Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  At the end of the day, having loaded his tools into the Toyota, he came to say goodbye to me, in the garden. The knuckles of his right hand were bloodied, but neither he nor I made any reference to the injury. ‘That’s it. I’m done,’ he announced, whisking his hands together. I thanked him for all his good work, and handed over the last of his money. ‘Another satisfied customer,’ he said. Aileen was in the kitchen and the window was open; she would have been able to hear our voices, but perhaps not every word. Shielding his eyes from the sun, Sam scrutinised the upper reaches of the apple tree. ‘Right,’ he said, as if passing comment on something he’d observed there, ‘what do we do now?’

  Taking his lead, I turned my attention to the tree and took a few steps towards it. Sam followed; his manner was perfectly casual. ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ I told him.

  ‘We need to sort this out,’ he said, in a sing-song lilt that signified that his patience was nearing its end.

  ‘We do,’ I agreed, as Aileen came out to join us.

  ‘We’ll talk tomorrow. Castle Cliffe Gardens,’ he stated. ‘Twelve o’clock.’

  Aileen was carrying a magazine, holding it to her chest like a shield as she walked towards us. She thanked him, effusively, as if he’d done us a generous favour. ‘I’ll recommend you to friends,’ she said. ‘If you need the publicity.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ said Sam.

  Indicating the damaged hand with a nod, Aileen told him that he should go indoors and clean it up. ‘Kind of you, Mrs Pattison,’ he said, ‘but I have to hit the road.’ He gave me – but not Aileen – the messy hand to shake, and in parting he said to me: ‘See you tomorrow, then.’

  So I had to improvise another lie when Aileen asked me what Sam had meant by that. He was going to be in town tomorrow, and I was calling in at North Street, so I’d said I’d buy him lunch, I told her. ‘That’s nice of you,’ she said, hooking a hand around my arm. He was an interesting young man, she commented, but she was glad we had the house to ourselves again.

  That night, as we were reading in bed, I noticed that the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers was slightly open. As I was closing the drawer I saw a patch of the carpet – a small patch, no larger than a credit card – where the nap was slightly flattened and very slightly paler than the surrounding carpet, as though a mark had been carefully erased, leaving not a stain but only the evidence of its removal. I opened the drawer – not out of suspicion that something was amiss, but simply to set it straight. It’s the drawer in which we keep our photographs, in two stacks of wallets. At first glance, everything was as it should be, but then I saw that one of the wallets had been inserted with its spine facing the opposite way from all the others in its pile. This was something that Aileen would never do.

  15

  I met Sam at midday, at Castle Cliffe. He was sitting on the bench in the angle of the old wall, in precisely the same posture as when I’d first caught sight of him in Russell Square Gardens – head resting on the top of the bench, face presented to the sky, arms outstretched, with a cigarette in one hand. The way he was sitting annoyed me. I watched him bring the cigarette smoothly to his lips and sip at it. With his eyes closed, he blew the smoke out slowly, looking like a bully who was rather pleased with himself. There was something swaggering about him, if it’s possible to swagger while sitting. This conversation, I had already decided, was going to be conclusive. I knew what I had to tell him, and I was not going to be deflected from telling him. Seeing him, I was made doubly determined.

  He discarded the cigarette and sat up. The day was warm, and there were several people sitting on the grass in the vicinity of the bench, mostly mothers and childminders with babies and toddlers, but straight in front of Sam a young woman was sunbathing, alone. Part of her face was hidden by strands of copper-coloured hair. She’d fallen asleep, and Sam was ogling her. I saw him shift on the bench, to give himself a clearer view of her cleavage, a substantial quantity of which was revealed by the neckline of her loose white vest, which she’d rolled up to give her belly the benefit of the sun. Sam leaned forward, elbows on knees, rubbing at his jaw and smiling, as if at the thought of what he might say to her when she woke up. He made no attempt whatever to disguise what he was doing – he was examining the girl so blatantly I could almost see cartoon-style tracks in the air, shooting from his eyes to her chest – and he didn’t desist as I came up to the bench, even though he must have detected my presence several seconds before I sat down.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, glancing at me, as you’d glance away from a gripping episode of your favourite television programme. ‘See her?’ he said, pointing clasped hands in the direction of the sleeping sunbather. ‘She’s the spitting image of a girl I saw once. Same hair. Same shape. Amazing.’ He’d been up in the watchtower in Armagh, he told me, with his psychotic birdwatching colleague, when this beautiful girl had appeared, riding a horse. For as long as she was within sight he’d kept his binoculars trained on her. ‘Love at first sight, it was. At a range of one hundred yards.’ Every day, after that, he’d gone up into the tower hoping he’d see her again, but she’d never reappeared. ‘But now,’ he said, shaking his head at the uncanniness of it, ‘there she is. It’s her. What are the odds on that? A girl in Armagh has a double in Guildford. Incredible, no?’

  ‘Indeed,’ I replied.

  He smiled at me as if to chide me for being envious of his extraordinary good fortune. ‘All OK at home?’ he asked. ‘Wall still standing? Roof not collapsed?’

  ‘Wall still standing, thank you,’ I said, and then – as he turned his face away from me – I asked him a question I’d thought I wasn’t going to ask: ‘What were you doing in our bedroom?’

  Staring at the sunbather again, he answered distractedly, as if he’d only half-heard the question: ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said: what were you doing in our bedroom? You had no business being in there.’

  He looked me in the eye for a moment, before turning back. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, unemphatically, as though in response to a multiple-choice questionnaire.

  ‘You know exactly what I’m talking about,’ I told him.

  His gaze was fixed on the sunbather. After a pause of fully five seconds, he repeated, calmly but slightly more slowly: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  I scrutinised the side of his face, compelling him to give me his attention. He did not move: his profile was an image of intense and solitary concentration. ‘You do,’ I continued. ‘You were in our bedroom. There’s a chest of drawers beside the door and you opened it. You were snooping. You looked through our photos.’

  With no change of expression he replied: ‘In that case you didn’t need to ask the question, did you? You’ve just answered it yourself.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘so you admit it. That’s something. Now—’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted, in a tone of strained patience. ‘I haven’t admitted anything. I said I didn’t know what you were talking about.’

  ‘Sam, you were in that room. I know you were.’

  Now he faced me. He regarded me placidly before speaking, and every word that he spoke was uttered distinctly yet softly; between sentences he paused, as though to allow me time to digest what he was saying. ‘Dominic,’ he said – this was the only time he ever addressed me by name – ‘I was not in that room. I have told you I was not in that room. I am sorry you don’t believe me. Now, I think we should change the subject. Otherwise I might start to get annoyed.’ He widened his eyes jokily and gave me a smile that was totally impersonal, before resuming his study of the young woman on the grass.

  He was lying, I knew. I was not surprised that he had lied initially, but I wished he hadn’t been so determined a liar, because I was finding it harder and harder to dismiss the notion that a huge lie was being perpetrated – that Sam, contrary to what I’d assumed from the start, had known all along that he was not my son, and that the Sam Williams on the birth certificate was
not the same person as the young man sitting beside me. Once again I was trying to put this idea aside, when Sam – with his eyes still trained on the cleavage – muttered: ‘Photos of what?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I replied.

  ‘You said there were photos. Photos of what?’

  ‘For God’s sake. You know perfectly well. You looked at them.’

  ‘Holiday snaps? Weddings? Family get-togethers? Intimate moments?’

  I was too angry – and too nervous of a full-blown confrontation – to answer.

  ‘Well,’ he said, as if giving voice to his thought processes rather than talking to me, ‘it would make sense.’ He took out a cigarette, lit it, and gave a young mother an appreciative check-over as she walked by. ‘I mean,’ he said, with a glance in the approximate direction of my head, ‘you haven’t exactly opened up, have you? I’ve made an effort, but you’ve just not been playing. I’ve made allowances, but nonetheless – I’ve not been getting any warmth off you. Know what I mean? You’ve given me the big clam treatment. I ask you: “Tell me about my grandparents.” And you say: “Piss off. None of your business.” In my situation, it’d make sense if I wanted to do a bit of research, wouldn’t it? Only natural.’

  ‘Snooping,’ I corrected him. ‘But you’ve admitted it. That’s progress.’

  ‘I’m not admitting anything,’ he responded. ‘All I’m saying is it wouldn’t be hard to explain. There’d be a good reason for it, in my situation.’

  ‘It’s inexcusable,’ I told him.

  He looked at me as if I’d made an observation that was utterly bizarre, then with a flicker of the eyebrows and a pursing of the lips he signified that I was entitled to my opinion but it was of no concern to him. Having taken a long drag, he examined the cigarette for a few moments, turning his hand this way and that, and then he examined my face, steadily, curiously. ‘Let me ask you something,’ he said. ‘If I’d been born a few years earlier, if it had just been a fling before you met Aileen and now suddenly you found out you had a kid, would you be carrying on like this? Or if I’d been someone not like me. If I’d turned out to be more of a suit and briefcase kind of guy – that would have been different, wouldn’t it? I think it would.’

  ‘I’m not carrying on like anything,’ I said.

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘If you were my son,’ I told him, ‘the situation would be quite different.’

  He seemed to let my reply fly past him. Squinting, he scrutinised my eyes – left then right then left then right – as if to verify that each was telling him the same thing. ‘I know what you want,’ he resumed. ‘What you want, more than anything, is for me to not exist.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You’d like me to be somewhere a very long way from where you are.’ This was said with a very slight hint of pathos – but it sounded to me more like the overture to a practical proposal.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I like you, but—’

  ‘Because I could,’ he continued. ‘I could go away. I’m not welcome. I can see that. You’ve made your feelings clear. You don’t want to know. But maybe that’ll change. Maybe if I’m not in your face so much, you’ll start to get used to the idea. If I put some distance between us, but we stayed in touch. How about that? I want you to acknowledge me, in the end. So if I got offside for a while, I’d still want contact. I’d be discreet, but I’d want contact,’ he said.

  ‘And what else would you want?’ I asked. The words seemed to speak themselves, like a bubble of gas rising to the surface of a tar-pool.

  For a few seconds Sam frowned at me, uncomprehending, then he jerked his head back as if the suddenly perceived affront were a physical blow. On the path, to his left, lay two cigarette butts. He scowled at them, by which I was to understand that what perplexed him now was why I had so traduced him. Gently he teased the butts together with the toe of a boot, then he placed a foot over them and slowly ground them into the tarmac.

  ‘Sam,’ I said, appeasingly, ‘there’s no need for you to go anywhere. We can have this resolved within the week.’

  He applied himself to grinding the shreds of paper and tobacco into finer particles. When that had been done to his satisfaction, he said: ‘And how would that be?’

  ‘We have a test done.’

  His eyes scanned the sky, as if a sound had come from there and he couldn’t locate its source. ‘Say again?’ he said.

  ‘We do a test. I’ve made enquiries. It’s a straightforward business. A swab from each of us, that’s all that’s required.

  Two minutes, in and out. We go to a clinic, have the swabs done, they’re sent off to a lab, and five days later we have the result. We’ll know exactly where we stand. There’s a basic test and there’s a court-approved test—’

  ‘What’s the fucking courts got to do with it?’ he growled.

  ‘It just means the highest standard of test. So there’s no doubt. It’s a bit more expensive. The basic test is about three hundred and the court-approved is four hundred, so there’s not much in it.’

  Sam had taken a fresh cigarette. ‘Fuck that,’ he muttered, out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘I’d pay for it, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ he parroted.

  I was watching him closely, gauging the likelihood of an outburst of temper, asking him tacitly to turn round and face me. He did not turn round, and there seemed little risk, imminently, of trouble. He took his time with the cigarette. His demeanour as he smoked was humiliated rather than angry: he might have been running in his mind a conversation with his boss, in which he’d been told he was going to be demoted and have his pay cut by half. Eventually, having finished the cigarette and mashed the butt into the remains of the others, he said, as morosely as any teenager: ‘Want me to do a lie-detector first? Might save you a few quid.’

  I told him that I wasn’t saying that he was lying. Pleased that I had managed to say it with sincerity, I repeated the assurance: ‘I know you’re not lying, Sam. I know you believe what you’re telling me,’ I said, though by now it was hard to accept that this could be so. At best, I thought, he might be wishing that he could still believe it.

  ‘Nice of you to say so,’ he muttered.

  I said nothing. I didn’t even look at him. I was prepared to wait until he was ready to say more. But it began to seem, as he lit yet another cigarette, that he might stay silent for the rest of the afternoon, so I said: ‘It’s what we have to do.’

  There was no response. He blew a long breath of smoke, and seemed to be counting the birds in the sky.

  ‘I can’t see any sense in delaying,’ I said, ‘so I suggest some time next week. Would next week be all right? If not, the week after would be fine for me. You say. Whenever is good for you.’

  I didn’t have the impression that he was weighing up his options: he had accepted that there was no alternative, it appeared. Nonetheless, it was with some relief that I heard him answer, so quietly that I wasn’t immediately sure what he’d said: ‘Suits me.’

  ‘Do you want to choose a day now?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he replied flatly.

  ‘In that case, I’ll give you a call tomorrow and we’ll make a date.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. Now his gaze had moved back to the sunbather, but there was no appetite in his eyes. He might have been looking at a stretch of unoccupied grass.

  ‘Look, Sam,’ I said, ‘if it’s positive, if it turns out that you’re my son, I’ll do the right thing. I’ll tell Aileen, of course. But more than that – I’ll see that you’re provided for. If you’re my son, I’ll make sure you’re OK.’ There was no response to this proposal – not even a twitch of an eye. The breeze in his ears was all that Sam seemed to be hearing. I had no reason to stay with him any longer, but I didn’t want the conversation to end with his ignoring me. So I asked him: ‘Do you have a lot of work lined up?’

  He gave me a wry smile and answered: ‘Am I staying in the area, you mean?
’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ he said. ‘I can get work whenever I want.’

  Taking this to mean that he didn’t have any work, I told him that I knew of someone who needed some paving done.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘give them my number. Thanks.’

  My suspicions had been dislodged by Sam’s apparent indifference at my mention of payment, and now they were carried away, for a time, as if a wave had come in and pulled them out to sea – but not far, not out of sight. He’d said ‘Thanks’ in the voice of someone bereaved, in response to words that were well-meant but inadequate. Suddenly it was not his potential for violence that was uppermost in my mind, nor the possibility that he was dangerously devious – the image of his filthy old caravan appeared to me, and I felt some concern for him. I asked him what he would do if the result of the test were negative.

  ‘It won’t be,’ he replied, with placid certainty.

  ‘But,’ I persisted, ‘what if it is? Are you prepared for that?’

  He squinted into the vacant middle distance, and now annoyance was seeping into his face. ‘Will I sod off and leave you alone – is that what you’re asking?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘I think it is. Can’t think of any other way of taking it,’ he said, with a slight increase in the pitch of hostility.

  ‘What I meant was: how will you take it?’ I told him. ‘If it turns out that I’m not your father, it’ll be a setback for you, I know that. Will you carry on looking for him?’

  ‘It is you,’ said Sam. ‘So it’s a pointless fucking question.’ He leaned his head back against the bench once more; he clamped a hand to his brow and the other hand over it; sighing, he stared wearily into the sky before looking at his watch and then at me, as if to ask if I could give him any good reason why he should continue to keep me company.