The street he’d grown up in felt surprisingly cramped. The little plastic houses went past one by one, a lurid row of incarnate memories. Nothing had changed here for thirty years.
[ I hope your dad doesn’t turn out to be as dead as Andrea,] chuckled Fist. [ Two corpses in a week would really be a bit much!]
There was a muffled, protesting squeak as Jack thrust him far into the back of his mind, slamming down as many firewalls as he could behind him. The technicalities distracted him for a moment. Returning his attention to the physical world, he saw that he’d almost reached his parents’ home.
The little rented house was just as Jack remembered it. It was a red plastic cube, its yellow window frames and front door shining happily out into the street. Age had scuffed its hard exterior, giving nature the lightest of footholds. Muddy patches of green sketched mossy patterns across hard primary colour. The upstairs windows were dark. Light shone out of the open kitchen window. There was a bustling clatter of pans and then a familiar voice said:
‘What do you mean, I’ll burn them?’
The voice tugged at Jack, dragging memory and emotion into his mind in a tangled, savage howl. It was just over five years since he’d heard it. It had aged yet it was unchanged.
‘You say that every time. And every time – oh shit!’
There was more clattering, then a hissing. A gust of smoke billowed out of the window, wreathed in swearing. Jack wondered what his father had just burned. He’d never been a very good cook. In the months after the quiet, defeated message that announced his mother’s death, Jack had, when thinking about his father’s loss, most often imagined him facing the kitchen’s shelves and cupboards in baffled confusion. His wife had so mysteriously conjured delicious meals from them every single night. Now those same on- and offweave ingredients would be arranged illegibly before him, like words in a language he’d never known he’d need to learn. Of course, her fetch would soon be coming to help him – but the six-month wait as it was assembled from her dataself must still have been shattering.
‘Well, I’m sure they’ll taste all right. Most of them at any rate.’
There had been a conversation or two, made little more than stuttering by the time-lag as words leapt from one end of the Solar System to the other. Then Jack surrendered himself to the Totality. He received one last message from his father: ‘When your mother comes back, I’ll be telling her that you’re dead. It’s for the best.’ There was such grief in his voice. After that there was only silence, roaring so very loudly between them.
‘I’ll just scrape the burnt bits off.’
Now the dead woman was guiding her husband round the kitchen. Five years was a long time to remain a bad cook. Jack wondered at his father’s continuing ineptness. Perhaps his refusal to learn from his wife’s fetch was some kind of memorial to her living self, a determination not to let their relationship change despite the fact of her passing.
There was a distant squalling in Jack’s mind. It could have been cackling, could have been a series of grunts. Fist was pushing hard to escape back into the centre of his thought. Jack let a few more barriers grow up – far more than he normally would. He’d pay for it later with a painful mental weariness. But he was determined to speak to his father alone and uninterrupted. He stepped through the gate, into the little garden, and walked down the path – metal plates clanging beneath his feet – to knock on the door.
‘No, I don’t know who it is, love.’
First there were two hands on the sill, then a face appeared at the kitchen window.
‘Oh!’ – followed by an immediate, instinctive glance back into the kitchen. Jack started towards his father, but he looked panicked and made a pushing back motion with his hands. Then he mouthed ‘NO’ and vanished.
‘Sweetheart, I’ve got to send you back down to the drives. I’d forgotten that Daisuke was coming by, you know how he feels about fetches … yes, I am sorry, it’s so abrupt … yes, I know what I promised, we’ll talk about it later … goodbye love.’
Silence.
Jack went over to the kitchen window. His father was standing with his back to him, a tea towel hanging from one arm. The worktops were a jumble of unwashed bowls and plates. There was a frying pan in the sink. Some black things were smoking gently on a plate.
‘Hello, Dad,’ said Jack softly.
‘She’s gone now,’ his father replied, turning round. ‘There’ll be hell to pay. She hates being sent away.’
‘Dad—’
‘Of course I couldn’t let her see you.’ One hand was nervously tightening the tea towel around the fingers of the other. Exposed flesh bulged and whitened. ‘You really shouldn’t have come back. You know what I told her. I’d got used to it, too.’
‘I want to talk to you, Dad. I’m not going away until I do.’
‘The neighbours might see you.’ A look of pained indecision drifted across his face. ‘She doesn’t really talk to them, but you never know.’
Jack said nothing.
‘You always were stubborn, weren’t you?’
There were pale spaces on the hall wall where Jack’s certificates had once hung. There used to be pictures of him, too; mostly as a schoolchild, taken before he reached the age of thirteen and left home. There had been one of him on the moon, at once thrilled and terrified to be off-Station; another of him and his mother, proud together in their Sandal wear. It had been taken when she was still working on the docks of the Spine. He’d been in the Sandal scouts, learning the ways of her patron. That had been just before the first great grief of her life, when Jack’s mathematical talents had been recognised and he’d been taken away from both her and Sandal. Grey offered himself as Jack’s patron and requested his transfer to a residential school in Homelands, where he could learn the mysteries of commercial accountancy and corporate strategy.
Jack remembered the messages that she sent him during those first few weeks of being away. The school discouraged direct contact so she mailed recordings. She determinedly told him how excited she was at his new life, at the prospects that were opening up for him. Grey had called him to higher service than Sandal ever could, she said, again and again. Jack found the apparent cheerfulness with which she accepted his absence from home profoundly hurtful. As an adult, he came to understand that to have admitted how much she was missing him would have breached the wall of support she’d so determinedly built. The tearing loss she felt would have broken out uncontrollably. As a child, no such insight was available to comfort him.
In the messages, his father always stood next to her, with one hand on her shoulder. Every so often he would stutter out a few platitudes, but mostly he said nothing. Now he was silent again as he made two cups of tea. He stirred the liquid carefully until the cube dissolved in the hot water, releasing tiny clouds of scent. Then there was the milk, carefully crumbled in so no sticky lumps remained.
‘Come into the back,’ he said, handing Jack his mug. ‘Just in case someone looks in.’
The dining room looked out over the garden. Sigil-encrusted plastic flowers nodded in the breeze. Jack sat down on one side of the table, his father on the other.
‘So, Jack,’ his father said warily. ‘You’re back.’
‘Yes, now the war’s over. For a little while.’
‘Until?’
‘Until the end.’
‘Is – the puppet – here now?’
‘No.’
‘Good. What I’ve got to say – well, it’s just for you.’
‘Dad, I want to spend time with you. I want to pay my respects to Mum’s fetch. There’s not much else that’s left to me.’
‘No friends to see?’ Jack looked at the floor. There was a moment’s silence. ‘You mentioned an Andrea, once or twice. How about her?’
As much as possible, he’d kept the affair secret from his parents. But he couldn’t help letting her name slip out from time to time. They knew him well enough to see how much he cared about her.