‘Seeing how wet I could get,’ he said.
Mum unloaded a small bag full of toys onto the bedside table and around his feet and we talked about getting well and bravery while he wrestled them free from tight plastic cases. He whined when I touched them. I clung to the arm of a plastic fighting man, just gently between two fingers and a thumb, just to hold it, and he snatched it from me, knocking the table with his elbow and scattering a precarious Lego wall across the sparkly tiles.
A woman who had shut her own son’s hand in the kitchen door that morning and watched as he had two fingers removed that afternoon sucked air through her teeth in disgust. I saw Dad rise, inside and out. He gripped me by the forearm and pulled me towards the door. My jumper stuck to me. My sudden temperature made the wet wool around the neck of it mash the tears colder against my cheeks. Dad slapped the back of my legs and swore and spat.
‘Go and wait in the car.’
So I did. I was a rolled-up wire ball.
By the time we were on our way home it was too late to make anything to eat. For my birthday meal we had fish and chips in silence.
Lou’s love letter, or Malcolm Ede’s first-ever piece of fan mail, was pushed into the bottom of the bin when I got in. It was purposely pressed into the rotting meat and bones at the bottom, soaking up the unloved juices of that evening’s meal. But not before I pressed it to my own cod-tinged lips just in case.
7
With Mal still in hospital the house stagnated. The colours grew duller, the time would grind, and right from Wednesday onwards I dreaded Sunday afternoon. Sundays were merciless. The sofa would hold me down and let the dark get in, and we’d sit in the living room together. On Sundays it felt as though the whole family was breathing in unison, slowly, slower and slower until the evening when we’d fester around the television and fight sleep until it won. The minute I awoke that morning I prayed the day would be over at double speed.
Through the wall was the smell of breakfast and a muffled argument. Mum and Dad, another waste of time. The plaster it passed through shaved the edges off the sounds until they were rendered underwater mumbles. As they raised their voices higher they grew clearer still but I wanted to listen less and less and I tried to stop my brain from translating the sounds as they arrived to me by caking my ears in the soft parcel of my pillow.
‘Akeimithoo,’ said Mum.
‘Eedussnikeit,’ said Dad.
And the day and the context and the worst possible outcome filled my head until it tuned itself in like a radio and I could hear them perfectly.
‘Take him with you,’ says Mum.
‘He doesn’t like it,’ says Dad.
Fishing. We were going fishing. I would only hold his hand to cross the road. Mum made me a packed lunch. There were cheese sandwiches and a chocolate bar, a carton of orange juice that needed piercing with a straw and piece of birthday cake, nothing special, just sponge. I ate it in the car on the way and it soaked up the boredom temporarily.
Once we’d arrived, Dad unpacked the boot in silence while I held the rods. Men who might be friends of his passed and grunted. I worried that I had nothing to talk to him about.
We pitched up on the bank. The thick slops of mud foamed through the gaps in the soles of my Wellington boots. With our lines troubling the flat, brown surface of the canal we picked midges off our lips and flapped them from our eyes. The need for him to speak filled the silence. It made me ache. Litter floated past.
And then he told me a story. It was the most I’d ever heard him say, and it was because Mal wasn’t there. It was just me and Dad, and the gap between us where the bridge should be. He didn’t know how to build it, but he wanted to try, and the aching stopped for a time. The story was about work. About toil. It had grown inside him so much I was surprised it hadn’t torn through his skin and clothes.
8
Dad said, ‘Imagine if you had a photograph of every important thing that has happened in your life. Your first child. Your wedding. A death in the family. Your first job. A car crash. The day you were ill. The night you won a competition. The time you lost a race. Everything.
‘Imagine that you carried them in your pocket. Imagine that, depending upon the importance of the event in the picture, the lighter or heavier the photograph became. The heavier the photograph, the bigger the event. Eventually some of the photographs become so light that you don’t even realise you never look at them any more, they just fall out of your pocket and disappear for ever. But one photograph, one of them, will get heavier and heavier, and you’ll never lose it, never. One of them you’ll always keep, and it will weigh you down until it becomes so heavy that when you think about it, it feels as though your heart is being dragged across the floor. And you’ll never be able to pick it up again. This is what happens when you get older. You lose all of your photographs, they become light, they become air, they become indistinguishable from dreams you had and places you imagined. But you can never get rid of the heaviest. My photograph is of TauTona.’
The line twitched in the water and Dad didn’t notice.
‘Before you were born I worked at TauTona. It means “Great Lion”, they told me. It’s a mine in South Africa, just west of Johannesburg. At its deepest it’s three and a half kilometres underground. Do you know how deep that is? That’s very deep. That’s one of the deepest mines in the world. Few people in history have been deeper inside the earth than the men who have been down TauTona. And they go there to collect gold. They dig it out and they bring it back up and it gets sold so that people can wear jewellery and be rich. And it was my job to get them down there safely. It was my job to oversee the building of the cages and lifts that lowered those miners deep down into the earth, deeper than the weight of the world and everything on it.
‘It would take one hour to get to where you were going if you were a miner in that lift. That’s the descent, and then the long walk to the face of the mine, which, if you’re with a good group of miners, gets further every day. Further and deeper and darker, gold doesn’t glisten underground.
‘That lift drops at sixteen metres a second. A double-decker bus in the blink of an eye. Can you imagine that? That’s fast. That’s really fast. And I helped to build those lifts. I was there when they were installed. I stayed there for six months. Teaching miners to use them and to maintain them, to make sure nothing went wrong.
‘That’s what I did, you see. I made lifts. Pulleys and chains and cogs, shafts and drives. The expertise and engineering that goes into the vertical transportation of people. The physics and mathematics of figuring out what force is required to lift what weight what distance. Working within limited space to build a machine that will change lives. That’s what I did.’
I’d never asked him what he did.
‘And it failed one day at TauTona,’ he said. ‘One day it all went wrong.
‘I’d just finished work. It was my last week in South Africa. I couldn’t wait to see your mother, we were very close back then. Before Malcolm. I was maybe half a mile away from the top of the shaft, but I heard it give way. The entire structure we’d created, an immovable force, bent and twisted. Sounded like two trucks meeting head on, a great metallic roar. A freak occurrence, that’s all.
‘There were sixteen men in that lift as it plummeted towards the centre of the earth. Doctors told me that the force of the fall would have ensured that they were unconscious by the time they hit the bottom. They’d have become five, maybe six times their own body-weight. They would never have stood a chance.
‘It took ten days to reach them using the parallel emergency shaft we’d built alongside it. Ten days. Of course, we knew they would be dead. When we got there, those sixteen men fitted into an eight-inch gap between the floor of that elevator and the roof. They had been packed into their hard hats. Completely crushed upon landing. There was nothing to rescue, no one to save. We couldn’t even bring mementoes for their wives who’d held vigils on the surface since news of the accident first s
pread. All they really wanted of course was answers, just something, a word or a line for their grief. But I had nothing. See, we didn’t know why it had happened. We had no idea why that lift fell with those men inside it, it just did. We blamed ourselves, everyone blamed themselves. But the truth is that I don’t know. I don’t know if it was my fault. I’ll never know.
‘See, whichever photograph is the heaviest in the end, that’s your legacy. That’s what you leave behind. Question is, do you have time to change it? Or do you avoid ever having one at all?’
We caught no fish that day. On the way home we picked Mum up to go to the supermarket, where we bought rich foods to eat to celebrate Mal’s return – she loved to feed us – and where Mum would let me think I was in control of the shopping trolley even though I wasn’t, because she knew it made me happy. She climbed into the car and kissed Dad on the cheek. He kissed her back and smiled. I saw then that we weren’t three people who didn’t know each other, we just acted like it.
9
When Mal returned from hospital the dynamic shifted to where it had always been, with him as the focal point. His absence had yanked a wheel from the cart and we’d all got out to push. With him back, we could all slot neatly into our seats. Things, for a while at least, were normal. Dad was being quiet again.
On the eighth floor of the biggest department store in town we were causing a fuss. Elderly shoppers with a need to concern themselves in matters not of their concern poured scorn from the far end of aisles of soft furnishings. Assistants shuffled shelf stackings and pondered intervening, but none of them ever did. Instead they looked on as Mal and I bounced on brand new beds still wrapped in plastic sheeting. We’d take it in turns to hide deep inside piles made of beanbags and cushions, or to toss crisp white sheets across each other’s heads, snow in make-believe winter ambushes. This is what Saturday morning always felt like when we were young and together.
Dad would drive us into town nice and early, before the crowds arrived. I knew it was a special occasion, despite its regularity, because Mal would always be dressed when it came time to leave. We’d clamber into the back seat and wave at Mum through the rear window as she stood in the kitchen. She only ever came with us once, and it ended in a row about the colour of lino. It didn’t really seem worth it after that. Her presence was replaced by the introduction of the shopping list she had written out the night before. Dad would approach it with military precision to minimise the time spent walking from shop to shop whilst achieving each objective. Once he felt we were suitably trained in this area he’d simply hand the list to Mal, who would take great pride in figuring out what the shortest possible route through town would be, depending upon whether we needed apples, or light bulbs, or flour, or whatever whim constituted a bargain. On the way home he’d try and figure out the longest route possible too.
This routine allowed us more time for Dad to indulge himself in the only thing he appeared to truly enjoy. Well, there was fishing, but no one enjoyed fishing really.
Ellis’s store felt bigger than real life. What it didn’t sell, you didn’t need. It had men stood at the revolving front doors who were resplendent in red overcoats and black peaked caps. They looked like the soldiers that guard the entrance to a cuckoo clock. Once inside, each of its eight vast floors was a trove of goods lit so brightly that it was impossible to cast a shadow in any direction. Purple velvet ropes trimmed with shiny silver buckles formed cordons around anything that wouldn’t survive an errant elbow. I used to think they had been put in place for Mal alone, who often destroyed things of value.
Past the gadgetry and through the food hall we’d march in Dad’s tow until we reached our destination, where a rare smile pulled his face taut. Tucked away in the far corner of the store, between the barbecue sets and the heavy-duty garden tools that we pretended were space weapons from the future, were a small set of brass-covered doors so polished and shiny that they caught all who stared into them as a golden sepia photograph. Behind them was one of the oldest lifts in the country.
We’d edge gently inside once it had obeyed our calling, which it always did immediately because, as Dad would suggest, we were the only ones that knew of it. It was always there to greet us on the ground. Inside it was only big enough for two adults, or one adult and two children, a formula that still resulted in Mal or me being tightly packed against Dad’s legs. Once the doors had closed behind us the light was that of dawn. It bounced from the reflective silver walls and circled the brass that held the big black buttons in place, playing tricks on your eyes, taking them back in time, making them feel sleepy and warm.
‘A feat, boys, of modern engineering,’ Dad would whisper before lifting one of us from the floor, whoever’s turn it happened to be, to the height of the biggest button of all, the one numbered eight. With a clunk and a whirr the levers and ropes would gradually fall into place and our ascent would begin. It was fast enough to feel that we were moving but slow enough so as to never know how far we had left to travel. The slightest movement would rock it from side to side and we’d shuffle our weight across it to test the patience of the machine. I worried that those ropes might give way. I imagined the heavy box they carried slipping from their grasp as easily as one might grip a dead pheasant by its foot and tug the cartilage out from the skin that encased its leg. I’d grasp Dad by the knee until the fear passed and he’d place one of his big, rough hands on the back of my head. I’d hear him say ‘Safest machine in the world, this’, though he hadn’t even moved his mouth.
At the summit the doors would open slowly and we’d burst from our secret capsule out into the store, greyhounds with a whiff of rabbit, and Dad would tell us off again.
10
It was sticky, midsummer, the night before we were due to go on holiday, and we’d both been sent out for the afternoon so that Mum could pack. Not by Mum. Mum preferred us to stay in. Small flies crawled all over my white t-shirt in one-winged disabled circles and wasps begged at the lip of my drink. We walked for a long time up and down our street, and came to rest on a small wall at the end of it, our energy sapped by the heat. Mal sat there in the full blast of the sun. I stooped behind him, contorting to fit the shade.
A flash, then gone. Then a face I see, then gone again. I spotted Lou, peering at us, at Mal, from behind the wall of the shop on the corner. Her head bobbed in and out in bursts, followed quickly by that of a friend, and behind that shelter I imagined them giggling.
I pretended not to have noticed for fear that she’d come over to talk to us and Mal wouldn’t say anything, instead leaving it to me, and I’d be stuck, I’d have no words, and I’d melt in the heat and she’d be standing hands on hips looking down into the splash of goo where I once was.
Though he wasn’t popular amongst the boys, he was amongst the girls, as popular as thirteen-year-olds can be. Where the rest of us were skinny, just ribs draped in wisp, his body was constructed from muscle, every inch of it solid. He carried himself with a poise I’d never manage.
He was good-looking too, unconventionally so, which is the best type of good-looking. Girls liked his chin, and his hair, black and curly, just fell like that. For the same reason, boys hated his chin. And his hair and the way it just fell like that. He was enigmatic. Not to me, to others. He had the right posture, a walk, a way. He just worked. Next to him I looked like I was assembled in the dark from spare parts. Most people knew me as Malcolm Ede’s brother. They’d call it, I’d wave and tell them where he was if I knew.
His idiosyncrasies amplified his achievements. When he swam it seemed he swam further than anyone else. An outsider on his own terms, he was free to build his own rules around him, rules no one but him could even hope to understand. Not even me. I was carried in his slipstream, the fluff that blows in through the smallest crack in the doorway if you close it quickly enough.
It felt as though this was his day, and that he didn’t want it to end. As if he knew that growing up was dying, not death itself.
11
In the check-in area of Heathrow airport the airline staff were whispering mangled panicked instructions through dated radios. Which queue? How long? Just calm down, sir, you will make your plane.
Only Dad had flown before, only to unimaginable South Africa and only to return a different man. The routine of air travel, the hurried banality of it, was as alien to us as climbing stairs in preparation for sleep. To Mal, on all-fours, the snaking queues were a maze of trees with trunks of legs to traverse. I sat on our suitcase listening to Dad espouse the benefits of a southern Spanish summer. Mum had glazed over, so rapt was she at the idea of stepping from a plane onto foreign soil. In her head it was with dainty ankle, the camera panning up slowly to reveal a wonderful Christian Dior dress in emerald green and half a million pounds’ worth of diamonds dripping from a silver chain around an elegant neck, like a starlet to the red carpet of a film premiere. She was so engrossed that she didn’t notice the tuts of disapproval being made by the two old ladies behind us in the queue, the whirr of insects in the reeds. Slowly the unrest spread backwards down the line until a curt man with damp circles the size of pie tins under his arms approached. He placed a firm hand on Mum’s shoulder like one might grip the throttle of a motorbike and registered the unanimous unhappiness of the stony-faced assembly.
‘If you cannot control your son,’ he said, in a way fear dictated he couldn’t to a man whose neck was as thick on shoulders quite as wide as Dad’s, ‘then perhaps someone else should.’ In his hand hung one of Mal’s socks.
Our eyes followed the trail of Mal’s clothing across the cold marble flooring of the terminal. A sock, trousers that would no doubt soon become mine, two shoes and a t-shirt formed a ragged pathway that led towards the conveyor belt carrying the luggage to the plane. Our eyes reached the thick black flaps of vinyl that formed the doorway just as Mal disappeared through them, flinging his underpants onto the head of the only security guard that had managed to get within ten feet of him with the studied panache of James Bond tossing his bowler hat at the rack in Miss Moneypenny’s office.
Bed Page 2
