by Mark Morris
Time passed. Seconds into minutes into hours. Jack forgot about the dust and the dark, he forgot about his discomfort, hunched forward on a hard floor, brow furrowed as he deciphered his father’s untidy longhand. These were stories. And not only that, they were good and varied stories. There was horror here, and science-fiction, and crime, and plenty that did not fit into any particular category. Depending on the subject matter they were funny or scary, poetic or colloquial, entrancing or hard-bitten, trivial or profound. The writing was good, the characters were people you cared about, the ideas were innovative, the plots clever and original. Each of the stories concluded with the words: THE END by Terence Stone, and then these words would be followed by a date. Jack flipped through the stories and counted them. There were one hundred and seventy-nine. The first was dated 9/9/89, the last 3/5/04. His father must have started writing a few weeks after Jack’s departure and had written his final story less than two weeks ago. Jack thought of his father, old and bitter and sad, sitting down with a pen and a notebook (and probably a bottle of whiskey) and creating these stories, these beautiful things. It was such a tragic image, full of loneliness and desperation and a kind of nobility, that, suddenly overcome, he gathered up as many of the stories as he could, hugged them to his chest, bowed his head, and wept.
12
JEWEL
Someone shone a torch full into his face. Jack squinted at it, raised a hand feebly, wishing to push aside the light and go back to sleep. It had been warm and comfortable, this sleep, deep and long and without dreams. He felt loath to relinquish it. But the light jabbed beneath the lids of his eyes and prised them apart.
It was the sunshine, not a torch. There was a gap at the top of the curtains, a tiny isosceles triangle, and the sun had found it. Jack rolled onto his back to evade the probing beam. He groaned loudly as he did so, though only because he felt so well rested. Light filled the room like a promise. Birds gossiped, cows lowed in the distance. Jack would never have believed it possible here, but he actually felt calm, almost content. He propped himself on his elbows and looked across the room to where his father’s notepads were heaped beside the bookcase.
They were like the expectations of a life never fulfilled and the sight of them saddened him. But by the same token Jack felt they would finally enable him to exorcise the ghost of his father, for here was the man’s soul laid bare. Jack’s lifelong fear had hinged on the image he had of his father. He had seen him as rage, hate, violence personified. Beneath this Jack had envisioned an emptiness, or at best a love that had grown black and stinking as a cancer with his mother’s death.
But no. These stories now gave lie to that assumption. There was love in the man, there was tenderness. And Jack intended to savour it all—the humour, the sensitivity, the compassion that his father had restrained between the bland blue covers of some four dozen notepads. It was as though someone had said: Your father is dead but here are his thoughts. Sift through them and take what you will. It was as though Jack’s yearning voice, his cry for help, had finally been acknowledged.
He got out of bed, belly not quite bulging over the band of his blue-and-white boxer shorts, and plodded to the window. He threw the curtains wide, allowing the sunlight to stream over him and into the room. The smell of grass and bark and soil and water, and perhaps even of the sunshine itself, was so rich, so exuberant, it made him giddy. Jack closed his eyes and felt the warmth of the sun lap at the delicate skin of his eyelids.
His anxiety, his trepidation, he found, was almost gone, or at the very least dormant; last night’s discoveries had knocked his emotions sideways. He felt buffeted by revelation, felt as though parts of his mind, tight as buds for so many years, had now opened spectacularly, trumpets of blossom, of piercing unexpected colour that hurt his eyes. Born-again Christians must feel something like this, he thought. He looked out at the spring morning, at the tangled conjunction of blue sky and dark, intricately limbed trees, and he felt that he wanted to sing. He grinned at the image of someone walking past and surprising him while he stood there in his underwear, belting out, Oh What A Beautiful Morning.
He went running. In lieu of a tracksuit, he dragged on the clothes he’d been wearing yesterday, laced up his trainers, and headed off into the woods. He was unwashed, tousle-haired and sour-breathed; he would never have set foot outside his home in London in such a state, but to do so here felt liberating.
The woods welcomed him as before. Sunlight danced in rhythm with his quick breath, the smell of foliage was like a lotion that eased the fire in his lungs. The ground seemed to cushion his footsteps, to protect his bones from jarring. Jack felt wonderful, his spirit unshackled as the wind.
He ran for twenty minutes, half an hour, forty minutes. Time slipped by as though it did not apply to him. Jack felt fresh and vibrant; he felt he could run forever. Undergrowth, stirred by his passing, fell back into place behind him as though covering his tracks.
Back at the house he took a long hot shower, shaved thoroughly, brushed his teeth and ate a large breakfast. He had carried his father’s notepads downstairs and placed them on the floor in front of the television. He stared at them as he chewed toast spread with blackcurrant jam. Everything he had done so far this morning felt almost ritualistic, a preparation for what the entirety of the notebooks would reveal. After breakfast, he rang his aunt and asked her if she knew where his father had kept his legal documents. She told him that everything she had found that looked official she had put in the left-hand drawer of the sideboard in the sitting room. Jack looked in there and found every single item the solicitor had asked for; it seemed like a good omen. He put it all into a large brown envelope, which he sealed and addressed, then he curled up on the settee and began to work his way chronologically through his father’s stories.
By lunchtime he had read sixteen of them, and each time he came to THE END by Terence Stone, Jack found his perception of his father had changed, had evolved, a little more. He began to think of his father’s soul as a multifaceted jewel concealed by many doors. One story was the combination to a single door. At the end of each story the tumblers fell into place and that door swung open, revealing one more facet of the jewel.
Jack found that having his father’s soul unveiled before him piece by piece was an experience both rewarding and traumatic. He felt exhilarated, enlightened, saddened, betrayed, exhausted. For lunch he ate cheese sandwiches and fruit, still reading. He would have liked to have remained in the house, reading his father’s stories until he was finished, but the intensity of his emotions were becoming too much. He decided it would be a good idea to take a break, get away completely, give his mind time to assimilate the information. When he stepped out of the house the sun pierced his eyes and sparked the dull threat of a headache into life behind his temples. Squinting, Jack crossed to his car and got in. He put on his sunglasses, hoping to dampen the pain, and headed out of town.
He posted the letter to his father’s solicitor, and then, using his Skoob as a guide, toured around some of the villages and small towns in the vicinity, hunting for secondhand bookshops. He often did this when his work was going badly and he never failed to find it therapeutic. Jack covered perhaps fifty or sixty miles, though he was never more than twenty miles from Beckford. The countryside was spectacular, the villages picturesque. Of the eleven bookshops he discovered, three had succumbed to half-day closing, four specialised only in antiquarian books, and one had been converted into a delicatessen. However, the remaining three were gems: by the time he headed back to Beckford, Jack was the owner of fourteen “new” books, among them a John D. MacDonald novel and a Charles Beaumont anthology, both of which he’d been looking for for ages.
He arrived back in Beckford just before five, and decided to call in at Taylor’s for some provisions. Though he had vague plans to eat out tonight, he nevertheless needed a few bits and pieces—milk, matches, mineral water. In truth, he had had ample opportunity to buy these things already today, but he wanted t
o get them from Taylor’s. He supposed what he really wanted was to see if the place had changed at all. Jack hadn’t thought of Taylor’s in years, had forgotten about it until yesterday when he had driven past it on his way back from the undertaker’s. From the outside the place looked exactly the same. It had a blue, white and gold handpainted sign, which for some reason always reminded Jack of the corner shops in World War Two dramas.
Taylor’s, however, was no mere corner shop—it was an all-purpose store, which he was delighted to see had survived the emergence of supermarkets, hypermarkets and shopping complexes. Jack had sometimes stopped for sweets here on his way home from school (when his aunt gave him the money for them, that was), and now and again, when he was really plush, he’d bought magazines and the odd paperback from the revolving book display.
Jack smiled at the memory. The contraption had been so ramshackle that if you pushed it round too fast it squealed like an injured mouse, and shed its books as a tree sheds autumn leaves. There was nothing, as far as Jack was concerned, that Taylor’s didn’t sell. The tightly packed shelves of the long, low, dingy room held everything from bicycle clips to baking powder, sherbet to shampoo.
When he pushed open the door he was delighted to hear the familiar ting-a-ling of the bell. He looked up. It even looked like the same bell, old and tarnished but still doing its job. The place smelled the same, too—a warm, unique mix of shoe polish and fresh bread and strawberries and a million other things. At the end of the room, standing behind a long counter, was a rosy-faced woman in her thirties wearing a floral apron. Jack smiled at her and she returned his silent greeting with a nod. He supposed it had been too much to hope that Mr. and Mrs. Taylor would still be running the shop. They had been old when Jack was a child; if they were still alive, they must be ancient now.
Though he knew what he wanted, he took his time, browsing amongst the shelves and racks and displays. The place really hadn’t changed all that much, though obviously some things were different. Taylor’s now sold CDs and DVDs, plastic Star Wars figures, squeaky dog-chews that were busts of Tony Blair and George Bush, Bart Simpson lunch boxes and computer games. One thing that did disappoint Jack was that the old revolving book display had been replaced with a newer, more streamlined model that neither creaked nor shuddered. As he slowly turned the display, lifting out the odd paperback and reading the blurb on the back cover, he heard the ting-a-ling of the doorbell behind him.
He glanced around casually, and then straightened, suddenly tense. Patty Bates, wearing a baggy tracksuit top and the same jeans he’d had on in the pub on Monday night, turned to close the door behind him. Jack turned back to the book display. If he ignored Bates, the guy probably wouldn’t even notice him. He heard heavy footsteps behind him, the slightly laboured breathing of someone who was rapidly running to seed. A voice said almost directly into his ear, “You won’t find any of yours on there.”
Jack turned to face Bates, forcing a smile onto his face. “I’m sorry?” he said, pretending not to recognise the bully (ex-bully?).
Bates snorted a disdainful laugh. “You will be, pal.”
Jack’s smile faded, but he refused to be intimidated. He looked directly into Bates’ stone-grey eyes, and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
Bates leaned closer, and now Jack could smell the stale tobacco on his breath. “You’ll find out,” he said.
Jack shrugged, tried to look casual, even half-turned back to the book display as though dismissing Bates. “I really don’t know what you’re on about,” he said.
The publican grabbed Jack’s arm just above the elbow and yanked him back. “Don’t pretend you don’t fucking know me. I saw you in my pub the other night, chatting up my daughter. I don’t want to see you in there ever again. Do you understand?”
Anger and fear fought for supremacy in Jack’s mind. At the moment it was about fifty-fifty, but Jack felt as though the anger was slowly gaining the upper hand, and he was both glad of it and alarmed by it.
“Don’t worry,” he snapped back. “The beer was shit anyway.” He yanked his arm out of Bates’ grip. “Now get your fucking hands off me!”
Bates looked momentarily surprised by Jack’s defiance, then he laughed again, harsh and throaty. Jack felt Bates’ spittle fleck his cheek.
“You made a big mistake coming back here, pal,” said Bates. “A fucking big mistake.”
“Really?” said Jack, trying to sound bored.
“Yeah, really,” snarled Bates. “You’re gonna fucking regret it.”
Jack felt an urge to laugh scornfully, or to punch Bates right in the centre of his stupid ugly face, and yet he also wanted to be out of this, to get some fresh air to calm his churning stomach.
“Oh grow up,” he said, trying to instill as much contempt as he could into his voice.
Jack saw the violence swirling in Bates’ eyes, barely suppressed. Would the bully start something here? Maybe back when they were boys he would have—or he would at least have waited outside and beaten Jack up in the street—but now he wasn’t so sure. Now there were other things to consider—how would the brewery react to one of their landlords brawling in public, for instance?
Bates took a step back. He looked like a rottweiler, frustrated by the order not to attack. If he had been a rottweiler, he would have been snarling now, showing his teeth. He raised a stubby finger and pointed it at Jack’s face, almost jabbing his nose. “Your days are numbered, pal. I’m coming for you.”
“Are you really?” said Jack airily. “Or will you be hiding behind your little army of thugs again? Keeping out of the way?”
That comment got to Patty. Jack saw his face flush, a wave of crimson starting below his ears, sweeping across his cheeks and forehead. Jack swallowed with an effort; his mouth was very dry. Any moment he expected Bates to lash out at him. He felt nervous, almost flighty, with the expectation of it. And yet the outrage was still there, a voice inside him screaming: How dare this . . . this nobody threaten me!
Jack wanted to belittle Bates, to tear him apart with rapier wit, show him how pathetic he was being. But the sad reality was that a mere verbal assault would be lost on someone like Patty. Jack did not consider himself brave. Violence appalled him, the prospect of it being inflicted upon his own body even more so. And yet he refused to be pushed around by someone with the intellectual capacity of a plastic bucket.
These thoughts raced through his head in an instant, adrenaline-charged. Patty was saying, “Don’t you fucking worry, pal. When it comes down to it, it’ll just be you and me.”
Jack wanted to ask why, what was the point, what was it that made Patty hate him, or anyone, for no reason? But he knew there was no answer, or none that he wanted to hear from Bates, anyway. Smiling tightly, he said, “Lovely, I’ll look forward to it. And now if you’ll excuse me . . .” He squeezed quickly out of the gap between Bates and the book display and walked rapidly towards the open-fronted cooler that held milk, mineral water and various soft drinks.
If Patty follows me now, he thought, bending to lift a two pint carton of milk, I’ll turn and smash this right into his face. But Patty did not follow him. Jack heard the bully’s heavy footsteps approaching the door. Before leaving, Bates threw a parting shot: “You’re a dead man, Stone.”
Keeping his back turned, Jack waved and said, “So nice to see you again, too. Just like old times.”
It was only when he heard the door of the shop slam behind Bates that Jack realised how rigidly he’d been holding himself. The instant he allowed himself to relax, his legs began to tremble and he felt a sudden urge to go to the toilet. He smiled at the woman behind the counter who was totting up his purchases on the till. “I love Beckford,” he told her. “Such friendly people.”
Despite his attempt to put it from his mind, Jack’s encounter with Patty left a nasty taste in his mouth, and he decided to redress the balance by calling on his aunt before heading back to the house. It was just after six when he arriv
ed. She was watching the news whilst eating her evening meal from a tray on her lap. She was pleased to see him, but said she wished he’d given her notice. She could have bought another piece of fish and made tea for both of them.
“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m not hungry yet. I’ll get something later.”
“Are you sure? I can do you some nice bacon and eggs. It won’t take a minute.”
“No,” said Jack firmly. “You sit down. I only popped round to say hello on my way back.”
She sat down and began eating again, taking small delicate mouthfuls like a bird. The smell of cheese sauce turned Jack’s stomach. He was annoyed that a no-hoper like Bates could make him feel like this, but it wasn’t just Bates per se. It was pointless hostility, violence for its own sake, that dismayed him. He smiled at his aunt, trying to shake the feeling. Using her remote control, she turned the volume down on the TV. “So what have you been doing today?” she asked.
He felt an instinctive reluctance to share both the discovery of his father’s notebooks and his encounter in Taylor’s. He told her about his afternoon exploring secondhand bookshops and immediately she raised her fork in the air. “That reminds me, I’ve got some books for you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, they’re in the wardrobe in my bedroom in a cardboard box. I’ll go and get them.”
“No, no, you stay there,” he said. “I’ll get them.” He did so. The box had once contained Persil washing powder. It was sealed with a thick brown strip of packing tape.
“I’ve been meaning to mention it since you got here,” Georgina said. “They’ve been up there for years. Your father brought them round one day and asked if I’d keep them for you.”
Jack’s stomach began churning again, but this time with anticipation as he scratched up an edge of the tape with his fingernail and peeled it back. He had a good idea what these books would be. The television showed a building on fire, the night sky above it brown as sludge. Jack tried to compose his face for his aunt’s benefit, but couldn’t prevent himself from murmuring, “Wow,” when he folded back the flaps of cardboard that comprised the lid of the box.