That evening Dad and I drove to the hospital where Mum lay recuperating from a lung infection. The hospital was built on a chalk hill overlooking the port. Old barracks and defensive structures had been torn down and ground under to make room for the hospital which, from the sea, had all the appearance of a bigger, better fortification.
Dad went inside, leaving me to wander round the weedy paths, the flights of cracked concrete steps, the pot-holed roads. You needed first gear to reach the car park here, so there was this constant whine in the air – a common mechanical labour renewed again and again and again. In the dusty banks and verges that bordered every metal-railed stairway, I found nubs and flecks of red-pink brick – remains of the old fortress – and in between were thready weeds with bright blue, pink and yellow flowers.
From this high vantage, I could see how the port city had been constructed over a network of mudflats and channels. In between there were islands, but they were bridged over in too many places to really count as islands any more. In fact the whole estuary was so heavily built upon that roads and waterways blended in the eye, and it took an effort to pick them apart. I looked at my watch. Dad was taking a long time. I went inside to look for him.
I hadn’t seen Mum since I’d tried to visit her incognito in the camp. Dad had warned me that the sight of me would upset her, but my nose was already healed, more or less. If Dad had let me, it would have been the work of a moment for me to hide the bruising with make-up.
The hospital floor was a mottled red vinyl that looked as though it had been poured and left to set. Every few yards, at a stairwell or junction, there was a vending machine. I tried to get a carton of drink. I put in my money, typed the code. The metal coil shuddered, turned, stuck. There was a notice, red capitals on white self-stick plastic, telling me not to rock the machine, which anyway didn’t help and set off an alarm that everybody ignored.
Mum’s ward had this easy to miss open-plan arrangement – impossible to say where the corridor left off and the ward began. Mum was alone, lying with her back to me. I watched her a while, not saying anything, then I went away and looked for some magazines to flick through. My emotions were so mixed up, my attention so fractured, the articles might as well have been written in a foreign language.
Dad turned up eventually, approaching from the wrong direction.
‘Where’ve you been?’
Dad told me Mum was ‘on the mend’.
‘When’s she coming home?’
‘Have you been in to see her?’
‘She was sleeping.’ Of course, she might not have been sleeping at all. She could have been just lying there.
I wanted to go see her again but Dad was keen to get going. ‘School tomorrow.’ As though my bedtime were any different from his.
It was nearly dark by the time we got going and still Dad was hunting for words, the right spell to lock down whatever he’d seen, or learnt, or been told. No lid he tried seemed to fit. ‘The camp’s got your Mum pretty messed up.’ The form of words he picked – ‘your mum’ in place of ‘Sara’ – was a measure of the trouble we were in. He was trying to establish something. He was trying to set this down. To be clear. ‘She’s upset.’
They’d wanted his signature.
‘Signature for what?’
He hadn’t signed.
‘For what? Dad?’
‘She’s upset.’
‘Dad.’
He pulled the car to the kerb. We were nearly home; halfway through the housing estate. It was Dad’s usual short-cut, he knew the way. There was no need for us to stop. He rubbed his hand across his eyes, faking a headache, thinking that I could not see his tears.
‘Please Dad.’
Dad undid his seatbelt and put his arms around me and held me. It was horrible. Unbearable. I was pinned by my belt. I couldn’t reach to undo it. I couldn’t hug him back. I was stuck there – his object. And here he was, holding me, shaking like an injured dog, faking everything, telling me everything was going to be all right, pretending (this was worst of all) that it was him who was comforting me.
The town I grew up in was a friendly place. At least, it was friendly to us. Because of the hotel, we were known to people – a local business, a source of summer jobs. Women fussed over my father. Febrile with a late and hopeless heat, they imagined they could save him from his ‘impossible’ wife. While Mum remained in hospital under psychiatric observation, they steeped us in sympathy and relationship teas. We whiled away hours like that, separately and together, in strange sitting rooms, breathing stale desire.
Some of those women tried to get to Dad through me. One in particular, distracted from her main purpose by what she called my ‘charm’, decided to pull up her top and get her tits out. They were very large but her nipples were tiny. Sucking one was like rolling a sugar cake decoration around in my mouth.
She helped me with her hands and tongue. She was quite rough. She took my hands and placed them on the back of her head. I wound my fingers in her hair and dared to pull her onto me. She made a little moan and slid me right down her throat. I rocked against her. After a minute of this she gagged and pulled away. ‘There are condoms in that drawer when you’re ready.’
I had never handled a condom before. I couldn’t make it unravel. Maybe it was inside out. I turned it round. That wasn’t right either.
‘Give it to me.’ The moment she leant over me I began to wilt. She wiggled me about and took me into her mouth again but it didn’t do any good.
‘Do you mind if I wank for a bit?’ she said, trying to turn me on.
‘No, I don’t mind.’
She laughed. ‘You’re such a gentleman.’
This is the sort of thing you say to a child.
I moved around the bed, curious to see her put her fingers inside herself, but all she did was fiddle. It reminded me of Dad worrying at a grease mark on our immaculate bar top. I ran my feet along the insides of her thighs, and she seemed to like that. She took hold of my foot and rested it against her sex. She rubbed my toes against her, making them wet.
At last she took pity on me. ‘Well,’ she said, gathering her clothes, ‘that was naughty.’
I used her bathroom. Her medicine cabinet was full of products she had brought back from overseas trade fairs; pharmaceuticals with names unsuited to the domestic market. Polysilane Upsa, Neo-Angin. Smecta. Spassirex. The shower looked fancy, but it wasn’t up to much. I remember the whine of the pump, and a sound in the pipes like a child draining juice from a carton.
The way home from her house led me beside the river, along the track I took to school. Its bark-chip surface had worn away, and the ground was soft after days of rain. I should have known better than to attempt the track in trainers. The wet soaked through my socks.
A serviceman picked his way towards me. I recognised him by his hair – albino white and wild. He was in trouble. His vest tick-tocked, tick-tocked, useless in this maze, and he wove from one side of the track to the other, unable to plan his line. How easily he might have stumbled off between the trees. The river ran behind them, sluggish and slow-moving; it made no sound.
Dad’s blinded servicemen didn’t often come this way into town. Their goggled, low-resolution blindsight handled the box-like architectures of the housing estate much more easily. The ambiguous and busy undergrowth of the track tended to confuse them. Here, they’d have been better served by a stick, a dog, a sense of hearing.
The white-haired man walked with a defensive, mechanical stiffness. I recognised it. I recognised him. We approached each other. In army boots he overcame the uneven ground. My presence confused him. When I veered left, he veered right, straight towards me. I skipped to one side to avoid him. He stopped and turned to me. The sun glittered off his goggles and winked in the lens of the camera mounted on his left earpiece. His chest chattered monotonously as he stood, perfectly still, the machine at his hip repeating, in regular pulses, the scene before him. Boy against foliage.