Guest

by SJ Bradley

  *

  Samhain washed in cold water. Every bit of dried blood came free, running down the sink. He was his usual self, without a scratch on him. Just bruises, and knuckles swollen as a broken leg; a mark from broken glass slashing the width of his palm.

  The bus ride was long. Scrunching gravel roads underwheel and endless, white-grey skies. He held on, trying to still a mouse-fast heart.

  When he closed his eyes he saw Ned. Ned’s face, Ned’s arm. Those cuts probably needed stitches. Would he be able to play guitar with his arm like that? Samhain thought probably not.

  Fighting was something Samhain hadn’t done since the infants. He didn’t solve things that way, or at least he hadn’t thought he did.

  He looked through his reflection in the window and out into a yawning black scar of earth, and felt sick.

  Somewhere around the Dutch-Belgian border, the old lady offered him a sandwich. It was in something like a French stick, and had ham hanging out of the side. She was very generous with it – she had two of them, and he didn’t know how to say no.

  ‘You want?’ she said. ‘Take, take.’

  There were only two of them on the bus by then, and her whole face transformed when she smiled. Black eyes opal rather than oily; she had a pointed little spaniel nose. ‘Take, take,’ she said, almost forcing it into his hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and then when she wasn’t looking, slid the ham out.

  *

  In Bruges, he sent Marta a text. In Belgium. Had a scrap with Frankie and left the tour. Hitching to Calais. He added: Bruges is pretty.

  He picked up a ride on the outskirts of town.

  A black Mercedes, driven by an immaculately dressed blonde woman, pulled up at the kerb. She opened the passenger side door and told him, in perfect English, that he reminded her of her husband.

  ‘Not now,’ she laughed. ‘But fifteen, twenty years ago. That’s why I stopped.’

  Samhain stared at her, sliding into the car. For an older lady, she looked good. A cobweb of crows’ feet wrinkled out from around her eyes, and she had smile lines all the way into the corners of her nose, but she wasn’t smiling now.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘that I used to be a little bit of a punk rocker myself?’

  ‘Were you?’ he said.

  ‘I was in Greenpeace,’ she said. ‘Close the door.’

  ‘Huh,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, and look at me now – driving a car! This I would never have done, not when I was your age. Definitely not, no.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you do,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  ‘You would have had to hitch a bunch of different rides to get to where you were going, otherwise,’ she said. ‘Believe me, I know. I did it enough times when I was younger.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, again.

  ‘I didn’t want to leave you there, waiting for ages.’

  It was such comfort, after the van. Soft seats, cushioned and adjustable. Air conditioning. He breathed in, and took in the synthetic smell of pine cones.

  There was a slight dip of wear in the passenger side door; perhaps the point where her husband, or her son, put his hand every day when pulling it closed. A scuff of sand in the footwell could only have come from a day out by the sea.

  ‘Nice car,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, it was just cleaned,’ she said. ‘It’s not like this normally. Not with the kids. Sometimes, when I’m working, I take it to the valet place to get it cleaned out, on the company’s ticket. My little treat.’ She said, ‘That’s what counts for excitement, when you get to my age.’

  Now she said it, he saw the signs. A scuffed patch in the backseat upholstery, where a child must have dragged a toy over the seat, a trench small enough for a toy soldier. The valet had polished the mark as clean as he could get it, but you could still see the scar.

  It wasn’t a car brand new and bright, but old, with pocks and marks, a thing with history. Like the furniture he moved at work, each scratch and ding adding sentimental value. One day eventually, there would start to be a judder and bump every time the brakes were applied, and after that was put right with new pads and discs, there’d be a mysterious knocking noise every time the car went over sixty; and that would be the point when she would go to her boss and say, ‘I think it’s time you gave me a new car.’

  A car clearance. Sand hoovered out of footwells, toys pulled from door pockets and seat pockets, empty sweet wrappers swept out of the glove box, hands shuffling around under the seats in search of old pens and coins, and anything else that might have fallen there. Until you hold the bits and detritus of a life lived when the children were young, in a bag smaller than something you’d use for shopping, up to a teenage face who no longer wants to be seen with you in this car or any other.

  He gave a start, realising that she had been talking the whole time. She might even have asked him a question.

  Four days on the road with those reprobates had turned him into an animal. He said, ‘Sorry, I think I fell asleep for a minute.’

  ‘I was asking, what brings you to Belgium?’ She glanced at him sideways, with deep, marbled green eyes. ‘I mean, don’t feel that you have to answer if you don’t want to. But bear in mind that I’m not your mother, and I won’t mind if you’ve been doing something, er...’ she shrugged. ‘Well. I might mind if you were one of my kids. But you’re not. So indulge a middle-aged lady with some of your adventures.’

  ‘I was on tour.’

  ‘With your band!’ Her face lit up like sun on a mirror. ‘I knew you were a musician. You look like you play an instrument. But wait.’ She frowned, pulling smoothly around a truck. This wasn’t the same as being in the van, where you felt every single loose piece of tarmac under the wheels, where a flat road could judder the suspension like a dirt path. ‘What happened to the rest of them? I mean, there must be others, right?’

  He didn’t answer right away.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ he eventually said.

  ‘Well.’ She stared at the road. ‘I would say that we have about another two hours together, anyway. So even if it’s long, you might as well tell it.’ Perhaps it was the way she spoke, as though she wasn’t going to stand for a disagreement – but something about her reminded him of Marta. ‘And you and I are never going to see one another again. I don’t know any of your friends, or your bandmates, or anybody you know. So. It doesn’t matter if you tell me something bad, because nobody will ever find out.’

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t even know where to begin.’

  6.

  He started talking about a childhood locked to diggers, and somewhere in that found himself talking about Graeme Stokes, a man gone before he could even remember it. A man who had left them to go back to a four-bedroomed detached house where a wife and two boys, only a year or two older than him, already lived. Lads who had everything Samhain could never even hope for, like karate classes and music lessons and places in a good school, half-brothers who didn’t even know he existed, a man that Flores wanted to pretend didn’t exist.

  Elsa drove carefully. She let him talk.

  ‘All this happened a long time ago,’ Samhain said. ‘My mum was...’ he struggled to find the right word. ‘She was raped by a police officer.’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘No. Years ago. Before I was born. He was my father. She didn’t know he was in the police – she thought he was an activist, like her. And I’m the result of it.’

  She nodded, and glanced into the rearview mirror, before changing lanes. ‘And have you always known? Or only now found out?’

  ‘My friend told me. My friend who’s looking after my cats while I’m away. My mum – Flores – doesn’t even know that I know.’

  ‘I see.’ Over and around a slow-moving Fiat. ‘So, your friend told you – and how does she know? Are you sure she’s right?’ Back, softly, into the slow lane. ‘For all you know, if you don’t talk to your mother, you may never know. You co
uld be adding two and two and making five.’

  ‘There was another man in Europe at the same time. Jimbo something. But it couldn’t be him. Or at least, I don’t think so. The dates don’t seem quite right. So when I get back, I’m going to try and find him – Graeme Stokes. I’ve thought about it. Everything about it makes sense.’

  Samhain had turned it over in his mind until the pictures had sharpened to hyper-reality. He remembered going into the small house on the estate for the first time, and how he had been thrown by the smallness of it – how closed-in the rooms were. Flores had shut the front door, and they’d gone into the hallway, which was the colour of a dust-storm, with its single light hanging over the stairs. She’d said: ‘This is where we live now. No more camps.’

  ‘We moved back to the UK,’ he said. ‘When I was quite young. Somebody in one of the camps had told her something – something had happened, some argument or fight, and she packed us both up and brought us away, that same day. I’d never understood what it was, until now. But it makes perfect sense. Leaving the camps like that, when normally she would have just hidden out in the tent for a few days. She completely cut herself off from her old activist friends, from everybody we’d ever known. Apart from one or two of them. And after we came back, she was always different. Like somebody had let all the air out of her. She just didn’t seem to enjoy things anymore. Not like she used to in the camps, when she’d always been laughing, always busy, always involved in some thing or other. When she – when we came back to the UK, she wasn’t like that anymore. She used to spend days in bed, sometimes. Weeks. I never knew what was wrong with her – but I got used to it, after a while. I thought it was what everybody’s mum did.’ He said, ‘She gave me a front door key to play with. You know, because we’d never had one before.’ He had turned the toothy, round-headed thing over and over in his hands, staring at it in wonder.

  ‘It all makes so much more sense now,’ he said. ‘Lots of things. Things from when I was a kid.’

  ‘Yes.’ Elsa nodded. ‘How horrible. What an awful thing for you to find out. And how horrible for your mother.’

  Samhain felt a curious sense of relief. As though a water balloon between his ribs, once tied, was now pricked and gushing loose, leaving him free at last to breathe. ‘Oh God, it feels like such a relief to finally be able to tell somebody.’

  ‘You haven’t told anybody else? For how long?’

  ‘A few weeks.’

  She slowed, pulling the car up a slip road. Services: petrol pumps and a square, concrete building. ‘What a burden. And I’m sorry, but I have to fill the car.’ She stopped by the pump. ‘I’ll get us both something to eat.’

  A text came through from Marta.

  U ok? Nt like u 2 abandn tour 1/2way thru. Wt hppned?x

  Elsa heading back from the shop, two blotchy paper bags in hand.

  Fnd out Frankie’s knwn ab Astrid 4 ages. Pnchd hm & gt thrwn out f sqt. Also pnchd Ned. Prbly stupidst thng Iv evr dn. A moment later, he sent a second text: How r the cats?

  ‘Here!’ Elsa got in. ‘Apple or cinnamon. You can have first choice – being my guest.’

  His stomach growled. ‘Either.’

  ‘Then, here.’ She passed him a bag. ‘Bon appetit!’

  Long stretches of flat land. Sky pale as a Turner.

  Samhain wondered what the rest of them would be doing. Round about now, they might only just be waking up: Romey pacing the floor, fretting about maybe having to cancel the rest of the gigs – not that anybody would hold him responsible. Maybe, with Ned all torn up the way he was, Patrick Stewart The Band might be in the same position. They’d both be going all over the rest of Europe, explaining what had happened. Now, whatever people thought about Samhain Estamos, these would be the legends that stuck, the man so unstable he fights members of his own band mid-tour, so badly they have to join up with another band, whose guitarist he also maimed, to make a single band out of the torn halves of two. You know: the guy who went nuts at the squat in Utrecht and got thrown out in the street at two in the morning, leaving his band without a guitarist, right in the middle of a tour. No, we don’t know how he got back, either. Perhaps he bought a ferry ticket using the money he stole from the rest of the band.

  He groaned.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Elsa asked.

  ‘Another long story,’ he said.

  She looked again at her watch. ‘I think you have time to tell it,’ she said.

  This new story was about how he had not just lost a daughter he had never known, but a best friend too, as well as four other good friends, and how, as soon as he got back to England, he’d have to find a new place to live – and that was if his boss was willing to give him any work, after he’d pissed off on tour two weeks after starting his job.

  ‘Everything’s a mess,’ he said. ‘My life is always such a fucking mess.’

  Elsa spoke carefully, as though negotiating with an armed man. ‘Do you know, I think that you can put all of this right.’

  It occurred to him for a moment to say, What the hell do you know, lady.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He screwed up his paper bag, and sprayed crumbs all over the footwell. ‘It’s far worse than it sounds. My best option is probably to move to a new city and start all over again.’ From what he’d heard, Charley and Astrid were doing just fine without him. They probably didn’t need some loser coming around and screwing things up the whole time.

  Starting again would be easy enough. After all, it wasn’t as though he had a lot of furniture to take.

  ‘You want to run away.’

  ‘That’s not running away.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is. Going to a new place, maybe making all of the same mistakes again. In four years’ time, you’ll be saying: I need to move to a new city, and start all over again.’ She said: ‘Can’t you see that you’re throwing everything away before you’ve even had a go at sorting it out? You can get a job you like – find a good place to live, where you can have your daughter on weekends. Lots of people do it. You’re talking about it as though you think somebody is going to force you to work in a bank, or something.’

  ‘I don’t want to have to work all week. Only having two days a week off...’

  ‘You know, you talk like this, and I can see your ex-girlfriend’s point. She says you’re immature, and you prove it. Lots of people do it. I do it. My husband does it. You can’t always have absolutely everything you want. That’s not what life is. Look at me, in this car. I was like you, once – young, and idealistic. Never thought I would live a life like mine – with a husband and two kids and an apartment in the suburbs. And your “two days off a week,” only with children, you don’t even get that. You never have a day off, once you have kids. When I was your age, I thought I would be out there fighting the good fight, forever, out there on the ocean. I didn’t want to stop going out on the actions. But then I got old, and tired, and I wanted to give my children a better life.

  ‘Pert – that’s my husband – said, we have to try and make the world a better place, for our kids. So we discussed it, and we agreed, Pert will keep going on these protests, for all of us. Only the short ones, for a day, or three days at a time. I could never go, because I had really bad sickness, both pregnancies, actually. At times I was just spending whole days at home, and after I had them, the same, too. At home all day. I said to him, you can go on any protest you like, for all of us, but try not to get arrested. Because I could hardly even make myself a sandwich, let alone get to the police station to pick him up.

  ‘So he started to do things that were less radical – where he didn’t have to do anything that was against the law. Once, he went to an oil spill on the north coast, where all the birds had been caught in the oil, and it was killing them – glueing their wings to their bodies. He and many others were picking up the birds and washing them, getting them clean enough to be able to fly again, and then keep them there so they didn’t fly right back into the oil spill agai
n – because nobody was cleaning it up. And these volunteers kept turning up from everywhere all the way around the world, and they were picking the birds up the wrong way, either being too rough with them or not cleaning them enough – or letting them go right back into the sea, where the oil was. And these birds were all over the beach. You can imagine it – gulls and puffins and moorhens – all covered in oil – so sticky they can’t get up and catch anything to eat – and there is nothing to eat anyway, since all of the life in the sand and in the sea has been suffocated by the oil. All these birds croaking and crying, and Pert said, there were all these bodies – the birds – and you couldn’t tell which were alive or dead, since none of them could flap their wings, and you could just see their eyes, black and terrified, and often there was oil in their eyes too. He said, the whole beach was full of them. And there was all this oil covering the sand – and as the volunteers and activists trod on it, they trod it further in – and he said that he felt like every step he took, it meant even more and more that the oil would never wash out of the beach.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘It really broke his heart.’

  ‘And after that,’ she said, ‘we decided – instead of protesting, we will work hard with our kids, and teach them awareness of these issues, and try to live sustainably, and so on. So that there are always at least two voices in the next generation who understand what slow living is, and who know how to do things in a way that is green and ecological. You know?’

  For the first time, they passed a sign saying Calais: 60Km.

  ‘It’s not quite the same as my situation,’ he said.

  ‘I know. But what I’m saying is, you reach a point in life where you have to face up to things. You can’t go along running away from it forever, pretending these things don’t exist. It’s not ideal, but what in life is? You’re not a child anymore. You’re a father.’

  ‘If she’ll let me be.’

  ‘Listen, really, if you want my advice – and I know you didn’t ask for it, but here it is – you should be thinking about what you can do to sort out all of this mess, not thinking of moving to another city and pretending none of it ever happened. There are lots of ways where you can be there for your daughter, and help her, without compromising your principles. Your priority now should be her, not yourself. That’s what being a parent is. Setting an example – working out ways to do better next time. And don’t you want to get to know her?’