Here, where his black hair had never been mentioned as anything unusual – or indeed as anything at all. He thought now it must have been a subject everyone avoided. His height? No more than a handy attribute when a jar was needed from the top shelf of the pantry.
‘Happen that’s where the brains came from,’ his mother added with a merry laugh that choked on itself and died. ‘Goodness knows they’re not from me. And your being so tall, like, what with us being short and that. We were going to tell you on your birthday, but we didn’t want to upset you, did we, Jack?’ She cast a glance towards his father, but it landed short. ‘We wanted to wait until you were old enough. We thought that were best. But then…’ She brought the lumpen handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes. ‘I don’t know. It’s not an easy thing to say, love, and it just seemed to get bigger, and then it was too big. You’re our son, Christopher, and that’s all there is to it.’
How quiet his mother’s voice was, as if the silence in the house were yet one more thing that must not be ruined. Christopher. Even his name had not been his own. Jack Junior had been given his name, the best family crystal; Christopher the lesser glassware: serviceable and of reasonable quality – nothing you could complain about.
‘We’ve told you now, at any rate.’ His father’s pipe had left his mouth but hovered near, just in case. ‘Doesn’t change anything as far as I’m concerned.’
He coughed into the thick roll of his plumber’s fingers, his other hand cupping the bowl of his pipe. He did not take his wife’s hand, though she looked like she might shatter for lack of touch. Deep creases ran across her forehead, her mouth set in a soft rectangle of angst. On the mantelpiece, the carriage clock chimed quarter past the hour. The shiny palm leaves that grew in patterns up the wallpaper seemed to sprout from his father’s head.
Father? The word stopped Christopher’s thoughts dead. But his mother was already standing, brushing at her skirt.
‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘Happen it’s better to know than not, eh.’
But as he said to me, he’d always known. And this is really what this story is all about.
Chapter Two
Nurse just came. She stands over me while I take my meds.
‘There you go, my darling,’ she says. She is Irish, middle-aged, a no-nonsense type. That’s what you become, I suppose, if you’re dealing with broken people all day long. Can’t waste your time getting sentimental – where’s the use in that?
‘What’s that you’re writing there?’ she asks. ‘A book, is it?’
I shrug.
‘Well now.’ She eases the little plastic dish from my hand. ‘I’ll leave you to your book.’
Part of me is sorry when she goes, sorry that I didn’t extend the basic courtesy of talking to her. Writing, not talking, is preferable. I don’t want to hear the words coming out of my mouth. And if I write it, I can burn it without ever having uttered a syllable.
I’d always known. That’s where I’ll start today. I asked him once what he meant by that. He’d taken me to the pub – he had a thing about pubs. It was the Traveller’s Rest on the hill, as I recall, and we sat in the little side room with the log fire. It was late afternoon and we were the only ones in.
‘What I mean is…’ I added when he didn’t respond. I was worried I’d pressed on a nerve, that I’d upset him. ‘Do you think that feeling came from actual concrete events, or was it something… I don’t know… more of a sixth sense?’
He picked up his glass and, without taking a drink, placed it back on its coaster. He picked up another coaster and tore off the corner.
‘I think it started with my brother,’ he said, tearing off a second corner. ‘When my mum was in hospital having him. She was away for ten days. That’s an eternity to a child, and I began to feel distressed.’ Christopher talks like that – quite formal in his way of expressing himself. ‘Towards the end of that period, I actually began to believe that she’d died and no one was telling me.’ He sipped his bitter and licked the froth off his lip. ‘She wasn’t dead, of course, but the feeling never went away. Was it concrete? No, but I could breathe it in the air. It was a secret, but it wasn’t a secret because a secret is something one person knows or maybe two or three. It was the opposite of a secret. It was something everyone knew but no one said anything about.’ All four corners of the coaster torn away, he began to worry it between his thumbs and forefingers.
‘But surely that’s paranoia?’ I said.
‘Paranoia, yes.’ He shrugged. ‘I came and went on that for years. But later, I knew it wasn’t, and it wasn’t one single event either. It was a multitude of little things – chance remarks, sudden silences if I came into a room, glances exchanged between my relatives. And I don’t know exactly when I knew it absolutely – maybe only when they told me – but I’d felt it long before.’ He stared at me, his eyes shiny and dark as treacle.
‘I can remember Margaret coming home with my brother,’ he said. ‘She told me to go and say hello to him. He was in a basket on the living-room floor by the fire.
‘I crossed the carpet in pin-steps. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck. I looked at our Jack, little Jack Junior. He was all red, snarling even though he was asleep, with tight fists raised above his head like an angry little boxer. I didn’t know how I was supposed to say hello to a baby, so I reached over and prodded his forehead with my finger. He started crying.
‘ “Careful, Christopher!” Margaret shouted.’
He had mimicked her and now stopped to laugh, though not happily. ‘Margaret could never keep the irritation out of her voice,’ he went on. ‘But she always spoke to me that way, so I was used to it. “You have to be gentle with babies, Christopher,” she said.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked him.
‘I ran out into the yard. There was a spider’s web I’d been watching for days and it was still intact, stretching across from the roof overhang down to the drainpipe. The spider was a big one; it had a body the size of a raisin – you know, one of those spiders that have knees. I’d shown it to my friend Roger the day before and he’d said it was a whopper. So then I ran my finger down the edge of the web and pulled the whole thing away.’
‘And the spider?’
‘Went scuttling – but not fast enough. I caught it. I could feel its little body frantic in my hand.’ Seeing the horror cross my face, he laughed. ‘It was only a spider! Anyway, I crouched down and let it out onto the patio stones and… and I crushed it with my foot.’
He picked up his glass and drank. I said nothing.
‘A week or two later,’ he continued, ‘Margaret told me off for nearly suffocating Jack. I told her I’d been trying to tuck him into his blankets, but I hadn’t. I’d pushed the blankets over his face and held them there.’
‘Why?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I can’t say I wanted him dead. It wasn’t as clear as that. I just wanted to hold the covers over his face and…’