by Gary Fry
They grow up quick these days hadn’t become a cliché for no reason, Jack reflected, and then realized all such sayings contained a kernel of truth. But now he had another matter to address.
The lens had zeroed in on the property and its grounds as far as it could reach. The screen showed a plot of land pressed up against a beach lapped by the motionless North Sea. Jack could see only a small garden, its rear giving on to a cliff with a rocky façade. In the garden, a number of familiar bushes grew, with clusters of colorful plant life restrained by borders. But…what was this?
It had clearly been a bright day when this image had been captured, because sunlight had left long shadows trailing from the building and several trees in the garden… Nevertheless, Jack was certain he had no growth in this particular area.
The specimen to which he referred was little more than a mass of black lines pressed against the bungalow, on one corner close to the master bedroom window—the room in which he slept nightly. Jack might have taken the squiggle for a fault on the satellite’s lens if not for a shadow falling away from the shape in the same direction as all the others in the garden. This looked skeletal, as if the figure that cast it was a cluster of blackened bones, with little flesh to hold them together… But of course that was ludicrous.
Inexplicable nervousness forced Jack to ask the same question he’d asked earlier, but now concerning this new area on Google Maps.
“When was this picture taken, Paul?”
But the boy only shrugged. “I don’t know, Granddad,” he replied, his correct enunciation failing to register with his listener on this occasion. “Maybe it was when it was hot, because there’s long shadows everywhere.”
Jack knew there was no tree—surely that was what the shape was: an emaciated trunk, with spiny, leafless branches—in that spot, and then wondered whether the previous owners had once kept one there and whether the picture had been taken before he and Christine had moved in. The people from whom they’d bought the bungalow had been a taciturn couple in their eighties, presumably unable to cope in isolation with their newly developed social care needs. They might have employed a gardener, in that case, or at least someone who’d come to help out around the place. And yes, this person would have dug up the dying tree and consigned it to a skip somewhere, or burned it on a bonfire, or at any rate, got rid of it without leaving any evidence of its former location.
Indeed, the tree wasn’t there anymore. There was no gnarled trunk, no bony branches, and no dark presence beside the house.
But what troubled Jack most in this latest development involved another observation he’d already made. If, as Paul had surmised, the picture had been taken in summer, when the sun was hot and shadows were long, why didn’t the tree have any foliage?
Jack looked again at its disorderly shadow leading away from the thing’s scrawny height. In truth, it looked like little more than bones, held together by the tenuous junctions of rickety joints.
3
They spent the rest of the day engaged in a variety of activities: watching TV (a thrilling cop show Paul enjoyed); eating hamburgers and fries; and reading—fulfilling the pledge Jack had made to his daughter yesterday, as if the treat of having his grandson to stay involved a small occupational hazard.
But it wasn’t really a burden, and allowed Jack, while teaching the boy the rudiments of language, to relive moments he’d valued during his career. He’d been a good teacher, before cultural conditions had become so challenging that the task of pedagogy had been usurped by damage limitation. He believed—and this was something commented upon by many others, including his late wife (who’d also been a teacher)—he’d possessed an ability to see to the heart of matters, extracting the bare bones of problems and then communicating them clearly. Once children had grasped these fundamental structures, they could shape material in a way that felt comfortable to themselves. But it was first essential to get across these inviolable cores.
The alphabet was a good example. Its twenty-six letters formed the heart of countless marvelous texts. With these simple constituents, Milton, Shakespeare and Dickens had moved, thrilled and disturbed billions of readers the world over. Jack was conversant with some philosophy and realized the ancient Greeks had believed the world was constructed from a finite group of elements, which altered only according to evolving theories and repeated experimentation. But the basic fact remained: the universe was atomistic, with tiny fragments combining to form meaningful wholes. And what were letters of the alphabet but the atoms of language, a medium through which all social discourse and communal activity was conducted? Indeed, it was this that made human life possible.
That was why it was sad when a person lacked the capacity to process words and meanings. Jack observed his grandson struggling with certain phrases, his lips pursed and forehead corrugated with a frown. At that moment, Jack felt tearful, but didn’t know whether he cried for the boy or for himself and what he’d begun to suspect might be happening to him… Outside the storm continued to rage, like cruel hands slapping against the side of the bungalow. It felt as if God was the teacher right now, His strategies decidedly disciplinarian. The building shook with punishment, great eddies of wind whirring with power, like audible representations of a deity’s rage. Jack felt that taut atmosphere crank up as it never had before.
At nine o’clock, after Paul had conceded his first yawn of the evening, Jack suggested it was time for bed.
“But Granddad, it’s the school holidays,” the boy protested, smiling his cheeky smile. “Mum always lets me stay up late when I don’t have to get up early the next day.”
They’d just caught the end of the national news and had been cheered to learn that the bad weather was set to relent tomorrow, and that it should be dry and sunny: good beach weather. Jack reminded his grandson of this prospect.
“I’ll let you stay up late another night this week, but right now I think you should rest.”
“Oh…Grand…dad…” Paul replied, making each syllable sound as lengthy as the many howls of wind outside. But then, observing Jack’s serious stare, the boy obeyed and, after a kiss good night, sauntered off to bed with an enviably nimble stride.
The truth was that Jack had wanted some time alone, and given how infrequently he saw his grandson these days, that was serious. Ever since Paul had shown him how to use the Internet, Jack had been eager to access it, searching for material that undoubtedly frightened him. He must keep this private, even from a seven-year-old; Jack certainly didn’t want his daughter Ruth to find out. She’d only insist he go to the doctor, just as Christine would have done. And there might be nothing wrong with him, after all; he might be worrying unnecessarily.
“And you might not, you fool,” the wind seemed to say, fumbling at the double-glazed lounge window. Taking this imaginary pronouncement as a challenge, Jack got up from the couch on which he and Paul had been sitting, and advanced upon the infernal machine.
He was simultaneously awed by and fearful of the Internet. For people of his generation, the notion that the world was interconnected was far from surprising; the legacy of the Second World War, a spectacular global conflict, had loomed large during his upbringing. But the thought of having access to all its complexities in one simple place was mind-blowing. Whatever he typed into the search engine, however outlandish and obscure, would result in at least some material, and if much was untrustworthy, well, that was the nature of the beast. The Net was a leviathan, impossible to police. And that was what made Jack feel wary.
Nevertheless, he also realized what a liberating boon it was for people in his position: aging quickly, failing in health, and subject to the hegemony of medical experts. Maybe if he’d been online when Christine had been undergoing treatment, he could have challenged some of the doctors’ less-effective decisions… But, regrettable though it felt, that was all in the past. Jack must look forward, to challenges he himself must face.
He typed “dementia” into the search engine, and
then after an uneasy pause, added “symptoms.” After clicking SEARCH, the screen filled with a hundred damning diagnoses, making him feel dismayed and frightened. This news had hardly been delivered sensitively, after all… But then he realized he was being foolish, and at the head of the stack of links was one hinting at a clear description of the condition and its etiology. Jack clicked this at once.
Moments later, he was presented with a body of text with many highlighted words, among them “Alzheimer’s disease,” “vascular dementia,” and “dementia with Dewy bodies.” He ignored these and scanned to the top of the description, starting to read with—what he hoped would be—unhindered speed.
“Dementia” referred to a range of conditions characterized by a loss of cognitive ability in a previously unimpaired person; this was beyond what would be expected from normal aging processes. Symptoms included damage to memory, attention, language and problem-solving abilities. Individual cases rarely reported one particular problem, rather a combination of some or all. It was important not to confuse the condition with delirium, which shared many symptoms, but which was short-lived and involved no irreversible organic change. A sufferer must demonstrate problems for over six months before the more serious diagnosis of dementia was possible.
Jack paused, leaning back in his chair to consider recent experiences. When had he first noticed his difficulty with reading particular words? He was sure it had only been a few weeks earlier. He’d found himself getting forgetful during the last few years, but hadn’t worried about that, believing it to be the well-documented “senior moments” with which many people in his age group were familiar. But the problem with his beloved reading couldn’t be dismissed so easily, which was why he was here, trying to figure it out.
The information about delirium interested him, and he wondered whether Christine’s illness and the trauma he’d endured after her recent death had had a corrosive effect on his mind. Maybe this was just a temporary problem accompanying adjustment to a new life alone, out on a barren coastline subject to vagaries of the physical world.
Wind howled again outside, as if spiraling down with force, attempting to drills holes in the bungalow’s roof. Jack imagined much sand out in the bay being lifted and scattered, as if mimicking the violent tantrum of an idiot artist scattering about base materials…
Jack turned his attention back to the screen, and then clicked on a link that promised an account of dementia’s effects on the use of language.
Ten minutes later, he knew a little more about the problem. The condition had a variety of impacts on literacy—in some cases the written word, in others the spoken, and in more, that relating to reading. Most commonly, sufferers of this symptom presented a combination of difficulties in these three fundamental modes of communication.
But this didn’t fit Jack’s experience. As far as he was aware, he’d had no problems making notes—writing letters, shopping lists, and emails—or engaging face-to-face with people: shopkeepers in the nearby town of Whitby; friends calling on the phone; and Paul, his beloved grandson. This knowledge offered him hope as he read on, wondering what it was about reading that should result in such an infuriating blockage.
Many theories were in circulation about language impairment, but none was authoritative or conclusive. Jack paged through a number that bore no resemblance to his own problem, but then chanced upon one that did. An American academic, building on ideas developed in twentieth-century French philosophy, had proposed that certain dementia-related conditions were characterized by an inability by sufferers to put together meanings. In short, they read one word and could understand it, but were unable to combine it with another and form what non-afflicted people took for granted: a coherent coupling, greater than the sum of its parts. Each element, the academic had argued—a letter in a word, a word in a sentence, a sentence in a paragraph, and so on—relied on context to make sense. Linguistic understanding was a combination of components synthesized by the human mind, and any disruption of this natural process—by illness, for instance—could result in its breakdown.
Jack looked away from the screen. Was it possible, he wondered, that this was happening to him? He recalled the way the word in Paul’s book had last night broken apart under his gaze, as if its constituent parts—the letters—had refused to remain connected, the uprights losing horizontal bars and curves slipping away like detached string, until all that was left in his mind was a squiggle of meaningless lines, set upon the page like something shattered on the ground.
Was he sick? Was his brain degenerating, leaving him vulnerable to the vicissitudes of an unforgiving world?
Outside, the storm continued to batter against his fragile property.
Jack switched off his computer, and realized he’d never felt more forlorn in his life.
4
The following morning, when Jack awoke in his bedroom, he detected only silence outside the window…well, relative silence, at any rate, because although there was no continuation of the howling storm in the area the previous night, he could still hear the sea splashing against rock and beach, like a hissing band of snakes retreating from the coast.
The tide would be out first thing today; since moving here, Jack had grown familiar with the sea’s variable activities. As it seemed to be a bright day—autumn sunshine, weary yet bright, pushed against the thick curtains Christine had insisted upon—Jack thought he and his grandson could venture outside at last. Paul would be delighted. Despite all the modern world’s relentless development—DVDs, mobile phones, home computers—a boy liked playing in sand; that was an inviolable cosmic rule.
Something about this notion troubled Jack, and he pushed it away, like a wild animal that had just sneaked inside a residential property. In turn, this latest thought made him fancy he heard something moving out in his hallway. Maybe it was just Paul, up already and keeping quiet to avoid waking his grandfather. But then Jack realized how foolish this conclusion was. Boys were rarely sensitive in that way; he himself as a youngster had never been. If tin drums and sticks to beat them with were available first thing on a morning, any healthy lad would combine the two in a fretful cacophony, as if the tendency was inscribed in genes.
So what could be lurking beyond the bedroom door?
Jack got up, tugged on his robe, and then made his way into the rest of the bungalow…which proved to be deserted, just himself and a bright wedge of daylight falling from the kitchen at the head of the hallway. He headed that way, his heart a restless object behind his ribs, but after reaching the room while suspecting his grandson was playing a game—he’d leap out at any moment, his face a riot of giggles—he saw nothing at all, only the linoleum floor, his oak dining table, all mod cons, and a vacant work surface.
The sounds he’d heard earlier—in truth, little more than a sequence of shuffling creaks—must have been only in his head. But given all he’d reflected upon last night, this thought did him no good at all. Indeed, to focus on a less disconcerting issue, he began cooking the lunch he and the boy would enjoy after returning from a stroll along the northeast coastline.
An hour later, once Jack had peeled potatoes and vegetables and placed a small chicken in the oven to roast, Paul emerged from his temporary room. He looked cheerful, having clearly registered that, unlike yesterday, there was a lack of inclement activity in the region. When he came rushing into the kitchen, Jack greeted him by second-guessing his first words.
“Granddad, can we go…”
“…yes, we can go to the beach.”
They’d spoken in unison, like two expressions of the same entity, whose mind was a single organism. Such were families; they shared experiential history. Sometimes with Christine, Jack had felt the way identical twins must feel, with intimate mutual knowledge mimicking a genetic connection.
The food underway in the dutiful oven, Jack told Paul to change into hardwearing clothes, while he did the same in his own bedroom. Jack removed denims and a sweater from the cupboard too big
now for his modest selection of garments. Some of this stuff he’d had for years, and when items needed mending, he could wield needle and cotton without complication. He wasn’t like many modern men, whose domestic abilities ended at filling the fridge with beer. These well-established skills—ones he’d learned as a boy not much older than Paul was now—would never be erased, no matter what became of other cognitive abilities.
Minutes later, he was back in the kitchen and unlocking the door that led onto the beach. His grandson stood eagerly beside him, bouncing like something wearing springs Jack had just released from a box. When they finally emerged into a bright, cool day, Jack smelled ozone heavy in the air, residue of the departed storm. There was also the usual pungent odor of rotting seaweed and damp sand. A soft breeze blew, persuading flowers and hedges to whisper as they passed, and then the glorious view was revealed: the North Sea, a hundred yards down the beach, wriggling and writhing like some distant, crouching creature.
“You can’t catch me, for a penny cup of tea,” Paul sang out, and Jack was just beginning to wonder where the boy must have heard this taunting snatch of doggerel when both he and his grandson spotted the shapes sticking up at the heart of the beach.
The sea mightn’t “get them,” but could whatever had created such strange cones manage the trick, after all?
Speechless and bewildered, Jack followed the boy down a flight of stone steps to reach the damp, expansive sand. Walkers often traveled this way, flanking Jack’s home with an amiable wave. But today there was nobody in the area—just himself and Paul, the only witnesses to this bizarre spectacle.
After reaching the first of what appeared to be six or seven hip-high cones, Jack stooped to touch it. The thing was about a foot wide at its base and tapered to a pointed top. Its sides had been crafted with a delicate touch, bearing intricate patterns like calcified stone. It was made completely of sand, with copious flecks of pebbles and an occasional strand of seaweed. It looked like a miniature church spire, pointing to heaven, the way steeples had since inception, reminding onlookers of their maker, of imperious God.