The doc’s kneeling on the floor next to Ben, a gloved hand gripping each of his wrists, as though he’s been trying to hit her, which he remembers vaguely doing. Not hitting her, of course, but lashing out at someone, or something. And trying to scream, but no sound coming out, like in a dream, which is sort of what being hypnotized feels like anyway.
But this time Dad’s there too, hovering behind the doc, and his face is a total picture – worried and narky and loving all muddled up – which makes Ben try to pull himself together a bit. So where he’d normally collapse back on the cushions with the doc and start crying, to sort of let all the scary stuff out, Dad being there makes him blink back the tears and try for a shaky smile instead, to show he’s OK. Which is what a proper boy is supposed to do, so it’s probably something he needs to get used to.
When the doc lets go of his wrists, there are white marks where she was holding him that turn red straight away, so she starts rubbing them gently, which is comforting, and makes up a bit for not getting his normal cuddle.
‘Is it always like that?’ Dad asks, plonking down on the pouffe, which huffs at the sudden weight of him.
‘I’m afraid this reaction is not atypical in Ben’s case – though it’s rare amongst regression clients generally.’
‘So what the fuck was going on?’
‘Well I can’t be certain, obviously, but my hypothesis would be that Annie’s knife injury occasioned a kind of “short circuit” in her unconscious mind, causing it to jump forwards, as it were – or possibly backwards – to a similar traumatic event.’
‘And that brought him out of it, right? Like when you wake up in the middle of a nightmare?’
‘Something like that.’ She looks around and Ian’s right there behind her, squatting down with his camera on his shoulder. ‘Ian, turn that thing off please,’ she snaps, like he’s a naughty kid. ‘The session’s over.’
Dad rests his big hand on Ben’s shoulder. ‘You all right, buddy?’
Ben shrugs. ‘I’m getting used to it,’ he says, sounding braver than he feels, because the tears are still in there, locked in his throat making it hard to speak.
‘Well done, everyone,’ says Ian, lifting the camera down. ‘That was bloody brilliant. Fascinating. Fantastic telly. Might even insert a bit of drama doc there if I can get the budget to stretch.’ He pats his pockets, looking for a lens cap. ‘Mary, we must talk about this. It raises all sorts of interesting questions. About Ben’s own knife trauma, for example.’
‘You think Ben’s experience with a knife wound in his current incarnation might have potentiated his rather extreme reaction to Annie’s cut? Well, it’s possible, I suppose.’ She smiles at Ben’s dad. ‘I must apologize, Paul – may I call you Paul? When two psychologists get together it can become rather technical, I’m afraid.’
‘I hope you’re not going to put Ben’s accident in the film,’ says Dad to Ian. ‘Talking about wanting a sex change is fine – well, not exactly fine, but we can cope, can’t we buddy?’ he adds, looking at Ben. ‘But I don’t want to risk the tabloids getting hold of that other story, OK?’
‘Of course not,’ says Ian, rolling up a cable and stuffing it in a bag. ‘You’re the boss.’ Ben can tell he’s not really listening, but Dad seems happy enough – though the doc’s still looking pretty crabby.
‘And Ian,’ she adds, in that same telling-off voice, ‘I’d rather we didn’t discuss Ben’s case in front of him – at least not while his therapy’s ongoing. I don’t want our speculations to influence the outcome.’
‘Right-o, hen,’ says Ian, like water off a duck’s back. ‘But you have to do me a favour too. Would you mind terribly leaving this room as it is till we’ve finished filming? I’ll take some stills, so I can put things back if they’re moved, but it would save an awful lot of faffing about if you could bear to cope with it like this for the next few weeks.’ He scans the room, looking for stray bits of gear.
‘It’s called continuity,’ he explains to Ben’s dad. ‘It means I can splice footage from different days together if I have to, without books mysteriously appearing and disappearing from behind Mary’s head.’ Then he turns to Ben. ‘And I meant to ask you if you’d mind wearing those same jeans and T-shirt for all the filming in this room. Is that OK?’
‘Them Scots lassies were a right hard crowd, weren’t they?’ says Dad as they walk home along the lower bank later, full of Laura’s chilli con carne and baked potatoes. ‘Gutting herring till all hours in the rain.’
‘What freaks me out,’ says Ben, ‘is that lass dying from just a knife slipping.’
‘Why, because you think the same thing might have happened to Annie?’
‘Sort of. In a way. It’s more the thought of everyone working with knives.’
‘That’s the job isn’t it? You should try gutting haddock on the boat in a swell. Half the old lads in Shields have got bits missing.’
They’re passing a shuttered fish and chip shop; squashed chips on the pavement, screwed up paper in the gutter. A few gulls are flapping around the street lights like big white moths. After a while Dad says, ‘Why didn’t you tell me what was going on in them sessions?’
‘You weren’t here. And anyway, I was fine – plus I didn’t want you to stop me going.’
‘Still, it’s a lot for a lad to cope with on his tod.’
Ben shrugs and looks down at their feet, sizes five and ten, walking past the cheapo Italian that always smells of burnt garlic. Then, ‘Dad?’ he asks, ‘How dangerous is it really? On the boat, I mean.’
‘Well it’s much safer these days, if that’s what you’re worried about. The net gear’s astern now, so there’s less danger of being swept over the side. And you can see storms coming on the scanner, and radio if you get in trouble. And there’s no furnace below deck like in the old days, with a lad shovelling coals for the engine. I mean, that must have been pretty clever on a rough day.’
‘Pete says they used to have special hospital ships that went out to the fishing grounds, because there were so many injuries from knives and winches and that.’
‘There’s rescue helicopters now – and sonar to track the shoals. But apart from that, the job’s pretty much the same as it ever was. Hands and feet fucking freezing, clothes ringing wet, salt sores round your neck and wrists, shitting in a bucket.’
‘You never have to shit in a bucket!’
‘Not on Wanderer, no. But the lads on the Tricker do.’
‘They never!’
‘They do too. All for a dozen monk and a couple boxes of baby haddock. Fucking mug’s game.’
The tide’s right out, so the river’s low, revealing the ancient stones of the harbour walls, hung with slimy weed and rusty mooring rings, loops of old chain and frayed rope. Most of the boats are out, but there are a few bobbing down there on the dark water: Wanderer, Colmanhinny, Kelpie.
‘So why don’t they pack it in?’ Ben asks.
‘Why don’t I pack it in, more like? What do you think? Sell the boat and get a proper job? Suit and tie. Company car.’
Ben laughs. He imagines his dad gift-wrapped in a striped shirt fresh from Markie’s with the creases still in. It makes him think of the Incredible Hulk, swelling and going green, then bursting out of his clothes. ‘Would you really sell the boat?’ he asks.
‘It’s always a gamble, that’s the trouble. I could sell up tomorrow, then the EU would change the rules and I’d be kicking myself. That’s what keeps you hooked in. There’s always the chance you’ll strike gold – like all them prawn we got last year – or you’ll haul a net full of monk, or they’ll cut the factory quota and give the little lads a proper look-in for a change.’
‘If you gave up, you could still do your nice little earners,’ says Ben. ‘And use the boat for long-distance diving trips. To Norway, or Iceland. That would be so cool.’
The more Ben thinks about it, the more he likes the idea. Anything to stop Dad from dragging that heavy twin rig along the sea bed, scraping up every living thing – sleepy codling and haddock, crustaceans and worms, weed, flatties, the lot – and leaving a wide dead motorway of bare rock and sand behind him. But he knows better than to say anything. He tried once, last year, after he’d seen some photos on the Internet, and he doesn’t dare raise it again. Because Dad just lost it. ‘Fuck the environment!’ he growled. ‘It’s not my job to protect the environment. It’s for governments to make the rules, and me to try and make a living.’
Which is fair enough, Ben thinks, if the rules are good rules. But when the rules make no sense, like that quota crap that makes you throw back any fish you don’t have a licence for, you can’t go along with that. Because that could mean a squillion codling that will never grow up, with their swim bladders burst from being hauled aboard, just chucked over the side for the gulls.
Dad says when the quota rule first came in, the lads couldn’t stand it. So they’d separate off the illegal fish and sell it on the black market – partly for the money, but mainly because it hurt them to throw a good eating fish back in the sea. But DEFRA brought in some new regulations to stop that, when what they should have done was ban twin-rig trawling altogether and outlaw all driftnets with small holes. Or organize a sort of crop rotation in the sea, like farmers do on land, leaving a third of the fields fallow for as long as it takes to recover. It would piss off the lads for a while, but at least there would be something left for them to catch. And they wouldn’t get that stony look Dad gets on his face sometimes, when he knows something’s wrong but feels he has no option; like when the old lads went on and on at him when he started using the twin-rig. Ben thinks that’s bound to get under your skin if you’re basically a decent bloke.
Next day Ian wants to meet Ben and the doc at the library, even though the sun’s blazing so the library will be like an oven. He wants to go over how they found Annie’s address again and get permission to film there.
The doc’s wearing a different shawl, draped over a strappy top that shows the pale skin on her chest and makes her look really young. Ian gets them to pretend to look at computers and maps, so he can take some more photos; then Pete takes him through the Staff Only door for a meeting with the Chief Librarian. Five minutes later the door opens and Pete appears with his face tripping him because the Chief’s whisked Ian off to lunch at the Saville Exchange, which is dead posh, and Pete obviously thinks he should have gone too.
Left at a bit of a loose end, Ben and the doc wander off to get stotties from Gregg’s, and then go back into the library to wait until Ian gets back – which suits Ben just fine, because he’s been itching to have another look at the Shields Daily News microfiches again. They’re full of information about normal daily life from the time Annie was alive, which helps him make a bit more sense of his hypnosis sessions, like creating a whole 1898 Sims house when before he just had the people. So it’s full of ads for weird potions no one would ever be allowed to sell now, because they’re probably poisonous; and coal scuttles and mangles and the sort of cooker you have to put coal in – because everything was run on coal in them days, and there were collier boats chugging up and down the river the whole time.
When he’s under hypnosis, he’s only aware of what Annie is doing – trying to get the fish smell off her hands or helping Mam peel the taties for tea. But with the Daily News he can read the fashion column and find out that posh ladies had a special outfit just for riding their bikes. And there’s a whole page near the back about what’s happening on the river that day, like how many herring boats were moored up and the amounts of different fish they caught.
It turns out that 1898 was the best year ever for herring, with more than four hundred boats in the harbour, up from Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and down from Scotland, plus all the usual local boats. Which is so different compared with these days, where the fish market’s just a pathetic little row of fish boxes piled up along one wall in a big echoey shed.
What really surprises Ben though, is that people were worried about overfishing even then, and holding protest meetings about how the big new steam trawlers were taking too many fish and damaging the spawning grounds. Which means it’s been going on for years, with big lads with their big macho boats shoving little lads out the way and grabbing all they can, and ignoring the old blokes who can see where it’s all leading. Which is the collapse of the herring stocks, and cod an endangered species, and Dad doing his nice little earners.
At about half past two, when there’s still no sign of Ian, the doc asks Ben whether he wants to come with her to the Discovery Museum in Newcastle. Pete says that’s where the boat records are stored and she wants to find out who was on Annie’s father’s boat. Ben thinks she must know by now, from talking to Annie. But it’s like she can’t quite believe all this reincarnation stuff unless she sees it with her own eyes – which must be because of all the flack she’s been getting, that Ian told him about.
So they set off on the Metro, with Ben sitting next to the doc, as though she’s his mam, watching all the stations go by – Percy Main, Howdon, Walkergate, where the collieries used to be.
At the museum there’s a posh new glass entrance attached to the side of a dirty old red-brick building. Going in is a bit like travelling through time, because the foyer is all pale wood and blue handrails; then you push through a door to the archives and the walls are covered with old dark wood panels and it smells like an Oxfam shop. When they get to the Search Room, the woman behind the counter brings out bundles and bundles of ancient forms, all stiff and brown, tied up with string, one for every boat registered in North Shields in 1898: all the tugs and trawlers, drifters and collier boats, each with the name of the boat, and its owner, then a list of everyone in the crew.
Ben hardly dares to touch them – because these are actual records over 100 years old, not microfiche copies, filled in by real people, with all their different curly hand-writings, with real blots and smudges. He unties a bundle and starts gingerly leafing through. ‘Why have they got firemen on the boats?’ he asks, then: ‘Oh, right. I get it. They must be the lads who looked after the steam engines. They went on strike, you know – I just read about it in the Daily News. Because they were supposed to help with the nets when they got a big catch, so they’d be really hot and sweaty stoking the boiler one minute, then soaked with freezing water up on deck the next. They said it was making them sick, so they should be paid more money.’
Then, suddenly, before he’s even properly started looking for it, there’s the Osprey. ‘Owner, Henry Milburn, 23 Lambs Quay Stairs, North Shields.’ He tugs on the doc’s shawl and budges over to let her have a look.
‘Do you think he filled it in himself?’ he asks, imagining Annie’s father bent over this actual sheet of paper with a pen in his hand, writing in all the names.
‘Look, there’s Sam!’ says the doc, and she seems really chuffed. ‘And his name is Heron, so I was right about him being that little boy on the Wellesley. And there’s Jimmy – and George Sheraton, the mate, so that must be Flo’s father. And a man called John Hall, in a role they refer to here as “hawseman”, whatever that means – and this must be Tom. Thomas Hall, aged 20.’
‘There’s no cook,’ Ben says. ‘That must be because Jimmy was doing it, but they were paying him as a deckie, though it has him down as a “mariner”.’
‘Thomas Hall,’ says the doc again, slowly, as though tasting the name on her tongue. ‘Initials T.H.’ Then she gets up suddenly. ‘Excuse me, Ben. I’m going outside for a cigarette.’
She’s gone for ages, so Ben goes out to look for her. But she’s not on any of the benches in the car park; so he wanders across the road to the newsagent, thinking she might be in there buying tabs, but there’s no sign. So he goes back into the museum, but she’s not there either; so he leaves a message at the front desk and sets off to catch the Metro back to North Shields. Typical doc, he thinks, stepping on to the down escalator; she’s probably got so caught up with one of her theories that she’s forgotten all about him.
When he gets back, he goes straight to the library, but she’s not there. Ian is, though, parked at one of the computers. Peering over his shoulder, Ben sees that he’s on that ancestors.com website and in the ‘Find’ box he’s keyed in the doc’s name, ‘Mary Louise Charlton’, and in the date box he’s keyed in ‘1967’.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks, and Ian sort of jumps, then closes the window really fast, as though he’s been caught on a porno site.
‘Oh, just farting about,’ he says, standing up so that his back is between Ben and the screen. ‘Come to think of it, maybe you can help me. I need some images to set the scene. To show people what life was like for Annie in 1898.
‘All I’ve got so far, you see, is Mary chatting away to you on the sofa. That’s fine for radio, but with telly you can’t just use talking heads all the time. You’ve got to give the viewer something else to look at.’ He’s speaking really fast, which is normal for him, but makes Ben feel slightly out of breath. ‘That’s why the news people fly reporters out to Basra or Nairobi. All they’re doing is parroting info from Reuters, but it means the viewer gets an eyeful of whatever bomb damage there is, and gangs with machetes, and so on. Crass but necessary. What a fucking primitive species we are, eh?’
‘There’s some photos in that cabinet,’ Ben says, ‘but most of the good ones have been nicked.’
‘I don’t need that many. Let’s take a shuftie, see what there is. If I need more I’ll put a researcher on to it at the editing stage.’
‘Does it have to be photos?’ Ben’s had an idea.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, there’s this old artist dude that Dad knows – the doc knows him too actually. Anyway he’s like an alky and loony combined, but he does these really cool paintings of the Fish Quay. Going back years, right to Annie’s time and before. Dad says there’s even one of the doc’s house when it was practically the only building on the top bank.’
‘So where does he get his information? Or does he just make it up?’ The Ian bloke’s got his Blackberry out, checking for messages. Ben can’t work out if he’s really interested in the paintings or not.
‘That’s the weird thing,’ he explains. ‘Dad says the paintings are well accurate, so there’s always a load of old people crowded round his stall at the market, ooh-ing and aah-ing about things they remember, and trying to spot themselves as kids. Because he’s even got the people right, so you can recognize them. I mean, how spooky is that?’
‘But he’d be pretty ancient, presumably, wouldn’t he? So maybe he can remember back that far.’ Ian puts his Blackberry away and gets out a stick of peppermint lip balm. ‘Sounds to me as though he might be some kind of autistic spectrum case. Have you seen them on the telly? People who can play a Mozart piano sonata after hearing it just once, or draw an exact image of St Pancras station after whizzing past it on the number 19 bus.’
Ben nods, but he’s not convinced. He’s seen those autistic people on TV and they seem really disabled to him, which is why what they can do is so amazing. But old Skip’s sort of normal really, if you can class being an alky and a schizophrenic normal. ‘The doc thinks he’s painting things from his past lives,’ he says.
‘You don’t say,’ Ian laughs. ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, running true to form as ever.’
‘Dad says he’s done loads of paintings of boats, because he used to be a skipper, right? In this life I mean. I don’t know about before, because when the doc hypnotized him he had a loony fit, so she had to quit. But I can take you to see them if you like.’
Ian weighs this up. ‘Actually, I might take you up on that,’ he says. ‘If those pics are any good, they might work rather well on the screen. Especially if I can get him talking a bit about the old days.’ He turns round and quits all the windows on the computer, click-click-click really fast, so Ben can’t see what else he was looking at. ‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘No, but the market’s on every Saturday and Sunday, so he’ll be on the stall today. If we hurry, we can catch him before he packs up.’
The market’s heaving when they get there, with old ladies in flowery dresses fingering the antiques, and mams cruising the craft stalls with their midriffs and muffin-tops on show, which Ben thinks is a mistake unless they’re brown and flat; and dads in combat shorts and trainers, which is also not a good look. And somewhere there must be a stall selling metallic helium balloons, because they’re bobbing around everywhere, tied to buggy handles; and another stall is doing candy-floss, so half the little kids have pink caked round their mouths and are poking at things with the sticks.
Old Skip’s stall is over in a corner, by the railings. Ben points him out and starts heading over, but Ian stops him. ‘Hang on a sec while I take some establishing shots. It’s never the same when someone knows they’re being filmed.’
He gets out his camcorder and hoists it on his shoulder, then darts about among the buggies and old ladies, filming the stall from all angles while old Skip sucks on a rollie-up and nods as some beardy bloke natters on to him about something. The paintings are higgledy-piggledy everywhere, propped up along the front of the stall, and down either side, and hanging on the railings behind. They’re all in cool arty frames he’s made out of driftwood: all sizes, from really tiny ones that you could hang in the bog, to huge paintings that would have to go in the living room, over a fireplace, if you had one.
Ben’s eye is caught by one small image of two herring girls walking along, arm in arm, with their heads thrown back, laughing. But before he can take a closer look, Ian gives him a nudge. ‘Now we know where all those photos went from the library,’ he whispers, stowing the camcorder in his bag. Which is so out of order, because old Skip probably doesn’t even know where the library is, plus Ben’s seen him with his easel on the top bank with his own eyes and he wasn’t copying from anything.
‘These are bloody fantastic,’ says Ian in his normal voice, looking at the paintings on the railings. ‘Could be just the business.’ He peers at a price tag and whistles. ‘I wonder if he’d lend them to me in exchange for the publicity,’ he says, half to Ben but really talking to himself.
Old Skip spots Ben and nods gruffly. ‘Howay, Paul’s lad.’
‘You must have quite a memory to do all these,’ says the Ian bloke.
‘Ay,’ says old Skip, polite enough, but as though he’s heard it all before.
‘Fancy a fag?’ says Ian, taking out a pack of Marlboro and flipping back the lid. ‘Take two,’ he says. ‘I’m trying to give up.’