by Peter Arnott
11.2.1.1.1
In fact, the chain of events that Janette’s ensuing conversation was about to precipitate was going to radically challenge all of their desires and calculations as to what was going to happen next.
11.2.1.2
As a unit then, with Janette at the centre, the family had by now achieved, however precariously, a combined emotional intelligence that was considerably more than the sum of its parts. And while both Hunter and Ronnie were wary of acknowledging the change, Janette, as the focus of the new paradigm, as the head of the family, in the literal and figurative sense of that word, was comfortable with improvising in a systematic way, with weighing contingencies and fallback positions.
11.2.1.2.1
After all, she had not committed any crime when she had left the Lawrence’s employ. She had had no formal contract she was breaking. Her stuff was mostly still in her room, of course, but she was used to travelling light. She had packed her favourite clothes. She had thrown her small collection of family photos in her bag, and Mr Lawrence was welcome to her remaining knickers.
11.2.1.2.1.1
And Janette, we should now reveal, was already committed not to an ideology or career path as such, but to a way of life. She liked the countryside, nature. All that stuff. She even wanted to save it from people. She felt the existential threat it faced from hardhearted and soft-headed men. She’d actually thought about joining the Green Party.
11.2.1.2.1.2
Can you imagine, could Tommy imagine, a child of his inhabiting the world so securely as to actually think about changing it, to actually consider involvement in civic activity? She never told him that. I’m not sure he’d have known how to cope if she had! Anyway, they weren’t going to have anything like that kind of time together.
11.2.1.2.2
When she had decided to come with Hunter, aside from the fact that she had already been more than ready to move on, we shouldn’t forget that for all of her apparent equanimity, Janette retained the rootlessness of a childhood passed without roots, but I think perhaps, I hope, with a positive intuition that the freedom and resilience this early education in fragility afforded her could be parlayed into a way of living in the world in the twenty-first century that had general application and correctness.
11.2.1.3
The world would be a saner place if we all acted according to how tenuous our hold on it is. She was sure of that. One can only hope that one day Janette will write it down for our philosophical consolation, even for our pragmatic adoption.
11.3
She looked at her father’s face. It was open. It loved her. He was eager to take whatever she wanted to share with him. That was how far he had come. If she had understood, really understood, just how far that was, she might have acted differently and spoken more softly. We’ll never know.
11.3.1
And besides, she was there. On the spot and in that moment, and she did what she felt was right. What more can you ask of anyone, really?
11.3.2
Her time here with Hunter, she thought, looking into his face, about to break his heart, afforded her most of all the opportunity she had needed to complete her renegotiation of her past, to put it behind her, to move on, not simply from the Lawrences, but from her childhood itself. She had had to do that. We all have to do that. It wasn’t just that she was forced to talk to her father by her being here with him as she was. She actively wanted to.
11.3.2.1
And this wasn’t a sudden thing. She had actively wanted to get through to him for some time, as she was about to explain. She had dreamed of him when she was a girl. She had memories of him from a very young age. She had imagined him at night and practised telling him things when she’d been alone. She had had many, many conversations with him when he wasn’t there. She’d used to tell him everything. Of course, he had been in prison and she had just been a little girl, and till a couple of years ago she had never even thought to write to him.
11.3.2.2
Even when she did send him that postcard from Calgary Beach, it had been from a moment of impulsive intention to communicate, rather than a real attempt at communication per se. That was why she had sent the card without her name on it. Sending the card, writing his name and address on it, she had been making him real to her, unaware that at that moment she, or rather “the sender of the card”, would become real to him. It had been a rather daft, rather self-involved thing to do. She hadn’t really imagined that him getting that postcard from her would give him ideas, let alone that he would have wrongly concluded that the card came from Janice and that those ideas he had were going to have been about her mother and not about her. Such unintended consequences might have been amusing in another context, rather than cataclysmic. But she was very young when she sent it, after all.
11.3.3
The fact that her handwriting looked very like her mother’s wasn’t something that Janette was even aware of. But it was. Such are the vicissitudes of inheritance.
11.4
It was, of course, her decision that now was the moment to reveal the authorship of the postcard as being hers that was to prove so devastating to their hard-won and sadly temporary functionality as a family unit.
11.5
JANETTE
Da?
HUNTER
What?
JANETTE
What if I told you yer never gonnae find her?
HUNTER
I never hurt her. I got a postcard.
JANETTE
(pause)
Mum never sent you that postcard, Dad.
She pauses for a moment. He tries to smile. Does she relish, just a little, her power over him at this moment? In memory of those fourteen years?
It was me.
And now she’s said it, and almost immediately, despite her having done the right thing by any moral standards, she finds herself rather regretting it. She stumbles a little now.
I know you never hurt her. I’ve saw her. I’ve talked to her. It was just the once.
Hunter is staring at her now, his face bloodless, his eyes wide, unreadable.
It was when we were in care, still. Ronnie was too wee to remember. She turned up at a hostel we were in. Kiddin oan she was wer auntie ur somethin.
His mouth moves. She speaks before he can.
She was a wreck, Da. She was high oan somethin. She was a junkie.
Saying this, hearing herself, her own emotion unexpectedly fills her throat, constricting her breath. Janette looks down at the remains of her vegetarian chilli burger. There is a line between the pragmatic disposal of information and dredging up pain from your own oesophagus that Janette has just crossed without meaning to. She finds there are tears in her eyes and that she can’t speak. Hunter’s mixed and private feelings for his lost lady-love are at this moment, very much to his credit, trumped by his concern for his daughter, however much he is attempting to distract himself from the terrible shock his system is yet to really absorb. He cups her chin in his big hand and says, gently:
HUNTER
Hey … Hey …
Janette, strategically or not, takes this solicitude to be questioning her veracity. In fact, she is speaking from a combination of defensive, retrospective doubt at the reliability of her witness as a ten-year-old, of her memory, and a fresh fear that she won’t be able to get through this without making a fool of herself.
JANETTE
I grew up in care, Da. I know a fucking junkie when I see one.
The brutality and undoubted truth of this statement silences and reconciles him to hearing from her now what she has to say. He will make no further attempt to shut her up by sentimental solicitude. She has made herself a platform now. She has set herself a stage.
When I was sixteen, I went to find her. Just like you. I went to the address of this squat she’d gien me. In London. She wasnae there. Nobody knew anything aboot her. I sent ye that postcard … when I was up workin there … on Mull. I was working in a hote
l there. I don’t know why I did it. I suppose I just wanted to tell ye … I suppose I wanted … I don’t know …
She hesitates. He doesn’t know why, but it’s because she’s considering lying to him again in order to keep her options open. While she is thinking about that, he makes the beginnings of his new understanding of things verbally manifest for the first time. A little obviously, he is asking her a question that is begging her for a comforting answer.
HUNTER
So you sent it because you wanted tae see yer Da?
He smiles, sadly, but in appreciation of her simple, childish wish, to which she reacts with some fury.
JANETTE
She’s fuckin dead, Da! She got a mass burnin at some place where they burn junkies. Probably … Okay? She’s fuckin dead. Yer never gonnae see her again. All right?
Hunter, still in shock, still nowhere near processing this, looks across at his son angrily banging the stripes about the table. She drags his attention back to her.
Ronnie knows fuck all.
“Right,” he says. And sinks into himself, feeling once again open beneath his feet the yawning abyss into which he fell all those years ago, and from which, like Dante, he had only recently been climbing. First, ascending from hell, with Ronnie as his Virgil, he had glimpsed the sky and the mountains. And now with Janette as his Beatrice, he had come further into the light than he could ever have anticipated. He had had a really good day, his first really good day on earth. He had touched the earthly paradise and glimpsed up into heaven. And now it was gone. All gone. Inferno’s darkness fell on him again like a hammer, obliterating him. His vision actually failed him, like he was having a seizure. He could not speak, he felt utterly incompetent, utterly alone, utterly helpless and afraid. The story he had told himself since the arrival of the postcard was that he would find her, find Janice. His dream, his lunatic dream that hat he would bring his family together and make them the gift he’d owed them all these years, the gift of togetherness underwritten by a cash injection, was wet ashes all round him and over him and inside his mouth and eyes. He felt dirty. He could smell himself. A blizzard of dark covered him. He could not see or hear.
HUNTER
(after some moments)
Efter the morra, I’ll let ye go.
JANETTE
(stunned that new information she’s given him has not made him pragmatically reconsider his plans yet — which was expecting a bit much to be honest)
What about tomorra? What are we doing the morra?
Hunter, clinging, she thinks, to unreality, takes the postcard from his pocket to look at it.
Did ye not hear me? Did ye not hear what I just told ye?
He looks at her. She can’t read him. He can’t understand anything himself yet.
HUNTER
Efter the morra, I’ll let ye go.
She stares at him nonplussed and a huge cheer goes up from the assembled revellers. The band on stage has started playing “The Birdie Song” and there is a surge of relief at the crowd’s being spared any more New Romantic rubbish as the floor fills with grannies and grandpas and children, with the generation in the middle proudly looking on at the organised cuteness of it all.
Hunter looks away from his daughter as the tears start, silently this time, just flowing without effort of his lungs over his stone face. Janette — seeing that he’s crying again! Jesus! — turns to watch her brother scoop enough pound coins from the pool table to get himself a drink, then she looks back at her silently weeping father to whom she has just confessed her awkward gesture of sorrow and love. He’s taken it all wrong.
She wishes she’d never sent the bloody postcard now, as her comparative competence in matters of the heart is found wanting. Janette watches her father mourn his wife, her mother … watches as for the first time, maybe, he gets past denial and passes into grief, and she wonders if she’s done the right thing.
The bill for dinner was £44.58. Hunter left the change from the fifty as a tip. I don’t know if he did that because Janette told him that’s what you do.
11.5.1
£24,492. 04
12.0
By coincidence or serendipity, depending on your preference, at that very moment and in the very pub where Janette had been working when she’d sent the postcard of Calgary Beach by moonlight, namely the Mishnish in Tobermory, Detective Sergeant “Danny” Boyle and Maggie “Single” Singleton had already fallen in love, had a shower together and come down for a drink before dinner.
12.0.1
It had started in the car, innocently enough. They had just turned left at Scotland’s crossroads, Crianlarich, as you do (the drive by Loch Lomond having exhausted his theories about Hunter and poor Jack and Agnes and the Wheens, which had come very close to the nub of things as I see them — an employment of the heuristic method of analysis of a very high order — Boyle being quite the Thomist), when Maggie asked him if he’d got any brothers and sisters.
12.0.2
Now, she’d never asked him this kind of thing before, it ranking, as a question, just above “what’s your favourite colour,” but there was something about the landscape and the sunshine and the moon being out in the daytime that rendered all things more simply themselves, and just eased the question out of her without forethought … and maybe it was the glow of the green and brown masses of the rising hills, the open sky, that encouraged Danny into talking with genuine warmth about his hitherto unmentioned brother — Michael, the priest, and how they’d always done everything together, and how he’d been out to visit his brother in Rome and then on a mission station in the Ivory Coast, and what a transformative experience Africa had been for him, not out of political sentiment, but simply in changing his perspective on life’s expectations — and Maggie told him what she’d been doing when she’d watched the Live Aid Concert and about her relationship with her own sister who suffered from bipolar depression and how time spent in a psycho ward with your sister drained of life, lost in sheer pain in the minimum act of merely existing also told you a thing or two about what’s what and whether it matters or not, and then they were on to the fact that Danny too had been in a seminary but that he’d fallen in love and abandoned his plans for the priesthood but then it turned out that she was no good, Helen, she’d been cheating on him the whole time, and maybe that sense of betrayal was why he had this fear of emotional commitment … and they steered away from that one, thank you very much, though both had deftly taken note of it, she as information that explained so much about him, poor lamb, and he in surprise at having heard himself say anything so personal to anyone at all let alone to another woman after all these years alone, even though he’d known and liked and admired Maggie for years and looked at her now, wow, in the reflected light from the waters … how it lit through the ends of her hair … and Maggie, flushing at his scrutiny, talked about her own fascination with religion and how she’d never really understood about transubstantiation and that led Danny into a fairly lengthy disquisition on the ins and outs of the Monophysite and Arian heresies he’d studied at the seminary and how when he really got down to it, it was history as a mental discipline rather than spirituality that he loved — the retention of fact and its dialectical relationship to mastering narrative, and by that time they were on the CalMac car ferry from Oban to Mull and he’d made her laugh over a coffee in the bar with some scurrilous tales of the early mediaeval papacy and the famous reluctance of anyone to take the job as the odds were they’d end up strangled, and the conversation hit a sticky patch at the mention of the word “murder” and her stomach almost fell out of her with disappointment as he went for a walk on deack and sank deeper into bitter gloom in the whipping wind as they crossed the sound at how the bastards on top always seemed to get away with it but she countered brilliantly by getting him on to international finance which was a little more abstract and as the ferry hove to at Craignure they found they both had hidden free radicals inside them who were longing for a way out of the cultura
l depression and politics of pessimism we all share, and they found themselves sharing anecdotes of the little kindly things that people sometimes do to redeem themselves, the little things that charm and surprise you and give you hope and by now they were driving along the road from Craignure to Tobermory and it was a glorious day and they passed through Salen and both said aloud at the same moment that it would be really nice to live in a place like this and they’d joked together about the wee hand-knitted police station there and imagined what their duties would be on an island where nobody could get away with anything except on the ferry and then they both avoided wondering any further about what Tommy Hunter, a fucking thug like that might want in a beautiful place like this, no they both suppressed that thought, that reminder of why they were here as they drove down the steep hill flanked by the waterfall and the distillery, down into the picture-book Northern Naples vista of Tobermory harbour with its self-coloured houses and sailing boats and famous cat and its chocolate shop and that really nice bakery where you can get a first-class sandwich, no, they avoided, purposefully all thought but each other and when he booked just the one room for the two of them at the Mishnish without even asking her, my God, just knowing, she felt herself open up inside and the blood pounded in his pelvis and they both knew exactly what was happening and they could hardly breathe and they climbed the narrow stairs of the hotel tripping over each other, and barely made it into the room before they had torn each other’s clothes off.
12.1
The moon was still pale in the late sunlight when the Hunters got back to the campsite and Tommy wordlessly went for a walk around the perimeter, his scheme of things in shards. Ronnie asked Janette what were they gonnae do? What was up with Dad? She lied and said she didn’t know and looked at her father in the distance as the last light left the sky and the lamps of the campsite flickered into life.
