by Edward Hogan
“Theoretically.”
Perfect. I grabbed my rucksack, put the message inside, and turned to the window.
“Dammit,” I said. “And how might you get out of the window if it happened to be locked and the key was nowhere to be seen?”
“I’d probably check under the wardrobe,” he said, standing from the bed.
I retrieved the key and stood. He smiled. “Shall we?” he said.
The Vespa was in the garage, under a dust sheet. It was sky blue, with fancy silver letters. I couldn’t help the tiny voice in my head saying, Uncle Robert — what a poseur. Max looked at the scooter and bit his lip — he knew he was going to get in trouble, but he didn’t say anything about it.
“There’s only one helmet,” he said.
“You take it,” I said.
“No way,” he said. “Someone’s got to look after you. Besides, I’ve got this.” He put a kendo mask on over his glasses. “Bought it in the sale.”
I put on the blue helmet and looked at my watch. The thought occurred to me that we might not get there in time, that I might be on my way to find my brother’s body. I shook the thought off.
Max was shaky on the scooter at first, but he soon got the hang of it, zipping through the city traffic onto the coastal road, past the backs of the beach huts. I looked at Peter’s and the square of flattened grass where his final box of possessions had been. He’d really gone.
We went through Crowdean, past the retirement home, with its painful memories, and out toward Whiteslade. The scenery changed, became more farmish. The towns unraveled. I started to recognize the potholed roads from when I was a kid, when Nana was alive, but it all looked so small now. Overgrown hedges clambered over random little houses. There was a run-down high street with charity shops and a couple of cafés. There were more Saint George flags in the windows here. More patriots, although one lone house had an Italian tricolor draped over the veranda.
I couldn’t see the shed up on the hills behind, and even if I could, how was I going to find the street where Johnny was to die? The sun was bright and mean. I tapped Max on the shoulder and gestured that he should pull over and park the scooter.
It was almost noon, and nothing looked familiar. How many square meters in a place like Whiteslade? Too many. He could have been anywhere. I walked in one direction and then spun round and ran in another, but I was just guessing. Max followed me, and he looked more and more disturbed.
“Frances, are you OK? Can you explain what we’re doing?”
I held my head. “We’re . . . we’re looking for Johnny. . . . I need to sit down.”
We found a bench next to a telephone box. “Think,” I said to myself. I took the postcard out of my rucksack and stared at it again.
“What’s that?” Max said.
God knows what he could see when he looked at it. He probably thought it was an abstract art print from the local museum. “Max, I’m trying to find a street, but all the streets look the same here. You see that den — the small ruin on the hill?”
He turned around. “Yeah.”
“That’s my only landmark. But you can see it from every damn street in the village. I think Johnny might have been hiding there.”
“So why don’t we just go there, then?” he said.
“I’m afraid that I’ll miss him. He’s going to be somewhere down here in . . .” I looked at my watch. “He’s going to be here very soon anyway.” I put the postcard down on the bench and put my head in my hands.
Max took off his glasses, laid them on the bench, and rubbed his eyes. He’d put the left lens of the spectacles over the postcard. The image was magnified. Johnny’s face had expanded. I picked up the glasses and moved them like a spyglass to focus more clearly. There was something — some detail — reflected in the lenses of Johnny’s aviators.
I couldn’t see it clearly, but it was all I’d got — my last hope.
“Max, was there an Internet café on the high street?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s go.”
He didn’t move, and I could see he was thinking he’d made the wrong decision. He was thinking that I was crazy after all, and that he was going to get into serious trouble about the scooter.
I kissed him on the forehead. “Max. Thank you for coming with me. Maybe you were right. Maybe one of us should walk up to the den. Why don’t you go?”
I knew Johnny wouldn’t be there, but I’d involved Max too much already. I had to do this alone. He looked up at the den.
“Take a little walk, eh?” I said.
“OK,” he said. “If you’re sure you’ll be all right. I’ll meet you back here.”
I barged into the Internet café and sat at a machine. I was frantic now, shouting at the computer to load. People were looking over, but I didn’t care. I scanned in the postcard and it came up. I scrolled along and caught the figure in the distance that I’d noticed that morning. It was a policeman running toward Johnny. They’d found him. They’d chased him. Maybe it was the police that caused his death. It was hard for me to zoom in on Johnny’s face, but I had to do it. I could see the shock in him, his mouth open. I went up to the lenses of his aviators, hoping to God for some clue to where he was.
There was a clue to his location, but that wasn’t what I noticed first. What I noticed first was the reflection of another man crumpled at the waist, cruelly twisted, and sprawled across the bonnet of a light-colored car. There was no doubt who it was.
Peter.
I raised my hands to my head. What was happening? It took me a moment to work it out. The message wasn’t for Johnny at all. It was for Peter. I kept thinking. In my mind, I saw the flattened square of grass behind his hut. He’d been back there, which meant he’d probably found the note and the copy of the picture. He’d surely have looked at the picture. Without either of us knowing it, I’d delivered his death message.
I looked back at the image. Why was Johnny in the picture? Why were they together? The glass around my brother was from the car, I could see that now. I could also see, in the reflected surface of Johnny’s sunglasses, a house across the street. It had a flag draped over the veranda. A tricolor. Italian.
I ran out of the café without paying. The man at the till shouted after me, but I barely heard him. I heard sirens. I ran through the grid of little streets and went past the bench on which I’d just been sitting. I stopped. Someone was sitting there and at first I thought it was Maxi, but it wasn’t. It was Joe. He looked dazed.
“Oh. It’s you,” he said.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve been to the zoo and he’s supposed to be taking me home, but my . . . Peter’s acting really weird. He . . . he got a voice mail on his phone, and he said we had to turn around and come here, wherever here is.”
“Don’t move,” I said.
I kept running, and as I came to the street with the Italian flag, I saw the policeman running toward me from the end of the road. I stopped and looked around, but there was no sign of anyone else. I was shaking.
It happened so quickly that I barely had time to think. I can separate each movement now, of course, not that it makes any difference. This is what I saw and heard:
A light-colored car came hurtling around the corner from behind me, doing at least fifty.
A man in a vest, sunglasses, and jeans burst out of an alleyway halfway down the street and sprinted across the road. My brother. I barely had time to feel the emotions that came with seeing him after so long.
Peter Kennedy emerged from the same alley a split second later, chasing Johnny, and being followed by another uniformed police officer.
Until the last moment, it seemed that the car would hit Johnny, but in that tenth of a second, everything changed. Peter changed it. He pushed Johnny onto the pavement and tried to evade the front end of the car. The driver hit the brakes, but he was way too late and Peter was thrown over the bonnet.
I went to Johnny. He looked up at me. His clothes were covered in sparkling blue glass, and his arm was raw and bleeding.
“Fran?” he said. He had no idea what was happening.
“Johnny,” I said. “You’re OK.”
He looked at the two policemen crouching beside Peter. I ran over to them, but I knew. I knelt down by Peter’s body, by his face, and I tried to talk to him. His eyes were closed. I can’t remember what I said, whether I said thank you or sorry. I only know that he didn’t respond.
Johnny had gone over to the car and was talking to the driver. “What the hell were you doing, mate?” he was saying. “Mate? Can you hear me?”
One of the policemen looked up. “You wait there, you!” he shouted to Johnny.
Johnny was going nowhere. He was going to be fine. But Peter was not.
I’ve been over it so many times. Part of being a messenger is imagining other people’s lives. I try every day to re-create the last hours of Peter Kennedy from any bit of information I can gather. I have talked to Joe — although God knows he didn’t want to talk to me. I have talked to Johnny, the police officers, and the paramedics. There was nothing they could do to save Peter.
You cannot know everything about a moment in time. It’s impossible. You can’t be certain about the thoughts and motives of the people involved, but you can make a decent guess.
Peter took his son to the zoo in a car he’d hired that morning. Joe was nervous to begin with and was still limping because of his sprained ankle, but the antics of the lemurs made them both laugh, and that relaxed them. Before lunchtime, they set off for Hartsleigh. Peter was happy, but in a curious way. It was as though the happiness wasn’t really his. It was like he was borrowing the good feeling, and he had a nagging sensation of unfinished business. Nevertheless, he and Joe drove back along the coastal road, politely sharing information about their lives.
As they went through Helmstown, Peter stopped to pick up his final box of belongings from the beach hut, being careful to make sure that a teenage girl wasn’t waiting for him. He checked the padlock and noticed the piece of paper and the postcard under his door.
He looked at them on his way back to the car. He didn’t know how long he had to figure out the image. He resolved to drop Joe off, go home, and put the postcard through his scanner. But after a few more minutes on the road, his phone beeped. He hadn’t heard it ring. It was in the coin tray.
“You’ve got a voice mail,” Joe said.
Peter picked it up.
“You shouldn’t do that while you’re driving, you know,” Joe said anxiously.
“It’s all right,” Peter said. “I’m being careful.”
He listened to the voice mail, checked his mirrors, and then spun the car around. He headed for Whiteslade.
“Where are we going?” Joe said.
“I’ve got to do something. Won’t take long.”
He happened to be following the police van into Whiteslade and so he saw it pull over. The officers got out — one started to chase Johnny while the other went around the block in an attempt to cut him off. Johnny ran straight past Peter’s car. Peter pulled over and got out with the copy of the message, quickly giving some money to his son and telling him to go to the shops.
Peter was quick on his feet. Quicker than an anxious, sleepless, out-of-shape boxer who’d been living rough. He hadn’t had time to study the message properly, hadn’t realized it was meant for him, and as he ran down that alley, he had no idea what was going to happen.
That’s my latest version. Some days I change certain details. Some days I imagine that Peter was angry with me for some reason. Sometimes I make him more loving. I make him miss me. The only bit I can’t change, of course, is the ending.
There are consequences, the old Peter would probably have said. An unstoppable, inevitable chain. He might have said that he and Johnny had been on a collision course since the day they were born. That Johnny was on the run because he’d punched a policeman, that he’d only punched a policeman because he’d trained as a boxer, that he’d only trained as a boxer because he’d done so badly at school, that he’d done so badly at school because his father abused him. The old Peter would have said that there are some things — some people — you just can’t help.
But Peter changed.
There’s only one person to blame, as far as I’m concerned. I served Peter with the message of his death. Not only that, but I convinced him he could make a difference. I convinced him he could save people from a fate he thought was inevitable. That’s why he went after Johnny. That’s why he died.
I’ve never believed in fate, inevitability. I believe we can change things. And so I have to take responsibility. It was me. I led him to his death. It was my fault. I was the messenger.
It’s easier to know what that day was like for Johnny, because a week later he told me, during one of the many visits I made to him in police custody. After the car that hit Peter stopped, Johnny went over and discovered that the driver was a man in his late sixties. He’d been driving erratically because of a tightness in his chest. He was trying to get home so he could take some painkillers and ask his wife, a nurse, what was going on.
Johnny asked the guy what the hell he thought he was doing, but the man couldn’t reply. He couldn’t get his breath. Soon he went pale and lost consciousness. He was having a heart attack.
Johnny had done a first-aid course. He dragged the man from the car and resuscitated him in the middle of the road. The paramedics said he’d saved the man’s life, but Johnny doesn’t want to talk about it.
“It’s all very well, what I did for the bloke in the car, but that other guy died because of me, Frances.”
He’s talking about Peter, of course, although I’ve never told him who Peter was. Maybe I will, one day.
While Johnny was on the run, the policeman he’d punched began to recover consciousness. It turns out waking from a coma isn’t like they show it in the movies. You don’t just sit up, tanned and fit, and start jabbering away to your beautiful wife. The guy woke up gradually, surfacing for a few minutes at a time, and then going back under. When he eventually came out of the coma for good, he was confused and upset. Even now, he’s still struggling. He’s having trouble with the vision in one eye, but his speech is fully restored. He’s alive.
Johnny’s never met him, but there’s talk that it could happen, at some point, when Johnny gets out.
My brother accepted his short prison sentence gratefully. The landlord of the pub outside of which he hit the policeman found some temporarily misplaced CCTV footage showing the guy throwing the first punch. The judge said Johnny probably acted in self-defense, but that he knew the sort of damage he was capable of. Running away didn’t do him any favors, either.
Just as the policeman’s recovery has been gradual, so will Johnny’s be. He’s cheeked the prison staff a few times. Interestingly, he’s abandoned his idea of a youth boxing gym. You know what he’s teaching the other convicts? Freestyle skipping. Apparently it’s catching on. It’s good for your heart, and nobody gets their face smashed in. “I can’t rub out the bad things I’ve done,” Johnny said last time I visited. “But I can scribble some good ones over the top.”
I told Johnny that I knew the stories about our dad were lies. I told him it didn’t matter, because just having Johnny tell me the stories was enough. He could have been talking about a rare species of pig, for all I cared. I got more than the father I deserved. I got Johnny.
Initially, Joe Davies didn’t want anything to do with me, but he is coming round. When I visit Helmstown, me and Max take him to the skate park. Max is rubbing off on him, which can only be a good thing. For a while, I suspect Joe thought
it would have been better never to have met his father, but I’m doing my best to fill in some gaps. I tell him stories about Peter, and while I gloss over some of the details, I never lie.
Me? Well, I’m a messenger, aren’t I? It was my hope, when I came home, that what happened in Helmstown would stay in Helmstown. But then I blacked out in the new shopping center back home, woke up, and drew a poor lad from the college, lying at the bottom of a high-security multistory car park. There is a sign above the entrance to that car park saying that it’s one of the three safest places in Europe.
I caught up with the boy on the steps as he was walking up to the top floor, his head hanging. His girlfriend had left him for an older man, he said.
“How old is he?” I said.
“Seventeen,” he said.
“So what you going to do?” I said, noticing his good broad shoulders.
“I’m gonna chuck meself off the roof.”
“You’re not,” I said.
“I am. What you gunna do about it?” he said. It was nice to hear the local accent again.
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” I said. “I’ll kiss you if I have to.”
He frowned, because he was a bit surprised. Then I could see his mind working, wondering if he could bargain with me, get more than a kiss. Sam, his name is. Scribble over the bad stuff with good.
I’ve had to get my act together. Filing systems, phone books, a laptop. My drawing is clearer, sharper, and death has not evolved any further, for now. Sometimes I want to tell the people I save: Use this time — this extra time is for you! Do something special with it.
I don’t, of course. Even if they believed me, the world is a fragile place, and you don’t want too many folk living each day like it’s their last. It’d be chaos.
Besides, there are some deaths you just have to accept. I have made messages of elderly people in hospital. They’re in pain. There’s not much you can do except bring the messages. I mean, I can’t cure cancer. My hope is that one day I’ll save someone who can. Sometimes you save someone who was going to be murdered, and they get murdered anyway. Sometimes you save someone, and they go on to do something bad. But I always save them if I can. In spite of everything that has happened, I still have got to believe that people can change. Otherwise, what’s the point?