Travelling in a Strange Land

by David Park

  I’ve started in the university area, showing your photograph to people of similar age and asking if they’ve seen you, but I worry that it’s too dissimilar to how you look now so when they shake their heads I’m not sure if it’s because they haven’t seen you, or whether it’s because they don’t recognise you in the image I hold before them. I trawl the student bars around the university and the fast-food outlets along Botanic Avenue, concentrate on the rabbit warren of student-land in what gets called with unintended irony the Holy Land because of its street names – Jerusalem Street, Damascus Street, Carmel Street, Cairo Street, Palestine Street. But everywhere it’s a blank. Once in the little square between Upper and Lower Crescent I approach two men drinking on a bench and one looks at the photograph for a long time, but his companion laughs and shakes his head when he says he might have seen you and then asks for money. I give him a couple of pounds; he rubs his chin and tells me he’ll keep a lookout for you.

  Something happens to me during those nights of searching and it’s as if the city begins to exert a compelling power and the world takes on a sharper reality than I have ever known, almost as if everything that’s gone before has been clouded and as I look for my son I start to record it. And I find myself increasingly drawn to those unfamiliar city-centre streets whose only purpose seems to be to link to more important places, streets I’ve never stepped in, and everything in them seems to ask for a moment’s recognition. I feel safe in them as if the great spaces of the night and the frantic clamour of the bars and restaurants are contracted into something my hand can touch so I let my fingers brush the brickwork and try to capture their silent emptiness with my camera. Sometimes I think I don’t want to go home, go anywhere, but instead make some new kind of life hidden in these secret streets and passageways.

  There are times too when I see you – a face glimpsed on the back seat of a late-night bus; a boy, his hood up, with a skateboard under his arm; a young man walking with a skinny dog. At such moments everything courses through me – random unpredictable memories, the words that were spoken, the words that weren’t, and then I force myself out of these places of refuge and stare into the crowds, once more show your face to strangers. I tell Lorna that I’m looking for you and as more weeks go by she wants to go to the police or use social media to try and get in touch with you but I persuade her to wait a little longer because you’ll be angry and say we’ve been stupid and that will put even greater distance between us all. I tell her I’ll look harder. I promise her I’ll look harder.

  I check out all the hostels, go to the ones belonging to the Salvation Army where I leave your photograph and my phone number and then enter the waste ground under the bypass where at intervals cars are parked up and from their open windows filter cigarette smoke and the sound of music. Sometimes there is a little pyre of fast-food debris on the ground beside them. Huddles of young people look at me with suspicion and I hide the camera under my coat in case they think I’m a policeman intent on capturing some drug deal. When I show them your photograph they barely look, as if to do so might compromise themselves in the face of their friends, and when I’m walking away I hear a voice saying that if I’m after a boyfriend I should try the Kremlin. Some people I approach think it’s a prelude to scamming them for money or collecting for some charity and shrug me off but most are polite and a little embarrassed that they can’t help so they walk off quickly and resume their conversations without glancing back. Each night I start in the university area and then end in the city centre.

  During these nights I take the photographs – the shadow of railings that have a child’s red shoe on one of the spikes, presumably in the hope that it might be reunited with its owner; the white spidery scrawl of new graffiti on a derelict building that has grass and willowherb growing out of its broken crevices; a smeared neon transfer in a shop window that looks like oil in water; the rows of Belfast bikes in their docking station with their grey metal glistening under street lights. And I come to understand the truth of what Ansel Adams said: that you don’t make a photograph just with a camera, but that you bring to the act all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. It feels like the closest I’ve ever been to finding that moment under the surface of things, the closest too that I’ve ever felt in understanding who you are, as if somehow these photographs also glimpse what exists in you just below your surface. So they’re special to me even though I’ve never shown them to anyone. And I realise that the city itself is a palimpsest, where behind the bland uniformity of chain-store shopfronts is an older and still enduring glimpse of what once was. I see it above the glass where the solidity of red brick and smaller-shaped windows are untouched by time and in my dreams offer the possibility of what might be once more. It makes me wonder if when the snow finally fades the world revealed beneath will remain unchanged or will it be altered in some unexpected way.

  These are moments too when the city unfolds itself and offers up its secrets. So what was once only a nondescript shuttered door in daytime reveals itself to be the entrance to a club outside which a line of young people dressed in finery queue for admittance and the small cafe, drab in daylight with its Formica tabletops and plastic chairs, is filled with taxi drivers and revellers stocking up before heading out. For the first time I encounter the city’s homeless, those unfortunates sleeping rough in doorways, attempting to insulate themselves against the cold with a base of cardboard and sleeping bags that are grimed and stained. There seem to be about six or seven of these while others who appear to be homeless and beg in spots they have decided might offer the best prospects of charity simply disappear later in the night to what I hope is shelter and a bed. I show your photograph to volunteers running a soup kitchen, but after studying it carefully they apologise for not being able to help. Part of me wants to take photographs of these people sleeping rough, but I can’t do it because it feels like I’m a voyeur of someone else’s misery and that’s never what I want to feel like when I look through a camera, and I can’t risk stealing the dignity they still have. Inevitably they make me imagine you transposed to the same situation and then I can’t help playing out some of the scenarios based on the conversations I’ve had with these street sleepers, where the likelihood of kindness from a passer-by is counterbalanced by the possibility of an unprovoked act of violence from those who have consumed too much drink and are laced with the bitterness of disappointment and self-loathing.

  From one who tells me his name is Chris I hear the story of a young woman in her thirties who has died during the night. And there have been other deaths too, more than I thought possible. After we talk I go to the shop doorway at the corner of Donegal Place and Castle Lane where she died and take a photograph of an empty space that seems emptier for my presence and I suddenly feel that same space opening up inside me and instead of it spurring me on in my search it drains me of the strength I need so for a couple of nights I can’t look any more. It feels like everything’s collapsing in on itself at a time when I know I have to be strong, so with the pure assertion of will I force myself to resume. And Lorna’s telling me that I need to go back to the doctor, get some of his happy pills, but I can’t bring myself to do it because whatever is gained I understand too what gets lost – the blurring of focus that makes things clouded, the dream-riven sleep and above all the loss of the completeness of who you are and what I feel for her. Right now I need to think and see clearly, however difficult that might be.

  Luke offers to come with me some nights but I can’t let him and know that when I find you we need to be on our own. Lilly does a drawing for you that I’m supposed to deliver. It’s got four people in it who may or not be our family and everyone is flying a kite, each one of different colours, and the strings that are attached to them are intertwined which in real life wouldn’t be possible but in a ten-year-old’s drawing is able to make perfect sense. I think again of those homeless people I encountered and hope that they have
all found shelter. And I don’t go back at night any more unless it’s unavoidable so perhaps now the city has different secrets to reveal and I’ve never looked again at the photographs I took. I think of it dressed in snow and know that everything I saw will have changed once more. I imagine Luke’s drone flying high over the city, seeing the snow topping the green domes of the City Hall, icing the cathedral’s new spire, layering the yellow cranes, making the cradle of the mountains white. Does the snow fill those secret streets in which I found a temporary shelter? I pass some kind of warehouse from which young men in blue overalls have spilled out to throw snowballs at each other then find myself behind a car that has reindeer ears attached to its roof. I’m heading south now towards Gateshead on almost the final stage of my journey and I know Luke will be packed and ready to depart.

  I turn up on the first few days of term at the art college and ask about you in the main office but they say something about data protection so I have no alternative except to stand and watch students come and go. I tell myself it’s easy to pick out the new students, that they have a greater sense of enthusiasm, or is it diffidence? Whichever, it’s more likely to be the newer art folders that identify them and the way they haven’t yet found a friendship group in which to cluster. On the second day of hanging around I’m approached by a guy who overheard the conversation I had in the office. A lecturer whose name is Alan asks me why I’m looking for you and I say that we haven’t heard from you and we’re worried. I think he’s checking me out, wanting to ascertain whether I represent any kind of threat or have come to cause trouble. Then, when he satisfies himself, he asks your name again and tells me to wait. He’s speaking off the record when he informs me that you haven’t registered or turned up for the start of your course and after I thank him and begin to walk away he says that he too has a son and wishes me luck. And I think it’s luck that finally lets me find you. Through Luke I get access to your Facebook page and find it hasn’t been updated for a long time but I start to trawl through old entries and discover three pictures of a girl, one in a Halloween outfit with whitened face, black hair and black lips like someone out of the Addams Family, a selfie taken in some bar with you and the final one with her standing outside a pizza restaurant. She’s wearing a black top and black trousers that make me think she might work as a waitress. Only the first three letters of the restaurant’s name are visible but they’re enough to identify it and I know its location. I’ve had a birthday meal there with Lorna some years ago so I enlarge the photograph and print it off. She looks about your age and has long auburn hair, piercings in her ears and one in her nose, and above the collar of her black blouse snakes a thin tendril of tattoo. She seems to be mostly called Katty which I assume is a nickname. I don’t have a second name and although I search through Facebook I can’t find her. So I take the photograph to the restaurant just before it opens and they tell me that she used to work there but don’t any more and anyway they couldn’t give out personal information. But when they’re talking amongst themselves I overhear a second name and when I go back to Facebook I’m able to find her account but can’t access it because it’s set to private. I ask to befriend her and before she accepts she sends me a DM asking who I am. I tell her and say I’d be really grateful if she was prepared to speak to me.

  Her hair is a different colour from the photograph but I have no trouble recognising her when we meet in the cafe of her choice. Her name is Kate.

  ‘You know Daniel, don’t you?’

  ‘I did but I haven’t seen him for some time now,’ she says without looking at me directly and sipping the coffee I’ve bought her. ‘Is he in trouble?’

  ‘No, he’s not in trouble – it’s just we haven’t seen him for a good while and we want to find out if he’s all right. He was supposed to start his course at the art college and he hasn’t turned up. We’re worried about him.’

  She nods but doesn’t reply at first, as if she’s weighing up the pros and cons of helping me. So I try not to pressurise her and instead ask her how she knew you.

  ‘We met at a friend’s party. We got on pretty well – we were both doing art in school so it gave us something to talk about. But we never became really close or anything. Danny was a good laugh – that’s all. Never took anything too serious.’

  Now it’s my turn to nod to show I recognise the person she’s talking about and to hide my impatience. She seems nervous and despite what I’ve done to try and put her at ease that nervousness seems to be increasing. I’m about to cut to the chase and ask her if she knows where I can find you when she holds her cup with both hands and without raising her eyes from it reveals the things that have made her uneasy.

  ‘I really liked Danny; for a little while when I first met him I thought we could have amounted to more than friends but … there were other things I didn’t like. And maybe you know this already but he didn’t have good friends, didn’t hang round with people who were going to be good for him.’

  ‘People who did drugs?’

  ‘A lot of people do drugs but they do the right ones. Know what I’m saying. Danny, and I don’t really know why, started to do the wrong drugs. Drugs that rub you up against bad people and drugs that aren’t about fun but something else. And he took risks.’

  She looks up at me briefly then glances round the cafe. A strand of hair that has fallen across her face is pushed behind an ear. When she moves her head her metal piercings catch the light.

  ‘We really need to find him. To help him,’ I tell her. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  She shakes her head slowly and I can’t decide whether she’s telling me the truth or not.

  ‘Please help us, Kate.’

  ‘I haven’t had any contact with him in a long time, haven’t even seen him since before the summer. I’d like to help you but don’t think I can.’

  ‘Where was he staying when you were friends?’

  ‘Somewhere up round the university, somewhere in the Holy Land but I never went there and don’t know where exactly. I’m sorry.’

  And then she’s gone with a haste that suggests she’s worried that she’s said too much and I’ve hardly time to thank her before she’s disappeared into the street.

  So I go back to the same starting place every night and sift the faces of the throngs of students whose numbers are now added to by other new arrivals from a mixture of ethnic backgrounds. I become familiar to the wardens who patrol the area seeking to stop the antisocial behaviour of mostly students that has plagued the original residents for decades. I pass houses where the accommodation looks worse than basic and which have been subdivided again and again to maximise rent returns. If anyone recognises you they won’t admit it and probably think they are showing the solidarity of youth and why should they identify what might be one of their own to someone who’s old enough to be their own father?

  It rains one night and there are fewer people about. I take shelter under one of the trees that line the street and think of going home but can’t face the expectancy on your mother’s face when I come through the door and then the disappointment that will replace it. I’m passed by three young men seemingly impervious to the rain, one of them carrying a pack of beer cans, the second wheeling what looks like a kid’s BMX bike and the third three boxes of pizza. They’re wearing a kind of uniform of Canterbury tracksuit bottoms and hoodies and even when they’re talking to each other they’re looking at their phones. Then they stop and stare up at the houses and they’re arguing about something I can’t make out. When they see me under the tree one of them speaks to me.

  ‘All right, mate? We’re looking for Declan’s place. Declan Rourke. His place is somewhere round here but we don’t know the number. Do you know him?’

  ‘Sorry. Can you not phone him?’

  ‘The bastard isn’t answering his phone. Anyone would think he doesn’t want us at his party.’

  The one with the bike asks me if I want to buy it and I say sorry again and then they’re gone,
their phone screens little glimmers in the dusk. As they walk they look up at all the windows with lights on and stand listening for the sounds of revelry. I think of going after them and showing your photograph but decide not to and am increasingly resigned to returning home with another failure written on my face. A woman wearing a hijab and carrying two bags of shopping goes wearily by.

  The rain is heavier now and two young women pass me, leaning shoulder to shoulder under an umbrella that has broken spokes, and they give little squeals when they get splashed. I watch them cross the road and enter the convenience store on the opposite street corner. Then in my final attempt of the night I follow them, narrowly avoiding the spray from a passing bus and beginning to feel an increasing coldness seeping into my core.

  The shop is crowded but no one is buying more than a couple of items that they carry away in their hands and because it’s so busy it makes it difficult to show any of the staff your photograph until I notice an older man I guess is the manager standing to the side of the tills with a cup of coffee in his hand. When I show him, it’s obvious he recognises you and he looks at it and then at me as to find the resemblance, then sets his coffee down on the counter.

  ‘Danny Boy. Yeah, I know Danny. You say you’re his father?’

  When I tell him yes he shakes his head slowly and at first I think it’s an expression of sympathy but then he says, ‘Good luck to you with that. He doesn’t come in here any more because he’s barred. He was lucky I didn’t call the police because it sure as hell wasn’t the first time he robbed me.’