A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

by Benjamin Wood

  Meanwhile, I watched the static mantel clock. I imagined us arriving in the plush, bright lobby of the Hotel Metropole. And I resolved that I would do exactly what my mother thought was best for me from that moment on.

  Eventually, there was a trickle of foot traffic through the room. Karen gathered her guitar and said it was time to head up. My father went to get himself a lager and a Coke for me, which I didn’t want or ask for. When he came back, he guided me upstairs, and grudgingly removed his wallet to pay the five pounds cover charge.

  The room had a grimy light, an air of damp. We shuffled to the table closest to Karen and Vee. My father put our drinks down. We took our seats. There was a nervous quiet. I watched a man on the far side of the room skim resin up and down his fiddle bow. I ate the ice cubes in my Coke. The important thing is that you spend some proper time together, my mother had said on our driveway that morning. So enjoy yourself. I tried to fathom how much of the trip I had enjoyed so far, and realised I’d been most at ease during the moments I had spent away from him—in the world of Albert Bloor and Cryck, under the spell of Maxine Laidlaw.

  Then there came a sudden weight beside me. Two bright red trainers pressed the carpet by my chair. ‘They told me you’d be up here, Francis.’

  He was nothing like I’d pictured him. A closely shaven head, concealing baldness. A bronze skin tone that can only be achieved with artificial lotion. A gold chain round his neck as thick as the brake cable on my bike.

  ‘Why I’ve got to come and fish you out a bleedin’ folk club in the middle of Christ knows where, I’ll never know. But here I am.’

  ‘About time,’ my father said. ‘Where the hell’ve you been?’

  ‘I’m not talking in here. Downstairs. Car park. Two minutes. Or you’re on your own.’ He made for the door.

  ‘QC, hang about, I’m coming,’ my father said, and hurried after him.

  Our parents’ lives before we’re born are merely phantoms, as unthinkable as what becomes of them after they’re gone. I don’t recommend reading your teenaged mother’s diary if you can help it. There are some details of a woman’s life that are better lost to history. My mother wrote a lot about the early stage of her relations with Fran Hardesty—or rather, what she called her ‘raging appetite’ for him. At least thirty pages (passages dated 10th June to 14th July 1982) are devoted to transcription of prolonged sexual encounters at hotel rooms in the Buckinghamshire region. Trust me when I say that there are only so many times a son can read epithets for the male organ scrawled in his mother’s handwriting before his uneasiness turns to nausea, shame, alarm. But, in another sense, it’s helpful to understand the strength of their physical attraction, because it was the single aspect of their lives in which they were compatible, and it provides the only valid explanation for them ever forming a relationship.

  I heard my mother justify it many times to friends who came to sit with her at our kitchen table in the aftermath of arguments, asking, while she wept aloud, ‘What did you ever see in a bastard like him?’ The way she accounted for it, the two of them were brought together by an unhappy coincidence. She was eighteen years old, due to start a degree in Finance at the University of Exeter that autumn, and was partway through a summer internship at Tyler Graves, a firm of accountants based in Beaconsfield. That she was undertaking low-grade secretarial work instead of travelling in Africa as she’d planned was the fault of my grandfather. He knew Malcolm Tyler from the golf club and the placement had been organised ad hoc, over a round of drinks without my mother’s knowledge—she had no choice but to uphold the arrangement. I expect, by interfering in this way, my grandpa had the best intentions, but without this intervention in her life, who knows what she might have become, what better things she might’ve experienced?

  One morning, she arrived at Tyler Graves to find the back section of the office had been screened off with particle board and plastic sheeting. A contractor had been brought in to expand the conferencing facilities: E. E. Flagg Construction Ltd. That afternoon, as she went to heat a can of soup for lunch, she found a man (my father) measuring the corridor. She describes the moment in her diary:

  He was scribbling all these calculations on the wall in pencil. I had to ask him to step out the way & he just looked at me with his eyes scrunched up. He wasn’t being rude just extremely confident. He said no you’ll have to wait while I finish this last bit unless you’re going to share that soup with me. I told him I preferred eating alone & he said suit yourself. So I stood there for something like a minute while he got on with his measuring & scribbling on the wall & it was like he knew I was watching him. He had the most amazing arms. Muscly but not from the gym. From proper hard work. & my god his hair was kind of amazing. Long & dark & tied back with elastic to keep it out his eyes. He didn’t look over at me once & then finally he backed up to let me through taking this little tin of cigarettes out of his jeans & he goes all done is there a good place I can smoke without getting told off? His voice was sort of whispery but there was nothing quiet about him if that makes sense. It made you really listen to him even though what he was saying wasn’t all that interesting. Nicest voice I’ve ever heard. & I felt like there was more going on inside his head than he let on. It’s kind of hard to explain. I said we aren’t at school you know, everyone smokes, you don’t have to hide it & he laughed & said he liked to smoke in the fresh air. I told him about the terrace on the roof & he said okay nice one thanks & walked off straight away & I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. Don’t know if he’ll be coming back tomorrow but at least it’s something good to think about.

  This has to be one of the few times in her life that she referred to Francis Hardesty as something good. They were married eight months later; I was born just four months after that; and all their differences would eventually be exposed as problems they could not surmount. But what this single entry from June 1982 reveals is the strange effect my father had on women. He seemed to magnetise them with the most routine behaviour—a two-handed lean against a lintel, a slide of his forefinger across his bottom lip, a casting of his eyes into the distance. He didn’t dazzle them with repartee, beguile them with his humour—in fact, I often sensed antagonism in his manner (‘Hey, Nadine, you over-charged me—there were only forty balls inside my bucket. We counted them, didn’t we, Danno? You can refund me next time. With interest’). His flirtatiousness was fairly subtle (‘Cute handwriting—look at that. You still dot your i’s with little hearts. How old are you?’), sometimes brazen (‘Why don’t you pick it up for me? Slow as you can. I want the mental image of that rear end to stay with me’). And I suppose for every woman who was immediately attracted to him, there must’ve been a thousand more who were immune to the sly quality he possessed or who rebuffed it. But it was enough to make my intelligent, discerning, ambitious, unimpressionable mother wilt the moment she met him.

  So perhaps this odd facility he had for winning her affection also worked on me. By which I mean that everything my father said and did on our trip was part of the same process of seduction. That the attributes that made him so desired by women were alluring to me, too, in a different or abstracted way. That I trusted him for the same reasons they did. That I was persuaded of his goodness by a similar hope for intimacy. That he relied on this, used it to his own advantage, as he did with them.

  I can’t say what became of Karen after her encounter with my father, but I know she gave a statement to police before the inquest, accounting for his movements on the evening of 17th August, offering opinions on his ‘state of mind’. Often, I’m drawn to wondering about the details she left out of her testimony. Was it shame or disgust that made her deny the extent of her contact with him? Did she worry their association would stain her reputation? I only hope she never gave up singing—or, if she did, I hope it wasn’t due to him.

  That night in the White Oak, she sang full-bloodedly, a pleasant wobble in her voice when she unravelled the high notes. She had alarming volume and clarity. Ther
e was an earnestness to her performance style, the way she slouched on stage with her guitar. And even if her skill on the instrument didn’t match the level of her singing (each chord was hacked, clumsy, a little off tempo) I could see her talent might one day outgrow the boozy drabness of her local folk club.

  Her set received only a mild ovation—from everyone except Vee and my father, who clapped his meaty hands above his head. When she sat down, her face was ruddy with embarrassment. The host took to the stage to introduce another act—that pensioner with his fiddle—and we endured his scratchy, two-tune repertoire of jigs until the interval was called. As the room emptied out, my father said to Karen, ‘Blimey, I had a feeling you’d be good, but that was something special.’

  She beamed at him. ‘You really think so?’

  ‘Yeah. Reminded me of Laura Nyro.’

  She shook her head, eyeing Vee. ‘Never heard of her.’

  ‘Look her up. She was big a long time ago—your voice is similar. Better, though.’ He stood up and stretched.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, reaching for his sleeve.

  He ignored me. ‘That sort of talent’s going to take you a long way. Believe me. You can forget about signing on.’

  ‘Aw, thanks, Fran.’

  ‘Dad,’ I said.

  He lowered his chin. ‘What? Can’t you see I’m talking, son?’

  I couldn’t stop thinking about QC and his red trainers, the urgency in his tone. I didn’t understand why we were still waiting round. ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve sorted something out.’ He sounded unimpeachable.

  ‘So, can we leave now?’

  ‘I was about to ask the same,’ Vee said, overhearing. ‘There’s only so much of this folky rubbish I can take.’

  I stared up at my father.

  His tongue stroked his bottom teeth. ‘We’ll be off first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘But—no—you said—’

  He raised his palm to stifle me. ‘Don’t bother, Daniel—I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it. I practically had to give QC a kidney to get us on that set tomorrow. We’ll be here overnight.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got us a room.’

  ‘But you said—as soon as he came—you said.’ I was almost shouting.

  ‘I know what I said, and I told you: we’re going. Tomorrow.’ He rolled his eyes at Karen, as though he was inured to such behaviour on my part. Then he slung me his sternest look. ‘It’s all organised. Eleven thirty at the studio gates. He’s given me his word.’

  ‘Eleven thirty?’ I said.

  ‘Eleven thirty on the dot.’ He crossed his heart. ‘We’ll still have time for that cooked breakfast if we get a good night’s rest.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. It came out like a sigh. ‘Tomorrow, then.’

  ‘This mean you’ll be stopping a bit longer?’ Vee said, coming near to him. ‘She always makes me sit through the second half out of politeness, but I might as well shoot off now, and meet you downstairs after.’

  ‘You’re just going to sit on your own down there?’ Karen said. ‘You’re not even drinking.’

  ‘Yeah, what’s wrong with that? Seems to work for Daniel.’ Vee was more perceptive than I’d thought. ‘Maybe a nice lad’ll buy me an orange juice.’

  ‘Go home, if you’re tired. I’ll get a cab,’ Karen said. ‘I don’t mind.’

  We joined her table after the interval. She installed a modest distance between herself and my father on the bench seat to begin with. The second half was given up to the main act, an accordionist from Whitby. I was not accustomed to the sound of the accordion, though I found it nicely diverting for a while, to observe the huff and puff of it, the bellows swelling and shutting, the keys going clack clack clack under the drone. My father pretended to enjoy the spectacle for as long as Karen seemed attuned to his reception of it. Still, forty minutes of sombre Russian circus music would test anyone’s resolve—I fell asleep against my father’s shoulder. He must’ve lowered me down sidelong on the seat afterwards, because I awoke to the strip lights blinking white above me. I looked up to find him prodding my shoulder with two fingers, as if I were a vagrant who’d passed out in a bus shelter. Karen had her arm around his waist, and he had her guitar strapped over his right shoulder. ‘Think it’s time we put you to bed, sunshine,’ he said. ‘You did well to withstand that racket for so long. At least I had the beer to take the edge off.’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon you did right to sleep through it,’ Karen said. Her words came out a little sloppily, her eyelids seemed more leaden. ‘I thought he’d have to sing eventually—his mouth kept moving but nothing came out. Just more twiddly-diddly-dee. He went on for-bloody-ever.’

  ‘I don’t see why you couldn’t have played a few more,’ my father said. ‘You should’ve been the headliner.’

  ‘I know. Two songs are all I ever get. Tightarses.’

  ‘All right, come on, I’ve got the room key here.’ Digging into his jeans, he retrieved a single Chubb key on a wooden fob the size of a salt cellar. ‘It’s nothing fancy, but it’ll do for tonight.’

  The pub’s lodgings were exactly of the type my mother had prohibited. Two single beds with floral coverings that matched the curtains. An en suite bathroom with mouldering green taps that looked to have been dredged from a canal. There was no telephone with which to report all this to her, so I had to abide it.

  My father asked me which bed I favoured and I chose the one nearest the window; if I knelt at the headboard end, I could see the glow of lamp posts in the car park. It was from there I watched him traipse across the tarmac to collect my holdall and his suitcase from the Volvo. The return leg took him twice as long. When he got back, he sounded five short raps on the door and I went to unlatch it. He deposited our bags on the foot of his bed with a groan. Then, reaching underneath his shirt, he unhooked an object from his belt and disentangled the coil of plastic wire and metal that came with it. ‘A little present from Karen,’ he said. ‘Just on loan, mind you. Here.’

  It was a cheap orange walkman. ‘Thanks.’ I flipped it open. There was no tape in it.

  ‘Oops—nearly forgot the most important bit.’ He pulled a cassette from his back pocket. ‘I wasn’t sure where you’d got up to with it all, so I brought you the third one out the box. Hope that’s okay. You’d better check the batteries are working in that thing.’

  I pushed play and felt the mechanism of the walkman move. He leaned to slot the tape in for me, setting the band of the earphones over my head. ‘Just in case you can’t get back to sleep,’ he said, but these gestures of concern didn’t convince me any more. I knew they were a ploy to soften his departure from the room. There was no point trying to stop him going downstairs to resume things with Karen in the bar. I would be left alone again, in another strange place, with a crummy bedside lamp casting a yellow light across the textures in the anaglypta; with the rising sadness of my thoughts, and the steady chink of glasses in the pub below, and the roil of voices spilling out at closing time, baiting my window; with the dread of further disappointments lying in wait for me tomorrow, and the feeling that my mother would be angry when I made it home, because of him.

  [. . .] He would come to cherish those days out salvaging with Cryck, examining the contours of the land for scars. Acres, they covered together, heads bent to the soil and grass, stopping every time he thought he saw a marker. Hand-drawn strokes of Aoxin were not easy to determine—so many of the figures in the dirt that he mistook for language were only scuffs from landed birds or prints from deer’s hooves or smudges left by rabbits—but he soon got the hang of it, and Cryck was grateful for his help.

  The more complicated markings had no consistent size or shape. One day, he saw her stoop over a streak in the wet mud by a ditch and leap up in exhilaration: ‘There, you see it. There!’ She was pointing to a slight circular impression, no bigger than a sixpence. Another day, she paused next to a shallow squa
re chipped from the tree roots at his feet. ‘It’s an indograf—these woods are full of them,’ she said. ‘This one says to be alert for weapons. Might be some rich pickings on this track.’

  She taught him how to look for the simplest indentations on the ground: lozenges that started fat and tapered to a trail of dots were indicators of compartment flues below. Typically, a rock nearby would bear a series of incisions, giving details in Aoxin: dates of occupation, length of sentence, name of prisoner, depth below ground. ‘Two thousand years and more on that one. No point digging,’ Cryck would say; or, ‘This one’s just a twelver. Let’s open it up.’ Each moment of discovery was followed by the same sight: Cryck lying flat over the marks with her ear to the earth, striking down with the heel of her fist, considering the noise. ‘Okay, cross it,’ she would say, and he would daub an X of yellow truxol paint on the ground, a target for her axe. Standing back, he would watch her slice the ground and break the topmost layer. A manhole cover would be scraped out of the dirt.

  She disallowed him from exploring the compartments with her. ‘Too dangerous—there could be infestation or disease,’ she said. ‘Besides, you don’t know what you’re looking for.’ She would step down into them and reappear a short time later with a bag full of salvage and a grin of satisfaction. After, he would wait as she added the location of the old compartment to her map. She reckoned their position by holding up a foreign instrument towards the stars: a slatted metal oval called a khav that she kept on a black string around her neck and gripped in her right eye socket. Eventually, she let him be her lantern keeper; he would lower it down into the manhole on a rope, brightening the dark compartments while she scavenged for materials.

  She explained to him the process of dismantling the panelwork that housed the power stalks, and demonstrated how to cut free the zhoori wires and disconnect a battery from an underjar without losing any vital fluid. The day they spent in the sheet rain, draining the stowage of an old compartment with a basepipe, was the hardest work day of his life, but it bore results: the unearthing of a quorh electromagnet from a wall recess. It was still functional, Cryck thought, and showed it to him proudly—a nosegay of discoloured parts like spark plugs from a truck. ‘Seems as though this old compartment has been modified,’ she said. ‘Not many have this type of quorh. It’s much newer, this model. Must have been a special prisoner, that’s all I can say. If we can find ten more of these, we’ll soon have that conducer powered and ready, or at least a prototype.’