I explored all this, touching it hesitantly. There was little I would want to keep: a few cufflinks, maybe, something I would associate with him. I knew I should just sweep up all this stuff, cram it into bin bags, and take it to an Oxfam shop. But not today, not today.
Gina had already said she didn’t want any of this old stuff. I resented her not being here, for running back to the Miami Beach sun and leaving me to this shit. But she always had kept herself out of the family fray. Peter McLachlan was a better son than she was a daughter, I thought bitterly.
I was far from finished, but enough for now. I got out of there.
On the landing walls were more Catholic ornaments, more Marys — even a Sacred Heart, a statue of Jesus with His chest exposed to show His burning heart, the realization of a particularly gruesome medieval “miracle.” I wondered what I should do with all the Catholic tokens. It would seem disrespectful, if not sacrilegious, to just dump them. Perhaps I could take them to the parish church. I realized with a start that I had no idea who the priest was; no doubt he was decades younger than me.
I glanced up at the hatchway to the access to the attic space. It was just a little square panel cut out of the ceiling. If I wanted to go up there I ought to find a ladder.
The hell with that. Bracing against the wall of the stairwell, I managed to get one foot on top of the banister rail and lifted myself up. This was how I used to climb into the attic as a kid. I could see spiderwebs, and bits of unevenness in the ceiling paintwork that cast fine shadows from the landing window light. I pushed at the hatch. It was heavier than I remembered, and, evidently a long time undisturbed, had glued itself into place. But it came loose with a soft ripping noise.
I poked my head up into the attic. It smelled dusty but dry. I reached up to a switch mounted on a cross beam; the light, from a bulb dangling from a rafter, was bright but reluctant to spread far.
I set my hands on the edge of the frame. When I tried the last step — kicking off the banister rail and pushing up with my arms — I was suddenly aware of my greater bulk, and feebler muscles; I wasn’t a kid anymore. Just for a second it felt as if I wouldn’t make it. But then my biceps took the strain. I hauled my belly up through the hatch, and sat heavily on a joist that ran across the roof, breathing hard.
Boxes and trunks receded into the shadows like the buildings of a gloomy miniature city. There was a sharp smell of burning, as the dust on the bulb was incinerated. Looking down into the brightness of the house was like a vision of an inverted heaven. I was rarely allowed up here when I was small, and even as a teenager never allowed to fulfill my ambitions of turning it into some kind of den. But I had always loved the sense of remoteness I got when I passed out through the skin of the house into this other world.
I swung up my legs. The roof was low; I had to crawl over the boards I had nailed down over the ceiling insulation in my twenties, when it had emerged that fiberglass insulation wasn’t good for you. Soon my hands were filthy and my knees were starting to ache.
Most of the boxes contained Dad’s stuff — he had been an accountant, his last few years working independently, and there were files from his various employers, even a few musty old accountancy training manuals. I doubted I would need to keep any of this stuff; it was more than eight years since he had retired. In one box I found a small red clothbound book, an ancient, battered, and much-used set of log tables: Knott’s Mathematical Tables (Four-Figured). The binding of the little volume was actually fraying. And here, too, was a slim cardboard box that contained a slide rule, wooden, with scales marked in pasted-on paper. I could barely see the tiny numerals, but the plastic of the slider was yellow and cracked. I put the rule back in the box and set it aside with the log tables, meaning to take them down later.
I moved deeper into the loft. I found one box marked XMAS DECORATIONS — WILMSLOW,1958 — WILMSLOW,1959 — MANCHESTER, 1960 … and so on, down through the years, right up until, I saw, the year of my mother’s death. In a box of assorted junk I found a couple of stamp albums and a half-filled box of first-day covers, plastic board games in ugly seventies-era boxes — and a scrapbook of pictures, original sketches, photographs patiently clipped out of magazines and comics, all pasted onto thick gray paper. My sister’s, from her own childhood years. It was a cobbled-together depiction of a family legend, a tale told by grandfathers and great-aunts: the story of a girl called Regina, who had supposedly grown up in Britain in the time of the Romans, and when Britain had fallen she had fled to Rome itself. And we were Regina’s remote descendants, so the story went. I’d grown up believing it, until maybe the age of ten. I put the book aside; perhaps Gina would like to see it again.
Then I came to a box that caught my eye: TV21S, read the label. (GEORGE). With some eagerness I hauled the box back to the light and opened it up. Inside I found a pile of comics — “ TV Century 21, Adventures in the 21st Century — Every Wednesday — 7d.” They were neatly stacked, from a very grubby and fragile issue number 1 downward. This was, of course, the comic that had been spun out of the Gerry Anderson science fiction puppet shows during the sixties, and a monumental part of my young life. I had thought my parents had burned this stack when I got to around twelve, with my uncertain adolescent acquiescence.
I opened one at random. The comic was a broadsheet. The much-thumbed paper was thin, delicate, and all but rubbed away along its spine. But the full-color strips within were as bright as they had been in 1965. I found myself in issue 19, in which the Kaplan, the leader of the Astrans — aliens oddly like huge jelly beans — is assassinated, JFK-style, and Colonel Steve Zodiac, commander of the mighty spacecraft Fireball XL5, is assigned to find the killers and avert a space war.
“Mike Noble.” It was Peter; he had stuck his head through the hatch.
“Sorry, I was lost again.”
He handed me a mug of tea. “My mug, my tea, my milk. I guessed you don’t take sugar.”
“Right. Mike who?”
“Noble. The artist who drew Fireball for TV-Twenty-one — and later Zero X, and Captain Scarlet. Always our favorite.”
Our? … But, yes, I remembered that a shared interest in the Anderson shows, and later all things science- fictional and space-related, had been an early hook-up between me and Peter, links that had overcome my reluctance to be associated with the school weirdo. “I thought my parents burned this lot.”
Peter shrugged. “If they’d told you they were up here they’d never have gotten you out of the attic. Anyhow, maybe they meant to give them back to you someday, and just forgot.”
That sounded like Dad, I thought sourly.
“Do you have a complete run in there?”
“I think so,” I said dubiously. “I think I kept buying it right until the end.”
“Which end?”
“Huh?”
He clambered a little higher — I saw he had brought a stepladder — and perched on the rim of the open hatch, legs dangling. “ TV Twenty-one went through a few changes as sales began to fall. In nineteen sixty-eight — issue one ninety-two — it merged with another title called TV Tornado, and began to run more non-Anderson material. Then, after issue two forty-two, it merged with a Joe Ninety comic and began a second series from number one …”
“The last issue I remember buying had George Best on the cover. How do you know all this?”