by A J Grayson
Copyright
HarperImpulse an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © A J Grayson 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photography © Shutterstock.com / Cover design by Books Covered.
A J Grayson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008239367
Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780008239350
Version: 2017-04-08
Dedication
For Rachael
Epigraph
I am not certain I may ever know, ever understand, that which makes death what it is and sorrow so sadly, desperately haunting. I am not sure what it is that lingers, once everything else is gone. But I know the boy, alive through all his torments, and perhaps that is enough. Perhaps we are not meant to know anything more cosmic than one child, one face, one set of hands. In them, I have found enough grief to encompass the whole of creation.
—Dr Pauline Lavrentis
Interview notes
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Boy in the Park, Stanza 1
Part One
San Francisco
Chapter 1. Tuesday
Chapter 2. Wednesday Morning
Chapter 3. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 2
Chapter 4. Wednesday Afternoon
Chapter 5. Taped Recording Cassette #014A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 6. Thursday Lunchtime
Chapter 7. Friday
Chapter 8. Taped Recording Cassette #014B – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 9. Friday
Chapter 10. Saturday – Office of Lieutenant Brian Delvay
Chapter 11. Sunday
Chapter 12. Taped Recording Cassette #021C – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 13. Monday
Chapter 14. Monday Afternoon
Chapter 15. Taped Recording Cassette #021D – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 16. Monday Afternoon
Chapter 17. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 3
Chapter 18. Monday Evening
Redding
Chapter 19. Wednesday
Chapter 20. Thursday
Chapter 21. Taped Recording Cassette #033A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 22. Thursday
Chapter 23. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 4
Chapter 24. Thursday Afternoon
Chapter 25. Thursday
Chapter 26. Thursday
Chapter 27. Taped Recording Cassette #041D – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 28. Thursday
Chapter 29. Thursday
Chapter 30. Thursday
Chapter 31. Thursday
Chapter 32. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 5
Chapter 33. Thursday – Nightfall
Part Two
The Farmhouse, 1974
Chapter 34. The Porch
Chapter 35. The Kitchen
Chapter 36. The Living Room
Chapter 37. The Kitchen
Chapter 38. The Living Room
Chapter 39. The Living Room
Chapter 40. Christmas Day – Two Weeks Later
The Schoolyard, 1975
Chapter 41. At School – Two Months Later
Chapter 42. The Schoolyard
Chapter 43. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 6
Part Three
Redding
Chapter 44. Thursday – Nightfall
Chapter 45. Thursday – Night-Time
Chapter 46. Taped Recording Cassette #057A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 47. Thursday
Chapter 48. Thursday
Chapter 49. Taped Recording Cassette #057A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 50. Thursday
Chapter 51. Friday
Chapter 52. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 7
Chapter 53. Saturday
Chapter 54. Sunday
Vacaville, California
Chapter 55. Conference Room 4C – California Medical Facility – State Prison
Chapter 56. Conference Room 4C – California Medical Facility
Chapter 57. Taped Recording Cassette #058A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
Chapter 58. Conference Room 4C – California Medical Facility
Part Four
On The Road
Chapter 59. Wednesday
Chapter 60. Thursday
Chapter 61. Thursday
Chapter 62. Thursday Night
Chapter 63. Friday Morning
Nashville
Chapter 64. Friday Evening
Chapter 65. Sunday
Chapter 66. Monday
Chapter 67. Monday Evening
Chapter 68. Monday Evening
Chapter 69. Monday Evening
Part Five
Vacaville, California
Chapter 70. California Medical Facility – State Prison – The Present Day
Chapter 71. Conference Room 6A – California Medical Facility
Chapter 72. Friday – Two Weeks Later
Note
The Boy in the Park
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
The Boy in the Park, Stanza 1
Little boy in the park,
Little boy standing, lost.
The waters quiet, the tree-wings
dance
For the little boy still, unmoving.
The little boy with stick in hand;
Little boy weeping …
Little boy weeping …
PART ONE
SAN FRANCISCO
1
Tuesday
My bench in the park is old, tainted from moisture, tinged a faint green by the growth of a moss that will one day consume it. A brass plaque that was once a colour other than tarnished black notes that it is dedicated ‘To the Memory of Margaret Hoss, Beloved (1924–2008).’ Margaret’s bench, now mine. We sit together beneath the trees. We sit and we watch, and the world dances before us.
From Margaret’s bench I am afforded the best view in the park. It is not off one of the great grassy quadrangles, nor the main paved walkways that criss-cross the gardens. To find it requires taking one of the thousand dirt pathways that branch away from these, spidering into densely planted greenery that’s divided, for convenience, by continent of origin. My bench
is in the hidden underbrush of Temperate Asia, and all around it are plants with names like Autumn Joy, Nymphaea fabiola, Emerald Cypress and Primrose Willow. The bench itself sits on a patch of wood chips – a place to rest one’s feet in the absence of mud. A private retreat. And descending below, spreading out beyond my toes, is the pond.
The pond is tranquil, even beautiful. Not the blue-basined, sanitized sort of water feature too common in public spaces (there’s one of those in the park, too, at the centre of its most obvious green lawn). The pond, though entirely manmade, is of a style au naturel. Just the right number of lily pads and watercress colour its surface. A few stones peek up from the brown water, often serving as perches for birds or even the occasional turtle. Surrounded by tall leafy trees, the pond is generally hidden from the breeze, and so almost always the texture of glass – and just as reflective.
I sit on my bench, the poet in the midst of poetry. It is an everyday thing, or almost everyday, this visit. I come with my little Moleskine notebook and stubby pencil, sometimes with a paper cup dredging coffee beneath a plastic lid marked with the brown imprints of my lips. And I, the poet, gaze into paradise. Outside the park, so close by, looms the paved wasteland of the city. I can hear it as I sit, there, out of sight. Cars (petrol, hybrid or electric, it makes no difference, really), skyscrapers, slums. But here, here a poet can come to sing his song to the greens and browns of nature, and witness it singing back.
A couple strolls by, arms linked at the elbows, smiling, a Nikon camera dangling from the man’s neck. There is a punctuated look in the woman’s eyes. Romance, keyed in by the scents of begonias and rhododendrons. It’s become a visible flush of redness on her face. I can tell she hopes it will become something more.
A chipmunk descends from a tree, marked by a small plastic sign as Picea orientalis, Oriental Spruce. He observes the layout before him, the inclines and dips of the soil. There is food here, a treasure trove of it; he seems fairly confident. A tail shivers in anticipation. Nearby a bird – a hermit thrush, I’m almost certain – swoops down and takes a perch on one of the rocks jutting up from the water. The breath from his wings ripples the surface, changing a still mirror into one of undulating motion.
There is a poem here. I can feel it. Woven into the greenery, the humanity, the natural ebb and flow of life. A poem, waiting to be found, waiting to be spoken. One that will sing of something brighter than the dark world that gives it birth.
And then, there in the distance, I catch it. The little brush of motion from the branches, customary and expected. I turn my head slightly, but I know what’s there. I’ve known since before the motion came. It’s familiar now, this sight, seen on eighteen months of afternoons just like this.
The little boy emerges from the boughs of the faux Asian foliage. He takes three steps to the edge of the manmade pond’s crafted waterline, to where his toes almost touch. He wears the same worn overalls, the same once-white T-shirt beneath them that I’ve seen him wear more times than I can remember. His blond hair is dishevelled, as all little boys’ should be. He holds a stick in his right hand and pokes it listlessly at the water’s edge, sending new ripples across the pond. He gazes vacantly out at these results of his movements. The jade treetops bend in a breeze that doesn’t descend to the tops of our scalps.
The boy is mesmerized. I am mesmerized. The bird on the rock clucks from somewhere beneath its beak then flaps its wings to take flight. The little boy doesn’t notice. His gaze is still on the ripples of the water, meeting other ripples, colliding gently in the swell of a scene fabricated by man, yet hauntingly serene. Almost inhuman. Almost free.
And I cannot quite see his eyes.
2
Wednesday Morning
There is a rail workers’ strike today. It’s the third this year, and I feel as a result as if I’m becoming an old hand at dealing with them. Taking the train normally saves me thirty minutes of traffic and $28 in a day’s parking charges, but a bus still beats out the car for second best. No reprieve from the traffic, but it’s a $2.50 ride and there’s a stop by the shop where I work, so I can hardly complain.
It’s meant a morning on a hard, plastic bench seat rather than a padded one, and a bit more jostling of starts and stops than my generally impatient personality would prefer. But the wheels on the bus have gone round and round, and I’m fairly certain I’ll get from point A to point B alive and unscathed.
I’d live closer to work if I could – the traditional commuter’s lament. There’s nothing in particular to recommend Diamond Heights, the neighbourhood south of the city that I call home, apart from the fact that it’s outside central San Francisco proper and, therefore, the grossly overinflated San Francisco housing market. The Planning and Urban Research Association designed the district as part of the Community Redevelopment Law of 1951, transforming most of its shanties into liveable quarters, one of which I call my own. On a rental basis, of course. To be honest, I can’t really afford living there, either, but it’s a full three or four degrees less unaffordable than even the smallest flat in the city would be, and those are the kinds of maths that make the impossible seem feasible these days. So it’s home. And it has the glamour of having diamonds in its name.
I can’t say I entirely mind the commute. As the sun rises over the hills in the morning, its rays bouncing up off the sea, San Francisco’s not a bad city to look at. I don’t know if it’s the beauty of the bay on its inland side, with its islands and hills and bridges, or the mystery of the endless, borderless ocean stretching out on the other, but something gives this city an aura – an otherness I’ve never felt replicated anywhere else. A sliver of land wholly encapsulated by the natural world, as if the earth herself had drawn a line around the silicon and steel and said, ‘This far you may come, you may make your homes and monuments. This far, but no further.’
The bus rounds a corner, swerving its metal bulk to avoid a tiny, parked Nissan, and pulls onto Lincoln Way. I’ve taken this line before, I know the route, but even so my heart flutters ever so slightly. It flutters because Lincoln brings us alongside my haven. Dylan Aaronsen’s perfect heaven. The place I most love.
There, on our left, is the park. Somewhere in there: my little pond, my little bench. It will be a while until I can visit them – can retreat beneath those trees, away from all this noise – there’s still the morning’s work ahead. But just the sight is soothing. I suppose I’m an easy person to soothe. I wonder, for a moment, if everyone is like that, where merely the sight of something loved makes the demons run away and peace descend a little closer to the present.
Apart from the modified commute, this morning has been ritualistically predictable – both before and after. In some sense there’s little to say of such a start to a day. As one who’s never fully cottoned on to the social media trend, I find myself unexercised in articulating the vacuously ordinary and unremarkable, in ‘sharing’ something as mundane as the fact that I chose brown socks today rather than black, that I bit my cheek while brushing my teeth.
It’s simply been The Routine. Coffee, perhaps (definitely) too much. Two eggs. A scan over the emails that accrued during the night, mostly adverts and spam and announcements of new digital titles ‘We’re Sure You’re Going to Enjoy’ (though the whole phenomenon of digital books generally eludes me). Then the commute, then work, such as it is, with its customary temptations and boredom-inducing normalities. It’s hard to look at the day-to-day flow of a life and not conclude that the vast majority of it is wasted, cycling through conversations that have been had before, actions that have been done before, chasing goals that never provide the sense of completion they promise. It was that kind of morning. The expected kind.
I have no status that allows me to escape the dross of life through rank. I’m not the sort that can claim a renowned profession or a compelling job title, so mornings generally lead organically into the mundane of the day; and I don’t particularly mind this. It’s neither as exciting as it could be, nor a
s boring. I’m satisfied to reside in the middle.
There is one definitive job perk, though, and that’s my midday schedule. An extensive lunch break is one of the benefits of menial employment, and there’s little more menial than being a teller at a health food retail shop, selling vitamin capsules to yuppies whose only question is some repetitive variant on ‘Is this the organic version? I really want the organic version.’ I’ve been gainfully employed at Sunset Health Supplements for two years, and despite the persistent desire to toss our vapid customers off the nearest bridge (and we have a few good ones for that, here in the city), I have to admit that not once have I been denied an ample midday escape. One that gives time to walk down the bustling rush of 7th Avenue to Golden Gate Park, then the twisting bends of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive to the iron gates mounted under pine-green signage that reads San Francisco Botanical Gardens. Two layers of fencing and turnstiles, fortress-like, as if the plants inside required prison-level security to preserve them from the outside world.
Today, at 12.11 p.m., I walked through those gates, produced my local ID so as to avoid the tourists’ entrance fee, and wandered through the greenery to my bench. To that spot where that which is expected is also that which is cherished. I took my familiar steps and thanked God it’s not just the dreary parts of life that are repetitive.
I have no coffee today, here on my perch. Enough of it has already worked its way into my system. It often does on mornings like this, which, though unremarkable, follow restless nights. I have too many of those, though there’s no discernible reason why I should. My job isn’t exactly the high-stress sort, and outside of work all is generally as peaceful as I could hope for. But still sleep is often slow in coming, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. I’ve tried the tablets, descended at times to drink, even given a shot to the soothing tones of a new-age SureSleep app downloaded to my phone for ninety-nine cents. But nothing really helps (and Apple won’t refund the ninety-nine cents). Insomnia is like an unwanted family member on a holiday visit. The more you wish he would leave, the more obstinately he remains.