So much
– but she just…
Just…
No.
Can’t.
Her eyes shifted over towards the classroom windows. It was a new building (everything was new here – for Isidore, something being ‘new enough’ was always a primary concern). She idly noticed how one of the smaller, higher windows had been left open. She gazed up at it, ruminatively. Her eyes moved to the square of putty surrounding the pane of glass. She could see – even from where she was sitting – that the putty had been interfered with. It was puckered; sliced; gouged out in some places.
She shuddered.
‘We all want what’s best for Fleet, after all…’ Mrs Santa continued. ‘Of course,’ Elen was still distracted, still looking up at the window. ‘So we wondered,’ Mrs Santa grasped her moment, ‘if it might not be an idea to book him in for a brief session with the child psychologist.’
‘No.’
Elen immediately snapped back to attention. ‘Absolutely not.’
Mrs Santa seemed shocked; less by the refusal itself, than by the casual manner in which it was delivered. ‘But it’s a perfectly normal procedure,’ she emphasised, ‘a significant percentage of our children end up seeing the psychologist at some time or other during their school career.’
Elen pushed her hair firmly behind her ears. ‘What percentage would that be, exactly?’
Mrs Santa floundered, ‘I don’t know. Two…three…’
‘That’s not a significant percentage,’ Elen was very calm, ‘that’s a tiny percentage.’
Fleet had completed his task in the play area. He yawned. He rubbed his eyes and then stood up. Elen reached out her hand towards him, almost as if appealing for his support.
‘If you’re concerned that there might be some kind of…of stigma…’ Mrs Santa continued, staunchly.
‘Yes I am worried,’ Elen nodded, ‘very worried. Because there would be.’
‘The point is that we’re extremely concerned about Fleet, and we simply feel…’
‘The fact is,’ Elen interrupted, ‘that I’m not really the problem here. It’s Dory, Fleet’s father. He’s German. He’s very old-fashioned. He simply wouldn’t tolerate the idea.’
‘Fleet’s father doesn’t necessarily have to be involved,’ Mrs Santa proclaimed boldly (glancing towards the child with a bright smile), ‘it could simply be something that the school has instigated, something which just “spontaneously happens”, so to speak.’
Elen seemed genuinely alarmed by this suggestion. Fleet was standing at her side, now. She slipped her arm around his waist and pulled him closer.
‘I don’t like the sound of that at all, Mrs Santa.’
Her gentle voice contained a strong warning.
Mrs Santa looked uncomfortable, as if a breach had been established and she – for one – was going to experience some difficulty in recovering from it. ‘Well just think it over, at least. We’re only trying to do our best for the boy,’ she leaned forward and chucked Fleet, playfully, under his chin (he stiffened). ‘We want him to be happy. We want him to excel.’
‘Of course.’
There was a sudden, loud creaking sound directly above them. Elen glanced up. One of the classroom’s suspended strip-lights had slowly begun to rock.
Mrs Santa glanced up, too.
‘It’s the breeze,’ she said, ‘it often does that.’
She clambered to her feet, walked over to the line of windows, picked up a specially adapted pole and pushed its metal tip through the high, open window’s latch. She briskly pulled it shut.
The light continued to swing. Fleet stretched up his arm towards it, pointing his index finger. He paused for a second, then jumped again – a tiny, apparently involuntary jolt – before smiling and carefully touching that same index finger to his right shoulder (as if in some kind of convoluted boy scout salute).
Elen quickly stood up as Mrs Santa walked back over. She grabbed her bag to try and signal an end to their discussion.
‘There, that’s better,’ Mrs Santa murmured. They all looked up towards the light again, their heads tipping, in unison, their chins lifting; like three, simple flower petals unfurling from the bud in a time-lapse-photography nature documentary.
At night he did his real work. You couldn’t call it ‘play’, exactly. It was far too serious – too painstaking – for that. He’d been re-creating, in perfect miniature, the Cathedral of Sainte-Cecile (the world’s largest ever brick-built structure) which was located (and this meant nothing to Fleet, he was six years old, and geography, to him, was just a clumsy four-syllable word) in the beautiful, French medieval town of Albi.
Fleet’s tools: a trusty pair of children’s paper-cutting scissors (the blades of which he’d secretly stropped on a stone until they were razor-sharp), some general-purpose adhesive (the white kind which came in a blue tub and smelled of marzipan), and matchsticks (in abundance; pristine – never spent – with the brightly tinted sulphured end cleanly lopped off).
He had a small black and white picture of the cathedral (a partial view – it was a monumental, many-faceted construction, 200 years in the making) which he’d discovered, by chance (at least, that’s how he remembered it), aged four, in a French holiday brochure. He liked to keep it hidden (he didn’t know why: instinct, perhaps) inside a folded strip of cardboard hoarded from a cereal packet, shoved under the dishcloths in the back of a kitchen drawer.
Sometimes he would creep into the kitchen at night with his torch, open the drawer and stare at the picture for hours, without blinking (or until his re-chargeable batteries faded). He would consume it, devour it. Then he would squirrel it away, and not feel the need to refer to it for days.
It was all a question of dimensions with Fleet, and of form: the scale of a thing, the logistics (what was feasible, what was not). Aesthetics didn’t enter into it. Beauty was just something that worked. Beauty paid its way. It was infrastructure. It was superstructure. All the rest was simply floss.
He had no pictorial evidence of the cathedral’s interior (which was legendarily beautiful, with an immense nave containing an Italian fresco of the Last Judgement, hundreds of sculptures, and one of the world’s most impressive organs), but the inside of his matchstick monolith had been just as fastidiously re-created (was just as pristine – no bish-bosh job, this) as the exterior.
He’d made certain, educated leaps based on his tours of Ashford Church (the inside a crazy mish-mash of ancient period detail) and – but of course – two wonderful day trips he’d taken (aged three and a half and five) to the astonishing medieval village of Chilham, with its grand, stately home, thirteenth-century church and numerous timber-framed houses and cottages.
It was a big project –
Big
– and his parents weren’t what you might call ‘entirely behind it’. In fact they’d done everything they possibly could to try and disrupt him (financial and spatial restraints had been suddenly – and arbitrarily – imposed at various points, karate lessons were posited, extra reading classes, the bloody cubs).
Fleet was even suspicious – although this was sheer paranoia on his part – that the leaky roof scenario was yet another complex gambit they’d suddenly dreamed up to foil his progress (since his quality time alone with the cathedral had been profoundly undermined by it).
The truth was that Elen and Dory hadn’t particularly minded the cathedral – at least, not at first. They’d found it charming; extraordinary, even (although – as was only to be expected – their tolerance of ‘difference’, or – worse still – of ‘eccentricity’, was entirely predicated by Isidore’s own mental health scenario. The question of heredity was naturally an explosive one).
Fleet’s burgeoning ‘obsession’ with structure (and they didn’t even dare use this key word in private together) had been some time in the making, although Isidore held himself chiefly responsible for initiating this current phase (which they both thought especially severe),
after he’d idly bought Fleet a small, Airfix aeroplane from a closing-down sale in a local toy shop.
His son had always been a frail, cerebral little creature – physically unadventurous – and his father (in whom nature found the perfect, working definition of ‘robust’) battled constantly to try and toughen him up. He’d take him out for walks, or cycling, or to the park to mess around on the Adventure Playground. He tried to interest him in competitive sports.
Fleet absolutely dreaded these activity-based excursions, would be sullen, uncooperative, virtually monosyllabic. When his father threw a ball at him, he’d simply neglect to raise his hands, and if it hit him, he would buckle and fall, without a sound (like a tragic young soldier in a silent film, mown down, in his prime, on the front line).
Sometimes his mother joined them (acting as a buffer between her husband’s enthusiasm and her son’s recalcitrance) and he’d cling miserably to her skirts, begging her, in urgent whispers, to help him, to save him, to just take him home again.
Isidore felt like the whole world was alien to his son; that he was a stranger, dispositionally; that there was a quality within him which was fundamentally ‘foreign’ (this was something which he understood only too well himself – and why on earth wouldn’t he? It was the keynote of his own existence; something, as a German, an outlander, that he battled constantly to overcome). Yet he found Fleet’s total inability to fit in – the boy’s effortless facility for bucking and chafing against even the most basic of social conventions – unbelievably infuriating.
Home life wasn’t much better. When they’d moved to the new Cedar Wood development, Fleet had been inconsolable for weeks; kept feeling for the familiar walls of the old house whenever he walked in his sleep – as he sometimes would, when he was especially stressed – calling out, in sheer terror, when he couldn’t locate them; or, worse still, they’d discover him, pushing, exhaustedly (tears streaking his cheeks, panting for breath) against a solid surface, as if fully expecting that it might desolidify in front of him…(or that he might, even).
During his waking hours he rigorously avoided the new kitchen appliances, quivered at the bathroom taps, baulked at the low-flush toilet and the dimmer switches. He even had to re-learn how to use his fork (exactly the same fork he’d used at their previous address); would hold it, loosely, in his hand, head tipped on one side, like a suspicious young thrush, inspecting the prongs with a mixture of fury and wonder.
It was all a matter of context, Isidore felt, and a question of adaptation. Neither of these concepts had any kind of hold on him. His dreamy, impish mind would simply wriggle free and he’d be set loose in the world again, unconstrained by anything.
It was an awful kind of liberty.
Model building – on the other hand – was something they could share in, something simple and quiet and relaxing; a perfect opportunity – or so Dory thought – for a little gentle father and son bonding. After the plane they’d made a tank (Isidore still taking the lead at this stage, Fleet mainly standing by, standing back, observing), then a sports car.
They’d graduated on to aquatic vehicles – a hovercraft, a submarine. Finally, a boat. A big one. Fleet chose the model himself (as a special fifth birthday treat). He plumped for a clipper (a 200 foot-er).
He built the bulk of the main structure, virtually single-handed, in just under three days (the age recommendation of the box specified twelve years and over) then got caught up in the rigging – tangled, knotted – spent hours on end perfecting the whole thing, even adding – much to Isidore’s amazement – several home-made modifications where, apparently, ‘the model wasn’t proper.’
They’d visited the Cutty Sark, in Greenwich, as a family, when Fleet was just a toddler, and he’d completed a school project on deep sea diving (earning himself a much-coveted gold star), but these meagre, boat-related provenances were barely adequate – Dory felt – to justify the extent of his son’s precocity.
There were – inevitably – a few gaps in Dory’s memory at this stage (which didn’t really matter – he told himself – since even the most superficially straightforward child’s developmental progress was rarely – if ever – entirely linear) but the next thing he knew, Fleet was experimenting with the idea of making objects ‘from scratch’. They’d messed around with clay (Fleet had screwed up his face; the clay was too gloopy, too glutinous, he was far too fastidious), then wood (Elen had stepped in and insisted – much to Fleet’s irritation – that the boy was too small to handle sharp tools responsibly).
Then, finally, on an especially boring Sunday morning, Isidore had grabbed hold of a box of kitchen matches, rattled it, speculatively, tipped the matches out on to the table-top, unearthed a stray tube of glue in a nearby drawer, and quickly built a sentry box for one of Fleet’s highly prized, enamelled Beefeaters.
That was it.
Fleet dived straight on in (not a whiff of uncertainty, no whining or faltering) and carefully began constructing a long, formal, looping creation (like an early piece of lace or crochet, or a dramatically enlarged chromosome – a cell, or a gene – cut open, stretched out, unwound). It was flat-topped, 2 inches wide, several feet long. It was beautiful.
‘The Bridge’, he called it. His parents watched on in quiet bewilderment.
Elen immediately divined (it was a curious feeling, a familiar feeling) that something primal was connecting within him. She didn’t know what or why. But she could see that he was spanning some kind of a divide (mentally, physically, symbolically), that this behaviour was unusual, that it was out of the ordinary.
Suddenly, without warning, ‘The Bridge’ was quietly placed aside and superseded (no fuss, no fanfare) by a menacing, fortress-style basilica. And with the arrival of this ‘cathedral’ it became patently obvious that parental participation was no longer an issue.
Isidore wasn’t entirely certain (as a play-mate, or as a father) just how much of an influence he’d actually been on his son; whether Fleet’s obsession reflected well (or badly) on him. He had a nagging – an uncomfortable – feeling about the whole affair. Had he led the boy, or had the boy – somehow, ineluctably – led him?
Fleet seemed happy (at least, to start off with), and that (they told themselves) was the important part. He seemed more confident, more at ease, was ‘opening up’ (asking for things, making lists, barking out instructions if anyone dared to try and join in).
As parents (as guardians, even, with a vested interest in his welfare) their enthusiasm had waned marginally when he’d expanded his architectural portfolio to include not only ‘The Bridge’ and ‘The Cathedral’, but a cluster of brand-new, subsidiary properties (a large, secondary building – down what was now ‘The Hill’ a-way – which he described as ‘The Palace’, then, shortly after, another structure, which he casually referred to as ‘The Dungeon Tower’. He’d even commenced work on a water mill, whose connection to the other buildings seemed, at best, entirely marginal).
And everything (Elen quietly observed – although she didn’t – for her own good reasons – confide in Isidore) was now suddenly on-going (happening all-at-once, burgeoning uncontrollably…like a…how to express it? Like the frantic, shifting interior of one of those toy kaleidoscopes, or a hall of mirrors, or a…a –
God help him
– some kind of a disease, maybe).
She tried to quell her increasing agitation by telling herself that Fleet’d seen development all around him (they were in a new-build property in a newly built area); the builder, the digger, the lorry, were all part of his locality; change was part of the milieu in which he lived and breathed and grew…
But it didn’t work. It didn’t mesh. It didn’t entirely ring true.
Space was increasingly at a premium (the inside mirroring the outside in an funny kind of way). Everything – Elen observed, with an encroaching sense of terror –
Oh no…
I’m…
Can’t…
Can’t breathe
/> – was now thuddingly equal (Flat. Reduced. Like a beautiful, five-course meal, tossed into a large bowl and then devoured all in one go). Nothing took precedence. Nothing was ever rounded off (finished, honed). There was no sense of an end to it, of a neat conclusion. Of curtailment. Of release.
Elen knew all about the brochure in the kitchen drawer. She’d found it, looking for a tea-towel, and had made the connection. Its placement, she presumed, indicated something – she wasn’t sure what – about Fleet’s unconscious desire to involve her (she was, after all, the only person in the house to do the drying up; Isidore, in general, preferred to wash).
She’d kept it a secret. Isidore still firmly believed that ‘The Cathedral’ was just part of some magical ‘dream landscape’, that it was simply another perplexing facet of the boy’s highly developed – if distinctly wayward – imagination (he needed to believe this, and Elen responded, automatically – as any considerate partner would – to whatever his needs were).
But she knew better. She’d been to the library and had looked up Sainte-Cecile in a Rough Guide travel book. She’d expanded her search on to the internet. There she’d seen a series of modern, photographic images of Albi, in all its glory (clinging to its hill, surrounded by water); then (with an increasing sense of claustrophobia) the Cathedral Basilica, the adjacent La Berbie Palace, the dramatic Dungeon Tower, the hooped colonnades of the St Salvy Cloister. Even the mill, sitting quietly downstream on the River Tarn.
And the bridge.
The link –
Oh God –
There it was
She traced its familiar, looping grandeur on the glaring screen with her index finger –
Yes
But of course –
Darkmans Page 16
