Trick of the Light

by Laura Elvery

  The Republic

  The plane lands. The man beside me, a solar energy salesman, unbuckles his seatbelt before he’s supposed to and tells me once more: ‘Enjoy your pilgrimage.’ I packed only carry-on luggage, so in the terminal I go straight to the car rental desk, collect the keys, say no to extra insurance and yes to a GPS, and I pull out of Heathrow onto the motorway. I’ve eaten nothing since breakfast except some plastic-wrapped banana bread and a too-sweet juice that the salesman grabbed from the flight attendant and shook for me. I tap the address into the GPS and I watch cars and motorbikes and lorries edge past me in the motorway traffic. I think the route to the cemetery will look familiar, but it’s been years. The plaque at Kit’s headstone says, As we loved you, so we will miss you. Even as a kid, I knew that no adults in Kit’s life, certainly not in his family, talked like that. I grip the steering wheel, hating the drag of the rental car’s clutch. The cemetery closes in three hours.

  *

  Kit told it like this: Manchester United were on a plane to Brussels to play a semi-final and the plane hit turbulence and the pilot thought it would be all right, because he had Manchester United on board – no pilot is going to be so unlucky that he crashes a plane with the entire team from Man U on board, plus all the coaching staff, and the reserve players, and some of the wives, too. And the pilot is right: no one is that unlucky and he gets the plane through the turbulence and everyone gets an extra tomato juice and a bag of peanuts. But then, five hours later, the pilot is walking through Brussels, something like thirty minutes after he would have been walking had there not been turbulence, and a car mounts the kerb and hits him and he dies right there and then. And Man U wins three-nil, and they catch their flight back to England, and no one even finds out about the pilot. Well, his wife and kids and the bosses at the airline find out, but certainly not Manchester United and their coaching staff.

  ‘Is that true?’ I asked Kit as we watched television in my lounge room.

  ‘One hundred per cent,’ he said.

  ‘But how do you know?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s true.’

  Kit knew things were true even when they might not be.

  ‘Did you know there are people who decide to become their own countries?’ he asked, switching between shows.

  ‘You can’t just become a country,’ I said. ‘There are already all the countries.’ But as I said it, I couldn’t pinpoint the number. And if there was a number, why that number? Why not one? Why not a million tiny crumbs of soil sliced the whole way around the world?

  ‘I’m just saying people do it, Cora,’ Kit said. ‘They set up their bit of land, and make a flag, and give themselves a name.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Kit shrugged. ‘I suppose they wait to see if anyone notices.’

  A week later, when Mrs Maslow asked who had brought along an idea for the class play, Kit and Alex and Srinath and Pilar put up their hands. Kit went last, rising to his feet behind his desk, though none of the others had done that. He started: Did you know? There’s this man, or woman maybe, who has set up his own land with a flag and laws and everything. And no one did know, not even Mrs Maslow, who added Kit’s idea to the fourth column on the blackboard, next to Srinath’s idea for a play about kickboxing.

  Mrs Maslow loved the possibilities for costumes and props, a hero and a villain. The opportunity was there, she said, to showcase the talent in the class, to be grown up, but also fun. The play would have something to say, in this multicultural age, about who people were and where they were from. She asked for a vote and Kit, still the only one in the room on his feet, shot his hand in the air. Then Alex and Srinath and Pilar and I and everyone else voted for his play. The Republic, he had said. By Kit Oswald.

  *

  ‘What is The Republic famous for?’ Mrs Maslow asked from the front of the room. I looked around, but I didn’t know what to say. I could tell my classmates felt it too, this small and curious uncertainty.

  Mrs Maslow’s feathery hair was silver. She held a piece of chalk between her fingers and tucked her top into the waistband of her skirt. No one answered.

  ‘What do they make?’ she asked. ‘What does the landscape look like? Are there mountains?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kit said.

  I turned to him. Others did too. How did he know this? The image of The Republic was right there, behind his eyes. I wanted to see what he could see.

  ‘Okay. What else?’

  Kit set his teeth to the flap of skin on the side of his thumb. When he brought it out of his mouth, his thumb was bleeding. In the past I’d seen Mrs Maslow hold his hands in hers and wrap his fingers in plasters from the first-aid kit. He did it when he was nervous, he told me.

  ‘They’re famous for a battle of independence,’ Kit said. ‘David and Goliath, and they won, because The Republic is an island and they could see the invading enemy coming on ships across the ocean.’

  Our teacher nodded. ‘Why are they being invaded?’

  ‘Beer!’ Kit said, and we laughed. Before Mrs Maslow could protest, he switched. ‘No, wait. Milk. The place is full of cows. And the enemy are attacking because they want the cows, for cloning. Like Dolly the sheep.’

  After lunch, Mrs Maslow told us to sit at our desks to design The Republic’s flag. She reminded us that it was an island, with black and white cows that were desired by the enemy.

  ‘What’s your favourite flag?’ Kit asked me. As he drew, he stuck out his tongue.

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t have one.’

  ‘Bet you do. Do you like ours or America’s better?’

  My answer was ready, even though I hadn’t known it. ‘America’s. Definitely.’

  ‘A good flag is important,’ Kit said. ‘You should be able to draw it from memory. See it from a distance. Stars are good, lines are good. Do plain colours, like green for land and blue for the ocean.’

  He peered over and landed his elbow on my paper. ‘Cora,’ he said. ‘That’s a mess.’

  ‘Oh.’ The idea dropped into my head that I should never have tried this, that of course I was going to be bad at it. I folded mine, creased it severely in half.

  ‘But it’s just a first draft,’ he continued. ‘Do another one.’

  I took his stack of draft flags – a whole stack – between my fingers. ‘Show me,’ I said.

  Kit lived with his mum, who wasn’t really his mum, and she was away from the flat a lot. Mrs Maslow used to give Kit glue and coloured pencils to take home. He wrote in journals that were nothing more than half-inch piles of paper stapled together from the stationery cupboard.

  Kit’s first drawing, the one on top, would be the winner. A green circle in the centre of a blue ocean. Five yellow stars were fanned out like a crown above.

  *

  The night of the play was cold, an icy wind hushing about my ears as I collected my costume off the clothesline: red and white knickerbockers, and a jacket with war medals that had been cut from a Weetabix box. I called down for Mum and Dad, and on the drive to school we sang to the Spice Girls on the radio together.

  Other classes performed that night as well. A scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A younger class had adapted The Little Match Girl. There were lights and a hot chocolate stand in the foyer of the school hall, and Mum and Dad sat and waved enough for Kit and for me, as Mrs Maslow pulled open the curtains.

  Kit took centre stage to deliver the prologue: Once upon a time, a group of brave explorers left their terrible land to set up a republic out on the ocean. The island became their new home. Palm trees hugged the edges of the stage. The rest of us crouched as soldiers from opposing armies. I stood, stage right, in a freeze with my arms wide to show strength, caught in a moment of reverence for Kit, The Republic’s leader.

  Offstage, the flag hung from its pole: Kit said that the audience shouldn’t see it till
the very end. He knew about timing, about waiting for the right moment. Kit’s life was all about getting nipped and chased and baited. He used to go walking late at night with older boys from his building. Together they would cross the bridge into town to press themselves into the dark, their jackets zipped up to their throats. As a pack, they plucked bits of trouble out of nowhere, looking for ways to get noticed. In daylight hours, Kit’s adult brother Gerry stalked the neighbourhood with his shirt off, past the playground with dozens of little kids, his pit bull terrier chained around his waist.

  The script that Kit and Mrs Maslow had written couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. In the final scene, the battle of independence over and the invaders defeated, we stood in our army jackets, patting the spotted plywood cows. I felt a sheen of sweat and a trembling nervousness while I grinned out towards the blazing lights. Kit raised the flag and the audience cheered, and Mrs Maslow promised to give him the flag at school as a souvenir, since it had all been his idea.

  But Kit was not in class the next morning. Or the next, or the next. Within days we found out his beloved Manchester United jersey was still in his room. Police officers, a man and a woman, came to class to speak to us. And then different ones came to our house, and asked me questions about a man Kit might have known, while I sat in Mum’s lap, sucking the tips of my hair, and ticking with fear.

  *

  I pull up on the street outside Dad’s house, ease my foot off the clutch. Lights are on in all four windows, except for my old room, upstairs, which is dark. Before I can knock, Dad answers the door, wearing his waxed cotton mac and striped pyjama trousers.

  ‘How was your flight?’ he asks, kissing me and smelling of tobacco and Weetabix with milk.

  ‘Good, Dad. I’m pretty tired.’

  ‘Of course, love. I’ve got your bed made up. Have a shower if you like.’

  In the kitchen, he sets a plate of buttered toast in front of me and a mug of tea. I’d forgotten the metallic taste on the rim of all the mugs in the house. How I went through a stage where I refused to drink from them, instead sipping from Mum and Dad’s wedding set of crystal goblets. Years later, after they’d gotten divorced – Mum in her new flat with a computer and a modem, and Dad still at the house with an adopted stray cat – I found the goblets in a box and carried them to a charity shop so Dad wouldn’t have to. But I couldn’t bear to leave them behind. I came back and hid them in the attic.

  I nod towards his armchair. ‘What’s in the paper?’ I ask.

  ‘Ten thousand people die from air pollution in London,’ Dad says. ‘Every year.’

  ‘Like from petrol? Cars and planes?’

  ‘What a way to go.’ He coughs, bumps a fist against his chest.

  I think of all those other ways to go. A bomb at the heart of a red bus, its insides pulled apart in quick bites. An aeroplane plunging to earth, lit from within by panic. A body, left for dead, bleeding like an inky stamp on a beach.

  ‘Your mum said to tell you she’ll be home all day tomorrow. I’ll drive you over there if you like.’

  ‘Can’t wait to see her,’ I say.

  ‘Good of you to stay here tonight, Cora.’

  Beside me, Dad drums his fingers in one long line on the table. I cover his hand in mine.

  ‘And the other thing?’ Dad says. ‘How’d that go?’

  In the silence we notice the noise from the television and Dad eases out of his seat to mute it.

  I say, ‘It looked like no one had been there in a while.’

  He nods. ‘I should go up for the lad.’ His voice collapses in on itself.

  Here in the kitchen, I can’t stop myself recalling the undergrowth scent of the cemetery, the chapel at its centre with a honeycombed roof and buckled walls heaped with leaves and branches. The cemetery was silent, dusk coming early in December – I’d forgotten how early. At Kit’s headstone I took out the flag and draped it across my palms. I should have ironed it, and I wished I’d made the stitching on the five yellow stars tighter. But this was it: I’d be back on an aeroplane in a few days, heading home. I laid the cloth out like a blanket beneath the plaque. Stupidly, somewhere between Sydney and Abu Dhabi I’d told the solar energy salesman about the reason for my trip back to London. A murderer had been caught, after all these years, and convicted. I needed to get on a plane and hear him be sentenced. Put it to rest. When I pulled the notebook out of my handbag and unfolded the flag from between two pages, the salesman didn’t try to touch it.

  Dad rests his hands in his lap and stares at the uneaten toast. ‘It’s not like I’m busy,’ he says. ‘You’ve come all this way. That’s not a holiday for you, love.’

  Dad looks at me, huddled with sadness. Our cardboard-brown kitchen, when I was young, never felt big enough for all our dinner plates and teacups and electric frypans with broken, greasy handles pinning down my Maths homework. Now, when it’s just Dad, the kitchen seems even smaller and far, far emptier, and I doubt he cooks much of anything for himself. I feel like we’re inside an amber beer bottle that swims with a set of tiny chairs and table, and a tiny bread bin with its mouth wide open. And over on that window, the one facing the backyard, Kit might have run his knuckles before appearing at the door to receive a ham sandwich from Mum. He would have sat on the floor with his back against Dad’s shins while we watched the football together.

  You won’t always feel like this, is what Dad said when Kit’s body was found on the beach, at the base of a sand dune, tucked behind rocks. Yes, I will, I told him, horror burning right through me, picturing Mrs Maslow cradling Kit’s hands. Blink, blink, my eyes went.

  Dad spins a mug on its base. We watch its movements together. His voice is animated with forced brightness. ‘I’ve just had the news on. That man is sure to get life,’ Dad says. ‘No loopholes. Witnesses and everything, although why you wouldn’t say anything all those years ago is beyond me. That other prisoner he confessed to. Straightforward.’

  Things should be straightforward. Drawn from memory, is what Kit told me they had to be.

  Foundling

  The baby bird falls from the tree right in front of us. Neil warns me we’ll hurt it if we pick it up, but still he edges closer to the wet handful of feathers on the uneven ground.

  ‘Martin, don’t,’ Neil says. ‘If you touch it and the mother comes back she won’t want it.’

  ‘But she’s not here, is she?’ I say. ‘What if she’s dead?’

  The bell rings for dinner and I realise how hungry I am. The sun is setting beyond the fence, where blocks of stone bulge from the soil like buck teeth.

  The bird tilts back its head and utters desperate cries. Its eyes are blueberries stuck beneath skin.

  ‘It doesn’t have many feathers.’ Neil wipes his nose on his sleeve. He’s been sick for weeks. Matron says she’s tried everything. ‘It must be freezing,’ he says.