Travelling in a Strange Land

by David Park

  I try to ask about art college and if you’re looking forward to it but it doesn’t produce any kind of committed response and we know there’s another subject in the car that squats heavily between us but about which we’re not going to speak unless something happens that surprises us both. I do a couple more locations and then we stop at a chippy and eat out of the papers while sitting in the car facing the sea.

  There’s a group of teenagers being taught to paddleboard and some of them are struggling to stay on and tumbling into the water every few minutes.

  ‘It must be harder than it looks,’ I say.

  ‘I always wanted to try surfing.’

  ‘What’s to stop you taking it up? You’d probably be good at it,’ I tell you, hugging the idea of some future pleasure and focus. ‘There’s places up here that run classes, hire out boards. I can check it out for you if you like.’

  But you shake your head as if even thinking of it is burdensome and then you sink lower in your seat, turn the heating higher and we head to the Giant’s Causeway where I try to generate some enthusiasm for what I’ve always thought of as a pretty boring bunch of stones and I start to wonder why I’ve been asked to do this job when they could just download a lot of generic shots of something that’s been photographed thousands of times. I’m trying to find some semi-original angle when I look over to where you stand on a rocky outcrop jutting out to sea and suddenly you seem unbearably small when faced with that immensity and I call your name but it gets lost in the rising wind. You put your hood up and when I see you shiver I’m steeped in an unfathomable fear, fear for you and for all of us. When you turn it’s to ask if I’m nearly finished and I know the day is over and that whatever I hoped for is not going to happen.

  What were you thinking when you looked at the sea? Tell me now, Daniel. Or was there nothing at all except the coldness seeping into your skin? It hurts me to think about it because I can’t do it without seeing you surrounded by what felt like a loneliness that I couldn’t breach. And now in my dreams when I call your name again and again my voice is drowned out by the wind and the restless sea’s incessant complaint. Afterwards you don’t come home but ask me to drop you off near the university on our way back through the city and I don’t drive away until you’ve walked out of sight.

  In the car the phone rings but I don’t answer it. I’m not ready to talk to anyone and I’ve started on the more complicated part of the journey that takes me on carriageways and a series of roads and roundabouts letting me bypass Newcastle and sets me towards Gateshead. So I’m grateful for hearing your calming, directing voice once more because just for a moment it takes some of the emptiness out of the car that even the music can’t fill.

  Not perhaps the best photographs I’ve ever taken but I try to hold on to the better images of that day – both of us in the car and you walking across the bridge disdaining to hold the side rails – and I try, too, to have once more the briny tang of the sea and the smell of the fish and chips in the car, the shared music. Sometimes I imagine you surfing because I know you would have been good at it and when I bring Luke home we’ll all go sledging and if the garage is still open on my return journey I’ll buy another one so we can go down together. I do this a lot – try to create pictures and let them pave the way to some future happiness but they are short-lived, almost fading away as soon as they’ve been printed and exposed to the light because in their place are more insistent and caustic ones that seem to exist outside any exercise of my will.

  So Luke is out with friends at someone’s birthday party and Lorna and Lilly are at the cinema and I’m in my room lying on top of the bed because I feel a weariness that takes me beyond the desire for television or anything at all which requires concentration. I’ve had a long day taking photographs at a wedding where the bride and groom exude what feels almost like a hostility to each other and an even greater one to everyone else trying to make their day memorable, so I don’t even bother asking anyone to smile and do everything at double speed because an irritated impatience ripples out from the happy couple and infects all around them. I should be looking at the pictures and trying to make the best of a bad job in my small studio situated in the extension at the back of the house for which we haven’t finished paying yet, but I can’t face it tonight and need to have shrugged off the day’s dismal mood or risk darkening the start to a married life. When I’m feeling like I am in those moments, and I can see the possible start of a depression creeping slowly over the horizon, I always want to sleep, to shut down physically and mentally. Try to ward it off at the pass.

  As I drive and sometimes see car tracks curving across lanes on the road I think of the woman I stopped to help. And it seems to me that what this feeling I’m thinking about is like is looking into those woods filling up with snow and wanting to walk into their depths until you disappear and can’t be found, not because of the film’s caption that there is no better grave than that of pure white snow, but because sometimes simply not being seems a better alternative to being and feeling. And I know that the promise I have to keep is bringing my son home and it’s a good thing that I have this to galvanise me, to stop me going back to where her car crashed and vanishing in those woods.

  I look at my phone. It’s Lorna’s number but I guess it’s probably from Lilly so I pull off the road into the entrance of an industrial park and call her.

  ‘Is that you, Lilly?’

  ‘No, it’s Lorna but it was Lilly who phoned even though I told her not to. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s good. I’m not far away now and if there’s no more snow we’ll be on the boat back tonight.’

  ‘I’ve looked at the weather forecast lots of times but they seem to be saying it’s moving south now.’

  ‘What’s the betting they get the airports open again just as I arrive?’

  ‘I don’t care, Tom. We couldn’t take the risk and I’m glad you’re there to bring him home. I wouldn’t want him travelling on his own when he’s not well. And there’s always the risk that they’d see he was ill and not let him board the plane.’ There is a second’s silence and then she says, ‘You’ve done really well and I’m proud of you.’

  I don’t know what to say so you ask me again if I’m OK and I tell you yes and trying not to feel like a fraud makes me frightened. Lilly wants to tell me a joke so you put her on.

  ‘Knock, knock.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Wayne.’

  ‘Wayne who?’

  ‘Wayne in a manger.’

  ‘That’s your best one yet,’ I say, wondering whether I should try to simulate laughter but instead I tell her, ‘I’ll soon be getting Luke and when we’re home we’ll all go sledging.’

  ‘You’ve already told me that.’

  ‘Sorry for boring you. Is the snowman still there? It hasn’t melted yet, has it?’

  ‘No it’s just like when you left.’

  And there is comfort in that simple assurance. Then she says a sudden goodbye and doesn’t give me a chance to say anything to Lorna as the phone goes dead. Maybe she’s done me a favour.

  The house is empty and my head is heavy with worries and I think that if I can sleep the weariness will leach away but as I start the slow shutting down I’m aware of noise from downstairs and at first I think it’s Luke or Lorna and Lilly but then realise that it’s too early for them to be back. So I try to stir and reluctantly make myself return to the world I’d hoped to escape and as I finally sit up and listen there is only silence at first and I think I’ve imagined it. But an empty house breathes in a different way to one that is not and then I hear a door open and close downstairs and although we haven’t seen him for more than two weeks I guess it’s Daniel and even before I get off the bed I’m angry with him. Angry for the pain he causes us, for the tears his mother sheds, for the confusion felt by Lilly who asks us if we’ve done something bad to him. And for Luke who doesn’t show what he’s feeling.

  I try to
stem the anger as I go down the stairs but it floods back and suddenly I’m thinking that bringing things to a head is a less painful option than letting them drag out along this unpredictable and erratic path. That somehow trying to take control of the situation in which we find ourselves might bring us closer to a better place. But he’s nowhere to be seen and I consider once again whether I’ve imagined his presence, that my son who takes up so much of my waking thoughts has simply formed himself from the anxieties that occupy my mind. Then I realise there’s someone in the studio and I consider the possibility of whether we have a burglar and wonder should I retrace my steps and call the police. But as I stand perfectly still and listen intently I know it’s Daniel in the way he presses his presence however lightly into the consciousness of the house, just as I can feel his presence in the emptiness of his room on those nights I linger in it before sleep, or in the hours around dawn when I enter to confirm what I already know – that he’s not there, that he hasn’t come home. I don’t understand why he’s in the studio and when I do, at first I try to tell myself that it can’t be so, but then know there’s no basis for that denial except a desire to escape the consequences.

  I startle him so he hasn’t time to jettison my camera or what looks like Lilly’s tablet and because he’s startled I should take the moment’s advantage but my anger doesn’t allow me to think clearly and so I shout at him and ask what the fuck he’s doing.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says and in the half-light of the room his voice is almost as waif-like as his body.

  ‘Doesn’t look like nothing to me, Daniel,’ I tell him with my voice still raised and wavering in anger. ‘Looks like you’re stealing from your family. Stealing from me and from your kid sister. Stealing from Lilly. Sneaking round our home like some cheap little thief who doesn’t give a shit about anyone else except himself.’

  Now I know that when I used the words ‘our home’ I shut him out from it and in truth that’s what I meant to do because in that moment I saw his presence as something toxic, infecting the well-being of my family and which would destroy us all if we let it. And when you don’t answer or attempt to justify yourself it doesn’t lessen my anger but rather increases it because it’s as if you can’t be bothered to try and muster a defence. I rip the camera and tablet out of your hands and remember now I looked at the camera to see if it had been damaged in any way and maybe in those seconds I worried that even this too had been contaminated. I don’t switch on the light because I don’t want to have to see you any more clearly than I do now but even so I can see the scab that disfigures the side of your mouth and how your whole face looks as if it is crimped and pulled into a tight memory of itself. And you frighten me because you look like someone who is a half-remembered stranger and when I try to force all my memories of you into a greater sense of recognition they come up short.

  ‘I need money,’ you say and even your voice sounds different to me because it’s thin and stripped of the self-confidence that helps you exercise control over the situations in which you find yourself. ‘I need money to pay my rent and because I had to borrow some off a mate. I’ll pay you back as soon as I get my loan for art college. It’ll be here soon.’

  ‘So you thought you’d come here and just take what you could get your hands on. What does that make you?’

  ‘I know what it makes me. But I need the money so will you help me or not? I haven’t got much time.’

  It’s an impatient ultimatum and my anger finds a new pulse because we both know what the money’s for and yet I’m the one who’s going to be in the wrong, the father who’s refusing to help his son. This is the moment. This is the moment on my constant reruns when different courses of action clamour for my choice, each one presenting itself as the best, and sometimes, just for a second, I try to convince myself that it was one of these I followed. But instead you stand awkwardly, as if contracted into yourself with only the tremor in your hands that mirrors the shiver I feel inside revealing something else. Then I tell myself that I see everything clearly, that I know what is best, and so what I tell you is to get out, that you’re not wanted in our home and although I don’t say it I don’t want you there when your mother and sister return because I know they’ll come back with a shared happiness and I won’t see that snatched away from them. And when you hesitate I tell you again and all the anger and fear break and course into the shout of my voice and when you slip out of the room’s shadows I realise I’m shaking and so I set the camera down in case I drop it and hold on to the table for support until I’m able to calm the race of my breath and my trembling body into something that resembles stillness.

  I open the car window once more and let the world breathe against my face, try to douse the burn of shame and anger. I spit swear words against the windscreen. It’s not you I’m angry with any more, Daniel – I’ve started to understand that it’s much too late for that even though there’s times when it’s what I still want to hold on to because when you’re desperate to stay afloat you’ll clutch at anything. Do you understand, Daniel? I’m not angry with you any more but the cold air rushes against my skin and drowns out any chance of hearing your voice. And I never tell Lorna what’s happened and when she returns Lilly is bubbling over about the film and saying I should have gone and that if I want she’ll go with me and see it again. Your mother says you’re hyper with popcorn and a sugary drink that they charged an arm and a leg for but yes the film was pretty good although she wouldn’t want to see it twice. Then she glances at me and asks if I’m OK and I tell her yes, just a bit tired.

  ‘What has you so tired?’ she asks and I know she’s looking for signs that I’m not feeling right and I let her think that’s what’s wrong because it’s easier that way.

  ‘Just dipped a little. I’ll be fine,’ I tell her.

  ‘Why don’t you head on up and I’ll get this girl organised,’ she says as she combs a hand through my hair.

  In the bedroom I push the door almost closed, keep the light off so the room is partly lit only by the landing light, and despite Lilly talking about seeing her film twice I haven’t yet started to want a rerun with a different ending to what’s just happened. So for the moment as I press my head into the pillow I think I’ve done the right thing and protected my family and if that’s meant throwing off what felt most dangerous to its survival then it’s a price that has to be paid. Every noise in the house seems sharp-edged and I pull the duvet higher on my head to try to blunt them as last of all I hear you doing what I normally do as you check the front door and leave on the outside light. The light that will stay on throughout the night. I’m not good at secrets and their weight is a constant burden that stops the free-flow of anything else so only by telling myself that the truth will cause even greater pain am I able to hug it tight, and when you’re lying close beside me with your arm across my shoulder and insisting again and again that everything will be all right, I can’t be the one who breaks this spell with which you seek to protect us all.

  The world is tinselled and baubled and time itself is filled with an expectancy to which we can’t supply a precise ending. A punter has a ten-thousand-pound bet on with Paddy Power that snow will fall on Christmas Day. And somewhere amidst the arguments about whether last year’s John Lewis ad was better than the new one and the city’s restaurants and bars filling up with work parties there is a story about a child being born. It’s a stupid thing to think but Christmas is a good time for a child to be born and better than the time you chose to come into the world. This unrelenting brightness of snow hurts my eyes. Now the countryside is left behind and I start to pass trading estates, tyre depots and more businesses trying to operate. A man on a quad bike stands upright like a charioteer as he heads along the side of the road.

  There is a sense here of the snow being pushed back because commerce needs to continue and because of the heavier flow of traffic. I’m not far away from Luke now and I’m glad because my back is stiff and I’m weary of driving. Even the music has
started to sound stale and flat as if I’ve heard it too many times but I know it’s better than what will be playing on the radio.

  I waited a week before I started to look for you. Even though your phone is dead Lorna keeps ringing it in the hope that it will suddenly spring into life and hold your voice. Once when she thinks I can’t hear she talks quietly into her phone and although I can’t make out the words I can guess what she’s saying.

  ‘He’ll turn up,’ I tell her. ‘He’s probably staying with mates until he gets a flat fixed up. He always turns up.’ And you nod because I know you want to believe me.

  The city at night is a stranger to me, as I grew up on the Peninsula, and because now we live a short distance outside it I always feel like I’m its foster child rather than one of its natural children. So I’m neither someone who romanticises it nor one who thinks of it only in terms of its bitter histories. But even now as I walk its night streets at a time of our supposed flourishing on the dividends of peace they have an edge to them, some ambiguous quality that you sense in the back of your throat, or on the soles of your shoes, which echo the pavements with both the sound of imagined menace and yet at the same time a friendlier optimism. So you’re never sure whether the person coming towards you might wish you harm or want to enfold you in the tightest of embraces. It’s a city corralled by mountains and formed at the mouth of the river. Much of it is built on sleech – that mixture of soft grey clay, silt and fine sand up to eight metres deep which in previous centuries meant a forest of timber piles.

  They don’t use wood any more but bigger buildings now have to be built on a thick bed of piles to anchor their weight on stronger foundations. I read when they constructed the city’s newest flagship shopping centre at Victoria Square thousands of piles were used on a site where three hundred years earlier half of it was under the river, while even now below High Street the Farset River curves its secret path to the sea. So perhaps this knowledge fuses with the thoughts in my head to make the random paths I take in the centre’s night-time streets feel shifting and, when I walk through the Victoria Centre approaching closing time with its upmarket shops beginning to shut their doors, I think of unseen waters that want to reclaim their stolen domain.