Strangers

Old George was just as bad, but for different reasons. ‘That bloke had the guts to call you yet?’ he asked her every time she went to collect Shadow or to join him for a cup of poisonous tea. She had told him about the episode when she returned the dog, and he’d made adverse comments about her lack of care and foresight. ‘Poor old lad,’ he’d said under his breath as he’d checked his dog anxiously for cuts and bruises. The man on the tow path was now ‘the man who kicked Shadow’ and who should have the courage to face the music. But the mysterious Joe seemed to have vanished.

She put it out of her mind. She was busy at work, but the job was only temporary, a stop-gap that she had taken without too much thought under the pressing necessity of earning some money. She had to start making decisions about what to do next. Her career path had been leading up to the moment when she had the funds, the expertise and the credibility to start her own business, and the way the rug had been pulled from underneath her had left her floundering. She had to decide whether to start again, to see if she could get some more money together and raise some more loans, go through the web of bureaucracy that all the permissions required, or if she should resign herself to the admitted security but endless frustration of working for other people in large, unyielding institutions.

Some of the options were attractive. The European universities were always eager for experienced language teachers and offered a whole field of academic work she’d barely explored. Beijing University was actively recruiting, as were universities in Korea and Japan. She’d never been to the Far East and was curious to travel there, but she had a life in Europe she wasn’t quite ready to give up. There was also the complication of her mother.

Roisin was adopted, and all her life she had been aware of her mother’s fear that one day she would walk away and declare an allegiance to a different past. Since her father’s death, this anxiety seemed to have grown and become a factor that Roisin had to weave into all her plans and considerations. ‘Why don’t you come back to Newcastle, pet?’ had been the most recent theme. Roisin loved her mother and wanted to help her settle into a new life, but she wasn’t prepared to go back home and live with her.

So she didn’t really have time to brood about a phone call that had not been forthcoming.

Spring was late arriving. London pulled a grey blanket over its head and rained. The buildings seemed to grow darker and the streets were sodden and filthy. Her morning runs with Shadow became an ordeal rather than a pleasure–for her at least. For Shadow, there was no such thing as bad weather–there was just weather and it was all good.

She was back in her flat one Saturday morning, rubbing her hair dry and warming her frozen hands round a cup of coffee, when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and checked the number. No one she knew. ‘Hello?’

‘Roisin? You probably don’t remember me. It’s Joe. Joe Massey. I tripped over your dog and nearly ended up in the canal.’

‘Of course I remember. How are you?’ She felt ridiculously pleased.

‘Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch before. I lost your number. I thought I must have dropped it when I was sorting out my money on the tube. I wasn’t concentrating too much that day. I thought I was going to have to wait until I was fit enough to get back on the tow path, but I just found it.’

‘That’s OK. How’s your ankle?’

‘I tore a ligament–it’s not too bad now. Look, I owe you a drink. I probably owe you dinner by now. Could we meet? I don’t suppose you’re free tonight?’

She was. She’d planned to spend the evening catching up with some of her outstanding work, but dinner with Joe Massey seemed a much more attractive option. They agreed to meet that evening.

Roisin dressed carefully for their date. Most of her clothes were things she’d bought for work and they all looked too sober and businesslike. In the end, she opted for trousers–hip-hugging with a wide belt–and a green top that heightened the colour of her eyes. Her hair was blessed with being naturally curly and–with a bit of help–naturally blonde. She put on boots that added a couple of inches to her height. She could remember helping Joe up the steps by Camden Lock, her head barely reaching his shoulder.

They’d agreed to meet in Camden Town–the scene of the crime. She wondered if he would look the way she remembered him, or if her eyes would pass over him, seeing only some stranger, but as she walked towards the station, she recognized him at once. He was standing under the canopy, reading a folded newspaper. He was wearing glasses, and his dark hair was damp from the fine drizzle that had been falling. When he glanced up and saw her, his smile lit up his face.

‘Roisin,’ he said. She could see the approval in his eyes as he studied her, and felt an answering warmth. He’d dressed up for the occasion as well, wearing a light mac over a suit that looked well cut to fit his tall, rangy frame.

He was still moving with a slight limp, and she suggested that they go to a café bar she knew that was fairly close to the station, but he shook his head, putting his hand lightly on her arm. ‘I booked us a table,’ he said, flagging down a taxi. He directed the driver to Holborn and a small bistro that welcomed them with the yellow glow of lights and the buzz of conversation.

Afterwards, she couldn’t remember much about the food that they’d eaten. What she could remember was that they’d talked. He came from Liverpool, he told her. He’d grown up there, but he couldn’t wait to get away. ‘It’s a good city now,’ he said, ‘but then…it was dying. I came south, to London, as soon as I could.’

She told him about her childhood in the North East, about the beauty and the wildness of the countryside, and the city where she had grown up. ‘I still like to go back. My mother’s there, and, I don’t know, there’s something…’

He was listening quietly, his eyes on her face. ‘It’s still home?’ he suggested.

She laughed. ‘I suppose it is.’

‘I don’t feel like that about Liverpool,’ he said.

She took the opportunity to turn the conversation round to him. ‘Does everyone call you Joe, or are you Joseph sometimes? I don’t know any…’ Her voice trailed away.

His face had changed, gone cold and distant. Then he seemed to remember where he was and gave a rather forced laugh. ‘No. I’ve only ever been Joe.’

He was a pathologist, he told her, with a research interest in foetal medicine and neo-natal development. ‘That’s when it all happens,’ he said. ‘In a way, the path of your life is mapped out for you in those few months. After that, it’s downhill all the way.’ He didn’t look too depressed about it. ‘It’s a bit like computer software. Leave a bug in there–most people have one or two–and it will probably kill you in the end.’

‘Like a predilection for tripping over dogs and falling in canals?’

‘Don’t knock it. Just because we haven’t found it yet…It could be there. But no, in that case the dog stops you from dying of what you’re programmed to die of.’ He was marking time while he decided what he wanted to do next. He’d spent the last year in the Gulf, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As he said that, the same, rather cold look flickered across his face.

‘Saudi Arabia,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it.’ She’d had a chance to work there a few years ago. The money had been excellent, but she’d decided she couldn’t face living under the restrictions the culture would impose on a single woman.

He hesitated, then said, ‘It’s not an easy place. They call it the magic kingdom. A whole modern world has just sprung up out of the desert, but the people haven’t changed. It’s like one of those optical illusions. You look and you see a modern country, and then you look again, and you’re in the Middle Ages, and what you thought you were looking at, it isn’t there any more. Which one is the real Saudi Arabia…?’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe we don’t have the equipment to see it. I have the option of going back, but…’ He picked up a piece of bread and didn’t finish the sentence.

‘You don’t want to stay here?’

He shook his head. ‘The NHS–it’s tied up in red tape and bureaucracy. I want something with a bit more of a challenge.’ He’d spent most of his working life overseas, and he planned to leave again as soon as he could. He’d applied for research posts in Canada and in Australia. ‘Those are places I want to be.’

‘That’s something I’ve got to decide,’ she said. ‘Where I want to be.’

He raised an eyebrow in query, so she went on. ‘I had plans to open a language school, but it went wrong. Money problems,’ she said, to forestall any questions. ‘So I need to decide–do I start again, or do I go and work for someone else? And where.’

‘You don’t want to stay in the UK either?’

She shook her head. She’d first started teaching English because it gave her an opportunity to travel. ‘Not really.’

‘So where?’

‘China. I’ve never been there and there are some interesting jobs in Beijing. Or Tokyo, maybe. I’m not sure if I fancy Japan. Patagonia.’

‘Patagonia?’

‘I just like the sound of it. Mountains and condors and more space than you know what to do with.’

They arranged to meet again. He wanted to see her the next day, but she put him off. She had bruises from her relationship with Michel that could still hurt. She wasn’t ready to go through that experience again. Joe wasn’t going to be around for long. She wasn’t going to be around for long. Whatever happened, their lives were going to cross only briefly. The parameters were already set. It would be crazy to get too involved.

Friends, she told herself. They could be friends.

He called her a couple of days later with a suggestion that they explore the Bow Back Rivers that Saturday.

‘The what?’ she said.

‘I’ll show you.’

He was waiting for her when she came out of Bromley-by-Bow station. He smiled when he saw her, and took her hand. The traffic roared by, heading for the Blackwall Tunnel. ‘Half of Londoners don’t know this exists,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

She thought she knew this part of London–a derelict area of industrial wasteland tracked by busy roads that was best escaped from, not explored. She followed him away from the roads, down some steps and found herself in a wilderness where waterways tangled together through overgrown footpaths and abandoned locks and bridges. They walked for an hour along the waterways without touching the city.

The rivers were choked with weed and the muddy banks were littered with rubbish, but there were swans on the water, and a heron rose lazily from the river ahead of them. He told her the names of the rivers as they walked–Pudding Mill, Bow Creek, Three Mills, Channelsea. The day was misty and cold.

They left the silence of the old waterways and came out into the roar of the traffic. It started to rain, and he opened his umbrella, putting his arm round her to pull her into its shelter. He had the thin frame of a runner, and she was aware of the hardness of his arm through the sleeve of his coat as they walked together.

They fell into a pattern of seeing each other a couple of times a week, often just walking, discovering parts of the city they didn’t know, sometimes going for a drink. Their meetings were friendly and casual. She didn’t know who he saw or what he did when he didn’t see her. He didn’t talk about himself much.

On an unseasonably cold day about six weeks after their first meeting they found themselves on the South Bank. They’d been to Tate Modern to see the Edward Hopper exhibition, and afterwards they’d wandered aimlessly back along the path. Joe had been quiet for most of the afternoon and Roisin was happy just to walk beside him and watch the river.

The water was translucent green except where the light glinting off the eddies and flows turned it silver. A tour boat went past, lines of seats visible inside the cabin where people sheltered from the brisk wind that blew up the river. The seats on the upper deck were empty apart from a couple who hung over the rail, pointing out the sights of the river as the boat passed. Briefly the voice of the guide boomed across the water:…the Houses of Parliament, built in the…A woman on the top deck leaned out dangerously to take a photograph as the boat rocked on an eddy.

‘She’s going to fall,’ Roisin said.

She felt him stiffen beside her. ‘She’s dead if she does. In this water you’ve got maybe two minutes before the cold paralyses you.’ They watched as the woman righted herself and the boat dwindled into the shadows under Waterloo Bridge. His voice was sombre when he spoke again. ‘I used to get the river deaths when I worked here before–a lot of them ended up in our mortuary. It’s a terrible way to die.’

She took his hand. This was the first time he’d talked about the darker side of his work. ‘I don’t remember reading about deaths in the river.’

He was still watching the water, his thoughts somewhere else. ‘There are so many they hardly bother reporting it now.’

She thought about the dark waters closing above her, the cold eating into her until it drove all feeling away, knowing that her existence would be snuffed out and forgotten and when her body was pulled out of the river–if it ever was–no one would care. The sky was grey and the wind off the water had a cutting edge.

She was still holding his hand. He tucked it in his pocket, and they continued along the riverside. She had walked here last May, past the concrete maze of the South Bank, enjoying the early summer sun, watching the crowds sitting at the tables in front of the National Film Theatre. They were deserted now. The wind blew and an empty can rattled its way across the paving stones. Behind her, a boat sounded its horn.

She could feel the touch of Joe’s fingers on her hand, the gentle pressure of his thumb as he circled it in her palm. Gulls were flying overhead, their calls echoing in the chill air. They didn’t speak again as they walked up the steps at the end of the bridge and paused to watch the water again. ‘What do you want to do now?’ she said.

He leaned back against the parapet and drew her towards him. ‘You’re cold.’

‘Everything’s cold.’

He opened his coat and wrapped it round her. ‘Not this,’ he said. She could feel the wind buffeting her ears and blowing her hair around his face as he kissed her. His lips felt icy as they touched hers, and just for a moment, she thought about the dead lips of drowned women under the water.

It was time for a decision. She could step back and draw the line that would define the path of their relationship, but she didn’t want to. She could feel the warmth of him pressing close to her, feel the slight roughness of his skin against her face. She had been standing in the shallows for too long, had been too frightened of stepping into the current, of getting her life back again. As Joe kissed her, she could feel the current start to lift her, start to carry her away. ‘Joe?’ she said.

He looked down at her. His face was warm and intent. ‘Let’s go back to your flat,’ he said.

As they wended their way back through Bloomsbury, she reminded herself that he was leaving, that by the autumn he would probably be gone, but it didn’t matter any more. What mattered was now.

4

It was a summer Roisin would never forget. In her memory, the sun always shone and the sky was cloudless. The forbidding river glittered as it flowed through the city, and the concrete of the South Bank warmed in the mellow light. She and Joe spent their lunch times wandering along the riverside, their evenings exploring the lanes and byways of London, and their nights at Roisin’s flat. She barely saw her friends, spent as little time at work as she could get away with. After a few days, he moved his possessions in, and stayed. It was as if they knew that their time together was short, and they didn’t want to lose a moment of it.

When she came home in the evenings, she’d pause for a moment with her key in the lock, wondering if he would be there, if the door would open to a waft of warmth and the smell of coffee brewing. ‘Joe?’ she’d call.

‘Hey, babes.’ He would come out of the small box room that masqueraded as a second bedroom, now converted into a makeshift office, and scoop her off the floor to kiss her. They would go out to eat, or take Shadow for a walk along the tow path, or spend the evening in the flat. They lived quietly in their own personal bubble that was completely absorbing, but so fragile and impermanent.

They never talked about the future, because very soon they would have to go their separate ways. She knew she had a decision to make, and kept putting it off. Each week, she looked at the jobs available all over the world for someone with her skills, and each week, she found a reason to reject every one.

Joe worked long, irregular hours and sometimes vanished for days if he was sent out of town. She got used to hearing his key in the lock in the small hours, feeling the mattress give as he slipped into the bed beside her.

It was after one such return towards the end of the summer when she woke suddenly. The display on the radio told her it was almost four. She could tell by Joe’s rigid stillness beside her that he was awake as well. ‘Joe?’ she whispered. ‘Are you all right?’

He didn’t reply. He just rolled over towards her, and pressed his face between her breasts. She could feel him shaking. ‘Joe?’ she said again.

‘A bad dream,’ he said. ‘Go back to sleep, sweetheart. It was just a bad dream.’

London, September 2004

The water gleamed in the moonlight, black and impenetrable where it surged between the standing stones of Tower Bridge, translucent brown where it washed against the banks. The office and apartment blocks were dark and silent.

The river was old here, close to the end of its journey to the sea. Now it carried the filth and detritus of the city, away from the slow meander through the fields of Wiltshire, past the bridges of Oxford and the gentle lawns of Henley.

The tide had turned. The river was in ebb, receding from the banks, leaving a waste of mud and shingle behind. Narrow steps led down to the river’s edge where water washed against wooden piles. The moon was setting, and the first light of a grey dawn was gleaming through the clouds. The light caught the water, turning it to opaque steel, reflecting off the frameworks of glass that towered above the old city. The air carried the bite of frost.

The body of the woman had caught against the mooring and had been left on the bank as the water retreated. She was still wearing the remains of a black dress, sodden and skimpy. Her feet were bare. Her long hair lay in wet, dark lines across a face that the river had battered beyond recognition, the features almost gone.

She had been young. The men from the Marine Support Unit, the river police, could tell that much as they lifted the body, already pronounced dead by a doctor called from his bed in the small hours, short-tempered and abrupt. They had been expecting to find this body since the week before, when a witness had reported seeing a young woman jump from the riverside walk into the icy water.

Suicide, accident, foul play–bodies dragged from the Thames had different stories to tell. Some of them had families–grieving, frantic, knowing their loved ones had been lost. Others had no one, or no one who wanted to claim them. Drunks, the homeless, addicts, asylum seekers, the desperate with nowhere else to run. Some were old, some were, like this girl, young, and some were no more than children.

A clawed, blackened hand slipped from the body bag and hit the ground with a thud. Through the mud, a gleam of metal was visible from the ring on her finger. One of the men gently tipped some of the river water over it to clean away the dirt. It was etched with a distinctive pattern.

Maybe this girl would have a name.

Coroner’s Court, London, September 2004 Post-Mortem Report, Dead Body 13 Body found in river, 7 September, at Stoners Quay

The coroner’s court of East London is all too familiar with river deaths. The curve in the river around the Isle of Dogs means that bodies are often left aground there as the water retreats with the tide.

Dead Body 13 was the stark designation of the thirteenth body to be taken from the river in a year that was shaping up to be much as standard. The few people attending the inquest stood as the coroner entered. The court had little to do in this case. No one had been able to establish an identity for the dead woman, or trace the origins of the unusual ring she had been wearing on the middle finger of her right hand. The ring bore an inscription in Arabic, lines from a poem or other literary text: take what is here now, let go of a promise. The drumbeat is best from far away.

Her origins were in the Indian subcontinent. Whether she was a recent arrival, or a runaway from home, it was impossible to tell. No one had claimed her and no one seemed to be looking for her.

She had drowned. She had been alive when she went into the water–the presence of algae in her liver and kidneys confirmed that, and a witness had seen her fall. He was a man called Joe Massey who had been on the river walk near St Paul’s. He gave his account, telling the court that he’d spent the evening in a bar and was on his way home when he had seen a woman standing on the wall looking down at the water. There had been a strong wind blowing and her balance had been precarious. He had called out a warning to her, but she hadn’t heard, or hadn’t listened. He couldn’t say if she had deliberately jumped, or if she had fallen, but she had seemed heedless of the risk she was taking.

Someone or something had hurt her before she died. There was evidence of half-healed but extensive bruising on her back and legs, and at some time in her past her wrist had been broken and had healed poorly. But none of this had contributed to her death. Whether or not it had driven her to the dark waters of the Thames, no one could say. The damage that the river had done to her body had blackened her skin and obliterated her features. To the uninitiated eye, she looked as though she had been burned. Her body was battered and broken by tides, currents and river traffic.

The coroner gave the only verdict he could: an open one. ‘It is not possible to say if this unfortunate young woman committed suicide, or if she fell into the water by accident.’ Police enquiries as to her identity were ongoing.

Joe Massey attended the inquest as the only witness to the girl’s last moments. Later, he went back to the riverside to the place where she had fallen in. He stood for a while, watching the water, then he swore, not quite under his breath. Two women walking along the path towards him stopped as they heard the obscenity, then walked quickly back the way they had come.

It was the end of September before the summer came to its inevitable end. Roisin was at work when Joe called her and suggested that they meet. He had seemed preoccupied for the past week and he was quiet as they followed their familiar route to the riverside. She could feel the slight tension in him. They walked past the bridge and the café tables outside the film theatre, crowded and cluttered with empty glasses, wrappers, and discarded food that the pigeons fought over.

They leaned against the parapet and watched the boats go by. The air was cooler, and she could feel the first touch of autumn. Summer was coming to an end. She looked across the water to the iron stanchions of the bridge. She could remember that grey day when they’d first walked along the river together.

After a moment, he spoke. ‘I got a letter this morning. From McMaster…’

The Canadian university where he hoped to join a research team. This was it. Their timeless summer was over. She opened her eyes wide and stared across the river. She couldn’t trust her voice. It was a moment before she could take in what he was saying.