by Edward Hogan
“Daniel,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“That kind of thing. Talking to thin air. It’s not right, really.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“But I do it now and again, too. Just try and be aware,” he said.
I shook my head. I was actually grateful to him. It was an unusual feeling, and it was taking some time to get used to.
“And if you want to talk to someone, you can talk to me,” he said.
I snorted.
“I promise I won’t listen,” he said.
I stopped myself from laughing. “All right,” he said, unzipping his tracksuit top. “I’m going to get changed, and then I’m off to play a bit of golf with Gavin. Do you fancy it?”
“No. I’m going to call Mum.”
“I’d almost forgotten about her,” Dad said. He sighed and stared through to the kitchen area and his plant. “I don’t know what’s wrong with those tomatoes. It’s as if they’re shrinking.”
I shrugged.
“Oh, yeah, Daniel, I meant to say. Chrissy wants to take you out for some lunch later,” Dad said. “She’s going to come round about one. I said you probably wouldn’t be on the golf course.”
“It’s like you can see the future,” I said.
Mum was on her lunch break. Since moving south, she’d started working again, doing temporary jobs as a paralegal secretary.
“Your dad always wanted to go to Leisure World. I saw him looking at the brochure once, but I think he was frightened that I’d beat him at tennis,” Mum said on the phone. “What’s it like?”
“It’s like a prison camp. We’re prisoners of fun.”
“Prisoners of fun,” Mum said, and laughed. She was always telling people how funny I was. They were usually disappointed. “There must be lots of youngsters there, in the holidays.”
“The odd one or two. In fact, most of them are very odd.”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I didn’t really think it’d be your type of thing, but I can’t get your dad to answer my calls. Is he behaving himself?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. He hasn’t had a drink since we got here,” I said.
I could hear him putting cans of cider in his golf bag.
“That’s good,” she said. “What about you? You still teetotal?”
“Yeah. I’ve lost a couple of pounds, I think.”
“You don’t need to be worrying about that,” she said. “You’re a beautiful boy.”
I smiled. That kind of compliment from Mum used to make me wince. Not so much now.
“Speaking of beauty,” Mum asked, “aren’t you having a holiday romance?”
“Who told you that?” I said.
“Ah, so it’s true! I was just shooting in the dark, but I’ve caught you out.”
There was an awkward silence as we both realized that I — without meaning to — had once caught her out, too.
“So,” she said. “What’s her name?”
“I’ll tell you if you don’t do that voice,” I said.
“I’m sorry. I’m serious. No teasing, I promise.”
“Lexi. Alexandria.”
“Ah, like the city.”
“What?”
“Alexandria is a city in Egypt. It was famous, in antiquity, for its lighthouse.”
“Lighthouse?”
“The Alexandria Lighthouse was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, Danny. A huge beacon off the coast. Back then, it was the biggest man-made structure in the world and used these massive mirrors to guide ships into the harbor. Or if you were an enemy, its beam could set your vessel on fire.”
“Sounds like Lexi,” I said.
“Which bit?”
“All of it.”
Mum laughed. “Ah, Danny. You’re a hoot.”
“She likes history, too.”
“Does she, now?”
“She thinks history is a circle that is destined to keep happening because of idiot men doing stupid things.” That certainly made a lot more sense to me now. I thought of the man in the shopping center and of her watch ticking backward.
“Danny, she sounds absolutely wonderful. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“Well, I don’t really know when that will be,” I said. I was close to tears, because she’d never meet Lexi. Very few people would. Mum thought I meant something else, of course.
“Oh, Danny, I know, love. Your auntie Jen is helping me look for a place, but I’m finding it difficult. Especially when your dad won’t speak to me. As soon as I get somewhere to live back up there, you can come and stay with me. That’s if you want to.”
I sniffed. The wound in my side was stinging. I felt dizzy. I could hear Dad hoisting his golf bag and picking up his keys. “Mum, I’ve got to go. Do you have a message for Dad?”
She sighed. “No,” she said. “I love you, Danny.”
“You, too, Mum.”
I put the phone down and peeled my T-shirt away from the sticky blood seeping out of the Band-Aid.
“I’m off, then, Daniel,” said Dad. “Don’t forget your lunch appointment with whatsit next door.”
“That was Mum,” I said.
“I know. You said.”
“Did you want to speak to her? I could call back,” I said.
“No. No way.”
He picked up his golf shoes and opened the door.
“Dad,” I said.
“What?”
“She says she misses you,” I said.
He stopped in his tracks. Then he shook his head slightly and walked out, closing the door behind him.
Chrissy took me to one of the chain restaurants for a pizza. I watched her hands working the tongs under the lights of the salad buffet, while I got stuck into the all-you-can-eat deep crust. “All you can eat” is a dangerous challenge for me. She smiled when we met back at the table.
“Your dad told me what happened,” she said.
I took out a pen and began to doodle on my napkin. “What did he tell you?” I said. “It was probably a lie or an exaggeration.”
“I don’t think so. He was pretty calm about it. He said you found your mum with another man, and that he then forced you to confess.”
I opened my mouth spontaneously to argue, but then stopped. “That’s about right, actually,” I said. I kept doodling, to keep myself calm.
“That must have been very difficult,” Chrissy said.
“What? Ruining my family? It was easy. I didn’t even have to try.” I thought of Lexi, of what she’d made me say. “It wasn’t my fault,” I muttered.
“No. It wasn’t. But it’s still pretty traumatizing.”
The beets on her plate had turned the mayonnaise pink. She didn’t seem to be hungry. I was. I scoffed down a slice of meat feast and started on the pepperoni. Lexi had told me that a greater body mass helps you float and makes you a better swimmer.
“Did Dad put you up to this? Did he send you to talk to me?” I said.
“Yes,” Chrissy said. She pushed back her graying hair, and the bracelets rattled at her bony wrist. “He thinks you might need some help.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a young boy on holiday in a sports complex, and you seem desperately unhappy.”
“I don’t like sports,” I said.
“I’ve seen you play volleyball, Daniel. I know you’re not a sports fan.”
“Hey,” I said. But I laughed, which was uncomfortable. The gouge in my side was pulsing. I put my hand there. Chrissy noticed.
“Like I said before,” Chrissy said, “our lives are written on our bodies. And this is not just about your dislike for sports. There’s something else going on, isn’t there?”
I took my hand away from the wound. “What happened that day? When you did the treatment on me and then passed out?” I said.
She took a breath. I could see that it was an effort even to think about it. “A lot of things happened. Occasionally when I treat a person, I get images of events that
may have happened to them in their past. Sometimes I see things that might happen in the future.”
I didn’t like where this was going. I was beginning to feel cold. “And you got these images with me?”
“Yes,” she said. She tutted. “Tash will kill me for saying this. She thinks it’s nonsense, and she doesn’t want me to worry you. . . .”
“Tell me what you saw,” I said.
“It was so unclear,” she said. I pushed my plate aside and stopped doodling. I could tell she was trying to recall what she had seen, but it was hurting her, making her weak. Her face clouded over with distress. The curls by her ear were moist with sweat.
“What’s wrong, Chrissy?” I said.
“Usually it’s clear what’s coming from the past and what will happen in the future. But with you, it was all mixed up. I couldn’t distinguish what was going to happen from what had happened already.”
Jesus, I thought. I’m in the loop.
“Look,” she said. “When a person is severely traumatized, the past, present, and future can get confused. Former soldiers suddenly believe they are back in the war zone when in fact they’re sitting in a pub. Because they can’t make sense of what happened to them, the memories go into the wrong part of the brain, and they seem to be happening now. They hear all the same noises, smell all the same smells. If you can’t deal with a bad experience, it just keeps happening to you over and over again.”
I perked up. Maybe that was what was happening with Lexi.
Chrissy kept talking. “Perhaps you are so deeply traumatized that —”
“Yeah, yeah. Look,” I said. “If you know someone who is, like, deeply traumatized — if they’ve had something really bad happen to them . . .”
“Are we talking about you here, Daniel?”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever. If they can’t deal with it, and it keeps happening over and over again, how can you help them?”
“They have to talk about what traumatized them. If you can put the bad things into words, into a story, then it goes into the correct part of the brain and gets stored away like all the other memories. It stops repeating in the senses.”
“Right,” I said. I thought about all the parts of Lexi’s story that she had blocked out. All the bits about the attack that she had glossed over when she told me. The parts she said she couldn’t remember. I picked up the pen and began doodling again.
“Daniel. I can do this with you. If we talk about what happened with your parents, we can make sense of it together.”
“Me?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Nah,” I said. I chewed some more pizza, feeling the grease seep out of the stretchy cheese. The problem with Chrissy’s solution was that Lexi wasn’t imagining the bad thing happening again — she was actually experiencing it. Her cuts and slashes were real. And so were mine.
“Is it cold in here?” I said.
“No, Daniel. It’s boiling. Did you know you’ve been drawing circles for half an hour?” she said.
I looked down. She was right. Circles of all different sizes filled the folded paper napkin.
“I suppose that’s got a deeper meaning,” I said.
She smiled. “Tash says it means ‘balls.’”
I laughed. “What do you say?”
She took the napkin. “Well. Circles usually mean family. The need for connection and family union.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” I said.
“But strangely, they can also mean that you are trapped in a dangerous relationship.”
I looked up at her, and she met my gaze.
“Daniel,” she said.
“What?”
“When I was doing the treatment on you, I felt the presence of another person.”
“Who?” I said, feigning innocence.
“A girl. It was like she was fused to you. She was in pain, and she was taking you with her.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I felt it strongly,” she said, and put her thin fingers over my hand. “It was powerful, and it was dangerous.”
“You’re wrong,” I snapped, pulling my hand away.
She sat back. “OK. Maybe I am. God knows I’ve been wrong before. Tash’ll tell you that. She says it’s all bunkum.”
I stared at the table. Then it came to me. If I could get Lexi to go through what happened on the night she died, if I could get her to search in her memory and remember exactly where he pulled her into the trees, then I could go there. I could be there to stop him when the clocks went back. It was the only hope.
I picked up the napkin. “I know what the circles mean, Chrissy.”
“What?”
“Time.”
“Pardon?” She looked baffled.
“Time is a circle. Yes, it’s powerful. Yes, it’s dangerous. But when it comes around again, you can damn well change it.”
I walked out of the restaurant, already calculating my next move.
Before going on to meet Lexi, I dropped by the cabin to get some money and my swim trunks. I crept in quietly, in case Dad was back and tried to drag me into some aggressive racket sport with his new friends. My shorts were on the radiator near the kitchen, and as I sneaked along the hall area, I could see the cord of the telephone snaking around the door of Dad’s bedroom. His voice came in the muffled tremors I was used to. I stood by the door and listened.
“Mmm. Yes. He’s fine, Anna. No. It probably wasn’t the best idea in the world, but you know Daniel. He makes the best of it. Aye.”
Anna. He was talking to Mum. I decided to leave the trunks; I turned and opened the front door as quietly as I could, scared that I might break the spell.
I went to the shops near the Dome and noticed how things had changed for me. My awareness and my vision were greater than they had ever been. I noticed, mostly, the glint of camera lenses in the cold sun, staring down from the corners of buildings. I noticed the vigilant, bullish security men who haunted every doorway, in their black shiny jackets, their breath and cigarette smoke pluming high in the frosty air. There were posters everywhere for a party called “Turn Back Time.” To celebrate the extra hour when the clocks went back, there would be a bonfire and a concert in the forest, featuring tribute acts playing the greatest hits of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Party for longer on the night that just keeps on giving. Fancy dress was optional but encouraged. I shuddered.
In the Tropical Dome’s reception area, chlorinated kids with red eyes sat on hammocks while their parents tied their shoelaces. I smiled at the receptionist, a thickset man with a shaved head. A fitness instructor of some kind. Arms like twisted electrical cable. “Yes?” he said.
“Hello,” I said in my brightest voice. “Do you happen to know if Ryan is on duty at the pool?”
“No. He doesn’t come on until five. Why do you want to know?”
I thought of Mr. Evans and his report of a lifeguard seeing a boy with open wounds in the water. “No reason,” I said. “I just need a word with him about something.”
The receptionist looked at me carefully. Something seemed to occur to him. “Hang on a minute,” he said, all of a sudden smiling and kind. “Just let me check whether he’s in the staff room. Wait there.”
He went over to a corkboard on the back wall. I saw a passport photograph of me, stuck there with a blue pin. The receptionist stared at the picture and read the little note next to it. I was gone before he had a chance to turn around and check.
Walking out to the lake, I saw that there were even security cameras in the trees. I looked up at the last one, which was placed high in a tree on the threshold of the wooded area surrounding the water. I picked up a stone. I knew I shouldn’t. But I gave a one-finger salute with my left hand and launched the stone with my right. For a kid who didn’t do sports, it was a fair old shot, catching the lens dead center and flipping the camera up to point at the sky.
Lexi was asleep under the red coat
when I found her. She was curled up in a mound, trembling with the cold. I knelt down beside her and swept some of the damp hair from her face, which was now swollen and bright with blood and bruises. I had never expected her demise to be so colorful. I had been afraid of her wounds, but now I bent close to her, smelled the lake on her skin. I went to kiss her, but she reached out and grabbed my shoulder. The grip was weak, but enough to scare me half the way back to Derby.
“Daniel,” she said.
I replied with a noise like a dying cow.
“A gentleman asks permission.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And he usually waits until the lady is awake.”
I sat back and watched her lift herself painfully onto her elbows.
“You scared the hell out of me,” I said.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she said.
I knew what she meant. I knew we had it all to come. She reached out and touched my face. Her own skin had a weak glow now, like the wax of a candle when the wick is lit. “Danny boy, you look a little peaky. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You haven’t found any more cuts and bruises on yourself?”
“No, no,” I lied.
She squinted at me, in the same way my mum always did. As though she could see into my fibbing soul.
“I bought you a present,” I said, to change the subject.
“Another!” she said. Then she coughed — a harsh, dry sound — for a few seconds. “Goodness me, Daniel. What a suitor you’ve become. A present per day.”
I’d remembered her telling me how she longed for fingernails, and I’d found some fake ones at a drugstore. I gave them to her now, and she put a hand to her chest. “Oh, you didn’t! Daniel, this is the most thoughtful gift.” She looked at her hand, the nails stubby and bleeding or blackened, and then she opened the packet. “What color shall I paint them?”
I took out a jar of nail polish. “Red,” I said.
“Will you do it for me?” she said.
“With pleasure.”
We carefully attached the nails to her fingers, and — with her guidance — I painted the plastic in long crimson strokes. The little fingernails only needed two strokes each.
