Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

  ‘Eliot,’ Margaret called, panic rising inside her again. She was panting, her quick breaths visible before her in the cold air.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Ben, putting a hand on her arm. ‘He’ll be here.’

  She broke into a run, but couldn’t get enough air and her chest was hurting. She tried to call Eliot’s name again, but couldn’t. Her mouth and throat were so dry she couldn’t swallow. Paula and Ben were running too. The sun had come out and every time Margaret blinked she saw a flash of red. Everywhere she looked there were trees and snow – a kaleidoscope of green and white and red before her.

  They both saw him at the same time. A man was walking his Labrador on the edge of the park and Eliot was kneeling in the snow, petting the dog. Ben slowed to a walk, but Margaret kept running up to Eliot. The dog turned as she approached and began to bark.

  ‘I’ve told you not to walk off like that. You have to tell me where you’re going.’ Margaret took Eliot by the shoulders and shook him lightly as she turned him to face her.

  ‘I was only petting the dog.’

  The dog walker smiled at Margaret. ‘Don’t worry, I know that feeling,’ he said, but Margaret did not smile in return.

  Ben and Paula arrived, hand in hand.

  ‘He’s desperate for a dog,’ said Ben to the owner, who nodded and left them. Eliot’s face was rueful – brows furrowed and lower lip visible.

  ‘I was just petting the dog,’ he said again.

  Ben lifted him up and put him over his shoulder. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, swinging his son down to the ground again. ‘Back to the car. Let’s go see your grandpa.’

  As the children walked ahead, Ben put his arm around Margaret and squeezed her.

  ‘I… I just thought… I had a bad…’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Ben. ‘We found him.’

  Margaret was trembling, but she tried to smile.

  Her father, John, was watching for them out of the lounge window when they arrived in Rugby. He lived in the same detached, Georgian red-bricked house in which Margaret’s mother had died. She had developed melanoma and John had nursed her at home for nearly a year. Although she had been gone fifteen years, the decor of the house was still the same, right down to the honesty and catkin bouquet in a vase by the telephone in the hall. Margaret couldn’t look at the dried plants without imagining her mother choosing them and sliding the long stems into the vase. Each time she visited, she would thumb the dust from the honesty’s shiny dried seed cases, which reminded her of the communion wafers she had placed in her mouth as a child on the rare times her mother had taken her to church.

  John threw open the door and his arms. He claimed to be the same height as Ben but he had shrunk a little. He still looked good for his age, but he had grown thinner since her mother died: bones shining through his skin, like fine marble. The children stood on tiptoes to embrace him.

  Margaret waited until John and Ben shook hands and the children had taken off their shoes before she hugged her father. The smell of him was a deep comfort, and she was glad that they had made the journey. She held on to him for a moment longer than she might have done, and found that he squeezed her instead of breaking away.

  ‘I’m so glad you made it up here,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to see you – make sure you were OK.’

  ‘I was lucky.’

  Ben had called to tell him about the crash, and Margaret had spoken to her father on the phone when she got out of hospital.

  John had bought in lunch: sausage rolls and pasties, coconut cookies and strawberry tarts. They sat at the table while he tried to make a pot of tea, opening and closing the cupboards as if unaware of their contents. John still moved around his house with estrangement, as if he didn’t belong here, or as if he had recently moved in. He had retired properly only last year and was finding the adjustment difficult. As an engineer he had worked long hours all his life. He played golf and liked looking after his cars, so that although he had stopped work he was seldom home. It was as if retirement forced him to remember, once again, that he had a life to face without her mother.

  ‘Let me help you,’ said Margaret, getting to her feet and making the tea as John unwrapped the paper bags containing lunch.

  ‘I should have had this all organised,’ he said, smoothing the scant hairs on his scalp.

  ‘You sit down and let me do it,’ she said, placing a protective hand on his arm. She was grateful to have a distraction from her own unease.

  John settled into a chair at the head of the table as Margaret placed the food on plates. She gave instructions to Eliot and Paula and they laid the table and folded napkins.

  ‘So how’s the house-husband thing going?’ said John with a smirk, slapping Ben lightly on the shoulder.

  It was a joke that John always found more amusing than Ben.

  ‘Hard work,’ Ben conceded.

  ‘Only kidding. How’s the writing going?’

  Her engineer and scientist father always gave a grandiose emphasis to the words. Margaret knew that part of her father didn’t think what Ben did was real work; while another part of him admired Ben, as if his son-in-law were an alchemist.

  ‘Not bad. I’m working on a piece on children and social media at the moment.’

  John nodded. ‘I read your article on the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons winning the Nobel. That was marvellous. Marvellous. I passed it on to a friend of mine.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Ben, and Margaret turned to watch the gentle colour rise in her husband’s cheeks. He was bad with praise. ‘Yeah… it’s all going well at the moment. There’s a chance I might get to go to Brazil next year. I’ve pitched an article about child footballers in the favelas, to run at the same time as the World Cup.’

  ‘That would be jammy,’ said John, winking.

  They were all hungry after the drive, and there was silence as they ate. Eliot had red sauce from his strawberry tart dotted on his cheeks and nose. Margaret was suddenly flooded with exhaustion and found it difficult to eat.

  ‘So you’re on the mend then?’ said John, raising an eyebrow at Margaret as he took a sip of tea.

  Margaret nodded. ‘Yes, just some bumps and scratches. It was scary but I was… lucky…’

  ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about what could have happened to you,’ said her father, his brown eyes murky with worry. ‘It terrified the life out of me…’

  Margaret turned to him and watched the concern gather on his face. He had always had difficulty expressing his emotions. It reminded her of times in her childhood when she had needed him, and he had been unable to comfort her.

  ‘But she’s doing well, aren’t you, Mags?’ said Ben, smiling across the table at her. She could tell from the way her husband spoke that he was trying to protect the children from hearing the details about the accident.

  Margaret cleared her throat and took Ben’s cue to change the subject.

  ‘Hey, Dad, I wanted to go up in the loft and have another sift through the stuff from the old house – if that’s OK?’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ said her father, eyebrows raised. ‘What’s it you’re after?’

  ‘It was some stuff of Mum’s. I think I know where —’

  ‘I told you I gave away some of her things last year?’

  It had taken over a decade, but her father had finally sorted through her mother’s possessions and given her clothes to charity.

  Margaret smiled at him. ‘Yeah, and it’s fine if…’

  ‘You’re welcome to whatever. You’ll need to go up yourself if that’s OK. My knees are playing up a bit today.’

  There was a rope swing attached to the big oak tree at the bottom of the garden, which her father had made when Paula was small. It was almost identical to the one that John had made for Margaret when she was a child. Ben took the children outside to play on it while Margaret stayed in the house with her father. She watched the children push each other on the swing before she turned away to
follow him upstairs.

  Her father had been a young man – in his early fifties – when her mother died. He had shown no interest in marrying again and had thrown himself into work until retirement.

  John used a hooked stick to pull down the stepladder from the hatch that led into the loft. He held the bottom of the ladder to steady it as Margaret climbed.

  ‘The light’s on the left-hand side,’ he called as she neared the top. ‘There’s a box of her jewellery that’s behind the beams on the far right.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘It wasn’t jewellery so much, just some bits and bobs I remembered were up here.’ She twisted on the stairs to watch his expression. The skin on his brow wrinkled as he looked up at her. From that time, she might have added, but did not.

  They had not spoken of it, as a family. Even when her mother was alive it was avoided, brushed over. What had happened to Margaret had sculpted the space between each of them, the way grief sculpts the soul, so that the unspoken took on a tangible shape, defining their family.

  She pulled herself up and found the light. She was aware of him standing below, looking up expectantly at the hatch, listening to the creak of the boards as she moved around.

  The attic was filled with boxes that were still labelled from the move. Her parents had moved house in the mid-nineties when her father changed jobs. It had been shortly before her mother’s diagnosis. Margaret had helped them move into the house and she remembered seeing the box that she was now searching for.

  She moved two or three packing crates labelled ‘bedding’, ‘sleeping bags’, ‘dinner service’, then glanced down the hatch to see if her father was still there. He was gone and she was relieved.

  It was a large green-cardboard shoebox, she remembered, unlabelled, unlike all the other containers, which her mother had obsessively inventoried. Margaret had only glanced at the box. She had found it during the move and had just opened the lid before her mother took it from her.

  ‘Don’t, love,’ her mother had said, her eyes desperate and misting with tears. ‘You don’t want to dredge all that up.’

  At the time, she had been confused by her mother’s words but had agreed.

  Margaret recalled a happy childhood, but she could not remember much from her lower primary school years. As an adult, she had decided she simply had a poor memory, but there had always been hints of what she had forgotten. She remembered being in hospital but could not remember why. She had asked about it when she was a teenager, but sensed that her parents didn’t want to discuss it. Margaret had not pushed for more information. She knew that a portion of her childhood was missing, but there was a sense that she had chosen to forget.

  The loft space smelled of the un-sanded wood of the beams. The floor was covered in plywood, but it was uneven in places. There were toys from her childhood, which her own children had rejected: dolls that her daughter had considered ugly. An old-fashioned kettle sat beside an electric heater. Near a box of old books were her mother’s jam jars, which she would retrieve every summer before she became ill and fill with a fresh batch of gooseberry, redcurrant and raspberry jams.

  Margaret recalled the day after her mother’s funeral, watching John sit by the fire and thinking how her tall, strong father seemed smaller now. Only a few days since her death yet he seemed shrunken, as if grief had caused part of him to dissipate, like air from a tyre.

  She had been young and in love and heartbroken all at once, yet she had said to her father: ‘You know when I was little, did something happen to me? Did I nearly die?’

  Her father had looked at her, his eyes shining.

  Margaret had pressed her lips together, not sure why she had spoken out. ‘I was in hospital, wasn’t I?’ The long service watching her mother’s coffin had made her recall all the things she had wanted to ask her mother, which would now go unanswered.

  ‘You had a… fever,’ her father had said, but then his face crumpled and he hid it in his hands.

  Now she could hear muffled screams of laughter as her children played outside on the swing. As Margaret grieved for her mother and then got married, became a teacher and had children, the fever had seemed a good enough explanation.

  In the warm loft space she smoothed the palms of her hands on her thighs, aware again of the smell of fire: thick black smoke. The fire seemed to have reached further into her mind than she herself had ever been willing to go. She could remember no more than she had before, but for the first time in her life she was fixated on those missing years from her childhood. It felt as if her present self was crumbling and she would only discover why if she could find out what she had forgotten.

  It took her some time, but she finally spotted the box she was looking for hidden under a pile of suitcases, wedged in the eaves. The suitcases were filled with sheets and old clothes and were heavy when she shifted them, but she managed to restack them and free the box beneath. Despite the weight that had been stacked above it, the cardboard box had kept its shape because it was packed tight.

  She carried it to a space underneath the bare light bulb that hung from the eaves, then sat down on a crate of bedding as she lifted the lid. The box was filled with yellowing newspaper articles, some of which had been carefully cut out, while others had been roughly torn. The box smelled of old books: intimate as skin. She riffled through the papers quickly and saw that there were also several sheets of typed paper and envelopes stuffed with photographs.

  She had to work out some way to get the box to the car without anyone seeing what she was taking. She didn’t want to discuss it with Ben or her father. It was a box that her mother had always kept private, but Margaret had known that it was somehow related to her.

  She touched the rough, yellowed pages at the top of the box. Memories: clean, unearthed as a bone from the ground, came to her, but they did not make any sense on their own.

  Margaret picked up the newspaper clipping that sat on top of the pile and read the headline: YOUNG GIRL ABDUCTED BY SUSPECTED PAEDOPHILE.

  She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry.

  The suitcase tower she had created on the far side of the loft toppled and fell suddenly, making her gasp.

  ‘Are you all right up there?’ her father called from below.

  8

  Kathleen Henderson

  Wednesday 2 October, 1985

  Kathleen hummed a song as she stood before the hall mirror and pinned up her hair. She put on some pale pink lipstick then went into the kitchen and leaned over the counter to write her list. She had messages to get: eggs, cheese and bananas, steak for dinner; the beds needed changing and she was meeting a friend for lunch.

  She skipped up two flights of stairs and stripped the beds, then carried the sheets downstairs and put on a wash. She moved quickly: not rushed but with energy. The radio was on and she sang along in places as she washed the breakfast dishes.

  The day was changeable, at once sunny and bright – warm shafts of sunshine catching the soap bubbles in the sink – but then the light would vanish and Kathleen would feel a chill and look up to watch the wind shaking the leaves of the oak tree, as if to remind her that it was autumn after all.

  She dried the dishes and put them away, opening cupboards that were covered in Moll’s artwork: macaroni collages, self-portraits, still lifes and family paintings. Kathleen’s favourite was a large colourful picture which was Blu-Tacked to the fridge. It was a painting of a house with a smoking chimney and green hills in the background and in the foreground were John and Kathleen, with Moll in the middle, holding hands. They all had circle faces and rectangle bodies and stick arms and hands but Moll was the largest figure. Her mother was smaller than her, and John smaller still, which Kathleen found interesting, as he was such a tall, thin man. Below the picture, Moll had painted the words my family, choosing a different colour of paint for each letter.