The message had said, simply, that they weren't dead.
This is the news everyone wants to hear — everyone, that is, whose relationship to their parents is marred merely by distance — and it was enough to make me spend the afternoon searching their house. I found the videotape my father had sealed into a VCR in his study, and this ultimately led to my discovering just how wrong I had been about my life. Wrong — or deliberately misled.
I had thought I was an only child. A section in the video showed me with a brother of the same age, a brother deliberately abandoned on a city street, somewhere back in the late 1960s.
I had thought my parents' death had been an accident. They weren't my parents and it wasn't. They had been murdered by the group my natural father had belonged to, thirty-five years earlier. This group was called the Straw Men, and believed themselves the only portion of humanity uninfected by a virus promoting social conscience above the cold-hearted individualism they believed inherent to our species. Whether they genuinely thought this, or it was just a convenient cover for acts of violence and depravity, was not clear. What was clear was that the group was wealthy and well connected. It was also evident that their point man, a person who called himself the Upright Man but could more accurately be designated as Paul, my lost brother, was about as dangerous an individual as could be imagined. The night before Bobby Nygard died we watched a government tape together, a compilation of the world's atrocities over the previous two decades. Shootings, explosions, mass killings. We saw the Upright Man in the background of a number of these events, mutely claiming the glory. In addition he had been acting as a procurer for the occupants of The Halls, a group of men — and, for all I knew, women — involved in considered and repeated acts of serial murder.
The first steps had been easy. I did my initial research a hundred miles down the road from Relent, sitting in a wired coffee bar with a laptop. I hated the idea that someone might think I was writing a novel, and kept glaring at people who smiled encouragingly at me, but I needed the net access. What I had to do first was confirm the city in which my sibling had been abandoned. Paul had sent me a message in which he claimed he had been left in San Francisco, but I was not inclined to believe anything he said without evidence. I had nothing else to go on except the short section at the end of the videotape my father had left me, which I had converted to a DVD.
The last section was in three parts. The first showed a train journey. There was no locating information — but I knew my father well enough to be confident he would not have included it just for background colour. So my guess was the first section was to signal a journey had been undertaken — and that it was far enough from our house to make sense by rail, but not far enough to take a plane. This gave me a choice of maybe thirty or forty cities and towns in or around Northern California or Oregon.
The tape cut then to a wide street in a downtown area. The camera followed my mother as she walked down a sidewalk, hands down and out of sight: holding, as the final section would make clear, the hands of two young boys. There was not much else to see except passing examples of the fashions of the late 1960s, in the shapes of suits and cars; and understated store fronts of the kind that made you wonder what made anyone buy anything in those days. Nothing remarkable, except…
I froze the image. Over on the right side of the road was a small department store, opposite a grassy square. I could just about make out a name — Hannington's.
Ten minutes on the web told me there were no department stores by that name still in operation in the US, or at least none who'd made their existence known to the internet. So I had to let scientific detection methods go hang, and work back from the conclusion.
I tracked down a selection of 'San Francisco of Yesteryear' sites and spent a while dredging through evocations of the city's days of yore. My eyeballs were beginning to melt by the time I found a reference to a Saturday morning ritual for one little girl, now grown old, whose long-dead mother used to take her to look at fancy haberdashery in a store called Harrington's. They couldn't afford any of it. They just went to look.
I flipped back to the freeze frame. I had misread the sign. The angle wasn't good, and sun was hazing out the film in a way that would have been difficult to predict when it was being shot. A quick check said there was no Harrington's still in business either, on the West Coast or anywhere else. Further web-mining with the new spelling established that the store had once sat on Fenwick Street, and been a big deal in its day. Big enough of a deal, probably, that my father might have assumed it would be there forever.
So. San Francisco was confirmed. My brother was evidently capable of telling the truth.
— «» — «» — «»—
Fenwick was ten minutes' walk from the hotel. The streets were crowded, flocks of end-of-the-afternoon strollers and shoppers casting long shadows on clean grey pavements. Though the road had been widened, and just about every ground-level aspect of the architecture had been altered, it wasn't hard to see I was in the right area.
When I drew opposite to the huge building that had once housed Harrington's, I ground to a halt. People cruised around me like leaves skirting a rock in a steady stream. The old store front had been split into two, and now held a Gap and a vast make-up emporium from which women of all ages were emerging with expressions of glee and very, very small bags in each hand. The floors above appeared home to the lairs of attorneys.
I found my eyes drawn to the sidewalk in front of my feet. I didn't remember having trodden this precise spot, but I had. I had walked here holding my mother's hand. My father had filmed us. They were gone but the place was still here, and me along with it. I was older now than they had been then, but at the time I had been about the same age as a toddler I saw being pushed past me in a stroller, a small being so different from me that I found it hard to believe I had once been one.
Time is strange.
'You in a fucking coma, man?'
I turned round to see a shithead in a suit standing behind me, unable or unwilling to do as everyone else had and step around me. I was about to explain how stupid this was but then realized I didn't want to get into another fight, even a verbal one.
I apologized, moved aside. 'Asshole,' he said.
A woman's voice said, 'Oh grow up.'
I turned and saw it was the woman with the stroller, who had stopped to deliver this advice to the other man.
He glared at her, then stormed off up the street. The woman winked at me and went her own way. In the trivial way cities sometimes do to you, I felt I had been taken inside.
I glanced across once more at the corpse of Harrington's, then set off up around the other side of the square and headed west. I had a print-out of several frames from the final part of this section of the video, which showed the area where the child had been abandoned. I didn't have much hope of finding the actual spot, or even the street. But Chinatown lay in that direction, and somewhere in there was a big bowl of food with my name on it.
Sometimes you have to keep your goals to a manageable size.
— «» — «» — «»—
Next morning I was on the phone at five after nine. By ten thirty all I had established was that you didn't get information out of social services in a hurry. After a while I had spent so long pushing buttons in menu systems that I began to be afraid I might eventually be put back through to myself, which I knew would freak me out. So I got onto the street and walked over there instead.