Monica takes the cushion from Ella, and they exchange a look and a shake of the head. Ella recognises that Monica is worried about Gramercy’s restless walking at night, about her general state of mind, but she can’t think about that now.
‘Can you stay here?’ Kim bends sympathetically towards Nellie; he’s acting the defence counsel, with her interests at heart; she is the kind of person, he recognises, that HSWU is all about. ‘Have you been given papers?’
Ella wants to reach out and touch his hair, to find the spirals of his crowns and follow the rim of his ears with her fingers to feel for the kink, to lift his shirt to see his smoothness, to sing to him something that might sink deep into that stratum of his cortical being that, years and years ago, might have been seeded by her.
In some stories, she knows, mothers know their lost children through some prickling of the flesh; but there are others she’s also heard, when they need tokens, identifying features, parchments and certificates – the right papers.
Monica interposes, with a cough, ‘The application’s dragging on and on, but I think we’ll get there in the end. Won’t we, Nellie?’ She smiles grimly. ‘Nellie has a wonderful daughter too, who’s by now so completely part of the environment that she couldn’t possibly belong anywhere else. And I think that’ll make a very strong case for giving them both permits to stay. But God, does it take grinding away, day after day, year after year – and it really winds me up that someone like Nellie is meant to be able to cope with all the fucking stuff . . . this document in triplicate, small print to make you go stark staring mad.’
‘When HSWU is really up and running,’ Kim said, ‘when there’s somebody in the office, not just me, the website will take you through all that – step by step, in twenty, thirty languages . . .’
Monica glances over at the clock on the wall above the stove: ‘But we must go, if we’re to catch that train and get you back in time for whatever it is you have to be there for – pity, Gramercy’ll be disappointed. You’ll have to come back!’
They’re nodding; Kim is picking up Hortense’s bag, and smiling into her grey face protectively, as they begin to pass through the door.
‘Why’s your name “Kim”?’ Ella asks. ‘It isn’t a name from Tirzah.’
Kim smiles at her. ‘It was on a button on my clothes, when I was . . . handed over to my Mum. Funny, I know. I thought it might be some kind of Tirzahner brand name – like being called “Lacoste” or “Oshkosh” . . . Still, I quite like it.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘I found it in the Bundle, too – made my skin prickle. There it meant something like “Good, Holy Memory”—’ He looks at Hetty, who mutters, on automatic, ‘It must have been a charm of some kind.’ Then Kim glances back at the woman, Gramercy’s help, the Tirzahner refugee. She looks like many of the HSWU followers, especially in the way her eyes cling to him; it’s an expression he knows. It’s recognition – that he can help; it’s made up of inextinguishable hope; it’s the look in certain faces that gives him belief that what he does is necessary.
At the threshold, he turns back to Ella, ‘Good luck. I hope it all works out. We’ll talk properly – I’ll be back.’ He nods, to himself, to the absent Gramercy, to Monica.
Ella watches him and sits down at the table, something she doesn’t usually do. Her head is light and her eyes are focusing strangely. The past is pouring through her vision, obscuring the dresser and the sink and the stove and the windows of morning in the kitchen at Feverel.
Kim – K-I-M – Kalē Iērē Mnemosynē O, Memory, Lovely and Holy . . . we used to scratch the letters into buttons for good luck . . . did I still have one of those buttons then? It’s all so long ago and the button wasn’t one of the tokens by which I expected to find you again my glossy boy as long as it is you if it is you it must be you and yes you are thriving you are at home here as I always hoped as I dreamed
6
In the Playground
It was the beginning of term, and a mild, blue September, still attached to summer’s kite strings, bathed the school, transfiguring the Cantelowes wasteland; in the playground, children were showing one another talismans they’d found and telling one another secrets they’d discovered or invented and made their own over the holidays; Kim was in the staff room, having a coffee with his colleagues, conscientiously putting his coins into the biscuit collecting box and generally trying to ensure with modesty and amiability that his recent moments of fame in the papers and on the telly should provoke minimum resentment and suspicion and hostility among them.
The head teacher, Kate Daiges, had telephoned him for a talk the week before term started; she’d asked him to guarantee that this new, public phase of his political activism would not interfere with his participation in the school. Kim was electric with hope, with plans, with possibilities, and he radiated confidence down the line: he was passionately committed to his job at Cantelowes, he declared; young children in just such a part of Enoch were the central motive of his life and work.
‘But all this stuff about visions – it makes some of us very uncomfortable. It’s one thing to campaign for greater justice and equality, to speak up for community, but . . . come off it, Kim.’
‘You wouldn’t tell the kids that Joan of Arc was lying, would you? Or that the Bible’s full of fantasies? It’s part of human nature and history to experience revelations. I’m not setting myself up as a saint – you know that. It’s no different from you waking up one day with an absolute, clear sense that something has to be done and can’t be done in any other way . . . Call it instinct, a sixth sense, the unconscious. To me, it’s a vision.’
‘So you keep saying, I know. I’ve read your interview. Your interviews. But I have to tell you I’m going to be watching closely your input in the classroom. I don’t want one thing getting mixed up with another. I don’t want the kids upset – or their parents – by religious fervour of some new order. And I don’t want absenteeism. Or excuses.’
‘I’m not denominational, I’m not sectarian. The whole point of HSWU is to combat all that.’
‘Mmm. I know that’s what you say.’
So Kim had yet to convince his head that the kids of Cantelowes would benefit from taking part in the film, featuring in the vanguard of the Museum celebrations for the Leto Bundle’s unveiling and recording the chorus backing to Gramercy’s Leto anthem – but he was confident. Hortense would be writing to Kate Daiges in her best official civil servant mode. No head of a run-down inner city primary could hold out for long, he felt, against such opportunities.
Happiness is a funny word, he thought, as he asked the children in his class to make a list of three things that had made them happy over the holidays.
Food – of various kinds. Outings – to the sea, to a film. Animals. My gerbil. My hamster. People. My Nan.
He made suggestions: What about colours, he said. Think of a colour that lifted you up. Yellow of sunflowers. Orange of satsumas. Cherry coke pink. Frosted mint of Mum’s toenails.
What about doing things? Did any of you make anything? Help your Nans cook? Draw what you made. Pat-a-cake pat-a-cake. Write me a story about what you did.
Were there any surprises? Any secrets? Such things make for happiness.
(Also for unhappiness, but we shan’t talk about that today.)
What about a song you like? Can you sing one to me? Do you girls still like that boy band Nixzone? (Titters, groans.) What about the Natural Selections? (A girl band, clearly down the tubes from the expressions of disgust round the low tables.)
You like who? Oh, I’ll have to have a listen to them.
To himself, he was saying, Happiness: haply I think on thee. Hapless in the jaws of fate. Can one be hapful? Happenstance is chance, accident, Lady Luck’s territory: not quite fate, because random through and through, whereas fate is driven by unseen forces, has a will and a purpose behind it, the knowing laughter up the sleeve of the old gods. But happenstance shows its direct links to happiness: it’s the country of perhaps
. Destiny forecloses options: the one who’s cursed can never escape, he shall meet his father at the crossroads, marry his mother and put out his eyes. But the country of maybe lets things happen, it’s that messy corner in time where you turn back on the journey because you think you left the immersion on and so you escape the multiple pile-up on the motorway or miss the plane that goes down in a ball of fire. Happily, I wasn’t there when the chariot with the angry patriarch reached the crossroads, happily I got stuck in the tunnel during a bomb scare and I wasn’t on that flight after all.
Happily: you are fortune’s child.
Haply I think on thee, Kim murmured again, and he looked out of the window, to avert his bright face from the children.
It had been a happy summer for him; the happiest he could remember. Six hundred hits a week on the HSWU website now, and a part-timer funded by Gramercy. She was keen to employ someone full-time, at Feverel, to answer the queries – she wanted Phoebe. That way, she’d secure Nellie. But Phoebe was wary and had only agreed to temp for a while. Kim also urged Gramercy to respect Phoebe’s objections to taking up the work full-time: ‘She doesn’t want you to overwhelm them – it’s simple. She wants her independence. Don’t suffocate her! I want to go on teaching, too, you see. I don’t want to be sucked in to . . .’
Gramercy did not have to listen. She’d heard this before.
Then Hetty, who was miserably spending the summer with her husband, first two weeks’ holiday up north on the islands, then back in Enoch, at the Museum, was writing Kim e-mails full of awkward officialese between tackling the Leto manuscripts. A full monograph was to follow the first background booklet. But it would take years: she was commissioning new translations, finding editors to collate the results, to trace the relations between one document and another.
A year ago, he would not have recognised himself as he had become. Before Minta moved to the Close Care home, he’d stay in, he’d tell himself, to watch out for her, but once he was all on his own in the house, he’d begun to build the website at night and he hadn’t gone out much. But now, HSWU’s profile was growing strongly: politicians of every stripe were making enquiries, many of them with startling unctuousness. The opposition was bringing it up, too; there were taunts to the website as well. They showed people were sitting up and taking notice. He wasn’t to be dismissed easily any more. All those features about Kim that had fazed people and provoked jibes (‘Change water into beer, come on.’ Or, ‘Here’s a bit of soap!’) were now part of his ‘charisma’. He was ‘sombre’, he was ‘mysterious’. Besides, he was enjoying Hetty’s rivalry with Gramercy: she now wanted him to know how much better she grasped the meaning of his mission than that rock star.
At break after lunch, some of the bigger girls were doing their French skipping, in and out of the elastic to a rapid patter. Many of the lines were new this season, and so Kim stood and listened, while a gaggle of kids bounced around him, plucking at him for his attention and crying foul against one another:
‘Milkman milkman do your duty
Here comes Mrs Macaroony
She can do the pam-pam
She can do the splits
But most of all she’ll kiss, kiss, kiss.’
A new boy that term, eight years old, small for his age, was watching them as they skipped; he stood entranced, eyes shining, his fists in his cheeks. The dinner ladies who helped out during breaks after clearing away and doing the dishes, tried to coax the quiet and frightened little fellow to join a mixed game of He, but he shook his head, and retreated further, in silence. Kim knew that little-boy yearning to belong, especially to a group of bursting, noisy, self-assured girls, for whom words and rhymes and jokes were so much knicker elastic, a tribe from whom tongue-locked boys like Simi would always be exiled.
They were chanting:
‘My boyfriend gave me an apple
My boyfriend gave me a pear
My boyfriend gave me a kiss on the lips
And then threw me down the stair.’
Thwang, schlwink, thwang, schwlink, went the skipping elastic; in and out the first girl jumped, her quick feet crisscrossing, but then she stumbled and was caught in the traces, so it became another’s turn, who dashed into the mesh, as the others crowed and bounced up and down, their eyes dancing with the mischievous delight of it. They were glad to be back at school, teachers and pupils alike: the summer holidays had been long.
When the sequence of events was reconstructed later, Sally, one of the dinner ladies, remembered seeing a man in a car with a mobile phone, parked outside the Girls’ gate on the zigzag lines, and feeling then impatience and contempt: ‘Men behaving badly, again’, she’d said to herself. But she didn’t take action then – it was the first day of term, the general mood was excited, but trusting. Later, she pictured the man clearly: he was sitting in some kind of customised, metallic green vehicle, with the window buzzed down, and when he finished making his calls, he turned up some techno dance stuff and jounced to it as he smoked, his eyes screwed up against the light so that she couldn’t see his features then, even though he was parked on the pavement side so that he could survey the playground through the barred gap between the walls. He didn’t look like one of the dirty mac brigade, more showbiz, more like a TV presenter pretending to be hard, with a baseball cap on back to front. The Girls’ gate of the playground was closed, but not bolted.
When he got out of the car, he looked gigantic, because it was a low-slung number which he swung himself up from, and because he was the only man, with the exception of Kim, and he was bearing down through the lines and loops of children and their female minders in the playground; besides, he was inflated by a huge, vivid magenta puffer jacket, in spite of the weather, and it bore fluorescent yellow stripes across the shoulders and on the upper arms and wrists; he looked, Sally said later, like a gigantic hazard sign on the march in some frightening cartoon ad.
One of the children who gave her version of events on television (before the social services clamped down on journalists approaching pupils about the incident) said that she saw him marching in like the bad brothers of the BFG – the fleshlumpchewer and the babyguzzler, and that she was scared: he was coming back, she said, ‘Because he’s still hungry ’cos he didn’t get anything to eat last time.’
Sally asked the man, ‘Can I help?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘looking for him.’ He pointed across the yard, and began making straight across it, over the hopscotch markings, through the clusters of children. They were still dancing up and down, singing,
‘I gave him back his apple
I gave him back his pear
I gave him back his kiss on the lips
And threw him down the stair.’
As he passed by her, Sally noticed, she said later, that he was younger and smaller than the impression given by the swollen mass of his jacket, that he looked pasty and sort of stretched and tired round the eyes. But it was the roughness of his tone and the purposeful gliding of his eyes towards one of the kids that made her realise here was real trouble.
‘Hey!’ she called out. ‘Where you going?’ But he went on, regardless, past another troop squealing as they jumped up and down round one child in the middle. As soon as Simi saw the man coming, the child ran to the far corner of the playground, and huddled against the wall, his face buried in the brickwork, his arms cradling his head. So Sally then shouted to Kim, and to Eva, the two teachers supervising that break. Kim heard her over the sound of the children’s skipping songs and the hubbub around him in the centre of the playground where the games were heated; he saw the quiet new boy cower against the wall, and he swivelled to see the man, with his face splotched with anger, gain on his prey.
It all happened so quickly, as everyone was to say afterwards, that most of the kids didn’t see it at all, and it wasn’t clear if the man in the puffer jacket sauntered or strode or ran to snatch Simi where he was crouching and whimpering against the wall. He seemed to leap, long-leggedly, moving th
rough the ranks of playing children without let or hindrance to pick up the boy and crush his head against his chest in the crook of his left arm and lift him off his feet and drag him away. Simi put up no fight, but seemed to expect his assailant, and play dead, as if total submission might ward off the coming blows, his dangling legs limp, his face squeezed in the bulging folds of the man’s jacket.
Kim felt something seize him, first cold, then hot; he could feel how the world tossed sickeningly as you were grabbed and hoisted and jolted upside down; he tasted, as searing as battery acid on the tongue, the child’s fear of beatings ahead; it was as present to him as if he were Simi, and so, dipping into speed, he ran across the ground to accost the child’s abductor.
The game of He was still whirling round the playground, one boy bumping into the man and the child he was hauling off.
‘Sorry,’ said the boy, and then stopped, seeing what was happening.
‘You’re caught!’ called another player in triumph, laying a hand on him and speeding off. There were squeals and whoops, the rings of running boys and girls looping over the ground.
The skipping game, too, was carrying on.
‘I know a little Dutch girl
Called Eye Shoe Shemima
And all the boys in the football team
Go Eye Shoe Shemima
How is your mother?
All right.
Died in the fish shop
Last night
What did she die of?
Raw fish.
How did she die?
Like this.’
Down flopped the child on the playground floor, playing dead.
The Leto Bundle Page 42
