Trace Memory

THIRTEEN

'I look stupid,' said Michael, standing before the full length mirror in the hotel room, wearing a pair of purple corduroy trousers, a brown cheesecloth shirt and a purple waistcoat.

'You don't look stupid,' said Jack. 'A little eccentric, perhaps, but no more eccentric than anyone else out there. This is the Sixties. You can't go round in those utility clothes of yours. Besides, it's not like you paid for them.'

Michael looked at Jack and smiled. Thanks,' he said.

The hotel was nothing special; in fact, Jack might even go as far as to say it was sub par, but he'd stayed in worse places and, for the time being, Michael would be safe here.

It was a ramshackle place near the town, sandwiched between a turf accountant and a dilapidated Victorian theatre. The sign at the front said The Shangri La Hot 1', but it was as far removed from James Hilton's fictional paradise as could be imagined. At least, Jack supposed, its low-rent nature and lack of luxury meant the owner, a woman with a tattoo of a rose on her hand and an addiction to crosswords, was unlikely to ask too many questions. Many strange things had no doubt happened at the Shangri-La Hotel.

The room was basic, with just a double bed, a small desk and a chair. The curtains were orange nylon, and the bathroom was in the corridor and shared by eight other rooms. Michael didn't seem to mind. He'd never stayed in a hotel before.

'You say you've got a sister?' Jack asked.

'Yeah,' said Michael. 'She lives in Butetown. At least, I think she does.'

'Do you think she'd still live there?'

Michael shrugged.

'Well,' said Jack, 'it's got to be worth a try, hasn't it?'

He didn't want to tell Michael that this was his plan. They would find Michael's sister, and then Michael would be free, free from forces he'd never understand, and Jack would be able to deal with the issue of Hugo.

'Can you remember where she lives?' asked Jack.

'Yeah,' said Michael. 'Number 6, Fitzhamon Terrace. I lived there. It was like yesterday. It was yesterday…'

'Well, she's as good a place to start as any,' said Jack.

Michael nodded, but Jack could tell that something was troubling him. He hardly spoke again until they were driving through the city's streets towards Butetown.

'Everything's changing,' said Michael, looking out through the window. 'Every time I'm here something's different. Something's changed.'

'It's the way of the world, kiddo,' said Jack. 'No point trying to fight time.'

Michael nodded dolefully, but he still couldn't take it in. This place, this city, was meant to be his home, and yet it couldn't have seemed more alien, more different to him. There were buildings he knew, of course, but so many that he didn't. Some buildings that he had expected to see were no longer there; whole streets razed to the ground, leaving nothing but wide open wasteland filled with nothing but gravel and weeds. He wondered, sadly, whether he'd ever see his real home; the home he really knew, again.

They reached Fitzhamon Terrace, and Jack parked up alongside the house.

'This is it,' said Michael. 'Number 6. I live… She lives here. At least I hope she still does.'

'Well go on, then,' said Jack, gesturing towards the door. 'What are you waiting for?'

Michael nodded and got out of the car. He climbed the steps to the front door, rapped the knocker several times, and then waited. From inside the house, he heard the sound of a dog barking, and then quick footsteps on a staircase.

The door was opened by a teenager with floppy hair and an adolescent attempt at a moustache.

'Hello?' said the boy, in a flat and inexpressive monotone.

'Hello,' said Michael. 'Does Maria Bellini, I mean James, Maria James… Does she live here?'

The teenage boy nodded, and turned to face the other end of the house.

'Mu-um! There's someone here to see you!'

From somewhere deep inside the house, Michael heard his sister's voice. He recognised it instantly, even if time had aged it a little.

'Well who is it? If it's one of them door-to-door people, tell them I'm not interested.'

'I'm not,' said Michael, smiling at his nephew. 'Tell her it's her brother.'

The boy frowned, as if Michael had said something which couldn't possibly be true, and then, without conviction, shouted, 'He says he's your brother.'

In the dim light of the hallway, Michael Saw a figure emerge from the kitchen, wearing an apron and Marigold rubber gloves. She was older than he could ever have imagined, streaks of grey in hair that had once been as black as his, crow's feet around her blue eyes, laughter lines around her mouth, but he still knew her.

'Maria…' he said. No other words came. His eyes burned, and he felt himself smile, properly smile, for the first time since as far back as he could remember. It was as if his heart couldn't be contained, as if he wanted to breathe in until he burst, as if every prayer he'd ever made had been answered in one.

Maybe now it could end, maybe now this thing would stop, and he could be safe, and home.

'Robert, go to your room,' said his sister to her son, to the boy Michael had last seen as a baby, only days before.

The boy shrugged and walked back into the house, and Michael realised that Maria wasn't smiling back at him.

'You're not my brother,' she said, shaking her head. 'My brother's dead. Years ago. Look at you. How old are you? He'd be almost forty now. You aren't Michael. How dare you come here and say a thing like that. Who are you? How do you know his name? How do you know where I live?'

'No…' said Michael, stepping closer to the door.

'You keep away from me, or I swear to God I will phone the police. Who are you?'

'I've told you,' said Michael. 'It's me. It's Michael. I'm back. I'm here, and I'm back, and I just wanted to-'

'Is this some kind of sick joke?' said his sister. 'My brother was missing for years. Probably drowned himself, they said. Probably jumped off a boat and drowned himself. How dare you come here and say these things. How dare you.'

She covered her mouth, and then wiped away the tears from her eyes.

'You're lucky my husband's at work,' she said. 'If he wasn't…'

'Please, Maria…' said Michael. 'I just-'

'I don't want to see you round here again,' said his sister. 'Do you hear me? I never want to see you again.'

The door closed, not with a slam but with a dull thud, and Michael was sure he could hear her sobbing on the other side. He leaned against the door, and tried to say something, anything, but he couldn't. It was pointless.

They sat in silence for the rest of the journey back to the hotel. Jack had pinned everything on the boy's sister welcoming him back with open arms, but then fourteen years was a long time. There was no textbook on how to react to a surprise like that, especially one which defied all logic. There was nothing Jack could say to console Michael; at least there was nothing he could think of, nothing that would mean anything to him. The only thing he could do was keep him safe.

Jack often liked to think that years spent waiting fruitlessly — years exposed to every grubby facet of life — had hardened him to the world, leaving him cynical enough to cope with whatever came next, and emotionally tough enough to walk away from any situation, but he knew this wasn't true. The last embers of his empathy and altruism had not yet died out completely. But what to do with Michael?

'What are we going to do?' Michael asked him, when they were back in the hotel room. The fading light of a setting sun filtered through the closed curtains, turning the whole room a fiery orange.

'In the long term, I don't know,' said Jack. 'I've got questions of my own I need answering, and you… Well, you are just one great big bundle of questions. There's a thing, tomorrow… I might have to meet up with some people. It might be nothing. Until then, I don't know. I'm fresh out of plans. But tonight… Tonight I say we go out and we drink. I mean, there's no real point in me drinking, cos I can't seem to get drunk these days, but we can sit in some noisy crowded pub somewhere and pretend that we're having a good time. Sound good to you, kiddo?'

Michael smiled. It wasn't a plan, as such, but it was better, he figured, than staying in this lifeless room and thinking about the events of the day so far. Besides which, just being with Jack made him feel safe.

The pub was called the Rose and Crown, and it was only a few minutes from the hotel, in a narrow passage off the thoroughfare of St Mary Street. It was exactly the kind of place Jack had described; both noisy and crowded. They sat in a corner that gave Jack a clear view of the rest of the bar, at his insistence, and for a while neither of them spoke. It was Michael who broke the silence, or whatever silence they had amidst the cacophony of the other patrons.

'So do you have any friends?' he asked.

Jack laughed. 'Friends? Well, there are people I know,' he replied. 'Associates, I suppose you'd call them. Acquaintances. I've had friends, but I've not seen any of them in a long time. You see, this thing I have, whatever it is I have… It doesn't lend itself to keeping friends.' He paused, and looked down at his pint of cold tap water with a wistful smile. 'It's like you're running on a different clock to everyone else. What feels like months to you is years to them, and then they're gone. They get older, they die. At first I'd go to the funerals, but then there were so many funerals to go to. The war didn't make that any easier.'

'You were in the war?'

'Oh yeah,' said Jack, nodding and still smiling. 'Both, actually, and a few more besides. And it's being in a situation like that that makes you… I don't know… think differently about it all. I mean, if life is so cheap that lives can be shovelled into war like… like lumps of coal into a furnace, what does that mean?' He shook his head, and took another sip of his water.

'You don't drink at all?' Michael asked.

Jack shook his head.

'Does nothing for me,' he said, grinning. 'I wish it did sometimes. You know, to take the edge off?'

Michael nodded. 'You do have friends,' he said. 'Not now, I mean, but in the future.'

'Whoa,' said Jack. 'No more. Like I said, you can't go telling me things that haven't happened yet. I could go into a whole lecture about paradoxes and upsetting the space time continuum, and-'

'I know, you said,' Michael cut in. 'But just so you know. You do have friends. They seem like nice people.'

Jack looked back at his drink and smiled again. 'That's good,' he said.

Michael smiled at Jack and drank the last drops of beer from his glass. Unlike Jack he had been drinking, and the alcohol was beginning to affect him. He wasn't drunk, but his first two pints had definitely helped relax him, if only a little.

Even so, he'd not forgotten about his sister. He wasn't sure how he'd expected her to react but then, in hindsight, he'd never even known for sure that she would still be at the same address. He just wished things could have turned out differently.

To take his mind away from such thoughts, Michael looked around at the other men in the bar. It occurred to him that almost without exception there were no women in there, only men, and that the atmosphere was somehow different. It reminded him of one of the pubs back in Tiger Bay, a place he'd been to only once or twice. The men spoke differently to one another there, as if talking in some kind of code.

At the bar, he noticed an older man in a lilac shirt smoking a cigarette through a cigarette holder, talking to a surly-looking youth in a leather jacket. The older man giggled nervously at something the youth had said, and then placed one hand on his shoulder. There was something in the gesture that Michael recognised and understood. The older man was what Michael's father would have called a 'pansy' or a 'powder puff. He knew that much.

'There's pubs like this,' said Michael, 'back where I'm from. In Tiger Bay. Some of the sailors go there.'

'What?' said Jack. 'You mean pubs where they sell beer?'

'No,' said Michael, bashfully. 'You know what I mean.'

Jack looked around the room, inspecting it, and frowned. 'No. I don't,' he replied.

Michael scowled. Was Jack mocking him?

'You do, ' he said. 'Pubs for… you know… men who…'

Jack laughed. 'Oh… I see.

Well, to be honest, I hadn't noticed. But it's true — I do have an uncanny habit of ending up in places like this. Nine star systems and many, many different eras, but it's always the same places, and often with the same faces. We can go somewhere else if you like.'

Michael shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'No, it's all right. We can stay here.'

Jack took another sip of his drink. 'So is there anyone else, apart from your sister? Are you married?'

'No,' said Michael, laughing nervously.

'A girlfriend?'

'No.' Michael paused, his mind momentarily elsewhere. 'Actually,' he said, 'there was a girl, Maggie Jenkins. We only went on one date. I don't know… It didn't go very well. Everyone in the pub kept saying I should take her out, but then when we went out it just didn't seem right.'

'OK,' said Jack. 'And was there anyone else before Maggie Jenkins?'

Michael scrunched up his nose and shrugged. 'There was someone,' he said. 'Someone I worked with, someone I liked, but I could never say anything to them. They were married, and… Well, I just couldn't.'

'And what's happened to them?'

Michael took a deep breath and looked straight at Jack. 'He died,' he said. 'In the accident. But like I said, I could never have told him. Chances are, even if I had he wouldn't have had a clue what I was talking about.' Michael shook his head. And now there's no one. And this thing keeps happening to me. I can't hold on to anything, it's all just slipping through my fingers like sand. What kind of a life is this?'

'It's just the life you've been given,' said Jack, softly. 'The only life.'

They walked back to the hotel a little after eleven o'clock that night. The darker streets of Cardiff were crowded with a night-time rush hour of vagrants and hookers, hustlers and spivs.

Michael could feel the effects of the beer now. He'd eaten and slept so little in what he supposed he should call the last few days that it hadn't taken much to leave him feeling drunk. As they entered the reception of the Shangri-La Hotel, the owner looked up at them and smiled.

'Evening, both. Capital city of Canada. Six letters. Something T something A something something.'

'Ottawa,' said Jack.

'Ah, that's it,' said the owner. 'I always thought it was Toronto. G'night lads.'

They climbed the four flights of stairs, the Shangri-La having been built in a time before elevators, and walked along the poorly lit corridor to the room. As they entered, Jack took a deep breath and clapped his hands together.

'OK,' he said, 'you can have the bed. I don't really need much sleep. I can just… you know… use the chair, or something.'

Michael looked at the rigid wooden chair and then at Jack.

'You don't need to do that,' he said.