by Ross Welford
Having my mouth full means I can’t really talk, so I look around a bit and I’m surprised to notice that he doesn’t seem to have tidied for a while. It’s not that his kitchen is dirty, it’s just messy. Grandpa Byron’s house was always full of stuff, but he had an amazing ability to keep it all tidy, only he must have been too busy lately, or something. I notice another thing as well: his long plait of hair isn’t there. There is the beginning of an uneasy feeling in me, which isn’t helped by the following exchange. I clear my mouth of spicy potatoes and say:
“Grandpa Byron, can I ask …”
“What did you call me? Grandpa Byron?”
“Oh. Yeah. I’ll explain in a minute.” This has kind of thrown me, as you can guess, but I press on. “What is the capital city of, ooh, I dunno … Greenland?”
Grandpa Byron squints at me. “Gree …? I’ve no idea, son. Why do you ask?”
And then we start talking. I won’t tell you everything. It goes on for hours. I’ll give you an idea, though, of what it is like from my side. Imagine trying to explain what a book is to someone who doesn’t know what reading is, like someone from some ancient jungle tribe centuries ago.
I guess it could be worse. At least he doesn’t assume that I’m crazy, or lying. He just lets me talk and talk, asking occasional questions, trying to keep my story on track, but it is hard, and I keep thinking at any point that he will say, “All right, bonny lad. That’s enough, and this is ridiculous. Either you tell me the truth, or I’m phoning the police. You’re a young boy in my house, I don’t know who you are from Adam and Eve, and it’s the sort of thing that could get a fellow into a lot of trouble …”
And so on. But he never does. Because here’s the thing:
I think he believes me.
It’s things that I can tell him, like:
Grandma Julie. I know who she is, and how she dies, and that Without You by Nilsson was number one when they got married;
I know why he came to England in the not-so-swinging sixties, because of fighting in Punjab;
Most of all, though, I know about Pye. What he looked like, how he talked, his blue satin bomber-jacket, his little head-bob …
When I talk about Pye, Grandpa Byron sits still, shaking his head, drinking in every word like a thirsty man. “My boy,” he keeps saying. “My poor, poor boy.”
Then I do something that almost – almost – proves my story to Grandpa Byron. I plug in my phone and give it enough charge to revive it, and there are the pictures I took, just a few days ago for me, but thirty years ago for Grandpa Byron: me and Pye on the beach, and me, him, and Hypatia. “Do you remember this?” I ask him, and he does a slow, sad head-wobble.
“I think so. Sort of. My memory’s … well, it’s not what it was, shall we say?”
We sit in silence for a bit, and Grandpa Byron gazes at the picture on my phone before saying, quietly, “Why did you run away after the … the accident?”
I find I can’t really answer, and when I lift my eyes I can see he’s looking intently at me. Not harshly, or angrily, but he wants an answer to something that I can see has been tormenting him for thirty years. And I hate myself at that moment, because all I can do – and I know it’s pathetic and childish and unworthy – all I can do is look away, and turn my mouth downwards, and give a half-shrug, and say, “Dunno.”
There’s a long pause as I squirm inside at my own wretchedness at giving such an inadequate answer. Looking back, I wonder if it was in those few seconds that Grandpa Byron’s attitude to me shifted slightly. From that point on, it has felt as if he believes my story, but also that he blames me for the death of Pye, and for not facing up to it at the time; for running away like a coward and leaving him to grieve, unknowing, for thirty years.
All he says, though, is, “It’s late, son. Shall I take you to your room?”
“My room?”
“Well, you look tired – and where else are you going to stay?”
The small bedroom was Pye’s old room. It’s got a bookshelf crammed with science books, and a wallpaper mural of earth seen from space, and from the ceiling a dangling model of the solar system. There are even still some schoolbooks on the desk and a pot of pencils.
“I haven’t been able to change it since he … since Pye left us.”
But it’s not actually as creepy as it sounds. There’s something nice about feeling this close to Pye.
“I like it,” I say, and I give him my best smile, but he’s just looking through me, a bit vacantly. Hard to blame him, really. I don’t think this was how he was expecting his evening to turn out.
Then it hits me. I knew there was something else about him that was different and it’s his arms – both of them straight and strong – and I ask him, “Do you remember me asking you to double-check the bolts on your pyro rig?”
His eyes roll up as he searches his memory and then he nods. “Aye, I suppose I do remember you sayin’ that. Why?”
“I see you kept your word.”
I’m sitting on the bed and he kneels down in front of me and starts taking off my shoes.
“Ha’way son. You must be most cream-crackered …”
(Cream-crackered = knackered. I haven’t heard him use that one before, and I smile.)
Then he pulls my socks off and he’s about to turn away when his head snaps back like it’s on a spring or something and he’s staring at my feet, like really staring, and he reaches his hand forward nervously towards my foot. He’s doing this odd goldfish-gaping thing with his mouth and I could swear he’s gone a bit pale. The old Grandpa Byron, the one from before, obviously knew all about my webbed toes. This one, though, looks horrified and I try to put him at ease by wiggling them at him humorously (if that’s possible, I don’t know, he didn’t laugh).
“Yep – ‘syndactyly’ it’s called. It’s pretty rare! Have you ever seen it before?”
He nods. “Once.” But he says nothing else apart from, “Sleep well,” as he backs out of the room. He smiles, but there’s something going on behind the smile, and although I’m super-tired I don’t sleep because I can’t stop thinking about Grandpa Byron’s confused smile and his over-the-top reaction to my pretty insignificant toe thing.
Well, obviously I do sleep because I wake up under Pye’s Doctor Who duvet cover. Everything – my clothes, my bag – has been tidied up from where I left it on the floor. There’s an old-fashioned digital clock on the dresser that says 14:02. I have slept for nearly twelve hours straight and still don’t feel exactly fresh as a daisy, but I get up nonetheless. There’s a desk in the room and on it is a cardboard box with low sides containing a saucer of water and some muesli, and some torn up newspaper with Alan Shearer curled up underneath it, all of which Grandpa Byron has done while I’ve been asleep.
It comes back to me, hazily – me waking up in the night and seeing Grandpa Byron sitting on my bed. It was dawn, but his eyes were glistening in the bluish light that came through the thin curtains, and I could tell he’d been crying. I turned on my pillow and gave him a sleepy smile.
“Oh, Pye, son,” he murmured, “I’ve missed you.”
I was about to say, “I’m not Pye, I’m Al,” but I found, as I opened my mouth to speak, I didn’t have the heart to spoil his dawn daydream.
Instead I said, “I’m … tired,” and I rolled over back to sleep.
On a chair is a set of clothes, but they’re not new, and I know straight away that they are Pye’s, including the shiny blue bomber jacket that he had on the first time I met him. When I put them on they smell like they have been in a drawer for ages.
I carry my hamster and his box downstairs to the kitchen where Grandpa Byron is tapping at the keyboard of a laptop. In front of him on the breakfast bar is the framed photo of me, my dad and my mum, which he must have taken from my backpack while I was asleep. As I walk in and see this, his hand defensively lowers the screen of the laptop a little, prompting me to ask, “What are you doing?”
Instead of answ
ering me directly, he looks at me with a sad sort of smile, standing there looking exactly like Pye, wearing his clothes and everything. He gets up and goes to the front door. “I need to tell you something,” he says as he pulls on a pair of wellies and tucks his jeans into them, indicating a pair for me to put on too.
Outside, he’s walking fast towards the beach, and I have to almost jog to keep up with him. And then we’re on the seafront, on the big, grassy headland that has the double bay of Culvercot on one side and the yellow-white stretch of beach towards Tynemouth on the other. There’s a long, sandy stairway down to the beach, and before we get to the bottom, Grandpa Byron has already told me that he was up all night on the internet. There’s a cool fret in the air and it makes me shiver a bit, but I don’t care because I’m listening to the story he told me.
It was 1994. Almost ten years after Pye had died, except this day was warm, one of those days in the Northeast in early summer when the fog has been burnt away by a hot sun, and there was a queue, the first of the year, outside the Culvercot fish and chip shop.
The sea was calm enough in the bay, where it was sheltered by the two curved piers, but round the headland, on the long beach, the waves were beating the sand hard. Not many people were swimming: further along towards Tynemouth the warning flags were up, but there were no lifeguards this early in the season, and even the surfers – who I’ve seen out there in the winter – had given up.
On the first Saturday in June for the past few years, the Indians who lived in and around Culvercot (mainly Punjabis, and there still weren’t many of them in 1994) had met for a beach party. There was Turban Guy – whose real name was Baru Bakshi – whose beachwear was an old, brown suit and a sleeveless jumper and a tie. His tiny, round wife, in a sari, was struggling through the soft sand with a cooler box. There was Tarun from the shop, now married to a woman from Amritsar, via Middlesborough, who was in jeans and a T-shirt, and their little girl in a yellow dress decorated with Indian-style sequins. There were others as well, maybe a dozen or so. And there was Hypatia, nearly fifteen, and of course Grandpa Byron.
“Your turn this year, Byron?” said Baru Bakshi, handing him a ceremonial garland of orange and yellow marigolds strung together in a long loop.
(“I thought Sikhs and Hindus had different ceremonies?” I asked Grandpa Byron, when he was telling me this. By now we had crossed the dry sand, and were walking along the edge of the long, gentle waves.
“So they do, bonny lad, so they do. But we don’t mind mixing it up now and then. This was more a social thing, anyway. And besides, I’m not that much of a Hindu, to be honest, and Baru’s a pretty free-thinking Sikh. Now let me get on with the story.”)
And so Grandpa Byron walked down to the water’s edge (“Pretty much exactly here,” he said, looking up and down the beach), followed by most of the others, near to a group of young women in their teens and twenties, wearing swimsuits, who had been playing in the shallows.
Baru Bakshi’s wife had been around the group giving everyone the red forehead dot – the bindi – with her fingertip and red paste, and they stood there, knee-deep in the water. Baru Bakshi had rolled his suit trousers up; the ladies’ wet saris clung to their legs. Grandpa Byron drew his arm back and flung the garland into the waves, and then there was a shout from further out in the sea.
The group of girls were pointing at a young woman who was not that far away from the shore, still not even out of her depth, struggling against the back-draw of a retreating wave, pushing the water aside with her arms to try and stay upright, and then her head disappeared under the water as another wave began its build up.
“Sarah! Sarah! Swim!” screamed one young woman on the shore when she saw the head reappear, and she started to go into the water before being pulled back by a friend. “No, Ava, no! You can’t!”
But already Grandpa Byron was undressed and striding naked into the sea before diving under the next wave and driving his strong arms, one after the other, into the water, getting closer and closer to the drowning woman. As he reached her, her head went under again, and Grandpa Byron – still just able to stand, but knocked and buffeted by the rocking sea – duck-dived beneath the surface at exactly the moment that the waves settled between surges. In the lull, the only sound was the group of girls wailing, “Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!” as they held their hands, prayer-like, in front of their mouths and Hypatia shaking her head and saying slowly, “Oh, my, God.”
There was no sight of them for about ten seconds. One of the girls started crying, and another had flipped open a big old mobile phone and was calling 999.
“Twenty seconds, Al. It doesn’t sound like long, but try counting it: it’s an age if you’re waiting for someone to reappear from under the water.”
(At this point, Grandpa Byron stopped telling me the story, realising what he had said. He looked down. “I know,” I said, but no more words came out, because I think I knew where this story was headed and my mouth was dry with fear and nerves and …)
And then someone shouted. “Look! Over there.” About thirty metres down the beach, struggling out of the waves was Grandpa Byron, holding up the girl, who kept stumbling over in the waves. When they got to waist deep, she convulsed and threw up a bellyful of seawater, then Grandpa Byron bent down, gently scooped her up and carried her out of the sea towards them.
He set her down on the dry part of the sand and her friends gathered round her. Grandpa Byron stood to one side, hands on his hips, face lifted to the sky, panting and spitting salty water. And then the girls’ attention turned to him. Baru Bakshi sidled up.
“Well done, Byron-ji. But I am thinking you might want to, ah … put your pants on.”
(I think Grandpa Byron has told this story before. Honestly – he paused with a comedian’s sense of timing before he said that last bit, and then looked at me, waiting for me to laugh. I was not really in a laughing mood, but I managed to force out a little noise so he could continue.)
“I climbed into my pants and stood smiling at the girl I had just saved, and she wiped a stream of snot from her nose and smiled back at me. And then she was spreading her feet out in the sand, showing that two of her toes on each foot were fused together. And she told me her name was Sarah.”
We stayed there for a while on the sand, the two of us, letting the waves lick around our wellies.
Sarah.
Mum. She’s alive.
“A boy needs his mum,” says Grandpa Byron, with a kind of finality. “And we’re going to find her.”
Which is how, later that day, Grandpa Byron and I end up in Blaydon, fifteen miles up the Tyne from the coast, and I tell you: fifteen miles on the back of a little moped is enough punishment for anyone’s bottom.
Grandpa Byron’s been telling me that when he first came to the UK, Blaydon was a coal-mining village, but there’s no mining here now, just street after street of neat, red-brick houses, and a supermarket, and a garage, and it’s just like everywhere else really, except it’s up one side of a valley and in some places you can see right down to the river Tyne and across the other side, and that’s pretty cool.
And that is where my mum, Sarah, lives, on a wide road outside of Blaydon. Grandpa Byron’s already phoned her to tell her he is coming. They stayed in touch for a while after her near-drowning; she invited him to her wedding (to Roddy, a policeman) but he didn’t go, and then they kind of drifted out of each other’s lives. But, as Grandpa Byron pointed out, it’s difficult to hide these days, unless you really want to, and it didn’t take him long to track her down.
The trouble is, of course, that my mum is only my mum in another – and I’m sorry, I’m going to have to get technical here – spacetime dimensional thingy. She’s not my mum here, a fact I’m not completely sure Grandpa Byron has understood (and who can blame him?). Quite what he’s thinking I don’t know. I don’t actually think he’s worked it out beyond, “A boy needs his mum.”
Now we’re outside her front door and even though
Grandpa Byron has told me to be calm and not to freak her out, when she opens the door, she is exactly, exactly my mum, even down to the way she’s wiping her hands on a tea towel, and something in me just pulls me forwards and before anything else happens, or any other greetings, I just say, “Hi, Mum!” and wrap her up in my arms, and I just know at that moment that the most powerful force in the universe – a parent’s love – will make her see the truth, and she’ll know that I am her son, and she’ll fold her arms around me, and kiss the top of my head, and say, “I’ve missed you, Al. All my life, I’ve missed you, and now you’re here,” and everything will be all right.
Except she doesn’t. And it isn’t.
It is awful. She kind of gently eases herself out of my arms, and holds on to them and looks into my face and says, “Er … OK?” and I say, “Mum?” and I know I’ve blown it.
She’s totally freaked out, though she’s kind enough not to make it obvious. Her eyes flick to Grandpa Byron; she’s still holding my arms at my side so that I can’t hug her again.
“This is, ah …” begins Grandpa Byron. “This is my grandson, Al Chaudhury.”
Mum lowers her head and looks in my eyes and says, a bit slowly, “Hello, Al. Nice to meet you.”
Of course. She thinks I’m slow, or have some sort of mental disability, and why wouldn’t she?
So begins the most awkward, uncomfortable fifteen minutes of my life. Or – to adapt the hot stove/pretty girl analogy of my namesake Professor Einstein – “fifteen minutes in the presence of someone who both is and is not your mum, along with her suspicious husband, feels like a lifetime.”