Travelling in a Strange Land

by David Park

  Miles to go before I sleep and time to make up but any desire to drive much faster is quashed by the image of her car nose down in the ditch. I hope she’s OK and that she doesn’t have to stay in hospital over Christmas, that her daughter doesn’t come home to an empty house. It’s stupid but I think I should have offered to deliver the carol sheets because now, more than ever, trying to do the right thing seems as important as anything else that exists, and maybe the right thing is just all the small things that one person’s life can muster. But there is another voice telling me that delivering carol sheets isn’t a meaningful step to any form of atonement and only a distraction from what really matters, which is to bring my son safely home.

  I want to understand what it was that took Daniel ever closer to the edge. When I retake that journey I try to find a different and unmarked path, step in some new direction driven by the hope that I might end up with better answers. I mute the satnav because this part of the journey is straight and clear and because I don’t want her voice, don’t want her listening in case there are things I find myself able to say, and because perhaps if I try really hard it’ll be Daniel’s voice not hers I hear and we’ll be able to talk even once like father and son or at least in a way that we’ve never done before. So put Rosemary’s car back on the road, rewind time and start with a clean sheet, a wiped slate, the moment before images are indelibly printed. The moment that lies below the surface of things and before things happen.

  He was always a surprise, born in the same year as our wedding, and this isn’t easy to say and has never slipped outside the silent confines of thought but there were times when I wondered if I was his father because my anxious imagination can construct a range of bad scenarios, all of them involving Johnston Bailey. And maybe I’ve tried to use this as an escape route, an abdication of responsibility. Because if this were true then there is the possibility of genetics, of an alternative DNA-printed predetermination being able to shoulder the blame. But it’s a cheap thought and it shames me so much that I open the window and punish myself with the rush of cold air against my face and drive like that for a distance before I close it again. And sometimes I think of Joseph, the father-to-be of a child who isn’t his, and it doesn’t really matter much about what his wife has told him because nothing she says can make any sense and when the Angel appears to him in a dream how can he trust what he remembers in the cold light of day without wondering if he has only imagined what he wanted to hear? So Mary becomes the heroine, the holy object of veneration, and Joseph fades into the shadows for ever. But I remember enough to recall that the story describes him as a good man and, although we have no way of knowing if he was a good father to this child who wasn’t fully ever his, I believe he must have been, even if he finally came to believe the Angel’s words and in so doing was separated for ever from any sense of flesh of his flesh. So if we could, I think we should bring him out of those shadows and make him part of this celebration of a child born in a manger, let some of the lights that decorate our homes burn for him.

  Daniel resists coming into the world for so long that the doctor thinks they’ll have to operate but perhaps the prospect of the scalpel is the only thing that’s ever seemed to frighten him because almost immediately he appears. Dark of hair and eye, he’s quick to let us know his lungs are working and the nurses joke about it as they clean him and hand him to Lorna and she quite rightly refuses a photograph and is irritated by my insensitivity.

  ‘I don’t want a photograph of me looking a mess,’ she tells me. ‘There’ll be plenty of time later and why not just look at him with your eye for once and not through the camera.’

  And a few minutes later she gives me him and I feel the inexplicable confusion of holding your first child and struggling to understand your connection with this new life and your responsibility for it. So if an angel were to appear and say this being you cradle in your arms has come from the Holy Spirit it would make as much sense as anything else in that moment. But look at him with your eye. He’s plump-cheeked with small dark pupils, his skin crinkled like wet paper, his face as if shrink-wrapped. The hands are most incredible, sculpted perfect and made from still-wet clay so when I touch one with my finger I’m frightened it might puddle out of shape and then they tighten on mine and nothing has ever felt like that before or since. And he’s born in July, the time of marching and beating drums, of arguing about who owns one road or another and the lighting of huge fires with their pallets and toxic fumes from tyres. When I leave the hospital late at night the air is acrid with smoke sliming itself on the back of the throat and the sky is black-brushed with twisting plumes that make me remember things from the past that I don’t want to intrude on this special moment. The sirens of fire engines wail through the streets and once glimpsed between houses near Sandy Row is a yellow and blue thresh of flame throwing its quiver against the silhouettes of taller buildings. The city becomes a giant shadow play with wavering images printed on gable walls and although it’s supposed to be celebratory everything is edged with a sense of menace that makes me press the button that locks the car’s doors. And I hope my son is safely cradled in his mother’s arms far from these sounds and the carcinogens that spiral from the burning tyres and the still-smouldering hatreds.

  Of course there are photographs, more than we ever took of our other two children because that’s what it’s like with a first child. Everything has to be recorded in some evolutionary chronicle, as if a missed moment will leave a blank in our parental memory, but I rarely look at them now and each of the different phases has blurred so I can’t distinguish any more where each one started and ended. All the inevitable clichés are contained in those same photographs – the blowing out of the birthday candles; the first paddle in the sea; posed at our front door with plastic lunch box in hand for the first day of school. A clever child, instinctively smarter than Luke could ever be, who did really well in school at the start before industry was needed to complement what came naturally. And I can’t think of Daniel as that child without freeing him from whatever stillness he has found now and setting him spinning in some new motion. So I see him climbing, always in air, the bars of the cot merely a challenge, and then it was trees, and roofs, the park pavilion where he tagged his name and once on holiday a tunnel over the railway line close to where we stayed. And Lorna tells me we can’t punish a child because he has no fear and so our concern is edged with an unspoken pride but if I can go back I’ll tell him that it’s not good to have no fear, that it’s dangerous not to feel it. Because that’s what makes him reckless all his life. Tell him that it’s wrong to trust so fully the insubstantial vagaries of air, the unpredictable whims of balance. And where does this come from because it’s not part of his mother, and I am someone averse to risks, in recent days tormented by the recurring dream where I walk far out on that frozen lake, waiting with each new step for it to crack.

  ‘So where does it come from, Daniel?’ I ask but he can’t be summoned any more than he can be bent to my will or anyone else’s. And there is only the sound of the slush under the car’s wheels and the fine spray from the white van in front that makes me switch on the wipers but I hesitate and for a moment peer darkly at the world through the spotted windscreen. Then I clear it to see a tractor in a field and a farmer pitching fodder from the trailer. On the television local news there have been stories of farmers looking for their missing sheep, hardened men with furrowed weather-beaten faces suddenly confronted with a loss that is obviously more than economic, and one finding a ewe still living, surviving in a drift against a stone wall because it’s found an air pocket, his dog barking and skittering excitedly round his feet as he wields the spade and then with one final heft pulls its black bewildered face free. And if I had been a better father I would have found my son while there was still time, pulled him out. This is what I know and can’t unknow however much I want to. Crows drift slow-winged above the tractor in the hope that there might be something left for them to scavenge. Where
did those bats fleeing from our smoke and darkly stuttering into the night air find a new refuge? Somehow on that night of his birth as I drove away from the hospital the beat of their wings blurred with the trails churning the sky but now I know that it wasn’t so and it was only after what happened that these two events were spliced together. And that’s one of the most difficult things as I try to think because time no longer stays ordered and chronological like the photographs I took of his growth into childhood and instead jumps back and forward, later events supposedly signalled by earlier ones to which I was oblivious at the time because what I’m always seeking is a pattern to impose on the chaos. And there’s a kind of attempted internal photoshopping with something deliberately erased because it stings like a paper cut each time you let your mind touch it and other things that get enhanced with meaning that was probably never there in the first place or because the memory allows you to invest some claim to goodness or transfer blame elsewhere.

  Lorna and I have never blamed each other, sharing it equally, even sometimes temporarily taking it from the other’s shoulders when the burden gets too heavy, and we have little sequences of phrases that by now are almost like a learned script which serve as lifelines to try and stop us going under. And we know we can’t go under because we have Lilly and Luke still to care for. But there are moments too when the lifelines don’t reach and we fall into a ritual of almost competitive self-accusation, then try to escape where that leads us by finding other things, other people to blame. This is the worst time for me because I find myself echoing what she says when I know that if I were a stronger and better person I would tell her the truth and take the consequences but I can’t do that because I’ve already lost too much and I can’t risk losing any more.

  I pass trees dusted lightly with snow that look as if they have simply shrugged off the heavier falls; children in a field sledging their favoured route on the slope until it’s polished shiny; a lorry parked up at the roadside with a wavering haze off its engine and slops of snow melting off its bodywork. And I tell myself that I’ll do it after Christmas, that whatever the risks I have to do it, try to find the right words so that she might just be able to understand that anything I did I did because I thought it was right and wanted nothing more than to protect all of us. But the prospect frightens me and I feel a need to talk to Luke, to know he’s all right and to tell him that I’m on my way, that I might even have done the worst of the journey.

  He answers right away and asks me if everything’s OK so for a second I feel panicked and wonder if he is able to sense what I’m thinking and feeling.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I tell him. ‘I got a bit delayed by an accident but I’m still on course.’

  ‘Was it serious?’

  ‘Not too bad, someone came off the road and slipped into the ditch.’

  ‘So are the roads still bad?’

  ‘The main ones are pretty well-cleared and the traffic has churned them into mostly slush but the side roads still look pretty rough.’

  ‘But you’ll be staying on main roads, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, all the way. Do you remember you once asked me why we call the seaside the seaside when it might be the front or the back?’

  ‘No,’ he says and the tone of his voice suggests it’s just a story I’ve made up to embarrass him so I let it go. ‘I’ve been listening to The Great Lake Swimmers CD you gave me for my birthday and I think it’s very good.’

  ‘That’s good. Glad you like it.’

  ‘And how’re you feeling?’

  ‘Not so bad. I’ll be glad to get home but I’m not looking forward to the boat. I don’t want to end up hooping. Was it rough when you came over?’

  ‘Really smooth. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘So how much longer, do you think, before you get here?’

  ‘About an hour. Stay warm and I’ll text you when I’m there,’ I say and I almost add, ‘Just like when I picked you up at Amber’s house,’ but I don’t. ‘And, Luke, give your mum a call, let her know that I’m not that far away and that you’re feeling a bit better. And you’ll be pleased to know that she’s given me every medicine and pill in the house for you to take.’

  ‘I’ve already had my instructions by text.’

  ‘No doubt in great detail.’

  This shared, pretend exasperation at Lorna’s insistent mothering creates a sense of closeness between us but underneath we both know we’re grateful and feel protected by it. When the call is finished I drive a little quicker but within the limits of safety and wonder what we’ll talk about on the return journey and wonder too if we’ll ever talk about Daniel. It’s never happened and I don’t know whether trying to make it happen would be a good or bad thing but I decide it would be wrong to force it and so should wait until he’s ready to talk, whenever that might be. And anyway the other thing I don’t know is what I will say, just as I didn’t know what to say that night when he was in his room after Amber had broken up with him, and I need to be sure of it before the moment arrives. It’s not helped by never really knowing what Luke’s thinking and afterwards he drew into a deeper privacy of self, on the surface almost detached from the external events that we had to give ourselves to, and if we asked him if he was all right he’d get annoyed and retreat behind the shut door of his room. It was the silence coming from it that I found hard to bear because if as always there had been the sound of music I would have known from his choices what was going on in his head. But there was nothing, just that unfamiliar, uncharacteristic silence and the shut door keeping us out and impossible to enter no matter how much we wanted to.

  Daniel first left home when he was eight. He had campaigned for a dog but with both of us out working all day we decided against it, told him that we’d consider it when he was older and able to look after it. But even then he was an instant child, short of the patience that so much of life needs, his low levels of concentration making him flit from one thing to another and no matter how much we worked with him that never really changed. So he wanted a dog but we guessed that in a short while he’d lose interest in it and have moved on to something else. But he took it badly, assuring us repeatedly of the commitment he’d make to it, how he’d walk and feed it, do everything that a good owner should, and how we’d benefit too because it would be a guard dog and so we’d never be burgled. He also enlisted Luke’s support for his cause. When it was clear that his persuasion hadn’t worked he took off, leaving a note saying he was going to get his own dog. We found him in the kids’ playground in the park, sitting on the top of a slide complete with a dog lead whose origin we never discovered and his face set in an attempted sullen mask but unable to hide his relief at seeing us. The desire for a dog came and went just like we thought it would.

  However, we came to see our child’s capacity for being … I don’t know if this is the right word but it might be headstrong. A strange word. When you think about it, it should be something good, a marker of internal strength, but when we use it we’re thinking of stubborn, self-willed, someone who acts without enough thought.

  Reckless, I suppose.

  I turn on the satnav – I don’t want to lose my way when I’m getting ever closer and heading for that never-ending sequence of ring roads. Want to hear a voice telling me which one to take because I need that now. Someone with a poor grasp of consequences – that’s probably how we started to think of Daniel. Sometimes I look intently at Lilly and there’ve been moments when she catches me and wants to know what I’m looking at and I say something like, ‘My best girl,’ or if she’s screwing up her face, ‘I don’t know but it’s looking back at me,’ but I’m really trying to see if there’s any trace of the future in her face, to see if there’s anything that should cause us worry. Something that could be prevented. At school almost everything gradually went to hell for Daniel just at the time when it was important that he got things right. Only his art survived the slide and in part I think that was due to his teacher – the same Mrs Clark wh
o taught Luke. She believed in him and I’m grateful for that and when he’d have been happy to walk away she coaxed him, nagged him, persuaded him to complete the course, and she’d never get flustered, more likely to laugh at some of his antics than get cross. She never ran out of patience and you can’t ask anything more than that from a teacher. Afterwards she sent me some of his work, seeking our permission to keep a couple of pieces that she was particularly fond of. Sometimes parents donate cups as expressions of gratitude or tributes to departed ones but it would have embarrassed the school to have a Prize Day award with Daniel’s name on it so in the end we simply sent her a thank-you card and at the last moment I included a copy of the photograph I’d taken on his first day.

  We’ve looked at his work a lot. On occasions together, sometimes on our own. Once I found Lorna on her knees in his room, her hands moving lightly over everything as if it was a form of braille and through her touch she might read whatever it was she thought she might find there. There’s sketchbooks and work on different themes that he never showed us but the central piece is three portraits of an old man – Mrs Clark got them framed and they were good enough to be shown in the examination board’s end-of-year exhibition. He never went with us to look at them, never saw our pride. The first in this series of three is a realistic portrait of the man sitting in his armchair; the second has the same face but with a slightly different expression and his head is surrounded by a photoshopped collage that represents his memories and they seem to be good ones, particularly of childhood. The third darkens the face and perhaps it’s fear flecking his eyes and this time the collaged images are disturbing – a headstone, a woman crying, a house in flames. I look at them a lot but try to resist the urge to read things into them, to twist the images to fit whatever interpretation currently occupies my thoughts. Sometimes I think the old man has the look of my father and so perhaps just a little like me but Lorna tells me I’m imagining it and I’m happy to believe her.