The Sandfather

by Linda Newbery

  He grappled with the clip fastenings of his rucksack, then fumbled inside. Triumphantly, he produced the bag of marbles, and held it out to Wesley with both hands.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Look!’ Hal pulled open the drawstring fastening, and shook the bag to make the marbles chink. He reached in and took one out - yes, the tiger’s eye! - to hold up, in case there could be any doubt at all.

  Wesley only looked baffled. ‘Sorry, you’ve lost me.’

  ‘Oh, come on! You gave them to Mum, didn’t you? Because people called her Marbles, same as I get called. And she told me they were from my father.’

  Wesley looked at the marbles and then at Hal, shaking his head slowly. ‘Sorry, no. Maybe they are from your father, but not from me. Yes, I called her Marbles sometimes - people did - but I didn’t give these to Tina. I’ve never seen them before.’

  ‘You’re lying!’ Hal burst out. ‘I know you are!’

  There was pity now in the way Wesley looked at him: pity and concern. And it didn’t look like concern for his son - just a stranger’s sympathy for a weird kid who was throwing a strop. This, even more than denial, fuelled Hal’s anger. He tried to say more, but it came out as a strangled gulp.

  ‘Hal, please believe me. I’m not lying,’ said Wesley, in a voice of quiet reasonableness. ‘I’m sorry if you’re disappointed. Obviously you want to know who your father is, but it’s not me. Truthfully it isn’t. I’m married to Valerie and we’ve got two little girls of our own. Before that - quite a while before - I went out with your mum. We were both teenagers when we met. I liked her a lot and we had good times together, and I was sorry when we split up. She was the one who ended it. She went off to Manchester and I went to Loughborough to do sports management. We both met new people, lost touch. That’s it. I didn’t even know she’d had a baby. How is she, anyway?’

  ‘She’s in hospital,’ Hal spat out. Immediately he remembered that Mum was at Claire’s now, but he didn’t tell Wesley that.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Wesley said. ‘You’re having a tough time, aren’t you?’

  Hal huffed a laugh. ‘Yeah. You could say that.’

  Wesley’s scrutiny was making him feel big and awkward. His eyes were stinging and his face felt puffy, his head throbbing enough to burst. His limbs felt uncontrollable, as if they might lash out, kick and hit. He wanted to hit Wesley. Snatching at his rucksack, he stuffed the bag of marbles back in, spilling some on the floor, where they rolled noisily. He’d have walked out without them, but Wesley gathered them up, scrabbling under his chair, and handed them back. Hal looked at the three marbles cupped in the palm of Wesley’s hand; he fumbled, trying to take them, and almost dropped them again. Time seemed to have gone into slow-motion. His fingers felt like a bunch of bananas, but at last he’d got them, thrust them in with the others.

  He was on his feet, blundering towards the open door. Wesley stood in his way, putting a restraining hand on his arm. Hal could easily have hit out. He pushed roughly back, but Wesley was a big man, strong and fit, and probably trained in karate or something. With no effort at all he deflected Hal’s arm so that the shove twisted uselessly to one side.

  ‘Let go!’ Hal bleated, though Wesley had never grabbed hold.

  ‘Now, look,’ Wesley said, in a low, infuriatingly calm voice. ‘You’ve got yourself upset. I can’t let you leave like this. Who’s looking after you? Is there someone I can phone? Someone who can come and fetch you?’

  ‘Piss off!’ Hal hissed it through clenched teeth. He ducked past Wesley and out, ignoring another male staff member who was approaching the door, drawn by the shouting.

  Hal ran.

  17

  MOONY

  Wesley was lying. Hal knew he had to be. Lying. Wesley. Wesley. Lying.

  The words banged and hammered in Hal’s head while his feet pounded the pavement.

  Wesley. Liar. Liar. Wesley.

  Drumming and thumping. His feet trying to outrun the voice in his brain.

  Had to be lying. Nothing made sense, otherwise.

  Either that, or he’d got the dates wrong. Thirteen years, fourteen - it was a long time ago. How could he be so sure?

  Hal didn’t know where he was going, or where he wanted to be. Only that he had to be away from everyone. Had to think. Had to not think. Didn’t want to be with his thoughts. Didn’t want to be with himself.

  One thing he was sure of - Wesley hadn’t known about him. Hadn’t known his name, hadn’t known he existed. Wesley’s surprise had been genuine; he hadn’t been faking.

  Mum had ended it. Wesley had said so.

  Because she was pregnant? Pregnant, and hadn’t told Wesley?

  But the dates—

  Wesley must have got it wrong. Mum had been pregnant, so she’d dumped him.

  Why? Why would she? Wouldn’t Wesley be the person she’d want to be with?

  He was arguing himself into knots and tangles.

  There was only one person who knew. And he could ask her now. His mobile was in his pocket.

  Reaching the road, he turned left instead of right towards the town and sea-front, then left again into a builder’s yard. A truck was parked there, alongside stacks of wooden pallets, broken slabs and a heap of gravel. Nettles and brambles grew thickly by a mesh fence.

  He shrugged off his rucksack, dropped it on the ground and took his mobile out of his pocket. When he rang Mum’s number she answered almost at once.

  ‘Hal!’ He could hear the smile in her voice. ‘How are you? How was the sailing? I bet it was great.’

  ‘Fine. Mum—’

  ‘Is everything all right? Are you with Aunt Jude?’

  ‘No. Yeah. I’ve just been talking to Wesley Prince.’

  A beat’s silence. Then: ‘Wesley Prince? What - how - is he there at the house?’

  ‘No. But Mum - is Wesley my dad? Is he?’

  Another pause, then: ‘No, Hal, he isn’t. What’s happened? How did you meet him? What made you think—?’

  No, Hal, he isn’t.

  No, Hal, he isn’t.

  His last hope, gone.

  ‘But—’ he whimpered. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Hal, of course I’m sure. Wesley was my boyfriend, but he’s not your father. Definitely not.’

  There was a silence. Hopelessness crashed around Hal, beat in his ears, muffled his throat. Back where he was. Dadless. Fatherless. Wesleyless. No nearer knowing than he’d ever been. He stared around, at the nettles, the brambles, some bits of chip paper caught in the fence; he’d forgotten he was still connected, until Mum started speaking again.

  ‘Hal? Hal? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, not feeling as if he was.

  ‘Listen. I’m coming down to see you. I’ll tell you - a bit more, OK? You need to know. Only thing is, I can’t drive, so I’ll have to wait till Claire can bring me. Where are you now?’

  ‘Uh - I’m—’

  ‘Are you at the house? Is Aunt Jude there?’

  Impossible to speak, to give a sensible reply. He ended the call, and switched off his mobile. Then he tore at the nettles, grasping a handful of stalks together, tearing off the leaves. The stinging and prickling of his palms was almost pleasurable. Picking up half a brick, he flung it as hard as he could, and watched it bounce and skitter off the rutted concrete. Then he ran up the slope of gravel, his feet slithering. He kicked and trampled the heap, fell on his hands and knees, got up again, stamped out his fury and frustration. Tears ran down his face and into the sides of his mouth.

  How pathetic he must look! A big kid having a tantrum. There might be security cameras. Dogs patrolling.

  He picked up his rucksack and slunk away.

  Now he remembered that he’d told Luke. Czeszka, too. A stupid boast, that’s all it had been. He’d made a prat of himself, and soon they’d know.

  The town seemed too small now, small and suffocating. He thought everyone he saw would stare at him, would guess how stupid he’d
been. He felt like a little lost boy who might burst into tears. Hurrying - but why? What for? What was the use of anything, now? - he was soon at the sea-front, facing the beach. Below a grey sky the wind was strengthening, gusting in from the sea. Some way out he saw a sailing-boat making way with difficulty, bobbing and rocking. The waves were white-topped, which meant rough weather, as Hal knew from his sailing trip. White horses, Mike had called them; Hal remembered that with a distant, irrelevant part of his mind. A dog-walker passed him and called out a cheery ‘good morning’. His dog, a spaniel, barked and barked at the waves, dashing back as each one rolled in.

  Hal felt in a mood to be angered by anyone who seemed pointlessly happy. Some people seemed cheerful merely to be alive. Mum, sometimes. Aunt Jude, definitely. Hal wanted gloom. He wanted rain and thunder and fog. He wanted everyone to be as miserable as he was.

  Mum, he knew, would be straight on the phone to Aunt Jude. They’d be talking about him, whispering the things he mustn’t know, the things they knew but weren’t going to tell him. As if he was a little kid, too young or too dim to be told the truth.

  He hated them. Hated everyone.

  He hurled a boulder into the sea, then another - grazing his fingers and his knuckles as he heaved them up, getting sand and grit under his nails and into the small cuts and grazes he was giving himself. The dunk of each stone going in, the explosion of water, gave him brief satisfaction, but then he was restless again, looking for another, bigger one. Bigger and bigger. Heavy enough for his resentment. Heavy enough to make a tsunami.

  Half of him, the Wesley half, the half he thought he’d found, the Jamaican half, the half with a kindly grandfather and a family and a place, had faded again, been washed into the sea, dissolved, gone, had left him stranded and alone, had never been part of him at all.

  When he tired of chucking stones, he stood panting. What now?

  Don. This had to be Don’s fault, didn’t it? Don had told him to go and see Wesley, told him, yes, Wesley was his father. Sort it out, he’d said.

  He jogged along the row of beach huts expecting to see Don sitting on the deck, or going down to swim, or his hut door fastened open while he sat inside painting.

  The hut was locked up like all the others. Not a sign of him.

  But Don was always here. Hal had taken it for granted that he’d be here now. Don had to be the one to receive his anger: Mum was too far away, his father still invisible. Don was the only one within reach.

  He could go in anyway. He knew where Don put the key - underneath the big stone beside the door. Brainless! Moronic! Wasn’t that the first place anyone would think of looking?

  And there it was.

  Hal unlocked the door, hooked it back and went in.

  The hut smelled of white spirit and coffee and dampness. Everything was just as Don had left it: the table covered with a litter of paint tubes and brushes, pencil stubs, an empty cigarette packet, sticks of charcoal, articles torn from newspapers, a leaflet about the new Arts Centre, postcards, sketches, nails and screws, several pound coins and odd bits of change, a mug with dregs of sticky brown, an envelope addressed to Don Inchbold, a Stanley knife with a sharp blade, half a Kit-Kat, stones and shells from the beach, a roll of parcel tape.

  Next to the table stood the easel with a painting propped on it, on a rectangle of the Daler board Don used. There was a layer of pale wash and some darker shapes, underneath an angry scribble of charcoal. Hal remembered Don’s bad day - was the charcoal a scrawling-over of failed work, or part of the picture?

  The bottom part of the table was made of two large shelves, each as large as the table-top. Flat boards were stacked there, dozens of them, some swathed in plastic, or cardboard or bubble-wrap. Hal hesitated. He wanted to shout at Don, rage at him, tell him he was stupid, he’d got it all wrong about Wesley, he’d lied. But he felt daunted by the atmosphere of the hut. He shouldn’t have come in while Don wasn’t there.

  Shrugging off doubt, he knelt on the floor and pulled at the stack of pictures on the lower shelf. Boards and plastic slid and tilted to the floor. Reckless now, Hal tugged at the shelf above, producing another satisfying slither.

  Painting after painting after painting. Various sizes and styles; some were the merest breath on the board, like the first wisp of an idea, hardly captured; others were finished and signed. Some were mounted and framed, others just raw-edged board. Most startling of all was that several had big letters slashed across them in bright red:USELESS

  RUBBISH

  CRAP

  Hal laid these out in a row on the sofa, and stared at them. Bad days? Don’s judgement of himself? Or were they artworks in themselves?

  A tread on the doorstep made him jump.

  Don.

  He stood there looking in, looking at Hal, at the pictures spread all over the floor. He said nothing, breathing hard.

  Hal cowered guiltily. What was he doing? What had come over him?

  Still not speaking, Don came further in. Carefully he skirted round the easel. He picked up the Stanley knife from the table and put it down again. He stood close to Hal, looking at the three words gashed in red.

  ‘I’m—’ Hal tried.

  Don’s chin jutted. ‘See? See? You know now. You know what I really am. Rubbish. Useless. Kuh-c-crap. Can’t do anything, can’t get anything right. Good idea of yours to trash the place. Go on - what are you waiting for? Chuck it out, chuck everything out.’ He gestured towards the pictures on the floor. ‘Break them up, smash them, use them for firewood. Yes, let’s have a fire! Burn the lot. All this useless old tat. All this detritus. Better burned.’

  He lunged towards Hal. Thinking he was going to hit or grab him, Hal sprawled to one side. But Don was aiming at the boards still on the shelf. In a fury he grabbed at them and hauled. He snatched a green pastel from the table-top and scrawled TAT and JUNK on another of the pictures, a delicate seascape, in strokes so fierce that the pastel snapped in two. Then he chucked the pieces aside and began to pull at a big, heavy painting swathed in bubble-wrap.

  ‘Don, stop!’ Hal shouted, trying to push it back. ‘Stop it! Don’t!’

  If Don heard, he took no notice at all. Hal clutched his arm, but Don flung his elbow back and threw him off-balance. While he lurched to his feet, Don picked up the Stanley knife and began hacking and tearing at the bubble-wrap, careless of the painting inside.

  ‘This one! This can go first,’ he muttered.

  ‘Wait! Stop!’ Hal pleaded. ‘Let me see.’

  It may not have been a good idea to position himself between the sharp blade and the painting, but that’s what he’d done, with no time to think. For an instant he saw Don’s face, very close, contorted in rage and sorrow, and the Stanley knife gripped tight in his raised hand. Everything went blurry; next moment he heard the knife drop to the floor and clatter on the boards. Neither of them picked it up. Don sat down slowly on the sofa. He lifted both hands to his face, pressing fists into his eyes.

  ‘I didn’t mean - my God, Hal! - I didn’t mean - I could have—’

  Hal was trembling, but found himself saying calmly, ‘It’s all right. You didn’t! It’s OK, honest.’

  He glanced down, saw the knife lying on the floor, and surreptitiously covered it with his foot.

  ‘But I nearly - could have—’ Don wailed. ‘As if I haven’t done enough damage already!’

  ‘What is it?’ Hal asked, to divert him. ‘This painting?’

  ‘Heap of old tat. Completely worthless. Waste of paint.’

  Don poked at the shredded bubble-wrap with his foot, then bent down to pull it aside. Hal helped. They both looked at the painting underneath.

  Night sky. Stars. Moon, a great curve of it filling a third of the picture, so close that Hal saw craters and ridges and folds in the rock. He felt dizzied by its perspective, as if he were in a spacecraft approaching the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin must have had a view like this.

  There were maybe three or four painti
ngs in the world that Hal could put a name to, and he was gazing at one of them. Moony. By Don Inchbold. 1969. Private Collection. Last seen by Hal on the Modern Painters website.

  ‘Is this it? Moony? The actual painting?’

  ‘For what it’s - nnng - worth,’ Don said, subdued now.

  ‘But Aunt Jude told me it was stolen!’

  ‘It was. I stole it.’

  ‘What,’ Hal mocked, ‘stole it from yourself?’

  ‘That’s right!’ Don was defiant. ‘I hid it. Sold it, then changed my mind. Gave the money back. Pretended it was stolen. I didn’t want anyone to see it any more.’

  ‘So now you want to slash it to bits? How could you do that? Your most famous painting?’

  ‘I don’t want it. It’s no use to me. You have it, if you like it. And I won’t be coming here any more.’ Don scuffed his plimsoll on the sandy floorboards.

  ‘Not coming here? Why not?’

  ‘She’s chucked me out, Hal. Doesn’t want me around. I don’t blame her.’

  ‘Aunt Jude? Why?’

  ‘Mucked everything up, didn’t I?’ Don wiped his nose on the sleeve of the baggy knitted cardigan he was wearing; Hal saw his eyes shiny with tears.

  ‘But - I don’t get it. What’s happened?’

  Don shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you. We had a blazing row. Ask her. She’ll tell you what a - k - useless old fool I am. Waste of space. Nothing but trouble. Sorry - nng - sorry, Hal.’

  ‘Look.’ Hal was terrified that Don was actually going to collapse into sobs - then what would he do? ‘She can’t have meant it.’

  ‘She always means what she says. Says what she means,’ Don said, his voice wavering.

  ‘No, but she wouldn’t, like, really chuck you out - she just wouldn’t.’ Hal looked around hopelessly for something to make Don feel better; his eye lighted on the kettle. ‘Shall I get us a drink or something? Coffee?’

  ‘No. No thanks.’ Don bent down, took off one of his plimsolls, tipped small stones out of it, and put it back on; then he stood. ‘God, what a mess this place is. Should have had a good sort-out, months ago. You ought to get home,’ he told Hal, standing up, straightening, becoming the adult again. ‘She’s expecting you. Have you - nngg - checked your mobile?’