My courage failed me. ‘My kit,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Go on, then.’
I got out of the car. I rarely came into school by the main entrance and the place – the clock tower and the low, slate roofs of the quad – seemed utterly strange to me, grandiloquent and Gothic, not any part of my real life.
Dad wound down his window and called to me, ‘I’ll pick you up tonight.’
I went round to the back of the car. I pushed the catch, the black rubber diamond. The catch was stiff, the mechanism was under tension, because the boot was overstuffed. I tried again, pushing harder, hard enough to hurt my thumb, and the lid popped up. The smell was a stench now. Dad was bound to smell it the moment he got back to the hotel and got out of the car. He was going to be driving and the heat from the engine was going to warm up the whole car, never mind the heat from the sun as the day went by, and he was going to smell it, how could he not? Him, or a guest at the hotel, passing by. Smelling it, he was bound to investigate it. He was going to open the boot. He was going to see her there. And he would know that I had seen her, too, and said nothing. Twice.
I was going to have to tell him now, after all. It was too late for me not to. I had to explain. I pulled out the sports bag from between my mother’s legs and I slammed the boot shut. ‘Dad.’ First, I would tell him what had happened. I would get him out of the car and I would tell him what happened, what she’d done, and while I explained, I would keep myself between him and the boot, until he was ready. I would at least manage the moment as best I could.
Dad tapped the horn and drove away.
‘Dad.’
I watched him go, out through the gate, onto the road.
Dad.
I picked up the bag. The bag smelled. I carried the bag into school.
Because the term was nearly over, the teachers were operating on autopilot. There were no tests, no questions, no discussions. In their place came interminable periods of private study. We were left to read whatever we wanted. During morning break I went and checked something out of the library, a big thing, something to hide behind, and that’s what I did – I hid. At lunch I walked round the sports fields, avoiding everyone. Especially Michel. I didn’t want him caught up in this.
The smell had spread to my clothes now. It was everywhere. On my fingers, from the handles of the bag. Around the lockers, where I’d left it. The corridor. Everywhere. Was there anywhere now that did not smell of what I had done?
What I had done. What had I done? Why was I taking on the burden of what she’d done to herself, that mad and vicious bitch who stole my mum from me? Dimly, in as much as I could feel anything in this buzzing confusion, I was beginning to understand that anger was my friend. I needed it. It was the glue that was holding me together. Without it, what was to keep me from spinning apart?
The day was a ragged, half-glimpsed thing, unconvincing in every way. In the final period before the end of school, marooned together in ‘private study’, Michel tried to get me into conversation about some book he’d been reading. Yet another apocalyptic science fiction ‘masterwork’.
‘I’m not interested.’
‘No?’
‘I’m not interested in any of that shit.’
And that was that.
I took the usual track home, on the look-out for servicemen. Their blindsight, useless as it was in many ways, unnerved me. Blind to so much, they would sniff my secret out, their remaining senses tuned to an exquisite pitch, lapping horror from the air. I met no-one. A flash of white between the trees turned out to be the rusted corner of an abandoned refrigerator, one of that sarsen circle that marked Michel’s redoubt. So much for his hideaway – even summer undergrowth could not conceal it.
The wire fence. The ditch. The lawn. Coming home this way, I could not see who was parked out front. Ambulances? Police cars? How easy it would have been for me if Dad had already opened the boot. How easy, and how terrible.
But Dad, none the wiser, was in the conservatory with one of his clients, a serviceman stripped to the waist, the visual vest bound round him like a piece of antique underwear. A truss. I tapped the glass.
Dad started and turned. I had surprised him. The light must have been at my back because for the longest moment, Dad did not recognise me at all. He stared at me through the glass as if I had been a ghost. At last he assembled a smile. He waved me in.
The serviceman was wearing the vest back to front. Some found they saw better that way – through the skin of their backs, rather than across their chests. Just as a blind person reading Braille truly reads (their visual cortex lighting up like a Christmas tree under the fMRI scanner), the serviceman, hooked up to Dad’s vest, truly saw. When Dad swung his torch from side to side, the serviceman moved his head, tracking the light with the camera mounted to his heavy black eyeglasses. Though he was seeing through sensations on his back, he didn’t attempt to turn his back to the light. A nubbin on dad’s remote control operated the camera’s zoom ring. Dad pressed it and the soldier, convinced that things were hurtling towards him, staggered, throwing out his arms to protect his face. Dad nudged the nubbin again – again the soldier stumbled.
‘Thank you, sergeant.’
The soldier’s face was a zipped bag. What emotion was he not showing? He put his clothes back on – clothes issued to all service personnel on their discharge from hospital. Baby clothing remade to an adult physique, with pockets and belt-loops to cushion their infantilisation.
Dad turned to me. ‘You’re home early.’
‘So are you. I thought you had a conference.’
‘I had a conference.’
‘You did?’
‘It was very nearby.’
‘Oh.’
‘Just the morning session.’
‘Right.’
‘Where’s your cricket kit?’
‘My—?’
‘Your bag?’
‘Oh.’ The pads, the bat, the gloves. ‘Oh.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to be at cricket practice?’
‘Oh. Yes. God.’ I felt my face burning. Burning and blushing, all because of a missed sports practice. Tears. I felt them welling. All the stored grief of the day, released at last, by such a trivial thing. ‘Well, don’t worry,’ Dad said, taken aback by my reaction. ‘It’s all right. Just run back.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Conrad?’
‘Please.’
The serviceman rocked from foot to booted foot, waiting to be dismissed. He’d forgotten he was not under orders any more.
‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Dad said, taking and shaking the man’s hand.
‘Yes.’ Still no expression on that tanned but too-smooth face. No embarrassment, and no relief. ‘Tomorrow.’ His vest click-clacked as he navigated his way to the three concrete stairs, climbed them, found the door-handle, and opened the door.
When he was gone inside the hotel, Dad turned to me, questions in his eyes, but the few seconds’ grace the interruption had made had been enough for me. I was sealed again. Bottled. In control. ‘Okay.’
‘Okay?’
‘I’ll be off.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’
‘I’ll see you around six.’
‘I’ll come pick you up,’ he agreed.
It was nearly four in the afternoon. Now I had somehow to get through two more hours – two hours in which, left to his own devices, Dad might, for reasons obscure to me, find a reason to look in the boot of the car.
And then what? Why should it ever come to a stop? What was there to prevent things going on like this, hour after hour, day after day?
We lived so near the school, I wasn’t even particularly late for practice. Hill said something routinely sarcastic. ‘Nice of you to turn up.’ Soon enough I was brought in to bowl.
At that time I was about the fastest bowler the school had, which isn’t saying much, but at least we kept a steady length. I found myself facing a boy called Martin. Nothing I came up with fazed him. I threw him a leg cutter and instead of blocking it as he was supposed to, he leant his bat a foot wide of his wicket and clipped the ball as it passed for an easy four. And I was done.