Always the Sun

by Neil Cross

  Cigarette smoke drifted down. He closed the door on it. Before EastEnders, he dialled Domino’s Pizza. He called Stuart and Jamie down when the pizzas arrived. They mixed and matched slices, piling them on plates that had not yet been used. Without thanking Sam, the boys sat on the floor and commandeered the television. Stuart went home at 9.45 p.m.

  Sam crushed the pizza boxes and put them in a bin bag, and loaded the dishwasher. Then he stretched out on the sofa with his hands knitted behind his head.

  He said, ‘No smoking in the bedroom.’

  Jamie grunted. His head bobbed twice on his shoulders; an irritated affirmative.

  ‘It’s a mug’s game anyway,’ said Sam.

  ‘You do it.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘Shot down,’ said Jamie. He made a gesture with clenched fists, like a triumphant sprinter.

  Sam rolled a sheet of Kleenex into a ball and chucked it. It bounced off Jamie’s head.

  Jamie rubbed at his crown.

  ‘Oi,’ he said. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Watch your language.’

  Jamie chucked the Kleenex back over his shoulder.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said again. ‘Please.’

  Sam laughed and changed the channel.

  3

  Unka Frank turned up late in July.

  Far away, along the quiet length of Magpie Avenue, they heard the familiar coughing of an antiquated, badly tuned motorcycle. Jamie stopped what he was doing and looked up, his jaw canted like a deer tasting the air at the forest’s edge. Then he ran to the window and waited there until Unka Frank came round the corner.

  Frank was a thin man with bad teeth and long hair, who liked motorbikes. More than twenty years ago, Mel had introduced him to their parents and announced their intention to marry. Frank was thirty-five and of no fixed abode. Mel was eighteen.

  A miscalculated ultimatum from their father—that Mel finish with Frank, or never darken his door again—made Mel technically homeless and, because she chose never to see her mother or father again, an elective orphan.

  She was also pregnant. According to the points system by which the Town Council tallied people’s lives, she and Frank qualified almost at once for a house on the Robinwood Estate. By the time they lost the baby it was too late: their names were on the tenancy agreement.

  The marriage lasted for thirteen years. This, as Mel was still glad to point out, was twelve years longer than many had predicted. Frank had proved to be a good and attentive husband, in his own way, and Mel to be a good and attentive wife, in hers. When they needed money, Frank worked hard for it. When they didn’t, he didn’t. Mel barely worked at all. They had no children, although for several years they tried, and they loved one other with an unaffected, infectious merriment.

  Nobody knew for certain why they separated. One night, they argued about something stupid. Neither could remember exactly what. But whatever it was, Mel told Frank to get out of her sight and he did—for fifteen months. Mel sometimes drunkenly rehearsed her last vision of him, Frank her husband: his spine erect, spluttering haughtily down the road on his elderly Triumph.

  When he returned, it was not as a married man.

  In a variety of ways, Unka Frank was among the least trustworthy men Sam had ever met. He’d not only served at least one prison sentence before meeting Mel; he’d spent a year inside since they separated.

  In partnership with a shambling, ursine biker friend called Yeti Moocow, Frank spent a number of lean months working as a landscape gardener. While he and Yeti were constructing a gazebo in a particular suburb of Manchester, it came to Frank’s attention that certain wealthy dog lovers, mostly elderly, smothered their pets with the kind of affection more commonly reserved for very young children.

  At much the same moment, it further occurred to him that the police, who were required to target their limited resources, were unlikely to share this depth of attachment. Frank thought the police wouldn’t be interested in investigating a few abducted West Highland terriers.

  And he was right. Simply by doing some online research and bundling a series of lolloping, silver-brown Weimaranas or bewildered Afghans into the back of a Morris Traveller, followed by a couple of sinister phone calls, Unka Frank and Yeti Moocow made two-hundred thousand pounds in less than eighteen months.

  If the research was done well, and Frank ensured it was, the entire affair could be over in less than twenty-four hours. During this time, Frank and Yeti Moocow usually took their charge to the local park where, for a blithe hour, it was permitted to chase soggy, balding tennis balls, or gnaw promotional Frisbees. The hounds were seldom less than grateful; Great Danes and snuffling prize bulldogs paraded for Unka Frank like cantering ponies.

  Only once in this brief but remunerative dog-napping career did Frank’s research prove to be less than thorough. The master of his final victim had some familial (or possibly Masonic) senior-level connection to the police force. As soon as Yeti Moocow parked the patchouli- and fur-smelling Morris Traveller beneath a motorway flyover, ready to exchange their panting contraband for a bag of unmarked twenties, their car was penned in by wailing, blue-flashing police cars.

  Freed of his captors by a grim, uniformed dog-handler, Bonny Prince William immediately escaped the tearful embrace of his owner, bounding back to Frank’s spindly, welcoming arms. Such was Frank’s shrewd but fond affinity with animals. He had enjoyed kidnapping them. Each pampered poodle was like Patty Hearst to him.

  Although he served twelve months of a two-year sentence, Frank still believed this idea to be possessed of criminal genius.

  Frank had nearly completed a doctoral degree in Marine Biology.

  It was late one Christmas night when he told Sam about it. Jamie, a baby, was tucked away upstairs. Justine and Mel were asleep in their chairs. Head back and mouth open, Mel snored softly.

  Frank poured Sam a whisky and lit himself a cigar. Then he told Sam about a trip he’d taken in the early 1970s: a descent to the deepest part of the ocean. He’d been alone in a spherical submersible, a ball of steel. There was only room inside for one person. Frank told Sam about the slow descent through the swarming, teeming deep blue to the deeper gloom, the depths where sunlight did not penetrate. Even here, the ocean abounded with life.

  But Frank descended still further, to the edge of the Abyssal Plane. Here he encountered a darkness so terrible he could not properly speak of it. Several times he glimpsed the transient, flickering bioluminescence of species as yet unknown to science. And still he descended: a single, fragile point of light in eternal, freezing blackness. Finally, the lightless and utter solitude blew a network of psychic fuses behind Frank’s eyes. Panic swelled inside him. He yelled and howled and begged and demanded to be returned to the surface. It took a while. He was a long, long way down.

  When finally the submersible was landed on the deck, the crew had to lift Frank from it. He was a jabbering ruin in khaki shorts and cheap flip-flops. Two weeks later, he returned the remains of his research grant and flew back to England.

  Frank was never able to describe exactly what it was that terrified him to the point of madness. Sam wasn’t sure he was able to do so. When the Abyssal Plane was alluded to even tangentially, all the jest and tomfoolery deserted Frank’s hatchet face and he fell silent and introspective, staring at the blue Ace of Spades tattooed on his right forearm.

  It was Jamie, at two years old, who named him Unka Frank. It wasn’t the first nickname he’d acquired; Sam had also heard him called Carnie Frank. But it was the name he liked best. Frank made Jamie few promises, but he kept the promises he made. He rarely sent birthday cards, but he might turn up unannounced on a Sunday afternoon and offer to take Jamie to Brighton, or to a motorcycle rally, or deep sea fishing.

  Shortly after Justine died, Frank turned up to spend the weekend with them in Hackney. He took Jamie to the cin
ema, where they saw The Mummy Returns, and he came home clutching a litre bottle of Jack Daniel’s. That night Unka Frank and Sam worked their way through the bottle and didn’t mention Justine. Frank talked about his new bike, his new girlfriend, some bad acid he’d dropped at the Reading Festival in 1982, various high-paying construction jobs he always seemed to be on the verge of getting, the predatory habits of Great White Sharks. Every few minutes, he topped up Sam’s tumbler, and Sam didn’t remember the end of the evening. When he woke, still on the sofa, Frank was gone. But before leaving, he’d wrapped Sam in a towel for a blanket, removed his shoes and left out for him a tumbler of water and two aspirins.

  He hadn’t seen Unka Frank since. Mel said he might be there to help them move in, but he hadn’t turned up and had never explained his absence.

  Jamie loved him. So did Sam.

  They waited at the window and watched the bike chug to the kerb.

  ‘Go and let him in,’ said Sam.

  Jamie broke for the door and launched himself along the garden path. Astride the bike, Unka Frank waved a gauntleted hand and dismounted, somewhat stiffly. Jamie threw himself into Frank’s arms. Frank hugged him back.

  Still at the window, Sam smiled.

  Frank straightened. He removed his helmet and upended it, then stuffed in the gauntlets. He posted his wrist through the open visor and wore the helmet like a handbag. He had a narrow, craggy face with a great beak of a nose.

  Sam thumped twice on the window. Frank looked up and smiled. His gold tooth glinted in the sunlight. He walked through the gate and down the path, bandy-legged as a cowboy with a ponytail at the nape of his neck.

  As soon as Frank came in, Sam could smell him—strong smells, but not unpleasant: fresh tobacco, engine oil, fresh sweat, leather. Exhaust fumes.

  Frank looked around.

  ‘This it, then?’

  ‘This is it,’ said Sam. He was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed.

  ‘Do you want to see my room?’ said Jamie.

  ‘In a minute, mate. Let me say hello to the old man.’

  ‘I’ve got PS2.’

  Frank assessed this information with a turned-out lower lip.

  ‘Nice one,’ he said, and nodded approvingly.

  Jamie looked at Sam.

  ‘Frank’s got a new bike,’ he said.

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘It’s a Triumph.’

  ‘It looks like a bit of a triumph,’ said Sam.

  Frank cackled. Phlegm rattled in his scrawny throat, silver-bristled round the jaw.

  ‘She needs a bit of twiddling,’ he said. ‘Here and there.’

  Frank’s bikes were always English and they always needed a bit of twiddling. When a bike didn’t need any more twiddling, Frank sold it and bought one that did. To Frank, twiddling was its own reward.

  Frank unzipped his jacket and dropped heavily upon the sofa. He set the helmet down next to him. It was black, and still bore the gummy edges where various stickers had been removed. He shrugged out of the jacket and dumped it on the floor. He wore a tight, washed-out Budweiser T-shirt. He sat there in his oily ripped jeans and biker’s boots and asked for a beer.

  Jamie ran to the fridge. They heard the pop and fizz of a bottle being opened, then Jamie ran back in to give the bottle to Frank. Sam rolled his eyes, then went to the kitchen and got a beer for himself.

  He got back to find Jamie cross-legged on the floor, wearing Frank’s helmet and gauntlets. Frank had propped his feet, crossed at the ankles, on the boy’s head. He was rolling a cigarette while Jamie continued the single, unbroken sentence he’d begun when Frank arrived.

  ‘Last time I was here,’ said Unka Frank, while Jamie’s prattling continued, unabated, at his ankles, ‘it was a building site. They were putting the kitchen in. Cowboys, like.’

  He licked the gummed paper and put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, then lit it with a brief, complex ballet of wrist and thumb and brass Zippo lighter.

  Sam sat on the floor, his back to the cool wall.

  ‘They did all right.’

  ‘Oh, they did all right,’ Unka Frank agreed. ‘Once Mel had said her piece.’

  He grinned; crooked teeth and gold. His little eyes were lost in complex tributaries of laughter lines and sun-wrinkles.

  He removed his feet from Jamie’s head.

  ‘Are you all right in there, sunshine?’

  Jamie raised the visor.

  ‘Do you want to play Gran Turismo?’

  ‘In a bit. You want to take that crash-hat off. It’s a bit hot in here.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Jamie,’ said Sam, ‘take off the helmet.’

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Frank. ‘He can wear it if he likes.’

  Jamie cocked his oversized head to one side.

  ‘See?’ he said, muffled. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Sam. He hugged his knees. ‘How are you, Frank?’ he said. ‘We missed you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Frank. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You know how it is,’ said Frank, although Sam didn’t know how it was, which was why he was asking. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t look like I was needed. Where’s all your stuff?’

  ‘He sold it,’ said Jamie. He put the visor down and began to breathe like Darth Vader.

  ‘You what?’

  Sam sipped lager.

  ‘It made sense,’ he said. ‘There was no point hiking it all the way from London. Half of it was knackered anyway.’

  ‘You had some nice stuff there. Designer and whatnot. There was that … cupboard thing. And the doodah.’

  Jamie began to walk like Frankenstein’s monster, his arms held horizontally before him.

  Sam leant to one side, to see past him, and made a dismissive face.

  ‘I didn’t want it,’ he said.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Unka Frank slapped his skinny shanks. He drained the bottle and loosed a mighty belch. Jamie stopped being Frankenstein and said, ‘Oh gross,’ with much evident pleasure. Frank offered him a skinny hand, blue-tattooed on the web between thumb and finger.

  He said, ‘Come on then, sunshine.’

  Jamie took his hand and Frank allowed himself to be dragged upstairs.

  Sam left his lager, half-drunk, in the fireplace. He went to the hallway, picked up the phone and invited Mel over. He checked his watch and then the weather, then went into the garden and lit the barbecue.

  Mel arrived in a Fiat Uno driven by Fat Janet. They’d each brought a bowl of salad and a couple of bottles of Frascati with screw-top lids. Fat Janet had also brought a portable stereo. They joined Sam in the garden, where he was barbecuing sausages, chicken wings and pork chops, flattening the meat with a greasy spatula and watching liquid fat dance and sizzle.

  Unka Frank and Jamie came down to join them. Frank had loosened his hair and it hung in two lank, grey-streaked curtains on either side of his fatless, haggard face. He hugged Mel and slapped Fat Janet’s arse.

  He said, ‘All right, Jan?’

  Then he knelt down and turned up the volume on the mini-CD player. Sam Cooke.

  Sam flipped a chop and sipped lager. Behind him, Unka

  Frank waltzed with Mel and Jamie waltzed, haltingly, with Fat Janet.

  He wouldn’t have believed it was still possible to be that happy—not even for an hour, in the summer, with Mel and Frank and Jamie and Sam Cooke on the stereo. But it was.

  4

  Early in September came Jamie’s first day at Churchill Comprehensive School. As the day approached, Sam grew more nervous on his behalf. He couldn’t sleep.

  He remembered his own first day at the same school. When he thought of himself, big and clumsy in his new uniform, he felt a ki
nd of pity, a strange desire to reach back through time and comfort himself. But it hadn’t been so bad for him. He was one of nearly three hundred First Years, blinking in the bright new light. And of course, he had Mel, his big sister. Mel was in the Third Year, as it then was, and Sam didn’t question that, for all they were sworn enemies at home, Mel would look after him at school. Mel had a reputation. Nobody messed with her, be it boy, girl or teacher. Sam believed then, as part of him believed now, that she was almighty and indestructible.

  Because the idea made Sam nervous, Mel took Jamie to shop for his uniform. She came round at 10 a.m., and they didn’t get back until late that afternoon. They’d bought everything Jamie needed: a new blazer, slightly too large in the shoulders and arms, to allow for growth, a yellow, blue and red striped tie, five polycotton white shirts, black Caterpillar boots and a full sports kit with reversible rugby sweater.

  Mel laid the stuff on the bed for Sam to inspect. It looked crisp and dense with the future. Sam looked at the school tie and felt his testicles retract. He remembered knotting an identical tie at his own throat. And he remembered the first few, terrified weeks of the first year. He remembered walking home at 3.40, dragging his bag on the pavement behind him.

  He hung the clothes in Jamie’s wardrobe. The sight of them, hanging there, made him feel sick, and he went to make a cup of tea.

  On what had become known as Jamie’s last night of freedom, Mel came round to cook a special tea. They had steak and chips and peas. It was well known that Mel cooked the best chips in Britain. They ate the meal on their knees, in front of the TV—a DVD of Attack of the Clones. Mel was loud and brash. Sam could tell she was nervous. Jamie seemed the most tranquil of the three of them. But he went to bed early, before the film had finished.

  Five minutes later, Sam pretended to Mel that he needed the lavatory. He sneaked upstairs, pausing and cupping his ear at Jamie’s bedroom door. He heard nothing. He wanted to knock on the door and march in there like a sitcom father, to sit on the edge of the bed and be strong and wise. But he didn’t feel strong and wise.