by Jan Carson
They don’t laugh.
They try to keep him talking on the telephone. ‘Is there anyone with you? Do you have a weapon? Is there a dog in the house?’
So many questions. They have to keep him on the telephone. It’s the closest thing they have to actual handcuffs. If Sammy’s here, shooting the breeze with some nice lady telephonist, he can’t be making a break for the border. He answers their questions. Why wouldn’t he? He’s the one handing himself in. It’s important that he’s seen to be compliant. ‘Yes,’ and ‘No,’ and ‘I’m not really sure,’ and ‘Isn’t it grand the rain’s finally stopped?’ until he hears the front door fidget on its hinges and knows Mark’s back for the night.
‘I have to go,’ he says, and hangs up on the operator before she can ask any more inane questions.
He stops the boy in the hall, stands between him and the staircase. He’s standing one step up and so, for the first time in years, finds himself looking down on his son. He notices the patch of baldness beginning to bloom in the middle of Mark’s hair and, without thinking, reaches a hand to trace the smooth slide of his own crown, naked now, across most of his head. He lets his arm drop. He wants to place a hand on his son’s shoulder but he hasn’t the energy left for kindness.
‘I’ve sorted it out, son,’ he says. ‘I’ve told them it was me. They’ll believe me. I’ve got history. They never sent me away before. I was part of the deal. You know that, don’t you?’
Mark doesn’t say anything. He just stands there, hands in his pockets, staring up at Sammy like he doesn’t speak the same language, like he can’t be bothered trying.
‘The police are on their way, Mark. They’ll be here any second. You need to go along with this. Make them see you weren’t involved. You’ve your whole life ahead of you, son. Plenty of time to turn things round and start again. Please. If not for me, then for your mother.’
Mark shifts his weight from one foot to the other, takes his hand from his pocket and looks at his watch, ever so casually, as if checking the time for a television programme about to start.
‘You don’t need to worry about getting caught up in this. They don’t have anything on you. I’ve burnt it all on the barbecue and cleaned out your room so there’s no evidence. I’ll say it was all me, Mark. I don’t mind doing it. I’m your dad. It’s what I’m meant to do.’
Mark looks Sammy straight in the eye. His face is like a concrete block. There is no warmth in it. It’s hard to tell if he’s even listening. ‘Jesus, Dad,’ he finally says. ‘It’s not the seventies any more. People don’t burn things in their back gardens. The police’ll take one look at the place and know it was me, not you. You haven’t the intelligence to do what I’ve done. Did you really think you could swan in here like Christ on a cross and take the blame? You’re an even bigger idiot than I thought you were.’
The clock in the lounge starts calling out the hour. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten metallic thuds, the sound of each hour muffled as it makes its way from the back of the house to the front, through such thick, thick air.
‘Sorry,’ Sammy says.
It comes sneaking out of his mouth before he can stop it.
‘Sorry,’ he says, a second time and louder.
Up come the sadness and the strong regret. But he isn’t sorry for Mark. He will not apologize to him. He’s only sorry for himself now and for all the years he’s spent lugging his guilt round, like a dead leg. Making amends. Holding himself responsible. Looking at the boy and seeing only his own ugly reflection. Mark is nothing to do with him. He can see that now. No chip off his block. No bad seed. No second coming. Mark is his own monster.
Sammy steps away from the boy, climbs another stair so he’s towering over him. Up comes the rage and the old blood thumping. Up comes the clean white anger. Up come the fists. First the right. Then the left. He draws back his arm and drives the weight of himself hard into his son’s face. He hears the crunch of bones snapping, the wet slap of tongue against cheek and, in the distance, drawing closer, a host of holy sirens screaming through the night. He keeps hitting and kicking and clawing until he can no longer feel the hot blood thundering round his head. The breath goes first, for he’s not as fit as he once was. Shortly afterwards the rage has passed and he can hardly remember how he got there, broken-knuckled, dripping with his own son’s blood.
Mark is still standing. He sways in front of Sammy, left then slowly right and left again, like a twelfth-round boxer trying to find his feet. Behind him, blossoming through the front door’s frosted glass, Sammy can see the neon blue flare of police cars announcing their urgent presence. He has hardly any time left with his son. All the air is coming out of Mark, in gasps and throaty wheezes. He is the colour of dirty paper. His head droops. His legs buckle and Sammy only just catches him before he hits the floor. They sink together, backs braced against the hall radiator, Sammy cradling his son in the crook of his arms. He holds the boy tightly against his chest. Like Christ just off the cross in medieval paintings. He has so much to say to him. All the needy questions. All the very-sorries. All the things he might do differently if such a thing as start again could ever be. There’s no time for any of it. The police are at the door now, yelling through a megaphone, waking the neighbours, surrounding the house with dogs and guns.
There is so little time. No space left for fixing. Nothing that can be done with words.
Sammy looks at Mark and he cannot see a bad man, only a little boy lost and broken, only a thing he has lifted his fists to and ruined. The red of blood is smeared across his face, dripping down his chin, pooling in dark smears across his shirtfront. He goes fishing up his sleeve for a tissue. He hokes it out, wets it with his own mouth juice, and tries to bring the whiteness back into the boy’s face. His hand dabbing gently at Mark’s split lip remembers this gesture from years ago: so many cut knees tenderly plastered, faces washed, cowlicks dampened down with Daddy’s spit. His hands know how to work this fragile moment. His arms are strong enough to hold it. He feels closer to his son than he has for decades. He knows him, surface skin to devil core. And this feeling is not love but something more essential, like the knowing of his own bastard head. And he would do anything to keep him here, safe and docile, held within his arms. Close. Closer. Close as a just-born infant.
Sammy is still holding his son when the police break down the door and cart Mark, unconscious, into the street. His shoes come off as they drag him across the front lawn. His naked heels leave track marks in the flowerbeds. Sammy watches from the doorstep, horrified. He cannot turn away. He cannot bear the sight of strange men holding his boy all wrong, not even caring about his poor face grazing against the gravel. He knows without reason or regret that he will still be feeling the heavy burn of Mark years later, still carrying the dead weight of him in his blood and bones. For this is what it is to be a father and he cannot give back the privilege.
19
Cut
It is the day of Sophie’s ‘operation’. I’ve marked the date on our kitchen calendar, making a little X beside the day I’ve chosen: a Friday, the last of the month. I can’t risk writing the word ‘operation’. It feels too explicit. Besides, Christine might see and ask questions. I’d have no good answer for her. No believable excuse. It’s harder to evade a question, to mumble half-truths or change the subject, when every conversation is written down in solid, indefensible ink.
I’ve walked past the calendar five or six times each day for almost a week. Every time my eye catches on that sharp little X, as if it is a barb on a steel wire fence. It hurts just to look at it sideways. Eventually I take a marker and change it from an X to a tiny star, which is less threatening, less like a crossing-out of something precious. I still know what the mark means, though. My eye still strays towards it every time I fill the kettle or empty the dishwasher. I want to throw the calendar out, but I can’t – can’t even push it temporarily to the back of a drawer. I need that little star, twinkling, twinkling
through the everyday muddle of electricity bills and grocery reminders, to keep me pinned to Friday. The last Friday of summer. The end of one time and the beginning of another.
I have asked for a few days’ leave. I’ve told Marty I want to make the most of the bank-holiday weekend. ‘I’d like to spend some time with my daughter,’ I say. ‘She’s growing up so quickly. I feel like I’m missing all the good bits.’
The other doctors understand. They have children too. They’ve noticed the way time goes swimming past, blurring baby steps into first teeth and school starts, until there you are, depositing your almost adult child at the university gates with no sharp memory of the moments between.
‘You’re just right, Jonathan,’ they say, ‘enjoy every second of her while she’s still little.’
They’re relieved to see that I’m softer round the edges since Sophie. I laugh easier now. I take more time with my patients and occasionally remember to ask what other people are doing with their weekends. When I say the word ‘daughter’ there’s a kind of shyness in my voice, like the way a religious person sounds when saying ‘God’.
The lady receptionists are all chat today. Their enthusiasm expands to fit whatever space is available. This afternoon they’re standing on the edge of a long weekend, the chitter of them rising and rising as the clock twitches closer to five.
‘And how is the wee pet keeping?’ they ask, trapping me against the staffroom wall with their hot coffee mugs and their false-nailed fingers.
‘Any teeth yet?’
‘Do the pair of youse have plans for the long weekend?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We have plans.’
I don’t elaborate. Less is more when you’re dealing in lies. I smile at the lady receptionists. I’m careful not to focus on anyone in particular. They can be dreadfully territorial in their affection.
‘Have a lovely weekend, ladies,’ I say. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’
And I’m off, past the reception desk, across the car park and into the safety of my own car. I lock the door behind me. Click. Clunk. It’s not even dark out but I feel the need to place an extra wall between myself and anything that may try to interfere with the plan. Car-jackers. Crazy patients. Lady receptionists knocking politely on the passenger window, wondering if they might beg a lift to the other side of the East. Damn them all. Tonight my door is locked. Tonight nothing is going to come between me and Sophie.
In my medical bag I have local anaesthetic, sterile needles and antibiotics, just in case the child picks up an infection. I’ve also lifted the photograph of Sophie from my desk. If something goes wrong, I’ll never darken the health centre again and I wouldn’t want her photo, still there without me, possibly binned with my left-behind biros. I’m not clear exactly what constitutes being ‘struck off’ and don’t want to raise suspicions by asking Marty for clarification. I imagine it’s a process comparable to excommunication. I have specific questions. If struck off, would I still be able to administer basic first-aid assistance if I happened to stumble into an accident? Would I be able to give Sophie Calpol or cough syrup if she were ill? Would a plaster, applied to a cut knee, be too much like actual doctoring?
I know that being struck off is a very real possibility. Also prison. Or possibly lynching if the paramilitary elements get wind of what I’ve done. The lads in the East don’t take kindly to grown men fiddling with children, and it’s not as if I can explain the why of what I’m planning to do. Most ordinary people would struggle to understand the necessity of cutting out your own child’s tongue. Most people don’t have a child like Sophie and I suspect that those who do – the unfortunate parents of Unfortunate Children and those Unfortunate Children old enough to speak up for themselves – value their anonymity too highly to advocate in my defence. I know I’m on my own if anything goes wrong tonight. Even if it goes right, I’m going to have to come up with the mother of all stories to cover myself. I’ve thought about this. We’ll probably have to move to a place where no one knows us, where people will think Sophie was born deformed.
I take a last long look at the health centre’s front door before pulling out of the car park. My head is like bottled water, cold and still. I am my former distant self, not caring if I never see Marty again, or the lady receptionist with the pleasant smile, not giving a second thought to the possibility of my spider plant, binned, and my office passed on to a recently graduated doctor. I’m not even bothered about losing my patients. But the Garfield mug is different. I have a real attachment to that mug. So, I’ve thieved it from the staffroom, my first actual crime of the evening, a practice run for all the misdemeanours to come. I test my conscience over the mug. There isn’t a single twist of guilt in me, even though it actually belongs to Marty. It will be different with Sophie. The thought of her, cut and stuck with needles, is already weighing on me. I toss my bag into the back seat, where I can’t see it and feel any worse than I already do.
On the way home I stop at Connswater Tesco to pick up a fancy pizza and a bottle of wine. Christine will still be there when I get in and I don’t want to make her suspicious. On Friday night I almost always have pizza, or chips from the chipper on the Newtownards Road. Weekend food, the sort of thing almost everyone in the East consumes on a Friday evening. I like to stand in line beside the other shoppers, holding my wine and pizza proudly, tucking a garlic-bread baton under my arm, like a rolled umbrella, as I wait for a self-service checkout to come free. Better still, if I’m juggling a box of Sophie’s nappies or formula milk. This is when I feel closest to normal, like a spy who’s managed to go unnoticed among the locals. I’ve not yet chanced conversation with my fellow shoppers, but I’ve practised in my head: ‘What about that rain?’; ‘Thank God it’s Friday’; ‘The wee one’s had me up all night.’ It doesn’t sound forced when I talk about Sophie. It sounds like I’m actually speaking the native tongue.
I’ve no intention of consuming any pizza tonight but, still, here I am, standing in the pizza aisle, deliberating between goats’ cheese and buffalo mozzarella. I hold one box in each hand and feel the refrigerated cardboard sag beneath the weight of uncooked dough. I feel vaguely nauseous. Which of these two pizzas do I want? I feel the sweat begin to slime around the collar of my shirt. This hasn’t happened in months. A full-blown panic attack is imminent. Yes, it’s only a four pounds seventy-nine sort of decision, but I know that if I don’t choose one pizza or the other, I’ll be similarly stuck between Merlot and Shiraz, incapable of deciding which side of the drive to park on, and then, after all the little choices slip past, I’ll be frozen when it comes to the biggest decision of all: to cut or not to cut, and just how deep to go.
Breathe, I tell myself, and try to hear the pulse ticking in my ears. Breathe and breathe, and now there are little dents in the cardboard from where my fingers have held the pizza boxes too tightly. I’ll have to shove the one I’m not buying to the back of the fridge so no one notices. I want to fling the damn pizzas, like damp Frisbees, all the way down the aisle and into the fresh-fruit section. But I don’t. I force my shuttering tongue still and, turning to the Tesco lady, who’s stacking individual tubs of marinara sauce in the next refrigerator down, ask, ‘Which of these pizzas would you recommend?’
‘Chorizo,’ she says, pronouncing the word like there is an eye in the middle of it. Even though I’m all in bits with the stress, I still notice and imagine the chorizo an actual saucy eye winking up from its mozzarella bed. The buck is passed. I feel relieved and also ashamed. What sort of full-grown adult cannot decide between one pizza and another? Still, I’ve calmed down a bit. The wine is much easier to pick. And the journey home is without incident. I don’t even have to choose which side of the drive to park on because Christine’s car is already taking up the space closest to the door. By the time I’m stepping over the Welcome mat, I’m hardly sweating at all.
Before I can even get my key out, Christine opens the door. She has Sophie hipped against her left side, an empty bot
tle in her right hand. She smiles – no hands free for signing hello – and passes the baby to me. I hold her awkwardly. My hands are full of medical bag, coat and groceries shoved carelessly into a Tesco carrier. For ease of transport, I have stuffed the wine precariously into my blazer pocket. It leans away from my side, like a man about to leap from a hotel window. I feel the tipping weight of it starting to gain momentum. Sophie is just another thing for me to hold but somehow I find the arms for her and curl her into the crook of my elbow, like a little anchor.
Every other part of my day is just a preamble to this moment. The evening reunion with my little girl. She smells of milk, baby urine and Calvin Klein perfume because Christine has been holding her all day against herself. I drop my bags and parcels on to the floor, lift my daughter to my face and kiss the dark swirl of her hair and the back of her curled fist, the precise spot where her cheek begins to pucker into her mouth. She is milk-drunk, her lips still dreaming about the suck and thrust of the teat.
I look at her lips. The quiet pink colour of them, the caving wideness of their yawn, the deep wrinkles folded into both upper and lower lip where the flesh has yet to fully inflate. I touch her lips with the tip of my smallest finger and think about the man in the Bible – Old Testament most likely – whose lips were burnt by an angel with hot coal. Holiness was the point of this story, or maybe not talking too much in front of God, or perhaps a little of both. I touch Sophie’s lips again and wonder how something so small, no bigger than a beach shell, could possibly ruin everything.
Christine returns with a notepad and cocks her head towards the kitchen as if to say, ‘Follow me.’ We lean over the breakfast bar as she scribbles down their day. It has been an inconsequential sort of day: regular feeds, regular naps, nothing too startling in the nappy department. I draw a little smiley face with my left hand. The smiley face looks like a stroke victim’s, not smiling so much as grimacing intently. I switch Sophie to my left arm so I can write properly.
