Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  It would be possible, if one were of an unsympathetic cast of mind, to present certain episodes from what some might call Lucas’s career in a way that would create an image that was not at all to Lucas’s advantage. Those episodes might be constructed from facts, but they would not be ‘true’. The case of the girl he called Claire Vaness, for example.

  He had found her too late; this was a fact. The mother had insisted on paying him, though he had failed; he had tried to refuse the payment, but he had relented; this too was a fact. Subsequently, something more than a professional relationship had arisen; some time had passed between the child’s death and the commencement of his relationship with the mother, but it could not be denied that some might have found this relationship questionable; he himself had come to regret it; these were facts. They were facts, however, comparable to unattractive features in a depiction of a face, Lucas proposed. The lineaments are not the essence; they are only the surface. The truth of the Vaness case – what was essential, what nobody but those involved could know – was what had happened between Lucas and the mother in the days that followed the finding of the daughter. He had helped her to achieve what he would call ‘a quietness’ – not acceptance, but the beginnings of acceptance, as the trickle of a spring might be the beginning of a river. Her ‘soul’, he wanted me to understand, was like a field of battle on the morning after the cessation of fighting. ‘A great deal of suffering was still to come,’ he conceded, moved by his own eloquence.

  •

  But what do I know of my parents’ marriage? At night, sometimes, I could hear them talking in their room. Rarely words – usually just the rumble of my father’s voice, and the less frequent and barely audible murmur of my mother’s, in the pauses. The voices would go on for many minutes. I might fall asleep in listening, or wake up and hear them, and be comforted. It was one of the sounds that were to be heard in the night, like cars at a distance, or the drone of the wind in the chimney, or the skirmishing of foxes, or the jostling of the leaves in the Olivers’ garden. The voices, never loud, each succeeding the other in a tone of agreement, made a sound that meant marriage. All parents talked at night.

  But after my grandmother died, the talking went on for longer. One night I came awake after midnight, and I heard them still. Another night, soon after, was the same. It was to do with my grandmother’s death. Now my mother had no parents. When she put me to bed, we cried together. In the night I heard her crying while my father talked to her. I still heard her crying weeks later. One afternoon, we drove to the house in which her parents had lived. It was not the house in which my mother had lived when she was my age; there was no upstairs, only a loft. It was warm in the loft, with a thick sweet perfume of rot and dust; boxes were filled with old clothes and books. I was allowed to stay there on my own. I found a dressmaker’s dummy, the colour of a lion’s fur, with writing on its chest. When I came back down, my mother was sitting where I had left her, in the garden, looking at the house. My father was not there. My grandmother would always hug my mother, but never my father, I had noticed. We stood side by side at the gate, my hand in hers. ‘Goodbye,’ she said to the house, raising a hand as if to a person standing in the doorway, and she gave me the key to hold.

  There was a lot of night-time talking around the time of the visit to my grandmother’s house. I heard no arguing, but something happened then, something that I saw, that struck me as forcefully as any argument could have done. I came into the living room, where something had been broken; I had been in the kitchen, and had heard the crack. From the door, I saw my mother kneeling to the side of the fireplace; a gap had appeared on the mantelpiece, the place that should have been taken by the porcelain shepherdess with the lamb in her lap; the shepherdess had come from my grandmother’s house. Swiping the carpet with her hand, my mother was gathering the fragments; she cupped the blue bonnet in a palm and looked at it. My father was standing at the table, with his back to me; his fingers were resting on some sheets of paper, and his briefcase was open alongside. It was as though he had noticed nothing; he could have been alone in the room. ‘It’s all right,’ said my mother, or something like that; we could fix it with some glue, she promised. Perhaps knowing this was not true, I went back to the kitchen; going, I glanced back into the living room, and in that moment my father, unaware that I was still there, looked aside, at my mother. He aimed his sight at the back of her head, and his face changed, for less than a second. For a moment, his face was convulsed. He became somebody who was not my father. It was so sudden – as if he had cut himself badly, or been shocked by electricity. I could not understand what I had seen, and tried to believe that my eyes had made an error.

  •

  Many men of my father’s generation, and of preceding generations, became fathers primarily because fatherhood was a role that a man was expected to assume at a certain age, Lucas wanted me to understand. This was not so much the case nowadays. A man who elects to be childless will not necessarily be deemed irresponsible or immature. For women, however, the situation has not changed so much, still. Convention is a powerful influence. The female body is a childbearing apparatus, and a woman is held to have an obligation to obey that biological imperative. The childless woman has to justify herself, unless there is a medical excuse, or she has failed to attract an acceptable mate, or finds no man attractive. Then Lucas said again: ‘My mother should not have had children.’ It was said as if his mother were not his mother. He speculated that my father might have been like her in this respect. ‘But I can’t say that was the impression he gave,’ said Lucas, and I remember wondering why, given that the mind of Lucas was so sensitive an instrument, he could not have known for certain if my father had been a man who had not wanted to be a father.

  •

  ‘But you look quite sensible,’ remarked a woman whose name has not been recorded, on being introduced to the celebrated medium Gladys Osborne Leonard. Perhaps the most famous of Gladys Leonard’s many clients was Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, who first consulted her in 1916, in the hope of making contact with her recently deceased lover, Mabel Batten. Over a period of eight years Radclyffe Hall consulted Gladys Leonard on an almost weekly basis, and so detailed was the information thereby obtained that she felt compelled to hire a private detective to find out if the medium might be making use of some non-supernatural source. The detective discovered nothing untoward, apparently.

  •

  The ones who run away generally don’t want to be found, and thus do not direct their thought-beams homeward, as Lucas explained, if not in exactly those words. In the rooms of some of the missing, the silence was the silence of final abandonment. It was sometimes extremely difficult to tell the family that he was detecting nothing. Though it would have eased their distress for a while, he would never pretend that he had received information when none in fact had been received.

  Some of those who run away, however, maintain an ethereal connection with those they have left, and these are the ones whose transmissions Lucas could conduct. Numerous states of mind could explain why these people could not simply pick up a phone or send a postcard, to set at rest the minds of those they had deserted. Anger is one. Lucas on more than one occasion intuited a great anger directed at one or more members of the family. Stepfathers and stepmothers sometimes, of course; most often, though, fathers of various degrees of moral corruption – who could not, as goes without saying, be told everything of which Lucas had become aware. Where the father turned out to be the cause, Lucas conveyed only the gist of the message: ‘Your daughter is alive.’ Fear is another explanation; frequently fear of the man they have fallen in with, who now claims exclusive rights. Confusion, depression, drugs – these too, separately or in combination, can create impediments to direct communication, as in the case of the young man from Telford, whose thoughts turned often to his sister, though he could no longer remember where she lived, and had lost his own name and history. ‘And s
hame,’ he added – as in the case of Katie Burtenshaw, whose recovery had given Lucas the deepest satisfaction of all.

  Here a stepmother was involved: a woman somewhat younger than the deceased mother of the girl, and a believer in certain theories of parenting, theories in which the enforcement of boundaries and rules featured prominently. No sooner had the replacement mother been installed than the rules were applied to the two stepdaughters she had acquired. One proved compliant, one not. Katie, the latter, began to hang out with ‘a bad crowd’. Before going to the house, Lucas walked around the town – a humdrum place, in south Wales. Had he lived there, and been Katie’s age, he would have found a bad crowd to hang out with, he told me. ‘No country for young people,’ he pronounced. On the morning of Katie’s flight, there had been an argument; she had come home at three o’clock in the morning, long after the agreed curfew, to find the stepmother waiting in the kitchen, like a policewoman. At eight she left for college, and at some point before lunchtime she came back home, crammed a bag that belonged to her father’s wife, and took a bus out of town. Three years passed, and not a word. An investigator was hired; the trail went cold in the Liverpool area; Katie had not touched her bank account, nor visited a doctor, it seemed; there was reason to believe that she no longer called herself Katie.

  Lucas followed the usual routine: first the conversation with the family, then the missing person’s room. The bedroom had been left in the state in which Katie had left it, except for the bed. Pictures were stuck chaotically on every wall, some of them drawn by Katie – fantastical landscapes, mostly; some with castles and towers. She leered in photographs, spoiling for a fight, or grinned, madly happy, with an arm around a friend. A collective preference for black clothing was evident. On a shelf, a pale photo of young Katie with her father and mother was propped against a small stack of sci-fi novels, amid miscellaneous tickets, a scatter of polished pebbles, figurines of polar bears, an empty perfume bottle, a miniature torch. ‘An oasis of unruly life,’ was Lucas’s phrase. The room spoke of the girl’s ‘yearning and unhappiness’. Lying on her bed, he heard her voice – or rather, he heard a voice that he knew would turn out to be Katie’s. The words of the dead, he elucidated, do not often have a sound ‘as such’ – they arise in the recipient’s mind like ‘strong thoughts or memories’. In the case of Katie Burtenshaw, however, there was an audible voice. It spoke of her father; it called to him. For perhaps half a minute Lucas listened, then the voice faded away, and at the moment of its vanishing Lucas knew certainly where she was. His mind for a moment had become the girl’s. He saw what she was seeing.

  That night he stayed in Bristol. In the evening he walked the streets of the city centre, not expecting to find her at once, but doing what had to be done as preparation for the encounter. He was ‘introducing’ himself, as he put it. The next day, at noon, he took up his position at a café that he sensed she would be passing. Within the hour, a bedraggled young woman appeared, in black jeans and sweater, sauntering from one side of the street to the other as she approached, pleading with shoppers, with little success. She reached the table at which Lucas was sitting. For a few seconds he studied her: she was thinner than the girl in the photos; the hair was a different colour; she seemed ten years older, not three; but it was Katie. She recoiled from his scrutiny, and when Lucas held out a five-pound note she looked at it as if it constituted a proposition. He pushed the note across the table, and as she picked it up he said to her: ‘Hello Katie.’

  There were people to whom she had to say goodbye, but the following morning she was in the car with Lucas. He bought her some new clothes for the homecoming. When they drove into the street, her father was outside the house, waiting. Lucas parked at a respectful distance. ‘When she was yet a great way off, her father saw her, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on her neck, and kissed her,’ Lucas recited, becoming tearful. ‘It was very gratifying,’ he told me.

  •

  At the start of the month a cheque would arrive from my father. My mother did not know his address, she told me, and she was not inclined to make enquiries. There would have been an address on the divorce papers, but I did not know that the divorce had happened until some time after the fact, and I never saw the papers. Around that time, the postmark changed: the cheques were now coming from Newcastle. On my birthday, I would receive a card, signed ‘Dad’, with a banknote inside, and a couple of words. The last one came when I reached sixteen; two banknotes were enclosed.

  For a long time it troubled me. Whatever the state of his relationship with the child’s mother, how could any man reject his son in this way? Could his guilt explain it? Had my parents, hating each other, agreed that it would be best if my father were to remove himself from my life? I could find no evidence of hatred, other – perhaps – than the glance that I had seen, when the figurine of the shepherdess was smashed. Might that have been the one moment in which the truth had become visible? There had been evidence sometimes of a coolness between them; and the woman in the green coat appeared to be part of the story. And yet, there seemed to have been some proof of affection, even in what were to be the final months, the months that I could remember most securely. My father putting an arm around my mother’s shoulder, as she stood by the sink; I remembered that, and a smile from my mother, for my father, as he came into the house. Or did the touch and the smile signify nothing? Was it their intention that I should observe them, and be misled? Would I have been able, at that age, to distinguish a performance of affection from affection itself? For that matter, was what I thought I remembered the same as what I had actually seen?

  Some time in my fifteenth year, I spoke to Lucas about my father. Was it true, I asked, that he could find missing people?

  There had been cases in which he had been able to help, he answered.

  In that case, could he tell me where my father was living?

  And Lucas replied: ‘Not if he doesn’t want us to know where he is.’ He explained: no matter how much a person might want to make contact with someone who had gone away, the crucial factor was not the strength of the first person’s feelings – it was the strength of the second person’s.

  Think of it as being stuck in the bottom of a pit, Lucas suggested. ‘You want to get out, but the pit is too deep and steep. You can’t throw a rope out, but someone can drop a rope in. The rope can only come from outside,’ he said. Seeing that I was puzzled, he offered an alternative image: what mattered was the incoming signal. With the naked eye we can see a star in the Cassiopeia constellation that is around three thousand light years from Earth – that’s three thousand multiplied by six trillion miles. The world’s most powerful beam of light is visible, on a clear night, at a range of 275 miles. ‘This is what you have to understand,’ said Lucas. ‘The outgoing signal is just a searchlight, the incoming signal is the light of a star.’

  But if that were so, I said, didn’t it follow that my father should be in some way visible?

  ‘Ah,’ Lucas replied, ‘but there are billions and billions of stars, aren’t there?’ Being visible was not the same as being conspicuous.

  I think I considered this proposition for a while, before venturing an objection: how, then, was it possible to find anyone at all?

  It had to do with intention, Lucas explained. The idea of the star and the searchlight was not an absolutely exact analogy. It served to clarify an aspect of the situation, but not the situation in its entirety. Now I had to think of the star as a kind of searchlight, albeit a searchlight of inconceivable power. The missing person, to make contact, aims his or her thoughts in our direction, like a beam of light.

  So if my father were thinking of me, I would be spotlit – was that it?

  Not quite. The light would be sent towards me, but one should bear in mind that – like the star in Cassiopeia – the light might be so faint as to be visible only in perfect conditions, with perfect eyesight. I was to understand that Lucas was th
e creator of perfect conditions, and that his vision was of a special order. And that a metaphor is only a metaphor.

  Because I was not yet an adult, Lucas would of course have to ask my mother’s permission before making any attempt to trace my father, he said to me. That evening, I told her that I had been talking to Lucas. She vetoed the proposal. ‘We have to move on,’ she said. ‘If your father wanted to be with us, he would be here.’

  •

  Another time, as if relating a parable, Lucas told me about the woman who had been his neighbour before he moved into Kathleen’s house – a single mother, with a daughter who was thirteen years old when Lucas first met them, sixteen when he left. The girl’s father had left when she was not quite one year old. He was not a good father, the woman confided to Lucas; people – women especially – have always tended to confide in him, I was to understand. The bad father had liked a drink, and it took only a few months of sleepless nights with the baby to make his drinking dangerous; dope was involved too – a lot of it. He resented more than he loved his child; at times had hated himself for this resentment, a hatred for which the treatment was yet more drink and dope. The man was a mess. Volcanic arguments became a regular event. Two or three nights a week he would come home in the small hours, sometimes with friends, all of them unruly. In the whole of that year, the mother had only one night off. She went round to a friend’s house, leaving the father in charge. She hadn’t told him that there was going to be a party at the house, but somebody who had never liked her was at the party and this person made sure that he found out about it. The bad father was led to believe that the mother had been getting too friendly with someone else that night. This was not true, the woman assured Lucas, but she had not told her child’s father the whole truth about what was happening at the friend’s house, so that had made her a liar as well as a whore. There was a fight, involving fists, then the father packed his bags and walked out, the same day. That was the last she had seen of him.