by Paul Read
‘Hotel. Not far. I thought Danny might want to stay here.’
‘Of course.’
Danny leapt up and down, made up a gibberish song.
‘How was Christmas?’ she asked.
Patrick sighed and sat down opposite her. ‘Mum was asking after you. It was quite an inquisition.’
Ana chuckled. She’d been attending medical school during the early days of their marriage, and her bedside manner throughout Patrick’s father’s chemotherapy had almost certainly been the reason Ana was so cemented in his mother’s affections.
‘How’s your work, Patrick?’ It was a veritable carousel of questions-by-number.
He shrugged and tickled his son, who hurled himself about on the floor with unabashed joy. Ana’s smile of sympathy annoyed and anointed him in equal measure.
His wife was intimidatingly beautiful and he wondered, not for the first time, whether the act of punching too high above his weight had been the root cause of their breakup. But, every man’s obliged to think that. No sane person would enter a relationship thinking they were above their partner.
‘Why don’t you stay here? It’s late.’
Before she could refute the idea, Patrick grabbed Danny and launched him into the air. ‘Shall we check out the new toys in your room, Danny?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ The boy punched the air as his father carried him through.
Inside Danny’s room, Patrick suddenly saw just how tired his son was, how was he was being held awake only by excitement. He opened one present – a soft Spiderman figure – and then encouraged Danny to lie down while he turned on the night light and spoke to him about where he’d got the toy from. There was no lie about Father Christmas here; he wanted his son to know that he was the magical benefactor. Finally, lying down, Danny was asleep in no time.
Patrick looked at him as he slept, as perfect a specimen of humanity as he could ever hope to see. He tucked him in, then turned off the night light and went back to Ana in the front room. This was almost definitely where it would get awkward.
But Ana had fallen asleep too. He draped a blanket over her, hastily, as though he were doing something perverse, then went to the kitchen window and scanned up and down the dark street. A fox slunk through gardens. A light wind shook Mrs Lingham’s conifers.
Outside, the world looked cold and deserted. Victoria Street. Alexandra Road. Holly Park. Town planners in London had a propensity for naming places after women, and, unbidden, the faces of old girlfriends floated past the window in the thin puffs of snow from the guttering. Katy Rowlett, whom Patrick had had to stand on a crate to kiss in the first year of secondary school. Sophie McGee, a college one-night stand who deserved to be so much more. Emma Worthington, the owner of the only heart Patrick had ever definitely broken. And then there was Ana, who refused to be summed up in a sentence, because he had actually loved her. Still loved her, surely.
He stayed there longer than necessary, alternatively looking back at the sleeping woman on his sofa, then the hostile world outside, before finally deadlocking the front door and going to bed.
He was woken by the sound of Danny crying out and was fully awake in a second.
Halfway from his bed, he paused. Danny had nightmares, he remembered now. The boy never recalled them in the morning and had probably already slipped back into peaceful slumber. That’s if Danny had even made a noise – it was quite probable that Patrick himself had dreamed the sound. He lay back down in bed and stared restlessly at the dark shapes in the corner of his room, his mind alert and excitable, until visibility came. That his family would return to him, no matter how briefly, was a thrill he’d not truly foreseen.
There came a shifting, muffled sound from another room. Patrick’s first thought was that it was Ana, but no light had sharpened under the door. Fear held him. His family weren’t safe here. He remembered how Denis went down. The unconscious, or dead, body on the alley floor.
Slowly, he slipped out of bed. He kept the light off and stood by the door, listening. How many pairs of feet could he make out through the hallway? Were they a woman’s footsteps, or a man’s? It was hard to tell. They were light. Tentative. His hand curled round an umbrella and he crept out into the landing.
In the hall he saw nothing, but was aware of rustling from the front room.
Remembering his son’s cry, he tore into Danny’s bedroom and slammed on the light, bathing the walls in retina-gouging pain. What he saw made his heart flee his body.
Danny’s bed was empty.
Patrick lunged forward, then exhaled sharply as he spotted him on the floor. Danny had obviously rolled out before falling asleep again. Carefully, he picked his son up and replaced him in the bedsheets. There was a discernable chill in the air and Patrick made sure he was tucked in tight. Danny’s breathing was shallow and miraculous.
Assured of his son’s safety, his heart still racing, Patrick re-entered the hallway then burst into the front room, makeshift weapon raised. Ana turned round in shock, one arm in her coat sleeve. He cornered the umbrella behind the door, flicked the light switch.
‘I’m off to the hotel,’ she told him.
‘You should have woken me.’ He peered into every corner of the front room.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I thought I heard someone.’
‘You heard me. Why are you so panicky?’
He flashed her an apologetic smile but it couldn’t have been convincing; he’d been living alone for too long and the roleplay required for twenty-four-hour human interaction was rusty from disuse.
‘Give me a call tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I need to sleep in a proper bed. My neck hurts.’
‘Have mine. I’ll take the sofa.’
She looked at him, as though weighing up the offer. Would sleeping in his recently-vacated bed be too personal an act? The light was scalding. Her look too.
He crossed to the window. The street was, as it always was, empty. He was shaking.
‘Can you look after Danny for a few days?’ she asked.
‘Of course. Why?’
‘I’ve made plans.’
‘Plans? You’ve only been back five seconds.’ He knew his suspicion, his jealousy, was unattractive, but hiding it was like camouflaging a facial blemish – or cleft lip – there was only so much concealer you could cake on the affliction. It was who he was; he was a jealous man. ‘Are you… seeing someone?’
‘No. Are you?’
He shook his head. When were the two of them going to acknowledge the elephant in the room? When would the word Divorce get its first mention? ‘Take my bed. I honestly don’t mind. You don’t really want to leave in this cold, do you?’
‘Not really, no.’
But she left anyway. And in doing so, painted a clear picture of where their relationship, or lack of one, was at. Patrick stood by the window and watched her go, then remained there for the rest of the night, a sentry peering out into the glass-cold dark.
The next day, the day after, the day after that, Patrick took Danny far away from the regular world: to museums, play centres, toyshops, McDonalds. His son was delighted, constantly, and his energy was infectious and boundless. It was a far cry from the night-time world, in which Patrick lay in a fragile dark listening for tell-tale signs of teenage intruders as the calendar mocked him, drew him back to school.
Over New Year, they visited Patrick’s mother, who seemed to ask, ‘And how’s your work, Patrick?’ every five minutes, as everyone always did, defining him through what he did for a living instead of his politics, his ambitions, his personal library. Danny, of course, got the lion’s share of the attention, but that was to be expected, while Patrick was told to ‘be careful on the sauce’ with each glass of wine. His response to his mother’s Methodist asceticism was to sulk, obviously, and though he hated himself for falling into the teenage sarcasm trap, no one had told him to watch what he drank since his wife left. Ana was, of course, asked after. Patrick could only answer, truthfully,
that he had no idea where she’d gone.
His mother’s entire body tightened at moments like this. The split had been a major incursion upon her sensibilities; no one in their family had got divorced before and she dreaded the rumours which would fly around her book club if the Big D happened. While Patrick seemed to spend the whole time talking through his teeth, she dabbed her thin mouth with a red and green serviette, as though holding back the real questions she wanted to ask. Being a failed novelist, she wasn’t predisposed to outward emotion. They didn’t mention Dad once.
Patrick and Danny sat on the top deck of the bus on the way back, at the very front. Danny loved it, and seemed to believe he was genuinely flying over the streets of London. Patrick, as usual, was nervous about bumping into kids he taught. The smell of petrol and vomit and chips offended him, despite how used he now was to their aroma.
‘Danny,’ he began. ‘Mummy’s taking you back to Argentina soon. Have you enjoyed yourself?’
The boy shrugged, then said simply, ‘Yeah.’
Patrick knew not to take it to heart. A child’s mood changed from second to second.
‘Would you like to stay here, with me?’
‘Your flat’s too small,’ the boy stated.
‘It’s big enough.’
‘In Argentina I have a massive room.’ He spread his arms in demonstration. ‘And a balcony. And it’s hot. And I eat jamon every day.’
‘What’s jamon?’
‘Ham.’
‘Right.’ Educated by his three-year-old. Nice. He paused, looked around him again. The streets clanked past, taillights beginning to glow as the evening scrolled over the horizon. ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Again, so matter-of-fact it hurt. For a long time, Patrick had assumed his son was autistic, but he’d eventually realised that all children, up to a certain age, spoke like this. ‘I know you do. And so does Mummy. Maybe a bit more.’
‘What do you mean?’ To disguise his hurt, Patrick stared out the window at the Turkish restaurateurs as they scraped greasy slices of donner kebab into stale pitta clams.
‘She laughs more.’
‘She… laughs more?’
‘And she doesn’t look around her all the time.’
‘Do I look around me all the time, Danny?’
‘You’ve been doing it all day today and yesterday and the day before yesterday.’
Patrick pulled his son closer to him. It was all true. His mother offered him a larger, warmer, friendlier, and all round safer environment.
The two of them stared out of the curved windscreen at a mushrooming storm cloud, its ominous grey mass singed on the right-hand side by sunset. Patrick held his son still tighter, and wept silently into his sweet-smelling hair. When Ana came back, he decided, he wouldn’t fight with her over what was going to happen to Danny. Danny would go where Danny felt the most comfortable, and the boy, with cutthroat receptivity, had already convinced him it would be more sensible if he flew back with her.
After all, it would soon be time to return to Highfields. And Denis would be waiting for him.
THREE
Passing through the playground’s crematoria-style entrance gates, Patrick’s eyes flitted round the darker recesses as he headed for the front doors.
A few teachers said hello as he flew down the corridor, their greetings falsely chirpy. That part-timer in Humanities, a knock-kneed knob-end from Wood Green who looked as though his haircut had been bought over the internet, even had the audacity to ask him how his holiday had gone. A nameless teaching assistant whose wonky face was saved by inappropriate décolletage probably tried to smile at him, but it looked for all the world as though she was about to start crying so he hurried embarrassedly on.
The final flight of stairs was always trickier than the three previous, usually more on account of the accumulating chewing gum on his soles than Patrick’s deteriorating levels of fitness. Through the rear windows, he saw Charlotte’s effete, little car and was momentarily dumbstruck. It was in exactly the same position as they’d left it two weeks ago. The snow must have prevented it from being fixed before she flew off to Barbados or Bilbao or Bilauktaung. But seeing the car brought the events back home. Even the snow now seemed like it was returning properly after its own holiday, fluttering back onto the grassy verges, the basketball court, and those weeks off suddenly seemed inconsequential and forgotten.
He decided against turning the light on in the Art office. There was no need to advertise the fact he was there to anyone.
Patrick stared into the slowly dawning sky to find himself wondering whether his son thought about him much, or whether he thought more about Spiderman, or the Gruffalo, or jamon. ‘Danny’s Tune’ was still very much a work in progress, but it had gained verses in his mind, and a middle eight. The problem was, it was now replete with his son’s fresh absence and had morphed from rousing stadium anthem to the lonely plink-plonk of a nursery-room pullstring.
Danny was probably on the plane, right now. Patrick searched the pregnant snowclouds for his boy. He’d heard of refugees falling to their deaths from the wheel housings of aircraft, frozen and asphyxiated, in a desperate attempt to flee their war- or economy-ravaged countries. He believed he had some idea of that kind of desperation, and right now would gladly have taken the risk of falling to his death from Danny’s plane.
Patrick slouched to the far side of the office and tugged his electric guitar out of the mire of other formerly loved bric-a-brac. He had more of a history, more of a relationship, with that instrument than the flesh and blood who shared the office with him. He knew its sounds and feels and emotions and, once upon a time, it had responded in kind to his. Though scratched and dusty, an object drawn by hundreds of children unaware of its pedigree, its weight against him felt good and he fastened the strap across his shoulder.
Adam had always been fiercely jealous of this guitar, coveted it the way Patrick had coveted Ana. Now both acquisitions were covered in dust, the poetic thing to have done, rather than let it rot in a London secondary school, would have been to send it to his former bandmate. But Patrick doubted Adam wanted anything from him these days and as he hugged the guitar close, breath coming in thin gasps, he hovered his right hand over the strings and cautiously strummed a slow E chord.
The note sagged derisorily out of tune.
‘Morning.’
Patrick jumped a foot in the air as Harriet entered the office, accompanied by a drawn-out sigh which didn’t herald from the door’s stiff hinge. She wore a long turquoise skirt with a turquoise jumper, both the exact same shade as one another, and further betrayed her age by accompanying the combination with a gold floral brooch.
‘Hi Harriet,’ Patrick tendered, trying to sound normal. He replaced the guitar. ‘Good Christmas?’
‘I didn’t sleep well last night. I never do before the first day back. Too nervous. You?’
‘Not a wink.’
He had the Elevens period four.
Deny everything, right down to the bruises on Denis’ face. Nothing happened. Just deny it, utterly. And make sure you’re in a public place at all times.
‘The kids will be bonkers,’ Harriet mused, looking out the window at the kids beginning to limp into the playground. ‘It’s snowing again. Is the heating on?’
‘Not that I can feel.’
‘There’ll be complaints about that.’ She said this with genuine concern, grimacing so hard Patrick worried about being sucked into the corrugated fissures around her eyes. ‘It’s like Mr H is desperate to alert Ofsted again.’
The inspectors were overdue as it was and Highfields hadn’t performed well previously. The climate around the school had been one of unparalleled anxiety since the September kick-off, a death row atmosphere hardly conducive to the teaching of children, and even Harriet, who’d seen off several such inspections in her time, wasn’t immune to the panic. In fact, she suffered it worse than most.
‘Charlotte’s paperwork�
�s all over the place and her GCSE grades are fucked up,’ she confided quietly. Patrick had long ago become used to hearing someone his mother’s age swearing so readily. ‘She hasn’t a clue how to control the youngsters. You remember what happened last time she was observed?’
Of course he did. His only regret was that he hadn’t been there to see Charlotte’s lesson first-hand. ‘The odds of another heron flying through the window are highly unlikely, Harriet.’
‘How were my kids in my absence?’ Harriet checked her timetable above the kettle.
‘Awful. Charlene was stealing other pupils’ school bags and filling them with water at the sinks.’
She nodded. This kind of behaviour was hardly news.
It was good to have Harriet clocking in again. Her demeanour was no fresher but her pained-yet-defiant air was somehow reassuring. Patrick noticed, not for the first time, just how truly knackered Harriet looked. Her top lip sported a thicker wisping of hair than usual and she’d been scratching at her cheek, leaving it with the thin traces of sadistic fingernails.
‘You… alright?’
‘I’m counting the days.’
‘Afraid there are still six weeks before half term.’ If she looked this awful on the first day back there was no chance she’d last till then.
‘I’m thinking beyond that, Patrick. I’m looking forward to retirement.’
‘You’re not going anytime soon, are you?’ he asked with what he hoped she’d take as a flattering dismay. Charlotte hadn’t mentioned anything about interviewing for a vacant post.
‘Less than two years.’
‘Doesn’t sound long.’
‘Not compared to the thirty I’ve already done, no. There have been good moments, don’t get me wrong, but it’s never been easy. In fact, it’s got harder. The moment I feel on top of my job the curriculum changes or the government introduces something to pull the rug from under my feet. Twenty years ago, I considered leaving but thought I’d be unable to retrain. The irony is you have to retrain every five years or so to remain in this job, or you get left behind. I was scared the money would be less if I went somewhere else, that I’d lose a secure career, that the holidays would be impossible to do without… I’m in the twilight of my career now. You’re comparatively fresh. Trust me, Patrick, if you’re not one hundred percent happy, get out.’