I wonder if you might help me in tracing the girl’s grandmother? She has only been with us a year and I am of the hope that she might one day remember the Mission only like a distant dream.
I am forwarding, here, some of the details I have been able to glean from her — and do hope, Jon Heather, that you will want to help. I hope to be making a trip to England in the New Year and, should things progress, I will bring the girl with me. I do hope you’re looking forward to a visit from your old world!
Your friend, as ever,
George Stone.
Jon Heather sits for the longest time, with the letter resting in his lap. He supposes he had always known he was not done with Crusades and Missions, but that world seems so absurd to him now, hemmed in by these four walls of flaking plaster, the little kettle whistling viciously on the hob.
When he is almost ready to shred the letter and burn it along with the fragments of his passport, a genuine smile erupts out of him, like vomit after a twelve-hour drunk.
Old friends, he thinks, wryly: they’ll always be back.
Captain Matthews still has friends in the constabulary, and they are happy to look the other way while he and Jon Heather pore through records. The girl’s family name is Gray, but her grandmother was always Granny White. It is a laborious day matching up certificates for weddings, births, deaths — but by nightfall they have managed to come up with three addresses. The girl, George writes, remembers an abbey with wildflowers and long grass, so they head, first, to the address closest to the ruins in Kirkstall.
The woman who answers the door is not nearly as old as Jon had expected, younger certainly than his own mother. At first, she is wary of letting them in. Only when Captain Matthews produces some identification, long since defunct, does she allow them through.
That night, Jon paces the bedsit and recalls the bewildered way the woman had looked when he showed her the memories George had been collecting. It would seem to be an absurd thing that a girl’s whole life would be scribbled down in newsagent’s notebooks — but Jon Heather looks at the brown paper bag lying open at his bedside, the stack of the pads he has bought lying inside, and thinks long and hard: like some cartographer of old, George has pieced together distant shores and contours, so that lost boys might make their way home. If George can do it, surely Jon Heather can do the same.
After lights out in the bedsit, Jon opens the first of his memobooks and begins to write: I remember keeping a vigil for my father, because I didn’t know he was dead. I had a cap gun and mulled Christmas wine (was there alcohol in the wine?). I was eight years old, proud to be nearly nine, and I wasn’t allowed beyond the end of my terrace.
It is hardly, Jon reasons, the essence of being an eight-year-old. He tears it out and begins again. If you cannot capture the way you were, he thinks, surely you can capture the way you are now.
I am lying in my very own room (the only other time in my life I had my very own room was when I was in prison) and I am not happy and I am not sad. Yesterday I met my mother. She is small and she has grey hair and her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.
After he has stared at it for some time, the novelty wears off, and it is just words on a piece of paper. It is like dropping ink into water; it bleeds and then it is gone.
He throws the memobooks down, and turns to try and sleep. Maybe it works for little boys and girls, but there isn’t a thing that can be done for Jon Heather.
On the 12th of December in the year of 1965, Jon Heather is introduced to the sisters who attended him on the day of his birth. Rachel and Samantha do not bring their husbands, but Samantha does bring her son. He is called Benjamin, and he is ten years old. When she looks at Jon for the first time, she says she knows now how Benjamin will look when he is fully grown. She is, she says, very pleased. One after the other, his sisters embrace him; it is more than his mother did.
As they sit down for dinner, he thinks: I was sleeping on one of your floors on the night Mother gave me away, but I couldn’t, for all the money in the world, tell you which one.
There are no tears this dinnertime. His mother’s husband, whose name is Lewis, is keen to hear about Australia, and particularly eager to hear about bush blacks. He is of the opinion that England itself has a black problem. Benjamin, too, wants to hear about it: is Australia all criminals and kangaroos?
Jon does not want to regale them with stories of the bush, but he tells them what he can. He does not tell them about Peter and George, but he tells them about Dog. He makes up a story that he rescued Dog from a litter of wild dingoes, and that thrills Benjamin. His mother, he says, prodding at a parsnip, won’t even entertain the idea of having a pet.
‘They’re dirty,’ Samantha tells him.
‘Your mother’s right,’ says Jon. ‘They’ll roll in their own shit if you let them …’
A fork clatters and a host of eyes scold him.
After dinner, the adults take drinks while Benjamin is sent off to play in the front room. At the kitchen table, Jon Heather pretends he likes sherry and listens to his sisters talk about their weeks. When they ask what kind of work Jon is doing, he tells them about the job loading pallets. Then they ask him what kind of work he would like to do. It is a question he does not understand until they repeat it a second time, and suddenly he feels ashamed. Then he is ashamed of himself for being ashamed — this way madness lies.
From the front room, there comes the sound of Benjamin hammering at the upright piano.
Samantha rolls her eyes. She is about to go after him, when Jon intervenes.
‘I’ll go,’ he says.
At the piano, Benjamin spins around, as if expecting to be scolded, but Jon only slumps into one of the settees and sets his sherry down on the coffee table.
Benjamin drops down to take a sniff. ‘I’d rather have orange,’ he says.
‘Me too,’ grins Jon. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Do you want to see a trick?’
He opens the front door, picks up a handful of pebbles and brings them back into the front room. With one hand, he tosses eight into the air. With the other, he catches all but one in the grooves between his fingers.
‘Your turn,’ he says.
In seconds, Benjamin is locked in concentration. Once he has caught one stone on the back of his hand, he is more determined than ever. Two is straightforward, three a tricky prospect, and four impossible.
‘A friend of mine can do twenty,’ Jon says. ‘Took him fourteen years to perfect it, but he can do it every time.’
‘Is it an Australian game?’ The very idea seems magical.
‘I suppose it is,’ says Jon.
‘My dad says they have rabbits in Australia, but they kill them all with diseases.’
‘There were plenty of rabbits in some of the places I was …’ He shifts forward, cross-legged, and Benjamin mirrors the action. ‘I remember one time, my friend Peter and I were making our way to a place called Carnarvon. They have a big banana plantation there, and we were going to do some work.’
‘Would you get free bananas?’
‘It’s all we ate,’ says Jon. ‘But, on the way, we were getting hungry, and our ute …’
‘What’s a ute?’
‘A wagon, like a motor car.’
Benjamin nods eagerly.
‘Well, our old motor car kept breaking down, so one night we had to camp out on the side of the road, not a thing to eat and hardly any water. But our old friend Dog spotted a rabbit burrow at the side of the track. Well, it’s too hot in the dead of day for the rabbits to come out, but as soon as dusk came around, there they were dozens of baby rabbits, just pouring out of those holes …’
Benjamin grimaces, half-delighted. ‘Did you … eat them?’
‘Oh yes,’ says Jon.
‘How do you eat a rabbit?’
‘Well,’ Jon begins. ‘First, you have to catch them. But young rabbits, they catch easily, because …’ He grins. ‘… they’re not very bright. Once you have him, you dangle him a
nd just slap him so he’s stunned. Then, you can just chop him on the neck with your hand. It breaks his neck, so now he’s ready for gutting. You get your knife, and slide it right into …’
Jon does not even hear the tears begin. By the time he realizes something is wrong, Benjamin is already on his feet, his face ruddy, flailing right past him to tumble through the kitchen doors.
Jon still sits, cross-legged, on the floor when his sister Samantha charges back through.
‘Jon Heather,’ she demands, ‘what have you done?’
Jon kicks his heels on the doorstep, like a naughty boy. Soon, his mother comes to him. She doesn’t say a thing, but offers him a cigarette instead.
‘He’s all right,’ she says finally. ‘He’ll get over it.’
‘It’s nice you care so much,’ says Jon. He is trapped, as if between a parted sea: the waves are rushing in at him from either side, but he doesn’t know which tide he would rather do battle with. ‘Do you know what I had to do the first week after we hit land?’ he asks.
‘Jon, you don’t have to talk about …’
‘I was put in the dairies,’ he says. ‘A boy called Tommy taught me how to butcher a goat. Here’s how, Mother. You whisper to him, and he’s scared but he calms down. Just like Samantha whispering to that boy in there. Then he trusts you. So you press on his rump and he rolls over, and you tickle his tummy — and then, one of you holds his legs, and the other just wrenches a knife across his throat. If you’re canny, you can do it in one cut — but, Mum, it took me a couple of years to master that. I was younger than Samantha’s son, and that’s what I was doing. The boy can hear about how to gut a little bunny. He doesn’t have to piss his bed at night for that.’
She slaps him, but he barely feels a thing.
‘You’ve had a hard time, Jon. But I …’ She labours over it. Just say it, Mother. Just spit it out. ‘I had a hard time too.’
It is a remarkable thing, but words can change meaning as they twirl from a person’s lips to the other’s ears.
‘Thank you for dinner, Mother.’
‘You don’t have to be like that. You don’t know how much I wanted you back, Jon.’
‘Yeah,’ says Jon, ‘but time heals all manner of wounds, if you let it, doesn’t it? The difference is, Mother, I wouldn’t let it. I loved you too much.’
‘Jon, look at me.’ She takes hold of his chin, angles it towards her. ‘I love you. We all do. But …’
Let it be known: your mother does love you, Jon Heather; she just doesn’t like you very much.
‘Will we see you for Christmas?’ she asks. ‘We should be … together … for Christmas.’
Yes, Jon thinks as he returns to the terrace, families should be together for Christmas — and they should be together for birthdays as well.
It is the 12th of December in the year of 1965, and though nobody has said a word, Jon Heather has turned twenty-five years old.
XIX
On the fifth day before Christmas, Jon Heather wakes in the small of the afternoon to the sound of pebbles thrown against his window. Still half-dressed, he shoves his head out of the window.
Captain Matthews stands on the edge of the street, and Jon hurries down. Frost ices the hedges running the length of the road. Streetlights throb, hours before dark.
‘It’s Charlie,’ says Captain Matthews. ‘Is he with you?’
Jon shakes his head.
‘His mother put in a missing persons report last night. He didn’t come home from school.’
Jon throws a look at his bedsit window. Some part of him wishes Charlie really was up there.
‘Why did nobody come to tell me?’ he demands.
‘I’m not here officially. His parents …’
Jon hawks up a torrent of phlegm. That is what he thinks of Charlie’s parents. ‘They should have told me,’ he snaps. ‘They checked everywhere?’
‘Went door to door.’
Jon sees the captain’s Mini sitting on the kerb. ‘I’ll drive,’ he says.
The captain does not let Jon near the wheel, but follows his every direction. It is only a short drive, around the moor and through the warren of streets beyond, before they come to the corner where the Chapeltown Boys’ Home sits. He makes the captain park at a distance and walks on alone.
Around the Home, the trees have been felled and a new road laid, but something of the old place remains, like an after-image on the back of the eye. He stops, and knows for certain he is in the same spot where his mother said goodbye.
He does not have to look for long. Charlie is sitting on a tree stump, wrapped in a duffel coat that is not his own, with a swag bag lying at his feet.
Jon wanders up to him. ‘Where did you sleep last night, young man?’
‘I can sleep out,’ Charlie mumbles. ‘It isn’t a big problem, is it, Mr Heather? You don’t really need a bed …’
Jon grins and sits down.
‘I don’t like it,’ Charlie says. He shrugs his shoulders inside the enormous duffel, and Jon realizes it is the coat of which he is speaking. ‘He bought it for me. He says I’ll grow into it. I only brought it because it’s cold. I’m so cold, Mr Heather.’
‘It’s winter, young man.’
‘I miss the proper winter.’
Clear nights and mild days, long enough that you can do your chores and still have time to play outside the dormitory. Yes, Jon misses the proper winter too.
‘Who is he?’ asks Jon.
Charlie looks up. He has not been crying, but he has long ago learnt how not to cry. ‘Just my new dad. But I’m to call him Owen. They took me shopping.’ The word drips with disgust. ‘I don’t like it here, Mr Heather. I don’t have any friends. And … I miss Mr Stone. He sent me a letter, but they didn’t let me keep it. They said — they said I’ve got to forget …’
Yes, Jon thinks, you do have to forget: if you’re going to live in the present, you have to eradicate the past.
When he catches himself thinking it, he has to gulp it back down. Can he really think the same as Judah Reed and his mother?
He shunts Charlie gently with his shoulder. This is a thing he learnt from Peter Slade. ‘They’re frightened,’ he says. ‘They wonder what you got up to, out there.’
‘They don’t like me playing in the garden. But I don’t like staying inside. It’s dull and it’s dreary.’
‘What about school?’ Jon ventures. ‘You’ve made new friends at school …’
Charlie fidgets; if he does not say anything, he does not have to tell a lie.
‘You don’t have to pretend.’
‘I hate it, Mr Heather. They put me in remedials.’
‘Remedials?’
‘It means the stupid class. But it’s not as if I can’t read. It’s not as if I couldn’t write. I wrote all those notebooks, just like Mr Stone told me to. It’s just …’
‘School doesn’t last forever, Charlie.’
‘Put them boys in the Mission and they’d be the ones in remedials, wouldn’t they, Mr Heather?’ For the first time, Charlie beams. ‘We didn’t do much reading or writing in the Mission. But not one of those boys in school would know a thing about digging or woodwork or how to fix an engine or …’
‘How to kill a goat,’ remembers Jon.
‘I’d like to see them try. I bet it’d take a hundred of those boys just to kill one silly goat!’
‘Do you remember what your real father was like, Charlie?’
He nods. ‘He used to work at the warehouses on the Meanwood Road. I asked Mum about it, but she said it isn’t there anymore.’
‘And?’
‘And I have to forget about him too, don’t I? I’m not allowed to think about Australia and I’m not allowed to think about before Australia either. So what am I allowed to think about, Mr Heather?’
Jon stands, reaches out a hand and is pleasantly surprised when Charlie takes it. Together, they meander up the street, away from the Home.
When they reach the Min
i, Charlie strains. ‘Do we have to?’ he asks.
They drive up and out of Chapeltown, snaking through the terraces until they hit the Meanwood Road. The thoroughfare is still banked with broad empty yards where its buildings were carved apart and, as they come to a stretch where new warehouses loom, Jon helps Charlie out onto the kerb.
Jon finds, as they walk, that Charlie’s hand is still in his. They venture deeper, scuttling through the darknesses to reach pools of orange spilling from the street lights. Men are still at work, and on occasion they see trucks wheeling from vast open doors, solitary workers throwing buckets of boiling water onto paths encrusted in ice.
‘My father used to work in a place like this,’ says Jon. ‘Maybe he worked here as well.’
It is a lie; Jon’s father laboured in warehouses and factories on the other side of the city. Yet — you’re allowed to tell little lies.
‘Do you remember him too …’ Charlie asks, ‘… from before Australia?’
Jon Heather shakes his head.
‘Do you remember anything?’
‘Some things,’ Jon admits.
Charlie’s fingers tense and Jon realizes he is trying to extricate his hand. Without a word, he lets go. The boy drifts a few steps into darkness, but goes no further.
‘I want to go …’
Charlie does not finish the sentence, but it doesn’t matter; Jon already knows what is coming next.
‘Really?’
Again: silence.
‘Every second you were out there,’ Jon breathes, ‘weren’t you thinking about this?’ He opens his hands, taking in the warehouses, the red bricks, the slates, the snow. ‘Weren’t you thinking about your parents?’
Charlie nods.
‘And if you could go back, but never saw your mother again …’
The boy’s face twitches in an exact impersonation of a fat little boy Jon used to love.
‘I know, Charlie,’ says Jon, wrapping his arm, for the first time, around the boy.
Little Exiles Page 39