Being Henry Applebee

Henry’s hand drifted to an envelope peeking out from his cardigan pocket. Inside it: pre-purchased train tickets for Edinburgh. First Class. Two.

‘Perhaps it’ll be fine after all,’ he said, his spirits revived by a resurgent ray of optimism. He leaned over and rubbed the back of Banjo’s head. ‘And if it’s not fine, then stone me, at least it’ll be illuminating…’

2

Wide Awake

FINSBURY PARK, LONDON, DECEMBER 5: JOURNEY EVE

Ariel

Somewhere along a dusky stretch of track, Ariel felt her nerve waver. She drew her face back from the window as the train decelerated, leaving the grainy, urban blackness behind and easing its way beneath the vast, multi-arched roof of Paddington Station.

A stranger standing in the aisle purred into her phone: ‘We’re pulling in now… I’ll meet you in the usual place… Yes… Yes, me too.’

Ariel lowered her eyes and picked at a hangnail embedded in her thumb. If anything should happen to her over the next few days – some random accident, some freakish act of nature, or God, or destiny, or whatever – Linus would be the one to get a phone call. It could come from London, Edinburgh, or just about anywhere in between; the point was that a police officer would call with the news, and none of it would make any sense because she hadn’t told him the truth about where she was going. It would be a disaster. The worst possible way for him to find out she’d lied.

Actually, that she’d been lying to him for days.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tugged. A quick, sharp flare of pain and the hangnail came away in her fingers, a tiny droplet of blood mushrooming upwards and outwards over the rosy surface of her skin. Don’t be a wuss, she told herself. It’s two days! Forty-eight hours from now it’ll all be over.

At 20:37, Ariel stepped down onto a freezing cold platform, her wheelie bag in her hand. She pulled her multicoloured scarf tighter around her neck and joined a fast-moving line of passengers heading towards the ticket barriers. On instinct, she tilted her face upwards and breathed in the thick, metallic air. A faint murmur of danger (unspecified, intangible, largely cinematic in origin) caught at her chest. The pull of the city, she thought, her spirits lifting. A promise of adventure. Thank you, God! Now I remember.

The descent to the Underground led her into a frenzied warren of escalators and tunnels. Ariel negotiated her route to Finsbury Park with relative ease, surfaced at ground level and walked down a long, starkly lit passageway until she reached a busy sleeve of London high street. She emerged onto Seven Sisters Road and faltered. A dense knot of pedestrians scurried past her, snatching her breath away, their faces armed with hard-edged confidence – the kind of attitude, she decided, that only a city as awesome as London could produce.

She stepped to one side, flipped open the canvas bag slung over her shoulder and searched for Tumbleweed’s email on her phone. Mags is cool with you staying the night, he’d written. You’ll like her. Just don’t call her Magdalena. Crazy girl thinks it makes her sound like a disciple.

She memorised his directions, crossed over the road and set off to her right. A zigzag of turns, and she arrived at last at a steep run of concrete steps leading to a side-street basement.

Ariel lingered for a moment on the pavement and peered into the milky darkness. ‘Mag-da-le-na,’ she intoned, airing the word out, freeing it so it wouldn’t sneak up on her later and catch her unawares.

She dragged her wheelie bag to the bottom of the stairs and pressed her finger to a bronze buzzer. A light snapped on beyond the window, and a wiry cat, perched territorially on the windowsill, glowered at her with bilious green eyes.

‘Hi there,’ she said, backing carefully away from it.

Behind her, the door swung open. ‘You must be Ariel,’ said a girl with violet, asymmetric hair. ‘I’m Mags. Come in!’

The first thing Ariel felt was the music, slipping inside her, squeezing the air from her lungs like a vice. ‘Aladdin Sane,’ she said, dropping her shoulder bag to the floor. ‘Ziggy goes to America. 1973.’

Mags raised her eyebrows. ‘Yeah, it is! You a Bowie-head?’

Ariel tilted her hand from side to side. ‘Kind of, I suppose. I used to think I was the only person on the planet who thought it was called A Lad Insane until I found out the pun was intentional. Estelle – my mother – was a massive Bowie fan. It’s weird to hear it here. Reminds me of home.’

‘Shit. Sorry.’ Mags took an aborted step towards an old-school iPod and seemed to be weighing up whether or not to turn it off. ‘Tumbleweed told me what happened, I’m –’

‘It’s okay. It’s fine, don’t worry.’

Ariel smiled awkwardly and looked away, her throat thickening, an icy, sinking sensation billowing through her insides. She tried to distract herself by focusing on her surroundings: low ceiling; a lumpy sofa; floorboards bare apart from a shabby, oversized Persian rug; cheap lamps and mirrored cushions and a half-eaten pizza scattered at random intervals around the room.

The back wall was covered with what she assumed must be Mags’s artwork. Sketch after sketch of semi-naked, contorted torsos which somehow managed to look both fragile and disarmingly self-possessed.

‘Are those yours?’ she asked, moving closer. The hand-drawn charcoal figures were softer close up; less physically arresting. ‘They’re amazing! Seriously, I wish I could do that.’

Mags threw her an appreciative smile. ‘Gracias. They’re part of my coursework. I’m still working on my technique, but honestly, I’d rather look at those than at that hideous woodchip wallpaper underneath.’

Ariel pulled off her gloves and ran a finger over the pockmarked surface of the wall. She’d grown up in a house full of woodchip wallpaper, but this stuff looked original, like it had actually been there since the ’70s, long before she was born.

She took a step back and inhaled. The air smelled damp and faintly aromatic, an oddly comforting blend of the rundown and the exotic.

‘You’re a lifesaver for putting me up,’ she said, turning back to Mags. ‘Linus thinks I’m in Oxford with Tumbleweed, so at least being here with you makes me feel less guilty.’ She caught the look of curiosity on Mags’s face and shrugged. ‘It was a necessary lie. Given the circumstances.’

‘No worries. Any friend of my cousin’s. Who’s Linus, anyway? Your boyfriend?’

Ariel smiled. ‘No, he’s my dad.’

‘You call your dad by his first name? Wow. Progressive.’

Ariel rolled her eyes. ‘Trust me, you wouldn’t say that if you met him. The name thing’s just something I’ve done for a while. It’s no big deal, really.’

Her gaze drifted to the sofa.

‘That’s where you’ll be crashing, I’m afraid,’ Mags said. ‘Or if that doesn’t grab you, my boyfriend and I are going to a party in Kensal Rise. It might even turn into an all-nighter if the booze holds out, so don’t be surprised if we don’t come back…’ She paused. ‘You know, you’re welcome to come with us if you like?’

As she spoke, a tall, monobrowed guy in a donkey jacket slunk into view in the bedroom doorway. He looked over at Ariel and grinned. ‘Alright?’

Ariel held up her palm in greeting. She opened her mouth to answer Mags’s question, then faltered. A student party. In London. Cool, arty, interesting people her own age. No one to answer to but herself. Wasn’t that what eighteen-year-olds were supposed to do? Let their hair down and have some fun?

She took a breath, felt the sharp thud of a door slamming shut somewhere deep inside her, and slowly shook her head. ‘Thanks, Mags, but I have to leave early in the morning to get to King’s Cross. I can’t risk missing my train.’

When they’d gone it felt as though they’d taken every trace of oxygen from the room.

Ariel laid her coat and scarf on the arm of the sofa. She stood tugging at the sleeves of her jumper, trying to adjust to the stillness. In Oystermouth, she was used to it. At night, once the bay had grown cool and dark and secretive, not even the low roll of the waves carried to her bedroom at the back of the house. But here – in the city – it was unexpected. Unsettling, even.

She turned and searched for the iPod before remembering that it, too, was gone; swept into Mags’s pocket along with a packet of Rizlas and some gum. The only sounds now came from the street: the swoosh of passing traffic; the truncated slamming of car doors; the dull scrape of anonymous, torso-less feet on the pavement beyond the railings; low voices, muffled voices, distant, unintelligible all.

Alone in the city’s alien underbelly, Ariel watched the pulsing of her heart through her clothes, the first leg of her journey begun.

She settled herself cross-legged on the floor and unzipped her wheelie bag on the Persian rug. Her hands slid beneath the hastily packed layers of clothing until they found the large, padded envelope at the bottom. She lifted it out and placed it in her lap, contemplating, as she had done so many times before, the startling immediacy of Estelle’s handwriting etched across its front.

Ariel read the words out loud: ‘For E.M.H.’

Secured with a strip of Sellotape beneath it was a Post-it Note containing a phone number and an address on the outskirts of Edinburgh – some far-off village she’d never even heard her mother mention before. And below that, five words, their lettering markedly less defined: ARIEL, PLEASE DELIVER BY HAND.

Ariel ran her fingers over the words, held the package to her chest, closed her eyes. It was bad enough not knowing what was inside it, but now she’d had to lie through her teeth, too. ‘Promise me you won’t tell him,’ Estelle had asked her. ‘You must promise me you won’t tell Dad anything about this at all.’

Why???

‘Fuck.’ Ariel glanced at the low-rent transience of her surroundings. Here, in this abandoned basement, the package had mysteriously transformed itself into the most intimate object in the room…

She lowered it to her lap and slid it back inside her case.

The second envelope – the much smaller one containing a letter ‘inviting’ her to begin her journey – had arrived by post the previous week, addressed in an unfamiliar hand to Miss Ariel Bliss. It remained tucked away where she’d hidden it, in the inside pocket of her canvas shoulder bag.

Remained, as it turned out, an enigma, even after reading.

The bathroom, Mags had told her, could only be accessed by walking through the bedroom. (‘Cracks me up,’ she’d called as she headed out the door. ‘Whenever I want to blow people’s minds, I tell them my shitty rental has an underground en suite!’)

Ariel pushed open the bedroom door and switched on the light. Immediately to her right was a desk weighed down by a large pile of books on art and design. Alongside them were a couple of well-thumbed Ursula Le Guin novels. Half a dozen by Stephen King. She reached out her hand and touched the woody texture of their spines with her fingertips. Home, she mused, with an unexpected smile.

The bathroom itself, tucked away in the far corner of the room, was narrow, windowless, white; surely, she thought later, the least likely location on earth for what was to happen next. And yet it was right here, as she was bending over the sink – one hand drawing her hair back from her face, the other holding her toothbrush – that she suddenly felt a pair of hands brush against her shoulders from behind.

Ariel dropped her toothbrush into the basin and spun round. Every cheesy horror movie she’d ever seen flashed before her eyes. Slowly, she turned once more to face the mirror. The reflection staring back at her was her own, the backdrop nothing more than a plain, ceramic tile.

‘Holy shit,’ she said in a horrified voice. ‘Get a grip! Idiot.’

A shiver of recognition rippled along her spine. Ariel gasped, her eyes open wide. What she’d felt had been cold, fragile, and something else – something she almost didn’t dare articulate – something familiar. The invisible hands had lain on her body for the briefest of seconds, but they had been there, she was certain of it.

Just before dawn, a pair of car headlights sliced through the living room darkness with two exploratory beams of light. Ariel stirred and raised her head from the sofa. She listened for the sound of Mags’s key scraping against the door, the drunken rapping of knuckles on the window pane, but none came.

A shadow flitted briefly past the window. Bollocks. She hated being scared!

She stared up at the ceiling, her heart thundering in her chest, then reached her hand to the floor and fumbled for her phone. At her touch, the screen sprang to life, illuminating her face with a bright, neon glow. She tapped on the email icon and opened a new message. LONDON CALLING, she wrote in the subject line, then backed up and changed it to LONDON, WIDE AWAKE!

Hey Tee, it’s me. I’m at Mags’s place and I can’t sleep.

Confession 1: I’ve been thinking about Estelle and wondering if she can see me. If she thinks I’m doing a good job. If I said the right thing when I told Isaac she left us to become a star in heaven and light up the sky over Oystermouth Bay. He started looking for her every single night, and when he couldn’t see any stars he asked if she’d forgotten to shine for us. I panicked and told him Estelle’s star was so beautiful and bright, she was probably needed somewhere else…

Confession 2: My head’s been full of demons again. It’s kind of intense. There’s just so much pressure to be a fully formed person, straight out the gate. Maybe I’m losing it. Maybe it’s just me?

Confession 3: A secret scares the crap out of me. Do you think my promise to Estelle will make everything come right?

Ariel lifted her thumbs from the keypad. She entered Tumbleweed’s name in the To box. Scanned over what she’d written. Faltered.

Tapped Delete.

In the distance a car alarm began to wail.

She slid her legs from her sleeping bag and carried her phone to the woodchip wall of artwork. Shivering in the half-light, she ran her eyes over the shadowy rows of pictures until she settled upon a sketch of a woman, her arms loosely folded over her small, bare chest. The woman’s face was in profile, her expression hard to read. Ariel leaned her head to one side. From one angle, she thought she saw rapture; from another, grief.

‘What are you looking at?’ she whispered.

A thin wedge of light from the window shimmied across the floorboards. London was lonely at night, she decided. It wasn’t the great big adventure she’d been expecting.

‘Loneliness is nothing more than an illusion,’ she reminded herself. ‘Just like Frank said.’

She accessed the camera function on her phone and held it up in front of her. ‘Anyway, I’m not here for an adventure,’ she added in a purposeful voice. ‘I’m here because of a promise.’

Ariel stared at the wall ahead. Then again, what if her cross-country mission brought her closer, somehow, to Estelle?

She snapped a photo of the woman in the picture and sent it to Tumbleweed.

Somewhere nearby, in the city of shadows, a clock struck five.

Her train to Edinburgh was at eight…

She made her way back to the sofa, zipped herself inside her sleeping bag and dropped her gaze to her canvas bag lying nearby. The person who’d sent her the letter – summoning her to Scotland in such a polite, cryptic way – had no idea Ariel would be arriving early. And that was just the way she liked it.

In fact, it was about the only part of this entire weird undertaking that was perfectly fine with her.

3

The Tower

BLACKPOOL, FEBRUARY 1948

Henry

Henry’s jaw drops. The moment he steps inside, he can smell it: something raw; and electric; and alive.

The entrance hall at street level is bigger, grander than he’d imagined; high-ceilinged, ablaze with light, fizzing with expectation. He joins the queue behind a man in a flamboyant silk tie and gazes overhead, cap raked at an angle, hands resting casually in the trouser pockets of his uniform. The new year is six weeks old. He’s back in Britain at last. He is almost, but not quite, home.

Henry roots his feet to the floor, his grey eyes drinking in the wonderment of it all. Lined up ahead is a medley of earnest faces, young men and women like himself, each more dedicated than the next to the business of having a good time. His thoughts flit impatiently to the music, to the chance to finally kick back and relax. He sucks in his cheeks and whistles, long and low. This is it, he thinks. This is something marvellous indeed!

In the shelter of the foyer it’s warm, too. Outside, a blistering wind tears along the promenade, snapping at the skirts of a group of girls who bustle through the open doorway behind him, giggling, a saucy glint in their eyes, their cheeks rouged raw by the chill. He reaches inside his jacket for a cigarette and pulls his hand out empty. Damn it. He gave his last one to Davy Hardcastle. ‘Good luck!’ they’d called out to him. ‘See you back at the billet! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

Henry smiles to himself. The Tower Ballroom. It had been his idea to come here all along, but the others had their own plans. O’Malley (it was always O’Malley; was there any place on earth the guy didn’t know?) had heard of a bar where the girls kicked up their heels, danced a merry jig on the tables, and if you were lucky, let you run the tips of your fingers up and down the finely stitched seams of their stockings, all the way to no-man’s-land where the gossamer silk ended, and a narrow strip of quivering bare flesh lay waiting to lead you all the way to heaven…

Henry pays his entrance fee and makes his way up a vast staircase, two steps at a time, all the way to the top floor. The dull click of his right knee as he climbs. The heavy drag of his boots. He tries not to think about how disorientated he feels, how the heft of his body would fall slack and clumsy from lack of sleep if he let it. As he rounds a bend, the muscles in his calves protest and contract beneath his skin. He keeps his eyes fixed on the turn ahead. Pushes on.

The scent of perfume, of anticipation, clouds the air. He wishes his uniform didn’t hang so loosely on his diminished frame, but there’s not much he can do about that now. Back at the billet he’d stumbled upon a hollow-eyed stranger in the mirror – a human coat-hanger – no body inside to speak of, just his air force blues suspended like a phantom before him. Henry tugs at the hem of his jacket and pulls himself upright. It’s an automatic movement, ingrained by now. But there are no commanding officers here. No roll call awaits. Just soaring melodies, couples whirling like spinning tops on the dance floor, and eight shimmering glitter balls rotating overhead.

He reaches the top floor, passes through a pair of double doors and enters the ballroom at balcony level. A blast of music rains against Henry’s skin, and a sweet, invigorating rush of adrenaline surges like nectar through his limbs. To his left, row upon row of plush, upholstered seats fan out vertiginously one behind the other, each arranged to afford the best possible view of the dance floor. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the low-level lighting, but he can tell at once that he made the right decision to come upstairs – there are far fewer people up here, and the spectacle is magnificent, like a view from Mount Olympus itself.

‘Bet you any money the Café de Paris never had anything on this.’

Henry turns, sees the man in the silk tie standing in the shadows to his right.

‘The place in London,’ he continues. ‘Piccadilly. Got bombed in the Blitz?’

‘I never went there,’ Henry replies. He shrugs, his mouth curling into a smile. ‘I wasn’t old enough to get in at the time.’

‘Wouldn’t have stopped me,’ the man says with a wink. He leans in. ‘You’re a Londoner, aren’t you?’

Henry, unsure where this is leading, smiles again. ‘I am.’

‘Thought so. I hear the London girls can give guys like you and me the runaround. They can be – you know, standoffish. Stuck-up. But let me tell you something, my friend, they go stark raving mad for it here. It’s the electromagnetism. A couple of spins on the dance floor, and the music releases all their inhibitions. Know what I mean?’

His breath smells faintly sour, and, Henry detects, there’s an unnatural glassiness to his eyes. ‘Hey, fella,’ he says, nudging Henry’s arm, ‘I can spot a rookie a mile off. It’s your first time here, am I right?’

Henry concedes a grin. ‘Maybe. Or then again, maybe I’ve just got a rookie kind of face.’

The man sidles closer. ‘Well, Rookie, take it from me… if you’re looking for a pretty girl to dance with, you’re wasting your time up here. I suggest you follow my lead and make your way downstairs.’

Henry takes a discreet step backwards. ‘Thanks for the tip,’ he says lightly. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

He waits for the man to leave and looks around for a place to sit. Immediately ahead of him the first half-dozen rows are almost entirely empty, with the notable exception of one young woman seated alone in the front row. At first, all Henry can make out is the hazy outline of her silhouette. Her bird-like frame is perfectly still, her back draped in shadow, her head tilted forwards over the shiny gold barrier towards the dance floor below. He slips his hands into his pockets and waits to see if anyone joins her, but there are only a handful of spectators milling around, and behind him, two or three couples, lost in their own private dominions, quietly ensconced in the upper rows.

Henry glances towards the staircase. He wonders if perhaps he should go downstairs and get something to drink, when some force – some strange, visceral, magnetic pull – draws his attention back to the young woman. Henry trains his eyes on the back of her neck. And yet she herself doesn’t look round once… She must be totally engrossed; he’s never seen such powers of concentration in a dance hall!

Go over to her, he tells himself. Introduce yourself. Find out who she is.

He takes a step and falters as the light from a glitter ball sweeps firstly over him, then over the girl. He can see her more clearly now: the lush India green of her dress, cinched at the waist; narrow shoulders; soft waves of sandy brown hair swept up in a bun and held in place by an array of decorative clips which glint and sparkle in the beam of light circling above them. Henry counts ten seconds exactly until the glitter ball completes its circuit of the room. The association is inevitable, instantaneous. Like a spotlight in a POW camp, he thinks. Thank Christ I never had to see the inside of one of those.

Slowly, he makes his way along the second row until he’s no more than a foot or two away from her. As he nears the back of her seat, Henry flicks his eyes in her direction. A fine layer of down curves upwards from the nape of her neck, as though reaching for the light. And, he realises with delight, she’s not sitting still after all – she’s moving! Both hands tapping out the rhythm of the music against her thighs.