Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  ‘Anna.’ Laura had called her by her first name since she could speak but it sounded different now. ‘I take your point, but you are telling the story from their point of view and that makes it look circumstantial. If you tell it from your point of view, that three people produced some work that could cost a drug company millions of pounds and potentially embarrass the organization that seems to exist to control information. Then before it is released one is injured in a mysterious house fire, another is discredited and the third is driven from her home and then summoned to be told why work that last week was considered breakthrough social research is now flawed and irrelevant… Well, that’s a different story isn’t it?’

  Anna nodded. ‘But it’s a conspiracy story, Laura. There are dozens of them out there.’

  ‘It is if that is what you choose to call it,’ said Tom.

  ‘Tom, there are whole books written about how drug companies hide research and whole lumps of history written about how corporations, institutions, and organizations control the flow of information. Who is going to listen to me?’

  They were back at the B and B now. They had walked just under a mile along the seafront and past the clock tower to a row of houses next to a disused funfair. They stood outside as Anna spoke.

  Tom shook his head. ‘Christ, mum,’ he said quietly. ‘When did you become such a defeatist?’

  Anna looked at him and almost called him something unforgivable, like naïve. Instead she bit her lip and wondered about the answer. She looked at them together, because it was they who were together, Laura and Tom, with her as an extra, in the room next door and she thought: ‘Now. Just this moment I was defeated.’ But she didn’t say anything.

  The landlady, a tiny woman who never showed her teeth and had what sounded like the remains of an East European accent, showed her to her room.

  ‘Shall we walk up to Adam’s?’ Laura had asked. Anna nodded.

  ‘Leave about seven,’ said Tom and before disappearing with Laura he leaned forward and kissed his mum on the cheek. ‘Do you want to come in with us and chat? We have tea and coffee making facilities,’ he joked.

  Anna decided, for no good reason, that he didn’t mean it. ‘I think I will just lie down for an hour or two, if that’s OK?’ she said. And she did, listening for her son’s voice through the walls and wincing just a little when she heard Laura giggle.

  *

  Adam kicked as he swam, partly to remind himself that despite the cold his feet were still there and partly to swim against the current. He moved his arms a little quicker, too. Normally he had a long languid stroke: now it was shorter and faster and it made him breathe more heavily; at least, he thought it was the stroke. He knew that he was too strong a swimmer to be overcome by this current; he knew that if he had to he could swim to shore, let alone the boat, and although it was cold it couldn’t be less than ten degrees, so he wasn’t at risk. Yet he felt something in his chest, that tightening again. ‘This would be a bad time to have a heart attack’ he thought and then instantly he gave a name to his feeling. He was fearful. Not of drowning, not of being swept out to sea on a cold September tide, not of any specific thing: he was just feeling vulnerable. And he might have smiled to himself, breathing out into the salty water, because why else would he be coming out here every couple of days if it wasn’t to feel something?

  He looked up and the boat was about fifty yards away. He stopped in the water a moment. Alison was looking at him, still holding the fishing rod. He waved, he didn’t know why. She waved back and he put his face down and swam toward her, pulling his arms as far back under water as possible, aware that this was his last bit of swimming for the day and wanting to get as much from it as he could. Alison was sitting at the bow where he had left her, looking at him as he swam past her to the stern where the anchor was. In one movement, with one hand on the anchor rope and the other on the side of the boat, Adam swung a leg over the side and rolled in. The breeze began to cool the droplets of water that rolled down him. He grabbed his towel and wrapped himself in it, looked up at Alison and said: ‘It’s turned colder.’

  ‘Do you have another towel?’

  ‘I have a shawl thing in that bag,’ he said, pointing at a canvas bag under her seat. ‘Would you mind?’ Alison opened the bag. There was a black hooded towelling shawl on top; she took it out and tossed it over to him. There were also a spare pair of goggles, some strange fingerless gloves that must be for the water and a bottle of red wine. She took it out. ‘Do you have a bottle opener?’

  ‘Yeah, somewhere.’ Adam was shivering.

  ‘I brought a flask,’ she said. ‘Your lips are blue.’

  ‘You brought a flask? Clever woman.’

  Alison took a fat silver flask from her bag, unscrewed the top, poured tea into the top and handed it over. ‘It’s cow’s milk, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘And your lips are actually very blue.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Could you just hold it for a moment?’ Adam took the towel off his shoulders and quickly slipped the towelling shawl over his head. He took the tea, cupped his hands round it and held it close. ‘I didn’t expect it to be quite as cold as that,’ he said. ‘That was a bit silly. I should wear a wet suit.’

  ‘You swam a long way out,’ she said.

  ‘It probably looks further than it is,’ he said quietly, looking at the horizon.

  Adam sipped his tea. He didn’t feel as cold but was still shivering. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘But I have to get dressed. It normally doesn’t matter if I do that inelegantly but…’

  ‘It’s OK,’ smiled Alison, blushing slightly. ‘I’ll look away, and if I do catch sight of anything, I’ll put it down to the cold.’

  Adam laughed. ‘Just concentrate on your fishing.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But usually I get wine before the man gets undressed.’

  Adam took off his shorts under his robe, dried himself as best he could and got dressed quickly and without any grace whatsoever. ‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine, although I may add a very becoming hat to my developing trawler-girl look.’

  ‘Did you bring one?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She took a pale pink beanie hat from her bag and put it on. ‘There,’ she said self-consciously. ‘Glamorous enough?’

  Adam put on his pork pie hat and smiled. ‘You can get away with it. What else is in that magic bag?’

  ‘Oh nothing really: some distress flares, a taser, some cheese and onion sandwiches I found that were going cheap in M and S on the way down here. Do you get scared?’ The change in subject wasn’t accompanied by a change in tone; rather she was matter of fact, looking at the end of her fishing line which was somewhere in the descending gloom.

  ‘Not usually, no,’ Adam said quietly. ‘I did today, just a little bit.’

  ‘Why? What was different?’

  ‘The young man who came into my shop when you were there a few days ago? It is possible he is my son. 50/50 I believe. Not that he came here to discuss that. He hasn’t really mentioned it and neither have I. He is looking for his mum.’

  ‘Were you with his mum for a long time?’

  ‘I wasn’t with her at all. We sort of worked together, in an asylum, and not for very long either.’

  ‘I visited one of those places once, when I was training. Fascinating.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He shrugged.

  ‘So what part of maybe having a twenty-something year old son you have never met are you scared of?’

  Adam looked at what was left of his tea. ‘Fancy a glass of wine?’

  ‘Are there glasses?’

  ‘No, there are plastic cups at the bottom of that bag.’

  Alison rummaged around at the bottom of the bag while Adam opened the wine.

  ‘It’s not the boy, I don’t think. Not, yet anyway. I think it was the past. I was
involved in some… I witnessed the death of a colleague and I have always felt…’ He stopped and looked at her: her nose was red and her eyes were watering. ‘I’m sorry, you look cold.’

  ‘I’m fine. Please carry on. You felt what?’

  ‘Are you key-wording me?’ he smiled.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter what I felt. It seems that the man who died, who killed himself and I had no idea as to why and I didn’t see any sign… apparently he was dying anyway. I found that out today.’

  Alison sipped her wine. ‘That’s a big thing to have to process,’ she said quietly and saw him wince slightly at her language. ‘I don’t normally drink red,’ she said. ‘Do you have lights on this thing?’

  ‘It is getting dark isn’t it? Do you want to head back?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know what the rules are about rowing boats at sea in a fading light.’

  ‘We can head back, best be on the safe side. It gets misty round here quite quickly sometimes. What time is it?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Six fifteen. We haven’t caught anything.’

  ‘Vegetable curry it is. And even I can cook that.’ He began to row back toward the lights of the harbour.

  ‘They say you can’t change the past,’ Alison said.

  ‘Who does?’ smiled Adam.

  ‘They do, agony aunts, cod philosophers, various songs, but we know it changes all the time, don’t we?’

  She sounded soft, close to kind, and despite Adam doubting his every instinct he smiled and said: ‘Was I wrong about psychologists, too?’

  She laughed and shook her head. ‘No, I doubt it.’

  When they got back to the harbour he threw his swimming bag and the canvas bag from under the seat up on to the jetty and took her hand as she stepped from the boat. Her hand was cold, but he was self-conscious enough to let go the moment she set foot on dry land. ‘What was it you wanted to talk about?’ he asked.

  She hesitated and looked embarrassed. ‘Another time. Anyway, that was in return for cooking lessons that you no longer need.’

  He looked at her: her eyes were almost as red as her nose and her hair was tangled and dry. ‘I’d like to invite you to dinner,’ he said. ‘But I don’t have enough chairs and I think it’s going to be an odd dynamic.’ As soon as he had spoken he thought that that was a stupid thing to say, but she helped him.

  ‘That’s nice of you, really, but I agree. Do you like Tom’s mother?’

  Adam thought for a moment. He had no idea. He assumed so. ‘She’s in trouble,’ he said.

  ‘Um, about the basement?’ Alison blushed slightly. ‘I am being a little forward, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘I was just wondering… have you ever thought of maybe letting it out?’

  *

  Anna may have fallen asleep. It was dark outside and a late afternoon gloom hung over her room. The adrenalin of the previous few days had faded. Mostly, she found as she opened her eyes and stared at a grotesque painting of a crying child on the wall opposite her, she felt sad. Her adult life had been an exercise in autonomy. She worked on small projects, in corners of whatever world she found herself in, because there she found some meaning and something like control. It was like swimming in the streams rather than the rivers: less chance of coming across something big enough to eat you and less chance of getting swept along by the current.

  In truth, she didn’t really imagine the research project would be more than a small-scale investigation into what amounted to the value of kindness in a decent place. She thought the most important thing about it was that someone, somewhere, was prepared to ask those sorts of questions or, more importantly, fund them. In an age where everything had to be measurable, explainable and vaguely scientific, someone had asked about kindness and she had sort of imagined that the next step from asking about it might involve trying to do something that made it more available, both to the people who needed it and the people who offered it.

  She or Paul or Meena may have joked at some point about proving that psycho-pharmacology was mostly a placebo, but it was a burlesque joke, born not of excited curiosity but an embodied surety that, no matter what, science and industry win. Deep down, she wasn’t surprised their research findings were not going to touch the world in any useful way. She was only surprised by just how unsubtle and brutal the mechanisms that stopped it were. Now, mostly she was tired. For a couple of days she had felt part of something beyond her control. Pursued by people who didn’t have normal rules, trying to outwit people who could destroy a man’s reputation at will. Now she was a tired old woman in a B and B in Margate, trying not to hear her son having sex. The only thing she was waiting for was dinner with someone she hadn’t seen for twenty-four years, followed by a long trek across the country to be told that actually she was rubbish at her job. Tired, but still capable of having a shower, washing her hair and doing something to make her eyes look less like Alice Cooper’s.

  By the time Tom and Laura were tentatively knocking on her door she was applying lipstick and standing a little straighter than when she had arrived.

  ‘You look good, mum,’ said Tom. ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘I may have. Laura you look lovely.’ Laura was wearing a black dress with a wild Pollock-esque print over black leggings. She was also wearing make-up. Anna had never seen her in make-up before.

  They walked toward Adam’s shop along the seafront. The moon was bright enough to silhouette low grey clouds and the smell of the sea was heavy.

  ‘Tom, have you had the chance to talk to Adam much?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Anna walked on silently, unsatisfied by the answer. ‘I mean have you had the chance to…?’

  ‘I know what you mean, mum, about him. Maybe, who knows, because way back in the Eighties nobody was keeping records, but it is possible that he is my dad.’ He had intended to sound lightly sarcastic but it had come out with more irritation than he had intended.

  ‘Since when has it mattered?’ Anna snapped.

  ‘Since I met him, actually. It was OK, or at least tolerable, knowing that my father existed in the abstract and had no more chosen to not know me than he had to help me be conceived. I sort of got that. But now he is potentially not in the abstract. Fifty-fifty, mum? Those are rubbish odds.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Should I have slept with two or three other people that week to make it a bit more of a lottery?’

  ‘Mum, stop it, this is not about you, this is about me.’

  ‘Yes, Tom, it is about you, but it was about me and how I could get you, and that is all I wanted.’ She stopped speaking. She was breathing heavily, perhaps through anger, perhaps something else. ‘I’m sorry.’ She hated apologizing. It was OK if it was a small apology, if you bumped into someone or accidentally took the last Rolo, but for big things? ‘Don’t take a step backward,’ she had told him as a child. ‘It encourages people to think they can take advantage.’ ‘I am sorry, Tom.’

  They walked on for another five minutes in silence before Tom took his arm out of his girlfriend’s and looped it into his mum’s.

  Adam had not had three other people in his flat since he moved in. He had enough chairs, although two of them were plastic, and he brought a table up from the shop and covered it with a sheet. Beyond that, he bought a bottle of wine on the way back from the harbour and then went back and bought another, because Alison said one would not be enough. He said goodbye to her outside the shop. She was going to see her brother, she said, and get changed. She would pop by the day after tomorrow to see if he had had the chance to think about her suggestion. In the meantime she gave him her mobile phone number; she suggested he put it straight into his phone. He suggested she write it on a piece of paper, which he put in his pocket.

  ‘So you
were after me for my basement,’ he said sarcastically.

  She didn’t say anything. It didn’t warrant a reply.

  Adam had grown everything he cooked except the rice, which was from a local shop, and the curry powder, which he had bought in bulk in India. Before he started cooking he had considered shaving, chose not to, put Aladdin Sane by David Bowie on his record player, the same record player he had had in London, and had a shower. As he cooked he sang harmonies to Lady Grinning Soul, not because of anything he was feeling but because cooking itself was not enough to engage him.

  When Anna saw the flat she said: ‘It’s smaller than the last one.’

  The living room and kitchen were part of the same long room. Not a particularly big one, but big enough for a small kitchen at one end and a table for four in the middle of a grey, carpeted one-sofa living space.

  ‘Bloody sight cheaper too.’

  ‘Did you own that flat? I had no idea.’

  ‘I co-owned it. Catherine made a killing thanks to my desire to leave quickly.’

  ‘Do you keep in touch?’

  He shook his head. ‘She’s an MEP, apparently.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yeah. Apparently.’

  ‘Blimey, you got off lightly there.’

  Adam laughed. ‘Yes, yes I did.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Nobody important,’ said Adam. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘We brought wine,’ said Laura.

  ‘I love your record player.’ Tom was working his way through Adam’s albums.

  ‘Pick something to play,’ Adam said.

  But Tom’s attention had strayed to the guitar in the corner. ‘That’s rather lovely too.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Adam who was in the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ said Tom with exaggerated surprise.

  Adam smiled and shrugged. ‘Do you play?’

  ‘Does he?!’ said Laura and Anna in unison.

  ‘Help yourself,’ said Adam.

  Tom paused. It didn’t seem polite and he worried that it might look like showing off. ‘Maybe later.’