Steve Merrifield - Ivory.rtf

IVORY

Steve Merrifield

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Steve Merrifield

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for Granddad

my first reader

IVORY

Steve Merrifield

Awakening

Prologue

Phillip Mayhew surveyed London’s buildings as they stretched out from beneath the crane cab into the grey haze of smog on the horizon. The site was at the heart of Camden where three high-rise blocks of flats had been demolished. The neglected and dated buildings had been cleared to make way for a smaller affordable housing development. He thought it a shame they would be low-rise and lose the arresting view that North London had to offer over the basin of the city and its landmarks; the skinny finger of the post office tower, the glittering glass gherkin and the group of skyscrapers around the obelisk of the Canada One building at Canary Wharf.

The crane’s cab creaked in protest against a gust of wind that leaned heavily against it. The sway became a lurch as the winds strength built and it was several minutes before he felt the crane shift back into its centre as the current of air weakened. The floating-like motion didn’t concern him since he had spent fifteen years working with cranes in his time in the building trade. As a labouring lad if there had been a crane on-site he would ask to go up it and if a foreman actually refused him he would sneak up anyway. That kind of mischief had got him suspended from sites for a few days, but he had taken his punishment of lost earnings like a man, and would then commit the same crime again if he had wanted to.

The days of being a labourer were far behind him now, but he still couldn’t shake his love of being in the cab of a crane. As an architect he had even less reason to be up there than his crane stowaway days, but it was well known by those around him in his office that whenever he visited a site where one of his company’s designs were being built, he had the quirk of giving a foreman a laugh or a coronary by asking to go up a crane. No one had any reason to suspect that today his motive for his visit was different.

Although his body lacked the energy of his youth and the climb had exhausted him, the experience had lost none of its appeal. It was a combination of things that drew him to the crane cabs, the view obviously – it didn’t matter what area the site was in, the height always made for an awe inspiring panorama. The constant listing drift of the crane was how he imagined it would be as a bird suspended in a thermal updraft. There was also the sense of power through being in control of a giant arm that would reach down and lift heavy things from the ground and move them effortlessly around the site, like Zeus in the Clash of the Titansfilm moving people around like pawns. He laughed as he remembered fantasies he had as a lad of plucking miserable foremen up from the ground and depositing them high up on builds on exposed girders.

However, what had drawn him to the crane today was the solitude the cab gave him and the much needed sense of escaping the mess that he had made of his life. At that moment in that place – his cherished place – he experienced a comfort and a peace that he imagined faith would give to those that had it. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a dog-eared photograph of his wife Brenda and their three boys. He rubbed the corners, trying to smooth it out, but the creases were too deep. He couldn’t fix it. Like the family in the picture – he couldn’t fix what he had done.

The love he felt for the family in his hands sharpened his guilt into wicked barbs in his chest. He and his wife had planned their life well. In the early years they hadn’t allowed their love for each other to distract them from their university courses, and they had made it through four years of living in different parts of the country while they studied. They then threw themselves into their respective jobs and getting themselves noticed by their employers. Once the money had been good enough they got married and bought a house and allowed themselves the luxury of a family, with the knowledge that they could give their children the good start in life they had both lacked themselves.

Over the thirty-five years they had known each other, Brenda had gained some weight to her face and her skin had lined in the delicate areas around her eyes and mouth, but she was still attractive and was all he had needed to fulfil his fantasies. He had the love of his wife, and his fantastic boys and he was a success in his job. That was supposed to be enough.

It had been enough. Until he had seen the girl.

He had never considered straying before – it was against his moral code. Yet he had. She was unusual in appearance but strangely attractive. Considering the probable thirty year age gap she would never have looked at him twice if she hadn’t been a prostitute. Going to a prostitute was something else that he would never have considered, yet he had been to her many times now.

He had felt shame every time. It was an awful feeling. A feeling that he had wanted to cut out of him if he could, along with his sin, but his shame hadn’t been potent enough to stop him paying for her again and again. The cancer of guilt had grown with every visit. He had no idea of the going rate for such services, but knew she was expensive. Even if she had cost less he had seen her every other day for months on end and he would still be facing the same financial crisis.

He had tried to stop himself, but she was beautiful. Even after the first month had destroyed his personal savings, he hadn’t been able to stop himself squandering the family savings, money that had been reserved for his boy’s education, their deposits on property and cars, and the nest egg for Brenda and himself in retirement. All gone on sex with a prostitute. Brenda was due an annual statement any time and his betrayal would be uncovered.

He stifled a sob. He hated himself. Yet that wasn’t enough to stop him meeting the girl. He would make up for it. He would replace all the blood money he had wasted and his family would never know what he had used the savings for. He might even retain the love and respect of his wife and boys. He looked at the cityscape of north London. It was a powerful panorama that imbued him with inner strength. He felt more than the weak man he had become. He felt free. Like a bird. Like a Giant. Like a God. Like the young man that had craved this view throughout his dreams and achievement of love, family and success.

Clutching the photograph of his family he stepped out of the cab and plummeted. The air rushed over his body, pulling at his clothes like a thousand snatching hands. After this industrial accident the insurance pay-out would cover all his debts. He did it for Brenda, the girl who had lived next door to him as a child. The girl he had courted, the woman he had married. Did it for the babies he had cradled, the young men he had raised. He did it for his family. He crammed his mind with their faces and scenes from their life together like his own imagined heaven. They would be the last thing in his mind as he died. It would secure his link to them in the afterlife. Christmas’s, births, birthdays, picnics, day trips.

A face filled his mind. It was a pale phantom of a face with blackness for eyes. The girl. The thoughts of his family scattered. He slammed against the concrete below and burst open. The last thing in his mind and heart was not his family, but his guilt.

Part One

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.

God and Devil are fighting there,

and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

Fedor Dostoevsky

Chapter One

Dark bloated clouds swathed the night sky in a low crawling ceiling, haemorrhaging their substance over London, turning the dark grey streets into stretches of black glassy marble infused and splashed with the reflected lights and neon signs. Martin Roberts’ Volvo estate hit a puddle with the impact of a hydroplane touching down, sending fans of silvery water into the air like wings. The lights of the streets were distorted by the vertical veins of rain and the watery pearls that twitched across the glass away from the direction of the car.

The outside world was a blur in Martin’s peripheral senses, swept away by the trudging march of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A that strained the speakers of his music system, blocking out the sound of rain rattling onto the roof and the hiss of the tires thrashing the puddles. The music’s steady climb to its crescendo imitated the rage that was building from the red lights and busy junctions that seemed to conspire against Martin’s need to get home and end his evening. The track came to its quiet close but instead of another pounding classic taking its place it was replaced by bouncy notes and saccharine voices – the Tweenies. One of the boys CD’s had been left in the CD changer. Ditched by the powerful classic tracks his mood suddenly had nowhere to go, and he had been so enjoying his rage. Feeling passion instead of the constant mire of his underlying melancholy and frustration was a refreshing change.

There was a clear stretch on the Charing Cross road, the Tweenies would have to stay for the moment, he gripped the wheel and aimed his car at the night-time streets, and the Tweenies sang as he floored the accelerator and charged to gain some ground on his trek across the city. He had been forced to take an indirect route home due to the major water pipe and sewer restoration and replacement project taking place at various points across the city. The road works had forced drivers into unfamiliar territory, causing them to hesitate and change their minds and directions, snarling the roads with traffic even at this late hour. He slowed as he approached a Queue of glaring red eyed break lights. He had gained a couple of hundred metres. Hardly worth breaking the speed limit. soured his gut before being diluted within his stagnant reservoir of other unpleasant feelings. journey and the nightmare driving conditions were the crown on a shitty day.

Martin stabbed a finger at the CD player and switched to the next classical CD and his red mood soared with Wagner’s Valkyries. The point when the evening had become a write-off with his hopes strangled and his pride smothered, had been when the little wanker Richard Hadleigh won the award for best piece at the University Departmental Achievement Ceremony. The ‘UDAC’s’ as they were called on the campus, were the universities equivalent of the Oscar’s. The judges had said that Hadleigh’s work ‘Conveyed the artists struggle with repressed emotions and hidden desires’. It was a piece that had symbolised his ‘coming out’ in his second year at university.

Everyone knew Hadleigh was a raving woofter. It wasn’t a secret, it wasn’t even something many people batted an eyelid at these days. It was almost fashionable. The amount of lads that he had seen hanging from Hadleigh or locked to his face over the last three years didn’t seem much of a ‘struggle’.

The cars burst of speed was halted as he reached Oxford Street and even though the lights were in his favour, he was forced to inch himself across the streets traffic. This award meant that Hadleigh had won the Universities Art prize two years running, which was a rare event that had only been achieved by Martin himself. Martin’s second win had been in Hadleigh’s first year at the University, after which they had met and forged a relationship of mutual admiration; Martin for Hadleigh’s developing talent and passion and Hadleigh for Martin’s generous teaching of his own honed skills. Their needs had been mutually met within the role of student and teacher. It had come just when Martin had first sense his creativity being stifled from a long tenure as lecturer, and Hadleigh’s passion had been infectious. Their shared bond through canvas acrylics and oil had been broken when Hadleigh defected to sculpture. A sudden and mysterious coup that had left Martin without a protégé.

A route-master bus lurched out in front of him, belligerently ignorant of Martin’s existence and right of way, causing him to suddenly punch his breaks, leaving him with his heart in his throat from the narrowly avoided collision. Scantily clad girls hung out of the rear door, one of them waved a bottle of champagne at him. A hen-night hiring. That meant the bus that was now ahead of him on Tottenham Court Road would be a fixture in his view and an obstacle until their paths diverged.

Martin was an artist. A painter. A traditionalartist. He didn’t understand sculpture – especially metal work. He could become one with the paint and command it with a subtlety or a passion most canvases were not fortunate enough to be graced with. In the past he had created portraits with a photographic realism that had captured life and emotion, and landscapes swept in bold strokes that emphasised their drama. Sculpture could compliment its subject and be both beautiful and inspiring of emotion, but its tangible reality in the three-dimensional world had a brutality and force that Martin struggled with. Hadleigh’s work in metal sheeting and salvaged machine parts was not what Martin considered being sculpture, it heralded from a school of art that Marin could not reconcile himself with: where a stack of bricks or some frozen animal halved and suspended in formaldehyde could be regarded as art. It was the Emperor’s new clothes of the art world.

The lights were out at Euston Road and he pushed the nose of his car hesitantly forward trying to measure the approaching gaps in traffic to see if he could risk pulling out onto the road. The sudden loss of the flattering draw on Martin’s knowledge and Martin’s talent being the focus for another’s inspiration, and the sense that his opinion and approval were needed to validate Hadleigh’s success, had caused the smouldering embers of Martin’s creativity to cool, and his talent had gone into remission. He found himself in a state of impotence. He had tried his best to resurrect his muse, working all year in his loft studio, mixing subtle hues and vibrantly skilful strokes to create life like some gothic necromancer. Yet what he had created had been a Frankentein’s bastardisation of his previous works. An imitation of his past glory that wasn’t strong enough to sustain a soul of its own. He could, and would, blame Hadleigh but it was a demise that had only been delayed by his brief work with his student. Martin was losing his art. For that reason, Martin hadn’t deserved to win the award.

Martin slammed his foot on the accelerator and lurched into a gap on a spray of surf. He held his breath as the headlights of the Mini Cooper he had cut across filled the car and blazed angrily in his rear view mirror. When there was no shunt from a collision he puffed out a breath he hadn’t realised he had been holding. He needed to calm down, although he was definitely not going to put the Tweenies back on to help him.

He was a son, a head of department, a teacher, a husband and a father, and each of these roles conspired against him with their own conflicting demands and responsibilities and drained his creativity. With the lack of his art, he was increasingly believing that he was an intellectual hypocrite in his role as art lecturer and head of the art department since he was teaching to create from the soul and from the passion within when his own were so diminished he barely had enough to sustain him his wife and his children. As hard as he found it difficult to accept he found that his family were equally as unsatisfying to him. His life was not how he had expected his life to be, although if he were asked to imagine the details of what he had wanted his life to be like he wouldn’t have been able to answer, all he had ever wanted was his art and to be a master of it. He often struggled to understand how this life had even come about.

At the corner of the British Library the traffic lights amber winked out and a red light burned in its place. He cursed and slammed his foot on the break. The stream of traffic on the Euston Road tauntingly left him behind. Life, which for Martin was family and love, was meant to influence his art, and his job was meant to fund his life. Stripped back to basics they were relationships of necessity; symbiotic. Yet his family and his job were also distractions that drained his resources, creatively and financially, and without his art they seemed without function.

A green light allowed him to resume his journey, but the resentment generated from his reflection caused him to lose patience with the main roads, his thick fingers, whitened by their grip, yanked the wheel to one side and turned the car sharply off the Euston Road and into a side road. He hadn’t travelled these roads for some time and he was sure their layout may have changed since the St Pancras developments but he hoped to weave through the streets more as the crow might fly rather than the intended express of the main roads. He took road after road and was as uncertain of the direction he was taking on these back roads as he was in life generally. At the age of forty-three he expected to be settled and taking life in comfortable strides, not stumbling and looking back unsure what had tripped him.

The car continued its journey into a residential area and on a whim he pulled into a narrow street. Most of its streetlights were out and the shadowy houses crowded in on him. Some had the odd light on behind curtains, but most of them were dark. The occupants asleep or judging by the houses rundown condition the houses were abandoned. The light from his headlights kept the darkness ahead of him, and hollowed the shadow out of the road, the rain falling in constant dizzying glitter in the beams. Suddenly his lights pulled something stark white from the dark road ahead like a ghost suddenly made manifest. There was a sharp noise, the sound of a thousand voices screaming out before being cut short by the crunch of metal and splintering glass. Martin lost sight of the road as he was thrown forward from breaking and yanked back in place by the tension of his seat belt. The white shape had gone and the light from his headlights had returned to picking raindrops out of the dark before the now stationary car.

Martin found an uncomfortable rigidness in his leg and relaxed his foot from pressing the brake-peddle to the floor. He still held the wheel, but the anger that had crushed his fingers to it had gone. His hands fell trembling into his lap and he sank back into the seat. With a faltering hand he clicked the stereo off and thanked fuck that the kids hadn’t been in the car.

He didn’t know what had happened. A man in an alley-way parallel to the car seemed caught mid motion, poised in a pose of running, before he turned on his heels and disappeared into the alley. Without the stereo the only sounds were the idle of the engine, the squeak of his windscreen wipers swiping mechanically back and forth shunting the rain from his vision, and the drum of a thousand fingers on his roof and buckled bonnet as the rain rattled down.

The bonnet was crumpled. He had hit something, yet there was no car, no motorbike, there was nothing before him that could have caused the collision. A bollard? One of those wrought iron posts made to look like a cannon. That would easily have caused the damage, but it wouldn’t have been in the middle of the road.

His heart joined the sounds in the interior of his car, drummed into the tempo of the falling rain, each quickened quivering beat launched an unbearably debilitating shiver of anxiety through his nerves. He remembered that his headlights had caught something. The bonnet was buckled. He had hit some-thing. The bonnet was buckled.

The rain drummed.

The wipers swayed.

His heart pounded.

He remembered the blur in his headlights.

It had hands that had risen up in defence. It had had a white face.

He had hit some-one.

The perceptions of headlights, the rain, the wipers, the tick of the cooling engine, the tremble of his hands, the echo of his heart all clambered around his head, then scattered away from a pale hand that reached up from before the car and slammed onto the bonnet.

The slender feminine hand spread palm-flat, the fingers working and probing to gain some purchase. His tongue trembled in his slack mouth. His heart’s uncertain beat in his throat. The hand tensed, as if bracing against dragging its body upright and back to its feet, then slid on the slick surface and abruptly disappeared back over the edge out of sight.

Chapter Two

The light from his headlights reflected from the narrow corridor of parked cars and picked out the overbearing walls of the canyon of houses that reached up into the night around him. The shifting silver grain of the rain gave the world beyond the windscreen the quality of a scratchy black and white film playing out. The dark shape of a man ran and stopped in the mouth of an alley in the terrace, but Martin was distracted from registering his details by the girl that fled from that direction. The girl darted into the road so suddenly that by the time Martin had turned his head to catch sight of her again she was framed in his headlights. It was strange that he could see it so clearly in his memory, yet hadn’t had time to realise what had happened when it had actually occurred. He had hit the girl at forty-miles an hour in a thirty-zone with a hulking Volvo estate.

The tyres had gripped at the road and surfed the rain wash before biting the tarmac in a screeching slide that had joined another sound. A choral sound of infantile voices wailed then abruptly ceased as his bonnet crumpled with a cacophonous crunch and the car slammed to a halt. The howl had been unnatural, but then all the noises that played back to him from that moment frightened him with their intensity and their unexpectedness.

Martin sat in his car for what seemed like an eternity. The man that had been in the alley, who in Martin’s memory had been part of the same body of movement as the girl, was gone and had not returned. A weight suddenly lifted from him and all the detail of his world came flooding back around him as the cloying treacle movement of shock time dissipated into the vividness and urgency of real time. Martin prayed it hadn’t taken him the length of time it seemed to have taken for him to react. He wanted to think that if someone’s life hung in the balance, after the shock and the consideration of driving off, he would make every second of that time count.

He popped his seatbelt, flung his door open and hauled his considerable weight out of the seat. After the stuffiness of the car the rain was like needles of ice on his face and neck and soaked his white dress shirt to his sweat clammy body with the shock of a cold compress. He rounded the broad front of the vehicle and crouched at his victim’s side with a sickening nausea in his belly. The girl was sprawled before the car on the gritty tarmac that had been washed into a textured glass by the fall of rain. He whined a noise that he had never heard himself make and swore at the world.

Her pose looked painfully uncomfortable. Her arms and legs had been thrown into unnatural disarray from the impact. The front of the car stood poised over her fragile form, the bumper buckled in, the bonnet curled up like a lip snarled to bare the ragged teeth of its shattered radiator grille. The car was just a foot away from being parked on top of her body. The headlights poured over her dispassionately with their glaring white eyes, lighting her white skin and clothes into an overexposed whiteness.

She was luminous in the light except for the dark marks where she had been dirtied from her rag-doll roll along the road, and the blood that was lit into brilliant scarlet against the white of her flesh. It was like blood on snow. Martin dialled for an ambulance on his mobile phone and crouched between her and the lights to shield her from their glare. In the shade of his bulk the colour of her blood lost its vividness, yet her hair and skin maintained its unnatural whiteness.

Her eyelids twitched the smallest of movements.

Speaking on the phone, panting against his fear, he reached out a hand that trembled with shock and the bitter cold of being soaked on a November evening, and shielded her face from the rain. It could easily have been the fall of the rain drops that had given the impression of her eyelids moving, but he preyed to a God he didn’t believe in that they had moved by themselves. That she was indeed still alive. That he hadn’t killed her.

Her eyes flicked open with the suddenness of a trap being sprung.

He fell onto his rear in shock but was instantly sobered by the soaking chill of the ground. He repeated himself on the phone to the operator after a cry had made his last statement unintelligible and he returned to his haunches. The movement of her eyelids had startled him but it was the sight of her eyes that had toppled him.

The rain had driven the lids shut again and he questioned what he had seen. Giving a shaken approximation of his location to the robotic sounding operator he knelt forward, not caring that the slurry of rain water on the road was soaking him. He shielded her eyes again and they reopened.

Her eyes were as black as jet and made more striking by the white eyelids that framed them. There was no coloured iris, no white of sclera, seemingly just yawning ciliary muscles leaving only pupils with the draw of black holes contained behind each lid.

Ivory had been taken to the University College Hospital, a modern glass building opposite the gothic orange brick Victorian façade of St Pancras. It was a place that Martin was familiar with having two boys. He sat with his head in his hands and stared down into the glassy black surface of a cup of coffee. He had bought it from the department’s vending machine, but it was too hot to hold let alone drink. He had bought a Mars bar too, more for comfort than for hunger, but he hadn’t eaten it. It was in his pocket, he didn’t want to be seen satiating his needs in these circumstances. He wanted to get out of there and escape, he thought of King’s Cross with its Platform 9¾ with the baggage trolley half-way through a wall on it’s way to the train to Hogwart’s. Finley had made him take him there countless times in the hope of spotting one of his favourite characters. Martin liked the idea of having a magical escape route, and not just tonight.

The polystyrene cup sat on the scuffed linoleum floor at his feet, staring back up at him with its well of black like one of the girl’s eyes. Those fully black eyes. What did it mean? Had she been on drugs? He had heard one of the nurse’s whisper ‘brain damage’. There was no way of knowing for sure at the moment.

The ambulance staff had found a medical bracelet on her wrist. Beneath a black caduceus symbol and engraved statement that declared that it was the patient’s wish not to receive any medical examination or treatment whatsoever. There was a phone number that was to be called in case of emergency, and this had been done. Although this had made it difficult for the hospital staff to determine the extent of her injuries, the attending doctor had ruled that the patient’s wishes were to be respected and she would not receive an x-ray or even a stitch. Besides a nasty gash to her head, which had looked to Martin as if it really could do with a stitch, and some other grazes and bruises she had seemingly escaped serious injury. She was apparently responsive to a certain degree, with shakes and nods of her head to questions and suggested examinations and treatments. That had to rule out brain damage. Could her eyes really be like that naturally?

She was now sleeping off the shock within a curtained cubicle ahead of him, although the nurses were convinced that she was feigning sleep. The staff had found that the pockets of her three-quarter length white Mackintosh coat had contained a supply of condoms and a fat roll of money. There had been a business card printed with the word ‘EBONY’ with a mobile phone number beneath it. Martin had heard a nurse say the number on the card matched the one on the medical bracelet, and in response a nurse had mouthed, ‘Pimp?’ It struck Martin as strange that a pimp would take such responsibility for her care. Perhaps she was an illegal immigrant and her pimp wanted to ensure that she didn’t get caught or escape him through an accident such as this.

He struggled to accept that she was a prostitute. Curiously it didn’t alter her allure. Her startlingly white hair and skin and her contrasting black eyes were strangely engaging. He wondered whether it was the peculiarity of her appearance that attracted the porters, nurses and doctors to her side on what appeared to be a busy night for the A&E department.

Martin’s police questioning was already out of the way. He was relieved he hadn’t been drinking. He didn’t understand why the police had kept asking about a second vehicle, and was unsure exactly how many points he would gain on his license, or whether the police were going to charge him for dangerous driving. When the girl had recovered they would take her statement to see if her version of events corroborated with Martin’s explanation that she had run out in front of the car. If their stories didn’t match then the police would investigate the scene to determine his speed.

The girl had yet to speak. When the discomfort or pain from the nurses handling of her overcame the resistance of her pretend sleep she would shake or nod her head to questions. One of the nurses surmised that she was foreign and couldn’t speak English, and that fitted with Martin’s assumption that she was an illegal sex worker, maybe trafficked. He had half-watched a Panoramadocumentary on it whilst painting. Another nurse had suggested that to keep silent against the pain she must be experiencing from her injuries she had to be a mute. If that were the case then he didn’t understand what had caused the sharp ululation that had seemed to be formed from more than one voice when he had run her down. He had never imagined tyres on tarmac could make such a human, full of terror and defiance, as if the world cried out in grief and outrage at her being struck down.

The girl was clearly still in her teens, but the taboo freshness of her youth was saved from being a vulgar guilty attraction by her classical beauty, for with her eyes closed she had the poised majesty of any sculpted Greek or Roman face that he had studied in the British museum. He was unsure whether it was her young age, her abhorrent job, her current situation, the innocence that seemed to cling to her, or a combination of all these that drew upon his sympathy. He took it as a point against society that it had turned perfection into a whore, and corrupted such a rarity as beauty into something that could be bought and used to satisfy ones needs. He found some consolation in the fact that those that used her would do so within some guilty dirty secret that could only sully their experience, and they could ‘have’ her but never own her. He caught his own naivety; her pimp ...