by David Park
‘Of course I will, I’ll do everything I can. I promise I will.’
Fenton picks up his rucksack. He is going to the top now. His sense of responsibility is too great to tell his companion to make his own way down so he hopes he will wait where he is until he returns but Alec asks if he can finish the climb.
‘If you like,’ he says, shouldering the rucksack into position, ‘but there’ll be no view.’
‘So you won’t throw me off the top then?’ Alec asks, scurrying to keep up, but there is no reply as Fenton lowers his head and pushes himself into the steep walk to the top. He hugs the stones close to the wall and soon without looking back he knows he has left the younger man behind. Sometimes he has to pause but only for a matter of seconds before pushing himself on again. A few drops of rain touch his face when finally he reaches the top where on a clear day can be seen the Wicklow Mountains beyond Dublin and the Galloway Hills of Scotland. Then without taking off his rucksack, or pausing to rest, he prowls about the summit looking for a view but everywhere is blinded by mist and cloud and in every direction he looks he sees only the face of a boy, the frightened face of a boy.
The transit van is packed to the gills. There is not a single inch of wasted space. The van itself is donated and regularly serviced by a member of his church who owns a garage and all its contents have been supplied by local businesses or bought from funds raised by the congregation. Piled high are blankets and new clothes; pots, pans and cooking utensils; cleaning materials and anti-bacterial wipes; shampoos and soaps; tinned foodstuffs; writing pads, pens and colouring pencils; children’s games; packs of nappies and basic medical items. The final things to be loaded, delicately placed in any space between everything else, are the shoe boxes – one each for the eighty children in the orphanage – supplied by the children of the local primary school and jam-packed with personal gifts.
This will be the first time he will make the long journey on his own – on the three previous occasions he shared the driving with another church member – but if he’s honest he prefers this prospect to the awkward shared intimacy of someone else’s company and the constant compulsion to make conversation over the thousands of road miles. He has planned the route carefully, opting to combine prearranged hospitality, set up for him through police contacts, with sleeping in the van. He’s equipped with a good-quality sleeping bag that’s already laid out on top of a pallet of soft clothing. It’s not possible to know precisely the duration of the journey and in some parts progress will be determined by the seemingly random whims of border security and customs. On a previous trip they spent eight hours sitting on the Hungarian border before getting an all-clear. The orphanage itself is only a couple of hundred miles inside Romania, buried deep in a remote, heavily wooded region of the country. The first links with it had been established post-Ceauseşcu when the media had competed with itself to find and reveal existing conditions.
He carefully checks the Auotorizatie and the fat sheaf of required papers, the seemingly endless documentation. He checks he has the requisite certificates for clothing, food and medical hygiene then stores it all in a document wallet which will stay close to his side all through the journey. After staying south of London with an old police contact from the Met, he crosses into mainland Europe via Calais and settles quickly into the rhythm of the road. There is a comfort in driving far away from where he’s known and a feeling of unaccustomed lightness, remote from all human contact. Through France, Belgium and into Germany, toll roads and the fierce, unforgiving relentlessness of the Autobahns. A thousand miles and the only connection with the rest of the world is through a passing glance from a fellow traveller or in the eyes of the dark-haired, dark-eyed children whose faces are pressed against the rear glass of ancient beat-up Volkswagen campers which carry Turkish migrant families and what looks like all their worldly possessions. Sometimes one of the children will raise his hand but he doesn’t respond. Past the random straggling remnants of cities, like tattered ribbons blown stiff by the wind. Glimpses of suburbs flecked and smeared by light in the consciousness of dawn and through towns and deserted small villages softened by the twilight where the only sign of human life is a momentary flicker in a window or the smouldering embers of a dog’s eyes. Heading south across Europe through thickly wooded terrain towards Vienna and south again into Hungary.
The boy rests his head on the pillow of his arm as if its weight is too heavy for him, so only the side of it is visible.
‘Sit up now, son, and be a man,’ he tells him but the boy doesn’t move. It allows him to notice the white squiggle of a small scar on his shaven scalp like a nick in the white of new wood.
‘I want to go home,’ the boy says, still not moving.
‘Well sit up now and we’ll try to find a way to let that happen.’
‘You can’t keep me here – I haven’t done nothin’.’
‘Maybe you’d like a slap, son,’ Briggs says, standing behind the boy and jerking his head up by the hair.
‘Get off, ye bastard!’ the boy shouts, swinging his arm vaguely in the direction of Briggs in that favoured gesture of aggression that Fenton knows he uses to hide his fear.
‘Sit up now, Connor, and we’ll talk this through,’ he says, patting the boy on the shoulder even though he squirms at the touch. The boy raises his head for the first time. There is a red imprint on his cheek where it was pressed against his arm. His face is pale, thin boned and pinched like a greyhound’s. He has red sores round his mouth, the badge of a glue sniffer. If he were to stand up and take off his shirt Fenton thinks that the full cradle of his ribs would be visible.
‘I haven’t done nothin’,’ he repeats, holding both sides of the desk as if it’s about to take off.
Briggs suddenly lowers his face level with the boy’s and watches his eyes blink out a Morse code of fear. ‘Yes, but you have and you have to stop telling lies about it, you little toerag.’
‘You broke into that old-age pensioner’s bungalow and stole her pension money,’ Fenton says. ‘You also threatened her with a knife.’
‘That’s not a very nice thing to do,’ Briggs says, standing at the boy’s shoulder where he can’t be seen. ‘And you’ve done other bad things as well, like stealing cars and thieving off your own.’
Walshe slumps back in the chair, letting go of the desk. His body suddenly looks as if it’s been de-boned like a fish and that at any moment it might slither to the floor. He turns to look at Briggs.
‘I know where you live. I’m goin’ to tell the Ra on you. See if you’re a big man then.’
‘So you know the Ra then?’ Briggs asks. ‘Well you must be a real big shot. Tell the Ra on me? I’m scared shitless. I’ll have to move house now and I’ve just put up new wallpaper.’
‘Think you’re funny,’ Walshe says, his voice full of defiance but his eyes blinking again.
Fenton wishes the younger Briggs would refrain from obscenities. He considers it disrespectful to the force, thinks it reduces everything and all of them to the same level, but he says nothing, knowing that younger officers see some things differently.
‘Well think of this, Connor, my brave boy,’ Briggs says, bending his knees with a loud creak, lowering his face level again with the boy’s, ‘maybe we’ll tell the Ra about you. Tell them how you broke into that old woman’s house and assaulted her. Tell them how you held a knife to an old woman of eighty and stole her pension and her rings. Stole the old woman’s wedding ring.’ He straightens up and walks a circle of the table. ‘You know what’s going to happen then, don’t you, son? They’ll shoot your kneecaps off – no, wait, maybe they’ll decide not to waste the bullets and use a baseball bat. Bullet’s always cleaner, not so many bits. And no doubt because you’re such an expert I’m sure you’ve heard they’re starting to use ones with nails in them. Makes a desperate mess, as you might imagine.’
The boy places his arms on the table again then rests his head on them once more. This time his face is complete
ly hidden so only the heave of his shoulders reveals that he’s crying. Briggs goes to say something but Fenton silences him by raising his hand and then speaks softly to the boy.
‘Maybe there’s another way, Connor. Maybe there’s a way out of this.’
The road feels increasingly narrow as it winds through the mountains and each side is bordered by dense bands of trees that sweep right down to the edge. A thin mist that seems to drift from between the trees swaddles and blurs the road ahead and, as he slows his speed, he reaches patches where it suddenly thickens. Putting on his wipers and lights he haunches over the wheel, his face close to the glass as increasingly it feels as if some creature’s breath is streaming against it. He glances at the deep swathe of pine trees, so densely packed that their branches jostle one another for space, and thinks that it must be permanently dark in the forest’s interior. For a second he is confused and wonders if he has taken the right road.
A way out. That’s what he offers the boy. A way out of the mess. As Walshe lifts his face towards him he studies it carefully, registering every detail permanently in his memory. He sees right away that he’s not been really crying, that like all his demonstrative emotions – the anger, the aggression the tears have been attempted rather than achieved. The thin, feral face is staring at him now with a sly curiosity. His blue eyes are the only trace of colour but even these are vague and unfocused and there is something in this expression, as well as in his speech, that suggests the narrow limits of his intelligence.
‘Do you want a drink or a cigarette?’ Fenton asks but the boy shakes his head sullenly and then blinks slowly as if trying to clear his eyes.
Gradually the mist sheds its grey skin and slithers itself somewhere far back through the trees. He passes clearings where felled trees loll against each other haphazardly like giant pencils thrown by an angry child. At the border he waits in a queue that takes four hours to clear. Eventually all his paperwork is deemed to be in order and stamped and he is only a couple of hours’ drive now from his destination and half a day ahead of schedule but suddenly he feels nervous, apprehensive, even though unsure of the precise reason.
Already there’s the sense of travelling back in time as he sees his first Dacia car and passes a horsedrawn cart, the old man’s whip flicking through the air like a fishing line. He passes threadbare villages and farms with orange-tiled roofs and suddenly he feels tired, desperate for sleep. Lowering the window he lets the cold night air wash over him but he knows he has to stop. Always conscious of the need to protect his precious cargo from thieves, he waits until he finds himself far from houses or signs of life, chooses a narrow dirt track that winds behind a screen of trees and parks. He carefully locks the doors of the van before climbing into his sleeping bag and stretching out on the pallet of clothes which gives him only a few feet of space between it and the roof, but which feels comfortingly secure.
In the morning he feels stronger, glad that he’s taken the rest, and tells himself that it’s better to arrive in the morning than in the middle of the night. He clambers outside into the first light of day and thinks of Miriam sleeping alone in a house many thousands of miles from this place and wonders what she dreams of, before his thoughts change to the young woman’s face on the mountain suffused with life. There are sudden memories of when Miriam’s face bore the same marks, times when love was that intense. He drinks slowly from a bottle of water and feels the seeding of sadness into the morning. In the distance across deserted fields he sees the shadowy, tantalising outline of mountains whose name he doesn’t know, then as a young man on a moped passes on the road, he steps behind the van where he can’t be seen and watches until its red tail light vanishes into the distance. He pours the water over his hands and splashes his face. He needs a shower and a proper shave. He feels dirty.
There’s dirt under the bitten, ragged nails of the boy and a blue scribble of a self-administered but aborted tattoo on the outside of his wrist. He is undersized for a fifteen-year-old, the runt of a large litter, all born to a single mother. His hair is close shaven, the stubble flecked by the white scar. The gold chain he wears seems to shiver against the paleness of his throat but it’s the eyes that Fenton stares at now. They are a light, delicate shade of blue, the only softness in his face, the eyelashes so vaguely defined that they are mostly invisible. The eyes look at him now as he promises him things, offers him a way out of the mess, and as Fenton talks to him, he keeps his own gaze locked on them, knowing that this is where he must direct his words.
In the van he takes a towel that smells of home and dries his face then splashes it again and repeats the process. He knows the job’s to blame, tells himself that it’s not possible to spend over thirty years rubbing up against dirt and not be stained by it. Like a smoker’s fingers rusted with nicotine. He has witnessed it over the years in his colleagues, the experiences that gradually coarsen and degrade. He hears it in their language, sees it in the one-too-many drinks, the way they disrespect then deceive their wives. He tries to show through his life rather than his words that they need a higher code to live by, otherwise things get blurred, harder to know where the difference is between right and wrong. He knows, too, for some, that difference has so shrunk that it’s hardly visible any more, replaced by what they can get away with and what they can’t.
He brushes his teeth, using what is left of the water, wishing it were colder. Wishing he could have a shower before he arrives at the orphanage. But what if the government was right after all? Perhaps too many of them were too damaged to be part of a future supposed to be cleaner. No longer to be called a force but a service as if they hadn’t served before and as he thinks of it he can’t assuage the familiar anger, the sense of his own shame at taking the money and walking away cap in hand. He spits angrily out of the window then gazes at his reflection in the mirror. He looks rough, his eyes blue-bagged and red-rimmed; his skin like it needs the fresh scour of the mountains; the grey that started at his temples then spread up and consumed most of his hair colour now seems as if it has infiltrated the surface of the skin itself. A tiny cluster of red pinheads peppers his cheekbones and when he inspects his teeth he sees two incisors on opposite sides of his mouth are yellowing in perfect synchronicity. He blinks then looks again as if he hopes to see something different in the glass but nothing has changed. Taking the battery shaver he tries to shave some of the greyness out of his skin then puts on a change of clothes and starts on the final leg of his journey.
He passes a tractor pulling a trailer filled with logs, an axe embedded in its crest. In a short while he sees distant figures working in the fields that look like stick men silhouetted in the morning light. An old man who works the slow swing of a scythe on a stretch of bedraggled grass briefly raises his hand in salute before turning again to the rhythm of his task. In a couple of hours he passes through the closest town to his destination but is unable to detect any obvious changes from his previous visit and then he begins the descent into the wooded valley where the orphanage sits at the meeting of two rivers. The road takes him across narrow bridges where there’s not room for two vehicles to cross together and then it spirals down in increasingly tight circles that require him to stay in a lower gear and keep his foot almost permanently on the brake pedal. Sometimes he catches a glimpse of water far below as it streams across stone-pocked gravel beds like white hair lifted and braided by a comb, then eventually he reaches the bottom of the valley where the road straightens to run parallel with the river and the willow trees that lean out and weep over it. A strange hidden place.
Like the places he met the boy. Far from prying eyes. Sometimes on the edge of the city, sometimes in a car park in the empty wastes of closed shopping complexes. Sometimes in a beauty spot or a place where lovers meet. At times he had him picked up in an unmarked car on his way, usually late, to school or after he had travelled to a neutral area. The first time they took him to the country park at Crawfordsburn, walked him along the seashore, his pale eyes wary o
f the sea. Delicately at first, nothing much more than talk about nothing much, and then the first of the money in his pocket and home again. And taking the money that first time is the hook he will hang on like a caught fish. Sometimes he takes him to places where he can eat and then he would sit with a coffee and watch him devour whatever was on the plate, the fired urgency of the eating facilitated by his tightfisted grasp of the knife and fork. He gives the boy a contact phone number where he can be reached by day or night and so he becomes part of the electric grid that courses across the city whose currency is information. The bugs and the devices, the cameras, the infra-red toys, the secret recordings – he doesn’t put his faith in any of them. It’s the human touch he puts his trust in – eyes and ears, tongues loosened by money or, even more reliable and more endurable, by personal hatreds. Sometimes unimportant people like the boy on small retainers, sometimes important people on the inside, and the more important, the less likely he was to know of their existence, their invisible nameless handlers, disdainful of anyone’s need to know except themselves. But the boy is his, a little acorn planted in the face of an uncertain future.
It’s a Saturday morning and as he drives between the wooden posts that mark the entrance to the orphanage he’s seen first by two girls whom he recognises even though they look older. They stare at him blankly and then their faces animated by recognition they jump up and down, running alongside the van as they wave their arms and shout with excitement. It’s the first human contact he’s had in days and it startles him. He looks at himself in the mirror again. Other children, drawn by the sound of the van and the shouts, begin to rush out of the central building and the dormitories. He slows right down, anxious not to hit anyone as they press on all sides, and finally he comes to a halt in front of the main stone building with its still broken wooden shutters. The grass in front of it is blistered with bare scabs of sandy-coloured soil. Then taking a deep breath he gets out of the van, locking it behind him while the children throng about him, calling his name and pulling at his shirt. He can hardly move through the press and he touches as many as he can on the head and uses as many of their names as he can remember, but it’s almost impossible to walk more than a few steps at a time and when he sees one small girl in danger of getting knocked over he plucks her from the crowd and carries her in his arms. As he looks up he sees Estina standing at the top of the steps and at her shoulder Natlia. Behind them is a young woman with long brown hair almost to her waist and whose clothes suggest she is from somewhere else. He acknowledges their presence by raising his hand and then shrugs as if to apologise for his slowness in coming to greet them. Estina smiles back and claps her hands loudly, does a little shouting until gradually the children step back and allow him to reach the steps.