Finding Davey

by Jonathan Gash

  “I spoke to Mr Corkhill,” she alarmed him by interjecting. “He said he’s just begun printing your repeat order.”

  “Yes.” Bray knew he was stammering, going red. Had George played the game? “I couldn’t wait on help.”

  “Help?” She toyed with her spoon. “An odd word, Mr Charleston.”

  “Help me, I meant. I’m out of my depth, Mrs Vinson. I’ve got letters from the tax people.” He hadn’t.

  He took the book back, felt a momentary pang at Davey’s copied drawing on the dust jacket. “Failure would have been easy. Success is a burden.”

  She smiled at that. “Look, Mr Charleston. No illusions about where you stand in this. You’ve been shunted – we actually call it that – to somebody who’s past her sell-by. I’m no whizz-girl in her twenties.”

  “Is this no?”

  “I’m recommending we accept.” She reached for the book but he withheld it. “What’s KV mean?”

  “That’s coming.” He felt himself redden. “I haven’t worked it out yet.”

  “But Sharlene has?”

  “Erm,” he said, taken aback, his imaginary stepsister here again. “I meant I don’t know what Sharlene’ll decide.”

  “I presume it’s multiple sclerosis?” Lottie was concerned.

  He felt an irrational annoyance. How on earth could he be expected to know what disease a mythical stepsister had? “It’s downhill, I’m afraid. She’s very brave. She uses a word processor.”

  “How soon can I see the sequel?”

  Leave it to me, he almost blurted out. “I’ll phone her tonight.”

  Lottie said, “I presume she’s your younger sister?”

  “Yes.” Safe to eat, now he’d survived the awkwardness. “I’m famished. This’ll save my life.”

  They spoke of journeys. Mrs Vinson lived along the coast, mercifully not close to his own village. She told him of her husband in Canada, no chance of reconciliation. Two offspring, both overseas.

  “It’s the old question,” she sighed. “When you retire, do you park yourself on your children, a load of trouble, or become a pensioned seasider waiting for letters?” She laughed to make comic incongruity of her plight.

  He told her of his work, then caught himself. “I talk too much about joinery.”

  Guardedly she asked him. He told her he had one married son, and he had an ex-wife he never saw. This too made him redden. He wanted to like this lady.

  “Better get onto first names, Mr Charleston,” she admonished eventually. “Lottie to you. Bray, isn’t it? In publishing, formality suggests something’s hidden,” she worried him by saying.

  “Is it?” His remark brought on her laughter.

  “No! Cynicism is publishing’s wit. I can see you and I are going to get along! I’ve never met innocence!”

  He felt emboldened. “Is there any hope of, well, getting some advice?”

  “I’ve already said we’ll go with it. You’re unique, defining a total sell-out as a problem. We need to rationalise details. This printer might prove dicey.”

  He gave her the phone number of his computer shed and lied, “I’m in the Dark Ages. No fax, no e-mail, none of that Web thing. Is that all right?”

  “Thank heavens for that!”

  She caught the coast express. He pretended he’d someone to see. He’d had enough personal chat. He watched her walk down Platform Nine, and felt stupid when she caught him looking. But where was the harm in liking someone? He felt exhausted. So far, he was pulling it off, but far too slow. He had to accelerate.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “It’s real clear over Illinois, Clint,” Pop said. “We say it’s the greatest state in the Union.”

  The Chrysler was waiting at the airport. Pop dismissed the uniformed chauffeur, electing to do the driving. Mom smiled and smiled, speaking endlessly on her carry phone. Mom had two phones. Clint asked why she had two phones in her handbag.

  Mom and Pop exchanged swift glances.

  “In my purse, Clint,” she responded quickly. “Two cell phones in my purse? Well, Mom’s a busy lady! You’ll soon remember just how busy your Mom is!”

  “Who’re you phoning?” Clint watched the scenery go by.

  “Who am I calling?” Mom cooed. “Why, my helper lady in Tain. My secretary.”

  “Tain?” It sounded strange.

  “Our new home, honey. We picked it especially for you. You’ll have a bright new start. Won’t that be marvellous?”

  Pop smoothly changed lanes. “Tain’s a great town, Clint. We love it, don’t we, Mom?”

  “And you’ll love it too, honey.”

  “See, son,” Pop explained, smiling, “I’ve my own corporation. I can handle things right from home!”

  “Isn’t that great, Clint?” Mom exclaimed. “We can be together as much as we want! Most families aren’t so lucky, are they?”

  “No, Mom,” Clint answered.

  He was tired. His eyes closed. He’d liked the palm trees outside the clinic windows. There were birds there, near where tidy people played golf and tennis. The birds were not ducks, but sort of. The palm trees made patterns. He remembered those. The previous week he’d got out of bed and traced the outline of one with a finger on the window pane. The nurse had no crayons. Clint slipped into oblivion.

  “You hear that, Pop?” Mom whispered to her husband. Tears shone in her eyes. “You hear him say it, just like that?”

  “Music, Clodie, sheer music!”

  “He makes us complete, Hyme.” She dabbed her eyes. “You expect no trouble relocating to Tain?”

  “The usual gripes from those commission fuckers.”

  “Can they affect us?” Mom was alarmed.

  “It’s business, Clodie, Chrissakes, not a sewing circle. Jesus, I’d like a smoke.”

  Mom warned, “Doctor said no smoking – Clint’s medication.”

  She could recite Doctor’s rules over and over. Hyme’s own doctor allowed him one smoke a day.

  “Tain is set up, Clodie. I might have to go back east a coupla times. My office click ware’s already installed.” Pop was silent as a huge interstate truck overtook. He allowed the vehicle to draw ahead. “I’ll kick ass if the move doesn’t go smooth.”

  “Pop,” his wife reprimanded sternly, smiling fondly at the sleeping boy. “You’ll be giving our son bad language habits.”

  Pop chuckled. “Can’t be too careful, huh?”

  “No first names even when Clint’s asleep, okay? Doctor said!”

  “The clinic covered every single detail. Jeez, I paid enough.”

  “Pop!” his wife cried softly.

  “Know what Doctor told me? He has six news clippers, do three hundred newspapers a day! Can you believe that? Every detail, for six months after an abduction.” Pop whistled. “Professionalism.”

  The man glanced in the rear view mirror, adjusted it to see the child’s face.

  “He’s sleeping like a babe, Clodie,” he said. “Right on course. It’s what we paid for. Just remember that.”

  “How far are we?”

  “Coming into Tain.” He chuckled, everything perfect. “Home!”

  Any doctor’s waiting room depressed him. Nobody was there this time. No anxious fidgety woman, with her handwashing movements. No pots of Cyclamen along the windowsills. Bray waited.

  When the receptionist called him he made an unfortunate entrance, stumbling over the smooth carpet. Dr Newton came to help, but by then he had his papers back into his plastic envelope. She must have noticed the Scientific American articles he’d photocopied. He stood, red of face, and was introduced to Dr Bateson.

  The man was monosyllabic. They sat like chess rivals. Dr Newton made light comments about a viva voce examination at the Royal Colleges. Bray pretended to understand the experience. Dr Bateson masked his impatience in a smile. All of us pretending away, Bray thought. The man was all but bald, his tie slack as if he was hard at work.

  “Shall we get down to it?” he said
eventually after pleasantries. “Your young relative’s plight. Dyslexia?”

  “I should like guidance, please.” Bray indicated his plastic file. “I’ve read extracts but I’m no nearer.”

  “Ask away, then.”

  “A young lass helps me – with parent permission, of course – with a computer. I pay her.”

  “And she’s dyslexic?”

  “She colours the keyboard with special inks, varnishes. She makes the computer talk, to save having to read or type.” He waited, but neither of the doctors spoke. “She gives me lessons.”

  “Are you improving, Mr Charleston?” Dr Newton asked, smiling.

  “I’m terrible. She says I’m stupid. She’s quite right, of course.”

  Better to say nothing about her antisocial behaviour. He wanted her dyslexia cured. The rest could wait on better times.

  Dr Newton prompted, “Be frank, Mr Charleston. Dr Bateson has worked with dyslexic children for twenty years.”

  “She is in difficulties,” Bray said. For all he knew doctors might have to report things to Social Services, and that would be the end of Kylee. “I don’t want her judged. I don’t really have the right. I’m not her father, you see.”

  “And might you bring her here?”

  “No.” Bray tried to justify his weak attitude. “I want to know where I might go wrong talking to her. She’s been a godsend, teaching me. I couldn’t get to a proper night school.”

  Dr Newton slipped in a lie, helping. “Mr Charleston has work commitments against the clock.”

  “I’ve read medical textbooks, but I don’t know their words.”

  “Very well,” Bateson said slowly. “How old is this girl?”

  “She says fourteen, but I’m unsure. She gets annoyed if I ask.”

  Bateson leant back, fingers clasped behind his head. “It used to be said that boys were the main sufferers from dyslexia, but we now know it’s in both genders.”

  “What is it, though?”

  “The brain operates in sections, Mr Charleston. The front parts govern speech output.” He tapped his brow. “There’s a patch called Broca’s Area near the front, that governs your mouth, lips, tongue – controlling speech as it comes out formed into phonemes others can comprehend. Broca’s Area helps to change the act of seeing a letter into a related sound.”

  Bray had memorised a diagram on the train in.

  “And there’s a special lobe of your brain,” Bateson went on, observing Bray’s alert attention, “near the crown of your head, called the parietal lobe.” He tapped his bald skin, leaning forward as if that helped Bray to see the anatomy within. Dr Newton smiled at Bray, don’t worry, keep listening. “The Angular Gyrus is there. It arranges what you see – letters, words, patterns printed on a page – so they hook up, so to speak, with various libraries of sounds a child’s brain has stored up.”

  “A child’s brain stores sounds?”

  “That’s it. The Angular Gyrus makes sure that a child’s collections of sounds are hitched to the right visual. That is, the letter evokes the necessary sound. Once that’s done, the child is reading.”

  “It seems simple.” Bray was edgy, wanting to ask bluntly then why was Kylee having to use colours and rely on talking machines?

  “It isn’t,” Bateson said with feeling. “There’s Wernicke’s Area that analyses sounds for the brain. The more parts to the microanatomy, the more things can go wrong and cause dysfunction. We examine blood flowing through a child’s brain while he sorts out words and sounds, by functional magnetic resonance imaging. It isn’t difficult. There are other tests. We can usually discover dyslexia and the range of the defect by simpler tests that don’t require instruments.”

  “Can a child be cured?”

  “Vastly improved. Catch it early. Six years of age is optimal.”

  Bray felt dismayed. He wasn’t so naïf that he’d come expecting Kylee to be given a simple tablet, but this was a real disappointment. The doctors exchanged glances.

  “Dr Pringle Morgan described it first, in Sussex a century ago,” Dr Newton said. “The child was a bright youth of fourteen. Very good at maths, games, verbal skill. Nothing wrong with his sight. Now we try to pick it up at much younger.”

  “You see, Mr Charleston, Homo sapiens is a relative newcomer. We evolved a mere 200,000 years since, when speech began. Writing started less than 10,000 years ago. Reading and articulacy isn’t something we come into the world ready equipped with. Parents hack it into our consciousness.”

  Bray sat thinking, the doctors waiting him out. “What’s best?”

  “Support,” Bateson said immediately. He had known the question was coming.

  “What does that mean?” Bray sounded testy, and apologised before going on, “Sorry. It’s a catchphrase from talk shows, isn’t it? Where somebody asks questions and an audience whoops.”

  Bateson smiled. “Giving her something useful to do, use her talents and appreciate what she does.”

  “Thank you.”

  They exchanged civilities and Bray left. Not much, but he felt better about what he was doing. Support Kylee. He’d do that, in exchange for her help. She’d regaled him with crude jokes about dyslexia clinics her parents had insisted on when she’d been eleven. It had made her ill. He’d have to do what he could.

  Support. Sounded easy, if you said it quick.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Lottie Vinson – how she hated that name! – wished the woman on TV nothing but chin spots, stubby eyelashes and moles. The woman was thin-lipped anyway, a bad sign. Her talk-show interrogator was a tall lawyer, silver of hair and glib with his limited-intelligence and catchphrases (“When your husband left and your children loathed you, how did you feel?” among today’s imbecilities).

  The woman said the unforgivable, a ragbag word. “My marriage collapsed.”

  Nobody, least of all the besuited wart, asked what the hell she meant by “collapsed”. Why not? New girls in publishing either learned how to define and so got on, or they didn’t and stayed useless typists. She scrutinised the woman’s garb, looking for reasons to hate her some more.

  Now, Lottie, she admonished herself, cut it out. What’s she ever done to you? It’s her few seconds of fame, let her be. Despite her better intentions, Lottie found her eyes drawn to the screen, so irritably switched off.

  Meeting Bray Charleston had made her edgy.

  She watched the estuary, standing at her window. Several boats were out, one of them Bill Iggo’s, with whom she’d spent time and lived to regret it. Difficult to shelve Bill, but she’d managed it.

  Her husband Stanley was living it up in Powell River, Canada. The divorce, a product of differing careers, had been dismayingly amicable. The children, Ian and Barbara, were frequent visitors to him, neither settled down yet. Maybe that too was the modern thing, roam until those first wrinkle lines appeared and party invitations dried up, then find an afterthought partner, pretend it was young love at last? Decent jobs, both, thank God. They visited her when the mood took. She was shocked, realising she didn’t care if they came or not.

  How irritating, that a twerp like Lindsay in editorial had the nerve to shunt Bray Charleston to her. Jesus, Lottie thought angrily, I’ve run the entire office in my time, you pompous whizzkid! They’d forgotten that. Retirement meant goodnight nurse, then who’s this ageing face at reunions? That’s what they think.

  That she’d been slipped this drogue was Lindsay’s clue: your only purpose, Lottie, is to handle the doubtfuls. Retirees were for reading scripts from fading agents, and provide polite but chilling rejections. Yet this man’s tale sounded vaguely something, with its brief track record. Quite likely, Lindsay was merely making sure she didn’t drop a clanger that might cripple her promotion.

  If the little project went well, who’d get the praise? Why, good old – no, young – Lindsay! If it went calamitously bad, well, had Lottie Vinson ever amounted to much? Forget her.

  Lottie felt unsettled, trouble
d. Something wasn’t right.

  Strange how the quiet cabinet maker – he’d said joiner, she must get the OED – kept coming to mind. And his remote stepsister, Sharlene, who evidently hadn’t to be approached at all costs. And Charleston’s determination to promote his stepsister’s stories. Did he have the slightest idea how many new writers tilted that particular windmill?

  Except he seemed embarrassed, feeling his stuttering way. And more than determined. Was there a word for that grave look of his, that readiness for endless setbacks? Like, when she’d explained that manuscript-to-book took a year maybe, his response had been odd, to say the least.

  Anybody else would have nodded eagerly, said fine, they’d go along with that. Bray Charleston had stayed silent, then said, “There’s another way.”

  “What?” She’d laughed at the arrogance of the man. “Tell me!”

  “I don’t know,” he’d replied evenly.

  Weird, yet not weird. No word came to mind. Implacability? Resolve?

  Watching Bill Iggo’s ketch – two bunks in it, she remembered, wincing – preparing to tack, she thought of the impression Bray Charleston had conveyed, with his embarrassments and his ignorance.

  Bray Charleston was in for keeps, she thought. That was it. For keeps. She’d read of his missing grandson, Davey was it? Local papers had Bray’s picture. Was this children’s book thing by way of compensation and guilt? Yet guilt, for keeps, must be wrong.

  He stayed in her mind.

  The lady in the next trailer was called Charmianne. (“That’s the spelling, Jim,” once they’d said hello.) She grew pansies and wanted to share plants. She offered to paint the stones white near his one step. He declined, told her he was still thinking, like he was planning a shuttle launch. She understood, but said it like a threat; he wasn’t off the hook yet, no sir. He avoided her.

  The trailer park was smart, the investment company choosing pretty well. He’d never been into golf, but went over, listened to the talk, had a beer. Occasionally he ate there, met folk at the leisure centre, getting into the place. He walked. He walked some more. He talked with people who’d got dogs, should he get one for company, finally pleaded allergies and folk said shame but what could you do with allergies? Doctor’s fees killed you.