The funfair comes to Becksmouth every summer. It’s exactly as I remember it, right down to the bad paintings of Eighties horror-movie characters decorating the ghost train. I don’t recall quite so many young gangs patrolling the place, mind you; it always seemed a family-friendly fair. The sedate Merry-go-round and Teacups are all but empty, whereas The Gravitron’s host to plenty of teenage screamers.
I’m by the hoopla stall when I spot my brother loping towards me. He’s seventeen or eighteen now and, unusually for a teen his age, looks neither twelve nor thirty; he looks seventeen or eighteen.
‘Hey there, Ryan.’
‘Hi.’ We shake dry hands as his eyes slide towards the birdcage at my shoes. The creature chirps, as if in recognition.
Part of the reason Ryan looks that rare thing – his age – is down to his choice in clothes. He isn’t wearing the latest fashions of his generation, nor is he trying to dress older than his years. Instead he wears a hodgepodge of charity shop apparel and clothes he’s had for eons. His jacket fits him, but is clearly second-hand, while his trousers are too small and expose two ankles’ worth of mauve sock.
Or maybe this is the latest look. I’m out of the loop, I guess.
‘Fancy a go?’
He scratches the fuzz on his chin, squints at the stall, its cuddly toy prizes. ‘Yeah ok.’
The attendant hands him five hoops and takes my pound. Ryan ruffles his big, electric-shock hair, then hurls the first hoop at a wooden block. He lands all five, winning a toy fire engine, which he refuses. We both try our hands at a similar game, in which balls are flung into small baskets. Again, Ryan wins.
‘Been practising?’ I ask.
‘I bowl yorkers,’ he explains, whatever that means.
Bored with the sidestalls, we head to a burger van. Ryan asks if he’s got any drinks and the vendor admits that he lacks the licence to sell alcohol but claims to have got round this legal loophole by giving out raffle tickets for one pound fifty, upon the purchase of which he hands out ‘complimentary’ cans of Stella. Ryan wants a Coke anyway, having never touched alcohol in his life. I get the impression, since he’s failed so far to develop a liking for the hard stuff, even in the wake of our father’s death, that it’s unlikely he ever will. At least, I hope that’s the case.
‘So, how you doing?’ he asks me for what might be the third time, his gaze glued to the screen of his phone.
This is how it’s going to be; skirting around the reason for my visit, making small talk like strangers until we recall our blood bond and end up sniping and argumentative. I wonder how long we’ll hold out for, who’ll crack and fire first.
‘I told you, I’m fine. Can’t we go elsewhere?’
‘Meeting people, aren’t I?’
‘Right. How’s college?’
‘Shit.’
‘Favourite subject?’
‘Dunno. Maybe PE?’
Our conversation remains trite: the opening of a new restaurant on the high street; the speed of mobility scooters; a recent beach party. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘they had a DJ and everything. Mum told me, about Dad, when I got home. I was on the stairs.’ I don’t know why he adds this detail, perhaps to emphasise that he was around and I wasn’t. I wonder how often he used to see our father. Once a fortnight? Twice a week? Every day?
We walk as we talk, hollered at by the salesmen through the tinny, squealing sound of the fair. The air is, in turns, sugary with the sickly scent of ice cream and perfumed with the smoke and oil used to fry hot dogs and onion. I let a little while pass before asking, ‘So where did it happen? Where did Dad…?’
‘At his flat.’
‘And who actually found him? The body?’
‘His tart.’
‘His what?’
‘Didn’t you know? Dad was doing some twenty-year-old. Sophia. They weren’t living together but she was round there a lot. They met while he was guest-tutoring at Brighton Uni. He was a bit old for a midlife crisis if you ask me.’
‘He was only… how old was he?’
‘Forty-eight.’ He speaks down to me, in that quick, offhand way teenagers tend to do when riled, but I wonder what else he knows that I don’t, about the circumstances behind our father’s death, about his life. Those sharp, frozen eyes of his might not necessarily contain wisdom, but they doubtless harbour secrets. When Ryan looks into mine does he perceive, in some way, my recollection of the blood which dripped from our father’s hands? Can he see the red prints up the wallpaper, on the cutlery drawer, the hall carpet? Can he see 1989 as lucidly as he can the morning he heard his father was dead?
‘And this Sophia, she found him soon after he died?’
‘We think so.’
‘You think so?’
‘Well she called us straightaway. After the ambulance, I mean.’
‘Did you ever meet her?’
‘Never.’
We stop beside a shooting range. I notice Ryan’s eyes have reddened, but he sniffs away the moment, defiant, as though presenting grief might insult either of us. He’s obviously not the person I should be grilling, under the circumstances.
It wasn’t the same for Ryan, back then. He wasn’t lied to like I was, and he knows that. He had nothing to take as personally as me, even if he’d been old enough to understand what was going on. But he still blames me for my anger, rather than our father for planting it there. Ryan remained unchanged by the events of that summer, and in many ways is nothing like me. Maybe he will be, one day. After all, I was nothing like me at his age.
‘For the record,’ he says, without a hint of emotion. ‘I don’t want to go over “it”. It’s in the past.’ His tone is resolute, final. ‘Give us a quid.’
Ryan seems on edge now, aggressively jabbing his rifle towards the targets as he stabs the trigger, as though this momentum will give the shells extra power. Still, he’s not bad, but not quite accurate enough to win a prize this time. I know I won’t get any closer to the bull’s-eye so I don’t even try.
Afterwards, Ryan and I walk to ‘The Eggs’, a kind of Ferris wheel with freewheeling ovoid compartments replacing the more traditional cars. ‘I’m meeting them here,’ Ryan says, looking at his watch. While we wait, I talk about the minor crisis at work and Ryan listens, sarcastically, somehow inflecting the silence with a well-practised adolescent cynicism. Working for a living? What a fucking sell-out! It occurs to me that he’s being disparaging about what I do because I did the same to him, patronisingly asking after his favourite college subject as soon as we met. We both consider the other to have a chip on his shoulder.
His friends turn up, threatening in their gawky, sulky way, the brooding presence of those who feel perennially hard done by. There are three boys and two girls, one of whom, a slender thing with a ring skewering her lip, immediately attaches herself to Ryan’s side. She smiles back at me, smug and closed. The boys sip furtively at cans of raffle-ticket Stella.
‘You coming on The Eggs?’ Ryan asks me.
‘I’ve got the budgie to look after.’
‘I’ll look after him,’ the kid in charge of the ride offers, already unhooking the bird from my grasp. Disconcertingly, he appears drunk as he mimics the budgerigar’s every shrill chirp and curious tilt of its head. The bird executes what seems to be his favourite trick in response, clawing his way along a wire bridge between two steel platforms before performing a mid-air shit. ‘Pulled a bird?’ is wisecracked by someone in Ryan’s posse as I’m ushered into a sick-smelling cage with my brother and locked into a seat. The large wheel rotates, slowly, and we rise towards the sky.
‘Been on this before?’ I ask.
‘Yeah.’ His friends are waving at us from the cage below. We sail higher.
At the very top, Becksmouth looks preposterously small. My school, Mum’s church, a lone wetsuit agitating the shimmering glass of the Channel with a circling jet ski, all linked by a stone’s throw. Below me is The Harp, an Irish-themed pub. I wonder if its walls are still adorned with pre-war Guinness posters and sepia photos of Joyce, Yeats and the craggy-faced Beckett; I wonder if Beverly, with her generous measures, still serves there. I wonder if the stout still tastes like a bottomless, creamy embrace.
Our cage screams.
I’m upside down, hurtling over and over. A sock in a washing machine. For an eternity.
I feel the need to sound thrilled, for some reason, so emit a ludicrous ‘woo’ and then a shrill ‘yeah’. Ryan’s silent beside me. Eventually, I recover a semblance of equilibrium, only to notice how extremely rusty our main axle appears.
Just as I think I’m about to be sick, the torture ends.
‘You alright?’ Ryan asks as I clamber from the cell, planting a tentative foot on solid ground. For once, the question isn’t an allusion to our father’s death.
I can’t reply.
His friends pay to go on again as I stagger to collect the budgie. The group didn’t seem to expect me to stay this long, so my geriatric performance hardly disappoints them.
‘He’s yours if you want him,’ I declare, nodding at the bird being passed back to me by the snickering attendant.
Ryan presses his lips into a ball, scowls, then jumps into the next cage. ‘I’ll see you at the funeral,’ he monotones.
I head back to my mother’s house. Ryan was energyless, grieving, and the encounter was an empty one. Entering the high street, it occurs to me why.
I was the one my father offended. I was the one he lied to. And I was the one who rejected him afterwards, refusing to acknowledge his very existence for a decade.
So why, Ryan must be wondering, am I the one who gets his flat?
Down Coleridge Road, I approach an establishment called ‘Becksmouth Superstore’. In the old days, before it started buying up its neighbours and expanding in my absence, it was a tiny old newsagent called Candy Corner. I catch sight of a shift worker as I pass. The figure prowls an aisle, replenishing stock after the day’s sales, arms laden with cheap home accessories. When I realise who it is, I reel from the window, paving slabs beneath my feet pitching at forty-five degrees. Time has left this lonely phantom gaunt and despondent, hunched into a form twice his natural age as he meanders off between toasters and cut-price clip frames.
And now I remember.
My heart pounds at my temples. I watch my tired, unshaven reflection peel from the glass. And then I’m running, the budgie flying beside me, back to my father’s flat.
Inside, I breathlessly grab the briefcase and tear it from under the shelving in a shower of dust. Unable to recall the correct combination number, I hurl it against the wall then prise it apart with a letter opener. School exercise books spill out, as do several scrawled essays on ghosts and outer space, their titles constructed from Letraset. There are several drawings, too, rendered by a young hand showing an early predilection for sfumato in the guise of big, grey fingerprint smudges. Buried amongst all this, I find something of far greater significance.
It’s not that I’d forgotten this object existed, but that I’d long ago blanked where I concealed it. And what perfect timing: in the wake of my father’s death, I almost feel the need to justify hating him. I know this artefact will provide ample validation.
The doorbell rings.
I walk to the hall, reluctantly shifting my face into an expression jovial enough, I hope, to deflect the staves of suspicious neighbours who’ve seen lights ablaze in a dead man’s home. I pull the door back.
‘Moved in already?’ my mother asks.
‘I… What? No… Can I help?’
‘You okay, Lucas?’
‘Bloody hell. Yes, I’m fine! Why’s everyone always asking me this?’
The brutality of the hall light above my mother deepens the lines around her mouth, thins and stretches the skin of her cheeks. Even her hair has lost its lustre, preparing itself for greyness. Only the eyes remain young; darkly emerald, almost blue towards the pupil.
‘There’s no need to shout, Lucas. I was just seeing how you’re doing, whether you’re coming back to the house anytime soon.’ She touches two fingers against my elbow.
‘I’m alright, honestly. I’ll be along in a bit.’
‘You’ve been here ages.’
‘Not really. I met Ryan at the fair.’
‘Oh. Right.’ She starts to back away from the flat, into the dark communal corridor. Her wary demeanour alerts me to the fact that this is possibly the first time she’s visited her ex-husband’s home. ‘There’s steak and kidney pie waiting, if you’re interested,’ she imparts on the turn. Despite having handed me the keys in the first place she now seems keen to remove me from my father’s territory, as though revisiting that parental tug-of-war she won long ago.
‘No. Thanks anyway. But, before you go… Tell me about this girl Dad was seeing.’
My mother shrugs, takes a slow step back towards me. ‘I know very little about her. His first lady friend for some time from what I can gather. Her name’s…’
‘Sophia. She found his body.’
‘That’s right. She contacted me the same day, barely able to speak. You’ll meet her at the funeral I expect. If she turns up.’
‘Why wouldn’t she?’
‘I haven’t heard from her since. Don’t know how to contact her. I’m the one sorting this whole bloody mess out. Me, of all people! The woman who left him over fifteen years ago!’
‘And what about the cause of death: it was definitely a myocardial infarction, was it?’
‘A what?’
‘A heart attack.’
Her deportment speaks of the utmost secrecy, as though information’s not to be trusted in my hands. But the truth seems to want to unveil itself, through the sighing and rising of her chest, the tremulous swinging of a handbag against her side. ‘They’re not sure about that. The post-mortem results aren’t available yet.’ She talks slowly, reluctantly, addressing the corridor over my shoulder, the lamp burning in the living room.
‘So there was a post-mortem?’
‘Don’t act so alarmed. He was perfectly fit and the death was sudden. It’s normal procedure.’
‘I’m not alarmed. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘What’s to tell? Anyway, I only got the call confirming the autopsy this afternoon. We’re awaiting results. Although the guy from the hospital did say something about an inquest.’
‘An inquest? Mum, you do know what that means don’t you? He definitely said “inquest”?’
‘I think so.’
‘But you told me you had a Death Certificate.’
‘Oh, that was, you know, rhetoric.’
My mother’s imprecision with the facts probably has more to do with the coroner’s own ambiguity – and death’s protracted bureaucracy – than my ignoring of the Becksmouth clan. But her reticence to divulge much is down to a simple truth: I’m not really part of the family anymore.
‘So his death’s suspicious? But… I’m here. I mean, I’ve been touching stuff. I knocked his whiskey over. Will that be a problem?’
‘The police have looked round already, when the death was reported.’ She says this more as a statement of fact than as reassurance they won’t want to look around again. ‘We’ll know the situation soon enough.’
I nod, utterly confused. A metallic ache returns to my bones, my tendons, the back of my throat. Not now. Not now.
‘What do you think the coroner discovered?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ she says with an old parental stab of finality, the direct eye contact that acts like a full stop. ‘It’s not bloody CSI, is it? What do you think happened? He choked on his own ego? Don’t worry about it. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you later.’
I close the door and head back to the study. An inquest? My mother’s been playing mind games for quite a while now and she’s become irritatingly good at it. And my father was no better: he couldn’t even die in clear-cut circumstances.
I again pick up the long-misplaced relic from the briefcase.
Onto its milky coffee-coloured façade, are dry-transferred the words,
LUCAS MARR (11¼)
A DAILY DIARY
TOP SECRET!
I can’t help smiling at the last line, the magnificent sense of my own importance. I suddenly recall how, at the sundown to each day, I made sure the diary was securely tied around its middle with a grey lace from an old school shoe and secreted between the springs of my bed frame and mattress, lest another member of my family should try to read it. Laughably pointless paranoia, looking back, considering the weight of the secrets others were keeping from me.
I walk through to my father’s lounge. The sun’s faded outside the curtains and street lamps shine puddles of fake dawn across the coffee table, silhouetting parched plants on the windowsill. The leaves of a bromeliad droop like straw fingers. I pull the curtains together and sink into an armchair with the childhood memoir I’d forgotten for over fifteen years. I’m shocked at how slim the volume is, that a lifetime’s enmity could be substantiated by such slender means.
Did I suspect, as an eleven-year-old, that my unruffled, sheltered way of life was soon to come crashing to its end? That a close family member would become, forever, a rival, a stranger? Perhaps so. Is that why, on some unconscious, prepubescent level, I felt the need to chronicle the summer of 1989? Or was I simply trying to recount the good times while they lasted? Whatever the reasons, I never dared write a diary again.
The diary’s still in pretty good condition – as a child, I was as fastidious as I was bookish and remote – and the only obvious evidence of wear and tear comes in the form of a slight kinking to the wire-spiralled spine, undoubtedly inflicted when I flung the briefcase into the wall. I can’t stop my hands from trembling as I open the diary.
My ordered, legible, pre-Bachelor of Medicine handwriting is executed entirely in pencil, unjoined and rounded where deference was shown to a dictionary. Pages creak softly, complaining about this sudden attention after so long pressed against their brothers, and, as I flick the slide switch on a tall floor lamp, the orange-yellow blush scatters itself over the diary causing the blue veins of handwriting to rise from the cheap paper.
I lie back in my father’s chair and begin.