by Edward Hogan
She stopped.
“Mum?”
“I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I don’t know why I am. Usually, I’d —”
“It’s OK,” I said.
She didn’t speak. So I did.
“But Johnny had all these stories about Dad,” I said quietly.
“You mean the ones he told you when you got home from school?”
“How did you know about that?”
“I used to listen at the door.” She sighed. “Oh, Frances. He made them up. Every last one. But don’t be angry with him, Fran. He was only trying to do something nice.”
I wasn’t angry. It was suddenly obvious that they’d been lies. Deep down, I think I’d known all the time. But was it really so wrong? There was still goodness and brilliance in those stories. It’s just that the goodness and brilliance had come from Johnny, not my dad.
“I asked him about the stories once,” Mum said. “‘Why you telling her all them lies?’ I said. He said he just wanted you to have the dad you deserved.”
I didn’t cry, but it was a struggle. Mum was crying now. I could hear her. “I just want Johnny back, Frances. He’s not like you. He’s not a survivor.”
People had always wondered why Johnny and me were so different. He was so wild, and I was all common sense. He went off the rails, while I did well at school. He took all that punishment in the boxing ring. Now it was clear to me why. He’d known our dad, and I hadn’t.
“He’ll be all right, Mum,” I said.
“But how do you know, Frances?” she said.
She was right. I didn’t.
When Mum and I hung up, I went over to the window and asked Johnny to come back. I asked him to remember the story he’d told me about how our dad had twisted the spring out of his finger. I told Johnny I knew that he’d made the story up, which meant that it was him — Johnny — who was the clever one. “You’ve got a good brain, Johnny,” I whispered into the night. “You can do this. You can make the right decision. Come back.”
But I knew he’d be thinking about jail. I knew he’d think there was no way out of the situation. He’d be scared stiff that the policeman would die and that they’d call him a murderer. But he wasn’t a murderer, was he?
I had been telling Peter to face up to his life, to take control of it, to take action. But what had I done about Johnny? Nothing. I had assumed he was a lost cause, in much the same way Peter had assumed that seeing his son was a lost cause. Sometimes it’s hard to take your own advice.
The conversation with Mum had shaken me out of my negative thinking about Johnny’s situation. I had changed Peter’s life, so surely I could change my own. Thinking about Johnny making up those stories on my bed, I knew I had to keep trying to help him. Maybe I didn’t need some stupid lawyer to find out if he had a case.
I didn’t consider going to anyone else. Max is a great guy, and Auntie Lizzie is very understanding, but when you’re a messenger, you have a certain view of the world. You develop a way of looking into the future, of seeing how each decision you make could set off an unstoppable cascade of events. So when I was working out how I could help Johnny, I wanted to speak to someone who shared that view. I called Peter and we arranged to meet on the sea path.
He was wearing a crisp white shirt, which still had the creases from the piece of cardboard they put in the packaging. The whiteness of the collar exaggerated the toasted color of his skin. Windburn, sunburn. He looked good.
He didn’t see me approaching because he was struggling with the cuffs. “You’re dandy today,” I said.
He looked up. “Frances!” he said. “Do you think this is too small?”
“No. Guys wear them tight.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about fashion.”
That was true. He wasn’t like other guys his age, but I guess he’d always had a lot on his mind.
We walked toward the hut through a stiff summer wind.
“I’m a bit nervous,” he said.
“Have a cigarette. That’s what you usually do.”
“I’ve quit.”
“Wow. Where are you going, anyway?”
“I’m going to Hartsleigh. Rowenna invited me. I didn’t want to look scruffy.”
I’ll admit to it, although I don’t like to: I felt more than a twinge of jealousy. There wasn’t much I could do about it. After all, it was me who had got them to speak to each other again. Sometimes when you feel like you’re never going to get with the person you love, when the whole situation feels impossible, you just want them to be with someone else. You want it to be over, so there is absolutely no chance. There’s nothing more painful than a glimmer of hope.
I clenched my teeth. “Great news,” I said.
“We’re going to sit down for a coffee, talk everything through. Me, Rowenna, and What’s-His-Name.”
“Ian,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“So,” I said. “All of a sudden you’re the sort of man who sits down for coffee. In a shirt. Times have changed.”
He stopped walking and so did I. “It’s down to you,” he said. He stooped, took my face in both of his big hands, and kissed me on the cheek. It was the kind of kiss you give a friend, but I felt the burn of his stubble and tried to imagine there was some passion in it. He smelled of sea air, clean and sharp.
I felt myself reach out a bit when he pulled away.
“It was nothing,” I said. My heart was going fast and hard.
“You’re incredible, Frances. When you arrived in Helmstown, I thought I knew why you’d come and what you were here for. But I didn’t. You’ve changed me.”
“Well,” I said, trying — for God’s sake — not to blush, “you’ve changed me, too.”
“I’m afraid I probably have,” he said. “But, look, I bought you a present.”
He took out a thin box, which I recognized immediately from the gold royal seal. Berol Venus pencils.
“I’m sorry I broke the other ones,” he said.
I took the pencils and smiled. For a messenger, a pencil is a gift of mixed feelings, but I did love my Venuses. And it felt good to get a present from Peter. I changed the subject so my pleasure wouldn’t be too obvious.
“Has Rowenna said anything about you seeing Joe?” I asked.
“We talked briefly. She wants to take it slow, and she’s not making any promises. I understand that. We have to go at Joe’s pace. Rowenna says he’s excited, but he’s got used to What’s-His-Name, and I’ve also got a bit of work to do, considering how long I’ve been away.”
“It sounds like a good start, though,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to tell myself not to get carried away, but it’s so much better than I ever could have expected,” he said.
We walked on down the sea path, into the strengthening wind, and two dogs approached us from behind. A gray whippet passed on one side of us and a huge gray Weimaraner on the other. It took me a moment to make the connection, but when I did, I turned around and looked back down the path to see Helen and Greg, hand in hand.
“Look,” I said to Peter.
He turned. “Oh,” he said. He was trying to look unimpressed, but I could see a little smile creeping through.
“We did that,” I said.
“I suppose we did.”
“Consequences. They’re not all bad.”
The dogs bounced on ahead of us, chasing each other and rearing with joy on their way to the undercliff path. I looked back again to see Helen bent over laughing as Greg said something to her.
“Anyway,” Peter said, “you said you had something you needed to talk about.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s my brother. He’s in a bad way, and I’m trying to work out how I can help him.” I felt guilty as soon as I said it, like I’d ruined the happy mood.
Peter winced. It was an expression that said, I feel for you and everything, but I’ve got a lot to do. It was a new one for Peter. It wasn’t new to me.
&nbs
p; “It’s all right,” I said. “It’ll be all right. I was going to go to the library, look up some stuff about the law. It’s not the first time a bloke has accidentally hit another bloke too hard outside a pub. There must be other cases. I’m going to see if there’s anything I can do.”
There was the face again. Peter looked at his watch. “I’d really like to come with you, but I’ve got to get to this meeting.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I wasn’t asking you to come.”
I tried not to sound hurt, but it didn’t work.
Up ahead, a police car pulled over and two officers got out. They walked onto the sea path, counted off the beach huts, and stopped at Peter’s red door. We slowed our pace. “What’s going on?” I said.
“Don’t know,” Peter said. “But I tell you what: you should go. Whatever they want, I’ll handle it.”
“OK.”
“Come back later. About five-ish. We can talk about your brother then.”
So I stopped and Peter walked on. The wind had picked up, and the air was like needles. I was standing near one of the seafront bars, where they’d hung those depressing old colored lightbulbs on a wire. I suppose they were trying to be retro and cool, this being Helmstown, where everything is retro and cool.
Peter reached the police officers, and they started to talk. From their body language, I could see that the policemen wanted to go into the hut, but Peter was shaking his head. One of the policemen took out a notebook, and as he did so, Peter turned quickly to me and made a gesture with his hand, a sort of wave that said, Get gone.
Just then, the wind took hold of two or three of the colored bulbs and smashed them against the wall of the bar. I flinched. Powdered red and blue glass swirled about on the ground, beneath the empty benches.
I got gone.
In the library, I found plenty of cases of what the judges called “one-punch” deaths, most of them involving boxers or former boxers. None of them had happy endings.
A washed-up ex-pro, who’d never been as successful as his dad, smacked a bloke who had his hands in his pockets, in Yorkshire. Seven years for manslaughter.
A welterweight knocked a man down the steps of a London nightclub and then ran away to America. He said it was self-defense. Three years for manslaughter.
A young boxer, whom the judge described as a “predator,” punched a man who was running away outside a bar in Birmingham. The verdict: murder, jailed for life.
The problem was that all the crimes were different, and all the men were different. And I couldn’t help but think about the victims. The families. The injuries. Fractured eye socket, broken jaw, severe brain swelling. I felt sick. I looked down at my hand. Five thin fingers, a drawing bump on the middle one, graphite smudges on the skin from my pencils.
I took out the photo that Auntie Lizzie had given me: Johnny and me in the shed. It was just a ruined old shed in the middle of a disused field, really. I used to lie on Johnny’s back while he did press-ups, and I’d watch the world go up and down. There were newspaper clippings of his career pinned up on the walls, and all these famous boxing quotes our granddad had copied out in red marker. Boxers talking about how they were in love with pain, addicted to their own hurt. There was also that quote by Mike Tyson about how he tries to punch the nose bone through his opponent’s brain. That last one always disturbed me. It wasn’t because I thought Johnny would ever try to do such a thing, but because there were people out there who would try to do that to Johnny. I’d seen them try to do it. And he was stupid enough to face up to them.
But there were also people out there, now, who thought Johnny was that type of man: a monster, a murderer. I prayed that the policeman he’d hit would pull out of his coma. That he would sit up and laugh. That he would remember throwing a punch at Johnny, admit to it, and they would make friends. They would play a game of chess together, for charity, as a protest against violence.
The only time I ever argued with Johnny was about boxing. Once I told a teacher, Miss O’Shea, about the Helmstown fight and how much it had upset me to see Johnny being hit. She said boxing was brutal and savage. I told Johnny, and he was furious. He said, “Your teacher doesn’t understand. She’s never had to fight for anything in her life. She doesn’t understand what it means to be hungry.”
“You mean angry?” I said.
Johnny took off his sunglasses. “I mean both,” he said.
I thought of him doing press-ups in the shed. I thought of him sitting at the end of my bed when I had a fever, a pack of frozen peas on his swollen cheekbone, a pack of frozen carrots on my forehead. I thought of him hiding in some God-awful lonely part of England, running from ghosts and shadows.
He’d been trying to make a difference. He had this idea of running a boxing gym for kids. He wanted to call it the Top Gun Fight School. He’d done first-aid training and a course in fitness instruction. But none of that would ever happen now.
I pored over the definitions of manslaughter and murder in the legal textbooks. I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. If you could prove that you were in such a messed-up mental state that you weren’t like a normal human being, then you wouldn’t be charged with murder.
Could it be argued that Johnny was different from “normal human beings”? That his father had beaten him, humiliated him? That he’d been a boxer — a job that involved being punched in the face every single day for ten years? Most people, when you throw a punch at them, will turn their back. It’s a natural instinct for self-defense. Boxers have that instinct trained out of them. They are rewired, reprogrammed. Could I argue that Johnny had been turned into a machine?
But he did hit the guy. He knew what his hands were capable of, and he used them.
I heard Peter’s voice in my head, imagined what he might have said. Did your brother have a choice? The truth was, I didn’t know. I slammed the textbook shut. The other people in the library stared at me, but I stared back and, in turn, each of them looked away.
As planned, I went back to the beach hut at five p.m. I knocked and waited, wondering how Peter’s meeting with Rowenna had gone. I thought of them staring at each other across the table in the hospital café and sighed. I knocked again. Nothing.
The air was full of water. Sea spray and summer rain. After a few more minutes, I decided to leave. He’s probably still with Rowenna and Ian, I thought. Probably just running late. There was likely to be a perfectly good reason why he hadn’t turned up to meet me. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
I went back to the hut the next day and found him.
He was piling his stuff into a kit bag. He was not a good packer. All the paints and brushes — he just dumped them in. I watched him for a bit, puzzled. The sun was hanging unsteadily above the Big Dipper on Helmstown Pier.
“Hi,” I said. “I figured it must have gone well yesterday, seeing as you didn’t make it back for our meeting.”
He froze, crouched, with his fingers around the straps of his bag. His green eyes flashed, and I couldn’t decide if he looked more like a hunter or some poor creature scared out of its wits.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said.
His limbs broke out of the freeze, and he stood up tall, looking both ways down the path. “Nothing,” he said.
“So,” I said, “how did it go? With Rowenna?”
“Great,” he said. “They’re going to let me take Joe out for the day. To the zoo.”
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “Hey, it’s been four days without any messages now. Do you think we’ve beaten it?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not as predictable as that.” He couldn’t even look at me. I knew there was something wrong, and although the day was warm, I shivered.
“Shall we go and get a cup of tea, then?” I said.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?” I said. “Where are you going? You’re acting weird. Even for you.”
“I can’t see you anymore, Frances,” he said.
I felt the cold hard shock of his words.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Your uncle. Robert, is it?”
“What about him?” I said.
“He’s had a word with the police.”
I had almost forgotten about the two officers outside Peter’s hut the day before.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Apparently he’s got friends in high places,” Peter said. “The officers said they thought it was unwise for me to invite teenage girls into the hut. They made it sound like I was . . . trying it on with you. Which is crazy.”
“Of course it is,” I said.
I didn’t think it was crazy. I’d have done anything to get him to try it on with me. Anything except ask.
“They seemed to know everything — well, not everything, but a lot. They said you were going through a tough time, with your brother’s situation, and that your family thinks you’re at risk.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“They said that if I continued to hang around with you, they’d make sure I never saw my son again,” he said. His voice was low and blank.
“What did you say?”
“I told them I’d leave you alone,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “But . . .”
What did I want to say? I wanted to say, But surely you’re not that weak. But surely you told them to stick it.
“I mean, you do understand, don’t you?” he said.
I nodded.
“Your uncle is a meddler,” he said, and bent slowly to put some blank postcards into his bag. He looked nervously up and down the path again. I realized that he was hoping nobody would see us together.
“So that’s it, is it?” I said.
“Well, not forever, obviously. Just until this thing with the police blows over. It’s just — Joseph is my son, you know. I’d do anything for him.”
“What about the recipients? What about the people we have to save? Am I supposed to work out my messages on my own?”
