by Edward Hogan
“But we managed to save those people and —”
“It’s too early, Frances. What about Charles Gregan? We don’t know what will happen next.”
“Nobody does, Pete. That’s life. But you can take it slow.”
“He’s a good boy,” Peter said. “At least I know that. So much of his mother about him.”
We turned to watch Joe coming down the pipe, his eyes wide and his T-shirt rippling. To me, people on skateboards always look strange, because they’re standing sideways. As if they’re trying to move without you noticing. As if they’re jumping the queue. But there was something quite graceful about Joe. “He’s not bad,” I said.
Peter laughed, but he couldn’t quite reply. He lit a cigarette instead and rubbed his eyes.
The sun became clouded. Only Peter’s chalk sun still burned bright. The stunt bikers were like silvery fish coming off the ramps, and the rumble of wheels went on and on.
Joe was coming down at quite a pace, his confidence growing with the encouragement from Maxi and his friends. But then he tried the rail and slipped. His ankle buckled, and he hit the ground.
He tried to stand up and be brave, but he collapsed again as soon as he put his weight down.
“Shit,” I said.
Peter and I ran over to him and nudged through the crowd. Peter put his hands out toward his boy, but then took them back, as if he might turn Joe to stone if he touched him.
“Are you OK, Joe?” I said.
He whispered so quietly, I could barely hear him. “No,” he said, and I could see that he was no longer pretending that he wasn’t an eleven-year-old. I could also see that the ankle had swollen badly already. I looked daggers at Max, who shrugged. “Shall we call an ambulance?” he said.
“No,” said Joe. “I’ll be fine. It’s probably just sprained.”
“Call a taxi,” I told Max.
“Where we going?” Max said.
“Joe and I are going to the ER,” I said.
“You need help getting him up the steps?” Max said, pointing back to the seawall.
“I’ll do it,” Peter said.
I looked at him. “Right,” I said. “Let’s get him lifted.”
Peter and I took hold of Joe by the shoulders and helped him onto one leg. The three of us struggled up the steps, Peter with his son’s skateboard under his free arm.
“We’re going to need some help on the other side,” I said to Peter as we waited for the taxi.
Peter nodded.
When the car came, we carefully slid into the back and I put Joe’s leg over my knees.
He smiled weakly and took out his phone. “I have to call my mum.”
I looked at Peter, but he just closed his eyes. I suddenly felt a sense of regret, as though I’d made everything move too fast. Things were getting out of control.
A cloudy dusk came on quickly. Other lights shone: the locked-door lights in the taxi, Joe’s luminous watch, the orange streetlight sliding over Peter’s face as he looked at his son. The hospital was boiling hot, and the sickly strip lighting picked out every gash on the early Saturday boozers. Day-trippers whose day trips were slipping into a bad place. Like Joe’s.
We signed in at the desk, and I sat in a seat across from Joe and held his foot up on my thigh. “You’re supposed to do rest, ice, compression, and elevation,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said.
Peter paced up and down, looking for staff to harass. He couldn’t cope with seeing Joe in pain.
Eventually he sat down on the rubbery seat next to his son. It made a rip-roaring fart noise. Joe held his serious, mature face for about two seconds, but then he couldn’t help himself. He laughed. It was a good, infectious laugh, and I caved, too. Then Peter did. He stood up and sat down again, and the noise was the same. He turned to the miserable old guy sitting on the other side of him who was holding his wrist, and he said, “I’m in for gas — what are you in for?”
Joe totally cracked up then. The nice thing about his laugh was that he had tried to resist it. It made him helpless. Within a few seconds, a good percentage of the people sitting there were laughing along with him, even if they didn’t know what the joke was. I could have sworn I even saw a smile on the face of the old fella with the dodgy wrist.
I had my back to the door, so I didn’t know why Peter and Joe stopped laughing so suddenly. I figured there were only a couple of options — either some poor guy had walked in carrying his own head or Joe’s mother had arrived.
I looked over my shoulder. She had a kind face, and she’d dyed two blond streaks into the front of the black hair that Peter had written about in the letter. She bit her lip and scanned the waiting area.
I looked back at Joe and Peter. Joe, who still had his foot on my knee, waved at his mother, and Peter looked down at his hands, which he’d folded on his stomach, as if he were trying to stop the blood coming out of a bullet hole.
“Mum!” Joe shouted.
“Oh, Joseph!” she said. Her flip-flops slapped the floor. She came toward us, but she only had eyes for her boy.
“Honey, are you OK?”
“Yes, Mum. I fell on my ankle at the skate park — that’s all.”
“What were you even doing there?” she said. She didn’t sound angry, just confused.
“I was . . . nothing. I was on my skateboard. Frances and Paul brought me in,” he said.
“Thank you,” Rowenna said to me distractedly.
I couldn’t speak. I could barely even nod, because I knew what was coming.
She looked up at Peter, and the word thanks got sliced in midair. Her eyes widened, and she took a big step back. Her hand went up to her mouth. “Peter,” she said. She said it with love, but that might have been accidental.
I knew it wouldn’t last, anyway.
I kept my eyes on Joe. Looking at anyone else was pretty much unbearable. But I was interested, too. I wanted to see what it was like to recognize your dad for the first time. He couldn’t quite take it in. “You said your name was Paul,” he said.
I suppose he had an image in his head of his father. A cross between various film characters and the stories his mum had told him. Just the way Johnny had given me an image of our dad. But now he was faced with the truth. He looked between Rowenna and Peter. “Mum?” he said.
She dropped her car keys, and the noise of them hitting the floor seemed to shake Peter to life.
“I’ll leave,” he said. He still didn’t look up. He just stared at his cupped hands. Then he stood. “He needs treatment. I just wanted to make sure he was OK.”
Rowenna made a strange gasp, almost a laugh. “You wanted to make sure he was OK?” she said. “Peter, where the hell have you been?” She looked him over. “What happened to you? Why didn’t you . . . ? Oh, Jesus.”
She began to cry. She tried to apologize to Joe, but she couldn’t get the words out. The atmosphere and the confusion (and probably the pain) had got to Joe, too, and he was also tearing up. He put his hand on his mum’s arm.
Peter didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at anyone. He just turned around and started walking down the corridor.
“What, you’re just going to . . . ?” Rowenna said, but he didn’t hear.
It had all gone wrong, and there wasn’t much doubt whose fault it was.
I just sat there.
Joe had eased himself back down and his mum was next to him, where Peter had been sitting. It was obvious that there would be questions and strong words later, but now they were just holding on to each other. It was weird, and comforting — even to me.
A nurse with a clipboard came. “Joseph Davies?” she said.
They both stood up.
“I want to go in on my own,” Joe said. “I’m old enough.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think you’ve been doing a bit too much on your own today.”
“Mum, please. I can manage.”
Rowenna could see that he was still upset.
&nb
sp; “OK,” she said. “I’ll be right here.”
He hobbled off, his arm around the nurse, and Rowenna slumped back down into the seat. I didn’t know what else to do, so I got a plastic cup, filled it up at the water cooler, and took it to her. She looked up at me.
“Thanks,” she said. “Wait. Who are you?”
“Frances,” I said.
“Why are you here?” There was a note of anger in her voice now, which was fair enough.
“Because all of this is my fault.”
“That he fell over?”
“No. It’s my fault that he met Peter. I’m Peter’s friend. I arranged for him to meet Joe.”
Rowenna closed her eyes. “Peter should not have done that.”
“It was me.”
“You’re just a girl.”
“Still,” I said. “Look, I can see I made a mistake, and I guess you’re very pissed off right now. But don’t be angry with Peter, because it wasn’t his idea; it was mine.”
“Don’t tell me who I should and shouldn’t be angry with! Clearly there have been a lot of things going on that I’ve not been aware of. I’m not very happy about that, and I certainly don’t want to talk about my and my son’s private life with some girl I’ve never met before,” she said.
“You don’t want to know about Peter?”
She paused. “Not really.”
“You know he has always thought about you. And Joe.”
“What? That’s rubbish! If he’s been thinking about us, then where the hell has he been for the last eleven years? A check in the post is not enough. And now this!”
A few of the injured people in the waiting room looked over at us.
“He does care about you both. It’s just . . .” How could I tell her about being a messenger? “You have to trust me.”
“Trust you? I don’t even know who you are! I’m not going to sit here and listen to a teenager explain my bloody life to me. If Peter wants to tell me about where he’s been, then he has to be brave enough to stand here and say it himself.”
“You’re saying you’d talk to him?” I said. “If he was here?”
“No!” she said. Then she looked down into her cup and shook her head. “I don’t know. Yes. I just want to know what happened. But he walked out again, didn’t he? Just like last time.”
All of a sudden it occurred to me that I might be able to turn this situation around. What had these past few weeks been about? Taking control. Changing things.
“Wait here,” I said, standing.
“What else am I going to do?” she said.
I stepped outside and felt the coolness of the night. A taxi, I thought, I’ll get a taxi to the beach hut and drag him back here. I ran toward the taxi rank, but then I stopped in my tracks. I had spotted something unusual out of the corner of my eye. Peter.
He was sitting on top of the bus shelter, smoking, his legs swinging over the edge. There was a man standing in the shelter, and either he hadn’t seen Peter or was choosing to ignore him.
“Oi,” I said.
He gave me a glance.
“Get down off there,” I said.
“Haven’t you done enough?” he said.
“She wants to talk to you,” I said.
“She wants to shout at me, more like,” he said.
“Well, she has every reason to, hasn’t she? You’ve got to take hold of your life, Peter. Now’s the time to do it. If you love her like you say you do, then get down off the bus shelter, get back in that building, and talk to her.”
It wasn’t easy for me to say that. I knew that he still had feelings for Rowenna. And even though Rowenna was angry, you don’t get angry with people you don’t care about.
The man waiting for the bus stared at me and then cast a look up at Peter. I could see Peter searching his brain for reasons he couldn’t go back to the hospital, but it seemed he’d run out of excuses.
They sat in the hospital café and talked. Leaving them there, across a plastic table in a dim and empty little room, I saw how much Peter had changed since I first met him. His shoulders were relaxed, and he sat tall and straight.
He looked at Rowenna. For most people, looking someone in the eye is no big deal, but for Peter it was always a risk. As if he might suck the person in and then spill their life onto the page. But I was proud of Peter for taking some control over how he dealt with being a messenger. Who knows what might happen from here? I thought.
I intercepted Joe in the corridor. He was on crutches. “You OK?” I said.
“It’s just a sprain. I’ll be off these in a couple of days. Where’s Mum?”
“She’s just having a chat with . . . Peter.”
Joe winced and turned away. It was all too much for him. He was in denial, I suppose.
“I’m sure she’ll fill you in,” I said.
“I’d like to see her now,” he said. “And I want to go home.”
So we walked around to the café entrance, Joe struggling on the crutches. At the entrance, he paused. Rowenna’s eyes were wet. Peter was nodding. And he was talking. I knew it’d take more than five minutes and a couple of crap hot chocolates to rub out the last eleven years, but it was a start.
Rowenna looked up but not toward us. There was another door, and a man walked through it. He was a typical Helmstown man, like Uncle Robert — about forty-five but with a side-swinging fringe and a coat with those tags on the shoulders like they have in the army. “Ro!” shouted the guy, in his posh voice. She waved to him.
“I came as soon as I could,” he said. “How’s Joe?”
It was as if we weren’t there. Like we were the Ghosts of Christmas Past. “Who the hell’s that?” I said to Joseph.
“That’s Ian,” Joseph said.
On hearing Joe’s voice, Ian turned and said, “Speak of the devil.”
I reckon Pete and me both thought he was talking about us.
I got the bus back to Auntie Lizzie’s. I sat upstairs, and a drunk boy was holding his cricket hat out the window to hear the flapping sound it made. It reminded me of running through Nana’s house with my blank piece of flapping paper, running through the garden, and climbing over the little wire fence into the fields. I got that wretched feeling again. Like hell was round the corner. Looking back, I realized that I must have drawn something that day, all those years ago. My first proto-message. It would have been a harmless squiggle. Indecipherable. A dud. Nonetheless, that must have been the moment I became a messenger.
It turned out that Ian was Rowenna’s partner. In the hospital café, he had shaken hands with Peter, and his eyebrows had twitched a little. Rowenna, I figured, would explain things to Joe and Ian later. Maybe she was doing it right now. Peter hadn’t looked too glum when Ian called Rowenna “darling.” I suppose he’d been expecting as much. He always imagined the worst.
I was tired by the time I got to Auntie Lizzie’s, and I didn’t want to talk. I intended to sneak in through the back entrance, but when I passed the open kitchen window, I heard them speak.
“. . . all I’m saying is that we ought to know where she is. She’s our responsibility, really,” said Uncle Robert.
“You’re right, I know. She is a good girl, though, Robert,” said Auntie Lizzie.
“She’s brilliant. Clever. Funny. But I don’t know if she has many boundaries at home. Your sister —”
“Louise gets depressed. And after everything that’s happened with Johnny . . .”
“That’s what I’m saying. Frances needs some security in her life. Some attention. And at the moment, the attention she’s getting is from this guy, and we don’t know anything about him.”
“What did he look like?”
“Tall. Sort of good-looking. From his clothes, I’d say he was a painter or laborer or something. Late twenties maybe. Too old, really.”
“But what are we supposed to do? We’ve tried talking to her.”
“Well, if she won’t listen . . . maybe I could have a word with Brian, dow
n at the station,” Robert said. Then he stopped. “What was that noise?”
I crept back round to the front of the house, opened the door, and ran upstairs before they could speak to me.
Up in my room, I called Mum. I flicked my mobile on to loudspeaker and chucked it on the bed, waiting for the voice mail to kick in. But, amazingly, she answered.
“Hello, Frances,” she said. She sounded numb. I grabbed the phone.
“Any news about Johnny?” I asked immediately.
“No.”
“Right.”
We were both silent for a moment. I hadn’t thought beyond questions about my brother.
“So,” she said. “Everything OK down there, is it?”
“Not really.”
“Oh, come on, Frances! Don’t try to guilt me. You’re in the lap of luxury. I know you like it better down there than you do up here. You’re the lucky one. There are other people in this world with bigger problems than you, you know.”
“I don’t want to fight, Mum.”
“Don’t wind me up, then,” she said.
I thought of a million smart-arse replies, but I let them all float away.
“Don’t go quiet on me, Frances. Come on, what have you been up to?”
“Nothing, really. Just helping out.”
“Helping out, eh?”
I could hear the accusation in her voice. Helping someone else was always seen as a failure to help her. It was disloyal. I could have reacted, but for once I didn’t.
“Frances? Are you there?”
“Why did he leave us, Mum?” I said.
“Because he thinks they’re going to lock him up and throw away the key,” she said.
“No, not Johnny. Dad. Why did Dad leave us?”
I thought Mum might tighten up. I’d asked that question so many times before and she’d just freeze. But she breathed out slowly. Maybe she was about to start telling the truth. Perhaps she was too shattered to keep lying.
“Your father didn’t leave us,” she said. “We ran away. We had to. He hit me and Johnny so hard, I didn’t know if we’d survive.”
“What?” I said.
“The beatings were nothing compared to what he’d say to us. The cruelty of it. Johnny was only a boy. I don’t know if he ever got over it, really. As soon as I saw you, darlin’, the second you were born, I knew we had to go. You was so small, so fragile.”
