by Mark Morris
Rupert Bear, Korky the Cat, Jennings, William, The Famous Five. All his childhood was here, precious reminders of a happiness that was both desperate and total, contained among yellowing dog-eared pages, between covers whose colours were still bright despite the passage of time.
As Jack lifted out each book and hefted it in his hand, his head filled with memories, as though messages were flowing from the books themselves. Here was Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes; he’d read most of this sitting on a deckchair in his aunt’s garden, wafting at wasps and sipping lemonade. And here was the Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, read one night in bed with a torch under the covers when snow was lying thick on the ground. And look here: The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis; his father had threatened to throw this on the fire once when Jack had accidentally left it on the dining table. And there were so many more, all of them old, dear friends. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Salem’s Lot, Charlotte’s Web, Five Children and It, The Secret Seven . . . If his aunt had not been here, Jack might well have kissed some of the covers of these books, remembering how they had saved him from despair.
And near the bottom of the box, after removing a copy of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Jack glimpsed a portion of the cover of a larger book that made his heart leap with excitement. He could see the blue of a pond, the green of a lily pad with a frog crouched on it. He removed the scattering of books that concealed this larger one, and now he saw the title: The Bumper Book of Fairy Tales.
“Oh, wow,” he breathed and lifted the book out. It was as hefty as he remembered it; picking it up as a small child had made his biceps ache. The back cover illustration was identical to the front. There was a large dent in the back of the book, completely mashing the princess’ head. Jack touched the dent, knowing it was the mark his father had made with the golf club. He examined the book, half-fearing it would be smeared with long-dried blood. It wasn’t, of course. He expelled a long slow breath and looked at his aunt. “This is amazing,” he said. “I thought my dad had thrown all these away.”
Georgina shook her head and smiled. “You used to love reading when you were younger, didn’t you?”
“Still do,” said Jack.
“That’s how I remember you, curled up somewhere with a book in your hands.”
The fairy tale book creaked when Jack opened it, like a door into a magical land that hadn’t been used for centuries. He began to turn the pages, remembering their layouts so immediately that it felt he was preempting them. The dragon with the gaping mouth dribbling smoke; the trees with gnarled human features; the troll skulking under the bridge, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting merchant; the witch brandishing the poisoned apple as bats swooped around her head.
By the time Jack arrived at the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, he felt as if his memories were so strong that they were reproducing themselves in print. The title was entwined with green vines just as he remembered it, the cow was a comically lugubrious animal with a swaying udder and shoulder blades so prominent they resembled stubs of wings. Here was Jack exchanging the cow for a handful of multicoloured beans, and here was Jack’s mother tossing the beans angrily out of the window. Over the page was a picture of the beanstalk disappearing into the clouds with Jack and his mother gazing up at it in awe, and in the next illustration Jack was nearing the summit of the beanstalk, where a craggy mountain peaked by a huge black castle rose impossibly from a swathe of thick grey mist.
Jack paused here, because he knew that on the next page was the ogre. He remembered his recent dream—he had turned the page and instead of the illustration he’d been expecting was an empty black rectangle. But that was before; everything was different now. His father no longer was the ogre. He was (had been) simply an anguished old man, poisoned by grief, unable to find a way to draw the humanity out of himself until it was too late. Jack cleared his throat. On the TV a weather girl was showing him large cartoon suns on a map of Britain. Jack twitched his aunt a smile and flipped over the page.
And there was the ogre, ugly and snarling, crouched over his coins.
Jack stared at the illustration for a few moments, breath held as if afraid it might pull itself to life from the page, break its boundaries. But the power of the picture seemed actually to fade as he gazed at it, until it was no longer threatening, impotent as make-believe.
Before he could stop himself, he smiled and said, “It’s okay.”
“What is?” asked Georgina.
He looked up, and felt himself blushing. “Oh . . . er . . . nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s just something that . . . no, it’s okay. It’s too complicated to explain.”
He hoped she wouldn’t press the matter. Explaining what the ogre had meant to him would diminish its potency, thus undermining his fear. And besides, that fear no longer seemed appropriate. To deflect further questions he skimmed through the rest of the book until he reached the story of Dick Whittington and His Cat. “This is one of the reasons I went to London,” he said.
His aunt looked puzzled. “This story?”
“This illustration,” he said, tapping his finger on the page. “Streets paved with gold and all that.”
Georgina shook her head. “You didn’t really think it was like that, did you?”
“Well, it was, wasn’t it?” Jack retorted. “For me at least. Going to London was the best decision I ever made.”
She made no comment, merely set her face and drew back her shoulders. Jack knew she was hurt. Whenever he mentioned London, and how happy he was there, she seemed to take it as a personal snub. Most of it, of course, was loneliness. If she wasn’t so proud, he knew she would be begging him to stay. Lord knows, he owed her more than he could ever repay.
Seeing her sitting there, lips pursed, knobbly hands folded primly in her lap, Jack felt a fierce, protective love. He crossed to her chair and hugged her before she realised what he was doing. She stiffened, then relaxed. “What was that for?” she asked when he broke the embrace.
“Nothing,” Jack said. “Everything. Can’t I hug my favourite aunt without having to have a reason?”
“Get on with you, you daft bugger,” she said. But Jack could see that she was touched.
He put the books into the box, stayed for a little while longer and then left. He wondered whether to get some food from the Top Wok, but the same gang of kids as before were hanging around outside it so he drove on. Ten miles outside Beckford was a village called Surley, which Jack hoped did not describe the nature of the inhabitants. He found an Italian restaurant called Da Mario’s, where he ate excellent garlic bread and disappointingly tasteless lasagna. The place was bright and the young staff unnecessarily noisy, as if in the belief it would mask the mediocrity of the food. A couple sat at the next table with three uncontrollable children. He spent the meal devising inventive ways of silencing them for good.
Darkness was seeping from the horizon, blurring the lines of dry-stone walls, when he arrived back at the house. He parked the car, eager to get inside and reacquaint himself with his father’s stories. Before he did that, though, he wanted to ring Gail and fill up the bookshelves in his bedroom. When he opened the door of the car and stepped out onto Daisy Lane, he was suddenly overcome by a sense of well-being. The encounter with Bates seemed distant now, insignificant. Jack grinned into the fading sun, drew a deep breath into his lungs, and simply stood there, savouring the moment. He had come here and done what he’d thought would be impossible. He had exorcised his ghosts, reconciled himself with his father—or at least with his own memories of him. Tomorrow he could head back to London, content in the knowledge that his life would become all the happier for having returned to Beckford.
As he stood there another idea jolted him, as if he hadn’t been in the position to consider it until now: when he got back to London, when he saw Gail, the first thing he would do would be to ask her to marry him.
He laughed out loud at the sheer wonder of the idea and punched the air with both
hands. “Yes!” he shouted. “Yes!” His voice bounced away over the darkening landscape, conveying his glee to the world.
He carried his books into the house and arranged them lovingly on his bookcase. When he had done, he ran his hands over the smooth spines, his fingers jolting over the ridges between them. This was a ritual he could have performed only by himself. Gail loved books too, but even she would have regarded his actions as somewhat fetishistic. Jack did not know if he could have conveyed how much having all these books back on this bookcase meant to him. It had a significance beyond words. Even the arrangement of the brightly coloured spines seemed to form a pattern that was almost mystical.
He felt eager as he dialed Gail’s number, anxious to share his good mood. Her phone rang four times . . . five. Jack had resigned himself to the fact that she was not there, was waiting for her answering machine to cut in, or for the phone to go on ringing as it had before, when there was a click and she said, “Hello?”
“Hi, Gail, it’s me!” he cried gleefully into the receiver.
“Jack, hi!” Then abruptly her voice adopted a note of concern. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, course. Why do you ask?”
“Well, with everything that’s been happening to you . . .”
“Oh, that.” He waved a hand in the air, as though batting away a fly. “No, that’s all under control now.”
“Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better? I’ve been worried about you, Jack.”
He thought of Patty Bates again. Should he tell her about this afternoon? Deciding against it, he said, “No, I’m fine, Gail, really. In fact, I’m better than fine. I’m happy. Coming back here has been really good for me, like you said it would be. I think I’ve finally laid my ghosts.”
She was silent for a long moment, as though taken aback, then said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean my father doesn’t bother me anymore. I’ve found things out about him.”
“What things?”
“Last night,” Jack began, and told her everything, wanting her to share his elation. “It’s almost like he left his soul behind. I feel like I’m really beginning to get to know him, to understand him. I only wish we could have been friends when he was alive. In some ways it’s tragic, I suppose; such a waste.”
He heard his own voice cracking, and took a deep breath, cleared his throat, wanting to carry on, to explain and share the depth of his emotion.
A few moments later, he said, “I don’t know. I find it so hard to describe. But it’s like . . . like I’ve found myself at last.” He pulled a face into the receiver. “Do you know what I mean? I guess that sounds pretty corny, doesn’t it?”
“No,” said Gail, “it doesn’t sound corny. It sounds . . . it sounds great. I know how you felt about your father before. I’m delighted that it’s working out for you. I told you it would, didn’t I? Oh, I wish we could be together.”
“We will be,” Jack said. “This time tomorrow, with any luck.”
“I know.”
But she sounded so wistful that he asked, “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I’m going to come back?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“Oh . . . nothing. I’m just being silly. Ignore me.”
Jack sighed. “Gail,” he said firmly, knowing she had something on her mind.
“What?”
“Spit it out.”
“Spit what out?”
“Whatever’s sticking in your throat.”
She made a small sound, an ironic hmph. “You know me too well, Jack Stone.”
“True,” he said, refusing to be sidetracked.
She allowed a few more seconds of hissing silence to pass, and then said, “I just hope it is how you say it is, that’s all. I hope you’re not getting carried away with the situation.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well . . . you suddenly seem to have put on a pair of rose-tinted spectacles, forgotten all the bad stuff, the violence and all that. I hope you’re not going to come down to earth with a bump.”
He thought for a moment and then said, “No . . . no, I don’t think so. The violence was . . . was bad, there’s no denying that. It was a wrong move my father made, a terrible mistake, as was the drinking and all the rest of it. But I think he’s finally . . . apologising for all that, acknowledging it.”
“By writing stories?”
“They’re not just stories, Gail. They’re more than that. They’re a legacy. I’m sure he left them for me. He wanted me to find them.”
“How do you know?”
He felt suddenly exasperated. Why did she have to question what he knew to be right? “I know, that’s all. I just know. You haven’t been here, you don’t understand.” She remained silent. Jack pictured her face, furrowed with worry, and his anger eased a little.
“Look,” he said gently, “I know this all sounds a bit . . . I don’t know . . . strange, maybe even slightly crazy. But this . . . this experience, Gail, it’s a positive thing, and that can’t be bad, can it? I’ll still be the same person when I come back.”
“Only happier,” she said.
“That’s right. Only happier.”
She sighed, as if conceding defeat. “I love you, Jack.”
“And I love you, too. More than anything. I’ll see you tomorrow. And try not to worry.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Bye then.”
“Bye.”
“I love you, petal,” said Jack.
“We’ve done all this.”
“I know. We must be in a time warp. See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah, bye.”
Jack put the phone down, feeling a little deflated. He had wanted to convey how significant he found the discovery of his father’s notebooks, but sometimes the words were simply not there.
He considered calling Gail straight back, trying again, but what could he say to convince her that he hadn’t already said? Sighing, he tramped to the kitchen. He spent the next ten minutes commuting between kitchen and sitting room, making tea, building a fire.
He closed the curtains, turned on the lamps and put on the Ennio Morricone CD he’d been playing yesterday with the volume down low. The music was nothing more than a murmur in the room. Occasionally the fire spat as it collapsed into itself in slow motion. Jack looked across at his laptop and felt a pang of guilt. He really ought to do some work before he lost himself in his father’s thoughts, just a few hundred words to keep the wheels greased and moving. But the blue notebooks beckoned him. He’d been waiting all his life for their insight; they had to take priority. He poured himself a mug of tea and balanced it on the settee arm, then dragged the notebooks onto the cushion beside him. He opened the notebook to a story called Floating, which was dated 5/1/92 and almost immediately lost himself in its weave.
Only once, hours later, when an owl hooted outside, did Jack raise his head. Immediately, the warmth of the fire seemed to lay a hot film across his eyes, making them smart; a jabbing pain in his back made him realise how long his body had been locked in the same position. He groaned and stretched. His mouth tasted stale, his saliva thick as curd. The room around him seemed not quite there, like a faded painting or a movie vanishing in sunlight. Jack rolled his neck on his shoulders, wincing as his vertebrae crackled like paper. He switched off one of the lamps in the hope that it would ease his stinging eyes, then lay back on the settee, his feet dangling over the side, and continued reading.
Some time later he started awake. He turned his head slightly, stared at the brittle, blackened coldness of what had been the fire with complete incomprehension. What was he doing here? What time was it? What day was it, for God’s sake? Jack always hated the feeling of disorientation upon waking up in a strange place. He often thought this was what it must be like to be senile, stumb
ling around blindly in your own head, unable to connect with anything.
He was cold, though he only discovered that when he tried to rise. And then he began shivering, as if someone had opened the front door, allowing freezing air to come rushing into the house. His arm had somehow got stuck beneath him and was jittery with pins and needles. One of his father’s blue notebooks was standing on its end on the floor, the strip of paper used as a bookmark lying beside it. Jack’s thoughts were still scurrying around like the Keystone Kops, trying to arrange themselves into some semblance of order. He leaned over the side of the settee and picked up the book. Turning it over, he blinked at the scrawled handwriting, feeling that if he could focus on something his confusion would pass more quickly. When he heard the door to the sitting room open behind him a sensation of extreme cold, like a blanket of snow, seemed to sweep over the settee and spread across his back.
For several long moments he literally didn’t know what to do. He felt so bewildered, so out of it, that his brain seemed to stick, to refuse to make a decision. The door had opened slowly, as though the intruder were relishing the fact that he needn’t rush. A thought suddenly came to him, strong and clear: Patty Bates that afternoon, pointing a finger and saying, “When it comes down to it, it’ll just be you and me.” Jack slid forward off the settee and onto the floor, tucking in his head to make himself less of a target. Even as he rolled over, closer to the hearth, and reached out for the poker, he became aware that the light was beginning to dim in the room.
But it was not until his fingers closed around the poker that he realised that was impossible. The lamps did not have a dimmer switch; there was on and there was off, nothing in between. Jack finished rolling and jumped lithely to his feet, brandishing the poker, half-expecting to see Patty Bates standing there with a baseball bat. The sitting-room door was wide open, the hallway black, indistinct. But there was nobody there. Unless . . . unless he was crouching behind the settee.