DANIEL DIDN’T CHANGE HIS mind the next day, but the sign he was looking for didn’t turn up until that weekend.
Sarah telephoned on the Friday night to say that she and George would be away for a couple of days. ‘That will give you a chance,’ she said, ‘to clear out some of that stuff in the shed. If you make enough space in there I can get rid of some of the junk in your old room.’
‘It’s not junk, Mum.’
‘Yes it is. Anyway I can do with moving things around. I want to fix that room up in case you and Louise come to stay.’
‘Why would we do that, Mum? We only live fifteen minutes away.’
There was a pause. ‘All right. Just in case.’
On Saturday morning Daniel let himself into his mother’s house bright and early. At first he took care to sort through the boxes and bags in the shed. For years he had been putting things he didn’t need there. Now looking through them was like digging into the story of his life.
In one corner, there were boxes of toys, picture books, comics and games. In another corner were bags full of old clothes. These held his old football kits, pair after pair of running shorts and shoes, old school blazers, and heaps of sweaters and trousers he had grown out of long ago. Beside them were an old games console, a battered computer he had swapped for a chess set he’d bought at a car boot sale, and his old mountain bike with his twelve-year-old football boots hanging on the bar. Then there were piles of paper, old school essays, sheets covered by his writing in black ink, photocopies and posters. On top of all these were bulky textbooks, stacks of printed notes from his college days, and old CDs.
Daniel went through all of them.
After a couple of hours he was tired, hot and sweaty, but he didn’t stop. It was as if he wanted to make sure there was a balance between his hard work and the thing he meant to do later. By halfway through the afternoon he had a big pile of black plastic bags stacked outside the shed.
He stopped, went into the house, washed, and changed into an old shirt from his room. Then he went into the little room where he had talked with his mother during the week. This was where she prepared her lessons and worked on the computer.
He was looking for the small filing cabinet in which she kept her private papers. He found it where it had always been, in the corner of the room near her desk. It was locked, also, as it always had been.
Sarah kept the key on her key chain, but this was no problem for Daniel. When he was fourteen she had bought him another cabinet just like it for his private things. He had lost the key within a few months, but he had soon found out how to open the lock without it.
Now he took out a long thin screwdriver he had found in the toolbox in the shed. One twist of the lock and the cabinet was open. Inside there was a stack of folders, and he took them out, one by one, keeping them in order. There was nothing in them except notes, household bills, a few letters, mostly from George. He took care not to read them. The last one was the thinnest, and this was the one he opened first. It held a few newspaper cuttings, the paper going yellow and faded. All of them were about a car accident. There was a blurred photo of a young woman, and the name under it was Nancy Benson, his aunt.
He was putting the cuttings back when he saw the photo. He took it out of the folder and turned it round, but somehow he already knew what he would see.
It was a couple with a baby – a black man and a young white woman. The woman was his mother. This time she was the one holding the baby. The other adult in the picture, his arm around her shoulders, was the man Brownjohn had called Chris.