‘I don’t know, Aidan. I don’t know. She couldn’t. That’s what I was trying to work out. If there’s any way, any way at all, out of this … mess.’
The way he held his bent-over head though told me he hadn’t come up with anything during that whole night he’d been away. Not one single solution.
Daniel was crouching down in a corner of the room, staring at the white and brown heaps. ‘If we sorted through it,’ he said slowly, like he was trying to persuade himself, ‘took out the really important things and made sure they were delivered, wouldn’t that help? Loads of it’s junk mail, isn’t it? Nobody’ll care about that. That way, when the police arrive, at least it’ll look like somebody made an effort. Like it wasn’t all totally abandoned.’
I don’t know how serious he was being. I think he only said it because somebody needed to say something, the silence was building, unbearable. But then I remembered the judge in Matthew Greenwood’s trial. I had all those courtroom words memorised. Among the items you attempted to destroy were irreplaceable family photographs and a present for a sick child – singling those things out as really bad and deserving of extra-special punishment. If the equivalent important items in all this mail had been delivered, then that was one accusation that could never be made in court.
It’d be easy too, to separate the mail like that. You just looked at the postmark, the corporate logo, the way an item’d been addressed. Yes, those important items, if we could sort them, if there weren’t too many of them …
‘And because your mum’s in hospital,’ Daniel continued, ‘the mitigating circumstances would be really strong, when it comes to court.’
Mitigating Circumstances, by the way, are what lawyers call having a Bloody Good Excuse. And the thing about excuses is sometimes they work, don’t they?
‘Court,’ said Dad. ‘Christ.’
‘We’ve got to do it,’ I said. ‘Dad, what do you think? Dad?’
‘There’ll be too much.’ He had his head up now facing us but the voice was the same dead-sounding one I’d heard him use when we drove to Tredegar House that time.
‘At least we’ve got to try. Come on, Daniel.’
We went out to the garden, the two of us. Darkness was coming on fast like it does in winter and the cloud from earlier was thinning so it looked like a clear sub-zero night lay ahead. Curtains were drawn up and down the terrace, nobody interested in looking out. Warm yellow windows, the soft bass murmur of televisions. Haxforth followed but he didn’t join us when we went inside the shed and began gathering and carrying the armfuls of mail into the house. He stared up into the night sky, the big plastic lunchbox safe under his arm. A few stars were visible already. It didn’t seem right asking him to do physical work, not after everything he’d been through.
The cold-slapping air brought a new urgency. Through the kitchen window I saw the microwave clock. 16.23. Little by little the shed emptied and the lounge filled up. Dad, staring into space, hadn’t budged from the sofa.
When the mail was inside and the shed was a normal shed with old rusting tools and nothing else, Daniel and I began sorting.
One corner for the important stuff, the mail that really mattered. The letters from hospitals, letters of condolence, letters offering help. Cheques, passports, benefits, money needed. Red gas bills. Pay now or we’ll cut you off, smack in the middle of winter. And within that corner, sorting into piles, putting everything into street and house order, like I’d been doing all along upstairs.
The rest of the room for the junk. Buy our pizzas. Win a holiday with our credit cards. Been turned down for a mortgage? Lose weight in the New Year. Life insurance, should a loved one die. Super-fast broadband. Special offers, a second pair of glasses half price. Buy this, get that for free. Dear valued customer …
‘You’ve been going out, trying to deliver it yourself?’ Dad said, after he’d watched us for a few minutes.
I nodded.
‘How many times have you done that?’
‘Don’t know, lost count. Every morning …’
‘In this weather,’ he said to himself. ‘Him too?’
‘He just started helping me,’ I said. ‘That’s Daniel. He’s in my history class.’
Another couple of minutes went by in silence.
‘You’re doing it wrong,’ Dad said. ‘Spending too much time on the detail. Here, let me show you.’
He bent forward and grabbed a handful of mail and reordered it. His movements were stiff and jerky, robot-like, but still he was a lot faster at it than either of us.
Then he went down on all fours and took another handful and sorted it and then he arranged the piles into a better order and after that there were three of us working through this mass of mail, not two.
For a long while nobody spoke, only focused on what needed to be done.
‘Most of it’s junk anyway,’ Daniel said at last, throwing aside yet another handful of envelopes.
‘That’s how Royal Mail makes most of their money these days,’ Dad told him. ‘Everybody knows it’s rubbish. Not that that stops them telling us how important it is all the time.’
He seemed to be getting a bit more fluid now. The robot-jerkiness was gone and his face wasn’t so white. ‘Can’t he help?’ he said, looking into the kitchen and through to the window beyond where Haxforth’s dark outline could just be made out in the garden.
‘He can’t read,’ Daniel said. ‘The names and addresses won’t mean anything to him.’
‘He can’t read? What – at all?’
I shook my head.
‘What is he, some homeless type?’
‘Yeah.’ It seemed easier, just saying that and nothing else.
‘Why’d you do it, Aidan? Telling them he was your grandfather. Taking that bird in there. I don’t get it. I don’t understand why you’d do a thing like that.’
‘I didn’t mean it to happen! I thought …’
‘Thought what?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said miserably. ‘I screwed up big time.’
‘That makes two of us.’ Dad put his hands together, pressed the joined-together fingertips to his mouth for a long moment. His eyes were closed, too. I don’t really know what he was doing just then. Trying to pull everything in perhaps and make himself stronger somehow. Or making a wish, or deciding something. When he went back to the sorting, he attacked it like a demon.
At 18.28 I ran upstairs and hauled out the leftover mail from under my bed because we were nearly done. I didn’t like the idea of the cops and Royal Mail investigators poking around my private space. Downstairs Dad was already bundling the mail, the important mail, together with red rubber bands. There was a lifetime’s supply of those, littering the floor.
The piles were big – the neat organised batches. Maybe, possibly, they could be delivered before seven o’clock tomorrow morning. But the junk mail – no chance. Only by standing back rather than being on hands and knees among it could you appreciate how much there was. Then you got perspective. It was massive and mountainous, solid snowdrifts of mail, a cliff-face of piled-high post.
It could never be delivered on time.
Ignore it anyway and concentrate on the real stuff, the real mail that mattered to real people. Concentrate on those Mitigating Circumstances.
‘We need our bikes,’ I said to Daniel, thinking how stupid it’d been, leaving them back at Annandale Avenue.
I moved towards the door but Dad put a hand on my shoulder. He was standing up straighter than before. Haxforth was forgotten. What I’d done at the hospital was forgotten – or forgiven.
‘I don’t ever want you delivering post again in your life,’ he said. ‘Never, ever again.’
‘There’s too much for one person, you’ll never do it …’
‘Just help me get it in the car.’
‘But what if someone sees you?’
Dad had his coat and bag on already – his winter Royal Mail gear. ‘I’ll have to risk it. If anyone asks, I’ll
roll my eyes and tell them it’s Christmas overtime. Tonight’s going to be the coldest night of the year anyway. That’s what they’ve been saying on the radio. The streets’ll be empty in an hour or two.’
You could see he wasn’t going to change his mind.
We carried the bundles out to the car and arranged them geographically, on the back seat, on the front seat, in the boot, in the footwells. Then Dad took some black sacks out from under the kitchen sink and used them to cover the bundles over. No point asking for trouble, he said.
I stood by the gate with Daniel and watched him get into the car.
‘Promise me one thing,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Promise you won’t try to deliver any of that junk that’s inside. Not one single item.’
‘But—’
‘It’ll have to stay where it is. There’s too much. I can’t do anything about it and neither can you. I’ll be here tomorrow morning, ready to face the music. That’s what I should’ve done a long time ago.’
‘Give us some of the real stuff then. We can do Annandale Avenue and round there.’
‘No. I’ve got time, if I start now. You’ve done enough.’ He turned the key in the ignition. ‘Well?’
‘I promise,’ I muttered.
‘And him?’
‘I promise too.’
So then I knew it needed to be a real one, if Daniel said it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dad. ‘About everything.’
He closed the door carefully.
The car made almost no sound as it drove into the night.
Chapter 40
‘Why did your father go to the trouble of stealing so much, if he wasn’t going to open any of it?’
Haxforth motioned with his head through into the lounge. He was back inside the house, standing by the kitchen table. The lid of the plastic lunchbox was off and with one hand he was lining the inside with grass and twigs that must’ve come from our garden. The other he held flat against the open rim, to stop Old Beautiful escaping.
‘He wasn’t stealing it,’ I told him. ‘He just didn’t deliver it.’
‘Aidan’s been trying to do that, but there’s too much – what with Christmas and everything,’ Daniel said.
‘It’s getting you into trouble, is that right?’
I nodded. Talk about understatement of the century.
We bent down, Daniel and me, peered into the lunchbox. Up close I saw how there were cracks in the skin of Haxforth’s fingers. Lots of people get that in wintertime though, cracked skin.
Old Magic, that’s what he’d said. Old Magic made Old Beautiful and it made me.
When? How?
Well, Old Beautiful wasn’t looking too lively now, that was for sure. All the haywire energy from when it’d got loose in Mum’s room was gone. The pustules on its face seemed to’ve dissolved or got soggy somehow, like when you do a painting in school but you use too much water and it runs. Its eyes were clear enough though and they were still sending out their black message BEWARE. In some way I couldn’t understand it hardly even seemed to be a bird any more, more like some spectral presence, only halfway existing.
When he’d finished lining the lunchbox Haxforth snapped the lid with the stabbed-through air holes back into place. I looked at Daniel and he looked at me and I think we both felt relief, that thing being locked away safe.
Haxforth went through into the lounge and stared at the cliff-face of junk mail. So did I. That was the easy thing to do – just stare and stare and think about the amount of work needed to deliver it all. For a few minutes, when Dad had snapped back into life, I’d thought that maybe we could get out of this situation altogether. But now looking at it mountainous like the scrag-end of some volcanic explosion (and remembering how much Royal Mail valued this stuff), I knew there wasn’t really any hope at all. The police were still going to arrest Dad, Mum was worse not better, I was heading direct for the nearest care home.
There’d been a time, once, when I’d honestly thought I could do something about it – the future, I mean. Thought I could alter or affect it in some way, have some control. But now I saw it for what it was, an incoming meteor, red-burning, fierce-frictioned, undeflectable.
‘You want to get rid of it?’ Haxforth said.
‘What do you think?’
He walked around the avalanche. Ran a hand through it. ‘It’s a pity,’ he said. ‘My brother would happily take it off your hands, but there’s too much to carry, far too much.’
‘You can’t just dump it somewhere,’ Daniel said. ‘Sooner or later someone’ll find it and …’
‘Dumping? I wasn’t proposing anything of the sort.’
‘What were you proposing then?’
‘Making it disappear. Forever. But look at it. If we had transport …’
I thought what a shame that was. A real crying shame in fact since we were going with him anyway, to find this long-lost brother of his.
Suddenly Daniel said, ‘EX05 JYP.’
‘What?’
He had the same expression on his face as when we’d skipped school that day of the museum. Only this time there was a load more fear. A load more excitement too.
‘Christy’s van. The Cloisters.’
‘What’s that got to do with …?’
Then my brain made the connection.
‘I can’t believe you’re even suggesting it,’ I said.
‘No, not that one. That’d be suicide. I just remembered seeing it earlier and, well – there must be others around like it.’
‘I still don’t believe it. Any van.’ All the same I felt my stomach coasting like crazy because I knew right in that moment that we’d have to try it, had no choice.
‘Haxforth,’ I said, ‘can you drive?’
‘Why do you ask?’
I had to find out if that was a thing he could do before I got too excited myself. He never seemed to belong to the age of computers and machines. But really there was no way of knowing. If only you could take a slice out of him and count the rings, I thought, like you do with a tree.
Daniel and I told him what we had in mind.
‘You mean a motorised getaway?’ I saw the flicker of a smile, coffee-coloured tooth-stumps behind thin white lips. ‘I believe I invented it.’
Chapter 41
The moon was coming up already, leaving Maresfield Crescent behind. It shone out over the rooftops like a big beaming spotlight. So much for my alliance. Where was the cloud when you needed it, the cloud that buried the light away the whole rest of the time? As we walked I handed Daniel a dark woollen scarf, one of two I’d taken from Mum’s room. The last thing we wanted, if we really were going to do this thing, was to be seen and identified – it being a small town with everyone knowing everyone else, or at least that’s how it seemed a lot of the time. Right away Daniel tied it tight, pulled it high over his mouth and nose. That was a good thing to do anyway. The cold came at you from everywhere, like being nipped at by a thousand icy pincers.
Haxforth hovered alongside, moving in and out of my field of vision. Most people his age’d never set foot outside on a night like this. The blood must pump slower by then and not reach certain parts of the body so well. Maybe the skin and bones start thinning too. But there he was, keeping up – Old Beautiful left safe behind in our kitchen – and sometimes you hardly even saw him, thanks to that silent shadowy way he had of moving.
I had a destination in mind, a specific destination. First though another place worth checking out, a courier van that was always parked nearby. Even as I thought it, the house came into view. With scarves up and hoods down Daniel and I stepped in closer. The van was ideal, but the Neighbourhood Watch sticker in the lighted house window wasn’t. Someone was moving around inside there too. This guy’d be dialling 999 in about two seconds flat. Concealed faces wouldn’t help much if police cars came out looking for us. Straightaway we moved on.
Our big chance lay four streets on. There was almost nobod
y about, one or two figures only hurrying by with heads down. Dad, or the radio, must’ve been right about this being the coldest night of the year. House after house after house and all the roads endless it seemed. Finally we saw it, the vehicle I’d noticed many times and which I knew’d be empty since it was part of a removals business. It was parked kerbside and for a moment, drawing closer, thinking this was possible, I heard the blood-drums start up in my head.
Then, ‘It’s boxed right in,’ Daniel said. ‘Look at it.’
He was right. Standing parallel in the middle of the road I saw how everything was bumper to bumper. Unless one of the neighbouring cars shifted first, it’d be impossible to manoeuvre out.
‘This was actually a pretty stupid idea. Perhaps we should head back …’
‘You were the one who thought of it,’ I said.
‘It just came out. When you stop to think about—’
Quickly Haxforth pushed us away. There was a curtain twitching, a face peering from a nearby window.
There were others, seen and identified as we roamed the frozen streets: one that looked perfect until a blinding halogen snapped on from an adjacent house, another that when Haxforth opened it up was full of timber … You think there are vans everywhere, but when you start looking for them, there really aren’t. At least there weren’t that night, not ones we could use anyway.
We kept moving though. Daniel didn’t say anything more about going back to Maresfield Crescent. By then we all knew exactly where we were headed. It was like fate or something was leading us right there.
The Cloisters are those new-builds, one snail-shaped street interlocking inside others and all the houses like neat square boxes. The place looks like it’s dropped out of a cereal packet. But standing on its corner we saw every door fortressed now against the winter. Double glazing everywhere. That was good, it’d help deaden noise from the street.
The van stood on a brick-paved driveway, its windows icing over already. Daniel had been right, there was no doubting it belonged to Christy. Even without the registration plate I’d’ve recognised it, the battered-up bodywork that made it so different to all the other smart silver cars parked on the street.
Why I Went Back Page 16