“What happened?” Adam said. “Tell me.”
I smiled, savoring every second.
“Come on!”
“My father’s broken his leg or something. I’ve got to go up to London.”
Adam was mystified. “What are you talking about?”
“My old man’s broken his leg. That’s what it was about—my dad. Nothing about Weeks.”
Adam whooped with delight. He put his arm round my shoulder and we kicked the door open, then pushed past the crowd outside. We were roaring with laughter.
“Close call, man,” Adam said.
“Yeah, close call,” I replied. “Close fucking call.”
When I had told Adam I had to go to London because of my father’s broken leg, it wasn’t strictly true. I didn’t have to go at all. Martha had rung the school and said there had been an accident, a traffic accident. Someone—a passerby, apparently—had called her and told her that Arthur had been run over in the street, had broken his leg, and was being taken to hospital. “Nothing to worry about,” the Head Man said brightly. “Your mother’s going straight to the hospital.” That defined something to worry about, but it wasn’t what I was thinking of. I had seen an opportunity, and while I weighed it up, I slipped a frown onto my face to keep the Head Man occupied.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine, Hayman. They’re miracle workers, these days. A splint, a lick of plaster …”
I had had a very specific vision: on the other side of the closed door to the Head Man’s study, Weeks might be lurking, waiting to tell his story. Or there was going to be an urgent call from someone at the medical center to tell the Head Man about the cruel joke that had been played on Weeks. It didn’t take me long to decide what to do. “I think I should go, sir. Don’t you?”
“Go?”
“To the hospital.”
He gave a blustery laugh. “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought there was any need for that.”
“But nobody’s actually, well, heard what happened, have they? I mean properly.”
He looked confused. “Well, your mother—”
“She’s not been well, sir.”
“Hasn’t she?”
“No, sir.”
I thought I might get away with leaving it like that but I could see he was waiting for me to go on. I studied my hands, as if I was embarrassed, while I tried to think of something to say. A conveyor belt of medical conditions passed by me and I grabbed one off it. “It’s the menopause, sir.”
“I see,” he said nervously.
I was on very shaky ground now. Maybe I meant hysterectomy. I added tentatively, “Yes, it’s been … a tricky one.”
“Well …”
“So it’ll be difficult if she needs to lift him … you know … onto the lavatory.”
There was a pause. “Won’t the nurses do that?”
“He’s rather particular about that kind of thing, sir.”
He looked at me in astonishment. I wondered whether I was going to have to blub as well. There was a brief silence, and then he said reluctantly, “Well, I suppose you’d better take the train up to London.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, in a humble voice with a little crack in it. It was the least I could do.
As I was getting up, he said, “Oh, yes—your mother asked if you would ring your sister. She hasn’t been able to track her down.”
That wasn’t a surprise. Although Rachel was nominally sharing an apartment in Golders Green with two girls who were at the same secretarial college, she never seemed to be either there or the college. Where she could normally be found was at Claude’s. They had been best friends at school and still behaved most of the time as if they were in the playground, their relationship an endless cycle of argument and reconciliation. They rather liked people thinking they were girlfriend and boyfriend, even though it amazed me that you could think that Claude was anything other than gay.
After the taxi had dropped me at the station, I rang Claude’s number. He lived in a house of bedsits in Earls Court. Claude had a room next to his new friend Damian, who had just arrived from South Africa and might or might not have been his boyfriend. Since his grandfather had cut off his allowance, Claude sometimes worked as a tour guide, taking Americans round London, and Damian was helping him. Rachel said that most of their work was in the evenings, so I hoped he’d be in.
I had a lot of coins in my hand because the phone in Claude’s house was on the ground floor and someone had to go up three flights to get him.
“What time is it?” Claude said, when he finally got to the phone.
“Three o’clock.”
“Who is this?” he said, in an outraged tone.
“It’s Luke.”
“Oh, Luke. I thought it might be Todd.”
“Who?”
“Todd’s in my tour group—” Claude’s voice was cut off as the phone began beeping. I put some more money in. He was still talking when the coins went through. “—from Chicago. A lawyer. So he says. Though he certainly doesn’t seem to have much idea of what’s legal and what isn’t in this country. You should have seen him at that club he begged us to take him to.”
“Do you know where Rachel is?”
“Anyway, Todd’s not the point. It’s his friend who’s the point. Do you know what he wanted Damian to do?”
“Claude,” I said wearily, “I’m in a phone box and I’m running out of money. Where’s Rachel?”
“I’ve no idea,” he said. I knew he was lying.
“Look, if you speak to her, will you tell her that Arthur’s broken his leg and’s in hospital?”
“How awful. I must get Damian to organize flowers.”
The train was coming in on the opposite platform. “Claude, I’ve got to go.” I gave him the name of the hospital.
“Luke, wait,” he wailed, as I put the phone down.
In the blank little room at the hospital where I had been sent to wait, there were many things I could have been thinking about. I could have been thinking about Arthur, who was on some other floor but seemed so distant he might have been on the moon. I could have been thinking about Rachel, who probably was on the moon. I could have been thinking about Martha, who, I’d been told, was up with Arthur and was probably making everyone wish they were on the moon. What I was actually thinking about was having left Adam to face the music on his own and how long I could spin out Arthur’s broken leg.
There was a certain vagueness about the messages I had been getting from the hospital people I had talked to. People had been in and out. Cups of tea were brought. Faces were crinkled with sympathy. Lately I had noticed that eyes were averted, which made me think that maybe Arthur had broken his leg quite badly and would have to stay for a while. Weeks had broken his leg playing football and had been in hospital for a fortnight. Adam and I had scrawled obscenities on his cast with a red felt-tip pen.
After half an hour, there was a knock on the door and a doctor came in. It was nice of him to knock: nobody else had.
“I’m Dr. Massingbird,” he said. “You bearing up all right?” He looked me straight in the eyes, so intently, in fact, that I lowered them.
“How do you mean?” I was feeling uneasy now.
“Have you talked to your mother yet?”
“About what?”
“She hasn’t been down?”
“No, I’ve been waiting here.”
There was a pause. “How old are you? Twelve?”
What did that have to do with anything? “Thirteen,” I said. “Actually.”
He breathed out and shook his head. “We’re trying to get him stable. Your father.”
“You mean with crutches? Because he’s unsteady on his legs?”
“He’s sustained severe trauma, I’m afraid. The situation is very serious.”
My voice squeaked, “But he’s just broken his leg!”
“Among other things, yes.”
I didn’t know what to say. The story I had constructed was slipping thro
ugh my fingers. If I could just hold it together, everything would be fine. Arthur had broken his leg. He was unsteady on his legs. He was unstable. It had been pretty traumatic but it’s all right now. Well, let’s be honest, it’s been severely traumatic but he’s on the mend. Close call. Yeah, close fucking call.
I might have kept the story in one piece, but then he said something so awful as he was leaving that I felt the blood draining out of my face, felt myself falling down and down and down, like in an awful dream. “Well,” he said, “you’re going to have to be a very brave lad.”
The worst thing was that it felt like my fault. What had been a simple broken leg that would take only a lick of plaster to fix had been worked up by me into something more serious so I could get out of school. If I had stayed there to face the music with Adam everything would have been all right. As it was, I had jumped out of the story in which I belonged into another story where I was not meant to be, in the process tampering with the natural order of things, the way it had all been meant to play out.
Adam once told me about a science-fiction story he had read in which someone traveled back through time with strict instructions not to alter anything in the past. Without knowing it, he did something that seemed inconsequential, like fart or tread on an ant, and when he got back to his own time the earth was a nuclear wasteland or ruled by man-eating cats or something. I preferred to think about that because it was so absurd rather than the other example of thinking something into existence that had sprung into my mind: at the end of Garden Growing, the third of the Hayseed books, Luke dreams of a bird dying—Sometimes Luke dreamed in color and sometimes he dreamed in black: different shades of black: dark black and light black and all the blacks of the rainbow. The crow in Luke’s hands was black … —and when he wakes up in the morning, to a silent and deserted house, he looks out of his window and sees the field that leads to the Darkwood black with the bodies of dead crows. Mr. Toppit has made his dream come true.
The panicking Luke runs through the house trying to find his parents:
Along the corridors, across the passages, up the stairs, through the rooms, Luke’s feet ran so fast that they were going faster than he was. He could scarcely keep up with them. They made no sound on the carpet and they made no sound on the bare floorboards. Doors slammed silently behind them, curtains flapped noiselessly in the silent breeze. Luke could hear himself shouting, but only at a distance: he was moving so quickly that his voice was always behind him. Where were his parents?
Sometimes, deficient though they may be, they’re who you want and there’s nothing you can do about it. I had to go and find Martha. I didn’t feel precisely the panic that the other Luke did, but I felt the grimmest kind of foreboding. Actually, I felt simply alone. I now realized that Martha’s nonappearance was another thing to be thrown into the murky pool in which “severe trauma” and “trying to get him stable” and “very serious” were swimming around hungrily like sharks searching for something to devour.
In the corner of the room there was a small basin with a mirror next to it. I splashed cold water on my face before I realized there was no towel so I had to dry it on my sleeve. Then I unzipped my trousers and peed in the basin. What was nice was that it was exactly the right height, which made me feel a little better.
When I reached the ground floor the lift doors opened with a metallic ping and I was back in the entrance foyer where I had started out. I went over to the boxed-in office in the corner and tapped on the glass. It wasn’t the same man who had been there when I had first arrived. This one looked more like a security guard: he was dressed in a blue uniform with a cap. He slid open a panel.
“I’m trying to find out about my father,” I said breathlessly. “They told me to wait and—”
He cut in: “You shouldn’t be walking around unaccompanied. How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Where are your parents?”
“That’s who I’m trying to find. I’m Luke Hayman. My father’s Arthur Hayman. He’s the one who’s ill, who’s a patient. My mother’s called Martha Hayman.”
He tilted his head in the direction of the far corner. “She’s been sitting over there.” I turned. There was a row of empty chairs.
“Who?”
“Your mother. The American lady.”
“No, she’s—”
“Black dress?”
“Well—”
“Dark hair?”
“Sort of brownish but—”
“She’s been sitting over there. She was here a second ago, asked if there was any news about Mr. Hayman.”
“But my mother’s in the ward with my father. And she isn’t American.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s her bag on the chair. Maybe she’s gone to the toilet.” I was really beginning to dislike him. I went over to the chairs and looked at the bag. It was made of black canvas and it said on the front in white lettering, KCIF MODESTO—A SMOOTHER SOUND.
“This isn’t my mother’s bag,” I said, over my shoulder, but his chair had swiveled round and he had his back to me.
I had no idea what to do next. Short of locking myself in a lavatory and screaming with frustration, I had run out of options. I sat down and stared into space. After I had been there a few minutes, my gaze tilted to the bag on the chair next to me. The top was bulging open and, without moving, I tipped my head sideways to see inside it. Glancing to check that the man wasn’t looking, I put my hand inside and felt around. It was like one of those games you play in the dark when you pass along a peeled grape and say it’s someone’s eyeball. There was a small box near the top of the bag, rectangular with a shiny surface. My hand pushed further in, passing what felt like damp tissues, a pen, and a thin book before it hit something at the bottom. It felt a bit sticky and I snatched my hand out fast. My fingertips were brown. Cautiously, I raised them to my nose and sniffed. It was chocolate.
Saliva flooded into my mouth. It seemed like hours since I’d had anything to eat. The man was turned away from me and had his feet up on a table in front of him so I felt justified in raising the bottom of the bag and shaking it so that things slid out onto the chair. The rectangular box turned out to be Tampax, and I pushed it back in as I pulled out what had been a giant bar of chocolate. At one end, the paper and silver wrapping had been torn off. I got out a couple of chunks and ate them.
Then I shoved everything back into the bag. As the chocolate went in, it pushed out the corner of what looked like a notebook. I was about to press it back when I noticed “Hayman” written on it in blue ink. I was so amazed that I stopped breathing for a second or two. I opened the book. Page after page—line after line, down the side, in the corner, upside down—was filled with two words: Arthur Hayman.
The lettering was in different sizes and styles, sometimes in capitals, sometimes in both upper and lower case. In places, the words were surrounded by boxes with ornate curlicues and flourishes. I didn’t even care whether the man in the glass box saw me or not. I just dumped everything from the bag onto the chair and searched through it all. Apart from the Tampax, the chocolate, and the notebook, there were some pens, a nail file, a key attached to a metal ring with the number 14 on it, a map of the Underground and—I pulled away my hand—a lot of scrunched-up pieces of tissue paper stained with blood.
I picked up the notebook again. The pages before the Arthur Hayman ones were relatively normal. There were a lot of calculations, which I guessed were conversions from pounds into dollars, and bits of travel information like “Nearest subway: Lancaster Gate,” the name of an hotel with a phone number, and various things ticked or crossed out, like “Call Alma.” Turning to the Arthur Hayman pages and those after them was like going through a door and entering a different world. There were doodles and little sketches, some just scrawls and others quite carefully done, all variations on a theme: a man and a child. Oddly he seemed to be a kind of Red Indian chief with a big headdress made of feathers. The child was a little
girl, and while his face was quite carefully drawn, both head on and in profile, the child was a sort of silhouette with no features. The most finished of the drawings took up nearly a whole page of the notebook and showed the man and the child standing: he was tall and thin and she was tiny, hardly taller than his knees; they were holding hands. Running alongside all the sketches were the lines of a poem. They had been crossed out and rewritten all over the place, but a little portion of it was finished and written out neatly:
Oh my Anaglypta calling,
Princess Anaglypta calling,
Calling through the forest darkness
Calling over prairie mountain.
’Cross the waves of Gitche Gumee,
Soaring waves that brush the seabirds,
Haymanito hears her calling,
Hears his Anaglypta calling.
It was like Hiawatha, only it wasn’t. “Haymanito hears her calling …” I repeated the line aloud several times, then put the notebook, along with everything else that had spilled out onto the chair, back into the black bag as quickly as I could. I felt a strange sense of revulsion and couldn’t wait to get it all off my hands. Just reading that poem had made me feel embarrassed, as if I’d been caught breaking into someone’s house. But it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. The frightening thing—the inexplicable thing—was that it was like breaking into a house you’d never laid eyes on, in a country you’d never been to, and finding it filled with your belongings.
So, there I was, sitting on a stackable black plastic chair in the foyer of a hospital into which my father, who might or might not be in a dangerously unstable condition, and my mother appeared to have vanished, and I was surreptitiously going through the bag of an obviously unhinged woman, who might or might not be American and whom a security guard believed might be my mother. The opportunities for confusion were endless and I wanted something to be simple. Then amazingly—for a second—it was. There was an echoey ping and a light went on above the lift. The doors parted and there was Martha.
For a few seconds she didn’t see me. She seemed rather small and old, and was apparently having difficulty with the lift: she was peering around her in a confused way, as if going through the open doors in front of her might not be the best way of getting out, as if, in fact, there might be several other exits that she couldn’t find. Then she stepped out tentatively, looked up and saw me. I could tell that whatever the news was going to be, it was not going to be good.
Mr Toppit Page 6
