The sound of his own footsteps echoed around him as he sped through pages of tabloid and the crabgrass sprouting in fractured concrete. Any other time, he would have feared what his frantic scurrying must have looked like to the estate’s residents. But no one was out. No one ever was after dark, except the gangs.
The earth had long since tilted on its axis, retiring the sun, as Patrick half-ran to the bus stop. He’d recently toyed with buying a cheap car but the roads around Highfields were a congested nightmare and the headteacher’s Beemer had been found with its tyres screwdrivered on more than one occasion.
This small section of the estate, the only part of it he ever dared penetrate, was a gridded mess of Escher-like confusion, the majority of Union City stretching vast and dark and mildewed to his left. Shadows flitted under raised walkways, sparked metallic-smelling joints. He’d always been conscious of the potential embarrassment of meeting pupils but today he was apprehensive, to put it mildly, about running into Denis. He kept thinking of that parting sneer, the coldness of it, the emptiness.
A trio of youths rounded the corner ahead and he held his breath as they parted for him, neckchains glinting blades under the sodium smearing of streetlamps. He thought he heard one of them whisper, ‘Mr Owen…’
Running from the darkness onto the main road, he saw his bus approaching. With fifty metres between him and the bus stop, the bus slowed and ejected a solitary passenger. The driver flicked on the indicator, hissed the doors closed. Twenty metres. Patrick threw himself towards the bus as it anticipated a gap in the traffic then, breathless, banged on the doors to attract the driver’s attention. Reluctantly, the doors reopened. A tired mother eyed him as the bus sighed on. An addict with pinpricks for pupils. Posters above the windows beseeched kids to join the army, to apply for college, to buy the latest video game. The only advert not aimed at children was an old one. ‘Use Your Head’ it said, above a photo of a young trainee standing before a class of eager learners. ‘Teach.’
Patrick regarded the recruitment poster’s carefree, lying stagecraft in numb agony for a moment before a kid – probably Year Seven or Eight – in an over-ironed Highfields uniform jogged down the stairs. Patrick attempted to shift to one side in his seat, turn his body to the window, but he’d already been noticed.
‘Alright, sir.’
Who was it? He never could remember their names.
The kid lingered by the door, waiting for his stop, then began rummaging in his school bag before tearing out a drawing and wordlessly holding it out to Patrick.
It was a drawing of a dragon, his tail engulfed in scribbled fire.
‘Oh, that’s lovely.’ It was terrible.
The bus hiccoughed to a halt.
‘See you, sir.’
‘Your drawing.’ Patrick attempted to pass it back to him.
‘You keep it, sir.’ The kid beamed proudly and stepped off the bus.
Patrick, a faint feeling of victory and pride rising like a bubble through his chest, turned at the sound of what seemed to be his own voice.
‘Oh, that’s lovely.’
A group of boys in Highfields uniforms were huddled round a mobile phone, sniggering. One of them re-pressed a button.
‘Oh, that’s lovely,’ went the recorded voice.
‘This is so my ringtone,’ one of them declared.
Patrick screwed his headphones into his ears to drown out their laughter.
Patrick lived at number six ‘The Heights’, a block of flats built in the fifties as cheap replacements for the Blitz-damaged dwellings which had once stood, like their survivors opposite, tall and boastful of relief laurels and alabaster covings. The Heights weren’t cheap any longer of course but Patrick knew the residents of the larger Georgian properties in the area – clear-skinned toffs in bespoke winter wear who avoided his eyes on Sunday mornings – still considered them to be. All that mattered to Patrick was that he lived far enough away from Highfields to avoid bumping into his pupils in the pub.
He put the picture the kid on the bus gave him on the mantelpiece, looked at it properly – it wasn’t a dragon, he now realised, but a soaring phoenix, mockingly reborn from the flames – then slumped at the kitchen table and uncorked a bottle of wine, staring at his red, ballooned face in the convex bulge of a glass he didn’t even rinse out before refilling. His eyes were two puffy, brown lozenges of exhaustion, his chin weak and tapering towards triangular.
For a long time, until quite recently, Patrick knew he’d got away with looking younger than his years. But no longer. His body was stepping up its war against youth, that irreversible submission to the ageing process every living creature must endure. In the evenings, the mirror showed his face as a net of worry lines and, upon waking, revealed it to be pressed into channels and creases by an unforgiving pillow. Gradually, he knew, the look he sported in the evening would move back in time through the day and the morning wrinkles would last until the afternoon. One day soon, at the day’s centre, the two faces would marry.
Teaching wasn’t entirely to blame. Time, and its accompanying intimations of mortality, was taking its toll. The eyes which passed over him in nightclubs. The blockbusters starring millionaires younger than him. Everywhere he looked, Patrick saw ugly and incontestable vanitas symbols.
He thought of Denis. The unfolded whiteness of his skin, the unstained teeth, and felt more terror than he’d ever felt in his life.
The telephone shrieked on the desk.
This was it. The call. All he’d done was touch the boy’s bloody shoulder, for God’s sake. And now the headteacher was demanding to know why Denis’ mother had threatened to have the school razed to the ground, the teachers lynched and the parent-governor body shot against the playground wall. There was nowhere to run; Denis had once again got him with his back to his desk.
He reached out and lifted the receiver.
‘Hello?’
A brief pause. ‘Patrick. Hi.’
There were times when he wondered whether it was merely his wife’s voice he’d desired, that oddly dichotomous mix of Catalan and American, the curt nature of her Barcelonan Ts and the lazy drawl of the West Coast. He once told her he’d never stop loving that accent and now, looking back through the prism of the years, that voice, he was sad to admit, hadn’t faded in his affections. Though thousands of miles away, she was as clear and familiar as though she were in the same room.
‘Ana. How are you?’
She launched into a story without pause. Something about the colour of the sand, the price of steaks, and how these seemingly disparate subjects were linked by the confusing colloquialisms and contortions of South American Spanish. He dreaded the moment she asked about his life, and when she did he merely replied, no longer buoyed by the wine, ‘Oh, okay…’ She was under the Argentinian sun, living, while he reposed on a futon in a rented London apartment six decades past its peak, aware of the fact that, two hours earlier, he’d nearly been beaten up by a child in front of a room full of other children. ‘And how is…?’
‘He’s fine. He misses you.’
Patrick found himself in the spare room, his eyes skimming over the reasons he’d moved to this flat in the first place. The Lightning McQueen duvet cover. The Darth Vader money box. Danny’s weekend home, before the extended holiday that took him away.
‘Does he want to Skype with me?’ Patrick asked.
‘He’s with Mum at the moment.’
‘Right. So…?’
A leaden pause. ‘So what’s the point of me ringing exactly?’ she asked with sarcasm.
He drained the rest of the glass. An argument was brewing and he needed fortification. ‘Yep.’
‘I received a letter from your solicitor this morning…’
It hadn’t been right between Patrick and Ana for some time, but the killing of routine is never painless and he’d been inconsolable the morning she told him she was taking their son with her to Buenos Aires. He regained enough control to say, ‘Look, I didn’t want to get the solicitor involved but… He’s my son too. I don’t want to have to catch a plane every time…’
‘But you must understand that there was nothing left in London for me.’
‘You think there’s anything left here for me?’
Another silence.
He surveyed the communal garden no one ever tended, the inky steeple of the neighbouring church, shelled and awaiting its second life as luxury accommodation. In a nearby block of flats a girl played a silent violin at her window, stabbing her bow arm up and down at firm and practiced angles. It might have been an Edward Hopper painting.
‘So when are you back?’ She’d only been supposed to stay with her mother for a month. It had been two already.
She hesitated. ‘Soon. The minute I get a job offer, I guess.’ If her leaving had been the death of their relationship, this new lie felt like its internment. ‘How’s work with you?’
‘It’s been better. Busy, you know.’ He chose platitudes and the expected response.
‘At that dodgy place still?’
He chuckled without mirth. ‘At that dodgy place still.’
‘Nothing else lined up?’
‘I went for an interview at another school a few months ago, but no luck. Everyone wants cheap, new blood. I’ve been doing this a while. I’m expensive.’
At this, Ana seemed to realise the cost of the call. Patrick was aware of an urgency in her voice as she attempted to wind up the conversation.
‘Look, I want to sort this amicably…’ she started.
‘Me too.’
‘I wish we didn’t have to…’
‘I know.’
‘Bye,’ she said.
‘Ana, I….’
He listened to the silence from the other side of the world for a long time before turning off the phone. The violin’s high-pitched and frenetic melody was audible now, hitchhiking on the wind, and he opened the window to eavesdrop on a sound which reminded him of days when perseverance and talent had seemed enough.
Patrick remembered the exact moment he knew something had slipped through his fingers.
Walking home from Highfields the previous spring, he’d seen twenty boys from Year Eleven fighting an avaricious game of football on a small recreational patch near the school, one side in white shirts, the other bare-chested. It was an unusually hot day – or so it seemed to him in retrospect – and, as he walked behind the makeshift goalposts, he’d fancied he felt a fraction of his pupils’ exuberance, the sensation of the oncoming summer, the genesis of adulthood. The joyous, competitive nature with which skinny centre forwards thundered over the churned, makeshift pitch seemed to belie the nearness of the exam season.
He’d gone home that day and slumped in his kitchen with his favourite guitar, the flame-maple Les Paul he’d had flown over from Japan. A tune had been running through his head for the afternoon and he’d wanted to pin it down. He attempted a few standard chords, groping around in his musical memory and, deciding the tune had been based around D minor, dropped the sixth string two frets. As he strummed, a different melody emerged and, slowing it and playing only minor notes, he intensified its mournful quality, as one might compose a nursery tune. It wasn’t technically innovative but he gave it a title – ‘Sixteen’ – in honour of his own carefree teenage years, the hair grown, the girls loved, the nights wasted. He wanted to immerse himself in the bittersweet vertigo of youth having passed.
After playing with the new melody for a while he found, to his disappointment, that it refused to grow and, after the first four bars, became stuck in a musical cul-de-sac. This happened sometimes and he knew he only had to rest the idea and come back to it later, but it had now become impossible to unlock the original melody he’d conjured during the day. The longer he tried, the more unplayable it became. Like the mismatch of ambition and the harsh light of reality, what he’d heard in his head and what came from his fingers were not the same.
Music had once been Patrick’s life but now it seemed as though his teaching qualification, a fallback career encouraged by a well-meaning Ana during the early days of their relationship, was all he had. He’d often wondered whether his status would be raised with his kids if he dared tell them about his old life, the star he nearly became. But failure wasn’t saluted, or attractive. Failure wasn’t even conceivable to those football-punting teenagers on the grass, in their perpetual summer.
At the time, Patrick didn’t look upon it as an omen. Not being able to excavate the symphony in his head wasn’t evidence he’d lost his ear for music entirely. But he knew something had changed inside him.
He was still standing inside his absent son’s bedroom, empty glass in one hand, humming telephone in the other. There was a photo of Danny and Patrick on the cupboard door, taken at the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland last Christmas. He was almost four now. Did he even look the same? And to whom was he offloading his cartoon, pillow fight-violence, his pigeon-chasing skills (did they have pigeons in Argentina?), his sweet tooth demands? Ana’s parents? Ana’s lover? Ana’s lovers? Patrick missed him, missed treating him, and the presents had been building up in the corner of the bedroom. He knew he’d see him soon enough, but probably not before Christmas. Yes, it was cruel of Ana, but she wasn’t a cruel person. She’d be back with him. He was convinced of that. They’d both be back.
The violinist had stopped – he couldn’t be sure when – but she was still standing in her window. She wore a dressing gown which had fallen open to reveal one half of a black bra and she looked at Patrick as if trying to place him from somewhere. A moment flickered between them. A common, human understanding amid the urban chaos.
He waved.
She gave him the finger before drawing the curtains.