by Matt Haig
'No,' George said, raising his hand. 'Don't call them. Please, Mr Cave, I'll be all right.'
I hesitated. There was something desperate about his expression. A pleading I couldn't ignore. 'No, I'm sorry,' I told the woman on the end of the line. 'We don't need an ambulance.'
I put the mobile telephone back in my pocket. George shook his inhaler and sucked his medicine. A bruised and breathless Goliath. I couldn't help but worry about what his mother would think, when she found him like this.
'Come on,' I told him, realising he must have more information to offer. 'Let's get you shipshape again, shall we?'
*
I offered to get him a cold flannel and some paracetamol.
'What, from upstairs?' he asked me, looking worriedly to the ceiling.
'Yes,' I said.
'No. It's all right. I don't want them. I'm fine. I'm fine.'
'You don't look fine, George,' I told him.
He sighed. 'I'm all right.' He looked nervous. Understandable, I suppose. Even so, it seemed most odd the way he kept looking out into the hallway. The way he jerked every time he heard a creak from upstairs.
'Do you know that boy?' I asked, keeping my rather uncertain cards close to my chest.
He nodded, but couldn't look me in the eye. He began fiddling with one of the art nouveau figures. The Girl with a Tambourine.
'How?' I asked. 'How do you know him?'
He took a considerable time to answer, and kept turning the figure in a clockwise motion.
'Everyone knows him. Denny Hart. He's a class-A scumbag.' A certain anger rose into his voice, which seemed out of character, belonging to the George I had seen in the field and not this George. But again, given the context, I supposed it was understandable.
Then, after an even longer time, he came out with it. 'He's seeing Bryony.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I know. But I still don't get it. Why did he do this to you?'
His mouth fell open. He seemed amazed that I could know you were seeing this boy.
'How long have you known?'
'A while,' I said in a hushed tone. 'Now, George, please, why did he do this to you?'
Again he turned away, and looked at the figurine. 'Because I threatened to tell Bryony something. About something he did to a girl in his class at school.'
'A girl?'
He nodded and touched the swollen eye behind his glasses. 'Alison Wingfield.'
The name was familiar. I had heard it before. Maybe Reuben had talked about her. 'Alison Wingfield?'
'She was in my year. My dad taught her. That's how I found out. You see, my dad was the only person she told.'
I thought of Mr Weeks, that bullish yeti of a man whom Reuben had hated enough to miss his classes.
'Told what?'
'That he –' He moved his hand away from the figure. 'That Denny raped her.'
Raped. The word was so horrendous, so violent, it ravished the whole room. Even the Tambourine Girl in his hand seemed to have suddenly been ripped of her innocence. My doubts were rendered useless. I was staring into George's bruised and swollen face, a face which showed in itself what Denny was capable of.
'Didn't they report him to the police?'
'No. No, she didn't want to. Alison. She couldn't. Even when she –'
'When she –?'
'Even when she found out she was pregnant.'
I felt weak. I hated what I was hearing and yet I could believe every single word of it. It seemed to be a truth I already knew, buried deep inside me but which had just been unearthed again. My instincts had been correct. Denny had malice within him. He was a beast. A predatory animal, a subhuman who preyed on young girls and sought, through his primitive appetite, to ruin their futures.
'Did she . . . did she have the baby?' I gagged on the question, but got it out eventually.
'I think her parents made her, in the end.'
'Her parents?'
'Catholics. Strict, strict Catholics,' he said. I was sent back to the Vatican, back to your naked shoulders under that burning sun.
'So that's why that savage attacked you? In case you were going to tell Bryony?'
George nodded.
I leaned in towards him. 'You must tell her.'
Fear filled his eyes. 'No. I can't . . . I . . .'
'It's all right, he won't hurt you. Trust me.'
He shook his head, and panic added weight to his breathing. 'I shouldn't have said anything, Mr Cave.'
'No, you should have, you should have. Please, George, you have to tell her. You have to.'
He winced, either from the pain or the situation. And I stood up and went into the hallway. 'Bryony? Bryony?' I kept calling you, my voice loud enough to climb the stairs but you didn't come. 'Bryony?' I shouted one final time and waited a moment too long in that hallway.
I heard the bell in the shop and ran back inside. 'George?'
But, of course, he was gone.
Over our lamb cutlets I told you what I had to say. All those impure, unsimple truths. What father would have done otherwise? Of course, you didn't listen to me. Or you listened, but not in the way I had foreseen. There was that slight upward tug at the corner of your mouth as I told you about George's pummelled face, and then the drop into rage as I told you about Alison Wingfield. You thought I was saying it all to hurt you. You ran through a whole century of dictators, along with any other insults you could hurl at me. You pushed your plate away and went to your room and I followed you. You were so wild and violent I had to exercise powers of restraint.
I told you a new rule, to replace all the others. You were to have no time away from me, except at school. You would be grounded for your own safety.
You screamed and raged and called me a something fascist something psychopath and you shut the door in my face. I left you alone. We had an hour before seeing Cynthia in the hospital after her hernia operation, so I went to my room and switched on the monitor.
I heard your furious breath. I heard your footsteps as you tried to walk off your anger. I heard you collapse on the bed. I heard you say something. Not on your mobile telephone, but just out into your room. 'I love you. I love you. I love . . .'
I began to question why he was staying back, in the wings away from the main stage. Your brother, I mean. My mind was fraught but it was itself. Perhaps he had gone away. Perhaps there were no more memories he needed to implant in my mind. Perhaps there were no more tasks he required of me. My optimism, of course, was a little too rash.
Now I wonder how my life will affect your own. Have I already set boundaries for you, with the things I have done? Isn't that what a parent does? Don't they settle the realms of experience their children will later inhabit? And don't the children then live inside these realms as a foot lives inside a shoe, stretching the leather but never truly breaking free?
I will answer this with a brief word about that earliest of the three unnatural deaths. I must, before I get to my ending, tell you a little of my beginning. I must, in short, say something about my mother.
She was a milliner, at the highest end of the scale. She had a shop in Piccadilly. Gardenia Hats. To you she is no more than the picture in the living room. You would think it had been taken in the thirties, judging from the dress but of course it was much later. She lived inside the past, the time of her own childhood, when hats were still the height of fashion. That picture tells a lot. The Greta Garbo mask that couldn't quite conceal the anxious, too-human face behind. Her own mother had built the business up in the twenties and thirties, selling cloche hats to the flapper girls, dressing the heads of Mrs Simpson and Lady Mountbatten. It was left to her daughter to try and keep the business fires burning and to broaden the range with fedoras and other such styles.
She gradually sank into debt, a lot of debt, and the woman behind the mask became increasingly desperate. She ended up killing herself, in 1960, after guzzling a whole jar of barbiturates. The poor woman was found in the flat above her shop, dribbling blue foam over the
stubborn numbers of her account book.
*
Picture me.
The little boy in the room of hats, calling out to whatever can hear. His mother's head, not dozing on her desk; her open eyes not seeing him or the numbers in the book she was frowning over only this morning. The book that is open now, a useless pillow, collecting whatever leaks from her mouth.
Hear that scream becoming a word. 'Mother.'
She does not answer him. Her arms hang limp by her side.
'Mother!'
His first word is now his only word, the only one that matters.
He is shaking her now, and he finds her body does not move the way he is used to. The way bodies should. His scream dies, unanswered, melts into tears, but the man on the wireless doesn't even pretend to understand.
Is it an earthquake or simply a shock?
Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?
Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy?
Or is what I feel the real McCoy?
The smiling voice quivers over the airwaves from another world, a voice that cannot see the woman or the boy or the wide-brimmed hats in torn-out advertisements and articles.
He tries to push her back in her chair, the rag-doll mother, this heavy and stringless puppet, but the weight is too much. She falls onto him, and then off him, her cheek skimming his shoulder.
Unnaturally, she hangs. She should be in pain, he wants her to be in pain, but she is not. It is not.
The scream is a howl now. A howl that, when the upstairs tenant Mr Steer arrives into the scene, will eventually be reduced to a heavy sob. For days, for weeks, for months, the boy will weep, and soon the sound of his own weeping will become a kind of comfort to him, the only continuity from the life in the city and the life on the Dorset farm of his adoptive parents. A new life of big skies and dung-scented air and clouts around the head from the only father he will know.
I used to blame myself for my mother's demise. I used to remember her telling me she hated me and that she wished I'd never been born. These memories are unreliable. The first one I can trust is the first one I have proof of. The one that is contained inside all the others, like the smallest Russian doll. Something I kept with me no matter how far away I got from that shop, and that home, in Piccadilly. After all, this memory had left traces. A body, an empty jar of pills, a throat that had screamed itself into laryngitis.
There was no note, though. There was no written explanation for what she did or why she did it. None of the usual suicide etiquette – 'this is not your fault', 'I am so sorry for', 'please find it in your heart to' – no, none of that. Later on, I wanted something I could hold in my hands, something I could read that would help me resolve my feelings towards this woman who was her own murderer, but there was nothing. All I had was that one simple fact.
The numbers in her account book provided her with a better argument for death than her three-year-old son had done for life.
For years, I had tried to rationalise it. My mother's suicide was not my fault. I was three years old. She was a grown woman who should have given up the business. It wasn't my fault a second world war had bombed the glamour out of the world years before.
No, not my fault. And, if I had been a rational creature, such reassurances might just have worked. Rational creatures? There are no rational creatures. Machines are rational, because they cannot love. And love, no matter what the brain scientists tell us, is not mechanical.
I felt an absence, a literal feeling, as real as the phantom limb of an amputee. You lose an arm but you can still feel the clenching of your fist. Doctors know the symptom as the 'phantom limb'. It can recur indefinitely for the rest of a life, the feeling that the arm is still part of you despite the knowledge it has gone. You get used to something being there, something you almost take for granted, that has been by your side, and you can never fully adjust to its absence. All my life, it's been there. An invisible clenching, trying to grip something I couldn't. In the process I surrounded myself with objects that belonged to the past in the vain hope I could try and reach back through time, or at least weigh it down, and stop its dread march forward.
It was too much, I realise that. And that clenched grip on the past became tighter still when I lost your own mother, and then Reuben.
All I can hope is that as my grip is released you will be able, one day, to run freer than I ever managed, and leave the unsatisfied ghosts of family to their own eternal regrets.
The Georgian houses rolled past the window as we climbed the Mount, towards the hospital. The quiet we were sharing seemed to be marginally civil, the calm after that earlier tempest.
The illusion was broken with the silence.
'How are you feeling?' I asked you.
'Why would a fascist care about feelings?' you said, pulling a thread on your bandage.
'I'm not a fascist, Bryony. I'm a father.'
'Mussolini was a father,' you said.
'I had to tell you the truth about that boy,' I said. 'What else could I do?'
'It's not the truth,' you said, and the threat of tears stopped me from pressing further.
We arrived in the ward to see her flirting with that young doctor.
When he left, to make room for us by her bedside, Cynthia looked at you and winked and made a facial expression rich with silent innuendo. I remember you laughing and I remember feeling strangely jealous of Cynthia, for being able to charm you with such natural ease.
'He'd make quite a Heathcliff, wouldn't he?' she told you, chuckling. And then in a more sombre, private tone: 'About the same age as your grandfather when I met him. Poor Howard.'
She looked around the ward and swallowed something back. Memories glazed her eyes. Poor Cynthia. All those hours she had spent in that same hospital with your grandfather, talking to oncologists or sitting by his bedside after another futile operation. Doing the crossword with him in whatever broadsheet she had managed to get hold of in the shop, as the cancer crept through and colonised every part of him.
I am sinking again, aren't I? Going backwards when I need to go forwards and explain myself. Perhaps I am reluctant to tell you yet another shameful fact. To reveal another betrayal. Yet I must. I had been in your room, that day, while you were at school. I had gone through all your drawers and bags. I found that framed photograph he had given you the night of Clifford's Tower. The belated birthday present. The picture he, or someone, had taken of Reuben. Your brother's face, smiling, no hand over his birthmark, looking down with an anonymous blue sky behind.
'Oh, Reuben, I'm sorry,' I told the picture. And after the guilt came the anger. How dare Denny use your brother to try and win you over?
I placed the picture back in your bag and tried to access your computer. I was bombarded with grey boxes and no entry signs. It was like navigating my way through the City of Perpetual Mist.
Eventually I conceded defeat and switched it off. Then, as I headed out of your room, I felt a sudden impulse to check the pockets of the coat you weren't wearing that day. The grey flannel one I had bought you last autumn. And it was there. On a neatly folded piece of paper. Denny's address, written in his own vulgar handwriting. That random combination of upper and lower case. Those ugly, ill-formed letters. I imagined your poor pen in his hand, as incongruously placed as Fay Wray in King Kong's fist.
I copied the address and I felt like I already knew it, as though it was the only possible place he could live.
If it was Reuben making me feel this, he stayed back, in the shadows. A fleeting image of council houses curving into the distance and then nothing.
So, on with it, Terence. On with it. Yes, standing in the hospital, looking down at Cynthia's sad and unmade face. She looked so odd, without her dark-painted lips and eyes. Unfinished. Like a preparatory sketch for an oil painting. Two of her hideous am dram chums arrived. The toby jug and his wife. At their appearance the nurse returned to tell Cynthia she could have no more than three visitors at a time. And me, hoo
dwinking you as you had so often hoodwinked me: 'Right, we'd better be off then, Bryony.'
It worked. Your eyes stared sternly at me.
'I want to stay. I want to talk to Cynthia.'
And the toby jug, piping in: 'It's all right, Tel. I can wait outside.'
'No. No, don't do that,' I said, perhaps too hurriedly, as I walked away. 'I need to get back and see to something. But Bryony can stay here if she wants. It's fine, Cynthia. Honestly. I'll be back in an hour.'
Five minutes after I had left the hospital I was driving onto the Greensand Estate, passing the post-war semi-detached council houses. The homes for heroes that seemed to glow in the pink evening light, blushing at their present occupants. I turned left, down Leverston Road, where the newer houses shrank in line with governmental commitment. Terraced rows of pebble-dashed squalor, complete with their vulgar window ornaments, crosses of St George and monotonous despair.
I had seen it earlier, in that blink of an eye.
Number 35. I pulled over and sat for a moment with the engine off. The house was on the end of a terrace and looked like all the others, except for the closed curtains. Had you been there? The thought repelled me. Maybe you had been up to his room.
I got out of the car and walked down the thin path, passing the bare and abandoned patch of lawn. I knocked on the door and then noticed the bell. No one answered. I tried again and stood back, to see if there was anyone peeping through the curtains. I thought about returning to the car and waiting for him, or for his father. I was determined not to leave until I had to. After all, I had time. I knew you wouldn't leave Cynthia until I returned.
'What you after?'
I was halfway back to the car when I heard the woman's voice. I turned to see her. Dark-haired and pale, like her son, with a face that might once have been beautiful. She wore jeans and a baggy T-shirt that hung off her shoulder, like a little girl playing grown-ups. There was the vaguest sense I had seen her before.
'Hello,' I said. 'I just wondered if your son was home? Dennis. Denny. I'd like a word with him if I could.'
