The sudden chill on the back of my neck isn't a breath. The plastic grin that meets me when I twist around belongs to Father Christmas on a roof. 'Not that I know of,' I retort.
'I thought you were supposed to have said on the phone you were bringing her.'
'I only said I'm living with her. She hasn't come today.'
'Oh.'
Before I have time to deduce what rebuke this contains, my mother cries 'Who's that? It isn't, is it?'
Her voice is faster than her approach. She repeats the questions and variations on them as she limps along the hall. She's dressed in the kind of discreetly striped suit she might have worn while she and my father were teaching. Over it she wears an apron striped like a portion of the suit viewed through a microscope. Her face surely can't be longer, but it's decidedly thinner, like the rest of her. I have the distracting notion that my parents have tried to emphasise their comical contrast, not least since her grey hair has grown maniacally uneven while his is reduced to a very few strands that barely span his piebald cranium. She stumbles to grab me, crying 'Come here. I knew you wanted to be home.'
Her hug is so fierce and bony that it's painful. It smells like a memory of Christmas dinner. Eventually she relents, only to redouble her force while my father watches like a viewer who has arrived too late to understand a film. At last she steps back to look me up and down. 'He's so much older, Bob. Whatever's been wrong, let's not let it be wrong any longer.'
My father shuts the front door, enclosing us all in dimness. I have a disconcerting sense of being confined somewhere smaller and darker until my mother urges us to the kitchen. 'What do you want to keep you warm?' she asks me as eagerly. 'A cup or something stronger?'
I could respond that the kitchen is hot enough. She's apparently too familiar with the old black iron range to have it replaced. Its heat is trapped by all the wooden panels that seemed to frown on my childhood, and even by the windows that would look out on the narrow L-shaped yard if they weren't opaque with condensation. 'Tea would be fine,' I say.
'Shut the door, then, if nobody else is coming.'
As she lifts a mug from the lowest wooden hook beside the thick stone sink and limps to the ruddy earthenware teapot, my father mouths 'Don't mind her. She's getting like that sometimes.'
I can't hear a word, but my mother swings around. 'What are you saying, Bob?'
'Watch where you're pouring for mercy's sake,' he says and stares at her until she relocates the mug with the teapot. 'Just bringing up your favourite subject. That's the family.'
The last remark is directed more at me. Perhaps it isn't as accusing as it sounds, because my mother says 'Now we're retired we'll have time for more of one.'
She plants the mug, still brimming despite the extended ellipsis it has scattered on the floorboards, in front of me on the oaken table that bears the childish start of my first initial, and then she giggles like someone a fraction of her age. 'Don't worry, we aren't expecting a little stranger, even though we still get up to mischief.'
'I don't want to know that,' I'm tempted to retort like some forgotten comedian. Instead I take a gulp of milky tea as she says 'I'm sure you can guess what we're hoping for.'
'She's on about grandchildren,' my father explains. 'She always is these days.'
'My partner has a son. He's seven.'
'We'll look forward to seeing him at Christmas,' my mother says. 'And I can't wait to show all our friends your dedication.'
What kind of performance are they expecting of me? Apparently I look bewildered enough for her to giggle again. 'Bob told me how you're putting us both in your book.'
I have to rewind quite a stretch of conversation to recall my actual words. I was planning to dedicate the book to Natalie, but I don't see how I can disappoint them, even though it feels as if my intentions have been diverted. I'm silently promising Natalie the next book when my mother says 'So you're here to research it.'
For at least a second I'm unable to mumble 'And I came to see you.'
'I'm so glad, aren't you, Bob?' Once my father grunts, either in agreement or in resignation, she says 'Hands.'
She reaches for my left and my father's right and nods at us until we join hands too. His is hot and moist while hers feels stripped down to its mechanism. I'm put in mind of a séance, because it's my early childhood, before she and my father parted, that she's trying to call up. I can't cling to my resentment now I've seen how much they've aged, but I grow uncomfortable as my mother squeezes the hands she's holding and waits not just for reciprocation but for my father and me to demonstrate as well. When at last she lets go of us, our hands immediately separate. 'Will you be talking to people up here for your book?' she appears to hope.
'I'm counting on the library. If there's any record of what happened it'll be there.'
'What do you think did?'
'A comedian by the name of Thackeray Lane took his act into the street and got arrested for it. Sounds as if he was too much of a laugh for the law, but there won't be anyone who'll remember now.'
'We do.'
Once again I feel imprisoned in a cramped dark place, and my face seems too unfamiliar to work. I want my father to tell her she's mistaken, but I'm afraid of how roughly he may do so. She giggles, which I don't find even slightly heartening. 'You ought to see your face, Simon. I'm not saying we were there.'
'Sorry, then, but how do you remember?'
'Bob's grandparents were. We were talking about it after you rang.'
'Did they say anything about his act that you remember?' I ask my father, and when he seems reluctant to speak 'Did he do a trick with balloons?'
'Never told me if he did. They used to say if I was bad they'd chase me like he chased them.'
'He was on stilts, wasn't he?' my mother prompts.
'Some kind of special ones, they must have been. I don't know if everyone had had enough or it was the end of the show, but he came down off the stage and got taller while he was chasing them. My granddaddy said he was so tall when he got to the door he had to bend nearly double and some children thought he was going to jump on them. Like a grasshopper with a man's face, my dad said.'
'I expect he just wanted to give them an encore. Like Simon said, he was there to make them laugh.'
'He tried hard enough in the street, according to my granddaddy. Maybe he wanted to win them back, but he still got arrested.'
This differs so much from the account I read that it sounds like an alternate take of the scene. 'What size was he then?' I wonder.
My father waits for my mother to finish giggling, though the question strikes me as less amusing than grotesque. 'His normal,' he says. 'A bit late if you ask me.'
'I'm sure he didn't do any real harm, Bob. If your grandma survived I don't see why anyone else should complain.'
'It didn't help her much, did it? I blame my granddaddy as much as him. Granted he mightn't have known what kind of tricks Simon's character was going to get up to, but I wouldn't have taken a woman to the theatre in that state.'
My mouth has grown dry with the overheated air. 'Which state?'
'She was about to have my dad.'
'Less than seven months pregnant, you said, Bob.'
'The same night she went to the show she had to be rushed into hospital.'
'You can't blame him for that,' my mother objects.
'All I know is my dad was premature, and they didn't have half the facilities they've got in hospitals now.'
'But he was all right and she was.'
'If you call it all right when nobody could be sure if she was laughing or crying. My granddaddy told my dad she kept being like that for weeks, and a nurse said she was while she was giving birth.'
'She was quiet whenever I met her. You could hardly get a word out of her.'
'Maybe it used her up.'
We've wandered into an area I can't define, and I'd rather not linger. 'Did they have anything to say about the court case?'
'My granddaddy thou
ght he deserved a lot worse, and I got the idea she agreed with him.'
I seem to have run out of questions. I'm trying to make sense of the information when my mother says 'Shall we take him?'
'Where?'
She's helplessly amused by my duet with my father. 'To whatever its name is,' she splutters. 'The theatre. The Harlequin, wasn't it? It's still there.'
'That doesn't say it's open. I'm pretty sure it's not.'
'It might give you ideas anyway, mightn't it, Simon? It might make your book more real.'
She's so anxious to help me that she has overcome her mirth. 'Let me check what the library's doing,' I say.
'Being where it's always been, I should think.' She knocks her elbows on the table and props her chin on her hands, drumming her cheeks with her fingertips while she watches me wield the mobile. It looks as if she's fanning the gleam in her eyes brighter. When my father reaches to calm her down she drags her wrist away from him. I pocket the mobile once I've been informed a second time that the number is unobtainable. 'Was I right?' my mother demands in some kind of triumph.
'They don't seem to be operating today.'
'Stay over, then, or you can go when you're all here for Christmas.'
As I mumble ambiguously she raises her hands, exposing a face that I could imagine has grown bonier. 'Shall we go to the theatre, then?'
She could almost be proposing a night at a show. At least the excursion will take us out of the kitchen, which feels shrunken by the heat. As soon as I push back my chair she jumps up, and my father rises grudgingly to his feet. 'Let's see what there is to see,' I say as though I'm eager.
TWENTY - IT STIRS
'Haven't we been this way before?'
'He'll be asking us next if we're there yet, Bob.'
'No, I'm saying I think we have. I'm sure we've passed this roundabout once.'
'Do you think I wouldn't remember?'
'He doesn't mean that, Bob. Don't confuse your father. Everything looks the same, that's all. Is it along there? I might know if they hadn't taken all the names away.'
'Nobody's done anything with any names. Don't talk daft, Sandra.'
'I know they haven't really. I was only joking. It's at the end of a road, I'm sure.'
My father is driving us north through if not out of Preston. I'm convinced that an elaborate detour accompanied by muted cursing has returned us to the same five-way intersection planted with a Christmas tree that spreads its lowest branches almost to the edge of the grassy ring. Their shadows twitch like spiders' legs groping over the snow. Now we're across the intersection, and my mother inhales shrilly at the hint of a skid as we follow the route she suggested. It's the second exit, somewhere between a quarter to and ten to if the roundabout were a clock.
The suburb has been simplified by the weather. While there was no trace of snow in the town centre, here it fattens the trees and erases the names of the wide streets. Light encircles the roots of the streetlamps and spills out of some of the broad white-headed detached houses across their colourless lawns; otherwise the route is dark. The night seems to coop up the stale heat of the Mini, which feels even more airless than the kitchen did. I'm thinking of proposing that we end the search before the icy roads or the distractions of my parents' arguments can grow more dangerous when my mother cries 'It's that way, isn't it? That one.'
She's waving her forefinger to steer the car left where the road forks. Haven't we already driven past the house on the corner, or was there another garden crowded with pallid dwarfish shapes that must be ornamental gnomes encased in snow? On the other hand, I don't think the houses in the street gave way to shops. Both rows of shops are boarded up, and snow is heaped against most of the doors. All the upstairs flats are dark, except for one that flickers with ashen light surely too colourless for a fire. None of this is encouraging, but my mother says 'Isn't that it? There's nowhere else to go.'
Indeed, the street comes to a dead end beyond two broken streetlamps. The barely visible glow of the moon behind the padded sky outlines the hulk of an unlit building. Very little identifies it as a theatre apart from a line of rusty protrusions where the awning must have been, twelve feet or so up the grey stone façade, and the pairs of faces carved lower down, their theatrical grimaces blurred by age or the dimness. Boards sprayed with large dripping initials are nailed across a door in the left-hand corner. 'That's it, then,' says my father. 'Don't you want a closer look, Simon?'
'May as well as long as I'm here.'
My father has hardly scraped the tyres along the kerb in front of the theatre when my mother darts out of the car. I hurriedly follow in case she slips on the icy carapace of the pavement, but neither the ice nor her limp prevents her from reaching the door. Beyond the broken lamps the deserted white street resembles a set, and only the cold that displays our dim breaths seems to make it real. My mother squints through a gap between two scrawled boards. 'Bring the flashlight, Bob,' she calls.
He shakes his head and grabs the item from under the dashboard. As he slams the car door he thrusts the flashlight at me. 'Hurry up, Simon,' my mother urges, stamping to fend off the cold or with impatience.
As I pick my way to her I realise that quite a few people must have used the pavement recently for the ice to be so uneven. Presumably there's a short cut past the theatre to the streets behind it. I pass my mother the flashlight, and she fumbles to switch it on with a hand that's swollen by a stuffed glove. She pokes the beam at the gap and peers through the disc of glaring light on the boards. 'Is someone in there?' she says and even more enthusiastically 'Hello?'
'Quiet down, Sandra. What do you want people to think?'
'Which people? Show me any. There's either someone in there or it's – '
She interrupts herself by knocking on the boarded door. When her glove muffles her thumps she turns the flashlight around. 'Sandra,' my father protests, which doesn't deter her from pounding on the boards with the end of the barrel sheathed in rubber. Amid the reverberations I hear a smothered metallic clank. She hasn't broken the flashlight, since the light continues to flail in the air. The next moment the door falters inwards. 'Good God, woman,' my father grumbles, 'what have you done now?'
As she trains the flashlight beam on the opening I see that the boards have been sawn through on either side of the entrance. While the door is shut they look intact. My mother knees the door through her quilted winter overcoat and leans into the gap. 'There he is,' she murmurs.
The beam has drawn the remains of a face out of the dark. It's a poster on the wall across the lobby, where the obscurely patterned wallpaper has sprouted whitish fur. The poster isn't just illegible with age; the features of its subject are distorted beyond recognition – they look puffed up with a pale fungus. 'Let's see what else we can find,' my mother says. 'Open the door for your old mum.'
'Do you think we should? If you or dad fall and hurt yourselves – '
'We've been out of your life long enough. We want to help with our book,' she says and bumps her shoulder hard against the door.
Rather than let her bruise herself I give it a shove, and it swings wide with a grinding of rubble that I feel more than hear. As my mother limps eagerly into the foyer, the flashlight beam illuminates the box office. The giant cobweb that billows in its depths is the shadow of cracks in the pay-box window. I'm hastening after her when my father demands 'How far are you two proposing to go?'
As she and the light turn to him I notice that the inside of the door locks with a metal bar, which couldn't have been fastened securely. 'As far as Simon needs to,' she declares and spins around once more. The glistening pelt of the walls appears to stir as if the theatre has drawn a wakeful breath. High in the darkness overhead the dusty tendrils of a chandelier grope like an undersea creature for us, or at least their shadows do. The mass of filaments pretends it hasn't moved as the flashlight beam settles on the cracked window. 'Is that something for you?' my mother wonders aloud.
A white lump is poking ove
r the counter beyond the glass. Is it a misshapen plastic bag or a wad of paper? Neither strikes me as promising, but perhaps my mother can discern the marks printed on it. She reaches under the window and strains to hook the object with her gloved fingertips. It appears to wobble jelly-like before slithering off the counter. I don't care for the resemblance to a sagging face that has ducked out of sight, but this apparently doesn't trouble my mother. 'Well, that wasn't much help,' she says. 'Let's see in here.'
As she heads for the doors to the auditorium my father tramps into the lobby. His tread shivers the carpeted floorboards more than I like. 'Are you done yet?' he demands.
It's only the unsteadiness of the flashlight beam that lends the double doors a furtive movement, of course. 'Oh, Bob, where's your sense of adventure?' my mother says. 'You never used to be like this.'
'I must have grown up. Someone round here has to.'
'Then it's a good job we haven't, isn't it, Simon?' she giggles and pushes the left-hand door with the flashlight.
The beam shrinks as if the dark has closed a fist around it. The door totters backwards with a creak of its metal arm, and the light sprawls into the auditorium. It illuminates the nearer sections of about a dozen rows of seats divided by the aisle. When my mother limps through the doorway the light finds more of them and outlines boxes full of darkness above the stalls, but falls well short of the stage. I'm about to wonder if the batteries are up to any further exploration when my mother says without much breath 'What are those?'
Several pale shapes are huddled in seats close to the walls. Surely they're stirring only because the magnified light is wavering. My mother limps along the aisle and swings the trembling light from side to side. 'Keep up with her,' my father growls at my back.
The Grin of the Dark Page 14