by Gary Fry
At any rate, I think this was what had happened in my family, when Dexter and I had grown up in the bullish 1980s.
I was driving north along an A-road leading from Leeds to York (where my dad had worked as a printing engineer at a company specializing in producing regional newspapers) and then into the countryside, the barren North York Moors, at the head of which stood Dwelham village, ten miles south of Middlesbrough.
That was where we’d both started out in life, in the house my brother still owned, and if I’ve depicted our youths as being unremittingly grim, that was only half the truth. There’d also been good times, especially during our earliest years, when I, two years Dex’s senior, had taught him all about the area, enjoying many fun activities, despite the irregular presence of our unpredictable dad.
Surrounded by hills and valleys, Dwelham was located in a remarkably flat stretch of land, with a wood to its east and a stream to the west, some kind of geological fault farther north and clay pits to the south. The terrain there (I’d learned during school projects, which I’d always keenly worked on) had been formed during multiple glacial periods, when immense movements of ice had swept across the district, leaving behind, after melting, different stones and minerals, which had combined with many already existing here.
This had resulted in a rich region for a couple of boys, and whenever we’d escaped our house (as often as possible, given its hostile atmosphere), we’d explored in every direction, seeking out new locations, making dens and other secret places, which only we knew about.
Mum had been happy for us to spend so much time away from home, even at ages not much older than my daughter Eva was now. Dad hadn’t cared one way or another, but as he’d been absent so often—working long hours to keep our sizable property heated and food in its cupboards (maybe his only redeeming attribute)—he probably wasn’t aware of most of our adventures, other than grunting if we told him about them and saying things like, “Never mind stupid nature. You should be out with other people. Or are you both so fucking unpopular that you can only play with each other?”
I had the impression that, as money for purchasing the property had almost certainly come from Mum’s side of the family, Dad had been forced to live in Dwelham when he’d have preferred somewhere more lively and rugged, like Middlesbrough or Newcastle. I think this was why he stayed away so much, frequently coming home smelling of booze, even though he’d had to drive so far across the North York Moors.
One time, when Dex and I had been playing in the garden, we’d entered Dad’s car and, on its backseat, found a long hair like a woman’s, but far from the blonde of our mother’s. We hadn’t said anything to either parent, but by that stage—me nine or ten, my brother trailing just behind—I think we’d both begun to figure out what was going on, why we sometimes found Mum crying alone in her bedroom, and why Dad seemed so discontented all the time.
But that didn’t stop us from making the most of our location. In many ways, we were lucky, because although there was little to do there other than explore, we both liked that anyway and had little patience with other people. School friends often bored us, neighbors we avoided, and girls we had little time for, especially Dex, who seemed to have developed a pathological dislike of them. Perhaps that was a lot to do with our dad’s attitude to women—he’d hardly presented a worthy role model in the way he treated our mum—but in my brother’s case, I’d always felt it went deeper, as if the additionally cruel treatment the boy received at the man’s hands had caused more damage to his psychology.
But then—when I was maybe thirteen years old, and about to begin studying for the first in a long line of academic qualifications—something happened.
By this time, I’d reached the turnoff from the A-road, heading into the depths of the North York Moors. I had my heater cranked up, because it was icy outside (minus two degrees Celsius, my digital dashboard readout claimed), and although snow had yet to arrive in this part of the country, it couldn’t be long before it did. When that happened, there’d be less chance of traversing these narrow country lanes flanked by dense woods, while steering up and down great undulations in the ancient land. I loved the area—its rural splendor was woven into my DNA—but even I could admit that it was no place to be stranded during a cold winter.
This was partly why I’d chosen to move to somewhere less isolated, pursuing education and employment opportunities in urbane, well-networked Leeds. My wife was of a similar mind, having also grown up in North Yorkshire, closer to the coast, on the outskirts of historic Whitby. A city was perhaps a less desirable place in which to bring up a child, but there was no reason why we couldn’t return to such a tranquil area once we’d gained the financial means to do so.
Dexter, one of life’s risk-takers, had achieved such an independent status early in adult life, making a fortune short-selling the stock market with a winning knack that had to be more skill than luck. He’d always had nous for uncommon pursuits, and this was what occupied my mind as I drew closer to my worrying destination.
The serious problems during our childhoods started when Dex found a claw in the woodland close to Dwelham. By this time he’d already annexed our house’s cellar and commonly ventured down there alone, claiming to be carrying out experiments he’d learned at school (although he wasn’t academically inclined, he’d always liked science). But after he located that unusual object, everything had seemed to change.
He showed it to me first, and maybe only to me ever. It was several feet long and half that wide at its broadest part, where it had originally been attached to whatever creature it had come from. Its point tapered to a vicious, blunt, flesh-ripping spike.
Dex tried to convince me that it had belonged to a dinosaur (the North York Moors had yielded much evidence of these creatures’ presence many millions of years earlier), but I wasn’t convinced. Without a process of fossilization, wouldn’t such an unspeakably old item have rotted away, however much it appeared to be made from a durable material like ivory? Anyway, once I’d made this suggestion, Dex had taken umbrage, retreating into the cellar to store the thing after giving me a dark stare.
From that day forward, things seemed different.
For one thing, there were my nightmares, which I began suffering weekly. I could never recall the following day what they’d been about, but they’d certainly unsettled me. Looking back, I could assign these nocturnal disturbances to anxieties arising from puberty and having had a complex cocktail of chemicals dumped inside me. But at the time, I’d sometimes felt as if I was going a bit mad.
Then there’d been my brother’s behavior, which had moved almost from that of a morbidly minded explorer to being privately preoccupied and standoffish even with me, his former investigative companion. He rarely spoke to either of our parents after maybe his eleventh birthday, when he’d begun to spend most of his free time down in that cellar, often causing peculiar smells to suffuse the house, and sometimes—I could vividly recall at least three occasions—tremendous bangs to disturb the otherwise quiet place. Fortunately, Dad couldn’t have been home to experience such episodes; there’d have been more violence involved if he had been, almost certainly many whacks delivered through those rolled-up newspapers.
Whenever I tried venturing downstairs, into the stone room belowground, Dexter would act defensively, as if, for some reason, he’d wanted to stage-manage the venue prior to anyone snooping around. When I tried to take an interest in what he’d been up to, I was greeted with little tolerance, little more than a case of, “Don’t be so nosy! I’ll show you once I’m done!”
Perhaps a year later, when I was fourteen and he only twelve, he proved as good as his word.
Dwelham had just appeared up ahead, lurking at the foot of the valley, its flat expanse forming across a misty landscape, whose paleness made the area look as if it was about to be erased forever. I soon passed the first few houses on this side of the village, which promptly gave way to the short high street with a modest selecti
on of shops that hadn’t changed much since my youth. Here were a butcher’s, a bakery, an off-license, a minimarket, several pubs, a post office, and a barber’s. It had been a decade since I’d last visited, and the sight of the place, looking much smaller than I felt it should, took me by surprise, stirring up uncomfortable thoughts.
But then, as my childhood home appeared at the end of the street meandering away from Dwelham, I didn’t wish to think about any of these issues, at least not so soon. In fact, for some reason, I felt that they’d all be forced upon me before long, whether I wished for them or not.
9
The house was a reasonably large detached surrounded on all sides by head-high walls. I think this had been its appeal to my mother, because what few neighbors there were—only several more properties across the street, which, back in the 1980s and ’90s, had been occupied by older people—could be kept at a distance, a clear case of “out of sight” being “out of mind.”
I parked the car near the roadside gate, a wrought iron unit that clearly hadn’t been painted in years. There was nobody else around this late morning (it was just before noon, my drive having taken over two hours), and so I entered the building’s grounds, paying little attention to my surroundings as I advanced for the main entrance at the end of a stunted path boasting tiny explosions of weeds. In my peripheral vision, the grass looked piebald and the flower borders barren; beyond them, the lounge’s window—the only view out from this side of the property—appeared to be draped with thick curtains.
I felt nervous—after all, it had been over a decade since I’d last seen my brother—and when I knocked on the door, my heart mimicked this action against my tender ribs.
Nobody replied for several seconds, but then, as if time were delayed inside, I heard a dog barking, the nasally yapping of some small canine, perhaps a species of terrier. This both reassured and troubled me: in one sense, I hoped that being a pet owner meant that Dexter had mellowed in his later years, but connotations of the name “terrier” put me in mind of too much I’d tried suppressing in the car.
Still nobody answered my summons, but then, once the dog had reached the other side of the door and ceased barking in favor of scratching at the carpet, I heard a voice call from deep inside: “Enter freely. It’s unlocked.”
Such an unorthodox way of speaking was familiar (wasn’t the first phrase associated with Count Dracula? Dex and I had watched that film repeatedly until he’d had developed his own parasitic identity), but as I let myself in, I was again troubled by the tone of my brother’s voice, which, just as it had on the phone yesterday, had sounded almost as gruff as the dog’s, an animal that promptly greeted me and almost escaped through the briefly open entrance.
“Hello, little fellow,” I said, stooping to pet the creature. It took to yapping—I hoped now in excitement rather than defensive rage. When I eventually settled the beast—it had bitten me, but surely accidentally, its teeth raising no more than a few minor marks on one hand—I stood and advanced along the hallway, all of whose details I remembered from the past and which hadn’t changed much since.
The familiar staircase led upward, though I doubted that Dexter had spoken from there. Similarly, the crooked door beneath the rickety flight, which gave on to the cellar, was equally unlikely to harbor him: his voice had sounded louder than that, despite its strained inflections. I could only assume that he’d spoken from this level, which made me wonder why he hadn’t answered the door in person.
Was he ill, as I’d suspected after his call the day before? Was he even seeking reconciliation with me because he’d been given some terminal diagnosis by a local medic? Pain and sensitivity associated with disease might account for why he’d left his curtains undrawn this morning, when the sky was so bright outside. In any case, all of this hinted at only one thing: he was in the lounge, whose drapes I’d half seen shut from the garden.
I moved that way at once, the dog a constant companion amid my stumbling feet, and once my vision adjusted to the low light in the room, I finally saw him: Dex, my only sibling, clearly injured or much worse than that.
“Hello, Harry,” he said with a dark-eyed amusement that raised anything but a smile from me. He was slumped on a couch in one corner, dressed in thick clothing and a large sheet, the kind older folk use to keep out the cold. The house, I now noticed (having quickly acclimatized from the iciness outside), was unheated, with no logs anywhere near the inert open fireplace. “How’s tricks?”
I didn’t care for his turn of phrase, especially as it, in conspiracy with this return to my childhood home, prompted more recollections of my brother’s teenage exploits: the sleight-of-hand magic, the outlandish sketches, and all those creepy experiments.
“I’m not interested in tricks anymore, Dex,” I said, hoping the comment wouldn’t come across as provocative, rather stating my belief that I was an adult now and wasn’t about to play any childish games.
“Oh, that’s a pity.” Dexter conjured an enigmatic smile. “After all, you know as well as I do that tricks are what I’ve always performed best.”
I slowly shook my head. “Well, we’re not kids anymore, are we? Times change. Other things come to preoccupy us. That’s life, isn’t it?”
Now my brother lapsed into silence, as if my comment had bothered him in a way he found difficult to respond to. His pause lasted for so long that I eventually terminated it with a friendlier and less combative inquiry.
“How are things with you, anyway?”
It was a foolish question given the circumstances—he was clearly suffering from some kind of malady, whether an internal problem or damage inflicted from outside. Nevertheless, he replied with an unpleasant smile.
“I’m a…little under the weather, shall we say?”
“That’s not good, man. I mean, we’re due heavy snow any day.”
“This is why I’m preserving all my energies,” he said, adjusting his thick body-sheet with stumpy fingers.
Dex had always been short and burly, more like our dad than I was. Tallish and slender, I’d always resembled our mum. In contrast with my straight blond hair and blue eyes, he bore dark curls and brown peepers, both of which made him look even more like his father. I sometimes wondered whether Dexter had attracted more paternal rage because, for Dad, merely glancing at the boy had been a bit like seeing himself in nascent form, with all his attendant weaknesses.
Trying to prevent my mind from such corrosive speculation, I refocused on what my brother had just said: he’d been trying to preserve his energies…but for what?
“Is it money you’re after—to pay bills? Heat this place?” I snatched my hands out of my pockets, where I realized they’d retreated to. “Or do you need me to…well, you know, drive you somewhere—a hospital, maybe?”
Dex laughed the way he had briefly on the telephone. It was a scolding, caustic sound, full of bile and phlegm, and it made me feel insecure back in that house, a property full of revenants I still didn’t wish to entertain. All this felt surreal; it should be me who had the upper hand here, someone who’d fled the place and done well for himself since. But the alarming fact was that the opposite felt true.
“You think I need money? Oh, dream on, big brother. I have more of that than you could hope to earn in your ever-so-respectable life.”
I recalled his uncanny ability to outfox the stock market, the day-trading tricks he’d learned as a teenager, which he’d kept to himself until our parents had divorced and the issue of what would become of our long-term home was raised. Dex had simply bought it from our mum and dad, allowing them both to go their separate ways. And he’d paid cash for it.
Realizing how stupid my question must have sounded, I was about to speak again when he beat me to it.
“As for medical care, well, yes, I’ll admit that I’m not at my best right now. But this won’t last—it’ll be a day or two before I recover. You watch.”
Christ, he looked further off getting better than that—weeks
maybe, if ever at all—but what unsettled me most was his suggestion that we might meet again soon, which prompted my next question.
“So…why did you ask me to visit you?”
By now, the tiny dog had gone to sit with my brother on the couch, curled up in an ineffectual ball on a piece of the sheet wrapped around its master. At a more viewable distance now, this beast commanded my stare a short while, as if its face wasn’t right, its snout stubbier than it should be, its eyes more arch than most canine’s. In truth, it looked as much like a cat as it did a dog. I snatched my gaze away, glancing back at my forceful brother.
Dex disturbed the hound when he reached out for something, which made a sound like rustling paper. When his right arm rose again from under the sheet, he held a single document, which he tossed onto a coffee table standing between me and him, an item ill-lit by wan daylight pressing through the closed curtains.
Realizing that I was supposed to examine this sheet, I crept forward, trying to rule out an impression that someone or something was moving elsewhere in the building. But no, the few muffled creaks and scuffles I heard were simply the property adjusting to the cold season; they were too light to belong to anyone else in the house, even if my brother had been inclined to entertain any other company than an obedient pet.
I stooped to collect the page he’d offered—in my peripheral gaze, his dark eyes twinkled with unsettling knowingness—and started to read.
It was an official-looking document, dated 1983 and relating to Dexter Keyes’s birthday back in April of that year. But it wasn’t a record of his arrival in the hospital, even though one must exist somewhere.
This was a certificate of adoption.