Robert gave me a big smile.
Kathryn sat and watched as I ripped up the last of our crusts and handed them to Robert.
‘Quietly,’ I said. ‘Just let them come to you.’
Moving as slowly and carefully as I could, I scattered a line of crumbs along the grass, starting from a spot close to the birds and ending at the point where Robert was crouched, ready.
We waited. Robert licked his lips; his face settled into a determined frown. He stared and stared at those peacocks until, eventually, one began to strut towards him, following the trail of bread. Its beak stabbed the ground repeatedly, and Robert studied its every move as it came closer.
‘Do you think he’ll be OK?’ Kathryn hissed.
‘He’ll be fine,’ I whispered.
When the bird was almost close enough to take the bread, Robert looked back at me; I simply nodded to him, and he resumed his position.
He remained absolutely still as the peacock bent its head to his palm and took the food. He watched that bird with wonder, his mouth gaping and his eyes wide, but he didn’t make a sound. Only when the crumbs were all gone did he straighten up and let out a squeal, which made the bird scurry away on its spindly legs.
But he’d done it.
I looked at Kathryn. ‘You see?’ I said. ‘He’s tougher than we think.’
On the last night we decided to treat ourselves. We’d leave him asleep in the caravan for an hour while we went to the park club for a drink.
Gin and tonic for Kathryn. I had a Mackeson. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d been out on our own like this. Kathryn’s flowered sundress showed the curve between her breasts, which glowed a little pink; her cheeks were brown from the sun, her lips full with lipstick, her hand rested on my knee. I kissed her there and then, sitting on our squat velvet-covered barstools, the smell of old beer all around us.
The jukebox was playing the oldies, The Miracles, Roy Orbison, things we heard before we were married.
I don’t remember speaking at all, I just remember the kisses she gave me, which were full and open and in front of everybody. We sat there together for over an hour, and I kept buying the drinks; the Mackeson’s dense brown liquid was both savoury and sweet as I glugged it back, and she didn’t say anything to stop me.
As we walked to the caravan we must have been a little drunk, because Kathryn took off her sandals and wandered barefoot in the grass. I watched her as she meandered between the caravans, swinging her sandals by their straps.
‘It’s so cool, Howard,’ she called. ‘You can feel the wet between your toes. You should try it.’
Looking round to check no one was watching, I unstrapped my sandals and joined my wife on the grass. She took my hand as we walked together back to our caravan. Kathryn joined in with some Diana Ross song that was drifting across the site.
‘Why did you marry me, Kathryn?’ I asked.
She stopped singing.
‘What sort of a question is that?’
I looked into her face. Her skin had taken so much sun that her teeth seemed to glow white in the darkness. At that moment, she looked like a new, exotic Kathryn. I waited for her answer.
Eventually she squeezed my forearm. ‘Because I wanted to,’ she whispered. Then she added, ‘And you asked me.’
‘I asked you?’ I searched her face, but she was staring in the direction of our caravan, and her mouth had fallen into an open ‘O’. She dropped her sandals on the grass and pointed frantically towards our plot.
‘The bloody door’s open,’ she shouted. It was the first time I’d heard her swear.
We ran to the caravan. There was nothing in his bed, and he wasn’t in ours. Kathryn leant out of the door, her knuckles white on the frame, and called into the night.
‘Robert! Robert! Where are you?’
I had to stop her because lights were going on in the other caravans.
‘I’ll never forgive myself, Howard, never,’ she said, but I knew she meant that she would never forgive me.
Then I noticed that the sign on the bathroom door read ‘engaged’. ‘Kathryn,’ I called, ‘he’s in here.’
Before I could stop her, she threw herself at the door, breaking the lock.
He was sat on the pan, asleep, his soft brown pyjama bottoms round his ankles, a silver line of drool hanging from his chin to his chest.
I carried him back to bed.
‘Don’t wake him,’ I said, laying him on top of his crumpled sheets. But she held him so tight that he woke, and when he saw her frightened face, the tears came.
six
1976
I’d bought it for his sixth birthday, second-hand from Gregg’s in Darvington. I had been going in there since I was a boy, inhaling the smell of rubber, listening to the bright ringing sound of new bicycle bells. They had whole drawers of bells at Gregg’s.
I saw Robert’s first bike straight away. It was a red second-hand Raleigh Spider, with white mudguards, red rubber handlebar grips and reflectors included. It was too big for him, but I could lower the saddle and handlebars right down, and that way he’d have it for a few years, at least. It had a little pouch beneath the saddle for a spanner and a puncture-repair kit. The only thing it didn’t have was a bell.
I asked to see the selection.
‘Is it for a boy?’ the man behind the counter asked. His ginger moustache twitched. I had already selected a boy’s bike, so I thought the answer was obvious.
‘That’s a shame. I’ve only got Minnies left.’ He handed me a bell with a Minnie Mouse transfer on the top. That red bow was in her hair (how could mice have hair? I was sure that Mickey didn’t have any hair), and those eyelashes curled up towards her ears. I weighed the bell in my palm.
‘But it’s for my son.’
‘I might have some Mickeys in next month.’
Robert’s birthday was the next week, and I wanted him to have the bell, to be able to warn people he was coming, to make some noise, to announce his presence. I wanted him to be able to do that.
‘Perhaps I’ll just take a plain bell.’
The man behind the counter frowned. ‘All the kids have these ones. How old is your son?’
‘He’ll be six.’
‘He won’t mind, then, will he?’
I hesitated.
‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll throw it in for free, with the bike.’ So he had the bike with the Minnie Mouse bell. The thing that puzzled me was, he didn’t seem to notice the fact that it was Minnie, not Mickey. He just loved ringing the bell as hard as he could. ‘I tried to get Mickey,’ I explained, but he ignored me and rang the bell again. ‘We can get you another bell. Later on.’
‘Don’t go on about it, Howard,’ said Kathryn.
He rode the bike every day to school. He got on well with his lessons from the first, especially English and Art. When he came home with gold stars stuck in his spelling book, Kathryn ran out to the garden to show me. ‘Look, Howard,’ she said, thrusting the book between me and the dahlias, ‘Robert came first.’ We held the book out in front of us.
‘He’s going to get on,’ she said. ‘Really get on.’ She kissed my cheek and laughed.
‘It’s early days,’ I said, thinking that we shouldn’t feel too proud. But I couldn’t stop the smile that was spreading across my face.
Kathryn gave the book a shake. ‘Gold stars. We should reward him.’
‘We’ve only just bought him a bike.’
She gave my upper arm a playful pinch. ‘Don’t be such an old stick-in-the-mud. He deserves a little something. As encouragement.’
After a moment I thought of a suggestion. ‘How about taking him to the power station?’
She frowned.
‘As a reward,’ I continued. ‘I think he’d like it.’
‘Would he?’
‘Power. Cables and engines and trains – it’s what boys like, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I can show him what I do.’
‘Do you think he’ll enjoy it?’
‘We’ll go tomorrow.’
It’s always breezier on the site. The wind cuts past the towers like a blade in the winter. But that Saturday it seemed to be warmer than it had been for weeks, and I let Robert unzip his anorak. His cheeks glowed. His thick hair, which his mother had allowed to grow too long, hardly moved in the wind.
I guided him around the bottom of the first cooling tower. Water roared as it poured down the concrete sides. We stopped for a moment while I explained how it worked. Every time he looked up at me, I thought he must be listening, but he didn’t ask any questions until we were back on the road towards the turbine hall. Then he said, ‘Why is there dust everywhere?’
I didn’t notice that any more, the piles of soot that gathered along the kerbsides and made the puddles black. I didn’t notice the way it caught in the back of your throat. I’d forgotten that when I first came to the power station I’d wondered why the snot was black when I blew my nose.
‘It’s from the coal.’ I pointed to the black hill of coal dust. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is what heats the water.’
He looked at it and frowned, but when I asked him if he’d like to go closer, he shook his head and reached for my hand.
‘Are we going to see the fire?’ he asked.
‘Fire?’
‘The fire the coal makes.’
I laughed. ‘We’re going to see where I work. I don’t work with the fire.’
His fingers were moist as they tugged at my hand. ‘I want to see the fire.’
Of course. He wanted to see the engine of the place. He was a young boy. He wasn’t interested in buttons and levers. He wanted pumps and pipes and generators. He wanted noise and power, the hot centre of the place.
I decided I would impress him: I’d take him into the turbine hall.
‘We’ll go and see the fire,’ I said, leading him into a side entrance and up the stairs to the viewing gallery door, ‘but it’ll be noisy. OK?’
He beamed.
Even on the stairs, there was a loud roar. I’ve never liked the noise of the turbine hall, the way it travels through you, making speech impossible. The men on the turbine floor seem to have developed some sort of sign language that I’ve never mastered.
Before we went in, I strapped him into a hard hat, making sure the visor wasn’t too low on his forehead, and I handed him a pair of plastic safety goggles, which he let dangle from his fingers.
‘You have to wear them, Robert. And earplugs. There’s up to ninety decibels of noise in there.’ I showed him how to pinch the foam earplugs between his finger and thumb until they were small enough to be jammed in his ears. Then I put on my own ear protectors and opened the door.
I could feel the noise through the metal grate of the walkway. It came up through my shoes, vibrated along the hairs on my legs. Robert reached for my fingers, his face turned to mine. His green eyes were wide open, unblinking. I squeezed his hand and smiled.
It was thunderous in there. The power station was never silent – there was always a hum or a whirr or a bell somewhere – but the turbine hall breathed noise. I felt a thrill, as I always did, at the size and power of the generator in that great hall: 2,000 milliwatts of electricity were being created here, at this very moment. I often thought of the hall’s long windows and elevated viewing platform as something like a huge theatre, with the generator as the star attraction.
But as we walked together along the viewing grid that ran along the top of the turbine hall, the sound swelling around us, I realised that I couldn’t explain to my son what any of the tin boxes and lagged pipes and bright cables did; even if I’d have shouted at the top of my voice, he wouldn’t have been able to hear a word. We had only sign language, and I wasn’t sure what signs to use to explain the workings of the turbine. So we walked together dumbly while the generator roared around us and the men worked below.
When we were almost at the end, Robert let go of my hand and pointed frantically towards the roof. Following the line of his finger, I saw a pigeon flying upwards. Its wings were spread wide as it glided in front of the long window that stretched from floor to ceiling in that massive hall. Robert kept jabbing his finger in the pigeon’s direction, grinning. I knelt beside him and we watched it together as it flew above the noise of the turbine, way beyond the heads of the men working below.
When we were out of the turbine hall, Robert pulled out his earplugs and said, ‘Does the bird live in there?’
‘Probably. They nest up there sometimes.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s warm and sheltered, I suppose. No one can touch them up there.’
‘But can he get out?’
I thought for a minute. ‘Yes. The windows open at the top. Yes, he can get out.’
‘He won’t get burned, by the fire?’
‘No. He’s perfectly safe.’
But the truth was, I wasn’t sure. Once it was in, would a bird be able to find that crack in the window again? Or would it spend the whole of its pigeon-life in the roof of the turbine hall, disorientated, deafened by the power of the place?
seven
Summer, 1979
It seemed there was no shade, even beneath the leaves of the lilac I’d grown all along the back fence. Its patches of purple froth were mostly over, and the tiny flowers were beginning to brown in the sun.
My garden was a glory in that June sunshine. We’d had nothing but good weather since May, and it was taking me an hour to water back and front every evening. I’d taken to watering in the early morning, too, before work. Six o’clock and I’d be out of bed, leaving Kathryn to sleep on for an hour. It was the most delicious freedom to me, padding out into the garden in my slippers, feeling the cool air edging through the gap in my dressing gown. As I worked my way around the garden with the can, the grass soaking my slippers, I saw the soil lighten and the petals begin to loosen as they warmed in the sun.
By then I was growing chrysanthemums and dahlias for show. I loved their pompom shape, the tight perfection of the petals. I loved the way earwigs hid inside the flowers, clinging on in their dark caves, even when you shook the stems. Kathryn said the chrysanthemums looked like soldiers wearing bright fur hats, they were so straight and striking when they bloomed. I had a whole bed, growing nicely up their canes. ‘Golden Gem’, ‘Cecilia’ and butter-yellow ‘Hansel’.
Robert was nine. Whenever he went into the garden, even if Kathryn was there, I watched him. I heard my own voice become repetitive and scolding, but I couldn’t stop the words coming. Mind those seedlings. I’ve planted a shrub there, don’t tread on it. Don’t pick the leaves off my box.
Kathryn had suggested I teach him respect for the garden by showing him how to love it. ‘Teach him how to grow things,’ she said.
So he’d chosen a packet of sunflowers, ‘Teddy Bear’ variety, which I expected to give us double blooms and good height, and I’d brought them on in the greenhouse.
Now it was Saturday morning, and, as Kathryn had started work again at the library, we were on our own until lunchtime. The seedlings were ready to plant out, and I wondered where I could find a place for Robert in the garden. It had to be away from the dahlia bed. In the end, I decided on a patch by the shed, where it wouldn’t really matter what happened. Using the imprint of my boots in the mud, I measured out the plot. One, two, three, four. Turn, and the same again.
Then I marked four rows using wooden sticks and string. As I let the rough fibre run through my fingers, I remembered Mum finding me, aged eight, with a length of garden twine wound too tightly round my hand. I was sitting in our shed, staring at my cold fingers; they were pure white, like the dead skin you strip off your feet in the bath. I expected a scolding, but she unwound me without a word, and held my hand in hers until it was warm again.
When I’d marked out the plot, I told Robert to put some old clothes on.
‘These are old.’ He plucked at the leg of his shorts as if it wasn’t wor
th touching.
‘They don’t look old to me.’
I heard him tut.
‘Do you want to plant these or not?’
When he came back out, he hadn’t changed his shorts or his sandals, but he was wearing an old T-shirt. It was far too small for him; his arms looked restricted by the tight little sleeves, and he kept hooking his hand beneath the front and pulling it down over his stomach, the outline of his knuckles bulging through the printed face of Mickey Mouse. I bought him that not long after the Minnie Mouse bell, as a sort of apology.
Music thumped over the fence and into our garden. The lad next door, Graeme, was playing his radio again. He always listened to the same radio station, just that little bit too loud, but not so loud that I could go round there and tell him to turn it down. And sometimes he sang along, in an out-of-tune voice, wailing when he didn’t know the words.
I put a hand on Robert’s shoulder and walked him round the plot, ignoring the beat that swelled around us. ‘First of all, you dig a shallow trench. Water lightly. Then plant each seedling at even intervals. Bring the soil up around them. Water generously.’
He was gazing towards the fence.
‘Shall we try it?’
Without looking up, he nodded.
When I came back with the trowel, Robert had left our spot next to the shed and was standing on tiptoe by the fence, trying to see over. I stood behind him and saw what he was looking at. Graeme was lying on a red towel on his concrete terrace. To one side of him was an oil spot from his motorbike, and to the other was another lad, also lying on a towel. Small swimming trunks and large sunglasses were all they wore. A bottle of suntan oil, its label stained dark from the grease, was upturned between them. A transistor radio blared by Graeme’s friend’s head. Neither of them moved a muscle as they lay there together, grilling in the sun.
‘I like the music,’ said Robert.
‘Let’s get this trench dug, shall we?’
I stood over him as he flipped the trowel in the earth. ‘Can’t you help me?’ he asked.
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