Guest

by SJ Bradley

  Flores had left a blank space on his birth certificate where his father’s name should have been. She’d once told him that if she could have put her own name there, as well as in the mother’s name space, she would have. But the registry of births, deaths and marriages didn’t allow it. ‘Fucking bureaucrats,’ she said.

  On the third floor, the research space, the long floor was tiled with sienna and burnished oak. Walls lined with long shelves, leather-bound spines, gilt lettering. St Augustine’s Parish Magazine, 1980-81. Headingley Examiner, 1985-86. Bound copies of local minutiae: he ran his fingers along the spines as he walked down to the reading room. Soft, and warm to the touch.

  Then the reading room. Soft carpet, long wooden desks. Old men reading newspapers on sticks.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  The girl wore a loose beige jumper, her face clumsy and wan, with a nose that didn’t seem to fit her face. She studied him with keen, fox-coloured eyes.

  ‘Maybe. I’m trying to find out about my Dad.’

  She held his gaze for a moment, maybe too long. ‘Ok. What do you know about him so far?’

  ‘Not much. Hardly anything.’ Samhain fixed his look on the pile of scrap paper beside her on the desk. ‘I know he was in the police. And that he spent some time in Europe, in the seventies and eighties.’

  Fox-Eyes didn’t flicker. Sympathy perhaps, like a drip of water running over a stone. ‘In the police – in Europe?’

  He was surprised. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Undercover?’

  ‘How did you–’

  ‘Here.’ She scrabbled in the pile of leaflets, and pulled one out.

  CopWatch support group, it said. Legal support – information – open to all.

  ‘You’re not the first to come in here, trying to find stuff out.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He took the leaflet.

  ‘Somebody I know runs it. A friend. Listen – there are loads of ways to find somebody, even if you don’t know very much about them. You’d be surprised.’

  She pulled the scraps towards her, and her sleeve caught on the desk, riding up all the way to the elbow. Spiny capillaries of black ink networked her forearm: leaves, branches, the shape of a tree. ‘All people leave traces. The police have got an advantage on using them to find out things about you, because they’ve got access to more things than you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do the same thing back to them. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look.’ She scribbled a bluebottle’s flight pattern with her biro on the paper, then drew a box. ‘Birth certificates – marriage records – mentions in the local paper. Nobody goes anywhere without leaving a trail. Once helped a woman find her long-lost father when all she knew about him was where he’d been born.’ She looked up at him, expectantly. ‘I mean, it took ages. Lots of detective work. Hours spent in the registry office. Referencing, cross-referencing, finding the original marriage certificate...’

  ‘You did all that?’

  ‘Yeah. Well.’ Embarrassment crept over her neck like a red scarf. ‘I like a project.’ She started scribbling away again at the page. ‘So. Shall we get...’ she cleared her throat. ‘Have you tried the Salvation Army?’

  ‘No. I hate religion.’

  ‘Me too. All that tambourine-waving. Always trying to get you to go to their meetings. So. What do you know about your Dad? His name? Whether he was ever married? When or where he was born? Anything might help, no matter how small it may seem.’

  There was so little. Samhain had been so young, he didn’t even know which country they’d been in when they left; he didn’t even know the fake name his father had been using. He told her all this, and Fox-Eyes nodded, softening.

  ‘Man, they really screwed you over, didn’t they? They didn’t give you or your mother a thing. No money, no information, no apology... have you even got a photo of him?’

  Samhain shook his head. ‘My mother must have got rid of it all.’

  ‘Christ.’ Fox-Eyes cast a glance around the room, then picked up a key on a large wooden fob. A thing the size of a door wedge. ‘Let’s try and get you sorted. Follow me.’

  At the back of the reading room, a door was hidden by a rack of leaflets.

  She led him inside, into a cool, dark corridor. ‘We’re not supposed to let customers in here,’ she said. ‘But my manager’s off today, and I think you need help.’

  A short flight of creaking, wooden stairs. Up five steps, then a dusty room, and the smell of sawdust.

  In the centre of the room were three tall, hooded machines, with sides of jaundiced metal. ‘You ever used a microfiche before?’

  She pulled two heavy binders off the shelves. There was also a computer, one which looked about the same age as the machines. Fox-Eyes dropped the binders on the desk, and switched it on. ‘Well, don’t worry. It’s easy. Just look through these binders to find the newspaper stories you want, and take the names and dates, and I’ll get the films for you. Use the computer as well, if you like.’

  She stood at the top of the stairs a moment. ‘The report’s probably a good place to start. It’ll give you a bit of knowledge about which groups were infiltrated, and which years. Try cross-referencing those years with mentions of organisations like Greenpeace and your mum’s group, if you know it, in the news. You might be surprised how much you can find out, from not knowing very much.’ The stairs made a noise like a stuck door as she descended. ‘There are some things I can do, too. Sources. People I can talk to – records I can search. Don’t worry – between us, we’ll find him.’

  The rattling of the microfiche took him right into the past. He looked into a tiny screen and read newspaper stories twenty, twenty-five years old. Soft light inside it, like candlelight on parchment. Activists protest against new road in rare frog habitat. An action he could barely remember, though he knew from reading the date that he might well have been there. Police clear women’s protest at Menwith Hill. The films turned and clattered inside, wheels and bobbins.

  Menwith Hill. That, he did remember. A chain-link fence, tents pitched in the shadow of huge, terrifying devices they called ‘the golf balls.’ He and Flores shared a tent in the heather. Drums beating: women dancing in overalls and leggings. Staring and shouting at the grey, man-made planets right there on the English hills. They were bigger than the Death Star and yet nobody really knew what they were, or why they were there.

  He remembered Badger with her guitar, leading them in a song towards the concrete. Nuclear war was on everybody’s lips. There were enough bombs to persh the planet three times over: anybody not killed right away would die in the nuclear winter that came after. They said you might as well not build a fallout shelter. Doors alone couldn’t stop the radiation.

  He didn’t sleep easily, in those camps. Nightmares: a flash whiter than lightning, a boom loud enough to break your eardrums. He woke screaming, imagining he could feel the flesh melting from his bones.

  The newspapers blurred and merged before his eyes. He still had his finger on the button, pushing the pages forward. They had been in those camps for peace, not violence.

  There had always been music and dancing. He wasn’t even supposed to play with sticks – Flores didn’t like it. If he wanted to play war, he had to do it in a place where she couldn’t see. And this, too, being in here, looking for him, was a betrayal. Flores had told him nothing about his father, her ex, because she didn’t want to be reminded.

  He would keep it quiet. All he wanted to see was a face. Only that. To see, to know, where he had come from. He went on searching, with the dust thick on his fingers.

  The state had hidden him well, whoever he was.

  In one news report he thought he saw a face. But the photo was old, grainy through the microfiche screen, and he couldn’t be sure.

  More recent reports kept the women, and the police, all anonymous. Only one woman had chosen to give her name, and she was somebody he’d never met.

  A text from Frankie: When are you planning on coming back?
I’ve got to sign on today.

  Badger might know more. She was one of the few friends Flores had kept in touch with from her activist days. She might know the fake name his dad had used, maybe even his real one.

  The only trouble was loyalty. She had more of it for Flores than she did for Samhain.

  There had been a time when she had lived with them. For how long, he wasn’t sure. He just remembered coming down one morning, all ready for school in his shirt and tie, and finding a purple-haired woman asleep on the sofa, with one arm scrunched up under a smashed-umbrella face, and a leather jacket draped over her torso. His first thought had been, I’d better go and tell Flores her friend’s here. But then the woman had opened one witchy eye, looked at him as though he were a bird hopping across the sand, and said: ‘Don’t you look the proper little man?’

  Those were days of good food and laughter, lots of it. Flores got up in the mornings, and looked more alive than he had ever seen her. It must have been summer, because he remembered the sunlight, orange and flaming onto the back yard, long into the evenings. Also, missing Sports Day, because Flores wrote a note and let him stay home.

  They were always sitting in the backyard together, Badger and Flores. Drinking out of bottles, Flores in sunglasses, and Badger squinting into the sun. Samhain went out on his own, circling the estate on his bike. Around and around the park, sometimes along the canal tow path. Over the motorway bridge. One night, bored, he called for Graeme, and Graeme’s mother had answered the door, and told him not to call again. ‘Don’t you know what time it is? You ought to be in bed.’

  He had gone home afterwards and Badger had told him, slurring, that he was going to grow up to be a good man. Looking at him kindly, though lopsidedly, with smoke escaping through her teeth. She was a soft-haired dragon with scaly tattoos. ‘You’re going to be a good man, Sam,’ she said. ‘Not like the rest of them.’

  Flores: ‘Despite everything.’

  A warm, beery embrace. He had crawled into Flores’ lap as best he could although, by the age of nine, he was getting too large to sit on her knee.

  ‘You’re my boy,’ she’d said. ‘My very best boy.’

  Badger’s MySpace profile had a picture of her standing gleefully, blurrily, in front of a cauldron in the middle of a field. Trees and camper vans in the background. He tried to figure out by looking at her face, lined now, and the hair mostly grey – when had Badger become an old lady?

  The next picture had Badger and Flores together. Arms around one another, faces streaked with blue paint, their pupils pencil nibs. Both standing in a field, in front of a scattering of tents. Their hair was wild, as though they’d been awake all night. The date said it had been posted two weeks ago. He and Frankie had a couple of pictures pretty similar to this one. Photos taken after a night of outrageous nonsense. Arms round each other, brothers in trust. You could share a lot over the course of a night. Say all of your secrets, stretch your skin inside out, almost. There was just that one person who saw you for who you really were. If anybody knew his Dad’s name, it would be Badger.

  A red notification appeared on the screen. Badger NoneOfYourBizznizz likes your photo comment: ‘Don’t Do Drugs, Kids.’

  That small, red circle, told him something else: that he couldn’t ask Badger, not now. She was Flores’ friend, not his. Anything she knew had been told to her in confidence, and he couldn’t ask her anything without going to Flores first.

  His phone bleeped again. This time, it was Mart.

  Hey there. How’s the animal sanctuary going?

  ‘Find out anything?’

  The librarian was at her desk, stringy pieces of lettuce falling into her lap. She was eating a sandwich, and making a clumsy mess of it.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Here.’ Swiping crumbs from her fingers: ‘Give me your notes. I’ll keep on looking for you.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked uncertainly at the single half-page of unintelligible scribbling, including a drawing of a cat in the bottom corner. ‘There’s not much to go on.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ She pulled a scrap from the stack. ‘You’d be surprised what things can come in useful.’

  He handed it over, and he didn’t even know why he was doing it.

  ‘I might go to the meeting as well.’

  ‘Yeah?’ A bit of falafel gathered on her lip. ‘Why not? Tell them Alice sent you.’

  ‘That’s you?’

  ‘Yeah. I help out when I can. Not by going to the meetings, but by helping people like you find information.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s my one small way of saying F-- You to my manager, who thinks this library should be turned into a coffee shop.

  ‘Write your number on there,’ she said. ‘I’ll maybe see you at the meeting.’

  11.

  ‘There you are.’ Frankie came out, with a paintbrush in a jar of turpentine. ‘I’d nearly given you up for lost.’ He’d dragged one of the picnic benches out into the yard: its tops and sides were glossy with new varnish. ‘Mart’s here.’ The bike was gone from his hands, as quickly as if he’d left it unchained in the town centre. ‘Better go – don’t want to get sanctioned again. See you later.’ Frankie rode away, bicycle bell ringing.

  Mart’s bike leaned against the wall in the hallway. She’d chained it with a long rope lock, to itself. Anybody wanting to come in and steal it would have to lift it up and carry it away.

  Samhain glanced through the kitchen door at the mess. Pans crusted, all sitting inside one another. He pushed the door open further to get a better look, and something darted along the top. A thumb-sized thing with a long pink tail.

  Something in the cupboards. Onyx-bright eyes, a chewed hole in a catering-sized pack of stuffing mix. A mouse stared out. It had dust and suet on its whiskers. Samhain closed the door carefully, and went up to his room.

  Marta was in there, sitting on a clean towel from the linen cupboard. For a second, he thought what he was seeing were hairballs.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘she’s had them.’

  Helpless, eyes-closed things in shades of ginger and coffee. Mama Cat had its paws around one of them, licking its head, its neck; and the kitten, no larger than an egg, was submitting to it.

  ‘So I see.’

  Four. Five. Or four? A mass of ginger lay curled in the towel, all fur with no beginning or end, and he couldn’t tell whether it was one kitten or two.

  ‘Lucky that I happened to be here. Thought I’d pop round – see how you were doing.’ She wasn’t looking at him, was just doing something with the edge of the towel. Folding it inwards, then straightening it out again.

  Mama Cat paused in her cleaning as he sat down on the bed. His eyes still swam with newsprint. The protestors... A source said... Police confirmed... Samhain put a hand to the ginger ball of fluff and found two kittens, separating in surprise. One curled around his fingers, while the other turned, and tried to struggle away on wheat-bending legs. ‘My friend knew somebody who worked at an animal sanctuary. They’d take anything in. Cats, dogs – guinea pigs. They even had an owl once.’

  Panzo had shown boy-Samhain around the shelter. Drowsy cats; thin, shivering terries. A pitbull with a head like an anvil. Jaws slavering, drool slopping all over the bars and floor. Panzo had said: ‘Be careful of that one. It hasn’t been socialised.’

  An almost-starved greyhound was more bones than beast. There had been a cat with no tail, and skin hanging off him like wet canvas – a watchful, ungainly thing, with a mange patch the shape of Africa.

  ‘They’d get these animals brought in,’ he said, ‘who were so scared. Some of them were half-dead. Nearly all of them were terrified. Some of the dogs were so scared of humans that you couldn’t even look them in the eye. It’d make them go crazy. Some of the dogs had been beaten and starved – until they were hardly an animal at all. I don’t know how anybody could treat an animal like that. A few of them couldn’t even be rehomed after what they’d been through. They had to...’

  He b
roke off. The dog with the bear-trap jaws had been put down. Panzo had explained that sometimes they had no choice, when the shelter was full. He had told him it was like going to sleep. Samhain had tried not to think about the dog climbing onto the vet’s table, being spoken to gently by its handlers. Laying down for the injection that would end its life.

  ‘So we need to find good homes for these little guys. I don’t want them to end up in a shelter.’

  ‘Ok. And by the way–’ she got up, and went over to a box on the floor, filled with cat food sachets. Beside it were a heap of band t-shirts, bloody and ruined. ‘I got you a few things. There’s a litter tray here, and some kitty litter. Some food sachets – bowls – just set it all up – it’s easy. Cat toys...’ A toy mouse with curved felt ears. Mini tennis balls, all bright colours. Mama Cat’s head jerked with interest; she slung one paw, grabbing, over the edge of the bed.

  ‘What happened to our t-shirts?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Sorry about that.’ She picked one up, all stiff and stuck with brown-red blood. ‘She gave birth on your merch box, and I didn’t want to move her.’

  ‘We were supposed to sell those on tour, Mart.’

  ‘Blame the cat.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I asked my friend who knows about animals. She said the kittens need lots of toys, and you need to play with them a lot – it helps develop their co-ordination and hunting skills. As well as that, you need to pick them up and talk to them all the time, so they get used to being around humans. I also made this.’

  A cardboard box, with cat-sized holes cut in each side. ‘It’s a cat fort. For them to play in... and these...’ Empty kitchen roll centres, which she lay on the floor, too: ‘...are toys too. It’s like Urbex for kittens. They love shit like this, she said. You won’t be able to get them away from it.’ She paused. ‘Just as soon as they can walk.’

  ‘Mart, you should take them. You obviously know what you’re doing.’ He put his new friend, who had been biting the tip of his finger with a toothless mouth, on the ground beside one of the rolls. It meowed blindly, and fell over onto its back. ‘You see?’ he said, righting it. ‘I haven’t got a clue.’