He read the letter back, but worried he’d come across as harsh, calling Adam an idiot. What if she didn’t know he was joking? Adam isn’t really an idiot, he added. He is tremendous fun actually. You would like him. She might like him more than she liked Christopher. He pushed the thought aside.
I am Adam’s ‘project’. He is teaching me how to dress more fashionably and how to talk to women. He has the gift of the gab but I don’t, not in that way. Although I’m sure I would enjoy talking to the right person. Adam says I should let my hair grow, which I have done, a little. It does save on barber’s fees, I suppose, which is an advantage on the maintenance grant. Not that I’m complaining. I like it very much here.
He regretted mentioning money. He copied the letter out again, missing out the reference to his grant but keeping Adam. He did not mention that Adam had taught him to smoke, made him try marijuana, which he had hated, nor did he write about his adoptive family other than to say he had been well looked after and that he was grateful for the opportunities they had given him.
When he had finished, he signed off:
I look forward to hearing from you, if you wish to have further correspondence with me. I very much hope you do.
Your son, Christopher, né Martin Curtiss
The risk he took, sending that letter. It took courage, I’ll say that even now. But it’s always a risk, isn’t it, reaching out to someone? Simply telling a person you love them, in whatever context, is to expose yourself to any damage they might wish to do to you, should they so choose. I guess all we can ever do is reach out anyway and hope to God they do us no harm. That’s what I did. That’s all I did: reach out, little knowing that I, that both of us, would come to such terrible, terrible harm.
Chapter Nine
Morecambe, Friday, 23 December. Margaret and Jack met him from the station, their faces set in anxiety. Christopher could see no reason for this beyond a certain nervousness around trains, travel, change of any kind. But seeing them, so diminished, on the platform, their eyes darting so that they might catch the earliest possible glance of him as the train ran past, he felt a pain in his gut. He had acted in secret, behind their backs. There was no getting around it. He should have told them he had initiated contact with his birth mother, but he hadn’t. The wrongness of that struck him with full force only now, seeing them in all their bewilderment on the cold railway platform. They deserved better. And here they were to welcome him home from his first life’s adventure. Just like normal parents.
The train whined and shuddered to a halt. He jumped down and ran to them, writing silent apology into the energy of his actions: See how I run! See how pleased I am to see you again!
‘Well, lad, that’s a pair of trousers all right.’ Jack’s first words and he, Christopher, had barely said hello. His father was shaking his head. ‘Loon pants, is that what they’re called?’
‘They’re just jeans, Dad.’ He braced for his father’s opinion on his Afghan coat, which was surely imminent.
‘Your hair’s grown,’ said his mother. ‘It’s down over your collar. What’s that coat? What is it, sheepskin? It reeks. Jack, smell his coat. It smells like a dog.’ For once, Margaret had beaten her husband to it.
‘You both look well,’ Christopher said, smiling, while to his relief his father ignored his wife’s request and instead wrenched the tattered, rope-bound case from Christopher’s grip. ‘Give us that, son, go on.’
Son.
Christopher let go without a fight. ‘It’s good to see you both anyway. Jack and Louise?’
‘At home wrapping presents, I should think,’ said his mother. ‘Last-minute Annies, the pair of them.’
‘Ah yes, well I must go and buy mine tomorrow.’
‘Haven’t you done it yet? What, none?’ The tone of his mother’s voice was more suited to having just heard he’d lost all his belongings in a fire. Now that he looked at them closely, it seemed that their lifetime of angst had been drawn on their faces with wrinkles. Their foreheads particularly were scored with deep lines.
‘There are only four to buy, Mum.’
‘Aye well, happen so, but tomorrow’s Christmas Eve! There’s practically nothing left in Woolworths.’
Her accent sounded strong – both their accents did, his ears accustomed to different voices these last months. Outside the station, rain fell in diagonal rods; a queue of taxis rattled as if shivering in the cold. His mother took out a small square of clear plastic from her pocket and unfolded it to make a rain hood. This she tied under her chin before dashing tiptoe out to the car park, giving small shrieks of disgust at the weather. His father followed, case flat over his head. Christopher walked behind, wondered when he would get his next cigarette.
‘We’ll drive past the pier, show you the wreckage,’ said his father.
‘Wreckage?’
‘The pier! Washed away, last month. Didn’t your mother say?’
‘I put it in the letter,’ his mother said. ‘A storm. Terrible, it were.’
‘Of course,’ Christopher said, feeling himself blush, glad of his place in the back of the car. Which letter was that? One he had not even opened possibly. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Well.’ His father’s mouth clamped shut in the rear-view mirror, opened again but only just. ‘Don’t suppose it’s of any great interest to you now.’
‘Too busy out on the randan, I expect.’ His mother, her words artificially light as ever, faltered as they always did under the persistent weight of her husband’s. ‘Chasing girls.’
Girls.
Through the streaked windows, his hometown rose before him: the beach and the promenade, the blackened skeleton of the pier. Girls. He had not seen Angie since that night in the Oak. He had not returned to that pub with Adam, who had moved on to the Bricklayers, nearer the campus, the Union bar sometimes, where the beer was cheap, and sometimes a string of pubs in town: the Cobourg, the Pig and Whistle, the Albion.
They had reached Hestham Avenue. The sight of the house made him catch his breath. For one suspended moment, familiarity and strangeness stood side by side. Time had done this. Knowledge had done this. And he could share none of that knowledge with Jack and Margaret.
His father swung the car onto the drive. Rain pooled in the pockets where frost had popped the tarmac. Christopher had to be careful to step over puddles when he got out of the car. He loved his new trousers but they sucked up water from a mile away. Determined not to lift his trousers like a long skirt, especially in front of his father, he tiptoed to the front door. He stepped inside, into the smell of the bathroom drifting down the stairs: damp towels, Imperial Leather soap, lily-of-the-valley talcum powder.