Dark Father

by Cooper, James

  Jasper looked at Father Hedley and saw a friend. A man he had spent time with over many years, eating, drinking, laughing. When he glanced at the Polaroid, he saw something he couldn’t even pretend to understand. It represented a rejection of every moral assumption Father Hedley had once vowed to defend. What could possibly have brought the man so low as to place him at damnation’s edge, his soul in turmoil?

  Jasper shook his head. “Mike,” he muttered, “what the devil have you done?”

  Father Hedley’s body seemed to slump against the sofa. His breathing was loud and uneven. He said nothing. As Jasper watched him, he realized that the old man sitting before him bore little resemblance to the man he thought he knew. Whatever identity he had assumed while they’d been apart, whatever mask Father Hedley wore when he wasn’t seducing his parishioners, it was far removed from the man Jasper was familiar with. The godforsaken figure seated opposite was a stranger; only a small part of Jasper could bring himself to pity the man his fall.

  “The Polaroid says Number 81,” Jasper said, trying to focus on what lay in front of him. “What does that mean?”

  Father Hedley was unable to look his friend in the eye. “You don’t want to know,” he said softly.

  “I’m damn sure I don’t,” Jasper said. “But I think you should tell me all the same.”

  Father Hedley placed his large hands on his knees and caught Jasper’s eye. “It’s something I regret,” he said, “with all my heart.”

  Jasper averted his gaze, disgusted both with the priest and with himself for feeling a quiver of sympathy.

  “I think we should leave,” Kate said, stepping forward. “We really don’t have time for this.”

  “She’s right, Jasper,” Alison said. “This is for others to deal with. Take the Polaroid and we’ll hand it to the police.”

  Jasper leaned forward and took the picture from Father Hedley’s hand. He buried it in the pocket of his jacket.

  “I’m so sorry, Jasper,” Father Hedley whispered.

  Jasper glanced up, their eyes no more than half a meter apart.

  “Me too, Mike,” he said. He thought for a moment, then added: “And if there is a God, I’m pretty sure you and your lot are doing your utmost to make him look a damn fool.”

  He moved out of the study and helped Kate gather Billy from the armchair. He was still fast asleep. The boy’s fringe lay in damp creases across his unlined brow.

  The four of them left the rectory in silence. No one looked back. As they clambered into the truck, it began to rain.

  * * *

  Half an hour after they’d gone, Father Hedley walked up the stairs to his bedroom. He moved across to a small writing desk and stopped. Atop the desk was a gold, unadorned box. He removed a small key from around his neck and unlocked it. He removed eighty Polaroid pictures without looking at them and held them for a moment in his hand. The weight of them almost drove him to his knees.

  He left the bedroom and carried the photographs down the stairs. He opened the front door of the rectory and walked the short distance to the church. He unlocked the door and stood in the nave, watching the morning light break through the stained glass windows in the north and south transepts. It was one of many things he would miss; standing alone in the church as the old joists creaked awake and gray light filled the apse had been one of his enduring pleasures. It was the time when he had felt closest to God.

  He walked to the vestry at the rear of the church and began to scout through the clutter he had always vowed to himself he would one day recycle. After a few minutes he recovered a thick length of rope among the altar linens and discarded robes. He remembered having used it to help corral the children during last Easter’s hunt for chocolate eggs; he had been up till midnight delicately placing dozens of them behind trees and flowers in the church grounds.

  He walked back towards the altar and stared at the dark beam above his head. He flung the Polaroids in the air and watched them fall like ash. They landed in a scuffle at his feet. He reached for the rope and set about fashioning a noose, remembering one of the boys approaching him after the hunt; devout and unsmiling, offering him one of the eggs.

  PART TWO: SCREAM WHEN YOU HEAR YOURSELF SCREAM

  “His face,

  There will be time and all time to observe

  In passing its passing resemblance to your own.

  And his voice, like a playback of your voice:

  This is going to feel precisely like death.”

  —Blake Morrison, “The Inquisitor”

  “Other things may change us,

  but we start and end with the family.”

  —Anthony Brandt

  CHAPTER 8: HOME

  When Frank first saw the boy, he thought he was being deceived by the rain. It was falling heavily and the boy was flitting through the downpour like something slightly out of focus, running in the churned-up mud by the side of the road. Frank peered through the windshield, his heart hammering fast. The wipers batted at the rain, colluding with Frank, laboring to provide an unobstructed view of his son. Was it Jake? Was it really him? He squinted again through the flooded glass. He was almost positive it was. The child had blond hair pasted to his forehead by the rain, but, more tellingly, he had the soft, unglazed features that Frank had committed to memory. The unique shape and fold of Jake’s innocent, unblemished face.

  For a moment, Frank was unsure how to proceed. His world had been flipped backwards, the last ten months casually crossed out as though nothing of note had happened in between. Could his son really be returned to him with such incidental simplicity, coolly handed back to him in passing, as he mindlessly rolled into another childless month? A part of him—a tired, uneasy part—suspected it was simply too good to be true; but there he was, running in front of him. His own son. Doing his best to outmaneuver the rain.

  Frank thought for a moment, listening to the wind, remembering back to the day on the hill, picturing the uncoiled arm—which in his head had morphed into a butcher’s hook—slowly withdrawing behind the tree. He heard Jake saying: He gave me Joey. He told me he was my new best friend. And as the rain drummed on the roof of the car, Frank felt something heavy inside his head come loose.

  He pulled the car onto the muddy trail and began to smile. If Jake could be taken from him in an instant, it seemed only logical that he could be returned to him that way too. Christ, he thought, if he’d been driving a little faster, or the rain had been falling a little harder, he might have missed him altogether. Would the fates really have been so cruel as to allow such a thing? Frank scowled as he turned off the engine; without hesitation, he thought.

  He stepped from the car and was immediately bombarded by the rain. He pulled his jacket over his head and sprinted down the waterlogged verge. An occasional car drifted down the washed-out road.

  “Jake!” he called, still running after the boy. The rain threw his voice back to him, merely confirming the distance between them. He vaguely wondered what in God’s name Jake was doing out here in the first place, but the notional conceit of why he was here was soon displaced by the mere fact that he was here at all. He was in no mood to question his good fortune.

  He continued on, struggling to maintain his footing in the wet earth.

  “Jake!” he called again. “JAKE! It’s Daddy!”

  Jake was about fifty yards in front of him. When he finally turned round, Frank’s throat went dry. He began to weep. Whatever had been incubating inside him began to grow.

  The boy looking back at him over his shoulder was Jake. From the low bank of his brow to the uncertain, fearful eyes, there was no denying that this boy was his son.

  Frank shouted to him again, but the boy glanced warily at him and continued to run.

  “It’s okay!” Frank yelled. “There’s no reason to be afraid, I promise. Everything’ll be fine now.”

  The boy was looking at him oddly. He seemed terrified. Had he forgotten his own father’s face in just ten months?
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br />   “Jake!” Frank called. “You can stop running now. It’s time to go home.”

  The boy risked one more startled glance over his shoulder. God, it was good to see him. Frank wanted to grab hold of his body and squeeze every ounce of love he’d left behind back into him. He wanted to squeeze him till it hurt so that Jake knew just how painfully his absence had been felt.

  The boy pivoted sharply to see if the man was gaining on him, his eyes bright with panic. When he turned his ankle and went down, it was like watching a deer slowly fold after being shot, the boy sinking to the ground in a juddering heap, his flight curtailed. He hit his head on the polished edge of a jutting rock and lost consciousness, his blood sluiced and diluted by the rain.

  Frank stopped. Jake had fallen so quickly he barely had time to brace himself, and the injury to his head looked bad. Frank covered the remaining distance between them and gently took the child in his arms.

  “Don’t worry, Jake,” he said. “Daddy’s got you.” He almost wept again at how light his son felt. It was like holding a bag of flour; he remembered the first time he had held him, the nurse handing him this tiny, red-skinned baby, its fingers clawing at the air.

  He wiped the blood away from Jake’s temple and walked back through the driving rain to the car. He placed his son on the backseat and wrapped him in a blanket he kept on the shelf behind the rear headrests.

  “It’s okay now, Jake. This was supposed to happen. All of it.” He dabbed at the blood dripping from Jake’s head with a corner of the blanket; it very quickly turned dark with the stuff.

  “Daddy will take care of you,” he said. He ran his hand around the wet circle of his son’s face and smiled. “Soon we’ll be a family again.”

  * * *

  As he drove, Frank kept peering into the backseat at Jake, unable to believe the sequence of events to which he had suddenly become tethered. The boy looked pale, his skin almost translucent as the rainwater dripped from his hair. The wound at his temple still bled.

  Frank turned and watched the road unfold before him, the rain so heavy now against the windshield it was like looking through a thin gray mist. He reduced his speed, conscious of Jake in the backseat, keen to avoid heightening his discomfort. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly his fingers throbbed; his heart thundered in his own ears and his breathing was fierce, as he replayed the simple narrative in which he’d reclaimed his son. Ten months of heartache and destruction healed in minutes. When he’d set out this morning, the car had felt stale, heavy with grief and dread; now, Jake was lying on the backseat, the memory of those months already laid to rest, their improbable reunion complete.

  His thoughts suddenly turned to Cindy. Their marriage had fallen apart because Jake had been taken from them and neither had been emotionally endowed to cope. Now Jake was back, didn’t it stand to reason that their broken family could be repaired? Everything could be returned to normal. They could compress the last ten months into ten seconds, like a coma patient stumbling back to consciousness, the three of them beginning their family life afresh.

  He hit the accelerator; the car sped through the rain. He smiled as he pictured Cindy’s face. The Cindy he remembered; the one defined by the child in her arms.

  * * *

  He reversed the car onto Cindy’s drive and glanced at Jake in the backseat. He was still unmoving. His face was crusted with blood, but Frank was pleased to see that the flow at the boy’s temple had begun to abate. He reached over and scrubbed at Jake’s face with the blanket. He didn’t want Cindy’s first sight of her recovered son to be marred by bloodshed; she might think Frank had been trying to finish what the abductors had begun.

  He adjusted the cover so that the boy was comfortable and clambered out of the car. It was still raining hard. He ran to the porch and knocked at the front door. His head was throbbing and he ran his hands through his coat pockets to see if he had any painkillers. Nothing. There was a powerful vibration behind his left eye. A nascent migraine was hidden there, waiting to declare itself later in the night.

  The door opened and Cindy stood before him. She looked surprised to see him and much older than he remembered. Her eyes bore dark shadows that reminded him of softening ruts, like the one that had floored Jake on the side of the road.

  “Frank,” she said. “What are you doing here? I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “I know. I just wanted to see how you are. To make sure everything’s okay.”

  “You didn’t need to come all the way over for that, Frank. You could have called.”

  Frank looked at his estranged wife and felt a pulse of excitement. He was about to turn her world upside down. To show her a future she thought she’d been denied. He could barely contain himself.

  “Whenever I call,” he said, “you think I’ve been drinking. It doesn’t usually end well.”

  “When you ring, Frank, you usually have been drinking. And it never ends well. For either of us. It’s just the same nightmare endlessly repeated.”

  Frank smiled. “I think I’ve found a way to make it stop,” he said.

  Cindy frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I have something to show you.” He reached for her hand and Cindy automatically pulled away. “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “It’s something good, I promise.”

  Against her better judgement Cindy allowed Frank to take her by the hand. “What is it?” she asked. “I’m really not in the mood for any of your shit, Frank.”

  “That’s all in the past,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  He dragged her out into the rain and they ran towards the car, hand in hand. Frank felt like a kid again, when they had walked everywhere like this in a public demonstration of their attachment to each other. For a long time it had seemed perfectly appropriate to do so. Perhaps, he thought, in a mild delirium, it might even be something that came back. Like Jake.

  “This better be good,” Cindy shouted. “I’m getting drenched.”

  They stopped at the car and Frank opened the rear door.

  “Take a look,” he said. “Tell me if you think it’s worth getting wet for.”

  Cindy leaned into the car. When she saw the boy on the backseat, her breath caught in her throat. Her hand went to her mouth and she felt suddenly lightheaded. The space in the car felt hot and small.

  When she withdrew, she looked at Frank’s smiling face and realized something had gone very wrong.

  “Christ, Frank,” she muttered. “What the fuck have you done?”

  Frank’s smile faltered. “What do you mean?” he said. “It’s Jake. He’s come back to us, Cindy. Like we dreamed. We can start over, the three of us. Be a real family again.”

  Cindy shook her head. Her face had lost all color; she was being pelted by rain, as though it was trying to knock her into Frank’s fractured reality.

  “This isn’t Jake,” she said softly. “Look at him, Frank. This boy’s a stranger to us.”

  Frank held his breath, momentarily disoriented. Could he have made a mistake? Allowed himself to be unbalanced by circumstance?

  He looked into the car and sighed. Jake was exactly as he’d left him, breathing shallowly, his smooth features unchanged in the light.

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” Frank said, turning back to Cindy, “but it’s really him. You’re just finding it difficult to take in. I was exactly the same. I couldn’t believe my own eyes.”

  Cindy stared at her husband. “This boy’s at least ten years old, Frank. Jake was five when he was taken. He’s not even been gone a year. You’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  For a moment Frank felt dislocated, utterly removed from the conversation, as though he were listening to Cindy through more than a veil of rain. It was like she’d been sucked behind glass, her mouth moving soundlessly; her eyes wide with alarm. All he could hear was that stinging refrain spoken over and over again: You’ve made a terrible mistake…You’ve made a terrible mistake…You’ve made a terrible mistake.


  The pain in his head intensified and he pawed at the ridge of bone above his left eye, trying to rub away the confusion. The noise of the rain was pounding in his head like a great wave, the undertow threatening to pull him under and deliver him into a darker world where he would be separated from his son yet again.

  He reached out and seized Cindy by the arm. “What the hell’s the matter with you? It’s your son, for God’s sake. Don’t you want him back?”

  Cindy squirmed in Frank’s grip, but he instinctively tightened his hold. “Of course I want Jake back!” she screamed. “But this isn’t him! I don’t know who this is. I have no fucking idea. It’s just someone you’ve picked up off the street. Some poor, terrified kid who you have to take home, Frank.”

  He hit her then, hard across the face, as the rain lashed down at them from the heavens. There was a frozen moment of confusion and disbelief, as they both realized the only possible consequence of such a blow. He saw a fleeting look of terror flash across her face before she started to buckle, her arms pinwheeling, her head smacking against the car door as she fell. Before Frank had time to even consider what he’d done, his wife was lying senseless at his feet, sprawled on the tarmac, those reproachful words still ringing in his ears: You’ve made a terrible mistake.

  He stood listening to the rain. Its rhythm was even and steady and in it he could hear the rushing of his blood, the dark constancy of it as it drove him on. He had to move; had to do something fast before the opportunity was lost. Cindy just hadn’t had time to come to terms with the notion of Jake being returned to them. It had been too much for her to contend with. He hadn’t given her time to prepare. Her rejection of Jake was a perfectly normal reaction, given the circumstances in which the child had been bestowed. Frank had made the mistake of presenting Jake to her as a gift, like something he had acquired on her behalf. It had been thoughtless of him, impetuous. He had laid the boy out in the back of the car and offered him up like some wild animal he had tracked down, the body still slick with blood. Was it any surprise that Cindy had been unable to accept what her own eyes were telling her? That she had been incapable of processing even a fraction of it had dismayed him, but all she needed was a little more time. A chance to appreciate the blessing they had been granted, no matter how improbable—or how unexpected—it might appear. He had to create the perfect environment to enable her to rebuild the family; that was his duty to her. To all of them. When he listened, he heard a whispered confirmation; it was what the rain was telling him to do.