by Matt Haig
'Goodbye.'
And I stayed there, listening to the dial tone's eternal hum, as the nature of my necessary task slowly became more clear.
*
When I told George I was sorry to hear about his father he nodded and closed his eyes and mouth as if a wasp was flying past his face.
He kept a lot in, that was my impression. Indeed, I admired him for it. That is how we rise above ourselves, isn't it? By leaning hard against those doors to our emotions, in the British tradition.
I put him to work on a lowboy cabinet, repairing the drawer rails and runners. He had finished by lunch, when I sent him out on another errand.
Now, let me think. It must have been ten minutes past one when George came back into the shop, breathless, with our lunch and the wax polish I had asked for. He didn't say anything at first. Indeed, I was two bites into my Wensleydale sandwich when he casually came out with it.
'I've just seen Bryony,' he said.
So relaxed was his tone that it didn't sink in at first. I nodded and had another bite, as if he was making a comment on the weather. Then the alarm sounded.
'Sorry? What?'
He swallowed his mouthful and pressed his glasses further up his nose. 'Bryony. I've just seen her.'
'No, George, I think you have made a mistake. She's in school,' I said. 'She has lunch in school.'
He shrugged, and looked over at one of the figures. The Girl with a Tambourine. 'I might have got it wrong. But it looked like her. I called her and she turned round but then kept walking. She looked like she didn't want to be bothered.'
'Was she on her own?'
'Yes,' he said, nudging his glasses further up his nose.
'Where? Where was she?'
'On the Mount,' he said. 'Walking towards –'
'The school?'
'Yes.'
A precious elixir kept in a barrel. You put a hand over the hole where it leaks but there is another, out of view, that you have missed.
I felt like a fool. Where had you been? To meet him?
I telephoned your school. I asked to speak to you. They went to fetch you and I had nothing to say. I had needed to hear your voice and I was hearing your voice but it expected words in return. It expected a reason.
'Cynthia's going into hospital,' I said.
'Yes, I know.'
George was looking at me, his sandwich-stuffed face paused in dread anticipation.
'For her hernia.'
'I know that. Why are you phoning?'
'She's got a date. The eighteenth. She called this morning and said she's going in on the eighteenth.'
'I was in French.'
'She'll have to stay the night.'
'It was embarrassing.'
'She sounded ever so worried.'
'Is that it?'
'Yes.'
You made a noise at the back of your throat to signify your frustration.
'I'll see you at four,' I told the dial tone.
George was confused.
'It's difficult,' I said. 'I have to handle Bryony carefully. There are things she hides from me.'
He nodded, and his eyes flashed wide behind his glasses as if I had made a considerable understatement.
'George? Is there something you know? About Bryony?'
He paused a moment too long.
'No,' he said. 'I don't see that lot any more.'
'Before, though. You used to know some of the same people. Was there anything?'
He took the last bite of his sandwich and shook his head, staring over at the lowboy cabinet.
'George? Was there anything at all?'
'No,' he said. And then, blushing: 'Well, not really.'
'Not really? What does that mean?'
'Nothing,' he said. 'I don't want to get her into any trouble.'
He didn't understand. 'You won't be getting her into trouble, George. You'll be helping her.'
He considered, or at least seemed to consider, and took two gasps from his inhaler.
And then, after much interrogation, he told me something I find myself unable to repeat. Something about what had happened that evening in the field. An incident which occurred after you had been drinking, between yourself and another boy, in full view of everyone. A grotesque act, which you participated in with full compliance. I remembered Uriah Heep's hand sliding down your back in that Cockpit, and I found the story all too easy to believe, especially as George trod forward through the whole thing with such slow and reluctant steps.
'I shouldn't have told you,' he said. 'I'm sorry, Mr Cave.'
The sweet chutney at the back of my throat lent the horrendous images tormenting my mind a sickly taste. I retched at the idea of you there, with those boys, allowing yourself to become no more than an object to be enjoyed. My Bryony. My innocent Petal. What had happened to you? What had happened since Reuben's death that had made you lower your own value? I couldn't stop my mind. I couldn't stop the images of this girl I adored but also despised. This girl who simultaneously was my daughter and also the person who was destroying my daughter. I felt appalled. I felt like I had just watched Marcel Duchamp draw his moustache on the Mona Lisa. You were my work of art, my priceless Petal, yet you clearly viewed yourself as no more than a cheap postcard. A souvenir of the Bryony who once was.
'You pushed me away,' I said. 'George, you pushed me away.'
He nodded. His cheeks burned crimson. He understood his crime. 'I'm so sorry, Mr Cave. I just wanted to fit in. I just wanted them to accept me. I'm not like that now.'
He was nearly crying. I swear to you, there were tears glazing his eyes.
'No, I can see that,' I said. And then, realising George was now an ally in my mission, and an ally with information, I knew I could not be too severe. 'Don't worry, George. I'm just glad that you told me.'
'You won't . . . you won't tell Bryony, will you? That I said anything.'
'Oh no, George,' I said, as Reuben laughed in silence around us. 'It's our secret.'
I went to pick you up from school. Through the windscreen I watched the day girls and weekly boarders walk out of the gates laughing, talking, their voices bubbling up and boiling over with the promise of the weekend. Four hundred pupils who were not quite you. More and more of them were spilling out, heading towards waiting cars or the railway station, ready to become their other selves. The laughs became slowly more hideous, the faces more tormenting as they became less, as the crowds began to thin and the cars, one by one, drove away.
I saw Imogen, but you were not with her. I ran over to her and tapped her arm and she jumped in shock and took a moment to recognise me, a moment where I was not her friend's father but a man she didn't know coming out of nowhere to touch her arm. 'Imogen? Have you see Bryony?'
She looked at her friends, whom I had not seen before, who found something in my question to amuse them, and Imogen shrugged and said with bleak indifference, 'She had hockey, I think.'
And I remembered you had taken your hockey stick with you that morning and I remembered the still comfort of having you there, on the seat beside me before I had known about your lunch-hour excursion or the incident in the field. I was remembering your purer, morning self when Imogen walked away, and added her voice to the giggles. I wondered if something had happened between you two, something a father would not know about and would never know.
I looked around and there were only a few uniformed bodies to be seen, climbing onto bicycles, putting on their helmets, or (the other type) cupping their hands against the wind, lighting cigarettes.
Even these stragglers disappeared and I was left staring at the school building, at the tall Victorian windows and the dark archway of the entrance, the blank eyes and blank mouth of a creature that had spat out its last pupil.
I walked inside and navigated my way through the labyrinth of corridors towards the staff-room, all the time feeling the invisible squeeze of those walls.
A face came out of nowhere. A sharp and hollow face of stern wom
anhood, attached to a body of long, floating clothes and mock-tribal accessories. 'Excuse me, sir?' she asked, staring worriedly at the fresh scar on my cheek. 'Can I help you?'
'I'm looking for my daughter. Bryony Cave,' I said. 'She was not there to meet me. She is always there, on time, and I am beginning to wonder where she might –'
The face tilted back, allowing my words to bounce off her chin. 'I'm afraid Bryony isn't in any of my classes, but I'll just enquire in the staff-room and see if someone might know.'
I followed her to the staff-room and was informed there had been no hockey practice today as 'Valerie' was away. I saw Mr Winter and recognised him from parents evening. 'The girls were told to wait in the library or inform their parents they were leaving school early,' he said, in a voice so cold and bureaucratic I could almost see its typeface.
'I wasn't informed,' I said. 'She didn't inform me.'
Mr Winter shrugged and closed the blue folder on his lap, 'I'm sorry, but I can guarantee that Bryony was well aware that she should stay on the school premises unless she had managed to get in touch with whoever is responsible for her. We understand our duty of care.'
My anger burst its cage. 'I am responsible for her from four o'clock. At a quarter to three she is in your care. Just as she is during lunch hour. Now, I have it on good authority that she wasn't here at lunch either. You cannot allow your pupils simply to wander out of school.'
The whole staff-room was looking at me. I was making a scene. I was, in their eyes, clearly overreacting. They did not understand the fatal danger that taints the air of this town, that rises up from the old Saxon streets to claim those too fragile to resist the follies of youth.
'She told me she had phoned you and that you were coming to pick her up,' said Mr Winter.
'And you believed her? You didn't follow her to the gates?'
'Unfortunately, we cannot offer each child their own private minder, Mr Cave. Not without significantly raising our fees.'
Someone laughed by the water cooler.
'You don't understand,' I muttered as I left the room.
'Mr Cave, I'm sure Bryony will be absolutely –'
Ten minutes later, I would be pressing my weight against a door that wouldn't open. I would be standing outside my own shop as I searched my pockets for the key. What was George doing? Why wasn't he behind the counter? I made it inside. 'George? Bryony?'
A floorboard creaked above me. I ran up the stairs and saw him there, on the landing. Not walking, just standing.
'George?'
'I needed to go to the toilet,' he said, in a voice that might have been ashamed, or angry.
'Where's Bryony? Has she come back?'
He paused, and then answered slowly. 'Yes,' he said, carefully, as though the word itself had brought you there. I moved past him and into your room and when I saw you standing in front of your rosettes, I felt so relieved that only now can I see the damp redness of your eyes.
Of course, you didn't witness this relief. You witnessed the fear, shooting out of me in angry words. 'What on earth were you thinking? Why did you lie to Mr Winter? Where did you go? You went to see him, didn't you? You went to see him. Tell me! Tell me! For God's sake, girl, tell me!'
I didn't mean to shake you, I didn't mean to make you cry fresh tears.
I want to be back there, I want to step inside that room and try again. This time, I will listen and you will tell me what I am sure you would have said, if only I had been a father and not a tyrant, if only I had trusted myself to love you the way I should have. But I did not, and you told me nothing. Inside your head, you already had it planned.
It didn't matter any more. Nothing mattered any more.
Nothing apart from him, that boy who was your world, that boy who had worked an apocalypse in your mind and turned the rest of us to dust. And so it was that I let you collapse on the bed and sink your face in your pillow, before going downstairs, with George, to reopen the shop.
Please, Bryony, understand this: the pain of a child is the pain of a parent.
I see it all, now. It was me. I was him as he was me.
I see myself at the window. I see my head busy with the accounts and I scream to get my attention. Below, they translate the scream as one of triumph and chant my name. All of them. All except one.
By the second scream I am feeling the pain in my left shoulder, a pain so sudden and intense that it becomes impossible to separate it from everything else. The voices, the terraced houses ('Gladstone Villas, 1888'), the whiskers of yellow light, my other self running across the park – all pieces of the same pain.
Still, I have to hold on. I have to wait until I am there on the street, running towards me. I watch as I step on the park wall and jump down to the pavement, landing badly.
'Reuben, Reuben!'
I see me as I push my way through the boys and know that it is time. This is what I have been waiting for, why I am here, and know I have no choice but to let go.
'Reuben! No!'
I fall, fast and heavy.
Within a second my screaming has stopped but I am still there, as there as I ever was, just leaking out from the vessel that contained me.
'Get an ambulance. Now!'
Little Cam vomited on the pavement as Aaron staggered back, away, onto the empty road.
I look at myself straight in the eyes and see the fear I know I am feeling. I turn away from me. Denny is there, silent, numb, and I see my hatred as I look at him.
'Don't go,' I tell myself, as I rub my hand, and I see the dread and confusion descend on my face. These are my last words. 'Don't go.'
I leave my body and the pain it gave me and the material world sinks into darkness. The road, the park, the shop. Every building and every object. All I can see is the dull glow of living souls, guiding me like a hundred lighthouses in the fog.
George had just left when I saw Denny walk past the window. He glanced inside but I made an overt show of not having noticed, sinking my head deeper inside the Antiques Trade Gazette.
Of course, the moment he had gone past I was off my stool and heading out of the door, out into an evening of crisp packets sliding along pavements, of empty sightseeing buses wheezing their way towards the Minster, of deserted climbing frames and Vikings in tattered raincoats, swigging back from golden cans.
He wasn't there. I scanned across the park, towards Reuben's lamp post and then down the length of the street, but there was no sign of him.
Cool moist air filled my lungs as I looked around. Then I realised something else was lacking from the picture: George. He had left the shop only a moment before I had seen Denny. If he was following his normal route home, he would have only reached the fish-and-chip shop by that point. Maybe he had gone inside to buy himself a cod supper.
I was about to step back inside the shop and check you were still safely upstairs when I heard something. At first I thought it was the hydraulic sigh of a slowing tour bus, although I quickly realised it wasn't coming from the road. It came again, this noise, though it was now accompanied by a kind of animal whimper. A scraping backwards breath. Shock? Fear? Sudden pain? I followed the sound and soon heard another. A cry, now recognisably human, calling out for something, someone. My mind sought to mend the mangled word but couldn't.
I kept running, to the passageway where the sound was coming from, and found them there engaged in a thoroughly one-sided physical struggle. George, the flabby giant who had once nearly pushed me to the ground, getting severely beaten by your boxer. His smashed glasses were on the ground, lying near a puddle alongside his inhaler.
Now, as I write, I remember a moment of hesitation as I stood there. Maybe I was wondering what, precisely, your boy was capable of, trying to ascertain the nature of that violence which so evidently resided within him. And it troubles me, truly, to tell you that when I saw him there, kicking an already well-battered George in the stomach, I felt a brief flowering of relief. I cannot explain it. Or maybe I can. You see, my concern
s regarding your boy required this confirmation, something this substantial, for me to act upon them. It was as though the thousand doubts suddenly spoke with a single voice, and the threat he posed to your personal safety could no longer be ignored. How many times did I let his foot meet George's stomach? Many enough for me to realise that this wasn't going to end without an interruption.
Would Denny have killed him?
'Stop!'
His foot finished its final kick and he turned and he saw me but I could not read his expression given that his face was in shadow. I must tell you I had no fear of him, as I stood there. Or rather, I had no fear of what his feet or fists could do to me, or of the pain he could inflict upon my body. No, the only fear I had was for yourself, as I knew your emotions were so tangled up with this brutish rogue that any attempt to extract you from him, or him from you, would be a task fraught with danger.
Oh, why couldn't he just leave our lives? If only he had never existed! If only he had been born something else! An insect to be trod on, or a weed to be pulled out of the soil. Would it have upset the world if he had never been? Would there have been a space, a yawning lack, which you would have wanted to fill?
He stayed looking at me, a suicidal street cat in the head-lights, then he turned and fled away from the scene, down the passageway, and out onto Swan Street. Once gone, I moved over to George and crouched beside him. He was in a truly horrendous state, coughing and whimpering as he held his stomach.
'George? George? George? It's me. It's Mr Cave. George, can you hear me?'
He opened his eyes, or as much of them as he could, and the sight of me seemed to have the effect of another blow.
I gave him his glasses and his inhaler. 'George? Why did he do this to you? George? We've got to get you to hospital. Can you stand up? George?'
'I think so,' he said, in a pitiful voice.
I helped him to his feet and drew my mobile telephone from my pocket to call for an ambulance. Even as I dialled the thought nagged me that I must get back to you. You were on your own, unguarded, with Denny on the loose. 'Could you put me through to the ambulance services please? Hello? Yes, we need an ambulance as soon as possible. A young man has –'