PART FOUR
55
PATRICK CALLED HIS mother to tell her he was coming home, but she wasn’t there. He left a message instead, with the time of the train, so she could come and pick him up from Merthyr.
On the ride home, he sat at a table and unpacked the mobile phone Meg had given him on the station platform.
‘For emergencies,’ she’d said.
‘But I don’t have any emergencies,’ he’d said.
‘Patrick! How can you—’
Then she’d realized it was a joke, and laughed.
Still, he didn’t want it or like it.
‘Will you call me?’ she said, as the train squealed in.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered.
‘OK,’ she said, with a strange look on her face.
Now Patrick read the manual, just for something to do.
Outside, the glittering Taff wound under the tracks, and the city dissolved quickly to green. Castell Coch came and went in the morning sunlight, and then the Valleys started for real – the rows of grey and brown stone cottages, set into the sides of the mountains that were sometimes rock and sometimes coal and all coated in careful grass and dotted with sheep.
‘Is it a BlackBerry?’ said one of the two twelve-year-olds who’d got on at Taffs Well.
‘No, it’s a phone,’ said Patrick and the boys grinned at each other.
One twisted his head sideways and peered at the picture on the front of the manual. ‘It’s not even a smartphone,’ he said.
‘It’s fucking shit,’ said the other.
Patrick put down the manual and said, ‘Three weeks ago, I sawed off a man’s head.’
The boys said nothing else, and got off at the next stop.
Patrick was at Quakers Yard before the stupidly complex manual told him how to make a call, and close to Troedyrhiw before he found out how to use the loudspeaker facility so that the phone didn’t fry his brain.
He dialled Meg’s beautiful number.
‘I’m calling you,’ he shouted from a safe distance.
‘I can hear that,’ she laughed. ‘Thank you.’
‘OK!’ he yelled. ‘Goodbye!’
His mother was not at the station to meet him, so he waited on the wooden bench outside for an hour.
Still she didn’t come, so he used his new phone to call the house, but there was still no answer, and this time it didn’t even switch to the machine, so he couldn’t leave another message.
He waited for another hour and went across the road to buy himself a burger, then ate it and waited some more. Not having a bicycle was like not having legs.
Around three p.m. he got a bus to Brecon and then a taxi home.
Not quite home. The meter clocked up the exact amount Patrick had left in his jeans when they were three-quarters of a mile from the house, so he asked the driver to drop him off, then walked the rest of the way. His suitcase was no fuller than when he’d left home, but that was full enough to be awkward, so he left it inside a field gate, up against the hedge, and walked on without it.
The Fiesta was not in the driveway and the back door was locked.
Patrick walked around the house, peering into the windows, and then fetched the spare key from the hook on the apple tree and let himself in.
It was April, but the old stone house still felt cold.
The cat ran into the kitchen to greet him, then stopped when it saw who it was, and sat down to lick its own arse instead.
Patrick noticed that the cat’s bowl was full to the brim with food, as was the one next to it – and the one next to that, and the water bowl was also full to overflowing.
He went upstairs to check her bedroom. There was no sign of her. No indication of where she was.
Back in the hallway he noticed the answerphone was unplugged from the wall. He plugged it back in. There were no new messages, even though he had left one just this morning. That meant his mother had listened to his message after he’d called from the station. She’d known he’d be arriving at midday. Had he missed her at the station somehow? He didn’t see how that could have happened.
He made a fire in the kitchen, and then a sandwich. The bread was stale, so he took the sandwich apart and toasted it instead. That meant he had to eat the cheese and chutney by itself and search through the cupboard for something that started with a late ‘T’ instead of anything after ‘B’. There was a can of tuna, and he forked that between the two slices.
Then he made a cup of tea. When he picked up the kettle to fill it, he realized it was still lukewarm.
It was only when he sat down at the table to eat that Patrick noticed the letter propped between the salt and pepper.
It had his name on the envelope, so he opened it and read it.
Patrick,
Welcome home. I am sorry I am not there but things have been very difficult for me and I cannot go on like this.
My will is at the offices of JMP Legal in Church Street. The house is not paid off but the mortgage is not big because of your father’s life insurance, and if you get a job you should be able to stay there if you want.
I hope you can forgive me, as I have forgiven you, but I cannot face the future if it is to be the same as the past.
Whatever you do, please take care of the cat.
Patrick sat and thought about the letter while he chewed slowly on his sandwich. He didn’t like it. Something bad came off it in waves, like a smell. There was definitely a message in it. He wasn’t sure, but it sounded as if she wasn’t coming back. And all that stuff about the will made it seem like she was dead, but that couldn’t be true because nobody knew when they were going to die.
It irked him that he couldn’t quite work it out, but at the same time he felt a strange urgency. So he left the second half of his sandwich, and took the letter round to Weird Nick.
Weird Nick shook his head and said, ‘Shit, Patrick! This is a suicide note!’
‘Is it?’ said Patrick doubtfully.
‘Yes it is,’ said Weird Nick. ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, mate, but your mother’s been behaving like a total nutter. A few weeks back she tried to burn down the shed! I had to put the fire out with the garden hose, and we’re on a meter.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Who knows?’ said Weird Nick, shaking the note like a farewell handkerchief. ‘But this is serious, Patrick. She’s going to kill herself.’
‘She told me she tried to do that once before.’
‘When?’
‘The day my dad died.’
‘Yeah? Well, that proves it. How did she try then?’
‘She said she was going to jump off Penyfan,’ said Patrick. ‘And the Fiesta is gone.’
‘We need to get to Penyfan right now!’ said Weird Nick decisively. Then he said, ‘Shit! I’m not allowed to drive my mum’s car.’
‘I don’t understand why she wants to kill herself,’ said Patrick.
‘It doesn’t matter why, does it?’
Patrick looked Weird Nick in the eye for the first time in his life. ‘Why is all that matters,’ he said.
Patrick’s mind started to bubble – battling once more with the implications of everything he knew. How the puzzle pieces fitted together. He turned suddenly and walked briskly back towards his own garden.
‘Hold on!’ said Weird Nick. ‘Patrick! Where are you going? I’ve only got slippers on.’
Patrick didn’t wait for him.
He only knew three things for sure that had changed since he was last home. His mother had written a suicide note. He had told her he was coming home. She had tried to burn down the shed. He could see no correlation between the three things, but he felt that somehow they must be connected.