A Girl Called Flotsam Read online

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  Hunter

  Who has fully realised that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?’

  Carl Jung

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ALSO BY JOHN TAGHOLM

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Beatrice Palmenter felt she was losing her balance. Somewhere beneath her the water had shifted and begun to tug at her legs, a soft but insistent weight against her boots and she raised her arms to steady herself. To those watching on the foreshore she was a grey crucifix reflected on the water. A cormorant skimmed low over the glassy surface just as the ripples began to appear behind the cables holding the metal barge in the middle of the river. The tide had turned. In a few hours she would be standing in double her height of water and for a moment she wondered if she should wait to be submerged. She turned and looked back at the others, spread out along the muddy shore, dark shapes stooped at different angles, staring at the ground and dragging behind them black plastic bags.

  Shortly after arriving she had wandered off from the group, walking into the river as far as her waders would allow, to stand with the smell of the dirty water almost tangible in her nostrils. The warm drizzle blowing gently from the east blurred the line between sky and water. The buildings on either bank receded and the view might not have changed much in a thousand years. The river moved more strongly against her legs, an invisible hand trying to attract her attention, to remind her that in the scheme of things she barely existed. She remained in the water, thigh deep in her hip waders, not wanting to rejoin the others. When she spoke it was to the open expanse of water in front of her.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘What was that Triss?’ The peculiar acoustics of sound and water had carried her words, although spoken quietly and to herself, fifty or so metres behind her.

  Beatrice lowered her arms to her sides and reluctantly began to make her way back to the foreshore. The water had disguised her height and when, having negotiated the broken bricks and discarded scaffolding, she stood next to her male companion, it was clear that she was considerably taller.

  ‘I said I can’t believe it.’

  ‘That’s exactly what you said earlier this morning, when you first woke up.’

  She frowned and had to reroute her thoughts and assimilate the information that she was now being given. Even though Beatrice had been living with Joshua for three months and known him for double that time, she now looked at him as a stranger, hearing his statement as a foreign language, unable at first to deduce its meaning.

  ‘Those were your words when you opened your eyes and looked at me,’ he insisted, nodding at her, appearing to want an explanation.

  And then she remembered and in so doing glanced away, towards a wall of damp bricks and green moss, where an old chain hung uselessly. She had woken to find him staring at her, dark-eyed and expectant and she knew then what she had been denying for months, almost from the moment they had met, that she should not be with him, that she was wasting her time. But it had happened and she had pushed her head back into the pillow and uttered the words he now prompted her to remember.

  On the opposite shore a young child was running along the dirty beach, a beacon of life amongst the drab greys and she heard the exclamations of delight with metallic clarity across the water. She could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl, but she registered the freedom and the unfettered cries of joy.

  Joshua was still waiting for an answer. She stared at him and knew that to offer an explanation would have been a waste of time, for he had already drawn his own conclusions. As it happened, the words that she had repeated standing in the water referred not to Joshua but to an incident that had taken place a few days earlier. As the water had pushed against her knees she had been berating herself for almost having believed the praise that she had been given, knowing that in truth it meant nothing and disguised everything.

  In the muddy waters, her arms outstretched, she had closed her eyes in weary acknowledgement of scenes she could not erase. She was walking between tables set for a banquet, men in dinner jackets and women in long dresses, everyone looking in her direction, clapping her progress towards the stage and she saw it again in slow motion, the ill-defined hands, the indistinct faces and the music from her film now so familiar that she never wanted to hear it again. It wasn’t her, Beatrice Palmenter, who was about to win a Bafta award for best documentary series, but a carefully constructed replica, perfect in every respect save for the fact that it didn’t have a heart and many of its senses had been cauterised. She saw herself receive the golden mask, or at least feel its cold shape in her hands, her fingers in the eye sockets and then look out over the expectant faces of the audience.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she had said and again her words were misinterpreted by those in front of her and the audience spontaneously applauded her modesty. Her short speech thanked those people who needed to be thanked and refrained from mentioning those she wished to hell and damnation, the list of which was considerably longer. It was, she mused to herself in the ladies’ loo not long afterwards, an out of body experience during which she was able to watch her fabricated self go through the motions of success, gratitude and appropriate humility. What a sham.

  Today, on the foreshore of the Thames, she was trying to put that person behind her. The golden mask was now propping open the kitchen door of her apartment and the debris that now lay about her, the accumulation of junk and treasure revealed by the departed river, was more real. At the prompting of a friend, she had volunteered to he
lp a charity charged with cleaning up London’s waterways and on this grey Saturday morning removing old tyres, rusting corrugated sheets, indestructible plastic and panty liners seemed a more honourable task than receiving awards in Piccadilly.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t really know what I meant,’ she said to Joshua. She was lying and she could see that he knew it. If she felt guilt it was the guilt of repetition for she had been here before, too often.

  She walked away from Joshua to begin a struggle to release a supermarket trolley whose metal grilled sides had acted as a filter in the strong currents and were now clogged with the detritus of the river. Another pair of hands, not Joshua’s, helped her pull it clear of the mud and they dragged it to one of the skips positioned about five metres in from what would be the high-water mark. At first it seemed a futile task, the old river too full of rubbish, ancient and modern but the work was repetitive and strangely satisfying and the hours went by as the water rose. She didn’t speak, except to acknowledge help from other members of the group, glad of the silence and the innocent camaraderie. Occasionally she looked up, but Joshua was nowhere to be seen and for this she was grateful.

  Then the sounds around her changed and she was conscious of a suppressed excitement close by and she saw three or four people gathered at the edge of the water. She made her way towards them noting that one of the group was holding a dark object carefully between his fingers, turning it slowly to show the others.

  ‘It’s a skull,’ she heard him say. He pointed to the broken arch of one of the eyes and along the roughened gap where the nose had been and peering closer she could see his fingers tracing the fine, tightly meandering lines that joined the different sections of the dome. There was no lower jaw, but several teeth hung in the top part of the mouth and this, unmistakably, had been a human.

  ‘What happens now?’ someone asked.

  ‘I’ll have to call the police,’ the man said, pulling off his gloves before tapping his pocket to locate his mobile. Without thinking, Beatrice offered to hold the piece of skull as he made the call. Like the other volunteers, she was wearing thick protective gloves and she placed the dirty curve of bone in the palm of her hand. This tiny reminder of a human had a strange impact on the group, which had now been enlarged by other volunteers and they stood, heads bowed in the fine drizzle, silent with their own thoughts. How many times had it washed backwards and forwards in the tides before emerging in this reduced form? Beatrice looked across the water and the child was standing opposite, quite still and she wanted to wave but the object in her hand caused her to pause. Moments later the figure was gone, scampering across the mud and gravel.

  Later the police arrived, two men in uniform who slipped on latex gloves to solemnly examine the fragment before declaring that it would need to go to forensics. They took names and made a note of where the object had been found and then they were gone, the skull in a transparent plastic bag, their radios crackling as they walked back to the embankment steps. By now the river had risen to within a few feet of the metal containers and the group began to disperse, hosing the mud off their boots and pulling off their thick socks. Before long a tug would come and tow the rubbish away to a land-fill site down river to create a different archaeology for another generation to discover. Beatrice cleaned her waterproof gloves, placed them together but just before she laid them with the others in a large container she looked at the palm of the right glove, the one that had supported the piece of skull. She remembered the shape of the eye sockets and it was only then that she realised how small the whole skull must have been and that it might have been that of a child. She sat down again overtaken by an immense sadness quite out of proportion to the event and at one and the same time she understood why but chose, as she nearly always did, to ignore it.

  Her phone chirruped and real life intruded. It was a message from her boss, the man who’d greeted her with such false pleasure at the award ceremony and who was now inviting her to a meeting the following day.

  ‘We were all thrilled at your Bafta, Triss.’ She remembered his open arms as she walked back to her table, swinging the statuette in her right hand. ‘Yours was the stand out success of the night, in a category of its own. I’m – we’re – thrilled for you.’ She marvelled at these words, spoken by the chief executive, for he had been notably reluctant to let her make the films in the first place and, apart from the fact that he had once tried to get into her knickers, she was fairly certain he had never liked her. Certainly she had little time for him.

  And was she delighted? Was it worth the effort of pushing the stone up the slope? How many of those who slapped her back that night had been willing to stab it only moments before?

  ‘Of course,’ she remembered saying, avoiding his eyes and shortly afterwards excusing herself to go to the lavatory.

  She looked back at the text on the screen and the phone vibrated again. It informed her that the meeting would take place over lunch at a well known restaurant where being seen was more important than the food being served. She was now a trophy herself, a Bafta award winner and he wanted to display her whilst she still glittered.

  The foreshore had now been swallowed up and the appearance of the river had changed yet again, fuller and more threatening, the currents pushing against the old wooden jetty and swirling angrily behind. Where the skull had been found was now under a metre of water and any other treasures would remain hidden until the river breathed in again and shrank back to offer another tantalising glimpse of the past.

  Beatrice Palmenter sat on a bench along the embankment wall and despite the grey skies and the continuing drizzle, closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed and in that no man’s land between sleeping and waking, a smile appeared on her face for only now did she make the connection between the eyeless mask of the Bafta statuette and the fragment of skull and in her mind the two images were merged, one mixing into the other and slowly coming towards her so that she entered one eye and through it to the other. She saw a child running, apparently weightless, her strides unnaturally long, her arms outstretched so that at any moment she might have taken off, so real that Beatrice involuntarily raised her arm in salute.

  CHAPTER TWO

  She runs because her life depends on it. She runs because her father’s life depends on it. She runs because her mother had fear in her voice. So she speeds from her home on to a track which many years later will become Lombard Street and where one day the tip of the morning shadow of the NatWest building will fall, over the track where the lion and bison have lain hidden for ten thousand years and will remain undisturbed for a millennium more, on down the slow incline where her legs promise to go faster than she is able to follow, over the patch of mud where a year ago the Viking had dropped the arrowhead that would survive the Great Fire and the Blitz, the slope getting steeper now so that she can see the line of water at the end of the path that at some future date will be cobbled to withstand the tread of a million feet belonging to those who, like her, will travel oblivious over a bowl of Roman coins hidden for safety and forgotten until the tunnels for the Underground are excavated, the noise of the men out on the river being carried towards her on the cold, east wind which, even at her young age, she knows will speed their enemies’ arrival, to come at last to the marshy shore hardly able to speak, to look breathless along the line of the bridge in search of her father, somewhere at its broken centre, replacing timbers that in years to come will be puzzled over by those who will wonder if they had truly belonged to the first London Bridge. The river is high and she can see it moving beneath her, carrying secrets in its belly, the whorls and eddies racing below through the cracks in the timbers, making her feel unsteady so that she holds out her arms to regain her balance.

  She feels the wind catch her cropped hair and she is staring so intently at the men on the bridge that she fails to see her father only feet away. And then he snatches her up and tells her not to worry but to return home and look after her mother, all will be wel
l. She looks into his eyes and embraces him. She knows about his fear for he has already lost a son and a daughter, her brother and sister. She smells his smell and is happy for that moment to rest in his arms.

  She returns up the slope from the river, where St Clement’s Church will one day stand, but just before the gentle incline claims her, turns and looks back at the scene.

  Wooden pins and rope hold the final section of the bridge in place and she can see the men dispersing, some southwards over the ground where the market is held and where the market can still be found, others northwards into what will become the City, to return armed and protected and ready to give their lives for their families. The smoke from several encampments rises into the grey sky where, exactly a thousand years later, the fireworks will explode at the arrival of the third millennium.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the end, it was Joshua who had ditched her, in his precise, designer’s way.

  ‘There’s something missing in you, a part, a piece of machinery. Emotional, I mean.’

  She watched him fold a napkin into a neat square and move the salt and pepper pots symmetrically to the centre of the kitchen table before continuing. He had not been at her apartment when she had returned home from the Thames but had reappeared early that morning, having prepared his ultimatum.

  ‘I don’t think this relationship is doing me any good.’

  What Joshua was saying to her came as no surprise. She’d heard it before and not only from him and her impatience to have this chapter over and done with, zipped shut, was typical although what she was sensing now was not the chance of freedom once again, but a narrowing of options and a faint whiff of panic and claustrophobia. All she could do was shrug, whether in sympathy for him or for herself, she couldn’t be certain.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You’ve got nothing to say. You can make films exploring people’s feelings but you can’t use the same approach to yourself.’

  As admonishments went, it was fairly accurate and the reason she offered no defence was due to the fact that she didn’t have one and so she gave another shrug, further confirming Joshua’s indignation. He was a neat, tidy man and the process of moving his possessions from her flat was equally precise and orderly and so by late morning Joshua Myers might just as well not have existed in her life. She should have known this that first night she spent in his apartment in Camden, shortly after they met, when she tiptoed to the bathroom in the early morning and saw, next to the lavatory, the magazine which proclaimed on its cover “The Thirty Fonts You Can’t Live Without”.