Always the Sun

by Neil Cross

  He was cutting the sandwiches in half when Jamie came down. He wore grey school trousers and a plain white shirt, untucked. He pulled up a stool to the little-used breakfast bar for which Sam had entertained such hopes. Sam set the plate down before him, followed by a squeezy bottle of tomato ketchup.

  Sam had opened the kitchen window and an early spring breeze was freshening the room. The extractor hood hummed. The kettle boiled and steamed. Jamie squeezed loops of ketchup over still-sizzling bacon and crushed the sandwich flat. He took a bite. Bacon fat and ketchup oozed down his chin.

  Sam set down two mugs of strong tea, then pulled up a second stool. He ketchuped his own sandwich, made appreciative noises. No radio played and the TV was not on. There was the faint, ascending whine of a car reversing on a nearby road.

  Love fluoresced in Sam’s guts like sunlight.

  He watched the movement of tendons in Jamie’s neck.

  Jamie said, ‘How’s work?’

  Sam shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Jamie chewed, swallowed.

  He said again: ‘How’s work?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sam. ‘Good. Fine. You know.’

  Jamie left the crust on the side of his plate and set about the second sandwich.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he said, ‘if you want to go out. If you want to go to the pub with your new mates, or whatever.’

  To give himself a moment, Sam lifted the mug of tea and took a tiny sip.

  He set down the mug and said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You didn’t have to come home early last night. And Mel didn’t need to babysit. I’m thirteen.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind. Next time.’

  The silence fell easily between them, as if some longstanding but unspoken difficulty had been resolved. Jamie ate the remaining sandwich with an air of concentration.

  Sam watched him, stroking the tender contours of his freshly shaved throat.

  Then he said, ‘Who’s Liam Hooper?’

  Jamie stopped eating. There was an uneaten, doughy ball of half-masticated, ketchup-y bread in his mouth. His expression did not change.

  He said, ‘Who?’

  Sam pushed his plate to one side.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about him?’

  Jamie’s brow furrowed. The lines there were new and unaccustomed. When he gathered himself they were erased completely, like footprints in sand. He met Sam’s eye; looked away. He lifted his mug of tea in both hands, blew across the surface. A kind of displacement activity. He took a considered sip, then put the mug down.

  He said, ‘I can deal with him.’

  ‘What do you have to deal with?’

  ‘You know. I’m a new kid. It’ll stop, sooner or later.’

  That was the moment when Sam’s heart broke.

  ‘What’ll stop? What’s he doing to you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Sam reached out to take Jamie’s hand. Pretending not to notice, Jamie avoided his touch by picking up the mug.

  Sam withdrew his hand.

  He said, ‘Of course it matters.’

  Jamie regarded him evenly.

  ‘It’s just school, Dad.’

  Sam stopped.

  Frank was right. He didn’t know any more what it was like to be a boy. He felt big and ursine and helpless. He wanted to hug Jamie, to tell him it would be all right.

  And he wanted to kill Liam Hooper.

  He said, ‘You don’t have to put up with it.’

  Jamie smiled, too sad and too wise.

  ‘It won’t last.’

  ‘We can stand up to him.’

  ‘No, we can’t.’

  ‘Yes, we can. You don’t have to be scared. This isn’t the Dark Ages. And I’ll always be here to look after you. I love you more than anything in the world. Do you understand that?’

  Jamie looked down. Embarrassed or tearful, Sam couldn’t tell.

  Sam wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand.

  He said, ‘That’s it. We’ll go to the school.’

  An expression of tenderness and pity passed over Jamie’s face. It allowed that Sam could never understand the world he lived in.

  He said, ‘Dad, if you do that, Liam will kill me.’

  Sam looked down at his uneaten bacon sandwich.

  He said, ‘Look, if you’re unhappy you need to tell me. I can’t do anything about it, if you don’t tell me.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘If you’re old enough to be left alone in the evenings,’ Sam said, ‘then you’re old enough to discuss your problems like an adult. Do you understand that? Talk to me. God, what did you think—that I’d be angry?’

  Jamie shrugged.

  ‘What can you do?’

  Sam thumped the breakfast bar.

  ‘That’s what we need to talk about,’ he said. ‘That’s what talking’s for. So we can decide what to do. Do you want to go to another school?’

  What colour was left in Jamie’s face drained away.

  Quietly, he said, ‘Don’t move me again.’

  Self-contempt twisted in Sam’s guts.

  He said, ‘I won’t do anything without discussing it with you first. But you have to talk to me, too, Jamie. I’m still your dad.’

  ‘But Dad, there’s nothing you can do. So what’s the point? He’ll leave me alone eventually.’

  Sam shook his head.

  ‘What’s he doing to you?’

  Jamie pushed back his stool.

  ‘He found out Mum was dead.’

  Sam said, ‘What?’

  Jamie dumped the sandwich crusts in the swingbin and put the plate in the dishwasher.

  ‘He found out Mum was dead.’

  ‘And he’s bullying you for that?’

  His back turned, Jamie shrugged again.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Sam.

  His voice sounded smaller than he wanted it to. He cupped a hand across his mouth.

  He said, ‘Hit him.’

  Jamie straightened. Sam couldn’t see his face, but there was dignity in his posture.

  ‘He’s big, Dad. He’s really big.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sam softly.

  Jamie left, to finish getting dressed. Sam found a pack of cigarettes and stood in the garden, smoking, the concrete patio cold and damp against his bare feet. The cigarette was smoked nearly to its stub when Jamie called him.

  Sam turned. Jamie stood in the kitchen doorway. He was in full school uniform, with the fat end of his tie tucked inside his shirt. He wore his blue parka, and had the Adidas sports bag slung across his chest.

  Sam dropped the cigarette. It lay on the concrete, smouldering.

  ‘Are you off, then?’

  Jamie nodded.

  ‘Do you want a lift or something?’

  Jamie shook his head.

  ‘Your car’s at work,’ he said. ‘You took a taxi home.’

  ‘So I did,’ said Sam. He looked at his feet. He said, ‘You don’t have to go through this.’

  Jamie shrugged one shoulder.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  Sam couldn’t watch him leave. He stood without moving until he heard the front door close. Then his shoulders sagged. He looked around for something to kick, but the garden, like the house, was practically empty. Everything in it was new. Jamie would see any damage he did, and he’d know the reason why. And his feet were bare and breakable.

  He walked inside and felt his son’s absence like a pain.

  8

  Before leaving for work, Sam called Ashford’s mobile number, and again got through to an answering service. He looked at his watch and supposed that, by now, Ashford would be talking about Julius C
aesar or Jude the Obscure to thirty bored and hostile adolescents. He wondered if Jamie was among them, counting down to the terror between lessons.

  Ashford returned his call at 10.45, during morning break. By now Sam was on the ward. He felt the mobile trilling silently in his hip pocket and hastily excused himself. He rushed from the ward without actually running and paced up and down the car park, in his shirtsleeves, puffing a cigarette.

  Ashford asked what he could do for him.

  Sam said, ‘I want to talk to Liam Hooper’s father.’

  There was silence on the line so extended that Sam checked the reception. It was fine. He made a face and put the phone back to his ear.

  He said, ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here,’ Ashford said. He sighed. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve met Mr Hooper …’

  Sam could almost see the contemptuous twist of the lip for that necessary Mister. ‘And?’

  ‘And—well. Look, how can I say this? I’m not sure talking to him will be of much benefit.’

  Sam lit a fresh cigarette from the still-burning coal of the first.

  ‘What harm can it do?’

  There was another long pause. Then: ‘I can’t give you his home address, but I can tell you where he works. But if somebody were to ask—it wasn’t me who told you.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Sam.

  He took the cigarette from his mouth and was surprised to see the pulse flickering in his wrist, rapid and shallow.

  That afternoon, he offered to swap his Friday shift.

  The mother of a colleague, Jo Hancock, had fallen and broken a hip, causing the cancellation of her Golden Anniversary cruise. Instead, Jo’s father had arranged for a surprise family party to be thrown in Cardiff that weekend, which Jo’s mother would be attending in a wheelchair. In order that she could drive to Cardiff on Friday morning, Jo spent the morning attempting to inveigle her colleagues into swapping their weekend shifts with her.

  With affected grace, Sam succumbed. Jo kissed his cheek and stood on tiptoes to hug him. Everyone was grateful. He’d liberated them from Jo’s passive-aggressive wheedling. In this way he made partial amends for the migraine and his recurring lateness, which he continued to blame on the poor bus service.

  It also meant that, on Friday morning, he was free to visit Liam Hooper’s father at work.

  Dave Hooper worked at the slaughterhouse, with which Sam was excellently acquainted. It stood just beyond the edge of town.

  Sam knew the route from childhood. He’d drive through the Merrydown Estate, past Mel’s house, then turn on to Sturminster Road and pass the Dolphin Centre. Eventually he’d reach the edge of the estate, where there was an inexact tessellation of countryside and grubby concrete, like foreign limbs inexpertly grafted.

  Then he’d have to drive past Farmer Hazel’s property. For generations, it had been widely known that Farmer Hazel would take a shotgun to any schoolboy or courting couple discovered trespassing on his land. Farmer Hazel was known to be an old, old man when Sam was a child. By now he would be impossibly ancient, a leathered agrarian mummy. But one morning, while passively eavesdropping on Jamie and Stuart, Sam learnt that Farmer Hazel’s murderous injunction was still current. Young boys still cycled quickly past his land.

  Hazel’s farm bordered the slaughterhouse, about which a great many stories had also been told. Generally, these tales concerned the ingredients that went into the plant’s secondary meat products: pie-fillings and sausagemeat. It was common knowledge that beetles, rats, domestic pets and aborted foetuses often found their way on to the production line. So too had at least one human being. During the summer holiday of 1974, Jason Brannen got drunk on cider, soaked a vagrant with petrol and burnt him to death. Later, the tramp was fed into the slaughterhouse’s industrial mincing machine. He emerged as sausages—the kind of sausages, moreover, that were destined to be served up by the malevolent dinner ladies at Churchill School.

  Jason Brannen was a slight boy with slow eyes, a hasty, jagged smile and hair like David Cassidy. Sam avoided him in the school corridors. Jason Brannen’s father worked in the slaughterhouse. The boot of his white Ford Anglia was thought to have been the vagrant’s final transport. Sam and his friends imagined him, still living, scratching feebly at the inside lid of the boot.

  Nobody really believed it, not even when they were fourteen and sincerely wanted to. They didn’t believe it even when Jason Brannen denied the story in a satisfied manner contrived to imply it might be true. The police never came, and nothing appeared in the papers or on the local news.

  But who would miss a vagrant? When Sam left town, several years later, Jason Brannen was still known as the kid who burnt the tramp to death.

  From the brow of the hill, the slaughterhouse resembled a disused airfield. It was a gated and fenced concrete enclosure, a vastly expanded shower block. At night it was luminous as a POW camp, its walls and walkways thrown into achromatic, intersecting planes of light and shadow. By day it lay muffled in heavy, dour air.

  Approaching the plant as an adult who was no longer afraid of the dark, Sam could feel his childhood self, half-eager, half-terrified, peering over his shoulder from the back of the car. They had never dared to investigate the abattoir, imagining their worst desires realized. How would it be, actually to see a blackened tramp’s body unloaded from the back of a rusty Anglia? How would it be to cycle headlong into unlit B-roads and dark lanes while someone, something, slavered in pursuit?

  At the main gates he found a permanently manned guard’s office and a security barrier marked Authorized Vehicles Only.

  Sam pulled up and uncranked the window. He thought he detected a rich, thick odour on the air. He made a visor of his hand and squinted at the security guard.

  He said, ‘Hi. I’m here to see Dave Hooper.’

  The guard clicked his tongue and referred to a clipboard, to which was attached a page of A4 paper that, for all the world, appeared to be blank.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Sam Greene.’

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what’s the nature of your visit?’

  Sam scowled into the sun.

  ‘It’s a personal matter.’

  The guard gave him a good, hard look. Sam wondered if he looked like a militant vegetarian. Finally, the guard instructed Sam to back up and park on the grass verge, alongside the perimeter fence. As he did so, the guard lifted the desk-phone and made a call. He turned his back as if further concerned that Sam might be a lipreader.

  Eventually, led by his belly, the guard returned to the car.

  Contemptuous in his politesse, he said, ‘Mr Hooper will be out shortly.’

  Sam thanked him with an insincere smile, then wound up the window and lit a cigarette. He took a few, nervous puffs and turned on the radio. He watched spring clouds scud across the low hills on the horizon. As he waited, three slat-sided lorries arrived and halted, throbbing, at the gate. Each driver spoke briefly to the security guard, then disappeared with a diesel roar through the gates, towards the concrete and stainless-steel secret at the heart of the complex.

  Sam didn’t see them leave. He supposed the drivers were breaking for a cup of tea and a cigarette, while elsewhere their living cargo, mortally terrified, was penned and lined up and executed.

  He unwound the window and chucked out the cigarette. He saw that a man was approaching. He supposed it must be Dave Hooper. Sam hadn’t known quite what to expect, but he’d anticipated at least a filthy, bloody apron. But this man wore clean, white Nikes, indigo 501s and a brown and cream, two-tone bowling shirt that, to Sam’s untrained eye, did not look cheap. Thinking about it, he supposed the slaughterhouse was run under strict hygiene regulations. That was presumably why Dave Hooper had taken so long to emerge; perhaps in order to leave the complex, he had to shower and cha
nge. It didn’t occur to him that Dave Hooper might not be directly involved with the slaughter of livestock.

  Hooper wasn’t a tall man, but he was solid and handsome, like a retired footballer, and he moved with a particular, familiar assurance.

  Sam got out of the car. He left the door open and the keys in the ignition. Hooper approached him along the grass verge. His expression was neutral; not unfriendly.

  Sam licked his lips.

  Hooper stopped several feet away and crossed his solid arms.

  He said, ‘All right?’

  Sam swallowed and hoped his voice wouldn’t shake.

  He said, ‘Hello.’

  Hooper uncrossed his arms. ‘You’re Sam Greene.’

  ‘That’s right. Have we—?’

  ‘We were at school together. Well, not together. I was two years below you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sam. ‘Right.’

  ‘You’re Mel’s brother.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You used to go out with that Lisa Kilmer.’

  Sam laughed now.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, distracted from his purpose. ‘Jesus. Lisa Kilmer.’

  He hadn’t thought about her in many years. But there had been a time when his life was rendered meaningless by her decision to dump him for Simon Marshall. Simon Marshall was seventeen, had highlights, and drove a Ford Capri. Sam was surprised that, even now and in this strange context, there was a stab in his guts: the sense-memory of pain endured long ago. He had assumed it to be neutrally assimilated, the stuff of self-deprecating comedy.

  Then he remembered what Simon Marshall had done with that Capri: he’d sent Lisa Kilmer through its windscreen.

  More than a year after the accident, more than two since she dumped him, Sam saw her on the street. Lisa’s face was crazy-paved with purple rhomboids, like a tattoo of scales, and she averted her gaze when they spoke.

  He supposed he was eighteen by then, preparing to leave. Putting it all behind him.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said again, and ruffled his hair. ‘Lisa Kilmer.’

  Then Dave Hooper said, ‘I was there when you had that scrap with Whatsisname. Lee Harris. The one on the school field.’