Your Father Sends His Love

by Stuart Evers

  The fence was easier than he’d thought to scale; but the drop was long and hitting the ground felt like it would shatter his feet and shins. He lay at the foot of the fence. The light from the storm lamp was uninterrupted by shadows. Elliot walked slowly towards it. His father was damp faced and pale. He did not look surprised as Elliot sat beside him.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ his father said. ‘You remember how your mother used to hate me drinking out of cans? Used to say, “You’re not on the building site now, love, get a bloody glass.” ’

  He laughed.

  ‘You remember that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elliot said.

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘You remember everything, you.’

  He drank from the can.

  ‘Did you follow me?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Elliot said. ‘I heard the door go, saw you leave. I was worried.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘I guessed. You’ve not been right these last couple of days.’

  ‘Remember when your mum failed her driving test?’

  ‘She cried for days.’

  ‘Yes, she did. Soppy cow, your mother.’

  He hadn’t mentioned the driving test in years. Driving even. His father drank his beer and shook his head.

  ‘It’s just a job, but still. This time. You know? I thought it had to be this time. Got to be this time. But.’

  He laughed and shook his head.

  ‘Just for once,’ he said, ‘I wanted to do something for us, you know? Get something that was ours. The two of us—’

  ‘Dad,’ Elliot said. ‘I need to tell you something.’

  His father put his can in the dirt and sat up. He was straight backed. A schoolboy, hands out.

  ‘What’s that, son?’

  ‘It’s important. I need to tell you something.’

  He laughed and grabbed the boy by the arm. He hugged the boy close to him, beer and sweat and the father smell.

  ‘It’s going to be okay, son. I promise you that. I love you. I love you to the ends of the earth, no matter what. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So tell me. Tell me your news.’

  And he did. And his father held him close. And his father said, ‘To the ends of the earth, son. To the ends of the earth.’

  Luca runs his fingers through Elliot’s hair. Elliot is allowed to stop here; Luca has given him silent permission. They are enough, these words. They slay the fears. A good man.

  ‘He was old-fashioned, my dad. A tough guy and quiet, yes, but a good man. He believed in goodness. A code of behaviour. It was the only thing he demanded of anyone. When he said “you’re a good lad” it was the highest compliment he could pay. It was what he valued above all else.’

  Elliot half laughs.

  ‘He loved my mother. He wanted only for her to be happy. He was the same with me after she died.’

  Elliot shakes his head. ‘A man like that is a danger to himself.’

  To the ends of the earth.

  ‘I used to love watching him work,’ Elliot says. ‘I would create jobs around the house for him; pull off door handles, smash locks, damage windowpanes just to see him get out his tools. Such concentration! It was hypnotizing.’

  His favourite of all the photographs: his father carrying a hod of bricks, his expression utterly absented in effort.

  ‘The summer I was fifteen, the last summer we spent together, I used to sneak up to this building site and watch him as he worked. It was the happiest I’d known him. I took photographs of him. They captured him, I think. That was the summer I told him.’

  The beer and the sweat and his smell.

  ‘I think he was relieved more than anything else. No more pretence, no more questions about girls and who was attractive and who wasn’t. I knew he knew. I wasn’t even worried when I told him. He was proud of me, he said. I remember him saying that as if it was the first time he’d ever said that word. Proud.’

  Luca kisses him. Elliot says nothing and waits. Kiss. Kiss. Same as wherever. Whenever. Kiss. Kiss, on the cheek, on the crown of his head.

  Elliot remembers the hospital. The sheets and machines. The time they took off the bandages, the itch of the plaster casts.

  ‘And then he lost his job. Or had already lost his job, I don’t remember. He didn’t tell me. He just wandered the streets trying to get something else. He seemed fine, though.’

  Elliot shifts down in the bed, doubles the pillow over.

  ‘It was fine, it was all going to be fine and then, I was walking by the site, the one he’d been working on. It was supposed to be all locked up but these kids were there. They were just messing around. But then they saw me. And that was that.’

  Luca touches Elliot’s cheek.

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Pretty bad. It was a small town. What do you expect?’

  Luca shudders. Mirror reflex.

  ‘They jumped me. Six of them, five, I forget. I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Dad sat by my bedside. Wouldn’t leave. He told me stories about my mother. About the three of us. Stories I hadn’t heard before. And I watched his anger. I watched it grow. I watched him swell with it. Lying there, I watched a good man just . . . drain away.’

  The blows, the release, and then the coming, rushing pain. The woman who liked his photographs somehow materializing beside him, a siren coming. Hold on, her saying, hold on. In the pain, in the sound, the paramedics helping him, green uniforms, and the thought of his father. His father later, at his bedside, putting headphones over his ears, playing songs he could just about hear, muffled beats, and the smell of vending-machine coffee and unwashed skin and nothing for it but to listen.

  ‘When I was up to it,’ Elliot says, ‘the police came and they asked me what had happened. I told them I’d been jumped by these kids. That they’d called me faggot, queer, cocksucker as they punched me, kicked me, pissed on me. They wrote it all down in their notebooks and Dad was shaking. He said nothing. The police asked me for more information. Who the kids were. If I knew them. I said I didn’t. I’d seen them around, but I didn’t know. They left without believing me.’

  His father standing as the police left, looking at his son.

  ‘You tell me,’ him saying. ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘I told them all I know.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Dad, please. I don’t know them.’

  And his father shaking his head. Him crying. Him putting his hand to Elliot’s face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ him saying. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘How he found out, I don’t know,’ Elliot says. ‘It was a small town. No secrets, I guess. A week later the nurse came in with a policeman. They showed me a photograph. Asked if I recognized the kid. I said I didn’t. They didn’t believe me. They told me that the boy in the photograph had been attacked. His father too. My dad had taken a hammer to the both of them. The kid had managed to run away, but Dad broke the kid’s father’s arms instead. It took three men to get him off the guy. They said he was lucky to be alive.’

  Luca’s arm on his chest still, heavy there.

  ‘I only saw him once more after the trial. I went to visit and I don’t remember what he looked like, or what he was wearing or anything. But I remember he sat across from me and said, “Remember the houses.” He said, “Remember the houses down by the lake?”

  ‘“Yes,” I said. “They were good houses.”

  ‘“I would have liked to have gone night fishing with you there,” he said.

  ‘I’d brought him this map thing we had of the housing development he’d been working on. I gave it to him and said he could have it for his cell wall.

  ‘“You keep it,” he said. “It’s yours.” And he smiled then. He asked how I was feeling and he didn’t listen. He was just remembering. That’s all. Just remembering.’

  Elliot stops talking. Luca does not say anything. There are shadows fr
om the blinds on the wall, Luca’s arm is heavy on his chest. A good man.

  For three days he photographed the boys. He shot them throwing bricks into the lake, jumping down into foundations, swinging on pieces of scaffold. One he half-recognized from school. They would arrive mid-morning and stay until bored. They pulled wheelies on their bikes, dared each other to do ever more dangerous things. His father’s house grew each day, a whole wall now constructed. He wanted to show the woman his new photographs, but she never came.

  On the fourth day the kids arrived later. They skimmed stones on the lake, set some small fires, watched them burn out. The one he half-recognized organized the other boys into factions and they played some kind of war game in the scrub. He saw the boy point to his father’s house. To their house. He saw him say something he couldn’t catch. All five boys started for the house, sprinting. There was a whooping, like the call of birds.

  The boys began to climb over the shell of the house. One of them had a spray can and tagged the underside of a window frame; another dangled his legs over the wall, hollering into the sky. The one he recognized was picking still-damp mortar from the brickwork. Elliot ran down the bank and climbed through the hole the kids had made in the fence. He waved his arms as though shooing pigeons.

  ‘Get off that,’ he shouted. ‘Get off that right now.’

  The boys turned to the noise and saw his quick approach. They looked amused. They jumped down from the house and walked towards him. The one he now recognized stopped. Elliot did the same. The one in the middle pointed at Elliot.

  ‘Hey,’ the kid said. ‘I know you. I fucking know you. You stole my fucking phone.’

  And the boys ran for Elliot. They ran for him and he could not move. In the breaking summer light there was nowhere for him to hide.

  FREQUENCIES

  Diwali lights in windows, on doors, on fences. The boy and him looking out over the yards and gardens. The bang-bloom of nearby fireworks; the bigger, brighter lights of organized displays. The boy chewing on his rubber giraffe; its hoof, its neck. Dean’s phone to his ear and her voice quietly muffled. He’s okay? Yes, he’s okay. And he’s had his bath? Yes, he’s had his bath. And you heated the towel? Yes, I heated the towel. You’re not by the window, are you? No, I’m not. How are you doing, love? I miss you. You miss me? He misses you too. I miss him so much. I know. I love you. I love you too. A still in the sky, the last firework spent.

  The boy’s room was cramped: a cot, a chest of drawers, a toy box, a small armchair. Dean sat down and tested the milk. A drop on the wrist, performed as rote, as seen on television. It slid off his wrist, fell onto his jogging trousers. Milk drips ran down the fabric. He didn’t like them washed often, so Rachel took them when he wasn’t looking. The jogging trousers disappearing and reappearing, long and damp on the airer, so big beside the boy’s small tops and bottoms.

  The boy took the bottle, eight months and a bottle now before bed. As a child, Dean had imagined the sound of fireworks to be a war coming; its bombs and gunfire. He looked down at the boy. At Jack. He watched the suck and rush of his neck. Jack’s eyes were open. His eyes open to confirm this was not his mother holding the bottle. Dark skin and dark eyes and the constant mechanical suck. Dean stroked the boy’s tight curls, brushed the tops of his ears. There was an old desk lamp bent at the middle, the bulb directed down at the foot of the cot. A late, straggling firework popped. The boy kept sucking. Dean stroked the hair on his son’s head.

  Dean and Rachel had married at twenty; their lack of other sexual experiences a shock to others. As their friends’ relationships became soured and twisted, hoarse from shouting and bitter from drink, Dean and Rachel’s home was a constant: a calm place to hide, a sofa on which to sleep, a place of caring and safety. When Dean and Rachel later managed to secure a mortgage on a two-up, two-down, their more infrequent guests swapped the sofa for their own room and bed.

  By their early thirties, Dean and Rachel’s relationship had become underscored by a quiet yet growing sense of trauma. The friends who’d crashed their sofa got married and Dean and Rachel went to their weddings. The friends who’d crashed their sofa had children, and Dean and Rachel went to their naming parties and christenings. The friends who’d crashed their sofa asked them to be godparents and Dean and Rachel politely declined. The IVF was an expensive joke.

  There were three treatments, no results, and no money for a fourth. They stopped trying. They saw a cousin of Rachel’s, sixteen years old; heavily, laughably pregnant. They sat in parks with friends surrounded by babies and toddlers and children. They were ashamed at their thoughts, their imagined interventions. They tried talking about it, they tried ignoring it; they went on as if normal. They got drunk one night and scored drugs in nostalgia for their teenage years. They fucked for an hour and in the morning Jack was mistaken for bad guts and comedown.

  The boy was in Dean’s arms, sucking still. The boy’s eyes were closing, his mother not coming. His mother on her way to Harrogate for a conference. Her and the boss, Doug Hopkins, and the sales manager, Bill Sewell, in the same hotel. For the weekend, she would staff the small stand in the conference hall while the two men went out canvassing, trying to sell their services. They worked in glass: conservatories, replacement sash windows, skylights. She’d started as the receptionist, been promoted to secretary, then to PA to Doug Hopkins himself. Doug Hopkins wouldn’t know what to do without her. Doug Hopkins relied on her. Doug Hopkins needed her. A hundred pounds in a brown envelope at Christmas. A box of chocolates on her birthday. Monday after the conference off in lieu of the lost weekend.

  Dean looked down at his son. Dean stroked his son’s hair. When people asked about his son, Dean hardly dared say anything. He was scared of jinxing the normal conception, the normal pregnancy, the natural birth; scared of jinxing it retrospectively. Dean stroked his son’s hair. Quietly he hummed a song; a tune that soothed the boy almost to sleep.

  He held Jack to his chest. He rocked from hip to hip, the way he and Rachel both now did, the way their friends rocked from hip to hip. The boy was breathing against his neck. Tiny breaths. Tiny breath against his jaw. The boy snored sometimes. A snuffle that could not be synthesized. A sound unique to him, though Dean knew there was nothing unique about it: it was just the sound of an eight-month-old boy with a head cold.

  Dean put Jack down on the mattress. The sleep-suit was warm and downy, but Dean covered him with a blanket anyway, one Rachel’s mother had knitted. It was well-made: cable knit, baby-boy blue, needled with love. He kissed the boy on a curl, turned on the baby monitor and walked to the door. He looked back and held his breath, heard the boy breathe and closed the door.

  From the fridge he got a can of beer and from a drawer took out a pizza delivery menu. It had been devised for people who were bored with pizza. There was something called a Chunky Monkey which had banana on it; another had a base ringed with a hotdog sausage. He would order what he always did – ham and mushroom, as large as they came – but he looked up and down the columns anyway. So many options.

  As he phoned through the order, he thought he heard something from the monitor. He put his palm over the handset. He heard the boy’s breath, the dead air, the white noise of the quiet house.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dean said to the pizza man. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Be about half an hour to forty-five minutes,’ the pizza man replied.

  ‘Thanks,’ Dean said.

  He took his beer into the vacuumed lounge; Rachel had done it before she’d left. She’d tidied away the play-mat and stowed the toys in a cardboard box, shunting it behind the armchair. Three bars on the fire and its sidelights gave a soft, adult kind of glow. He sat down on the red sofa they hadn’t yet paid for and turned on the television. There was a film he’d recorded, something she would not watch. He thought of Rachel arriving at the hotel, the way she would be dressed, the picture of Jack in her purse, on her phone. He pressed play and watched a man kill another man using a plastic shopp
ing bag. The victim sucked in the last of the air; his eyes went slightly, then completely. Dean drank his beer. The title music began and he turned down the volume, glancing at the baby monitor; its brow of lights, its plastic-grille speaker. He put it to his ear, the boy’s breath. He put it down and went back to his film.

  Rachel called as the killer slashed a man’s eye with a razorblade. Dean pressed pause. He saw the aftermath on the screen as he said hello. He turned off the screen. His beer was almost finished.

  ‘Hey, love,’ she said. ‘I’ve just got in.’

  ‘You made good time.’

  ‘Yes, it was fine in the end. How is he?’

  ‘Fine. Asleep.’

  ‘Did he get off okay?’

  ‘Yes, no problem at all.’

  ‘You ordered your pizza yet?’ she said. There was bathwater running in the background.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘Have you ordered your pizza yet, cloth-ears?’

  ‘What makes you think I’ve ordered pizza?’ he said. He was smiling a little; she was a fine and regular tease.

  ‘You always order pizza when I’m away. Always.’

  ‘How do you know? How do you know I always order pizza?’

  ‘Because I love you and I know you better than anyone else in the world and because you always leave the box unbroken in the bin.’

  He laughed and walked into the kitchen for another beer.

  ‘I might have ordered a pizza,’ he said. ‘But you can’t be certain.’

  ‘I’m naked,’ she said, not listening. ‘Naked’s different when you’re in a hotel, isn’t it? Feels different, anyway.’

  He opened his can of beer and watched the suds poke through the hole like wool. ‘That was a lovely hotel we went to, that last time.’