Tideline (36 page)

I tell Jez I need to make a statue of him. He stares at me for a minute. Takes another drag on the joint.

‘You want a sculpture of me?’ He sounds a little alarmed. Even through the dope. I want him to be calm now.

‘Yes. That’s all, Jez. That’s all I want. To capture you as you are now.’

Of course, he’s seen me transfixed by him. By his arms, by the way his Adam’s apple rises and falls in his honey-smooth throat. I’ve tried to keep my admiration covert. But
once or twice in the last couple of days he’s blinked, and looked up, or turned his head just as I thought he was absorbed. He’s caught my gaze, and though I’ve moved quickly to
hide my rapture, he’s seen it. I think part of him has grown to enjoy it. He probably knows the power he holds over me. This new-found vanity is useful for what I want to do. It means
he’ll comply. Yet it spoils the very essence of him that I want to capture. The lack of awareness of his own beauty and youth. This frustrates me to the point of desperation. In getting what
I want, I destroy it.

‘It won’t hurt,’ I tell him. ‘This is a gentle process. Women use this stuff to model their pregnant bellies.’

‘Why do they do that?’

‘They want to remember themselves as they’ll never be again.’

He stares at me, wide-eyed. My words have the opposite effect to what I intended. He’s frightened again.

‘I’d be no good to you dead. You do know that?’

‘Jez! Please! Try to trust me. This is the last thing I’m asking of you.’

‘The last thing? What do you mean?’

‘The last thing before you change.’

I feel a cavernous hollow of sadness gape within me.

He’s still so weak. His illness has left him wrung out, drained. He can barely resist as I peel off his jeans and his T-shirt. Everything.

‘I’m cold.’

‘I’ve lit the wood burner. And it’ll be warm once I begin.’

For a few minutes I can’t move, pinioned to the spot by the vision of his body on the white sheets.

Then I smooth on the petroleum jelly, first onto and between his toes. They curl as I do so, a fine bone in his caramel-brown foot twitches. I lift each foot in turn, hold it close as I spread
on the jelly and as my warm breath touches his sole, his calf muscles tighten, and a smile flickers across his lips. He’s like a litmus paper, his response is instant. I wrap his feet
individually in the bandages, working up his legs one at a time. I dip my hands in the warm water so they are moist as I smooth and press on the bandages then wrap them around his feet, round and
round so they are caught. The wet plaster has to be eased through the fabric then stroked down so it’s like another layer of skin, fine, but opaque, over his own.

I think of those spider skins caught in the webs in the garage. The detail of the spider remains in perfect replica after the spider has walked away, suspended in the moment. I reach the concave
area of his pelvis, where his muscles are drawn in, and his whole body shudders as I lay on the bandages. I ignore his response and move on up, smearing the petroleum jelly over his pectoral
muscles, feeling the sharp protrusion of his nipples as I go, then up to his neck where I press the plaster into the runnel of his clavicle, lingering a little here. My fingers caress his
collarbone, the tender cartilage in his neck, his ears. They stray over his square chin, to his face. Soon he’s a white silhouette, only his contours visible. He’s caught at the exact
age Seb was the last time I saw him.

‘It’s weird. It’s going all heavy,’ Jez says. His voice is succumbing to the drugs, his tongue must feel like leather. His eyes widen. He looks as if he’s had
enough.

‘It’s the plaster drying out,’ I tell him.

‘I feel trapped. Not sure I like it. It’s hot.’

‘It’s just the chemical reaction between the wet plaster and the air. It won’t be for long.’

‘What about my face?’ he asks.

‘Don’t speak. You mustn’t move or it won’t work.’

‘But – you can’t cover my face. I won’t be able to breathe!’

‘There’s a straw. Take it in your mouth.’

I place the bandages over his face, pushing with my fingertips into the valley between his chin and lips. Lay pieces of bandage over his nose and cheeks. I stroke them over the sockets of his
eyes, and with one finger, ease the plaster along his eyelids. Every rise, every dip. At last he’s done. He lies, a white shape in the fading orange light immobilized. I’ve done it.
I’ve got him.

They come to the River House in the early hours of the next morning. The windows in my room throb with flashes of blue light. I get up and go downstairs in a trance.
They’ve already smashed the door in the wall down, and are battering the hall door with crowbars while others bang on the barred windows and helicopters circle overhead. They start up the
stairs, heavy boots, protective vests, tasers in holsters, leather gloves. I watch them go. One of them holds me in an armlock, while others mount the steps to the music room. I hear them bang on
the door, rattle it. Boot it open. I smile because I know what they’re going to find. The Jez in the music room is static and lifeless, every pore of his skin produced in perfect replica. A
spider’s husk, suspended in a silken web, so that it will never grow old. The live body gone. Not a trace of the real Jez remains, it’s as if he were never here. I go with them quietly,
because there is nothing left to be done.

Sonia

You don’t know what season it is in here, or even what the weather’s doing. The light outside has been pale all day, but it’s waning now. The branches on the
stubby tree are bare again. And there’s not much else to see. A high fence topped with barbed wire, the concrete wall of a multi-storey car park. No river. They took me away from the
river.

He comes to me after the teacups have been carried off on trays. He comes into the room in a scarf and wool jacket and I realize it really is winter out there. He sits on the
green plastic armchair and looks at me with the same old gaze, eyes half shut as if he’s trying to understand. I don’t speak, I just look straight back at him. I remember the brush of
his eyelashes against my finger-tips. His hot skin under my lips. The warm scent behind his ear. But this is not the boy who lay semi-conscious between the pilings where I let him go free.
He’s larger, broader. I remember the barely there stubble, see that now it’s blacker, coarser. His youth’s past, like the Clipper hurtling along the river, out of sight and
earshot, rocking everything in its wake as it disappears round the bend towards the Thames Barrier.

He stays a while. Tells me he’s compelled to return to the River House. Often sits outside on the wall opposite. He feels it’s an extension of him. He doesn’t know the people
who live there now. Greg and Kit left of course to live in Geneva. I only hear from them from time to time.

I open my mouth to explain that even if I’d kept him there, even if the police had not finally deduced from Maria and Mick and Alicia that Jez must be in the River House, it could not have
worked. What I wanted was dissolving in my own hands. But the words won’t come.

So he asks what happened the night I let him go. And I try to tell him.

It was almost dark when I got back to the music room. I’d tied the dinghy to the chain beneath the wall by the stone steps. The tide was in. Jez was slumped in the
wheelchair, ready to go. He slouched forward as I pushed him out, over the alley, to the top of the steps. I’d balanced the oars across the handles of the wheelchair. I took him along the
path, under the dark shadow of the coaling pier, to the top of the steps where my boat was waiting. I felt light, fearless. Unlike the night I let Helen’s body fall into the hungry river,
petrified by my own actions. The tangerine glow had long since dissipated. It was dark. Orange lights from the buildings on the other side pierced the water. The dinghy was tied up at the top of
the steps, nodding gently on the spring tide as if it were impatient for us.

He slipped easily into the boat. I left the wheelchair at the top of the steps, it wouldn’t be needed again. Someone would take it, nothing gets left on the alley. It’d end up at
Deptford market or some lost soul would make use of it as a shopping trolley or a pram.

I climbed into the boat behind him, slotted the oars into the rollicks. Then I took a few minutes to arrange him. I’d released him from the plaster. His skin was still warm from its
encasement, slippery from the petroleum jelly. I arranged him symmetrically, his head in the bow, feet almost touching the stern. It was only a small boat.

I used my oar to push off across the dark water. We glided easily upriver as I knew we would now the tide was coming in. It was a balmy night. One of those freak days you get in February when
you think spring has arrived. Pubs full, people standing out on the wooden platforms. I could hear laughter, snatches of conversation as we passed. All the pubs familiar to me from the years
I’d spent on the river, The Trafalgar, the Prospect of Whitby on the north, the Mayflower on the south. Memories of me and Seb reflected like the lights in the water as we passed each one. I
rowed upstream, the water dripping off the oars lit up by the lights glittering on either bank. I was in a state of deep peace. Jez at my feet, supine. I wanted that journey to last for ever. The
river was gentle, rolling. Jez and me together on the boat, complete. Drifting back east as the tide turned.

We reached the north side, under the overhang of the road, and I took us into its shadows through the pilings. These days, there would have been ghastly, wilting wreaths lashed to them to mark
the spot. But we never marked it once they’d released Seb from the rope that had caught around his neck. The rope that was throttling him, as he shouted to hold on to him. As the raft sank
beneath the tide. I tugged in the dark. The wake from a passing river-bus rolled over him, and I pulled tighter to stop him from being dragged away. I had no idea that the rope I pulled was
strangling him.

‘Pull, Sonia,’ he cried. ‘Pull. Hold me. Help.’ And I did. I pulled to save his life.

I stop. Look up. Jez has gone away silently, without saying goodbye.

It’s funny, sometimes I think I can hear the river here, though they tell me that is only in my imagination for there are miles of motorway between this place and there.
Then the industrial estates and more suburbs before you get to the park, where you can stand at the top on a fine day, encased in green, and hold the whole of London within your sight. Only then do
you catch a glimpse of the river, insinuating between the Queen’s House and the ghastly eighties constructions on the other side, towered over by Canary Wharf. It’s still a good walk,
down between the spreading cedar trees of the park, past the Conduit House and out through the grand wrought-iron gates at the bottom. You have to cut through Greenwich Market, and then pass the
Cutty Sark shrouded in white plastic while it’s being renovated, and only then do you arrive at the river path, where the railings of the old Naval College cast long black shadows like bars
across the flagstones. It’s a long, long way away.

It’s usually at night or sometime soon after waking in the morning, before they bring the medicine trolley round, that I think I hear foghorns, long and deep and mournful. For a few
seconds I can actually feel the chill river mist on my skin, smell the chemicals rising off the water, and catch a glimpse of light, the way it bounced off the surface and everything was bathed in
silver when the moon was at its brightest. Then I can sense the tide draw the river back, and all I thought I’d ever lost is there, suspended in the mud as if it had never gone away.

Tideline
would not have been written without the encouragement and companionship of everyone on the MA course in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University in
Cambridge, tutors and fellow students alike. In particular, I would like to thank Martyn Waites, Anna D’Andrea and John Davy for reading early drafts, for their contributions and invaluable
support.

I am eternally grateful to my friend Suzanne Dominian, whose inspiring conversation helped spark the idea for
Tideline
in the first place and who has been there
throughout.

My thanks also go to:

Everyone at Gregory and Company, in particular Jane Gregory for taking me on, and Stephanie Glencross for her ideas and editorial advice.

The team at Simon & Schuster, especially Francesca Main for all her hard work and insight.

Jethro Pemberton for research on the Buckleys and his musical knowledge. Victoria Rance for help with research and providing a base in Greenwich from which to carry it out.

Pip Tabor and Matthew Hancock for their memories of the Thames in the 1970s and 80s.

Polly, Emma and Jem Hancock-Taylor for accompanying me on river trips, and for fending for themselves when I was too distracted to remember to feed them. Andy Taylor for his
unswerving patience and for hanging out the washing.

Thank you to Eliot and Mohammed at the Greenwich Power Station.

I am indebted to Peter Ackroyd’s London:
The Biography
for information about the history of the Thames.

The story of the foraging boy in Chapter Twelve is based on the film
The Mudlark
(1950) directed by Jean Negulesco, based on the 1949 novel of the same name by Theodore
Bonnet (1908–1983).