Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  We all took the same train, but Cerys and Simon got out at Camden Town. As she stepped out of the carriage, Cerys turned and grinned and pumped a fist, in a parody of a tennis player’s self-encouragement, and I experienced an intimation, at that moment, of something like paternal affection. This had happened before, with Cerys, but it seemed more acute this time.

  ‘What was that all about?’ asked Aileen. I explained.

  14

  Sam repaired the garden wall and again his work was faultless. So impressed was Aileen that she compiled a list of extra jobs we might ask him to do: a couple of the sash windows needed attention; the utility room would benefit from replastering; some floorboards upstairs were in poor condition; another floor could be sanded and sealed. Sam was, she remarked, the workman you dream of finding.

  And it wasn’t just that he was so versatile and dependable and not at all expensive – he was so helpful as well. When Aileen – needing to get a parcel posted in a hurry – found that her car wouldn’t start, Sam came promptly to the rescue. Having ferried her in the Toyota to and from the post office, he diagnosed the problem with the car, removed the faulty battery, picked up a replacement for her, and fitted it. Then he stayed at work past six, to make up for lost time, as he put it. Hearing Aileen coming back from the supermarket, he left the wall for a few minutes to give her a hand with the carrier bags. Aileen made a remark in passing about a wobbly chair leg – next thing she knew, Sam had fixed it, without being asked. A door upstairs was sticking – Sam took it upon himself to plane and rehang it, while Aileen was out of the house for a couple of hours. He’d noticed the small table I’d made for Aileen in our first year together, and had asked if he could take a closer look at it. He’d admired it very much, and so – she hoped I wouldn’t mind – she had told him a little about my father and his work. As for Sam’s own story, he’d volunteered some more scraps of information, mostly about his years as a boy in the Midlands and his father’s blighted career in manufacturing. Those scraps did not include, however, the facts about his place in the Hendy family.

  Sam came to the end of Aileen’s list on a Wednesday. He’d sanded and varnished the boards of the upstairs room with such care, it looked like something from the Ideal Home Exhibition. Now all he had to do was to put the finishing touches to the utility room and paint the sash windows. Aileen and I were both working at home that day. Midway through the morning, after Aileen had gone into town on some errand, I went into the kitchen; within a minute Sam appeared, ostensibly to get a glass of water. We’d not had anything you could call a conversation since the day I’d gone up onto the roof with him – just a few words in the morning, as I left for London. Now, as if we were resuming a discussion that we’d not had the chance to finish, he said: ‘I really liked Cerys, by the way. Terrific pair of lungs on her.’

  My comprehension lagged a few seconds behind my hearing of his words. ‘You went to the show?’ was eventually my response.

  ‘Well, duh,’ he replied, grinning; his mockery had a tinge of malice in it.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Same night as you. I was sitting a dozen rows back.’

  ‘I didn’t see you.’

  ‘You looked right at me,’ he said.

  ‘I couldn’t have.’

  He shrugged, holding his hands out, open, to the side. ‘What can I say? I was standing up; you were standing up, thirty feet away; you aimed your face in my direction; you didn’t see me.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you come over?’

  ‘I think you mean: “What the hell were you doing there?”’

  ‘I know what you were doing there.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I do,’ I stated, with incontrovertible emphasis.

  His response was an insouciant ‘OK’ and a shrug.

  ‘So why didn’t you come over?’

  ‘Didn’t want to butt in, did I?’ At this I couldn’t prevent a quarter-smile of grim amusement; he ignored it. ‘Went very well, I thought, didn’t you? Crowd seemed to appreciate it. Must have been gratifying.’

  I agreed that the evening had been a success.

  ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I thought the girls had a better game than the blokes. Quite a girl, the dark-haired one. And your girl was bloody good and all. Nice voice. Not surprised you like her so much.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean: what am I talking about? I’m talking about your Cerys. She seems very nice. She’s cute. She’s got a spark to her. I can see why you like her so much.’

  ‘You’re in no position to say something like that,’ I told him.

  ‘You saying she’s not nice?’ he replied, affecting bewilderment.

  ‘No. Of course she’s nice. I’m not saying that, as you know full well. I’m saying you’re in no position to talk about my liking her. You don’t know anything about us.’ As I said this, it crossed my mind that if he’d been in the hall and I’d failed to spot him, he might have followed us to the bar that we’d gone to after the show; for a moment, before sense reasserted itself, it didn’t seem impossible that he’d seen me walking with Cerys to the Tube station.

  He was shaking his head now, slowly, with the demeanour of a man who had decided to let an insult pass. ‘You’re forgetting,’ he said, in a mollifying tone, ‘that I have spent time with your wife. She has told me things about your niece. She has told me that you’re very close to her. Both of you. And I’m saying that I can see why.’ The tone was still low and smooth, but the last phrase sounded like the commencement of a threat.

  Before I could form a response, he asked me: ‘You an only child, by any chance?’

  The question was so presumptuous that, taken aback, I answered it without thinking. I said that I was.

  ‘So that’s one way we’re alike,’ he said, with an encouraging smile, as though this might be a basis from which we could make progress. Then he wanted to know if either of my parents were still alive. Having been told that they were both dead, he asked: ‘Get on with them, did you?’

  ‘Yes, I did. Very well,’ I replied, intending to stop the interrogation there.

  Immediately he had another question: ‘How did they meet?’ I told him that I didn’t know how they met. ‘Really?’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t see anything odd in that,’ I replied. ‘And I can’t see that my parents’ courtship is any business of yours.’

  Sam screwed his eyes shut as though stung by smoke; he opened them wide: the message was that he could hardly believe his own ears. ‘I’m sorry?’ he said. ‘None of my business? The lives of my grandparents are none of my business?’ He held his arms out as though cradling the vast truth that my decaying old brain had unaccountably overlooked, and then he said, softly, in the tone of someone coming to a subject that could no longer be deferred, however much the person he’s addressing might wish to defer it: ‘When are you going to tell Aileen? I know it’s hard, but just give me an idea. You don’t want me to tell her, do you?’ This was said as if he were offering to help me out.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘of course I don’t.’

  ‘When, then? After I’ve done here? Would that be easier, if I wasn’t around?’

  I had never thought that Sam was my son. At most, his being my son had seemed not wholly impossible. By this point, however, I had observed him at close quarters for several days, and had noticed not even a tenuous indication of kinship between us. The probability of my being his father was now only an infinitesimal degree short of zero. ‘That would be easier,’ I agreed. With a sensation akin to that of missing a step, I went on to say: ‘But I can’t see what would be gained by telling her.’

  His eyebrows crumpled; his mouth came open; with jerky movements of his head he looked around the kitchen, as if suddenly he didn’t recognise the room. ‘Could you say that again?’ he whispered. ‘You can’t see what would be gained? You can’t see what would be gained if you were to tell her the truth
? You’re my father. I want that to be known. I want it acknowledged. Can’t you understand? How can you say nothing would be gained? How can you say that?’ His voice was rising, but he appeared to be more distressed than angry.

  ‘Well,’ I answered, ‘if I speak to Aileen, the one thing we know for a fact is that she’ll be upset.’

  ‘At first, yes,’ he agreed.

  ‘Very upset. Possibly for a very long time. Do you want that? You say you like her. So do you want me to make her unhappy? Is that what you want?’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. His eyes scanned the floor, as if tracing a maze there, before coming to rest in a stare of hopelessness. ‘So what do you expect me to do?’ he asked, still looking at the floor. ‘Just fuck off and forget all about it?’

  I was on firm ground again, I thought. ‘Sam,’ I said, ‘I like you. Aileen likes you.’ He glanced at me; there was tightness around the eyes and mouth; he seemed to making a great effort to prevent tears from appearing. ‘And I’m not just saying that. We do,’ I said. And then I took the decisive step forward: ‘But I have to tell you – I don’t think we’re related. In fact, I’m sure we’re not,’ I stated, and the act of stating it made my belief even more secure.

  Slowly he turned to look at me. His face showed the profound incomprehension of a man being addressed in a language of which he speaks not a word.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and sorry was a part of what I felt. ‘I am not your father.’

  This statement too, to judge from Sam’s expression, was bereft of sense. He examined my face, as though I were a mystifying object that he’d just encountered in a museum. ‘I’m not hearing this,’ he said in a dead voice, more to himself than to me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated. I was trying to be as soothing as possible, but sounded insincere and unctuous.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘The certificate, remember? Mother: Sarah. Father: you – in her writing.’

  ‘I know you’re Sarah’s son,’ I replied, which was overstating the case. ‘But my name shouldn’t be there.’

  ‘What? Like it’s a mistake?’

  ‘That’s one possibility.’

  The response to this was a laugh like a paper bag exploding. ‘You hope,’ he said.

  ‘No. That’s what I believe.’

  ‘Look me in the eye and say that,’ he said.

  I did so, and I wasn’t sure if what I saw in his eyes was loathing or the deepest anguish.

  ‘That’s ridiculous. Absolutely fucking ridiculous,’ he said. The syllables sounded as though they were being pressed beneath an immense weight of anger.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ I countered, calmly but immediately, because it seemed to me that if I faltered he would be likelier to erupt. Talking in the sort of voice you’d use on someone who was standing on a ledge forty feet above the street, I told him what I believed: that the appearance of my name on the certificate didn’t prove that I was his father – it proved perhaps that Sarah had thought that I was the father of her child. ‘I was the most likely candidate,’ I told him, ‘but likelihood isn’t certainty.’

  ‘She was certain,’ said Sam, in the same pressurised monotone. ‘She told me you were my father.’

  ‘OK. But you can see why she might have said that without being absolutely sure in her own mind? You can see why, with you there, she’d want to say something definite?’

  He looked away, frowning with the difficulty of accepting what he understood me to have meant. When he turned back to me, it was with an expression of great distaste. ‘She screwed around? That’s what you’re telling me? She was fucking around so it could have been you or it could have been some other bloke. Or who the fuck knows else. Pick a name out the hat. That’s it?’

  ‘That’s not how I’d put it,’ I answered.

  ‘I know that’s not how you’d put it. But that’s what you’re saying. Yes?’

  ‘All I’m saying is that is that I wasn’t the only one she was involved with. There was one other man. I know that for a fact. And I suspect there were others. I’m not making any judgement on her. Don’t think that. I’m not that big a hypocrite. But that was the situation. There were others.’

  Sam shook his head, slowly, like a policeman being asked to accept a risibly feeble alibi. ‘This is unbelievable,’ he murmured. ‘Totally fucking unbelievable.’

  ‘It’s not unbelievable, Sam,’ I said. ‘It’s possible. More than possible. I think it’s the only explanation. The only explanation I can think of.’

  ‘Only explanation you can think up, you mean,’ he said. The tone was contemptuous, but his anger seemed to be dissipating.

  ‘No,’ I persisted. ‘We’re clearly not related. Just look at us,’ I said, gesturing from myself to Sam and from Sam to myself again. I may even have made myself shrink a little, to enhance the discrepancy between us. ‘She may have thought I was your father, but if she were to see us now, she’d know I’m not. The idea is irreconcilable with reality.’

  Sam was regarding me as if he were dealing with someone who wanted him to believe that an object in front of him was an entirely different colour from the colour he was seeing. ‘I’ll tell you what the reality is,’ he said. ‘You can’t accept what’s happened. You don’t want to see it, so you’re making out you don’t see it. That’s the reality.’ I was about to reply when I heard Aileen’s car on the drive. Sam turned, registered the sound with a shrug of the eyebrows, as if dismissing it as a triviality, and carried on talking. ‘You know why she never told you about me?’ he went on. ‘It’s simple. She wanted shot of you. She thought you were an arsehole. That’s what she told me. A five-star arsehole.’ He peered into my eyes, gauging the impact of the insult, but there was no impact. For one thing, Sarah had called me worse things than that. For another, it was too long ago: the shot fell years short of its target.

  The car door slammed. ‘Sam,’ I said, ‘we have to—’

  ‘I don’t have to anything,’ he carried on, apparently intending to maintain the attack regardless of Aileen’s return. ‘It’s not that you don’t believe you’re my father. That’s not it. You don’t want me to be your son. That’s what it is. I’m not the kind of boy you’d have wanted, am I?’ With a sneer he surveyed the kitchen; he looked out at the garden, as if measuring it. ‘I know what this is about. Oh yes, I do,’ he said, with the weariness of one who, though young, has no more illusions as to the rules of life.

  The key was in the door. ‘Sam—’ I pleaded.

  ‘One thing I was wondering,’ he continued, oblivious. ‘Why haven’t you got any other kids? You didn’t want any? Is that it? You couldn’t handle it?’ The question was asked aggressively, as if I were being asked to explain something reprehensible that I’d done.

  I wanted to tell him that it was none of his business, but the front door had closed and a weakness had flooded through me like water crashing down a pipe. In ten seconds everything would start to come apart. Sam glanced at me, gave me a smile that seemed to commiserate, and moved towards the back door. ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t pretend it’s not disappointing, but I hope we can work it out. Let’s talk again.’ Aileen entered. ‘Hi, Mrs Pattison,’ he said, as if they were passing each other on the street.

  But later that day Aileen came into the study to tell me she’d just had a very strange conversation with Sam. She’d gone out into the garden and come across him crouched by the drain at the side of the house, rinsing his brushes under the tap. They exchanged a few words, and while they were talking Sam started to scratch at the scars on his forearm – to claw at them, as if they were giving him a maddening itch. ‘Gives me gyp sometimes,’ he said. Aileen asked if anything from the medicine cabinet might help; the offer was gratefully declined. It was Sam’s last day at the house; she’d wondered about the scar, and now she decided to ask him about it, expecting a brief answer.

  Instead, Sam was suddenly as talkative as he’d been during our Sunday lunch. He’d been
burned by an Iraqi kid, he told her – or rather, ‘a fucking Iraqi kid’, the words being pronounced with venom, as though he were seeing the culprit as he spoke. Never before had she heard Sam in unedited mode. They’d been patrolling past some shops, very slowly, because the crowd was so dense, and then the people flowed away in the space of a few seconds and some shots went off, and the next thing they knew this kid – twelve years old, thirteen maybe – had materialised from behind a donkey and was coming at them, holding a Pepsi bottle with a rag on fire in its neck. The kid ‘got dropped’, said Sam, but before going down he’d managed to chuck his bottle, and Sam’s arm was going up in smoke. So two of his mates were putting his arm out while the others were taking cover and returning fire, and then the captain noticed some activity in a doorway, and in the next instant there was an RPG in the air – ‘rocket propelled grenade’, Sam explained, in a peculiarly detached voice, as if adding a dash of commentary to someone else’s narrative. The RPG missed by yards, but the retaliation was bang on target. ‘We really sorted him out,’ said Sam, almost smacking his lips at the thought of it. ‘That lad got superkilled, I’m telling you. You could have put what was left of him in a shoe box.’

  To Aileen it was clear that Sam had wanted to shock her, but that wasn’t quite the effect he achieved. The story was horrible, of course, but the teller made as strong an impression as the tale, and she was perplexed by him. Perhaps she was also a little disturbed. Certainly she was troubled by what she witnessed not long afterwards. From our bedroom window she looked down into the garden and saw Sam by the wall that he’d repaired. He was examining a part of it as though he’d found something there that dissatisfied him. With a forefinger he was picking at it over and over again, and then he punched the wall, twice, very quickly. That done, he strolled back to the house, his demeanour that of a man with not a worry in the world. He stopped at the rose bush, bent down to look closely at the blooms, put his nose to a flower, and smiled with closed eyes.