-Will-
I will not hear Max’s rhythm. I will not join in with the train. That must go now. I must focus on the future, maybe, I think – but the past… I killed my father. How, how, how do I start to accept this? But more, how do I accept that I do not really remember this? I mean, now I am told, the pieces, they start to fit together. But how can I not have remembered it for so long? How can there be this whole huge important murderous thing in my life, part of my own fabric of being, and me not have known about it? A tantrum, Ellie said. Was I so enraged, then, by not being given enough attention, that I didn’t know what I was doing? Or did I know full well, by the age of four, that taking a hammer to someone’s head is bad, naughty in the extreme? I must have known afterwards, because of the slaps, and the shouts, from Sophie. Is that the bit I found traumatic? Is that what made me repress the memory? And then, after he died. Did four-year-old me connect it to the hammer-blows? Did I understand what I’d done? Have I buried that guilt?
Do I feel guilt now?
It’s me, four-year-old me, that is to blame. That’s another person. Someone separate from me, thirty years ago. In a totally different life. A life I robbed myself of. A life with a fantastically talented father, following him around the concert halls of… But no. That is a fantasy. I must stop that. Fantastically talented pianist he may have been, but talented father he was not. Said Sophie. I can imagine, now, the obsession of a genius. Interested only in his music, not in the mewlings of a child. Not surprising, then, that there were tantrums. Not surprising about the hammer.
So – what? Am I blaming Max now? It was his fault that I killed him? Maybe I am saying that. But Sophie. Whose fault was what I just did to Sophie? The mother who ran from me, who couldn’t bear to look on the son who had killed her beloved genius. That is my own fault. Nobody else’s fault – just mine. Understandable, maybe. Or is it? Was that me, too, who took a hammer to France to smash in the skull of a woman whom adult me had never met? Is that understandable? And if it is, does that make it excusable? To kill a woman who has spared you death, who has spared you the truth? Because you are so obsessed with the father you hardly even knew? Is it genetic? Do I have a predisposition to kill? Have I passed it on to this son of mine?
This son. Train, stop playing Max and move faster, will you? Put Paris behind me and just move on, move on back to England, back to Ellie, back to Leo. I will not – please Sophie, please French police – I will not be the absent father that Max was. I will be there for you, Leo. I will do for you, well, I will do for you what I guess John tried to do for me. Give me stability. Give me normality. Give me ice-lollies from Sainsbury’s and stickers from the zoo. Be always, always there. Even though he always, always knew, that I was a little boy who killed fathers. And Gillian, too, she must have known. She must have wanted to protect me from this – from myself – for a lifetime. Even my own memory tried to protect me, finding ways to blame other people, not me. Would I have wanted to know? Would I rather never have followed hammers and water and pianos to where they led me? Would I rather the pretence had continued forever, that I would never have known about Max, about Sophie?
No. No. Because they are who I am. I am who I am. I am William, wife of Ellie, father (still, I hope) of Leo, adoptive son of Gillian and John, son of birth father Max who I killed, and of birth mother Sophie who I (may, I hope not) have killed. I am all these things. I have to move forward with that knowledge and just accept it. Accept it and focus on what I do have, for now, but have so nearly destroyed. A life with Ellie and Leo. They are key.
Because Ellie. Ellie protects more than anyone. Ellie, who found out my thoughts, my plans, I don’t know how, and phoned to warn me, to tell me. Ellie who hasn’t renounced me. Ellie who still wants me home to see Leo, despite what she knows I was doing. She will be a good mother, if when I arrive we still have a son. She will find out his secret desires without him knowing, and help him safely through. I can only hope those secret desires don’t include… Well, why would they? Like father, like son? Lesson number one of parenting: do not put hammers within easy reach. Lesson two: do not allow tantrums. Lesson three: do not allow either parent to be alone for too much time with the child. Lesson f— no. I can’t be paranoid about this. Can I? No. I must go to that hospital as an already talented father. I must return home with some fatherhood instinct in myself. I must put my child first at all times. I must not be frightened of its power over me, when it grows. I must just hope that it does.
Finally, the train is out of the tunnel and speeds on, on, on towards London. Sights that must have been there on the way out begin to appear. But I didn’t see them, then. I was going in a different direction, I suppose. Now, I see them fully. Not just for the first time on this journey, but for the first time in months. Where have I been? How have I missed the birth of my first child? I begin to cry. I don’t care who sees me, who hears me. Apart from Ellie. She will not see any of this when I arrive. I will be strong, I will be protecting. I will be what I have not been since the day I found out I was adopted. The last two months of her pregnancy, I have been elsewhere. My own private made-up world of blame, of anger, of resentment. Following the false trail of a type of fatherhood that never existed. But I must find my own fatherhood now. That nursery, I will need to repaint it. Or else, I will need to let the zebra become zebra again, not walking pianos. The piano itself, my old new best friend, I will try to think of as a commodity, learning from Sophie. And I will sell it, to pay for Leo’s – well, whatever it is that small babies need. I haven’t even read any parenting books, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know what they need, what to do! Apart from that you have to be present. Always present, and always noticing things, them, what they do. For self-preservation as much an anything.
And Ellie, Ellie does not need to get a job. Have I really, for the sake of a piano, been making her schlep around Kingston and London looking for work? Has she really been willing to do that? Who am I, that she would do that for me?
The train screeches into St Pancras. Will the Tube be quicker than a cab? Maybe, maybe not. But I cannot risk to be delayed, stuck underground, when I need to be on the surface, in the air, pushing quickly forward on my way to Leo. Because who knows? With every moment that passes, he may be growing weaker. Any moment might be the moment that he dies.