Silent Children Page 15

  "I still am getting used, if I've even started." Part of Jack's mind was desperate to hang on to the life he'd invented for the biography on his book jackets and had elaborated for the Ameses, but it was deserting him like a series of ideas that failed to hold up when he tried to write about them; no grandfather who'd taken him fishing, no auto repair shop, no midnight basketball, only the childhood their departure was uncovering. "Never mind me," he said with all the conviction left to him. "We have to talk—"

  "I'll vote for that. It's been too long. Only don't ask me not to mind you when I'm your dad. You've got on well, haven't you? You've made a name for yourself."

  "I did my best."

  "That's my boy. We brought you up right, didn't we, me and her?"

  Jack knew he had to sustain the conversation until his father trusted him, but the only response he could manufacture was a wordless mutter. Apparently it was enough for his father, who chortled as though he had just seen a joke. "Jack Lamb, eh? Woollie Lamb. That's a laugh. Shows you're a joker like your dad. We had a few laughs when you were living at home, didn't we?"

  "Guess so."

  "I remember we did. Maybe my memory's better than yours. You've never been far from my mind. Did you think of me sometimes?"

  "How couldn't I?"

  "Good thoughts, were they? Good memories?"

  "Some."

  "And the other sort too, is that what you're saying, John?"

  "Dad..." Uttering the syllable disturbed him even more than being addressed by his old first name. "What do you want? Why are you calling?"

  "That hurts, that does, you asking that. It really hurts." Jack heard an indrawn breath so wet it made the receiver against his face feel moist as his father said "It makes no odds how long it's been, you're still my lad. You know you are, or you'd have changed your name more. Just because your mother did her best to part us doesn't stop you being my son."

  "I don't think she was trying to separate us. I was allergic to some stuff you used at work you couldn't help bringing home on your skin."

  "That's what her and the doctor made out all right."

  "I had an allergy for sure."

  "More like she got you thinking you were allergic to me so she could send you to Pamela's."

  "Say, dad..." Jack thought he glimpsed a chance. "I'm finding this hard, you know."

  "Fair enough, let's leave your mother out of it. She's had her time. She saw a lot more of you when you were at her sister's than I did."

  "You don't blame me for that, do you?"

  "Don't you reckon you were old enough to tell them what you wanted? You were the same age as the lad where you're living now."

  Perhaps only Jack's nervousness made that sound like a threat aimed at Ian, but it was another reason for him to say "Look, I said this is hard. I've never been good on the phone."

  "You sound as if you're doing pretty well to me."

  "I'd rather we were face to face though, wouldn't you?"

  "You mightn't think much of my dial now, the way it's ended up. It'd take even more recognising than yours did."

  "You don't think I'd let that matter, do you? As you say, you're still my dad." Jack managed to follow that with "You want us to meet, don't you? Isn't that why you rang?"

  "Maybe."

  "We can't very well meet here. Even if the people I'm living with didn't see you, the neighbours might. I guess that's one thing you don't need."

  "Why's that, John?"

  Jack had a grotesque vision of his father, a clownish figure with a grin as wide as a horse's and large hands pale with concrete dust and boots thick with dried mud, his elbows on the table as he dined with Leslie and Ian and Jack. "I just thought," he said carefully, "you'd like to avoid it."

  "You'd get embarrassed if your friends and neighbours saw you with your old dad, eh?"

  "Not that, no. Why would I? I thought you mightn't want to be seen around here in case you were recognised, however you look."

  "Cheer up, son, or you'll have me crying. Don't you know a joke when you hear one? Let's have a laugh or I'll think I've lost my touch."

  "Got you." Jack produced a stuttering series of grunts he hoped could be taken as evidence of mirth, and was rewarded by a prolonged sound like the panting of a dog but moister. "That's the spirit," his father said. "It's laughing that keeps us alive, am I right?"

  Jack's innards shrank from a sudden memory. "Something else must be."

  "True enough, I'm having to fend for myself."

  "Well, now you needn't. That's what this is about, isn't it? Tell me where to come if you want looking after."

  "You'd like to find me, would you, John?"

  "Meet you, sure. I figured that was the point. If you don't want me to know where you've been hiding—I mean, there's no reason you should be afraid of that, only—"

  "Bit eager to track me down, aren't you? I'd better give it a think."

  "Go ahead. I can wait. If there's anything you need to ask—" Jack was anxious to compensate for whatever he'd said that had roused his father's distrust, but it seemed he shouldn't have tried. A click interrupted him, and then the line hummed smugly to itself.

  "Asshole," he snarled, not at his father. "Stupid ass." He dialled 1471, but of course the other number had been blocked. He brought the receiver and its stand together and abandoned them to the table so as to crouch over himself. He felt as though a knot at his centre were pulling him smaller, reducing him to the child he'd been—the child his father had recalled by speaking to Jack.

  "Let's have a laugh." When had he first heard that? The first time Jack had cried, perhaps, or complained, or appeared to be ill or injured or miserable or simply not happy enough? And his father had always required a laugh of him immediately after finding any kind of fault with him, after "Sit up straight at the table, nothing wrong with your back" or "No need to hold your knife and fork like that, you've been shown how" or "Walk properly, be glad you can" or "Hold your pen like your teachers told you or they won't be able to read your writing"... Jack's mother had told him about his father's little brother who'd died, and eventually that the brother had suffered years of agony from having been born with an exposed spinal cord, but the explanation hadn't helped Jack—it had made him feel that his father kept accusing him of imitating the dead child, of poking fun at him. On top of that pervasive guilt had been not only the exhortations to laugh but how his father watched him while he did, a scrutiny which had seemed to caution him not to laugh too loud or long or high or wildly and which had relented only when he'd produced as much mirth as he'd thought safe.

  Could all this have led his mother to concoct a reason to send him to his aunt's in Ruislip? Could she have been aware, at least instinctively, of worse? Jack didn't know if he was only imagining he remembered an impression that requiring him to laugh had been his father's mode of restraining himself from some other behaviour. Just now his definite memories were enough to cope with: the way Aunt Pamela had cared for him as if he was another subject of her social work; his Sunday visits home, which he'd grown to dread, because his father's attitude to him had become mechanical, a parody of itself, as though—or was Jack inventing this in retrospect?—his mind had been on somebody elsewhere. As Jack had struggled through adolescence his aunt's solicitude had oppressed him, so that his mother's sister who returned to tour Britain with her American husband had personified a promise of release from Jack's father and Aunt Pamela as well. Jack had befriended his by then American aunt, he'd got himself invited to stay in San Francisco, and the second time he'd stayed he had been old enough to apply for papers to allow him to work. A variety of menial jobs had enabled him to move into a small apartment, and it had been his mounting sense of freedom that had impelled him to try writing the kind of book for which he'd acquired a taste from the thousands of dog-eared paperbacks his American aunt hoarded. He'd sold the first novel within months of stuffing the typescript in an envelope. John Woollie had struck him as no byline for a writer, and so—<
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  His American memories were letting him feel more like the person he wanted to be, and he had straightened up when the phone rang. He lurched forward, renewing his crouch, and fumbled the receiver toward him. "Hello?" he called as soon as it was close enough.

  "Waiting for me, were you? Hoping I'd ring back?"

  Jack planted the base of the phone beside him on the stair and forced his body upright to convince himself he would do better this time. "Sure," he said.

  "Why?"

  "I don't believe you mean that. You're the one who keeps reminding me you're my father."

  "Have a go at this, then. Shouldn't be too hard for you at your age, seeing as how you're so clever with words."

  "I'm not trying to be."

  "Not so sure about that, son. It's your job, isn't it? I'll tell you what I've been wondering. Why did you come back?"

  "Because I heard you were dead and what you'd been doing, and I figured I'd write about it." Those were truths Jack thought better of telling, but he couldn't pause long. "To see how my mother was surviving," he blurted.

  "You've been to visit her, have you?"

  Suppose his father knew Jack hadn't—perhaps was even hiding at her house? "Not yet," Jack admitted.

  "Shall I let you into a secret, son? That doesn't surprise me at all."

  "How come?"

  "Because you'll be wondering how much she knew."

  "Nothing, I should think. I can't imagine you'd have told her."

  "More like you hope I never did. All right, John, I won't keep you in suspense. Your secret's safe with me."

  "My..." Jack did his best to laugh, then had another try at speaking. "What do you mean, my ..."

  "No need to pretend with me. Remember it's your dad you're speaking to."

  "That doesn't mean I've any idea what you're talking about."

  "Does it not, John?" Underlying his father's apparent disappointment was more than a hint of worse. "Remember this?" he said, and began to sing.

  "Now I lay you down to sleep,

  Close your eyes good night.

  Angels come your soul to keep,

  Close your eyes good night..."

  He was halfway through repeating the verse when he broke off. "Remember when I used to sing that?"

  "Yes," Jack said, but that didn't get rid of the question. "When I was small and you wanted me to go to sleep."

  "Like my mother used to sing to me. It's a good memory, isn't it?"

  "Sure."

  Perhaps Jack's answer was too quick or too suspiciously unspecific, because his father made a moist rude sound. "That isn't all you remember though, is it? Remember where else I'd sing?"

  Jack felt as though the personality he'd taken for his adult self was about to disintegrate. "What if I do?"

  "Just don't be so keen to find me if you're thinking of telling anybody where I am. You wouldn't expect even your dad to protect you if you shopped him. If I were you I'd be thinking how to look after my old dad and make sure nobody else knew he was alive."

  "Nobody does as far as I know, I can promise you that, but what are you saying I need protection from?"

  "Oh, John. I just hope for your sake nobody's listening to us. If I got caught I'd have to say you helped me."

  "Why would you?"

  "Because there'd be no reason for me not to tell the truth."

  "What truth?"

  "Do me a favour, son. You were never that thick. Even if you'd forgotten about it, it must have come back to you now, helping me to flatten the earth down in those houses. What did you think I was singing about then? You must have thought something."

  "I was young," Jack protested, almost pleading.

  "You weren't that young. Or if you were to start with it must have affected you more, mustn't it? I wonder how much like your dad you really are deep down. I reckon if anybody found out who you are they'd have some ideas about why you're living in that house."

  Jack's mouth worked, but all that emerged was a shaky breath. "I'll leave you to have another think," his father said. "I'll be in touch."

  When the phone reverted to humming, Jack found he had to think which hand to use for replacing the receiver. Sunlight was leaning through the glass above the front door and wedging itself into the hall, but he felt as though its brightness couldn't reach him; it was too dark inside his head—dark as the underside of earth. He was remembering how he'd helped his father.

  Though he'd done it only twice—the properties had needed to be close enough for him to visit on his way to school—it felt far worse than twice too often. In one case he'd been almost Ian's age, but it was the other that was restaging itself in his mind. He'd been no more than eight years old, yet he remembered how the morning had tasted of fog, how a spider's web that resembled spun glass had been swaying in a breeze outside the kitchen window of the vacated house, how the kitchen had smelled of the earth where the floor should have been. "Make sure there's no irregularities, son," he could hear his father saying as he'd handed Jack—no, John—a brush. He could feel the soil gritting beneath his feet, could hear the repetitive scrape of the brush, but surely he was only imagining in retrospect that he'd sensed anything under the earth; he'd thought his father was behaving no more oddly than grown-ups often did when he'd started singing in little more than a whisper "Now I lay you down to sleep ..." But he couldn't dismiss the memory, not when his research had enabled him to put a name and an age to the victims he'd helped bury. Billie short for Wilhelmena Carter, six years old, not much younger than Jack had been at the time. Martin Hawthorn, also six.

  What had his father been expecting of him on those occasions? Some kind of unknowing encouragement, some reassurance that he himself was acting properly, or could he have hoped Jack would inherit his behaviour? The question seemed to pervade everything Jack was and his surroundings too, so that when the phone rang he couldn't help wishing it had brought him his father again. "Yes," he said into the mouthpiece, so sharply his breath chilled his teeth.

  "May I speak to Mrs. Ames?"

  It was a woman's voice, and he had to make an effort to respond. "She's at work."

  "I've been trying her there, but it's engaged. I'll try again." Instead of ringing off, however, the woman paused. "Are you the writer?"

  Jack had little sense of who he was any more. "I guess."

  Perhaps that seemed unworthy of a reply, or perhaps she felt she was responding to it when she spoke. As if she thought he was accountable for the state of affairs and unworthy to be told the details, she cut him off once she'd finished saying "If you happen to speak to her, please ask her to contact her son's school urgently. I'm afraid he's in grave trouble."

  TWENTY-SIX

  "Fix Duke's eye for him."

  Leslie swung round to stare at the group of boys who were passing her and Ian. Any of them might have been pretending not to have spoken. "There's been quite enough of that," she said in a voice that rang on the concrete of the schoolyard, but as the boys vanished behind an annexe that resembled a temporary office on a building site, she heard them start to joke.

  The brown bricks of the school, half a two-storey H with its middle bar facing the gates, looked sandy with mid-morning light. Dozens of windows leaned out as though to scoop heat into the classrooms, which were emitting a selection of the noises schools made. As Ian opened a side door for Leslie, she said "Don't let anyone start thinking you're a hero."

  "I didn't mean to get his eye."

  "You've told me that and I believe you. You aren't a monster, but you aren't a hero either. You're more or less who you've always been, so try not to let what people say about you affect you. Except what your headmaster says is going to have to count, and we'd better hope it isn't too bad."

  The door closed behind her and her awkwardly overgrown son with more of a slam than she could think was encouraged. A classful of boys laughed and thought about whatever they were laughing at and laughed again, a master's voice echoed down the corridor whose walls looked s
lippery with paint. She felt as though she'd been sent back to school, and uneasier for knowing that some of the pupils thought the Duke boy's injury was a joke. How could they want him to be hurt when he'd lost his little sister? Perhaps they disliked how that had changed him, but why couldn't they see past their dislike? Now she was at the doors that gave onto the corridor inhabited by the headmaster, and when Ian pushed one open she saw Mrs. Duke and her son.

  Four straight chairs had been placed with their backs to the headmaster's office, two on each side of the door. The Dukes were sitting on the farther pair, and turned just their heads toward the newcomers. The boy's movement might have been intended to reveal the right side of his face, the eye covered with a wad of gauze held by a cross of adhesive plaster. His mother let her dull gaze weigh on the Ameses as they took the remaining chairs, and Leslie tried not to imagine that she was comparing her grey suit and white blouse with Leslie's more expensive version of the outfit. When eventually she felt Mrs. Duke's stare lift itself from her she glanced at her wristwatch, and had another look a minute later. It was past time for the appointment, and so she wondered aloud "Should we tell anyone we're here?"

  She had to turn and gaze at Mrs. Duke, then cock her head and raise her eyebrows, before the woman said tonelessly "He knows we are."

  Either that or Leslie's question brought Mr. Brand to his door. He was a tall chubby man who smelled of sweetish shower gel and whose blond hair persisted in flopping over his brow. He extended his hands on either side of him, so slowly that he might have been offering a dual handshake or advising the women to remain seated or even inviting them to inspect his small neatly manicured nails. "Is everyone present?" he said.

  Since Mrs. Duke only shrugged, Leslie risked trying to lighten the mood. "Looks like it, or there wouldn't be enough seats."

  "One or both of the gentlemen would have given theirs up, I trust," the headmaster said, and with a residue of admonition "So it's just mothers and sons."

  "Has been," Mrs. Duke declared, "since they took my man in because they thought he'd done something to Harmony."