We were too tired to play snakes and ladders; Dad just warmed up a pizza and we sat in the bare front room and ate off our laps. I said I was knackered. Dad said it was a break from dragging wood through a forest. I asked how the sculpture was going and when we could see it.
‘Shortly,’ he said. ‘Nearly there.’
With my dad, that could mean tomorrow or next Christmas. You never could tell. My heart spun when I saw him bring in a whisky bottle and pour himself a measure, but he told me it was just a small drink, just to relax, that we had another busy day tomorrow. And I checked the bottle before we went to bed and it looked like just one or two had been poured.
The next day followed a similar pattern but Dad finished sanding the floors and started helping me with the painting. We had a brief break for lunch, ate more pizza in the evening and then carried on working. Dad even managed to varnish some of the floors downstairs and got started with some of the smaller jobs. He replaced the missing wood in the banister and had a go at making the plugs safer. I didn’t know if they would pass any tests, but at least you didn’t worry about pulling the socket out from the wall when you unplugged the kettle any more.
Dad had bought throws and got more light bulbs and light shades and a couple of lamps and some picture frames. It was almost midnight when all the painting had been finished and when he started screwing in the light bulbs and fitting light shades. I was collapsed on the settee, my eyes flickering, my legs jerking out in sleep spasms. I stretched myself awake and said it was pity we didn’t have anything to go in the frames. Dad looked at me like I was simple and told me that paintings were one of the few things we had loads of. I managed to stay awake a few minutes longer but by the time he started to bang nails into walls I was gone and sleep was swallowing me. I dragged myself up to my brand new bedroom and climbed into bed without taking my paint-splattered clothes off. I fell asleep in a second, despite the banging, clattering and occasional swearing from downstairs.
White walls and red throws
The next morning my body ached and groaned at every tense and twitch. Joints were rusty hinges, muscles as heavy as pistons. Standing up hurt, sitting down hurt, even cleaning my teeth hurt and I grumbled as I pulled on my uniform. I’d moaned the day before about having to go to school when there was still stuff that needed doing to the house but Dad made the point that I could hardly be seen at home, skiving, by the Social Services Family Placement Team.
I walked down the stairs that morning into a new house. I’d been too tired the night before to see what we’d achieved in the previous forty-eight hours. And judging by the further progress made, Dad must have continued long after I went to bed. I found him asleep on the settee, hugging himself, mouth wide open and the warm smell of sleeping man fugging up the room. I didn’t wake him; I wanted to enjoy our new home alone for a few minutes.
The sun threw itself through the windows and onto our work. The snowball-white walls contrasted with the crimson-red light shades and the matching throws on the settee and chairs. I couldn’t help thinking that Dad had chosen well, that his eye for detail had been put to good use. My eyes were drawn to the floor, to the smooth brown surface. No longer grey and rough, no nails in sight. In each room hung a couple of my paintings. In the lounge were two paintings of the stones at the top of the fell. In the hallway he’d hung two paintings of a derelict barn. I’d painted them on different days. One was done on a crisp, clear day like today. The other was painted on an early-winter evening with a Lucozade-orange sky hovering above the dark, crumbling barn.
Dad had woken and padded his way into the hallway. Despite his moaning about how quickly the damp would come through, I could tell he was pleased with the place. Pleased with how it had turned out. And for the first time since we’d moved to Duerdale, for the first time in months, I was somewhere I didn’t want to leave. I was sad to climb into the car and go to school and sit in scruffy classrooms in itchy trousers for hours. I was nervous throughout the day. I was worried that when I opened our front door at the end of the afternoon it would have turned back into the dirty old house it had been for the last thirty years.
But when the bus dropped me off at the end of our lane I could see lights burning in rooms that had never had light bulbs before. And when I got through the door I saw plants in pots in corners of the hallway. There was even a doormat inside the front door with a picture of a cat in a hammock and ‘Home, Sweet Home’ across the bottom. I thought that might be too much. He’d varnished doors and fixed dodgy handles. All the washing-up had been done and put away. The place was immaculate. I found him in the lounge, collapsed on the settee, messing up a throw. When he saw me walk in the room he said, ‘Hello, Luke, guess what?’ I lowered myself carefully into one of the chairs and said, ‘What?’
‘The bastards have just rung. They’re not coming till next week now.’ He laughed like a lunatic, shouted ‘Jesus Christ!’ at the ceiling and told me to put the kettle on.
Bring the camera
The horse was finished. Finally. Dad had been working on it whenever he got the chance. When all the pieces were in the clearing, he’d assembled it, repainted it, and made all the adjustments he always made. Slowly inching the piece over the finish line, working until he was happy with every view from every angle. It was a Saturday morning when we all went to see it in its new home. This time when Dad pushed through the green iron gate and started weaving between the trees, he didn’t need a map or notes. He knew the route well; he could probably do it on a moonless night. And maybe me and Jon could have found the way too. There were clues now every few yards – footprints and broken twigs on the floor. Lines torn through the green mossy mounds where Dad had given up carrying a limb and decided he would have to drag it instead. A footpath had started to emerge between the trees.
We moved faster than last time and nobody needed to stop and rest. Dad checked a few times to see that we were keeping up OK, and we were, and it felt like we made it to the clearing in about half the time it took on the previous visit.
Me and Jon chatted as we walked, saying we were sure we recognised the strange-shaped tree that must have been shocked into position by lightning, or we didn’t remember that stream running away to the left. But as we got closer to the clearing, we fell quiet and I was aware of our feet cracking twigs and our legs swishing through ferns, the pulling of a zip and the clearing of a throat. Every noise amplified in the silence.
It was a frosty morning and Dad must have been pleased when he pulled back his curtains to see white on the ground and the winter sun filtering through. We were the first people out and about and even the grim streets of Duerdale sparkled brightly as we drove through the silent early-morning town. In the forest our feet crunched and broke into the crispy ground and our breath blew cold smoke into the leaves as we pushed our way through the trees. Just as we were about to arrive Dad stopped and made us change direction. He walked us round to the right and up a steep slope so when we stopped and turned we were walking downhill towards the carving. He said it looked better approaching from this angle. The trees were clustered tightly here and as we trod forward, carefully stepping over roots, I got my first glimpse: a patch of white, leaping through the branches. Just for a second. And then gone. A few seconds later Jon got his first sighting and he said loudly, ‘There! I saw it … just then …’ But it disappeared as quickly for him as it had done for me. For a minute or two we were tricked and teased by further glimpses. A glance of a flank. A snapshot of a leg. Then Dad pushed past the final row of trees and stood to one side and we stepped out right behind him.
We walked out to see the horse from the side. The first time we saw him in Brungerley Forest he was a silhouette. His front legs kicking high. White against green. It was early enough for patches of mist to be lingering on the floor of the clearing and Dad’s horse sparkled hard with frost. It looked better than any painting in any gallery I’d seen.
Dad had brought his old camera and took lots of pictures. Captur
ing it, he said, before it got weather-torn and tired. And then he made me and Jon stand in frame and took photos of us patting and stroking the horse. And then one of us just stood by it, looking back at him with stupid grins on our faces.
Portakabin calm
The day of Dad’s big interview with Social Services we didn’t go to school. We went to Jon’s Portakabin. I didn’t even know it existed. Neither of us planned it, but when we met outside school it felt impossible to walk though the gates and across the yard and into registration. We didn’t want to get called sheepshaggers and sit in lessons with annoyed teachers and stupid kids all day. So we legged it. We ended up at the rec, sitting on the swings, surrounded by greasy fast-food paper stuck in the fences, shivering in the wind. The clouds sat on top of each other at the foot of the valley, rain was inevitable, and we had nowhere to go.
They’d set the date for the interview the day after they came to inspect the house. That had gone fine; lots of nodding. They’d seemed more interested in the view of Duerdale and the toys in his workroom, Dad said. Dad had been told that no individual step of the process carried more weight, that the final decision would be made taking all aspects of his application into consideration. But he didn’t believe them. He said this was the big test. But he was ready. He’d done his research. He’d read all the booklets and he’d been on the internet. He’d been on the forums and he’d emailed people who’d been through the same process. He knew what questions to expect and he’d prepared answers. He’d even taken his grey Marks-and-Sparks suit out of the cupboard and hung it on the washing line to air. He meant business.
Dad’s interview wasn’t until four in the afternoon so we had six hours to wait. Six hours of leisure time taunting us, on a winter’s day in Duerdale. We should have gone to school. I swung limply on my swing. Jon didn’t bother to move at all. He sat still, feet on the ground, hands holding the chains, staring across the rec. After a few minutes of cold silence he stood up grabbed his bag and told me to follow him and we went to his Portakabin.
It was hidden by low-hanging trees and years of untamed undergrowth and nestled on the lip of one of Tunnel Cement’s abandoned quarries. You could see the quarries from up on our fell. They spread out to the left of Duerdale, taking up almost as much space as the town itself. On the edge of the quarries are the two tall chimneys that tower over the town. The chimneys pump out smoke constantly. Two giant, eternal cigarettes. If the wind is blowing in a certain direction, you wake in the morning to find that cars and windows in town are covered with a thin layer of white powder, like the police have been and dusted for fingerprints in the night.
Jon’s Portakabin was long forgotten and unloved until he got his hands on it. He told me there was a key still in the door when he found it, and he left it there the first couple of times he visited. But when he was sure he was the only person who used the place, he pocketed it.
It took about ten minutes to walk to the site from the rec, to the edge of town and then we cross-countried through a few fields. As we drew close I could see the high perimeter fence, topped off with a rusting loop of barbed wire. It looked impenetrable. ‘Watch this,’ Jon said, and I looked at his slight frame and back at the tall fence and the rusting wire and was prepared to be amazed. It wasn’t that amazing. He walked up to the fence, found his spot and pushed. He ended up on the other side in a second, grinning back at me. I got close and I could see the tiny tears where the fence had been cut. I was about to push my way through when I noticed a rusty yellow sign on a tree behind Jon. Big black letters informed that GUARD DOGS PATROL. Jon followed my eyes to the sign and said that in two years he’d never seen or heard a dog. I squeezed through the fence, quickly inspected the tear to my trousers and the scratch to my leg, and followed a fast-disappearing Jon through the trees.
I stayed close to Jon as he pushed and pulled himself through bushes and bramble. We scrambled through one last thicket and were there, facing the squat, grey, ugly cabin. Jon fished for the key in his pocket and pushed it into the lock. He turned the key and at the same time gently lifted the door upwards. It swung open smoothly and I followed him inside.
It was brilliant. He had bookshelves, a table and two chairs. A rug. Spotless and tidy. No clutter anywhere. He saw my expression and grinned. ‘Some of this stuff was here already but I’ve added to it. I put the shelves up. The table and chairs were left by the workmen.’
I sat down and said, ‘It’s amazing.’
And Jon nodded. Not boasting, just agreeing.
‘I used to come here all the time,’ he said, ‘before I started coming to yours.’
I went across to the bookshelves and pulled out The RSPB Book of Birds. It had the Dewey number still on the spine but when I opened it I saw the title page had been ripped out and WITHDRAWN had been stamped across the contents page.
‘They sell them for almost nothing when they get a bit scruffy,’ Jon said. ‘They aren’t allowed to keep them no matter how popular they are.’
I put the book back on the shelf and wandered around, getting a feel for the place, enjoying being in this secret world. Then I sat back down and we both stretched our legs out, like old men in front of a fire.
‘This is brilliant,’ I said.
The clouds that had been at the foot of the valley when we set off had caught us up and the sky turned black and the inside of the cabin darkened. There was a loud crack of thunder that echoed like a bomb in the surrounding quarries. The rain hit the Portakabin a few seconds later, drumming hard and fast onto the roof and streaming down the windows in rivulets. It didn’t matter. We could wait there until it passed. It felt like we could wait there for ever. We sat in safe, dry silence and let the storm explode all around us.
Silent and grey
They don’t tell you straight away. They write up a report and then it goes to a panel. Like Dad said, safety in numbers. He said the interview went as well as could be expected but that we should all wait and see and nobody should get their hopes up. I was disappointed, Jon even more so, although he tried not to show it and he battled on as valiantly as usual. I think we both thought that it would be a sealed deal. That Dad would return with a takeaway from town and we would celebrate. But more waiting was needed and we were learning to add patience onto patience.
And of course Dad had to attend the interview with the police. We hadn’t spoken about it since the night driving back from the hospital and I was worried it might send him grabbing for the whisky again. Leave him brooding in dark rooms. But there hadn’t been any of that yet. There was no suit this time and I think he purposefully chose his scruffiest clothes before dropping me off at school and driving back to our old town and the police station.
I didn’t know what I would come home to that day and I was irritated by everyone and everything at school. The stupid kids seemed even stupider than usual and the sarky teachers even more snide. I snapped and snarled my way through the day and didn’t make friends with anyone. Lesson after lesson dragged by and it all seemed pointless and a waste of everyone’s time. The tension finally poured away when I got home to find him in his workroom, working away, as if nothing upsetting had been discussed that day.
He told me to come in when I poked my head around the door and we sat down by his workbench and he told me what’d happened. The police asked questions about Mum, her medication and her state of mind at the time of the crash. Dad said that he answered the questions as honestly as possible and it was all over in a few minutes. But after he’d answered the last question and before they ushered him out of the interview room he said that he made sure he told them that it wasn’t suicide. He told them that he knew his wife and on April the 11th at 4.27 p.m. it was not her intention to kill herself. He told them that it was a road accident and nothing else. I asked if he thought they believed him and he said he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell, but it didn’t really matter what they thought. They just presented the information to the coroner who looked at all the facts and ruled on
the cause of death. We had to wait; the inquiry and the ruling would be held two weeks on Thursday and we would find out then whether it would be ruled as suicide, accident or left as an open verdict.
‘Just prepare yourself, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Prepare yourself for whatever they might decide.’
That night, over snakes and ladders, I asked if he would write me a letter to get me out of school on the Thursday and he nodded that he would. We wouldn’t be going to the inquest though, he said. We had a job somewhere else.
Idiot wind
It was half-term and we were in limbo. Vague time. Annoying days when even getting up seemed a waste of time, cleaning your teeth too much of an effort and doing just about anything else felt impossible. I was waiting; we were waiting for decisions to be made. Whether my mum drove her car into the front of a lorry on purpose or not was going to be decided by a group of people I’d never meet in a room I would never see. Dad’s suitability to look after Jon was also being considered and although we knew Mr McGrath was involved, it still felt like we were waiting for a verdict from way up on high. All things out of our control.
All week I’d felt stuffy somehow. All my clothes felt too tight and I was hot and scratchy. It was like someone had rubbed dust into my eyes and pinned a duvet to my back and I shuffled round the house under the extra weight like an irritable old man. I tried not to be grumpy with Dad and Jon but I wasn’t doing too good a job of it. And of course they had their own reasons to be grumpy and tense themselves. But I wasn’t seeing too much of Jon anyway. He was way across the other side of town at the Theobalds’ and spent most of his free time visiting his grandparents. They’d both been moved to Greenside Home for the Elderly. Jon said that one day he went to visit and couldn’t find his granddad and the place was almost empty. He nearly fell over when a carer said it was always like this on a Tuesday morning: Tuesday was market day and a minibus turned up and took all those willing and able down to Duerdale market for an hour. Jon couldn’t believe that his granddad had got on the bus and was currently browsing cheese and meat stalls. He said he was sure his granddad hadn’t been into town for more than five years.
Luke and Jon Page 13