by David Park
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him and offer to pay for whatever was stolen but he shrugs the offer away. ‘Have you any idea where I might find him? It’s really important.’
‘I know where I’d like to find him.’
It’s obvious he wants his pound of flesh and so I apologise again and try to give him twenty pounds but he shakes his head.
‘He’s not the only one round here. They have their money spent halfway through the first term and if Bank of Mum and Dad doesn’t bail them out they’re in here thinking it’s a charity shop. Put your money away – it’s not you owes me but if you see him tell him he’s still barred.’
I promise I will and when I ask again if he knows where I might find you he turns to call to one of his staff on the till and the answer comes back, ‘Somewhere in Palestine Street.’
‘Somewhere in Palestine Street,’ he says in case I haven’t heard and then lifts his cup again.
It’s only a five-minute walk away through the rain that continues to fall and which shines the road and the roofs of the houses. There are fewer people about – a couple of women jogging, someone riding a bike with no lights. A few of the houses have skips outside them and are being renovated or cleared out. The narrow street runs down towards the river and it feels as if a dampness has ebbed from it to lap round the red-bricked houses and the cars parked outside them. The dampness and the rain make the houses seem blurred into each other and everything feels unfocused. I don’t know where to start but for some reason walk to the lower part of the street where there are more For Rent signs.
Two men, maybe Romanians, are having an argument over a car, with one of them looking as if he is indicating its defects, and at one point he slaps its roof, jewelling a little spray of water that splashes into the air. When I approach I have to wait until they finish shouting at each other and become aware of my presence. I apologise for disturbing them and show the photograph. They confer with each other and I think they’re going to argue again but then the younger man gestures to a house across the street and when I point at the one I think he’s indicated he nods vigorously before launching into their argument once more.
The curtains in the front room are pulled tight. From the fanlight above the solid door leaks a soiled yellow light. I ring the bell but hear nothing inside so I knock and then knock again. Eventually the door is opened only wide enough for a man to see me without revealing much of himself. I try to explain but he shakes his head as if he thinks I’m looking to sell him something and he’s going to close the door until I hold the photograph up to the sliver of light. The door is opened to me. The hall I’m standing in has two bicycles leaning against the wall, some stacked cartons of what looks like cooking oil, and laced through everything is a pungent smell of cooking and something that might be drains. He doesn’t speak but simply points up the flight of stairs.
There is a cheap spongy carpet on the stairs and on some steps it sags loosely outwards so I climb carefully and slowly. The walls are covered with flocked floral wallpaper that looks as if it’s been there from the seventies and in places it has tears where something’s snagged it. Halfway up I stop and think of going back. The man who opened the door has disappeared into the front room from where I hear the sound of a television. So stop now, retrace your steps and walk back outside to where the wet streets now hold out the chance of a return to the world as it was once before.
This is the last moment when the story can be told a different way, when the images that you carry printed on your memory can be arranged in a different pattern, and if the outcome can’t be changed then there’s still time to come to it by a different and maybe better path. Something that might offer the hope of more understanding or a greater prospect of comfort. Steps on the stairs. Sometimes they become the steps of Luke’s house on which I climb up two floors to where his room nestles under the roof and which he was pleased about because he thought it was big and gave him more privacy. Now he waits there for me to arrive. Waits for me to take him home. At other times they are the stairs of our home which I climb only after checking all the doors and making sure the front one is unchained and the outside porch light remains turned on, because when I get in beside Lorna she will ask if I’ve remembered. And if there is a night when I’ve forgotten she will throw back the duvet and go down the same stairs, each resolute press of her bare foot a rebuke for my carelessness. Denis Thorpe’s photograph in Lowry’s hallway taken after the painter’s death when he came across men starting to clear the house and persuaded them to let him record the interior. Two coats and hats in a shadowed hallway. Flock wallpaper. I touch it with my hand and then pull away at its coldness.
Afterwards when everything has been done a policewoman drives me back to where I’ve parked my car. She asks if she can phone someone who might come and drive me home but I tell her that I can do it. She touches my arm before she leaves. I feel it deeply, aware even briefly in that second that I still exist as a physical being, because from that moment the material world gives up its reality as life now ebbs and flows only as an inescapable welter of thought and image. But when she’s gone I can’t get in the car, can’t take this thing home to my family. I’m not ready. I walk down to the river in a desperate attempt to steady myself long enough to make the journey home to prepare myself for what I must say. Its surface is pimpled by the rain and I hold tightly to the railings, try to find once again the reality, however brief, that I still exist in a body. The water looks dark but is oiled and smeared in places with a jittery skim of light. Your skin bruised and discoloured as if whatever corruption and decay unravel inside you are seeping steadily to the surface and the light edging in from the street is unable to quicken you into life or second chance. I know that from the moment I open the door. It’s in the frozen fix of your body’s shape on the mattress, a locked and rigid stillness that makes me cry out, cry your name because I can’t recognise that stillness in you, have no memory of you ever held in such a grasp. And the room is bare, with little more than a single chair that holds your clothes, a second mattress and a wardrobe with its missing door revealing that it contains nothing but a few metal hangers. I say your name again and again and louder each time as if you are a small child once more and I am calling you back to safety. Back from the high places, the sea that is too rough. Back to love. Come even now, Daniel, walking towards me across this snow-filled road, and I’ll stop the car for you, blast the heater to warm you. Take you home.
‘Are you all right, mate?’ a man asks. He’s stopped jogging because he’s thinking I might be about to go into the water.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I tell him, trying to stem the waver of my voice. ‘Just looking at the river.’
‘I can stay with you, look at the river with you,’ he says and his high-vis vest hurts my eyes.
‘That’s good of you,’ I tell him, ‘but I’m heading home now. Have a good run.’
He stands by the railings until I start to walk away. And have I ever thought of going in the water since that night? Yes I’ve thought about it, and had times in the hours before dawn when sleep has deserted me or when out driving on my own it’s whispered to me, but it’s not a voice I’ll ever listen to because I have a family who need me, need me more than ever, and so I have to find strength from wherever it can be found to keep on. Just as I’m keeping on this road to bring Luke home. A mattress and a sleeping bag. That’s all. No paraphernalia we see in films – no needles or tourniquets, no lighter or silver foil, no pipes or small spoons. The bareness of that room. Each time I go into yours that Lorna is not ready yet to change I remember it and it tries to shape itself into this space we thought of as belonging to you, pushing aside the older memories the room wants to hold. They aren’t able to say what made your heart give out. There are traces of many different things. And none of it matters. Lilly wants to see you but it’s a closed lid because you’ve gone beyond what might be done to make that possible. All of us are smaller, drawn inwards to silence because we do
n’t know what it is we should say to each other, and all of us are frightened because as we stand at the graveside we encounter full face the shuddering dominion of death. A father and now a son in this place so I stand in a no man’s land between what should have been the future and the past that was and I don’t know to which I belong. It troubles me that Luke is going to return there and make his film but I know I’ll go with him and help him in whatever way he needs, if he needs my help at all.
Sometime in the weeks afterwards Lilly puts an app on my phone. Everyone in her class has it and what it does is measure how many footsteps you take in a day. She tells me I’m supposed to do ten thousand. But it comes to record only my inertia, the pathetic number of steps I take, because now everything feels as if it has shut down and can’t be stirred into motion. Sleeping, staring at the television with its sound turned down low and without any awareness of what I’m watching. Even getting out of the chair to go to my studio takes on the appearance of an arduous trek fraught with obstacles and dangers. And the world is too loud – the sound of the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine’s final manic screaming spin, even the clean cutlery being dropped into the kitchen drawer. All of it lacerates, all of it makes me feel as if I want to swim in perfect silence under the surface of deep water, for the ice to close over my head. For Lorna it’s different. The very opposite. She can’t sit still and she’s set herself in a motion that she must hope will stem what’s inside and at any moment is at risk of overflowing and drowning her. So she’s set her feet on surer ground and she’s washing and cleaning, stripping the beds and beating the house into a shape because she says it’s been neglected and everywhere is beginning to look run-down and in need of attention. I want to beg her to stop but I can’t and so I try to separate myself from the noise she’s making as if she thinks it might scatter the spirits that have settled on our home. And sometimes Lilly makes us both reveal the number of steps we’ve taken and the gap is so great that there are times when I wonder if we can ever survive this thing or if every day we’re stepping further away from each other.
We choose photographs for the funeral service that are projected on to the wall behind the speaker to the sound of Moby’s ‘Porcelain’. People don’t understand photographs. They think they always freeze the moment in time but the truth is that they set the moment free from it and what the camera has caught steps forever outside its onward roll. So it will always exist, always live just as it was in that precise second, with the same smile or scowl, the same colour of sky, the same fall of light and shade, the very same thought or pulse of the heart. It’s the most perfect thing that sets free the eternal in the sudden stillness of the camera’s click. I find a comfort in that and I’ll take comfort anywhere it offers itself. Those that Lorna chooses are of Daniel in a different time and they all show a boy still holding tightly to happiness. I understand that and I like them too. But the final two projected on the wall are the most recent and in neither of them do we see his face. The first is on the bridge when he was walking across, because I took it before he saw me and he’s walking away across a chasm of space towards the other side, and the second is of him standing on the stones looking out at the sea, dwarfed by its immensity and power. These are the ones that tear at my heart because he’s on his own, just as he was at the end when I should have been there in that room, taking back the words I spoke in fear and anger, taking my son back to his family.
The traffic slows and eventually comes to a stop. At first I can’t see the cause of the delay then as we begin to edge forward I see a policeman with a light-stick calming and directing the flow. As I get closer I see his light-stick has a little garland of tinsel round the handle. I lower my window and he tells me a lorry has jackknifed and just to keep my speed down and follow directions. But we soon come to a complete standstill as they let traffic flow from the opposite direction. I check there’s no police about and phone Lorna because I want nothing more than to hear her voice.
‘Everything all right?’ she asks and I realise that ringing her instinctively makes her think something bad has happened.
‘Everything’s fine. I’m not far away now. But I’m sitting in traffic because some lorry up ahead has blocked the road.’
‘Will you still be in time to get the boat?’
‘I think so and if we’re not we’ll still be able to get the later sailing.’
‘They say the airport is opening again.’
‘Murphy’s Law but most of the flights between now and Christmas are booked up – there’s no guarantee that we could have got him on one.’
‘Luke phoned, says he’s started to feel a bit better. But make sure he keeps drinking and takes those tablets.’
‘He just needs to get home, get a bit of TLC. He’ll be fine.’
The traffic still hasn’t moved. Some of the cars coming towards me have their sidelights on and I take their example. There is a moment of silence before I ask, ‘Have you turned the outside lights on yet?’
‘They’re on. I’ll keep them on so Luke can see them if you get home late.’
‘How are you?’ I ask suddenly, almost before I know I’m going to do it.
‘So-so. Up and down. I’ll be better when you’re both home.’
‘How’s Lilly?’
‘Pretty excited. We’ve been doing some baking. The kitchen’s a mess.’
‘Can you put her on?’
I hear Lorna tell her that her father wants to speak to her.
‘Hi, Lilly.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Not far away. Almost there.’
‘It’s taken you a long time. Luke will be tired waiting.’
‘It’s a long journey. What are you baking?’
‘Shortbread shaped like holly leaves.’
‘Very good. Maybe we’ll see you on The Great British Bake Off with Mary Berry or you’ll be the new Mary Holly Berry.’
‘Very funny.’
Silence and then the next voice I hear is Lorna’s.
‘OK, Tom. Drive safe and don’t rush to catch the next sailing if it’s better to take your time and get home safely. Even if it’s the last one I’ll be waiting up. I’ve lots of things to do. Things to wrap that I can’t do while you-know-who’s about.’
I say goodbye without asking her what was in my head – if we are going to make it, keep our heads above the water, how we can keep our children safe every day for the rest of our lives. If she will be able to forgive me. I wanted too to say that I am going to try harder this Christmas than I have ever tried before no matter what I feel inside. I promise it aloud in the silence of the car and grip the steering wheel more tightly as if to make the words a physical reality.
We start to move again but slowly and then enter a chicane of orange cones, passing the jackknifed lorry as a policewoman beckons us on and inevitably every driver’s head turns to stare. It doesn’t look to have crashed into anything more solid than a stretch of scrubland and nothing has spilled from it. I think of Rosemary and wonder how’s she doing and whether any of her injuries have proved more serious than she thought and I wonder too if she will be cared for by her daughter who nurses in the hospital. Strange to be nursed by your child but I guess that reversal of roles is one that probably awaits us all down the road. And I wonder why Luke wants to film in the cemetery and whether he’s been infected by some morbid fascination with the rituals of death. Although I didn’t say to him, I know the section he’s talking about because I walked through it one afternoon when my mother had asked me to check that my father’s headstone had been done as requested. The cemetery is taken up mostly by traditional graves where no decorations are allowed so that the grass can be cut, but on the other side of the road exists this strange area of trees where families have personalised the final resting place of their loved ones so it’s a sea of glass-covered photographs, soft toys and mementoes, suncatchers, wind mobiles, hanging crystals, ribbons and streamers tied to branches. Scarves and items associated wit
h favoured football teams feature a lot and there are memorials to babies who have died. It’s a strange place and the talismanic offerings give it the feel of something more primitive and superstitious and, despite the modern objects, of you having ventured into some ancient burial site that rests outside the conventional world.
The road ahead is clear now, and the satnav tells me I’ll be at Luke’s in twenty-five minutes, but even though I’ve started to consider what we might talk about, the music we might listen to, that’s not where I’m going any more. I haven’t planned this. It doesn’t make any sense. But something stronger than sense is making me turn off the road, reconfigure the satnav even though I almost hear its bewilderment at this last-minute change to the journey it’s mapped out so precisely for me. I saw it a few minutes ago, suddenly rearing up, insistently bigger than any picture can conceive, and I tell myself that it won’t take long. That there’s still time. There’ll still be time for me to find my son and take him home. I’m not a religious person but I think of those who have travelled across deserts and dusty plains, following what comes down to faith and then finding the journey ends in a place none of them has ever expected. I have no faith but there have been times when I wondered if one could find me because it offers things that aren’t open to anyone without it. Things that look good to this person I’ve become. So there’s the possibility of forgiveness, of your sins being white as the purest of this snow, of thinking everything is part of a plan that although bewildering in the present will make sense in the future. Of having the pain taken away. Being given something to follow other than your own craziness and something to guide you to what I remember the minister at my father’s graveside called ‘blessed assurance’.
I don’t possess that blessed assurance, don’t think I ever will, but wherever it’s coming from I know I have to follow where this impulse is taking me. And perhaps that’s the only form of faith open to me now so I can’t ignore it or write it off as the confusion that has come to dominate every part of my life. And for the first time since this thing happened I want to take a photograph because maybe, if I can do that right, other things might come right too. Take a photograph of this Angel that rises high above everything and whose wings exercise a dominion over all below. So I follow the directions given to me by a woman whose voice has brought me safely this far but who I’ve never seen – is it possible that she alone in the world now understands what veers me off my pre-planned route and brings me the short distance to the car park where there is only one other car? The light is beginning to drop and I can tell from the footsteps in the snow that many people have been there during the day and I see tracks that look like some kids have had a sledge.