Three Things About Elsie(74)
He smiled an awkward smile, and we all smiled back and made more noises in our throats.
‘Do you know where we might find these people who remember him? Or remember what happened to him?’ Jack said.
‘That’s the mystery.’ The man shook his head. ‘He just vanished a few years after the war. It happens all the time when you’re trying to trace someone from the past. People don’t leave a trail like they do nowadays. The next generation will have no such problems chasing any of us.’ He straightened some leaflets on the counter, which were clearly in no need of a straighten. It appeared to be some kind of shopkeeper code to signal the end of the conversation.
‘You could try the library, of course. Plenty of historical information in there.’
We were at the door, and the little bell was celebrating our departure, when the man spoke again.
‘Of course, you might not find him under Price. It was just his stage name.’
‘So what was his real name?’ Jack turned back to the man, who still had the leaflets in his hand.
‘It’s strange, really. His real name sounds more like a stage name than the one he changed it to.’
‘So what was it?’ I could hear the frustration in Jack’s voice, although it clearly went over the top of the man’s head, because he was more interested in fussing with the leaflets than answering a perfectly simple question.
Eventually, he looked up. ‘Honeyman,’ he said. ‘Gabriel Honeyman.’
HANDY SIMON
Handy Simon waited on a crowded pavement for the bridge to close. He always seemed to catch the bridge at the wrong time, and he wondered if the boats held back until they saw him appear on the horizon and then put their foot down. Simon listened to the slow churn of the diesel engines, pushing through the water. Waiting for them to make their way through took an age, and a collection of people gathered around him. There were holiday teenagers, unfastened from parents, toddlers trying to join them and break away from their pushchairs, and Saturday-morning carrier bags, swinging from sunburned hands. The seagulls, free from the constraints of boats and bridges, watched everything from the harbour wall, and shrieked to themselves in amusement. Simon didn’t trust seagulls either. His mother once told him they’d take your eye out given half a chance, and he’d been on his guard ever since. He couldn’t see anyone he recognised from Cherry Tree. Miss Bissell had put a strong case forward for keeping everyone at the hotel, but in the end, it was decided confinement might cause more problems than it would solve.
‘Just be vigilant,’ Miss Bissell told them, which was exactly the kind of vague instruction that made Handy Simon nervous.
He looked over the water to where a mirror of people waited on the west side, and he spotted Miss Ambrose almost immediately. She was deeply involved in her mobile telephone, but every so often, she glanced up and looked confused by nothing in particular. Miss Ambrose always seemed to find him a little job to do, and he was just trying to work out a way of getting across the bridge without bumping into her when she closed her telephone and darted up an alleyway. This meant they would both be on the same side of the harbour, which made Simon pull the straps on his rucksack a little more tightly, and dig his finger into the collar of his shirt, but it couldn’t be helped. He had decided how he was going to spend his morning, and he wasn’t going to abandon his plans now.
The West Pier is the only part of Whitby that feels like it belongs to the tourists. The rest of the town, visitors just borrow for the summer months, trailing up and down the abbey steps and marching all over the beaches. Whitby really belongs to Yorkshire and to maritime. It belongs to the whalers of centuries past and to the fishermen of now, who slide into their boats in the still black of an early morning. It belongs to Captain Cook and the Endeavour, and to all those who sail towards a horizon, not knowing what they might face. Unlike other seaside towns, Whitby has not given itself up to the slot machines and the pink candyfloss. The yards and the snickets, and the alleyways, hold on to the footsteps of our ancestors, and somewhere at the point where the cliffs reach out to the North Sea, the past is valued rather than abandoned, and everyone who visits is given a reminder of their own place in history.
Simon drifted down the West Pier. You couldn’t really do anything other than drift, because although it was still early, crowds were beginning to build, and everyone seemed to be walking at a holiday pace. The smell of fried onions mixed with the seaweed green of the harbour, and Simon took a very deep breath. Perhaps if he breathed hard enough, he could hold on to the smell and revisit it whenever he wanted to, when his life returned once more to the aroma of Pot Noodles and guttering. He looked at the row of shops as he walked. Between the hot dogs and the ice cream, there were souvenir stalls. Places which specialised in postcards and sticks of rock, and putting your name on things. When Simon was little, everything he owned had his name on it. Pencils and bookmarks and T-shirts, moneyboxes without money and keyrings without keys. Even the door to his bedroom had his name on it, just in case his parents should get confused and accidentally try to sleep in there overnight. He wasn’t even sure why he did it, but every time he saw something with Simon written on it, he had to take it home with him. Perhaps it was the only way he could explain to the world who he was. Perhaps at that age, all he had was his name and an idea of who he might become. Simon kicked his shoes on the sandy pavement. Perhaps he was still waiting to find out.