The Whisper Man

by Alex North

  “Yes,” he said.

  “That’s a nice picture.”

  “It’s not finished yet.”

  “What is it going to be?”

  He thought about how to explain the battle he was drawing—all the different sides fighting it out, with the lines between them and the scribbles over the ones who had lost—but it was too difficult.

  “Just a battle.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go outside and play with the other children? It’s such a lovely day.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “We’ve got some spare sunscreen.” She looked around. “There’s probably a hat somewhere too.”

  “I need to finish my drawing.”

  Sharon stood back up again, sighing quietly to herself, but with a kind expression on her face. She was worried about him, and while she didn’t need to be, he supposed that was still kind of nice. Jake could always tell when people were concerned about him. Daddy often was, except for those times when he lost his patience. Sometimes he shouted, and said things like, It’s just because I want you to talk to me, I want to know what you’re thinking and feeling, and it was scary when that happened, because Jake felt like he was disappointing Daddy and making him sad. But he didn’t know how to be different from how he was.

  Around and around—another force field, the lines overlapping. Or maybe it was a portal instead? So that the little figure inside could disappear away from the battle and go somewhere better. Jake turned the pencil around and began carefully erasing the person from the page.

  There.

  You’re safe now, wherever you are.

  One time after Daddy lost his temper, Jake found a note on his bed. There was what he had to admit was a very good picture of the two of them smiling, and underneath that Daddy had written: I’m sorry. I want you to remember that even when we argue we still love each other very much. XXX. Jake had put the note into his Packet of Special Things, along with all the other important things he needed to keep. He checked now. The Packet was on the table in front of him, right beside the drawing.

  “You’re going to be moving to the new house soon,” the little girl said.

  “Am I?”

  “Your daddy went to the bank today.”

  “I know. But he says he’s not sure it’s going to happen. They might not give him the thing he needs.”

  “The mortgage,” the little girl said patiently. “But they will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s a famous writer, isn’t he? He’s good at making things up.” She looked at the picture he was drawing and smiled to herself. “Just like you.”

  Jake wondered about the smile. It was a strange one, as though she were happy but also sad about something. Come to think of it, that was how he felt about moving. He didn’t like it in the house anymore, and he knew it was making Daddy miserable too, but moving still felt like something they maybe shouldn’t do, even though he was the one who’d spotted the new house on Daddy’s iPad when they were looking together.

  “I’ll see you after I move, won’t I?” he said.

  “Of course you will. You know that you will.” But then the little girl leaned forward, speaking more urgently. “Whatever happens, though, remember what I told you. It’s important. You have to promise me, Jake.”

  “I promise. What does it mean, though?”

  For a moment he thought she might be going to try to explain it more, but then the buzzer went on at the far side of the room.

  “Too late,” she whispered. “Your daddy’s here.”

  Four

  Most of the children seemed to be playing outside the 567 Club when I arrived. I could hear the mingled laughter as I parked. They all looked so happy—so normal—and for a moment my gaze moved between them, searching for Jake, hoping to see him among them.

  But, of course, my son wasn’t there.

  I found him inside instead, sitting with his back to me, hunched over a drawing. My heart broke a little at the sight of him. Jake was small for his age, and his posture right then made him seem tinier and more vulnerable than ever. As though he were trying to disappear into the picture in front of him.

  Who could blame him? He hated it here, I knew, even if he never objected to coming or complained about it afterward. But it felt like I had no choice. There had been so many unbearable occasions since Rebecca’s death: the first haircut I had to take him to; ordering his school clothes; fumbling the wrapping of his Christmas presents because I couldn’t see properly through the tears. An endless list. But for some reason, holidays had been the hardest. As much as I loved Jake, I found it impossible to spend all day, every day with him. It didn’t feel like there was enough left of me to fill all those hours, and while I despised myself for failing to be the father he needed, the truth was that sometimes I needed time to myself. To forget about the gulf between us. To ignore my growing inability to cope. To be able to collapse and cry for a while, knowing he wouldn’t walk in and find me.

  “Hey, mate.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look up.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing much.” There was an almost imperceptible shrug under my hand. His body seemed barely there, somehow even lighter and softer than the fabric of the T-shirt he was wearing. “Playing with someone a bit.”

  “Someone?” I said.

  “A girl.”

  “That’s nice.” I leaned over and looked at the sheet of paper. “And drawing too, I see.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Of course. I love it.”

  I actually had no idea what it was meant to be—a battle of some kind, although it was impossible to work out which side was which, or what was going on. Jake very rarely drew anything static. His pictures came to life, an animation unfolding on the page, so that the end result was like a film where you could see all the scenes at once, superimposed on top of each other.

  He was creative, though, and I liked that. It was one of the ways in which he was like me: a connection we had—although the truth was that I’d barely written a word in the ten months since Rebecca died.

  “Are we going to move to the new house, Daddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the person at the bank listened to you?”

  “Let’s just say that I was convincingly creative about the perilous state of my finances.”

  “What does perilous mean?”

  It was almost a surprise that he didn’t know. A long time ago, Rebecca and I had agreed to talk to Jake like he was an adult, and when he didn’t know a word we’d explain it to him. He absorbed it all, and often came out with strange things as a result. But this wasn’t a word I wanted to explain to him right now.

  “It means it’s something for me and the person at the bank to worry about,” I said. “Not you.”

  “When are we going?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “How will we take everything?”

  “We’ll rent a van.” I thought about money, and fought down a hint of panic. “Or maybe we’ll just use the car—really pack it up and do a few trips. We might not be able to take everything with us, but we can sort through your toys and see what you want to keep.”

  “I want to keep all of them.”

  “Let’s see, eh? I won’t make you get rid of anything you don’t want to, but a lot of them are very young for you now. Maybe another little boy would like them more.”

  Jake didn’t reply. The toys might have been too young for him to play with, but each of them had a memory attached. Rebecca had always been better at everything with Jake, including playing with him, and I could still picture her kneeling down on the floor, moving figures around. Endlessly, beautifully patient with him in all the ways I found so hard to be. His toys were things she’d touched. The older they were, the more of her fingerprints would be on them. An invisible accumulation of her presence in his life.

&
nbsp; “I won’t make you get rid of anything you don’t want to.”

  Which reminded me of his Packet of Special Things. It was there on the table beside the drawing, a worn leather pouch, about the size of a hardback book, which zipped shut around three of the sides. I had no idea what it had been in a previous life. It looked like a large Filofax without the pages, although God knew why Rebecca would have had one of those.

  A few months after she died, I went through some of her things. My wife had been a lifelong hoarder, but a practical one, and many of her older possessions were stored in boxes stacked in the garage. One day I’d brought some in and started to look through them. There were things going back to her childhood in there, entirely unconnected to our life together. It felt like that should have made the experience easier, but it didn’t. Childhood is—or should be—a happy time, and yet I knew these hopeful, carefree artifacts had an unhappy ending. I began crying. Jake had come and put his hand on my shoulder, and when I hadn’t immediately responded, he’d wrapped his small arms around me. After that, we’d looked through some of the things together, and he’d found what was to become the Packet and asked me if he could have it. Of course he could, I said. He could have anything he wanted.

  The Packet was empty at that point, but he began to fill it. Some of the things inside had been sifted from Rebecca’s possessions. There were letters and photographs and tiny trinkets. Drawings he’d done, or items of importance to him. Like some kind of witch’s familiar, the Packet rarely left his side, and except for a few things, I didn’t know what was in there. I wouldn’t have looked even if I’d been able to. They were his Special Things, after all, and he was entitled to them.

  “Come on, mate,” I said. “Let’s get your things and get out of here.”

  He folded up the drawing and handed it to me to carry. Whatever the picture was meant to be, it clearly wasn’t important enough to go into the Packet. He picked that up himself and carried it across the room to the door, where his water bottle was hanging on a hook. I pressed the green button to release the door, then glanced back. Sharon was busying herself with the washing-up.

  “Do you want to say goodbye?” I asked Jake.

  He turned around in the doorway, and looked sad for a moment. I was expecting him to say goodbye to Sharon, but instead he waved at the empty table he’d been sitting at when I arrived.

  “’Bye,” he called over. “I promise I won’t forget.”

  And before I could say anything, he ducked out under my arm.

  Five

  On the day Rebecca died, I had picked Jake up by myself.

  That afternoon was supposed to have been one of my writing days, and when Rebecca had asked if I could pick up Jake instead of her, my first reaction had been one of annoyance. The deadline for my next book was a handful of months away, and I’d spent most of the day failing miserably to write, at that point counting on a final half hour of work to deliver a miracle. But Rebecca had looked pale and shaky, and so I had gone.

  On the drive back, I had done my best to question Jake about his day, to absolutely no avail. That was standard. Either he couldn’t remember or he didn’t want to talk. As usual, it had felt like he would have responded to Rebecca, which, coupled with the ongoing failure of the book, had made me feel more anxious and insecure than ever. Back home, he had been out of the car like a flash. Could he go and see Mummy? Yes, I had told him. I was sure she’d like that. But she isn’t feeling well, so be gentle with her—and remember to take your shoes off, because you know Mummy hates mess.

  And then I had dawdled at the car a little, taking my time, feeling bad about what an abject failure I was. I’d trailed in slowly, putting stuff down in the kitchen—and noting that my son’s shoes had not been taken off and left there as I’d requested. Because, of course, he never listened to me. The house was silent. I presumed that Rebecca was lying down upstairs, and that Jake had gone up to see her, and that everyone was fine. Apart from me.

  It was only when I finally went into the living room that I saw Jake was standing at the far end, by the door that led to the stairs, staring down at something on the floor that I couldn’t see. He was completely still, hypnotized by whatever he was looking at. As I walked slowly across to him, I noticed he was not motionless at all, but shaking. And then I saw Rebecca, lying at the bottom of the stairs.

  Everything was blank after that. I know I moved Jake away. I know I called an ambulance. I know I did all the correct things. But I can’t remember doing them.

  The worst thing was that I was sure that, although he would never talk to me about it, Jake remembered everything.

  * * *

  Ten months later, we walked in together through a kitchen where the sides were all but covered with plates and cups, the little visible counter space dirty with smears and crumbs. In the living room, the toys spread over the bare floorboards looked scattered and forgotten. For all my talk of sorting toys before we moved, it looked like we’d already gone through all our possessions, taken what we needed, and left the rest dotted around like trash. There had been a constant shadow over the place for months now, always growing darker, like a day gradually drawing to an end. It felt like our home had started dying when Rebecca did. But then, she had always been the heart of it.

  “Can I have my picture, Daddy?”

  Jake was already on his knees on the floor, gathering his colored pencils together from wherever they’d rolled to this morning.

  “Magic word?”

  “Please.”

  “Yes, of course you can.” I put it down beside him. “Ham sandwich?”

  “Can I have a treat instead?”

  “Afterward.”

  “All right.”

  I cleared some space in the kitchen and buttered two slices of bread, then layered three slices of ham into the sandwich and sliced it into quarters. Trying to fight through the depression. One foot in front of the other. Keep moving.

  I couldn’t help thinking about what had happened at the 567 Club: Jake waving goodbye to an empty table. For as long as I could remember, my son had had imaginary friends of some kind. He’d always been a solitary child; there was something so closed away and introspective about him that it seemed to push other children away. On good days, I could pretend that it was because he was self-contained and happy in his own head, and tell myself that was fine. Most of the time I just worried.

  Why couldn’t Jake be more like the other children?

  More normal?

  It was an ugly thought, I knew, but it was only because I wanted to protect him. The world can be brutal when you’re as quiet and solitary as he was, and I didn’t want him to go through what I had at his age.

  Regardless, until now the imaginary friends had manifested themselves subtly—more like little conversations he’d sometimes have with himself—and I wasn’t sure I liked this new development. I had no doubt the little girl he told me he’d been talking to all day had existed only in his head. This was the first time he’d acknowledged something like that out loud, talking to someone in front of other people, and that scared me slightly.

  Of course, Rebecca had never been concerned. He’s fine—just let him be him. And since she knew better than me about most things, I’d always done my best to abide by that. But now? Now I wondered if maybe he needed real help.

  Or maybe he was just being him.

  It was one more overwhelming thing that I should have been able to deal with, but didn’t know how. I didn’t know what the right thing to do was, or how to be a good father to him. God, I wished that Rebecca was still here.

  I miss you …

  But that thought would make the tears come, so I cut it dead and picked up the plate. As I did, I heard Jake speaking quietly in the living room.

  “Yes.”

  And then, in answer to something I couldn’t hear, “Yes, I know.”

  A shiver ran through me.

  I walked quietly over to the doorway, but didn’t step through
it yet—just stood there listening. I couldn’t see Jake, but the sunlight through the window at the far end of the room was casting his shadow by the side of the couch: an amorphous shape, not recognizably human but moving gently, as though he were rocking back and forth on his knees.

  “I remember.”

  There were a few seconds of silence then, in which the only sound was my own heartbeat. I realized I was holding my breath. When he spoke next, it was much louder, and he sounded upset.

  “I don’t want to say them!”

  And at that, I stepped through the doorway.

  For a moment I wasn’t sure what I was going to see. But Jake was crouched down on the floor exactly where I’d left him, except that now he was staring off to one side, his drawing abandoned. I followed his gaze. There was nobody there, of course, but he seemed so intent on the empty space that it was easy to imagine a presence in the air there.

  “Jake?” I said quietly.

  He didn’t look at me.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Nobody.”

  “I heard you talking.”

  “Nobody.”

  And then he turned slightly, picked his pencil back up, and started drawing again. I took another step forward.

  “Can you put that down and answer me, please?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important.”

  “I wasn’t talking to anybody.”

  “Then how about putting the pencil down because I said so?”

  But he kept drawing, his hand moving more fervently now—the pencil making desperate circles around the little figures there.

  My frustration curdled into anger. So often, Jake seemed like a problem I couldn’t solve, and I hated myself for being so useless and ineffective. At the same time, I also resented him for never offering me so much as a clue. Never meeting me halfway. I wanted to help him; I wanted to make sure he was okay. And it didn’t feel like I could do that by myself …