from the phone book – but the editors had already left for the day. They, he’d learned, were the ones who mattered.

That evening he began the sequel to the children’s book he’d delivered to George Corkhill.

Drawings were a particular problem. He had come across Arthur Ransome’s stern advice to the two
ambitious schoolgirls, the teenage Misses Hull and Whitlock, who unbelievably had sent their novel to the eminent children’s author. Kindly, Ransome helped them to publish, but said to make their drawings less complicated.

Bray copied more of Davey’s drawings over and over. He was meticulous with the originals, replacing them behind the panel in his old shed. Davey’s shed, he decided, was the one that mattered, where he and Davey had spent so much time carving and arguing. The new shed had no relevance. Brash, clean, spartan, it was merely the shed of a hunter. A bothie, a place of refuge for a stalking hunter.

He drew, drew again, constructing the famed Balloon Game of Davey’s imaginary country. Three times he returned to Davey’s shed for information, making sure, Buster accompanying him. Davey’s flat pencil was still there on the floor. Bray left it untouched. His computer code word was Davey’s word.

Hunting so short a time, he knew enough to ridicule the TV crime films where some daring girl whisked her way into secret American CIA files by guessing a code word. Kylee had said nobody could do it except by accident. She would come and spend time with him. “Forty fags and as many marshmallows as I can eat, okay?” she’d said on the phone. What did that mean? Bray agreed.

He had a faint unease. The feeling was growing that she knew what he was about. Late into the night, Buster on the door mat of Davey’s shed, Bray fretworked letters on a cedarwood panel. He planed, filed and sanded. He gave it a coat of yacht varnish. In the morning he stained it russet and nailed it above the inside of the hunt shed door.

Let the world know.

The following week he even began to feel like a hunter.

Everything seemed to come at once. One night he even slept, midnight until six-thirty. A mixture of panic drove him on, all the
time
. He dared not let himself think of what might be happening elsewhere.

Shirley’s progress was sadly downhill. Geoffrey now spent most nights at the hospital. Bray went to see her, planning on visiting once a week. The computer was starting to impose demands of its own.

A letter finally came from a publisher, Cannon Endriss (est. 1782) plc. He rang, and a girl said she’d give him a few minutes, her brusqueness putting him in his place. She asked if he had an agent. He told her no. George Corkhill’s parcel had come by a motorbike courier.

He stared in astonishment at it. Small, the size of a paperback thriller. The front was stiff almost like real cardboard, covered by a dust jacket, blue and red, embossed with gold lettering.

The title read, “
The Story of KV
”. On the front was his crude drawing, two little figures on a hill, crazy kites, square clouds in the distance.
By Sharlene Trayer
. The
name had caused him heartburn. It wasn’t an anagram of his own name or Geoff’s or Shirley’s, for safety. He didn’t want to warn anybody Out There. Sharlene Trayer, he hoped, was simply impossible. No Sharlene Trayer in the phone book, none anywhere. A woman’s name would deceive.

For quite a time he gaped at it and kept opening the pages, inspecting the binding. A real
book
, just like in a library. Inside was the whole thing, the publisher’s address given as George’s printing firm as arranged. A brief biography of the mythical Sharlene Trayer, born in the USA, living in a location carefully unspecified, this was her first book.

As if that wasn’t breathless enough, next day he got from Mr Winsarls lists of notable customers who had bought antique and reproduction furniture from Gilson Mather. Bray told Mr Winsarls he would compile a tick list before the weekend. Mr Winsarls was pleased his leading craftsman was recovering. For the first time Bray felt flustered. Hours in the day, was his problem.

“The trouble is,” Bray explained with diffidence to the young lass in the office at Cannon Endriss, “my stepsister Sharlene isn’t well.”

“You’ve some children’s book, you say.” She made it sound offhand.

Lindsay Belmontral was plainly determined to avoid looking like one of those young executive women who went about being gorgeous for a living. She was in charge. While waiting, he’d heard her angry shouts, setting girls scurrying. Blonde, unhappy, her desk piled with manuscripts, chairs stacked with books. Bray counted
nearly two dozen women about the offices. One was the manuscript woman off the train. Well, she
had
mentioned this firm. He looked away. Was it tradition, women do books, and men print them?

“Yes.” He held his small package. “It’s been published. By me. I got a printer to make it for her. But I’m afraid it sold out.”

She focussed for the first time.

“It
what
?”

“Sold out. I’ve only this one left.”

She held out her hand. “Let me see.”

He made no move. “Do you think I did right?” He fumbled and brought out the folder of invoices for Corkhill’s firm. First things first. “Orders kept coming in.” He sounded querulous. “I couldn’t cope. Sharlene had a breakdown over it. I wonder if I did wrong, encouraging her in the first place.”

“Sold
out
?” Her voice spoke of shock, heresy. Bray felt on the right track.

“Her doctor gave me quite a reprimand. By letter, of course. She’s in the United States. We’ve no other family.”

“Give it here.”

He handed her the book. She squinted along its spine, rubbing the dust wrapper.

“It’s not the best product, is it?” she said disparagingly. “Who’s Corkhill?”

“The printer. Sharlene sent me the text, I took it to Corkhill.”

She leafed through his folders of invoices. “What’s NLSO?”

Most of them were fake, fabricated by Bray at home in the dark hours. Some however were recent arrivals from the Kings Cross accommodation address in response to his
adverts. He’d left those in their envelopes, showing legitimate dates.

“None Left Sold Out. I put it on to remind me. I’ve many others.” He passed his letter of apology to his mythical buyers. “I said sorry.”

She stared at him. He could see why she, of all the young women in the office, had climbed.

“How many?”

“Letters? Forty or so there. But many more.” He tried to placate her irritation. “I printed a thousand copies, but they went in a fortnight. I keep having to write and say there’s none left. It’s getting tiresome.”

“They want books,” she said like he’d offended God and the kingdom, “and you tell them to get stuffed?”

She shook her head. “I don’t believe this. It’s fucking absurd.” She flicked through Corkhill’s invoice, the sheaf of orders.

Bray was nonplussed. What was it these days, when young women swore like troopers? Then the hunter he now was smiled inwardly. He was the phoney one here. Wasn’t Ms Lindsay Belmontral, foul language and all, doing her proper work? He was the fraud, lying in his teeth.

“You’re a clown,” she said. She spoke to him directly, a colonel giving orders. “I’ve an old editor. She can judge this book’s potential. If it’s a go, we’ll maybe take the book on.”

“Take the book on?” he said, blank. Now he knew he’d been deceiving himself.

“Publish it.” She lifted her phone and added sarcastically, “To sell. You understand
sell
?”

Lindsay Belmontral was disgusted. She’d wanted youth, and that he no longer had. He was being palmed off on
some reject. She caught his eye, gave a grimace at the tardiness of phones. Anxious, he smiled back, feeling his way.

“Lottie?” she cooed, all sweetness. “Lindsay here. Only a possible, but right up your street.” And after a pause, “I know, Lottie, but it’s definitely a query.”

That evening Bray met George Corkhill in the Donkey and Buskin. Squaddies from a local army camp were usually in but a darts match had prised them away. The place was almost deserted.

“I want a thousand books, please, George,” Bray told his co-conspirator.

“Real this time?”

Bray recognised the printer’s joke but couldn’t share the levity. “Can you print something in it saying that it’s the second…?”

George seemed able to absorb a pint by some power other than mere suction. Bray watched with admiration as the beer level lowered evenly. His own went in jerks and starts, froth untidy about the rim.

“The Christie trick? Agatha Christie crime novels. Inside the book they gave a printing history. Remember? First printing, it’d say, then a date. Then second, then third, sometimes up to twenty-third printing.”

“Proving the demand for it?” Bray guessed.

George laughed, his Adam’s apple yo-yoing.

“You fell for it! Each printing was scanty, see? Maybe only a few hundred. Readers thought the whole world was reading it!”

Bray was instantly worried. “I thought I was being original.”

“In book sales? Don’t make me laugh, Bray.” George
became serious. “The only original thing is that you’ve a reason other than money.” He paused. “I meant
we’ve
a reason.”

The world clouded. Bray cleared his throat.

“Thanks, George. Send a proper invoice. Correct ledgers, tax records. Can the book show a different price? The publishers are sending it to some old biddy. If they accept it, I’ll tell them you’ll do the printing.”

“They might not like that, Bray.” Bray tried to finish his ale but couldn’t. The printer added, “Don’t worry. If you have to go along with them I’ll understand, and good luck.”

Bray already knew that. For the rest of the hour he told George his impressions of the publishing house. Bray actually began to almost enjoy the feeling of progress made despite everything. He also felt a kind of warmth, and recognised it: he trusted George. One ally wasn’t much, but it was something.