But I remained concerned. One point for each bonus question, when we had given them two? Nothing for the USSR? Mentally I calculated our correct score, calculated it again. There was no denying, we’d been cheated of victory, and I felt I had no choice but to cross to the quizmaster and make the case for a recount.
For a while, audience and contestants seemed confused. Was the evening over? Not quite yet, not until I’d consulted with Albie’s head of year, Mr O’Connell, pointing out the discrepancies in the marking.
Mr O’Connell placed his hand over the microphone. ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
‘Yes. I think so. Yes.’
By now the hall had taken on the grim and solemn air of a war crimes tribunal. I’d hoped my intervention would be taken in the light-hearted spirit I’d intended, but parents were shaking their heads and pulling on their coats, and still the recount continued until, after what seemed an age, justice prevailed and it was announced to the half-empty hall that our Kranium Krusherz had lived up to their name and won by half a point!
I looked to my son. He did not cheer. He did not punch the air. He sat on the bench gripping his hair with his hands while Ryan draped an arm around his shoulder. In silence, my fellow Krusherz divided up the spoils, £10 worth of vouchers to spend at the local garden centre, and we walked out to the school car park.
‘Congratulations, Doug,’ said Mike, standing by his Transit van with a grin. ‘You showed us who’s boss!’ Then to my son, with a hateful wink: ‘Your dad, he’s practically a genius!’ In times of old, we’d have just gone at each other with clubs and rocks. Perhaps that would have been better.
Anyway, the three of us drove home in silence. ‘For as long as I’m alive I never, ever want to talk about this evening again,’ said Connie quietly as she unlocked the front door. And Albie? He went upstairs to his room without a word, contemplating, I suppose, just how very clever his father was. ‘Goodnight, son. See you tomorrow!’ Standing at the bottom of the stairs, I watched him go and thought, not for the first or the last time, what an awful feeling it is to reach out for something and find your hand is grasping, grasping at the air.
Sweating, shaking, I woke with a start. The blackout blinds had done their job all too well and I was locked in a black box at the bottom of the ocean. I fumbled for the switch at the side of the bed and the metal shutters juddered apart, letting in a blinding morning sun bright enough for midday. I squinted at my watch — a little before seven. Madrid. I was in Madrid, on my way to see my son. Plenty of time to make the rendezvous. I lay back in bed to let my heart rate normalise, but the damp sheets had gone cold and so I padded to the window, saw the blue sky, the early-morning traffic on the Gran Vía, the bright new day. I showered at length and got dressed in my brand new clothes.
At breakfast, I ate a great deal of delicious ham and clumpy scrambled eggs and read the news back home on my tablet, missing the old sense of isolation that foreign travel used to bring. ‘Abroad’ seemed so much further away then, isolated from the British media, but here it was, all online, the usual mixture of rage, gossip, corruption, violence and bad weather. Good God, no wonder Albie had run away. Wary of souring my mood, I researched a little about Madrid instead, looking up the Wikipedia entry on Picasso’s Guernica in case Albie and I made it there later. The steps of the Prado at eleven. Still not yet eight. I decided to go for a walk.
I rather liked Madrid; grandly ornamental in places, noisily, messily commercial in others, scruffy and unpretentious, like a fine old building covered in stickers and graffiti; no wonder Albie had headed here. Perhaps I was mistaken, but there was a sense that ordinary people lived here, right in the centre of the city, a possibility long lost to the citizens of London or Paris. Although I only had the hotel’s complimentary map to guide me, I had covered some ground by nine forty-five, at which point I made my way to the Prado.
Like shoppers at the January sales, a small group of tourists was already waiting for the doors to open, visibly excited at the prospect of all that art, and I joined the queue and tried not to worry. ‘What will you say when you see him?’ I had been suppressing Freja’s question, yet I remained fuzzy-headed about the answer, with only a jumble of apologies and justifications in mind. Along with self-reproach, resentment lurked too, that the holiday — potentially our last holiday — had been hijacked by Albie’s disappearance. Not a word from him, not one word! Did he want us to worry? Clearly he did, but would it really have hurt him to pick up the phone? Did he really care so little for our peace of mind? The voice in my head was becoming increasingly indignant, and it was vital that I stay calm and conciliatory. In an attempt to find some repose, I shuffled into the Prado to settle a question that had been troubling me for some time.
‘Is it Prah-do or Pray-doh?’ I asked the lady at the ticket desk. I’d been alternating the two in my head, and was pleased to confirm that it was the former. ‘Prah-do,’ I said to myself, trying it out. ‘Prah-do. Prah-do.’
Immediately, I could tell this museum was something special. Here was Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a picture that I’d been enthralled by as a child for its lunatic detail. In the flesh, it was as much an object as a painting, a large wooden box that unfolded to reveal the painting and called to mind the gatefold album sleeves of certain progressive rock bands that I’d enjoyed in the 1970s. Here, on the left panel, were Adam and Eve, so vivid and sharp that they might have been painted yesterday, and here was heaven, populated by innumerable nude figures, pot-bellied like children, clambering over giant strawberries or riding on the backs of finches, and here was hell on the right, perverse and nightmarish, lit by bonfires on which those same tiny pot-bellied figures were the fuel. A sword embedded in a neck, a feather quill between disembodied ears, a sinister giant, fused with a pig, fused with a tree. A non-academic word, I know, but it was ‘trippy’, the kind of thrillingly horrible picture that a teenage boy would love and I hoped that, once he’d accepted my apology, Albie and I would return this way and absorb all the psychedelic detail.
No time now. I headed upstairs past El Grecos and Riberas to a spectacular room, a startling collection of portraits of moustachioed aristocrats, the Hapsburgs painted by Velázquez. One face recurred throughout, lantern-jawed and moist-lipped, here as a self-conscious, pink-cheeked teenage prince in brand new armour, here dressed absurdly as a fancy-dress hunter, now a sad, spaniel-faced monarch in late middle age. I wondered how he’d responded to the paintings, if Philip IV had squirmed the way we all do when we catch sight of our true likeness. ‘I wonder, Signor Diego, if there’s any way to make my chin a little smaller?’
These portraits were extraordinary enough, but dominating the whole room was a painting the like of which I’d never seen before, of a small girl, perhaps four or five years old, encased in a stiff satin dress as wide as a table at the hips, very strange on a child. Las Meninas, it was called, which means The Maids of Honour, and sure enough the princess was surrounded by courtiers, a nun, a finely dressed female dwarf and a small boy, or perhaps he was another dwarf, prodding a dog with his foot. To the left, a painter with a comically Spanish moustache — a likeness, I supposed, of Velázquez himself — stood in front of a huge canvas, facing out as if he was painting not the little girl but the viewer, specifically me, Douglas Timothy Petersen, the illusion so convincing that I wanted to crane around the canvas to see what he’d made of my nose. A mirror on the back wall showed two other figures, the girl’s parents I guessed, Mariana and Philip IV, the large-chinned gentleman on the wall to my left. Despite being distant and blurred, it seemed that they were the true subject of the artist’s portrait, but nevertheless the artist, the little girl, the female dwarf all seemed to stare out of the painting at me with such level intensity that I began to feel rather self-conscious, and confused, too, as to how a painting could have so many subjects: the little princess, the ladies in waiting, the artist, the royal couple, and me. It was as disorientating as the moment when you step between two mirrors and see infinite versions of yourself stretching into, well, infinity. Clearly there was ‘a lot going on’ in this painting too, and I’d return with Albie soon.