A shadow twitches a curtain and the waves of time roll back. My grandfather isn’t explicitly harking back to a moment I captured in my diary – I’m sure he spies through the window most afternoons – but I can’t help, on this of all days, but feel hounded.
The shock still hasn’t thawed.
I was seconds away from speaking to Daniel. Not my real mother. Daniel. He requested permission to call me, to commiserate, to commit an act of kindness after all this time. And what did I do? I hung up, assuming that the past, after years of having left me alone, was now in pursuit. Even before one parent was cold in the clay, I exhumed the other.
How could I have thought it was my mother? Why?
The panel door is pulled open without my having knocked and the magnetism of my grandparents’ embraces causes the hairs on my arms to stand like iron filings.
I can’t resist a snoop around the old place, though I’m shamed it’s been so long since I last stepped inside their red-bricked semi. Can it really be as long as a decade? My grandfather points out new wallpaper, the lino in the kitchen, an additional tea-service, but the home’s sameness somehow transcends these new features. My mother’s old bedroom is used as a storage room now but it still, though her belongings have long gone, retains the feeling of her. I slept here myself at weekends sometimes, just to escape Dad, and I was aware of that strong trace of her even then. The little girl destined to become a woman who would pretend to be my mother.
There are still pencil notches on the inside of the bedroom door, where my grandfather measured my height in bi-monthly increments. My grandmother, somewhat over-keenly, produces the scribblings I created when I stayed here, including the – hilariously disproportioned – drawing I made of my grandfather after our documented game of Cluedo.
The tea brewed, the milk jugged, I’m gestured towards the sofa. My grandfather loses his years once ensconced in the matching, baize-green, tall-backed chair by the window and talks with the energy of a man half his age, his arms flailing propellers as his rigid, thin legs remain folded before him. My grandmother, whose cheeks are as downy as the skin of a ripened peach, does less of the talking, but when she chooses to embellish one of her husband’s tangents with a date or name she radiates a wisdom it would be imprudent to argue with. They cite the past a great deal, as befitting a couple fast approaching their eighties, but it’s remarkable how little they mention family. Perhaps this is for my benefit. The past is deemed a sore point, especially today.
‘Are you alright, Lucas? You’re sweating.’
I sluice off my forehead with the back of a hand, the nausea from my encounter with Julian still lingering. ‘A bit hot, that’s all, Granny.’
Replacing my teacup on the sideboard, I notice the black and white image of my grandparents’ wedding. They look remarkably similar to how they appear fifty years on – my grandfather even wears the same pair of thick-rimmed spectacles, or ones very much like them – though the smiles were broader then. There’s also a photo of Ryan and my mother, quite a recent one, in a golden frame next to a pot of African Violets.
‘I don’t know why that’s there really,’ my grandmother offers, shifting uneasily in her chair. ‘We just liked the photo, I think.’
My eyes prick with tears when I spot a photo of my eleven-year-old self nestled there too. I’m sitting in practically the same place I’m sitting now, slightly dwarfed by the floral patterns on a throw covering the settee, and lost in a chemistry book. I don’t even remember the photo being taken.
‘You were always very independent.’ My grandmother looks at the photo too. ‘A bit like… Your father did some silly things in the past but he was a good man, Lucas. He didn’t deserve to be taken at such a young age.’
My grandfather looks worried by his spouse’s unscripted remark.
‘He tried very hard with Ryan, he really did,’ she adds. ‘He was a good father to Ryan.’
Perhaps this is true. As time went on, my mother certainly relaxed her grip on her only child and let my father see more of him. Conceding my relationship with him to be a write-off, she thought he ought to make good the bond with his remaining son.
‘I feel so sorry for Ryan. He adored his father. Such a sensitive boy. Do you remember how mortified he was when he found out you weren’t his brother? He thought you were going to be taken away. He cried for a week.’
‘My my, look at the time,’ my grandfather says. ‘We’d better get going.’
He accompanies me to the garage, muttering apologies, while my grandmother locks up the house. Once I’ve backed out their old Ford he climbs inelegantly in beside me to explain about the ‘tricky’ release button on the handbrake. My grandmother clambers into the back.
There’s a pointless one-way system round these parts now and, despite having been given long-forgotten landmarks to watch out for and it only being a mile or so drive, I take a wrong turn a couple of times. This is treated humorously, but no one makes the joke, more appropriate for weddings, that I’m trying to avoid the church. By design or accident, we arrive in Windermere Road.
I slow down, then grind to a standstill outside Forty-One.
My old house sports new windows and a sizable extension now, its ground floor swelling smugly, but the place is still tiny compared to the fabrications of a child’s memory. The walls are clad in white pebbledash, as they always were, and the front door is wooden and unpainted. I think the door used to be blue, or green. Perhaps it was different colours at different times.
‘Are you alright Lucas?’ my grandfather asks as a Volvo honks impatience behind us.
I slide their car into a parking space. ‘Do you mind if I have a quick look around?’
The two of them stare back, quizzical, horrified at my willingness to break with an arranged schedule. I’m already out the car. ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ my grandfather yells after me, stabbing a finger towards his retirement timepiece.
It’s a real summer’s day. Heat swims up off the tarmac. The small recreation ground opposite my old house is constructed of completely alien dimensions from those of my recollection and features a wooden play-castle with rope bridges and curling slides and a soft, spongy black floor. A mother watches her two daughters haring about with the blithe panic borne by all mothers since time immemorial. There’s a doctor’s surgery where two bungalows used to stand. The Old Mint House has disappeared without a trace.
Its driveway now leads to a small red-bricked warehouse, seemingly recently built. The ‘spooky’ Victorian building has been pulled down and the prefabs and haulage crates have gone, though there’s a faint reminder of their dynasty in the form of darker, unbleached squares on the concrete. A To Let sign hovers outside two empty office cubicles and, looking through the window of the third, I spy a small workshop, presumably rented by local tradesmen or artisans.
The same low, stone wall to my old garden remains. Without much thought, I scale it.
In the old days, I would’ve been out of sight of the house down here, in the ‘allotment’ area, as my mother used to label it, home of oddly-sprouting potatoes, Keegan’s bones and broken flowers, but the garden is open plan now, scattered with gardening tools, flowerbeds and birdfeeders. A new shed stands on the old concrete base. Ghosts stir in an upstairs bedroom and I duck out of sight of the house, behind the shed, then climb the creosote-smelling fence that’s been erected between Forty-One and Thirty-Nine.
The water butt, lawnmower, gazebo and barbeque could belong to any British garden but I doubt Julian’s parents still live here; the newness of these artefacts somehow hints otherwise. Another fence has sprouted in wire criss-crosses at the rear, separating the garden from the overgrown chaos of weeds behind it. It’s amazing the elderly lady’s garden hasn’t been tended in all this time, though I guess it’s not impossible the old bird still clings to life. But this new fence means that, even if our old camp, or the vague form of it, were to have survived, access is denied.
This ancient world is a small place indeed. With the advantage of extra height, I can see above a succession of fences: the steel pyramidal spire of a child’s swing; the smashed panes of abandoned greenhouses. The soft thrum of lawns being mowed competes with the gentle, distant whine of cars, and the sun blazes as it slips a cloud’s moorings, intensifying the greens before me, the red berries.
I prise the wire fence up and it pings from its ground brackets without resistance.
Instinctively, I find the trail of old roof tiles, ones Julian and I pinched from several gardens in the wake of the Great Storm of ’87, and crawl under, parting weeds and branches. The camp has retained a cramped memory of the space we used to occupy, though nature has vehemently repossessed it. I inch myself in, creating room as I press through the brambles. The scratching canopy of blackberry and ivy still filters the light through in thin lasers.
It’s the smell that takes me back. Earth, sap and grass: the promise of a future; the peace after thunderstorms. A pleasant scent of rot, a fresh mould, makes me thirsty for earlier times, for the soaked bottoms of too-small trousers, for arms sore with nettle stings and lightsabers torn from English Oaks. I smell naivety, purity, and the fickleness of youth. Bike-riding friends one minute, foes the second.
The last time I sat here I snogged Daniel’s sister. I wasn’t allowed near her again after that. For the weeks up until my father and I departed Windermere Road, she was steered sharply into her house and the curtains snapped tight if I happened to be in my garden.
I take out my mobile to ring Mariana. There’s no phone signal in 1989.
The retching begins, but there’s nothing in my stomach, nothing to trouble the pharynx, so I just sit in the old camp with tears in my eyes and a pain in my core. I take in a lungful of moist air. And another.
If I don’t get some diamorphine in me, I feel certain I’ll die here.
After what feels like a few minutes recomposing myself, I check my watch. Somehow, almost quarter of an hour has passed. I begin to crawl from the camp.
As I do so, I’m aware of a noise coming from the garden, the sound of plastic bouncing off a body part, a clonking, hollow echo. Silence precedes a soft shuffle of feet.
I remain as still as possible, but the evidence of the torn fence hardly hides my unlawful conduct. The feet step closer.
Now, the lifting of the fence, the worming of an investigative body. The camp is about to be infiltrated. Indeed, my very childhood.
A child, no more than seven or eight, appears through the bracken. His eyes are huge and dark, the mouth a small pink bud, pressed open with curiosity.
‘Hello,’ I say.
The boy’s expression changes to one of unfathomable horror and the head shoots away. ‘Daaaad!’ he hollers, charging on his diminutive legs towards Thirty-Nine’s open French windows, yellow toy sword springing at his hip.
I flail as fast as I can back under the fence, my knees caking themselves in mud, my elbows too. Something prevents me escaping fully into the daylight, a tugging of the camp on my belt, its reluctance to let me go, as a large, broad-shouldered figure appears on the patio, bends to comfort the boy, then swings his head sharply in my direction. ‘Oi!’ A deep, male voice. I summon an extra effort to tear myself out and there’s the sound of ripping. Free, I clamber back over the taller fence leading to my old garden, run across its lawn, up the shared drive, then through the gate between the two houses.
My grandparents are still waiting for me in the car, faces carved into the pregnant, ever-watchful gazes of abandoned children. I bound into the driver’s seat.
‘Time to go,’ I say, jovial, out of breath, twisting the ignition key. I wrench at the handbrake. The car stalls.
‘I told you it was tricky,’ my grandfather says.
The front door of number Thirty-Nine flies open and a furious blur bounds across his stubby front garden. I fire the engine again and, punching into first, arc the car into the road and whipcrack us away from the livid father, the sudden acceleration throwing my startled grandparents back in their seats like astronauts at launch time. Receding, the figure shakes his fist at us in the rear-view mirror, before flapping at the pluming black exhaust fumes now enveloping him.
‘I suppose you have a good explanation for that, Lucas?’ my grandmother asks.
The scarred patch still exists on the tree in the churchyard, child height, smoother and yellower than the rest of the trunk but darker than when I first ripped off the bark. In the years since, couples have crunched across acorns and cupules to carve their initials into the exposed wood, inscribing them within clumsy love hearts: BJP 4 NLM; STEFAN LUVS LESHIA 24/7; J♥P. Someone has tagged SKAR or SHAK with a knife. The effect of it all is an ugly, cryptic nonsense. My rage, years ago, seemed to last longer than indicated by a bare patch no more than the size of a computer screen. Ironic, too, that it begat all these pronouncements of love.
I turn and walk back to the church.
The cortège is fifteen minutes late, a fact which pierces a grimace into the rusted face of Father Anthony. Bodily, the priest remains stoic, with only his charcoal vestments fluttering the breeze, but his occasional glances at the clock on the church tower expose consternation.
There are a number of people gathered outside the church, taking advantage of the sun. Yews, now in fruit for the hundredth time, wave gently by the far wall. The headstones stretch in tidy rows across the small graveyard, perched atop mounds of subsidence. As an adolescent I used to drink with school friends at the end of this cemetery, tossing empty cider bottles into the hawthorn, laughing at the archaic-sounding names on the stones – these Ingrids and Ermintrudes, Wilfreds and Gertrudes – in the knowledge that my own end was eternities away.
And here I stand, not even a decade later, lucky not to have died yesterday.
I set about brushing the mud from my suit. My grandfather’s expression is unreadable, but no doubt the tear to my jacket is of concern. Ditto, the black eye.
I search amongst the alien faces for Mariana. Some hope.
There’s the sound of crunching gravel and the crowd turns as one to see the flat nose of the hearse pass through church gates, fresh streak of seagull shit on its ebony bonnet. Father Anthony’s face cracks into relief and he immediately starts directing the remainder of the murmuring congregation inside with those big flapping raven’s wings of his.
My grandparents and I hang back to await the coffin.
The driver and his passenger, both funeral director staff, walk the length of the hearse and click open the boot. My mother and Clint, then Ryan and his girlfriend, slide out of the second car. The two paid undertakers pull my father’s sleek, light-brown coffin with practiced grace towards Ryan and Clint, who receive a corner each. These four pallbearers gently haul my father onto their shoulders and turn him one-hundred-and-eighty degrees before beginning a slow march to the church door. Any guests remaining outside hold back to let the coffin float pass.
I should be helping to carry the body. I know this. But the time has long passed for any grandiose or sentimental gestures on my part, and I can only watch the four of them transport my father stiffly, steadily, into the church. They’ve evidently rehearsed this without me, just as they all, no doubt, visited my embalmed progenitor, once released by the coroner, during the time I buggered about in the US of A. I haven’t gazed upon my father’s face, dead or alive, since I was sixteen.
That fact has never shamed me before. It does now.
Before I can step inside the church, I’m stopped by the palm of a tall middle-aged man who’s melted out from the brickwork. His hair has grown too long to flatter his recession and he suffers from mild rosacea on his puffy cheeks and high forehead. He quickly pulls a flash of silver from his black jacket.
‘Can I speak to you later?’ the detective asks. His voice is fraudulently kind.
I nod, then follow the body and my hobbling grandparents through the transept and into the nave.
Behind me, the detective stuffs his ID back in his pocket then finds himself a seat near the back. His eyes, I feel sure, never leave me.