Dark Father

by Cooper, James

  The smell of the antiseptic was making him feel light-headed and Hopewell turned his face to one side. He could barely remember what he’d just been thinking; only knew that the sense of it was less than secure. Perhaps the blow to the head had caused more damage than he was prepared to admit. He recalled the silver steak mallet lying on the floor of the kitchen, how one end bore the clotted sod of his own blood and hair. He closed his right eye; his head began to spin. It occurred to him that he if he started to vomit, he would be perfectly justified in having done so.

  He felt Maggie grab hold of his chin and slap him hard around the face. “You need a doctor, Jimmy,” she said. “Or a trip to the hospital. There’s not much else I can do. Your eye’s a fucking mess.”

  “No doctors,” Hopewell said. “Just do what you can. Take the swelling down. Clean away any discharge. And drain the pus.”

  “While all that sounds absolutely delightful, I’m not fucking qualified to do any of it.”

  Hopewell pointed to the first-aid kit. “How hard can it be?”

  “Guess you’re about to find out,” Maggie said.

  She stared into the dark reach of the hole; the cold shadow in Hopewell’s eye, for the time being, allowed her to look.

  * * *

  Kate offered Father Hedley an abbreviated version of the night’s events and drank the warm tea Alison McCray had provided. She kept her eyes on Billy’s sleeping form through a glass partition that separated the living quarters from a cluttered private study; Father Hedley had gently placed him on a collapsed sofa, its stuffing spewing out and insulating the boy from the chill. He slept fitfully, each troubled utterance interrupting Kate’s account, and they would wait while she went through to the study and sat with her son, laying her palm on his cheek and calming him with the heat of her hand. She had never felt less equipped to deal with a situation, and as she stared at her own fingers caressing the cheek of her sleeping child, she was reminded of the breakdown she had set in motion; and granted a fleeting, horrifying glimpse of how it might end.

  Father Hedley waited for her to finish her tale and then reached out and took her hand. His fingers felt as warm and oily as hot wax.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  Kate stared at him, a little drained by laying out the details with such clinical detachment. She was playing the words she had just spoken aloud over in her head and they sounded ridiculous; a charmless fable of the princess and the villain, when it could be argued that quite the reverse was true.

  “I don’t really know…” she said, turning to Jasper and Alison and seeing two tired faces staring back. They looked hopelessly old and she thought she saw Alison’s smile slip a little, like an eroding coastline, until eventually it fell away completely.

  “Just somewhere to rest up till morning, Mike,” Jasper said. “And maybe a spot of breakfast to send us on our way. You still burning sausages on that damn skillet?”

  Father Hedley laughed. “They taste better that way.” He stood up and glanced through the glass at Billy. “Maybe we should leave the child there,” he said. “He looks at peace.”

  Kate thought so too. Billy seemed so small lying on the broken sofa that she wanted to weep. Not for the first time that evening she felt the dreadful weight of her actions bearing down on them. How quickly their world had changed; how swiftly she had brought their old life to an end.

  “Perhaps I’ll sleep down here too,” she said, fearful of leaving Billy unattended.

  “Nonsense. The one thing this place isn’t short of is guest rooms. You can have the small room at the end of this corridor. If he wakes up, you’ll be the first to hear him. You need your rest too, my dear. I expect the next few days may be more trying than you think.”

  The idea sounded sensible in principle, but she knew how terrified and disoriented Billy would be if he woke up alone in Father Hedley’s study. She was overly conscious of having uprooted him once tonight; the very least she could do was be there to comfort him when he awoke.

  The others could sense her reluctance and Jasper drew her to one side while Father Hedley and Alison cleared away the cups.

  “You have to sleep, child,” he said. “Ain’t no hiding from the difficulties we got brewing, and that’s a fact. That son-of-a-bitch is going to come looking for you, and when he does, you need to be ready. Otherwise you might just as well go back now and take your damn medicine. The boy too.”

  Kate looked at Jasper, her eyes dark as an armory. “That’s not going to happen,” she said quietly.

  Jasper nodded. “Glad to hear it,” he said. “I’d hate to have to eat Mike’s damn sausages for nothing.” He smiled and Kate felt such a rush of gratitude towards the man she was lost for words. Instead she embraced him, feeling his body resist for a moment and then relax into it.

  “Thank you, Jasper. You and Alison…I don’t know what we’d have done…”

  Jasper pulled away, both of them feeling a little awkward now that the moment had passed.

  “No need for any of that,” he said. “Just get some rest. We’ll look at things through refreshed eyes in the morning.”

  Father Hedley came back into the room with Alison a pace or two behind.

  “I have a little work I need to do that I’ve been putting off for the last few days,” Father Hedley said. “If it’ll put your mind at rest, I can work and babysit at the same time. That way I can keep an eye on the child while you get some much-needed sleep. If I think he’s stirring, I’ll come and wake you.”

  Kate was slightly overwhelmed by the extent of everyone’s generosity and she suddenly felt the crushing force of the exhaustion she’d been fighting for much of the last hour. She felt her body bow to the pressure and slumped forward, almost toppling into the waiting arms of the priest.

  “You’ve been very kind,” she said, recovering her composure. “All of you.”

  Father Hedley smiled. “Let me show you to your room. It’s no more than a dozen paces away. It’s a little spartan, but the bed’s wonderful. Whenever I work late, I usually end up there myself.”

  Kate allowed him to escort her down the panelled corridor to an oak door. She could feel the gentle insistence of his hand at the small of her back.

  “Please,” she said. “If Billy shows any sign of waking, come and get me. He’s been through so much tonight.”

  “You both have,” Father Hedley said, opening the door. He led her into the room and turned on the light. There was a nightstand, and a single bed covered with freshly laundered sheets. Above the bed was a simple wooden cross.

  Kate seated herself on the bed and felt even the tightest muscles in her body start to relax. She looked around the room and decided that the austerity of the place was its most inviting aspect. It was a room in which she felt infinitely calmer than she felt she had any right to be; the memory of what had taken place earlier that night was, rather improbably she thought, already beginning to fade.

  She smiled her gratitude at Father Hedley. “Thank you,” she said. She glanced at her watch; it read 4:45 a.m. “If I’m not already up, wake me in an hour. I have a lot to think through.”

  “Of course,” Father Hedley said. “An hour. That should be plenty of time.”

  He switched off the light, left the room and quietly closed the door behind him. Kate heard him walking along the short corridor towards the front of the rectory. She remembered his large hands engulfing her own.

  She slipped off her shoes and fell back on the bed, allowing her eyelids to close. She wondered if she was too tired to sleep. Her lids fluttered gently in the gray light filtering through the window. It occurred to her that she might have been asleep this whole time, that only now was she engaging with reality, in this uncluttered, alien room, where men, and children of men, were nowhere to be seen. When she opened her eyes, she felt suddenly unsettled and clutched at the mattress. She felt something sharp pressing into her hand, and reached beneath the springs to retrieve whatever had been carelessly stash
ed there. She pulled out a Polaroid photo and heard Father Hedley saying I usually end up there myself.

  She turned on the bedside lamp and held the photo to the weak light. She felt her entire body go cold; when she tried to breathe, all she could manage was a sequence of convulsive gasps. She pictured Father Hedley carrying her son from the truck. He had crossed the gravel and cradled her boy in his hands. She remembered feeling sick with relief.

  She looked at the Polaroid and listened to the silence echoing round the rectory. She couldn’t draw her eyes from the image; what darkness there was in the room seemed to have its source in the picture and she was having great difficulty focusing on anything beyond it. A naked boy, about Billy’s age, was forever held in the frame. His body was painfully thin. Beneath the image somebody had written Number 81 in immaculate script. Her hand trembled. What did the figure signify? Were there eighty other pictures? Or eighty other children?

  She thought of Billy screaming and Jimmy’s eye and Father Hedley’s hands, the night’s ghosts suffocating her, pushing her towards some quivering revelation as she stared at the wooden cross above the bed. Before she ran from the room, she looked again at the lost child in the Polaroid. She was held by his pitying eye as the world around her started to hum.

  CHAPTER 5: FAMILY CIRCLE

  Frank sat in the woodshed, remembering the last time he’d been in here, with Jake worried he might chop off a toe in the fading light. In the ten months that had elapsed between then and now so much had changed it was almost impossible to imagine life being so mundane. If Frank were to draw a line between the day Jake disappeared and this one, with him holding tight at either end, he doubted anyone would recognize him as the same man. As well as losing his son—the memory of which chases him through every waking hour and haunts the creeping minutes from midnight to dawn—the intervening months had robbed him of his wife, many of his friends and at least two and a half stone in weight, all of which he could ill afford to lose.

  The woodshed still smelled exactly as it had on that day ten months ago, when he and Jake had chopped wood together for the first time, and Frank resented it. The emotional weight of the memory was crushing his heart, but Frank had no more tears left in him. All he had was bitterness and rage. For Frank, the world had become a contemptible place, and everything in it was a joke. It had taken his son and watched as he’d wept. Then six months later it had taken his wife. The world—that had once been a safe, unspoiled environment—had become a dark gulf, into which had fallen everything he ever valued, everything he ever loved. What was there left to cling to after that?

  He looked into his hands and stared at the twin pieces of wood he and Jake had chopped in a different life. He recalled how happy they’d both been, how impossibly bright life had seemed as they worked. They had smiled a lot. He remembered that. They had smiled because they were happy. Had that really been the case? And had it really been so long ago?

  He held the wood in his left hand and lifted a bottle of whiskey to his lips with his right. Had he been at his most happy chopping wood with his son in the dusk? It would seem so. He hadn’t thought so at the time, but the memory of it had produced feelings of such heartbreaking pain and loss he was having difficulty holding himself together. When the grief assailed him, as it did now, it always did so without warning. It hit him like a freight train, barrelling through the station to the next stop, utterly consuming him. When it passed, Frank usually found himself in a cold room, shaking, holding a broken toy, or a faded photograph. Or two evenly chopped pieces of wood.

  * * *

  The period immediately after Jake’s abduction had been agonizing. Whenever Frank could bring himself to cast a cold eye over what had happened, he invariably remembered it on a purely emotional level. The order in which things unfolded had essentially been a blur from the start. He had a vague recollection of him and Cindy upending the house, screaming Jake’s name, but as soon as the police arrived the whole operation escalated so quickly he’d have been unable to reconstruct the pieces even if he’d wanted to. Uniformed men filled the house, making him feel as though he’d been cut adrift in his own home. There were endless questions, most of which required the same answers. He and Cindy were interviewed in different rooms at a time when they most needed each other, when they needed to be able to reach out and cling to their shared memory of Jake, reinforcing the family bond. This hadn’t been allowed and Frank was still bitter about it, blaming the police for initiating their very separate response to the abduction. They had been forced to deal with the situation alone. And, ultimately, that’s exactly what they had done, turning away from each other when they should have been grabbing hold of each other for dear life.

  Frank’s memories of the ensuing days collapsed into themselves, forming a terrifying montage of grief, anger and despair. At a time when he needed to feel like he was contributing to the search, he had been locked out, encouraged to engage the media, address an endless stream of journalists, fill out forms, answer questions, recite prayers. He had been driven to the point of fury by it all and the medical staff assigned to oversee his recovery had prescribed pills that he would conceal and then spit down the drain.

  From the moment Jake had been abducted, he had been in control of nothing. One minute he’d had a family, the next they’d been taken away. This is how the ordeal had taken shape in Frank’s mind. It had evolved around his particular inability to protect his family. His failure to read the signals of distress; to form a defensive bubble that nothing could penetrate; to react to the crisis that was advancing through the woods. His frailty, his powerlessness in this regard, was the barrel that blew away whatever was left of his hope. It had been an illusion, every minute he and his family had spent with one another. A deception the world had held in place and laughed at, fooling them into believing they were safe. They had never been safe, not really; not even for a second. They just didn’t know it; hadn’t really considered the price they’d have to pay for their ignorance. Without a moment’s notice their world had been flipped, propelling them into a suffering no parent should have to endure. And once the torment and the sadness and the impotence had passed, they’d had to live with the memory of it, hour after hour, day after day, week upon week.

  If Frank was aware of anything after Jake had been snatched, it was that he had lost everything. He felt so empty it hurt when he breathed. This was how it had to be, he told himself. He had to come to terms with the pain and the guilt and embrace them, before what was left of his reason began to degrade like weathered stone.

  So this was what he did. He punished himself; he condemned himself by continuing to live.

  * * *

  He and Cindy had managed almost six months without Jake, but the last three had been so destructive they had wisely chosen to lock away many of the things that had been said. The days had been indistinguishable one from the next, notable perhaps only for the distance each new day placed between them as the arguments and the exchanges raged on. They had begun to seal themselves off from each other months ago, eating at different times, sleeping separately, avoiding contact as much as their surroundings would allow. Neither of them knew quite how it happened, nor why they allowed their relationship to break down as quickly as it had, but the fact that they partially blamed themselves, as well as each other, for what had happened to Jake, really left them nowhere to go. Cindy would lie awake at night reliving the day, moment by gruelling moment, picking apart her role in it, wondering why she hadn’t grabbed hold of Jake when he’d gone scampering after the damaged ball, why she hadn’t been more attentive, why she hadn’t ulcerated her lungs screaming at Frank for abandoning his pursuit of the man.

  In another room in the house, Frank would be doing a similar thing, training a lens on the details, the things they missed the first time round. How obvious it all seemed now that their capacity to act was gone. He too couldn’t understand why he’d stopped looking for the man once Jake had been returned to his mother’s arms. No
r could he comprehend why he’d allowed Cindy to talk him out of reporting the incident immediately. He cried himself to sleep for months thinking about it, listening to his wife doing the same thing no more than fifteen feet away in the master bedroom. Worse still, he recalled how nervous he’d felt about Jake playing in the garden, how he’d tried to intervene. But Cindy had been tired; it had been a long, draining day. He remembered her saying: Let’s get things back to normal, shall we? You’ll just be in the garden, won’t you, Jake? And that had been the last they’d seen of him. Jake had gone running through the patio doors and the frame of their world had collapsed.

  In cooler moments, when they set their bitterness and shame aside to talk about the future, it became quickly apparent that together they had nothing left to explore. Their journey had stalled on the day Jake had been taken from his den. They convinced each other, in these brief moments of unexpected tenderness, that they had done nothing wrong, neither of them. They had done what had seemed right at the time. Their eyes, though, told a different story; they were narrow and accusatory, flecked with disappointment. They could barely bring themselves to look at each other, not because they were still angry, though this was undoubtedly true, but because each reminded the other of Jake to such an alarming degree it placed a weight on their heart and robbed them of their ability to breathe.