The King of Diamonds itadc-2

by Simon Tolkien

  David was utterly exhausted by the time he got to the turning to his mother’s street. He felt himself tottering from side to side, hanging on to street lamps and garden walls for support like he was a drunk on his last legs returning from an unusually excessive night out on the town. He looked down at his watch — half past six. He’d have to wait and keep watch — his stepfather couldn’t have left for work yet. Crossing the road, he retrieved yesterday’s Daily Express from a litter bin and sat down on a bench with the newspaper held up over his face to hide his features. He was too tired to read more than the headlines: US presses ahead with Polaris submarine program: More nuclear missiles fired from underwater. The bomb, always the bomb — the shadow over all their lives. There were times when he was younger when David had thought about nothing else. He’d seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and read the reports of what had happened after the atomic bombs were dropped on the unsuspecting Japanese down below, and fear of the Russians had kept him up through countless sleepless nights, thinking about the Politburo leaders in their brown fur caps standing on top of the Kremlin wall, watching the tanks roll by on May Day with unreadable expressions on their Slavic faces. But now for a moment he almost welcomed the thought of a war that would wipe everything out, leaving nothing behind.

  He woke up with the sun in his eyes. More than an hour had gone by, and now he had no way of knowing whether his stepfather was still in the house. Cursing his stupidity, David threw the newspaper off his chest, turned the collar of the stolen jacket up around his neck, and started to walk slowly down the street toward his mother’s house. Stopping just before the low box hedge in front of the next-door neighbour’s garden, he knelt down as if to tie his shoelaces and peered round the corner. He took in the front garden — a postage stamp patch of carefully mown grass bordered by two rows of red chrysanthemums growing at precisely equal distances from each other, and beside it, parked on the tiny drive, his stepfather’s brand new lilac-green Ford Anglia motor car, its owner’s proudest possession, gleaming in the early morning sunshine. And then, edging forward, the front bay window of the nondescript little house that had once been David’s home came into view. Framed in the centre, David’s stepfather was at that moment finishing his breakfast. As David watched, Ben Bishop removed his napkin from where he’d had it tucked into the front of his shirt and dabbed it around the corners of his heavy-lipped mouth. Then, getting up from the table, he pulled his braces up over his big shoulders and put on his bus driver’s jacket that had been hanging over the back of the chair before he disappeared from view as he walked away from the window into the interior of the house. The bastard must be just about to go to work, thought David as he retreated back down the street and, sure enough, five minutes later, David caught sight of Ben with both hands on the wheel of his car as he turned carefully onto the main road, headed for the bus depot.

  Back at the house, David suddenly felt an attack of nerves, and his hand shook as he pressed the bell and heard it chime behind the frosted glass of the front door. And all at once, before he’d had any time to compose himself, there was his mother standing two feet away from him, wearing the same pale blue housecoat that she always wore, with a pack of John Player Navy Cut cigarettes in the breast pocket, and a lit one in her hand that she dropped in shock on the doormat when she saw who it was who’d come to call. David reached down to pick it up, and, as he straightened up, he saw how the expression on her face had changed from surprise to fear, almost panic.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘I know you’re not pleased to see me, but I only need a few hours. I’ll be gone long before he gets back.’ He held the cigarette out to her like it was a peace offering, but she shook her head and so he threw it back behind him onto the path where it burnt uselessly, the blue-grey smoke curling up into the cold morning air. And still she said nothing, just stood staring at her son like he was some kind of horrible apparition.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to invite me in?’ he asked, injecting a false cheeriness into his voice. ‘I used to live here, you know — once upon a time.’

  ‘You’ve escaped,’ she said in a dull, flat voice. It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve escaped, and I’ve hurt myself too. Here, in my shoulder. And I need your help, Mother. Please.’

  Suddenly he swayed in the doorway, stumbling over his words as his legs began to buckle beneath him, and instinctively she put her hand under his arm and supported him over the threshold, before he fell to the floor in a dead faint.

  He came to on the hallway carpet. There was a cushion under his head, and a boy whom he didn’t at first recognize was squatting down beside him holding a glass of water. The boy was wearing the most enormous pair of glasses that David had ever seen — he thought they were an illusion at first as his surroundings swam in and out of focus — but behind the glasses were eyes exactly the same colour as his own. David knew who the boy was now: it was his half brother, Max, Ben Bishop’s son. He’d doubled in size since David had last seen him nearly three years before and grown a thick mop of curly black hair on top of his head, and his skin was oddly pale, as if he spent all his time inside.

  ‘You fell over,’ said the boy. He spoke slowly and with an extraordinary seriousness, as if he was disclosing a vital piece of information.

  ‘Yes, I fainted.’

  ‘Fainted? I don’t know fainted.’

  ‘It means “pass out”. Like when you crack your head,’ David added lamely. But Max seemed to understand, and it was almost as if David could see the boy’s mind working as Max carefully added another important word to his store of vocabulary.

  ‘Do you want some water?’ asked Max, holding out the glass, and David took it gratefully in both hands, swallowing the water down in great gulps.

  ‘Where’s…’ David hesitated, unsure of what name to call his mother, but Max came to his rescue.

  ‘Mum?’ he said. ‘She’s in the kitchen. She’s getting you something. I’ve already had my breakfast: toast and jam and cornflakes.’ Max counted off the items like he was making a list.

  ‘Sounds good,’ said David, smiling.

  ‘Mum’: the way Max said the silly one-syllable word touched David suddenly. He and this strange boy had something in common, something vital, and for a moment David felt a deep sense of kinship with this half-brother of his that he hardly knew; for a moment he didn’t feel quite so all alone in the world as he always did.

  His mother’s stern-sounding voice brought him back to reality. ‘Can you walk?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so,’ he said, getting gingerly to his feet.

  ‘Well, you’d better come in the living room if you want me to look at this wound of yours. The light’s better in there.’

  He lay down on the sofa, the same sofa where he used to sit listening to the radio after school what seemed like a lifetime ago, and his mother knelt down next to him, placing the tin box in which she kept her medicines beside her on the floor. He remembered it from his childhood — the bright red cross emblazoned on top of the white tin and, inside, the bandages and elastoplasts and little bottles with strange-sounding names on their labels. He remembered how the box had frightened him and made him feel safe all at the same time.

  Clearly it was an object of fascination to Max as well. The boy’s eyes seemed to get even bigger when his mother opened the box, but that was all he got to see.

  ‘Go and do your homework, Max,’ she said. ‘You know what your father said.’ Reluctantly the boy obeyed. He looked back for a moment at the door. David weakly raised his hand in a farewell gesture, and the boy responded wordlessly in kind.

  ‘Making friends I see,’ said David’s mother. There was no pleasure in her voice, and David sensed her hostility.

  ‘Is that a crime?’ he asked, rising to the challenge.

  ‘No, but escaping from prison is.’

  You don’t know the half of it, thoug
ht David. He had his eyes tight shut, determined not to complain about the pain as she helped him out of the stolen jacket and the ripped-up prison shirt underneath and washed the dried blood away from his shoulder with a wet sponge.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Someone took a shot at me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I was escaping,’ he lied. ‘I could feel the blood afterwards, but I don’t know if the bullet’s in there. Can you see?’ he asked, clenching his teeth and his fists, setting himself against the agony as she probed the wound with her fingers.

  ‘It’s superficial,’ she said eventually. ‘It’ll heal if you give it a chance.’

  He let out his breath in small gasps, physically experiencing his relief as his mother began to dress and bandage the wound. If Claes had really got him with that second shot, then he’d have needed a doctor, and David knew he hadn’t a hope of finding that kind of help without getting caught, however much money he had in his pocket. Now he still had a chance.

  He closed his eyes, daydreaming of freedom, of foreign cities — places he’d never been, where nobody would know him or ask questions — and then suddenly came to when his mother shouted out his name. He looked up: her face was contorted with rage, but there was fear there too, and the beginnings of despair. She was holding the gun in her hand, dangling it between her fingers and thumb like it was something diseased, and he realized what a fool he’d been to forget his mother’s mania for order, for hanging things up. He should never have let her anywhere near the jacket.

  ‘Give me the gun,’ he said. ‘I need it.’

  ‘Not in my house you don’t. Do they know you’ve got this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you used it?’

  ‘No. I tell you I haven’t,’ he added, half-shouting when he saw the look of disbelief written all over his mother’s face, but the repeated denial did nothing to soften the severity of her expression.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter what you did with it. They’ll shoot you when they come if they know you’ve got it. And me too. And Max. He’s only six years old. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Why did you have to come here, David? Why?’ Her voice was rising all the time. Soon she would start to scream.

  ‘Because there was nowhere else. I told you I wouldn’t stay. Just something to eat and a few hours sleep and I’ll be gone, I promise. And they won’t come here today. They think I’ve gone to London. I made it look like that at the station. For Christ’s sake I’m your son. Doesn’t that mean anything?’

  She looked at him long and hard and then over at the brass clock ticking above the fireplace.

  ‘Ben works half days at the weekends, so you can stay until one o’clock,’ she said. ‘But not a minute later. And this stays in here until you go,’ she added, putting the gun in the top drawer of the old bureau in the corner where she kept her papers. ‘I’ll get you some clothes and make you something to eat.’

  He sat at the table in the same place where he had watched his stepfather finishing his breakfast half an hour earlier. Ben Bishop’s oversized shirt and cardigan hung off him like a scarecrow, but at least they were an improvement on the torn, bloody shirt he’d had on up to now. And the breakfast was wonderful. It was hard not to eat too fast. David hadn’t realized just how hungry he was until he started putting the food in his mouth.

  His mother stood in the doorway of the kitchen silently watching him as she smoked yet another cigarette. He remembered how she never seemed to sit down: it was as if she couldn’t allow herself to relax for one moment from the endless round of cooking and cleaning and washing that she’d devised for herself because otherwise… Otherwise what? The world would end? Well, that was probably going to happen anyway, David thought grimly, remembering the newspaper headlines he’d read earlier.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said when he was done. ‘That was the best meal I’ve ever had.’ He wasn’t exaggerating.

  She ignored the compliment. He couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t seem frightened or angry any more, but there was a distance between them that he couldn’t seem to bridge.

  He looked over at the mantelpiece, from which the photographs of his mother and father on their wedding day and of him as a boy of Max’s age had long since disappeared. Consigned to the bureau, he supposed, gathering dust.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dad. It’s like he was never here.’

  ‘No,’ she said, responding to the question but not the comment.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was like you: always full of ideas, never settling to anything. Ideas don’t pay the bills,’ she said with finality.

  ‘Not like Ben, though. I doubt he’s had an idea in his life.’

  ‘He’s solid,’ she said, not taking offence.

  David nodded. He understood what his mother meant. It couldn’t have been easy for her all those years, worrying about debts and eviction notices, although it had to be said that the old man had done better toward the end, with his own one-man business and a second-hand white van with SPARKS ELECTRICS painted on the side to prove it. Much good it did him: the van was where he’d died — a heart attack on his way to a job in Abingdon. ‘Painless,’ the doctor had told them at the hospital, ‘but lucky he was stopped in traffic at the time, now wasn’t it?’

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ David asked. His mother handed him her packet and lit one herself too. The acrid smoke felt good in his lungs, and the shared cigarettes broke down the barrier between them for a moment so that they seemed almost like old comrades, free of the bonds of their failed mother-son relationship.

  ‘The old man’s ideas didn’t do me much good either, you know,’ said David reflectively. ‘All those crazy plans for my future like I was going to be a university professor or something. This is the last town he should have been living in. Those bloody dreaming spires went to his head.’

  ‘He wanted the best for you.’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ said David bitterly. ‘He wanted to live his life again through me. That’s what he wanted. It’s why he spent his last penny and yours too sending me to that posh school — so I could learn to speak like the upper classes, be one of them. And you know what they called me there, Mum? Sparky! Maybe he should have thought twice about sending me to the same place where he changed the lightbulbs, but I expect they gave him a special rate — cut price fees for Sparky Swain’s son. I never stood a bloody chance in that place — that’s the truth.’

  ‘You did all right in your first lot of exams.’

  ‘Yes, to keep him happy. But what was the point in that if he was going to die? What was the point in any of it?’

  ‘I don’t know, David. I’m not God. Like I said, he wanted the best for you. You’re the one who chose to throw it all away. You could have made something of yourself if you’d wanted to.’

  ‘So it’s all my fault, is it?’ David asked angrily.

  ‘You make your bed, and you lie on it,’ said his mother. The finality of the platitude infuriated him, even more so because he couldn’t think of a cutting response.

  ‘Why didn’t you visit me in prison?’ he asked. It was the unspoken question that had been hanging in the air between them ever since he’d arrived.

  ‘Because I couldn’t,’ she said simply. ‘I wanted to, but Ben wouldn’t have it, and I didn’t want to go behind his back.’

  And David knew she was telling no more or less than the truth. Honesty was his mother’s great redeeming quality, and, as had happened so often in the past, his anger bounced off it and evaporated.

  ‘You can sleep in your old room,’ she said. ‘I’ll wake you when it’s time to go.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, getting up. And on impulse he bent over and kissed her on the cheek on his way to the door, and then left without waiting to see her reaction.

  Upstairs, David washed in the tiny bathroom. Just like in the rest of the house there
was not a speck of dirt anywhere — even the taps gleamed in sterile glory. David opened the medicine cabinet over the sink, looking for aspirin, and found some behind a bottle of men’s hair dye. He smiled, amused for a moment by the thought of his stepfather trying to keep his non-existent looks, and then caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror. He looked awful — haggard, with great dark circles under his staring eyes, the living image of a man on the run, a convict on his last legs. He needed to sleep.

  His old bedroom had become Max’s room, distinctively Max’s room. The bed and most of the furniture were still the same, but every surface was covered with careful arrangements of toy soldiers and Dinky cars and different species of furry animals. There was something oddly touching about this great assembly of disparate objects and creatures, and yet the room was still disturbing to David’s peace of mind. Here he’d played and read and slept, done his homework with his father, and been tended to by his mother when he had the measles. He’d had a family and a purpose and a life, and now he’d come back here a fugitive from justice, an outlaw like in those John Wayne movies he used to watch at the cinema when he was a kid. David closed his eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. Outside a cacophony of Sunday-morning church bells pealed out, calling the faithful to worship, and he tossed and turned on the bed, tormented by the memory of Katya lying on her bed with a bloody hole in the middle of her pretty forehead and the gun shaking in his hand like it had a life of its own.

  David opened his eyes and saw Max in the doorway. The boy looked worried, and his eyes behind his oversized spectacles seemed even larger than before.

  ‘You cried,’ he said, ‘like you were having a nightmare or something.’