Looking nowhere.
Patrick waited at the police station until nearly midnight, when they finally contacted his mother. She couldn’t come to fetch him and when they drove him home he understood why. She had been recovering and could barely stand. The older policeman had tried to explain things to her, but she kept losing focus on him. Eventually he had made them both hot, sweet tea, and then had cooked Patrick beans on toast, before driving away under the fullest of moons.
‘What happened to Daddy?’ Patrick asked his mother.
‘Daddy’s dead,’ she said hoarsely.
‘Why?’
‘Because of you,’ she said, and her voice broke in half. ‘Because of you!’
Then Patrick watched her howl, and slap her own head, and crawl about the kitchen floor – and thought that she hadn’t really answered his question.
For a long time after that day, Patrick had searched for his father. He roamed the Beacons, he peered through the doors of Harris’s garage, he was chased out of the Rorke’s Drift, and he crept into the bookies to huddle beside the Labrador, waiting for his father’s blue legs to pass him. At night he lay awake, restless and alert, sure that he’d hear the key in the lock and catch his father creeping in by moonlight; in the mornings he stood breathless at the top of the stairs and looked down into the hallway, expecting to see the Doc Martens in their proper place.
His father had been there one moment and gone the next. It was like a magic trick that he might expose, if only he looked up the right sleeve.
In his dreams he always took his father’s outstretched hand, and they crossed the road together.
His mother didn’t go to work in the card shop, and Patrick didn’t go to school. His mother slept and slept and slept. He barely saw her, and found that calming. He made his own meals. Every day was sandwiches: breakfast, lunch and dinner. He stopped bothering to put the lid back on the jam.
Two weeks after the accident, a woman and a man came to the cottage and spoke to his mother with files on their laps, while Patrick watched through the crack in the door. They said the car had not been found, that the driver had not been traced. They said someone had seen a number plate but that someone had got it wrong. They said they would keep trying but that the trail was going cold. His mother sat on the couch as limp as a rag doll, and nodded her head now and then. When she looked up, her eyes were almost as empty as his father’s had been.
A doctor came and gave her an injection. Patrick slipped out the back way and ran across the Beacons, scattering sheep.
After that, he went back to school. For the first few days, he got a lift with Weird Nick and his mother. Then one day when he got home, they had the Fiesta instead of the blue Volkswagen and a new jar of jam, and life returned to some kind of normality – on the outside, at least.
The school counsellor asked him how he felt and he didn’t understand the question, so she told him.
‘You feel sad,’ she said. ‘That’s normal. You’ve lost someone you loved very much and if you want to cry, that’s not being a baby.’
Patrick didn’t want to cry; he only wanted to find out what had happened to his father.
The counsellor sighed. ‘You see, Patrick, when somebody dies, it’s like going through a door. Once that door closes behind them, they can’t come back.’
Patrick had never heard of a door you could only go through one way. He hadn’t seen a door opening or closing – or even his father moving towards it. He’d simply been there and then not there. But the counsellor seemed very sure.
‘Then I can just find the door and open it and find out what happened,’ he told her.
‘Oh, Patrick,’ said the counsellor with tears in her eyes, and reached out to give him a big hug.
He’d had to hit her to keep her at bay.
7
I CAN SMELL bacon! Frying bacon. I can even hear it sizzle – and the waves of memory crash saltily into my mouth.
Sunny mornings outside the caravan down on the Gower.
Why don’t we sell the house and live like this? That’s what Alice and I always say to each other, sitting in our old stripy deckchairs, after the breakfast and before the washing up, while Lexi and Patch chase each other through the tufted dunes, squealing and yapping.
Flying the pink plastic box kite I bought Lexi in the little shop festooned with beach balls and buckets; feeling it dance and tug at the end of the line. And then suddenly we’re holding nothing but falling string, as the kite breaks free and soars into the Wedgwood sky like something that knows where it’s going, and can’t wait to get there. As it disappears into a dot, Lexi slips her little hand into mine and says, ‘Look at it go, Daddy!’ – and my heart is overwhelmed with joy, because watching it go is better than holding it back, even if we’ll never see it again.
I can feel her hand now, squeezing my fingers so hard that it hurts. But I don’t pull away because holding her hand is so special; so precious…
All that from the smell of the bacon. All that wonder and joy…
Somebody tells me they love me. It’s not Alice but it warms me anyway. Love is never bad, wherever you find it; Alice taught me that.
I wonder where they are, Alice and Lexi. Do they even know I’m here – waiting for them to come and find me while a stranger holds my hand? Until they’re with me, what am I? Not a husband and not a father.
I’m lost without them.
The only noise is a soft blip… blip… and the sound of my own breathing. In and out… and in and out… and in and out… and in and out. My chest rises and falls to the maddening rhythm. It makes me think of Lexi learning to play the piano. ‘Chopsticks’ outrunning the metronome, and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ lagging behind it. But she stuck at it, even though her fingers were never going to be long enough to be good. That’s my fault; I brought the stubby hands to the marital table. Alice brought the even temper, the sense of fun, and all the looks.
And the sad eyes.
When did that happen? Is that my fault?
In the cot next to the bed, Lexi cries as if her heart is breaking.
So sad. So sad!
I want to roll over and comfort her, before she wakes Alice. In my head, I do.
’S OK, I whisper. ’S OK, sweetheart, go to sleep.
But I’m the one who sleeps, down the dark years.
When I wake again, sliced white bread is laid out in neat squares for buttering. For a party, perhaps? A catered event, and here’s all the bread, waiting for the tuna and the cheese and the coronation chicken. I’m not hungry, but a sandwich would be nice. A sandwich and maybe a sausage roll, and a pint of Brains bitter. My mouth is so dry.
I open my eyes anew and realize that it’s not bread; it’s ceiling tiles!
I’m happy because that is dull enough to be real. No writhing Jesus, no giant man-crows, just square tiles suspended in a metal frame like the view at the dentist’s.
I think it means I’m definitely awake.
It must be night now. The tiles were off-white before, which is why they looked like bread, but now they’re grey, and in one place there’s a small black triangle where one has slipped or broken.
There’s a miserable sound somewhere nearby. It’s the sad whine of a puppy left out in the rain. Shivery and cold.