As I did my best to forget how much of my disgust had related to Bobby and Jim, Carole said “So did anyone else see the evidence?”
Was this another sly gibe? “Not that I ever heard.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t come with you, Dom,” Bobby said.
“Make that both of us,” Jim said. “At least it’s over with and long gone.”
“If you think it is,” I said.
Until that moment this hadn’t occurred to me, at any rate for many years. “Why,” Jim said, “have you heard any more about him?”
“No, but you know what he was like. Can you imagine him just giving up? Wherever he is, he’ll be up to something.”
“If anybody hears,” Bobby said, “we should let the others know.”
“At least his daughter will have grown up,” Jim said.
“Yes,” I said, “but there could be other children involved in whatever he’s doing.”
“I don’t suppose that’ll be against the law.” All the same, Jim said “Keep me posted if he shows up anywhere.”
“Does that exhaust the subject?” Carole hoped aloud.
Sensing that Jim and Bobby felt it should, I thought it best to let it go. I produced interested comments while Carole described the series she was writing about homophobia in various ethnic communities and assorted workplaces. “My publishers say it’ll make a book as well,” Bobby said with pride. Though I’d done my best to leave Carole in the spotlight, when we all left the restaurant I felt compelled to say “Sorry if I let an old obsession take over.”
“Better caring too much,” Carole said, “than not enough,” and clasped Bobby’s hand.
“I expect it was too much,” I said, and just then I believed that Christian Noble was no longer our concern. I suppose that was a kind of faith. I might as well have put my trust in the neon signs that lit up the streets—in imagining they had done away with the infinite darkness that surrounded us, when they couldn’t even hold it back.
2 - Shaped By The Snow
As I let myself into the hotel room a crimson shard glared at me out of the dark. I groped for the switches on the wall of the unfamiliar room, and when I managed to turn on a lamp above the bed around the corner of the vestibule I wondered if I’d extinguished the red light somehow. It took me several drunken moments to grasp that I could still see its enfeebled image in the dressing-table mirror. The light belonged to the bedside phone, showing that someone had left me a message.
I dumped my luggage on the bed and dialled 9 as a card beside the phone directed. I was hoping this would take me to the message, but a voice said “Operator.”
“Yes, hello. You’ve got a message for me.”
“One moment, sir. What room are you again?”
I almost asked him how he couldn’t know. “Two one four,” I still remember saying.
“Just a moment.” After quite a few of those he said “Sorry, sir, no message.”
“That can’t be right, The message light’s on.”
“Someone must have tried to call you and rung off.”
“Didn’t you take the call, or whoever was doing your job? Can you tell me who was trying to get in touch?”
“We’ll have noted the number if it wasn’t withheld.” I heard a faint sound just identifiable as the turning of a page. “The call was placed at ten past five this afternoon,” he told me and read out my home number.
I thanked him and hung up but kept my hand on the receiver. Surely if Lesley’s call had been important she would have left some message. Perhaps she’d simply wanted a quick chat when she would have assumed I’d just checked into the room, which I might have done except for the delayed train. Now it was well past midnight, and if I called back I was likely to disturb her and very possibly our son.
I let go of the phone at last and headed for the bathroom, where I reflected how unattainably luxurious en-suite facilities would have seemed to my parents in the years I’d gone on holiday with them. A shaving mirror on a metal arm magnified my doubts about the phone call until I pivoted it to face the ceiling. As soon as I switched off the bedside light I wondered if Lesley was lying awake, listening for sounds through the baby monitor that we’d kept by Toby’s bed for most of the five years since his birth. I wakened several times in the hotel room, blinking to make sure the message light hadn’t revived in the uncommunicative dark.
Sometime after four o’clock I fell thoroughly asleep, struggling into daylight to discover I’d been gone for almost five hours. I called Lesley at once, letting the phone ring longer than I hoped it would, until at last it brought her voice. “Lesley and Dominic Sheldrake,” she said. “We must be busy just now but we want to hear from you if you aren’t a cold call. Be sure and say who you are and leave us a message.”
“It’s Dominic. Just wondering why you called yesterday. I assume it wasn’t anything crucial or you’d have said. If you were cut off you’d have called back, obviously, wouldn’t you. If you’re there now do pick up or I’ll head for the train.” I was saying all this at such length to give Lesley time to reach the phone, but she evidently wasn’t there. “I’ll be on my way, then,” I said.
Rather than waste time breakfasting at the hotel—even using the bathroom felt like an undesirable delay—I caught a cab to Euston and sprinted to the Liverpool train. When the buffet car opened I bought a coffee and a sandwich, but not knowing what was happening at home pinched my appetite. I consigned half the sandwich to a bin, and as fields that shone with frost paraded past the carriage I did my best to occupy my mind with Bobby’s book.
It developed the theme of economic addiction that she’d proposed in a notorious instalment of her column in the Spectator, where she’d compared people who demanded welfare to the children’s character Burglar Bill, who declared “I’ll have that” whenever he saw anything he wanted—Bills and Billettes, she called them. In The Entitlement Trap she argued that any positive effects of welfare were outweighed by the dependency it caused. From being grateful for a new or increased benefit recipients would progress to accepting and then expecting it, which led to feeling entitled to the support they hadn’t previously enjoyed, followed by demanding it as a right because it had left them incapable of doing without it. Underlying Bobby’s analysis was a sense that people had been tougher and readier to cope when we were growing up. She cited case after case as evidence of the contemporary trend, and despite my instincts I couldn’t altogether disagree with her. I was more struck by how she’d changed since our schooldays. No doubt in my own way I had just as much. Of the three of us, Jim had come closest to living up to parental hopes.
A snowstorm met the train as it crossed the Mersey at Runcorn. Large loose flakes patted the windows, dwindling into delicate skeletons of ice. Along the cutting that led to the terminus, snow swooped through the gloom while moisture trickled darkly down the exposed rock that walled the train in. The platform at Lime Street was slippery with trodden snow, and so I couldn’t even walk fast once I stepped down from the carriage. At least there were plenty of black taxis in the rank beneath the roof at the edge of the station. The driver of the foremost taxi raised his broad shaved head on not much of a neck to squint at me when I gave him my suburban address. The windscreen wipers started to repeat a squeak and a thump as the taxi veered out of the station, spraying the pavement with slush, and the driver said “Been somewhere?”
Presumably this was his way of asking where. “London,” I said.
“Maggie’s stronghold,” he retorted, and with even more disfavour “She’ll stay down there if she knows what’s good for her, her and her mob. She may have beat the miners but she’ll find out she can’t mess with Liverpool.”
Elsewhere hundreds of coal miners had gone back to work, ending a prolonged strike, but the city council was confronting Mrs Thatcher’s government over local rates. “I wouldn’t like to guess what may happen,” I said.
The driver scowled at me in the mirror as if I meant to hold the future ba
ck. “Any twat like her, they’ll learn.”
Was he including me among those in need of education? Keeping quiet didn’t end the dialogue. As we sped past the Adelphi, where a bedraggled wedding party was disappearing in instalments through the revolving doors of the hotel, the driver said “Pity more miners weren’t from round here. We’ve got no time for scabs.”
I wondered how Bobby might have responded, but said only “I suppose the men who went back had families to support.”
“Your mates in the union’s your family too. Let them down and you’ll end up like your gardeners.”
While I had an inkling what he meant, I said “I’m not sure how they’re mine.”
“They worked round where you live, didn’t they? And people round there made out they were right.” As he sent the taxi uphill past St. Luke’s roofless church, where the unglazed windows showed snow falling inside the ruin that commemorated the blitz, he said “Serve them right for caring more about their precious orchids than their comrades. I’d have sentenced them to worse than mowing grass.”
When six men at Harthill botanical gardens refused to join a strike in case the famous collection of orchids suffered, the stridently left-wing council demoted them to mowing verges and demolished all the greenhouses. I imagine Bobby would have been reminded of Chairman Mao’s way of educating intellectuals; I was myself. “Don’t you think history matters?” I was provoked to ask. “That collection of plants was begun before Victoria was born.”
The driver made a noise like a preamble to spitting. “You reckon plants are worth more than people.”
This silenced me, but not as he would have wanted. I was recalling Christian Noble’s subterranean garden, where the growths were more and worse than plants. As I gazed out of the taxi the snow seemed to flock into my mind, overwhelming my thoughts. I hoped Toby was enjoying it, wherever he might be. That drove Noble out of my head and reminded me how anxious I was to be home.
On Princes Avenue the spiky Christ on the wall of a church was amassing a plump white crown. On Smithdown Road a double-decker bus had skidded against a parked van, and brake lights reddened falling snowflakes while indicators lent the pallid storm an orange pulse. Further on a gang of boys shied snowballs at the taxi and then scampered into the Mystery park. Where a four-way junction of main roads curled around a pair of roundabouts, the storm assailed the taxi from every side, and I wouldn’t have believed a mass of white could turn an interior so dark. Snow clung to the windows while the taxi sped beneath the laden trees on Menlove Avenue, so that I had to sit forward and peer through the windscreen when we turned along Druidstone Road. The snowfall had shrunk to a glitter in the air. “Here, thanks,” I said and had to call the first word louder.
The driver plainly regarded a tip as an entitlement that barely warranted thanks. As soon as I clambered out onto the chilly padded pavement he drove off, spattering the snow beside the kerb with dingy pockmarks. A snowy crust froze my fingers as I opened the front gate, etching an arc in the snow on the path, beside which Lesley’s flowers had mutated into fat white shapes. I hitched up my bag while I dug keys out of my pocket, and was aiming at the latch when the stout pine door swung inwards, bringing me face to face with my father. “Get yourself inside,” he urged, stepping back so fast he almost lost his balance. “We don’t want you catching your death.”
Nobody else was to be seen or heard—not along the hall, where Lesley had renewed the bunch, of winter flowers in the vase on the slim table draped with Greek embroidery, or up the stripped pine stairs. I might have asked my father what he was doing in the house, but found a gentler question. “Where is everyone?”
“Where do you think they’d be?”
“I really don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“I thought you had more imagination, Dominic. Where would you be at Toby’s age? He’s out at the back with his mother in the snow.”
I should have known, and only concern for Toby had led me towards imagining some unspecified disaster. I wiped my feet on the shaggy Welcome mat and hung my coat in the cloakroom. Having zipped myself into a hooded waterproof more suited to the weather, I was heading down the hall when I saw another reason to be worried. “Dad, what have you done to yourself?”
“It’s nothing at all. Don’t give it a thought.” As he fingered the bruise on his forehead I glimpsed how he restrained a wince. “You’ve got your boy to care about,” he said. “God looks after us old folk.”
“You still need to take care. Will you tell me what happened?”
His thick lips grew wry while his eyes tried to look even sleepier. “Came down a ladder too fast, that’s all. Serve me right for working on a Sunday.”
“Dad, if work needs doing at the house, pay someone or at least let me know and I’ll help.”
“I’m not incapable or you’d be putting me in a home.” His resentment subsided at once. “I’m just trying to do jobs I should have done when your mother was alive,” he said. “I knew she’d have liked them seen to, but she never was a one to nag.”
“All the more reason for me to help if it’s in her memory.”
“You’re a good lad,” my father said, which made me feel absurdly young and threatened to revive memories I thought I’d left well behind. “Anyway,” he said and stopped short of the kitchen as if we might want to keep the conversation private, “how was your friend?”
“I didn’t just see Bobby. Jim was there as well.” My father was making me feel defensive, unnecessary though it was. “She’s changed a lot. I think you’d like her more in some ways,” I said.
I meant her politics rather than her sexuality, but he gave me no time to explain. “I wasn’t trying to pry, son,” he said. “You told me to open your invite when it came to the house in case it was important.”
“I didn’t think you were prying.” Just the same, I was quick to add “You can rely on Jim, though. He’s a police inspector.”
My father looked ready to be sad. “You mean you can’t rely on her.”
“To end up the way you’d expect, I was meaning. I trust them both. Let’s see what Toby’s making of the snow.”
A snowy glow was turning the pine panels in the kitchen even paler. I rested my elbows on the aluminium sink below the extensive window and gazed down the long white garden at my wife and son. Toby had built a snowman or at any rate a snow figure, half a dozen large snowballs piled as high as his head, and now he was poking multicoloured lengths of Lego into the column, a pair of them into each ball like the legs of a caterpillar. “He’s picked that up from you,” my father said.
While I sensed he meant this as a compliment, I had to ask “What’s that?”
“Your imagination, son. He’s an original, though. Odds on some of that’s from his mother.”
I had time to read her expression before she noticed me. Her round humorous face, still a little plumper like the rest of her ever since she’d had our son, had regained the look I was so fond of, the start of a smile that encouraged students to speak up in her lectures but often conveyed a sexier meaning to me. I very much hoped her reason for it wasn’t just the sight of Toby’s activity, heartening though it was. I was heading for the back door when she saw me. A word to Toby made him swing around, kicking up snow with his bright green rubber boots. “Daddy,” he cried. “Come and see what I’ve done.”
I used to say he was composed of the best of us, which largely meant his mother—roundish face, high forehead, wide dark eyes, small slightly upturned nose, generous lips presently broadened by a smile. Just the dimple in his chin showed I’d been involved. “What is it, Toby?” I called as I tramped across the squeaky lawn. “It’s an insect, yes?”
He looked a little hurt. “It’s a thing that grows.”
I gave Lesley a quick hug and kissed her nose, the bridge of which was slightly dented—a flaw I’d always loved, left by a childhood collision with a swing. “How does it do that, Toby?”
“It grows and comes out
and flies away.”
“You mean it turns into a butterfly,” Lesley said.
He was apparently too preoccupied to agree. “Now I’ve got to make its face,” he said, but as he stooped to his plastic box of Lego a wind brought a renewed snowfall swooping across the garden. It felt like icy knives, and Toby flinched. “It doesn’t want me to,” he protested.
“There’s too much of it just now, son,” my father called from the kitchen doorway. “You come in till it settles down. It’ll still be there for you to play with.” As we all took refuge in the house he said “You get changed right now, Toby. Maybe he should have a bath as well.”
“It isn’t bedtime, grandad.”
“You could always try and have a nap,” my father said and glanced at Lesley. “Don’t let me interfere if you think I’m not being any help.”
“Would you like a nap, Toby?” When he shook his head she told him “Just get changed as grandad says, then. Shall I come and dry your wet bits?”
Toby looked sufficiently insulted for someone twice his age. “I can.”
“Hot chocolate when you come down, and is it coffee for everyone else?”
I felt as if too much of this was delaying my question. As soon as Toby left his boots by the back door and padded upstairs I asked Lesley “Why did you phone me and not leave a message?”
“I had a little bit of news, but then I thought I’d leave it for when you came home and I had more. I’d have told you if you’d been there, only if I’d left a message you’d have wanted to speak to me.”
“I was stuck on a train for hours. So what’s the news?”
“I think we’ve found somewhere they know what’s wrong with Toby and can help him.”
“Well, that’s. I’m.” I was afraid to enthuse until I knew more. I hastened to leave Toby’s boots and my shoes and coat in the cloakroom, returning to the kitchen almost faster than my breath. “Tell me all about it,” I said.
“I was talking to a different paediatrician at the hospital. I only wish we’d met her sooner. She says his condition is beginning to be recognised but most doctors don’t know anything about it or won’t commit themselves. Well, we didn’t need her to tell us about them.”
Born To The Dark Page 2