Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  The sunbather had been awake for a minute or two, and now was talking into her phone as she ransacked her bag. Sam stood up and shook my hand, looking at me directly for the first time since I’d raised the subject of the test. ‘You needn’t worry yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking of re-enlisting. That’s probably what I’ll do.’ He smiled at me, as though to apologise for having had some fun with me, for not having told me this right at the start.

  But the idea, I was sure, was that I was to feel guilty that his life was in such a state that he was reconsidering going back into the army. ‘You said once was enough,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Did I?’ he said, mock-puzzled. ‘Well, perhaps more than enough is what I need.’

  ‘You said to me that only a madman would sign up for another tour.’

  ‘So? In that case I’m mad,’ he said, giving me a deranged stare.

  ‘No, Sam, you’re not mad.’

  ‘OK – bored, then. Is that better? I’m fucking bored out of my skull,’ he said, as though I were to blame for his boredom. The stare was now authentically intense, and alarming. ‘This isn’t being alive,’ he said, flailing an arm in a gesture that took in everyone around us. ‘This is being asleep. When some fucker is trying to stop you being alive, that’s when you’re really alive. When you wake up in the morning and you don’t know if you’re going to see tomorrow – that’s what it’s about. I’m telling you, I’ve been more alive than you’ll ever be.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I told him. ‘You can’t say that. You don’t know.’

  ‘I was in your house. I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve lived more than you ever will, and you know it.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense, Sam.’

  ‘Ever been shot at?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘OK then,’ he said, with a curt and forceful nod, which brought to mind the sight of Terry Fenway falling back after Sam had cracked his face. ‘I’ll tell you something else as well,’ he went on, glancing at the sunbather, who had stood up and was brushing flecks of grass from her skirt. ‘You meet a better class of person in the army. People you’d trust with your life. Straight up. That’s not just words. Trust with your fucking life.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ I said.

  ‘I tell you, you can keep all this,’ he sneered, throwing out both hands in a casting-off gesture. ‘This is death,’ he said, looking around the park; his eye alighted on me momentarily, as just another aspect of the environment. ‘Fuck all of it.’

  Sympathy had evaporated again, and all my doubts had returned, as forcefully as ever. I said to him: ‘You’re saying I’m your father, but I have to ask you: is that the way you would talk to your father?’

  In lieu of an answer, he shook his head as if the question were too feeble to merit the effort of a response. The sunbather, chatting on her phone, strolled away; Sam’s gaze travelled from her feet to her waist and slowly back down. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said, and he walked off, following the young woman. Five yards away he stopped. ‘Thursday,’ he called. ‘Thursday is good for me. Any time. Set it up and I’ll be there. Call me when you’ve fixed it. I’ll be there,’ he said, pointing a finger-gun at me and closing one eye to take aim.

  The next day I made an appointment at my GP’s surgery, for 9 a.m. the following Thursday. As soon as I’d done that I called Sam; I left a message on his voicemail – I gave him the time and place of the appointment, and said I’d ring him again tomorrow. Three times I left a message for him in the course of the week. The Thursday arrived. At nine o’clock I was standing outside the surgery, having already been there for twenty minutes. I’d told Aileen that my ears were blocked up and I wanted the doctor to take a look. Given Sam’s punctiliousness when he was working on the house, I was more or less certain what was happening when there was still no sign of him at five past the hour. At half past I called him, and left another message. On Friday, when I rang again, his number was defunct. On the Monday I drove to the field where his caravan had been parked. I wasn’t surprised to find that it was no longer there.

  16

  A week or so after Sam had vanished, I dropped in at North Street. I hadn’t been there in the interim, and it seemed to me, from the moment I walked in, that the staff were regarding me slightly differently than before – and there could be only one explanation for that. Agnieszka’s manner had unequivocally, if subtly, changed. She was a somewhat nervy young woman, often with a suggestion of barely suppressed panic in her eyes. Now, however, there was an uneasy watchfulness to her expression, as if I’d done something that was making her wary of me. And when Geoff said ‘Hello’, it was as though he’d recently seen me behave unreasonably and had consequently adjusted his opinion of me.

  Usually, when we meet in Geoff’s office, we have a couple of minutes of small talk. Most weekends he goes kayaking, and that’s generally worth an anecdote or two. On this occasion, however, the talk was strictly business. It was fairly clear, as I watched Geoff stirring his coffee, that Sam had spoken to Agnieszka, and Agnieszka in turn had told Geoff that she’d heard that Mr Pattison had a son – a son whom he refused to acknowledge. Remembering the comment Sam had made about Agnieszka, I was sure that this is what had happened. If Geoff had seen Sam talking to her, I thought, surely he’d have warned her that this man was to be treated with great caution? So, presumably, Sam had noticed her at work but had spoken to her outside. Perhaps he’d followed her home?

  Something had to be done, so I asked Geoff if there’d been any further trouble with the character who’d made a scene with the two women – the young man who’d wanted to get in contact with me. Geoff’s response – a too-brisk shake of the head, averted eyes – confirmed that I had grounds for concern. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve had trouble from him.’ I told Geoff that this character was a stalker, that he’d got it into his head that we were related and had been making a pest of himself. ‘We’re not related,’ I told him, with the air of a man obliged to counter a self-evident absurdity. ‘He’s mentally unbalanced. And if he shows his face here again, I want you to ring me, right away. Even if he’s on his best behaviour. Call me.’ Geoff promised he would; and the next time I returned to North Street I could tell from the attitude of the more relaxed Agnieszka that the message had been passed on.

  I was relieved to be rid of Sam. But I was also disappointed that he had disappeared, because by running away he had eliminated the possibility that he had not known that what he’d been telling me was untrue. I didn’t want him to be a liar, but he was a liar, and I couldn’t understand why he’d maintained the lie so strenuously. How had he thought it would end? That I would simply accept him at his word and take him in? That I would pay him to stay away? Had he just wanted to make a mess of my life, for some incomprehensible reason? And I began to wonder if the connection between himself and Sarah might be as much a fiction as was his connection with me. The certificate, after all, was merely a piece of paper. Thousands of people in this country have documents that don’t mean a thing. It was intolerable, not knowing who he was. I had to know more, but talking to Sam again, even if it were possible, wouldn’t provide any answers.

  The phone book, I was astonished to find, contained more than twenty private investigation companies. PDE Solutions (Professional, Discreet and Effective) was the one I selected. The box advert assured the potential client that ‘All our Operatives have a Military or Police Background’, but I chose PDE chiefly because the advert wasn’t illustrated with a drawing of a magnifying glass or a telescope or a shifty trenchcoated individual leaning against a wall, and they were based in a village where there was no risk of my being spotted by someone I knew. I had concocted a story to explain why I needed information on the late Sarah Williams and her son. I had rehearsed this story so often that I’d managed to convince myself that it sounded plausible. On my way up the stairs to the office I was running through the knottier aspects of the tale. Within two minutes of meeting Mr Innes, the boss
of PDE Solutions, I had abandoned the pretence and reverted to the truth, or an approximation of it.

  The office, and Mr Innes, were not quite what I had expected. I’d pictured brown carpeting, Venetian blinds that no longer functioned properly, old filing cabinets, fluorescent lights, an unhealthy-looking individual in a cheap suit, behind a messy desk. In reality, access to Mr Innes was through a reception area as smart as an expensive dentist’s, staffed by a pretty young woman whose cool graciousness could not have more perfectly embodied the words ‘Professional’ and ‘Discreet’. She led me into the presence of Mr Innes, who was sitting behind a black glass desk, at work on a top-of-the-range Mac. Alongside the computer there were two phones, a lamp, and not much else. A vast monochrome photograph of snow-topped mountains occupied much of the wall behind the desk. As for Mr Innes himself, he might have been an upmarket dentist – a dentist who played a lot of rugby, maybe. He was about forty years of age, five feet eight or thereabouts, with crew-cut blond hair and incisive blue eyes, and he was burly, but with no fat about the face or middle. The suit was certainly not cheap, the shirt was pristine white, and the tie – deep blue, silk – had not been bought from a chain store. Having given me a handshake that impressed upon me that I was dealing with a man of probity and decisiveness, he invited me to sit in either of two sumptuous black leather armchairs, which stood on opposite sides of a smoked glass coffee table; he took the other.

  ‘Now, explain the situation to me, in as much detail as you like,’ he began. The voice – precise, relaxed, certain of its authority – was also suggestive of a medical man. On the phone I’d said only that I was interested in finding out more about a particular person’s background. Now I gave him the outline of events: this young man had appeared, purporting to be my son; he had claimed that his mother was a woman with whom I had been involved many years ago (I omitted the precise circumstances of the alleged conception); he had produced a birth certificate that had been altered; he had agreed to take a test, and then incriminated himself by running away.

  Mr Innes had placed a notebook on the table, but as yet he hadn’t opened it. ‘You’re married, Mr Pattison?’ he asked. In his eyes I could see that a diagnosis was being made.

  ‘I am,’ I answered.

  ‘And your wife doesn’t know about this situation?’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ I said. ‘I can’t see there’s anything to be gained by telling her. Not yet.’

  Our conversation was suspended as the receptionist entered, bringing chunky little white cups of coffee and glasses of mineral water. ‘I understand,’ Mr Innes resumed as the door closed, and I suspect that one thing he understood was that this client was being less than wholly honest. ‘Let me summarise,’ he went on. ‘You believe this young man to be an imposter.’

  ‘Or deluded.’

  ‘Or deluded. Either way, you don’t wish to have anything to do with him. He has now broken off contact with you and would seem to have taken steps to ensure that you cannot make contact with him. Yes?’ I confirmed that this was indeed how things stood. Mr Innes took a sip of coffee, placed the cup back on its saucer precisely, as though moving a chess piece, then leaned towards me, hands lightly clasped. ‘In that case, Mr Pattison,’ he said, ‘my advice would be to leave it at that. This is what I say to many of the people who come here, believe it or not. “Go home and forget about it” – that’s what I tell them. Most of them don’t go home and forget about it. And later they wish they had taken my advice.’ A softening of the gaze and a small chewing motion of the jaw hinted at the depths of regret these people had experienced. ‘This man was a nuisance. He’s unsettled you. Now he’s gone. You want him to be gone. So leave it. It might take months, it might take years, but in time he’ll fade away. Let him go,’ he said, but his face said that he could see that in this instance, once again, his better judgement would count for nothing.

  I told him that I didn’t want him to find Mr Williams – not at the moment, anyway. I didn’t want to speak to him, because I found it hard to believe a word he said. But I needed to know how much of what he’d told me was true. It might turn out that his account of himself was a fantasy from start to finish. I wanted to know if he was Sarah Williams’ son, and I wanted to know more about Sarah. I assumed she’d had friends. He’d told me that he’d spent time with her, so had she introduced him to any of these friends? Had she mentioned his father to any of them? ‘I have to know more,’ I told him, as if defining my stance in a business negotiation.

  Mr Innes picked up the notebook. Taking from his jacket pocket a Mont Blanc pen, he began to detail his charges, which were impressively high. A plan of action was formulated, and I paid him a sum up front, in cash. We agreed to speak a week later.

  Mr and Mrs Hendy were soon found, living in Acock’s Green, and an operative named Max – formerly a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police – was duly dispatched to the Midlands. Max was a man people find it easy to talk to, said Mr Innes, and the Hendys proved to be a friendly and talkative couple, but with an air of woe about them, which appeared to be largely attributable to their having more or less lost contact with their adopted son. There had been no falling out – it was just that his life didn’t include them any more. Well, it wasn’t quite true that there hadn’t been a falling-out – they’d had a big row the first time they’d seen him after he’d come back from Iraq, but they’d patched it up right away. He phoned them every three or four months, but they didn’t know his number. Since he’d come out of the army they hadn’t seen much of him. It was almost a year since he’d last visited. Mrs Hendy thought that the army had changed him. He’d never been what you’d call a chatty boy, but after the army there was a sense that he’d become closed off, she said. And the way he’d lost his temper, that time they’d had a row – he’d always had a tendency to flare up, but this was something different, like he’d completely lost control. Last time he’d been home, he’d not told them much about what he’d been doing – his attitude seemed to be that there was no point talking about it because they couldn’t understand.

  He hadn’t talked much at all, in fact, and certainly hadn’t said a word about wanting to find his real mother or father. When he was fifteen or sixteen he’d asked about them a few times, and they’d told him all they knew about his mother – which amounted to barely anything more than that her name was Sarah Williams, and that she’d given birth to him in Canterbury. Nothing was known about the father, not even his name. The Hendys were surprised to hear that he’d gone looking for Sarah, but only mildly surprised, because they really didn’t know what was going on in his mind nowadays, if they ever had. Max had the impression that Mr and Mrs Hendy’s social circle was small, or non-existent. He was with them for a whole afternoon, and they told him a lot about themselves. Nothing they told him clashed with what Sam had told me: Mr Hendy’s CV matched Sam’s account and in every corner of the house there was evidence of his DIY skills. It even turned out that Mrs Hendy did indeed have relatives in Ireland, on the west coast, in Donegal. Everything tallied with what Sam had told me. Max brought back a copy of a photo of the Hendys’ adoptive son; their Sam was my Sam.

  When Max returned from Birmingham, a former RUC officer called Mr Cochrane – a man of such tenacity, said Mr Innes, that he liked to boast that you could drop a golf ball off the top of Mount Everest and he’d find it for you – was assigned the task of researching Sarah’s story. Sam had never told me precisely where she’d been living. The nearest sizeable town was Tunbridge Wells, that’s all I knew, but I did know where she was buried, and that was enough for Mr Cochrane, who traced a route from the grave to the undertakers, and from there to the old railway carriages. Now home to a weatherbeaten old hippy from Aberdeen, the carriages stood at the end of a long track, and were so secluded that there could have been a terrorist training camp down there and nobody in the vicinity would have known anything about it. The nearest cottage was at a straight-line distance of three hundred yards, and thick woodland oc
cupied most of that space. Mr Cochrane made enquiries at the cottage, and knocked on every door in the neighbouring hamlet. It appeared that Sarah had been regarded as something of a crank, albeit a picturesque crank. ‘Scatty’ and ‘batty’ were among the adjectives that Mr Cochrane heard; she was a hermit, someone said; ‘an eccentric’, said someone else. One old chap had talked to her a month or so before she died; it had been raining heavily and he’d come across her walking along the road, about a mile from home, so he’d given her a lift. ‘Did she mention her son at all?’ asked Geoff. She had not. To every interviewee Mr Cochrane showed the photograph of Sam that his colleague had obtained from the Hendys. One man had seen someone of similar appearance in the village; another thought they recognised him, but couldn’t be positive; neither of them, however, had seen Sarah with him. Nobody had ever heard of a son, let alone heard of the father of a son.

  Mr Cochrane turned his attention to the local cat club, four miles away. Sarah was remembered by the club secretary, Mrs Villiers, not as a crank but as ‘a character’, a ‘first-rate breeder’, a ‘very independent lady’. Of her family and her life story, however, Mrs Villiers knew absolutely nothing. With Miss Williams one discussed only cat-related matters, Mrs Villiers explained; she was the sort of person, she said, who regarded personal questions as an impertinence. Mrs Villiers had visited Sarah’s property on a number of occasions; she had never seen anyone except Sarah there, and there were no family photos on display – pictures of cats, yes; people, no. The Hendys’ photo of Sam was accorded a glance, for the sake of politeness; he was not recognised. When I knew Sarah, she would rarely spend an evening alone; her address book had no blank pages. Yet even the tenacious Mr Cochrane couldn’t find anyone who had regarded the older Sarah as anything other than an acquaintance, at best.

  He did, however, manage to find Sarah’s mother, in a home full of people you’d have taken to be dead if it weren’t for the drooling, as he put it. Delicate as a chrysalis, Mrs Williams spent most of her waking hours propped up in a chair in a large overheated room with a selection of fellow residents, gaping with them at a television that was turned up so loud that conversation would have been impossible, had any of the inmates been capable of conversation. Mrs Williams was wheeled into her bedroom for her interview with Mr Cochrane, which was conducted with a nurse as intermediary. The old lady seemed to think at first that her visitor was telling her that he was her grandson. This misunderstanding was cleared up, but then, having finally understood that Mr Cochrane was a policeman, more or less, she took from somewhere the idea that he’d come to tell her that her daughter was in trouble. As tactfully as was compatible with bawling at her, he managed to impress upon her the sad fact that her daughter was deceased. Once that information had been absorbed, Mrs Williams refused to talk to him, as he’d been responsible for breaking the news of Sarah’s death. After five minutes of vacant staring she fell asleep, so abruptly and with so deep a sigh that Mr Cochrane thought that the last spark of life had at last gone out.