Chapter 24

I don’t text China for two weeks. I’m half hoping she’ll be the first to break the silence, and half afraid she won’t reply if I do. I can’t work out why it took her so many years to come say hello—or what can possibly have changed to make her want to see me now. At the back of my mind I hear the nasal voice of the man at Heathcote’s reading: “He’s dying. Didn’t you know?”

Clearly something has given way because when I eventually work up the courage to send her a message, her reply is as friendly as can be. Soon I find myself invited over for dinner with her, her three children, and our sister, Lily.

As I walk down China’s leafy West London street, I realize I’ve been within minutes of her home hundreds of times. A boxing club I used to train at three or four times a week is a short walk away. She might even have seen me jogging down the high street on Saturday mornings, heading up a herd of rowdy kids from the boxing club, whom I’d somehow been given responsibility for. One of my adoptive half sisters lives a few streets over, as do two close friends. It’s like we’ve been living our lives in different dimensions—in invisible proximity.

Stepping over my sister’s threshold for the first time is like entering a hall of mirrors. I pass through a corridor cluttered with bicycles and football boots and into the kitchen, where four heart-shaped, impish, elbow-chinned faces peer at me with expressions that range from childish innocence to adolescent indifference to a strange mixture of suspicion and sadness on China’s part.

China’s kitchen feels very familiar, too: wooden hutch overflowing with chipped mugs, battered cookie tins, and postcards; houseplants crawling along the far wall above a crippled settee; kids’ drawings all over the walls—a sort of chaotic but homey bohemianism. An oil painting I recognize as one of Heathcote’s is hanging over a finely grained wooden dining table. A field of remembrance poppies with crushed Coca-Cola cans for petals, a not entirely subtle point about disaster capitalism, I suppose. Underneath it, China’s youngest child, a little boy with a mop of blond hair, is coloring in bottle caps with a golden pen.

“I’m making treasure for my treasure box,” he says, holding up one of his golden coins. “Would you like to see?”

Lily arrives late and flustered with boyfriend in tow. She’s come straight from visiting Heathcote in Oxford—or “Dad,” as she and China call him. Like China when I first met her, she seems nervous and wary. Lily gives me the sort of hello one might reserve for a neighborhood kid who has come to ask for his ball back after having kicked it through the roof of your greenhouse. I cycle through my various crimes trying to locate exactly what I’ve done to upset her. Perhaps some of my ill-advised attempts at getting Heathcote’s attention caught hers instead. Or perhaps, I reflect, it’s just the basic fact of my existence that’s difficult for her. I am her father’s faithlessness made flesh, after all.

Lily is the sister I’m almost entirely certain I’ve encountered before. If I’m not mistaken, we’ve crossed paths secretly and anonymously online. It was a strange episode. I was seventeen and looking for traces of Heathcote on the Internet. One of the places I kept checking was Wikipedia. I watched Heathcote’s entry grow from a few sentences—a stub—to a short biography as people anonymously added bits and pieces here and there, details I never knew about Heathcote’s colorful life. At some point, a contributor added details about his family life and listed his children—including me. And then, not long afterward, someone went in and deleted me from his list of children. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I logged in and reinstated myself, this same user kept going back and wiping me out of existence, symbolically erasing me from history. I assumed Heathcote must have been behind it, until I traced the user’s IP address and discovered that whoever had spent so long trying to delete me from the family had done so from a computer in the office where Lily works.

Lily squirms miserably under the bright overhead lights as China presses a tumbler of white wine into her hand. I examine her closely, wondering if it really was her all those years ago, but now doesn’t seem like the moment to go over old wounds—not when there’s such a fresh one to deal with. Lily explains that Heathcote has been in the hospital for a week with low oxygen and bad circulation; complications related to his severely advanced emphysema. It’s a confusing picture. It sounds to me like he’s falling victim to the sort of random failings the very old suffer just before they die, the last stretch of the circular staircase down which everyone staggers with increasing infirmity toward death. But he’s only seventy-five. I think of my dad, roughly the same age and strong as an ox. And my grandmother, well into her eighties and still able to snatch flies midflight between her fingers. Heathcote can’t be dying.

“He’s really seriously ill,” Lily says, “but he won’t do anything about it. He’s in total denial. The doctor has been telling him for months that he needs to keep active, but he just sits in his room—and now this has happened.” I can’t work it out. He’s either on his last legs, or it’s something he’s simply going to be able to walk off.

China serves a dinner of roast chicken and the two sisters gripe affectionately about Heathcote’s hopeless attitude toward, well, everything it seems. Their mixture of love and despair is fascinating to me. Sitting right in front of me is the answer to the guilty little riddle I’ve secretly nurtured and mused over ever since I can remember. What would life have been like if Heathcote had stuck around to be my dad? I’ve often thought it really might have been a little like being brought up by Fagin from Oliver Twist. He’d have taught me to pick pockets with an endless stream of silk handkerchiefs and life would have been a merry crime spree. Or he’d have been like Merlin, revealing the mysteries of alchemy and flight. Or Sirius Black, the criminally insane wizard who escaped from a high-security prison to protect his orphaned godson. Part of me still holds on to this idea of a rascally old man blessed with supernatural charm and wisdom.

To my surprise, I discover that life as a child of Heathcote’s wasn’t all magic shows and mischief. Through China’s and Lily’s eyes I get glimpses of the reality of having such a mentally unstable man for a dad. Heathcote ramming a car drunkenly into the back of a fish van with one of his young daughters beside him, laughing hysterically as silvery mackerel flew from their boxes; being woken up on Christmas Eve by an earthquake and going downstairs to discover Heathcote in the basement taking a sledgehammer to a supporting wall, trying to gain entry to an imaginary room; the sense of relief when he was shut away in a distant mental hospital that could only be reached by bus once a week. Even the jackdaw seems to have had a sting in its tail.

“I hated that bloody bird,” says Lily. “It used to attack me whenever I came to visit.”

And that’s as much as anyone seems to want to talk about Jack Daw. I think again about all the stories I’ve been told over the years about Heathcote the eccentric anarchist. These stories—about him drunkenly stealing cars from outside Notting Hill Gate police station, or setting himself on fire, or shoplifting Christmas from Harrods—always made him seem even more alluring to me. My imaginary father was unconstrained by the laws that govern mortal men. Until now I never stopped to think about how unsettling, how upsetting, it must have been to grow up under the rule of a man like that, at once so fragile and so destructive.

With this realization comes an unexpected flash of anger. Not toward Heathcote but toward my sisters. It would have been useful back when I was a confused teenager to have had someone to compare notes with, I think, gripping my own tumbler of wine. We could have worked together instead of against each other. It’s irrational, and totally unfair. It wasn’t their fault we didn’t meet. Heathcote kept us well out of each other’s orbits.

This meeting was never going to be easy. China’s sweet children and her two cats ease some of the tension between us and I find my bitterness becomes more diluted with each gulp I take from my glass. My new sisters are guarded with their Heathcote horror stories—especially in front of the children—but they have both, I suspect, had a much tougher time of things than I did. I can’t find it within myself to stay angry at them for long.

It would be an exaggeration to say that any of us feel at ease at any point in the evening. But by the end of the meal it’s clear that something has begun to form among us. Not trust, or love, but a shared mission between China and Lily that I find myself being recruited into: help Heathcote. Just before I leave, China touches me on the elbow.

“You should go and see him if you can,” she says. “Really you should.”

On the top deck of the night bus home I sit thinking about China’s exhortation as the city passes by in a miserable blur. All my anger toward Heathcote has gone down the hatch now that he’s so dangerously unwell. I’d like to help him, if I can. But what can I possibly do? And what, a hurt little voice whispers, if he won’t even see me?

The next morning I am woken by a familiar “Come on! Trump!”

I smile at this. I’ve been thinking all night about China’s suggestion that I go and see Heathcote. It’s been hard to imagine what I could possibly offer him, except guilt, but now I think I know.

After sticking the bird and his horrible breakfast out of the window, I sit down to write, telling Heathcote I’ve met my sisters at last and that they mentioned he’s unwell.

“I could come and visit if you like?” I write. “Perhaps I could bring the magpie too, if that would cheer you up?”

I think about the magpie Trumping around his filthy kitchen, snapping flies out of the air, bringing a flash of color and life to the old man’s dying world. We wouldn’t need to talk about anything except birds if he didn’t want to. All the pressure would be off.

Heathcote’s reply comes by email a few days later.

“… Thanks for the smashing card and for your concern. Yes, slight blip when I was reading an anti-Trump diatribe in a freezing-cold warehouse. The John Radcliffe [Hospital] topped me up and gave me a new certificate of roadworthiness. Back in harness. Sadly, there is an ugly feral cat here so birds are contraindicated. Come in the summer when it’s not so damp and miserable, H x.”

“A slight blip?” I mutter.

“Glad to hear you’re a bit better,” I reply. “I’d be happy to visit whenever. We could go for a slow ramble around Jericho sometime—or catch a cab to whichever spot you fancy—if that’d do you any good?”

Radio silence. I know I’m being tricked again. A week in the hospital isn’t a blip and telling me to come in summer is simply a coward’s way of telling me not to come at all. But I allow myself to be persuaded. It’s a seductive story he’s selling. He isn’t dying, or even really ill. He’s witty and alive as ever, just waiting for the sun to start shining so we can take tea in his garden and talk about birds.