Herring Girl Read online

  And for a moment Mary glimpses a different Ian to the one who’s breezed confidently into and out of her life over the years, with his tight schedule and his expense account, and his exotic armoury of electronic gizmos. If she didn’t know him better, she’d say he seemed rather desperate.

  She softens her tone. ‘Look, even if I were to agree to your film – which I haven’t yet, by the way – it’s not my decision. It’s Ben’s father you’ll have to convince. And Ben himself, of course.’

  ‘Why do I sense there’s something you’re not telling me?’ Ian’s eyes narrow. ‘Why did Ben come to see you?’

  ‘You know better than to ask me that.’

  ‘Fucking client confidentiality.’ He exhales impatiently. ‘OK, OK. I know the drill. I give you my card. You phone the bloody father. Then I kick my heels while he decides whether to contact me.’

  ‘I think he’s away on his boat at present – he’s a deep-sea fisherman, by the way.’

  ‘Here you are then.’ He flicks a small white card onto the table. ‘Have you got his number with you? No time like the present.’

  At least he allows her to finish her steak before shepherding her into the foyer and handing her some kind of souped-up mobile phone apparatus he fishes out of his pocket. Apparently it’s also capable of recording conversations and showing extremely small feature films. The very idea of it makes Mary feel tired.

  She leaves a message and Paul calls back minutes later. Ian arranges a meeting the following day then pockets the machine with a flourish. ‘See? Total pushover.’

  ‘Surely he didn’t agree?’

  ‘Not yet, but he will. I can tell. Fucking falling over himself.’ He’s joking, but Mary’s not amused.

  ‘I’d like to say, “I hope you’re right”. But I’m not sure that I do. I’m not sure that having his private life broadcast to millions is what Ben needs at the moment.’ However much she might be warming to the documentary for her own sake, she can’t see how it can possibly benefit Ben.

  ‘Do you want a dessert?’

  ‘What I want, I’m ashamed to admit, is another Gitanes.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll join you,’ he says.

  Outside the hotel, the coast road snakes north to Blythe and Berwick, south to Sunderland. They cross over to a wide pavement promenade and wander northwards until they find a vacant bench overlooking the dark sea. As she’s sitting down Mary gets a sudden image of a towering black wave rearing up in front of her. She shakes her head briefly to banish it.

  ‘I trust your room has a sea view,’ she remarks.

  ‘It’s “rooms”, actually. When I said I was from the Beeb they gave me a suite.’

  As she suspected, he’s the kind of lapsed non-smoker who pretends not to be by never buying cigarettes. She proffers one of her Gitanes and they light up and exhale in unison. ‘When did you take it up again?’ she asks.

  ‘It was that fucking programme on nicotine. Did you realize tobacco’s more addictive than heroin?’

  ‘It’s not just the nicotine, I find. It’s all the comforting rituals one comes to associate with the habit. Even if I gave up – which, for your information, I’m not even considering – I’d probably still need to sit outside on a bench in the freezing wind forty or so times a day.’

  ‘I came here once as a kid. Did I ever tell you? Nineteen sixty-six, sixty-seven, around then. The weather was boiling but the sea was fucking freezing.’

  ‘That’s because of the Arctic currents. The water barely warms up at all in the summer.’

  ‘We stayed in a B and B in Cullercoats, the whole family in one room. Place was heaving with Scots. They’re all in Corfu now of course, getting skin cancer, but back then all the factories would close down for two weeks and the whole populace would hop on the first train headed for a decent beach.’

  He blows a series of inexpert smoke rings. She’d forgotten what a restless smoker he was, continually playing with his cigarette, rolling it around the ashtray, making patterns in the ash. What must it be like to operate continually on such a level of adrenaline?

  ‘How’s the thalassaphobia?’ he asks.

  ‘Acute as ever, but I fear Laura and Ben may have embarked on a doomed campaign to cure me.’

  ‘I wonder if I could sustain a whole telly series on arcane phobias.’

  ‘I used to dread the summer,’ she remarks. ‘Coming home from boarding school to find my old gaggle of chums heading off to the beach every day. It was a like a continual party that I wasn’t invited to.’

  ‘1967. It’s all coming back now. That was the year I learnt to surf. I blew all my paper-round money on a pukkah surfboard and stayed in the water until I was blue round the gills.’

  She shudders. ‘Mad. Inexplicable. My worst nightmare,’ she says, crossing her arms across her chest. ‘I think that was the summer my parents hired a – well, a sort of governess I suppose she was. To keep an eye on me while they were doctoring. Nice lady, very prim and proper, hated the beach nearly as much as I did. But unfortunately for us both they’d issued strict instructions that she was to encourage me into the sea. So every day she’d pack a picnic and bring me here to the Long Sands, and walk me up and down along the water’s edge like a frightened filly.’

  He laughs. ‘Poor Mimi,’ he says, using his old nickname for her. ‘I wish I’d known you then.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have been interested in me.’

  ‘I bet you were pretty.’

  ‘I was bookish and scrawny, as I always have been.’

  They sit for a while, inhaling, flicking ash, each lost in their own memories.

  ‘Her name was Miss Turnbull,’ muses Mary. ‘How strange. I haven’t thought of her for years. She’d carry the picnic and I’d carry the windbreak and a spade. It was my job to make the table. She refused to sprawl on the sand – far too unladylike – so I had to dig two neat little trenches and create a cubic mound of sand between, then flatten the top to form a table on which she’d spread a chintz tablecloth.’

  He barks with laughter. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Then we’d sit either side, on folded towels, with our feet in the trenches, like in a banquette at a cafe. It was surprisingly effective.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen you.’

  ‘You almost certainly did.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Subliminally, you mean.’

  ‘Assuming you were surfing with your eyes open, you probably stared straight at me a hundred times a day.’

  ‘Then you’d have seen me too.’

  ‘Indeed. What colour were your swimming trunks?’

  He laughs again. ‘God knows.’

  Blue, with a white stripe down each side. She remembers him suddenly: a red-haired boy with a surfboard, utterly fearless, swimming way out of his depth. She’d gazed at him, horrified and spellbound, day after day.

  ‘No, wait,’ he says. ‘Mum got me some new ones with a drawstring, because my old ones kept being pulled down by the waves. They were blue with a white stripe down each side.’

  Though she’s encountered such coincidences before, many times, since she embarked on her research into reincarnation, they never fail to astonish her. ‘Jung called it “synchronicity”,’ she remarks. ‘Apparently coincidental events that he believed to be more than a coincidence – he referred to it as an “acausal connecting principle”.’

  ‘Obviously we were meant for each other.’

  How typical of Ian to choose the most solipsistic of interpretations. ‘Actually it’s rather an interesting theory,’ she says. ‘In which he posits an intelligence in the patterning of non-corporeal events.’

  ‘Why did you leave me?’ he asks suddenly, and Mary wonders briefly how bad things are with the lovely Christina.

  ‘You promised you wouldn’t ask me again,’ she says.

  ‘Blame Jung.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What other woman would bring synchronicity into a conversation about swimming trunks?’


  ‘Even you can’t expect me to launch into an analysis of our break-up three seconds after you waltz back into my life after nearly a decade.’

  ‘Are you saying that I’m back in your life?’

  ‘You are staying at the Grand Hotel in Tynemouth, Ian, and you appear determined to make a documentary about what has become my life’s work. What does it look like to you?’

  ‌Chapter Eighteen

  2007

  Paul steers Wanderer into the mouth of the Tyne and throttles back on the engine as the choppy waves of the open sea smooth out, like someone’s taken an iron to them, into the silk of the river. He lets out a long breath, like he always does, as the engine quiets, and the boat stops fighting. That’s how he thinks of it: like the sea’s a muddy field, all rutted and claggy, and the boat has to plough a line straight through it.

  It’s a relief to see the familiar buildings on the bank glowing pink in the rising sun: that posh new terrace along from the Wooden Doll, the High Light and the Low Light, all the chippers and fish shops.

  The lads are hoying offal over the side so the birds are screaming and diving, strafing the wheelhouse with gobs of white and green. He’s wondering whether there’s any of them weird innards going over too, but he’s not said anything to the lads – and they’ve not said anything neither, so maybe it’s only one or two that’s like that. Still, it makes you think. What else is going weird that we don’t know about?

  Up ahead he can see the Tricker belching black diesel: filthy old rustbucket, should have been scrapped years ago. And that cut-price derv – amazing Bing’s got away with it for so long. But that’s what it’s all about these days, keeping the overheads down.

  The flat’s empty when Paul gets in and the cleaners have been, so the cushions are all plumped up and there’s that air-freshener smell, and hoover lines on the rugs. He dumps his gear and kicks off his boots, then prowls from room to room in his socks, sifting through a handful of junk mail. Where’s the bairn, he wonders. And Nana. He texted them both he’d be back this morning.

  He checks the fridge. Those lamb chops he bought are still there. And the two pizzas. All past their sell-bys. And that milk’s off. What’s the bairn been eating? It’s like the flat’s been empty the whole time he’s been away.

  He’s just taking out his mobile to give Nana a piece of his mind, when he hears a key in the door.

  ‘Dad!’ It’s Ben, out of breath and grinning ear to ear, run all the way up the stairs by the looks of it. ‘I was at the library and forgot the time.’

  Paul ruffles his hair and smiles down at him. ‘I thought you’d skipped the country,’ he says. ‘The fridge is full of rotten food. Where’s Nana? What have you two been up to?’

  ‘I’m going to be on TV! This like really famous Scottish bloke wants to make a programme about the doc’s therapy and he wants me to be in it.’

  ‘Ian something, right? Yeah, he called me on the satellite phone. He’s coming here this afternoon to talk it through.’

  ‘Can I really be in it?’

  The lad looks great: excited, pink cheeks, freckles, caught the sun a bit. Happy, that’s what it is, Paul thinks with a pang. For the first time in years, the lad actually looks happy. ‘I want to eyeball him first, mind,’ he says. ‘Make sure he’s not taking the piss.’

  ‘That’s where I was just now, with him at the library. He wanted to see some of the stuff we’ve been finding out about Annie. Pete nearly wet himself when I told him about the film!’

  ‘And who’s Pete when he’s at home?’

  ‘This old library dude who’s been helping the doc and Laura and me look up old maps and that. Dad, did you know our building used to be this really famous pub called the Jungle? With three bars and a disco and that, and belly dancers in cages hanging from the ceiling. Pete used to play the piano in the basement. He said it was so rough they had special spotlights they switched on when there was a fight, so the bouncers could see what was going on and break it up.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve been busy.’ Paul feels like he’s been away for a month, not just a week.

  ‘And we found where Annie lived!’ Lad’s so full of it, he’s practically hopping on the spot. ‘Dad, did you know the whole river bank used to be covered with these slum houses, right down to the water, and there were millions of jetties going out onto the river, so when the big boats moored up their prows would poke right in through people’s windows.’

  ‘That’ll be the old Low Town your great granda was always on about.’ Paul swills old water out of the kettle and refills it. ‘He said the rats were the size of rottweilers. Where’s Nana? Has she been feeding you properly?’

  Ben gets a shifty look on, that says he’s covering up something. ‘She texted me yesterday, but she hasn’t been in much.’ (At all, Paul thinks.) ‘But I don’t know. Maybe she has. I’ve been out a lot and I’m never hungry when I get in, because Laura’s always cooked something or packed a picnic and that.’

  ‘Laura? Who’s this Laura? I don’t know. I go away for a week and come back to find my son’s been adopted by some strange woman.’

  Ben grins. ‘She’s this really cool friend of the doc’s, who does all the cooking because the doc’s like totally useless about food. She runs a caff by Tynemouth Market.’

  Sounds all right, Paul thinks. At least the lad’s getting fed. ‘Would I like her?’ he asks.

  Ben laughs suddenly, a really big belly-laugh. ‘I don’t think she’s your type,’ he giggles, then explains: ‘I mean she’s really old, like Nana’s age. She says when I’m thirteen I can have a weekend job at the caff and she’ll train me up to manage my own place.’

  So, two middle-aged ladies and a piano-playing librarian. Pretty rum playmates for a lad his age. But it could be worse, Paul thinks. At least he’s not twokking and necking jellies down the Meadowell with the chaver brats from his school.

  As the kettle comes to the boil, there’s another key in the door and it’s pushed open by a fat arse in mauve trackie bottoms as Nana backs into the hall weighed down by carrier bags. ‘Howay, son,’ she grunts when she sees Paul. ‘God, my fingers are killing me where these handles have dug in. Get me a cup of tea, will you? I’m gasping.’

  She heaves the bags onto the table and starts unpacking. Two-for-one tubs of vanilla ice cream. A six-pack of low-fat yoghurts. Giant sack of crinkle-cut chips.

  Here we go again, Paul thinks. ‘I hope there’s some proper food in there somewhere.’

  ‘There’s some shepherd’s pies in that one, and some sausages on special offer,’ she says, flapping the neck of her trackie top to cool down.

  ‘I’m going to be on TV!’ pipes up Ben.

  ‘Stop talking daft and put those things away. I’m shattered. Paul, that’s thirty quid you owe me.’

  ‘It’s true!’ Ben goes on. ‘This film bloke’s coming to see the flat this afternoon. He wants to film me waking up and getting ready for school and that.’

  ‘Paul? What’s the bairn going on about?’

  ‘It’s that therapist I told you about,’ says Paul. ‘The film’s about her really, but they want to use Ben as a case study.’ He watches his mam’s face change as the light slowly dawns.

  ‘What time’s he coming?’ she asks.

  ‘About two-thirty.’ Paul turns to Ben. ‘That gives you three hours to sort out your room, buddy.’

  ‘Where’s that tea?’ says Nana. ‘I’ve got to sit down.’

  ‘Get some tea for your nan, Ben. I’m off for a shower,’ says Paul, making a quick getaway.

  Better leave her to it before he says something narky. Already he can see her getting in a lather over this TV bloke. Working out if she’s got time to get to the hairdresser’s – when what would really help is if she’d just take her bags of hi-carb shopping back to fucking Iceland.

  He goes to his en-suite and peels off layers of rank dampish clothes. After a long trip Nessa used to say they could walk to the washer by themselves. His skin, under
neath, is blotchy; his crotch itchy and matted; his armpits stink. Waiting for the shower to run hot, he steps on the scales and forces himself to look down. Fuck. Up four pounds. He sucks in his belly, then pushes it out as far as it will go and slaps it both sides. Have to have a word with Dougie about all them puddings he’s been getting in. Normally he loses weight on a trip. Something called callisthenics, according to some lad down the Low Lights: all the work the muscles have to do to balance when the boat’s heaving up and down.

  Paul takes his time getting dressed. He can hear Nana jabbering on the phone in the living room and he doesn’t want to get involved. He’ll wait till she buggers off back to her place to get dolled up.

  As it happens the film bloke arrives early, before Nana gets back, so Paul doesn’t have to worry about her fussing about, getting in everyone’s road. On the phone he sounded like a big bloke, but in the flesh he’s five six, five seven at most.

  ‘I bought the bike up in the lift,’ he says. ‘Hope you don’t mind.’

  He’s wearing shorts and trainers, and there’s bike grease on his hands, which is a bit embarrassing as Paul’s put on his new leather jacket and smart kecks. But he’s making all the right noises about the flat, so that’s OK.

  ‘I just wanted to check that you’re happy for Ben to be involved in this documentary,’ he says after he’s had a bit look round and they’re all sat down on the leather three-piece. ‘And to find out if there’s anything I should know before we start. Mary – Dr Charlton – is a stickler for confidentiality and I didn’t think it was fair to ask Ben.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, is there anything about Ben that you wouldn’t want two million viewers to find out about?’

  Shit, that sex change crap. Paul hadn’t thought about that. ‘I thought you just wanted to film the hypnosis sessions and a bit of daily life.’

  ‘I think the viewers will want to know why you took him to Dr Charlton in the first place, don’t you?’

  ‘Can’t you just say we were curious?’ Paul sneaks a look at Ben, to see if he’s caught on, but the lad’s just sitting there jiggling his knees and grinning like he’s won the lottery.