by David Park
‘Learn a little patience, man. Sometimes you have to wait.’ A pockmarked moon scowls sourly over the darkness of the playing fields.
‘I should keep the engine running,’ Briggs says, quietly taking his gun out of his holster and holding it in his lap.
‘Put that away,’ Fenton tells him. ‘I don’t want him scared off.’
‘He’s not coming,’ Briggs insists, putting his face close to the windscreen and scanning slowly round. When he turns to look over his shoulder the whole seat creaks. ‘He’s not coming and we’ve been here too long. He was never any good right from the start – we should have done him for the burglary and the assault. Still could. I knew soon as I laid eyes on him that he wasn’t any good.’
‘He’ll be here,’ Fenton says quietly but looking at his watch. And then he sees him coming across the pitches, his pale face growing whiter as he approaches. His face is intensely white like an owl coming out of the darkness.
‘Don’t bring him in the car, please!’ Briggs says, putting his gun back in his holster and slouching lower in the seat.
Fenton gets out and walks towards the boy. Briggs watches them talk, sees the boy’s restless movements, the stillness of Fenton as he listens. He lowers the window to try to catch some of what’s being said but they are too far away and then after a few minutes Fenton turns and walks towards the car with the boy hovering at his shoulder. Before he starts the engine he hears Walshe say, ‘I did good, didn’t I?’ Then Fenton gets into the passenger seat, lowers his window and answers, ‘Yes, you did good.’ The car moves slowly forward as Briggs carefully negotiates the worst of the rain-filled potholes that shiver with the cold glimmer of the moon.
He can only stay two days at the most because to remain longer is to impose too many burdens on their limited resources and get in the way of the daily running of the home. He talks to Estina and enquires about what they need most in the future and makes a list but they never talk about how much the home has improved since the first contacts. Some were the result of improved government funding and changes to the administration system but many of the most striking and practical improvements have been the result of outside intervention, especially early on when a team of Irish builders spent three weeks working on the interior of the buildings. He knows that Estina does not like to talk about those times – he assumes it’s embarrassing or even painful to be reminded of how things were and she is a proud woman, her natural independence and pride making things all the harder for her.
They sit talking on a long seat carved from felled trees. The bark feels sticky under his fingers and a sweet scent of sap still lingers about it even though the wood looks dried and sun bleached.
‘You are no longer a policeman?’ she asks.
‘No, I’m too old now,’ he says, smiling.
‘You’re not too old,’ she says in the slightly abrasive way that sometimes characterises her speech. ‘When my grandfather was eighty he still worked in the fields.’
‘I still find plenty of things to do – I don’t sit at home in an armchair.’
‘Everyone must have a purpose,’ she says, her eyes scanning the children as they play. The light falling across her hair reveals thin lines of grey filtering through the thick swathe of black. She asks him questions about life back home, about how the education system works, about how much things cost and how much different jobs pay. One of the smaller boys falls and lets out a wail as he sees his knee is cut and his friends cluster round and attempt to administer comfort. Fenton goes to rise but thinks it’s not his place and glances at Estina who sits still, staring at the children.
‘Is he all right?’ Fenton asks.
‘He’s all right,’ she answers as the children steer the casualty in her direction. ‘Always someone falling, always someone needs help.’ When the wounded child arrives in front of her she bends forward in her seat and inspects the cut, making a clucking noise, and then she says something to them and they usher the still crying child towards the main building. Fenton turns to see Melissa appear in the doorway and take the child by the hand. The voices of the children and sharp little cries of pain continue to echo from the shadowy interior.
‘How is Melissa getting on?’ he asks. ‘Is she a big help?’ There’s a moment’s pause and then Estina drags her feet across the bare, grainy soil. ‘Sometimes,’ she answers but lets the word hang in the air, her thoughts unexpanded, unexplained.
‘What do you mean?’
Estina turns and looks at him, her eyes dark like her hair, and as she pushes a stray strand behind her ear says, ‘She is only a girl but already she thinks she knows everything.’
‘That’s what a little education can do sometimes to people,’ he offers.
Perhaps assuming encouragement in his words she goes on, continuing to fix her gaze on the side of his face. ‘She knows nothing. She does not understand how things are, what is possible.’ Fenton says nothing, not wanting to turn his face towards the intensity of her feeling. ‘This is not America,’ Estina says with a flush of bitterness. ‘We are not to blame for what we have not got.’
They sit in silence for a few moments and Fenton thinks it better to say nothing than say the wrong thing. Then after a while he says, ‘It’s not easy,’ but Estina makes no response and now her eyes are focused somewhere in the distance. He lets his fingers trace the crusted crenulations of the bark. Estina flaps an insect away from her face.
‘You have a friend now,’ she says, pointing to the tree line with her bare toes that she has slipped free from her sandals. ‘Florian.’
He narrows his eyes and peers towards the broken line of trees but it takes a while before he finds him standing motionless under the branches of a tree that lurches at a crazy angle.
‘Sometimes I think he lives in the woods,’ she says. ‘He has a place where he sleeps.’
‘He’s a good boy,’ Fenton says.
‘A boy who needs a father. He’s been with women too long – his grandmother, us. Here is no good for him.’
‘Is there no chance of him being adopted or placed with a family?’
‘The only chance is that someone will come and think he is a strong healthy boy who can do work for them on their farm. But Florian is too clever a boy to work in the fields. He should study, go to university.’
‘Maybe we could help with money, sponsor him,’ Fenton suggests but she shrugs her shoulders unenthusiastically.
‘It’s not always about money,’ she says and he feels clumsy, heavy-handed. ‘He likes you. Maybe you could spend some time with him before you have to leave.’ She stands up and slips her foot back inside her sandal. ‘I must go now.’ But after taking a few steps she turns and says, ‘Thanks, James, for everything you brought.’ He raises his hand in a vague, dismissive way that says it was nothing then watches as she walks away,
As soon as she has gone Florian approaches then stops about ten feet from him and looks about as if he’s suddenly arrived at the spot by chance. The boy doesn’t look directly at him and Fenton realises that in fact he has never made eye contact.
‘So, Florian, how are you?’
‘I want to show you something,’ he says, staring at his own shuffling feet. ‘You come with me but it is secret.’
‘I’m good at keeping secrets,’ Fenton says, standing up and brushing the seat of his trousers.
He follows the boy towards the trees unsure of whether to walk beside or behind him but Florian does not look round or speak to him as they go. They breach the tree line and at first tread well-worn paths until eventually they fade away and the boy heads into unmarked areas. A light breeze shuffles the top of the trees and sometimes passes right down the branches as if in a sudden shiver. The boy’s footsteps are soundless and on the way they step over felled trees that are almost smothered by moss and fern-like plants. Sometimes they pass under arched branches and above them the light lessens and the sky is glimpsed only in shallow pockets. Leaves brush against Fenton’s face and his
senses are filled with the pungent scent of pine. He shrugs a branch aside and feels something sticky on his fingers.
The boy moves languidly but with purpose, in a dipping, fluent rhythm as he leads deeper into the forest. When Fenton asks if there is much further to go the words sound too loud in the silence. Florian doesn’t reply but signals him forward with his hand and almost immediately they are breaking into a clearing, circular in shape, and at first Fenton is aware of nothing except the boy turning to smile and then he sees it. There is a tall tree, green and verdant on each side but hollowed out in its centre with three levels inside it created by floors of cut branches lashed together with rope. Improvised ladders connect each of the floors and there are various pieces of wooden furniture – chairs, a small table and in the top narrowest level what appears to be a small bed.
Fenton walks closer, stepping through the sunlit braids that create a lattice of light in the clearing, and stands with his hands on his hips admiring the building. Then he breaks into a burst of applause and turns to see Florian smiling broadly.
‘Can I go in?’ he asks and Florian nods and gestures an invitation. Fenton steps gingerly up to the first level but it feels secure and he sees that both nails and rope have been used to create a solid base. ‘How long did it take you to make?’ he asks, examining everything in close detail. Seeing Florian holding up four fingers, he says, ‘Four months?’ but the boy smiles and tells him that it took four weeks. Fenton shakes his head in a pretence of disbelief that makes the boy laugh and nod a rapid affirmation of his claim.
‘You should be an architect when you grow up,’ Fenton says, slowly lowering himself into a chair, but the boy doesn’t understand the word and he has to explain.
‘I want to be an engineer,’ Florian says. ‘I want to build bridges. Big bridges.’ And he holds his hands far apart to suggest the scale.
Fenton looks at the sudden passion in the boy’s eyes and already he is thinking of what he might be able to bring him on future visits – drawing books, pens, pencils, whatever sort of modern equivalent of Meccano is on the market. Maybe a book of photographs of bridges. The idea of Florian sitting in his tree house studying a book that he’s brought gives him pleasure and a good reason for returning. Despite what Estina said maybe there is some way he could create a sponsorship plan for the boy, help him get a good education, help him not to have to spend the rest of his life working in the fields.
‘How did you learn magic?’ the boy asks.
‘I only know a few tricks, just what you saw. I taught myself from a book. You want to know a secret? I’ve never done it in front of an audience before. I was really nervous, worried in case I’d make a fool of myself.’
‘You did good,’ he says, holding one of the outer branches of the tree and leaning out from it at a forty-degree angle.
‘You know what I’d really like to be able to do, Florian?’ The boy pulls himself vertical again and listens carefully. ‘I’d like to be able to do that trick where you make somebody disappear, They go inside a box or cabinet, you do whatever you do and they disappear.’
"That trick is good,’ Florian says encouragingly.
Suddenly Fenton wants to ask the boy about his parents, whether he thinks about them, whether he hopes that one day they will come back for him, but he sees a momentary happiness in the boy’s eyes which he does not want to take from him so instead he asks if there’s someone he would like to make disappear if he was able. He asks it as a joke but sees the boy’s face become serious as he ponders the answer.
‘I would make myself disappear,’ he says quietly.
‘Why, Florian?’ But the boy does not answer and instead he peers up into the apex of the tree as if looking for something. ‘Are you unhappy here?’ The boy merely shrugs his shoulders and stares out into the forest before he eventually breaks the silence by saying that some nights in summer he sleeps here. ‘You’re not frightened?’ Fenton asks. ‘Not frightened to be out here on your own?’
For the first time the boy looks at him directly, holds his gaze and says. ‘I am not frightened.’
‘That’s good, that’s good,’ Fenton says.
Later as they walk back he thinks of the boy’s lack of fear and can’t stop himself thinking of all those moments he has felt it. As the branches brush against him it feels as if he wears the traces on his skin like a tattoo. Stepping into the bar after it was sprayed. Hearing the news coming in that a colleague has been shot. Sometimes just turning on the ignition of the car. Afterwards when he told himself that he was alive, that it was someone else who hadn’t survived, it brought no sense of relief but only a sense of fragility, of things hanging by a thread. The randomness of fate. Then as he looks round at the endless stretch of trees he turns his eyes to the boy he’s following and thinks it is a good thing to find a place where there is no fear.
When he eventually breaks out of the trees the light hits his eyes and he shades them with his hand then turns to speak to Florian who dropped behind him when they reached the well-worn paths but he’s gone, silently vanished, probably returned to his own house. Suddenly he thinks of Walshe’s white face swooping out of the shadows of the playing fields and then tries to rid himself of it by walking quickly towards the main building. As he walks, children run up to him or tag along beside him showing him various objects that they have received in their shoe boxes. Their pleasure in these things reminds him only of the inadequacy of what they’ve been given and that the cost of the shoes that were once in the boxes would probably sustain them for many months. And then nothing feels enough, nothing feels solved or complete. It’s as if he has done his best and given his best offering but it’s not enough. He wants to be on his own to stop taking part in what suddenly feels like a fraud but the children seem to be everywhere, scampering and running pell-mell in games of chase, flooding round him and conveying by gesture that they want him to do tricks but he has no more to show them. It’s Melissa who rescues him, shooing the children away.
‘They get so excited,’ she says.
‘It’s a little sad they get so excited over so little,’ he answers as she signals him over to one of the rough benches that have been yellowed by the sun. ‘How long are you here for?’ he asks.
‘I go home next month.’
‘Looking forward to it?’
‘Can’t wait, can’t wait to see my family and friends, to eat proper food, sleep in a comfortable bed. All that stuff.’
‘But you’ve enjoyed your time here?’ he asks as he watches her stir her hair from her face with a slight shake of the head.
‘Some of it,’ she says, turning to look at him. She looks slightly younger than her age, her brown eyes light with life and her face pretty and seemingly open as if she has no secrets. Taking out a band she pulls her hair back in a rough ponytail, using both her hands to smooth it. ‘I won’t miss head lice,’ she says, shivering her shoulders. ‘Check yours when you get home.’
‘Not as many places for them to hide in mine,’ he says but already imagining he feels an itch.
‘There are other things I won’t miss,’ she says, looking at him more intently, and he knows that if he encourages her at all she will tell him but he is unsure of whether or not he wants to hear and so at first he stares ahead. ‘Things you should know,’ she insists and then he knows she’s going to tell him whether he wants to know or not. He glances over his shoulder but they are on their own. ‘Don’t worry, no one can hear and it doesn’t matter if they do. You have a right to know.’
‘A right to know what?’
‘About some of the things that are wrong with this place.’
‘And what are those things, Melissa?’
‘Well take Estina for a start. I don’t think she is a fit person to be in charge of a place like this. I don’t think she’s educated – once I tried to talk of her qualifications and she pretended she didn’t understand. I don’t think she has any training in child care or child psychology or child anything.�
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He is surprised by the sudden anger that shows in her voice and surfaces in her face. ‘But she seems to care for the children, seems to run the place as well as she can.’
‘Sometimes she’s cross with the children, sometimes she shouts at them – you should never shout at a child, James, especially ones who are already emotionally vulnerable, and there are children here who obviously have special needs, who need to be assessed but who just get lumped in with all the rest.’
His concern at her words is tempered at first by the tone of her voice and the impression it gives that it’s imparting wisdom to the needy. He listens to her talk and the flow of her words is evangelical, so self-assured that he can’t but be struck by the discrepancy between her age and her insistence on knowledge. Perhaps Estina is right about her, perhaps she is a young woman whose education has given her an inflated sense of her own importance, so he says little but his silence only seems to prompt her to renewed efforts to persuade him.
‘Sometimes her friends and family come up here at weekends and drink, eat big meals and get drunk.’
‘You’ve seen this?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But you’ve said nothing?’
‘Not directly because whenever I try to say anything at all about the way things are, she gets angry and things get heavy. Sometimes I think I should have left earlier.’ She fingers the silver cross at her neck and then pulls it tight to her lips. ‘Not all the stuff your church sends goes to the children. There’s a room in the basement where she keeps stuff and I think she sells some of it in town.’
Fenton stands up and expels a nervous rush of air. He rubs his hand up and down his throat feeling the tufts of bristles left behind after a week of hurried, inadequate shaves. He stares up at the tree line and wonders if Florian is in his secret place at this very moment. Into his mind comes the memory of a time shortly after he had taken up walking when he was following a path up the Annalong Valley, bounded on one side by a wood and on the other by the mountains when the sky had filled with mist in a thickening tumble of grey. He had kept walking, feeling it feather his face like a clinging web, telling himself that it would lift, but with each step visibility reducing until he stopped and let it engulf him. He felt no need to be frightened because he was on a well-used path, a mile from where he had left the car, the climb into the mountains not yet reached. All he had to do was wait and stay warm or hug the edge of the wood and follow it back. Now as Melissa talks on he thinks only of the feeling of being softly cradled, removed from the hard edges of the world and held in the arms of the sweetest kind of letting go.