Shtum (23 page)

Wrench

‘How hard has this been on you, eh?’

Jonah is lying in my father’s bed twiddling a leaf he picked up from the garden at lunchtime. It even made it through bath time.

‘Nobody actually asked you what you wanted, did they? We just dragged you around like a show pony, stuck you in front of strangers and they decided for you. Well, this is the deal. Do you remember the place that Papa and I took you to visit? Highgrove Manor? With the nice people and the wood, the animals, your lovely big room, the swimming pool and all that space? The lovely people there thought you were so gorgeous that they want you to go and live with them. They think they can help you learn and have lots of fun and you’ll never be bored. You’ll still come home for holidays and – of course – I’ll come up every weekend or so and see you. Does that sound okay with you?’

The school has sent me some photos and I lay them out on the duvet in front of him. He carries on twiddling. So I pick them up to show him.

‘Look, this is the house that you’re going to live in, it’s called Bell House and this is your classroom and …’

He has a photo in his hand and is holding it up to his face, staring intently at something.

‘That’s it sweetboy, what can you see? Do you remember something?’

I try to make out the shot from the side, I think it is his bedroom. ‘Can I see?’

He hands it to me without blinking and begins twiddling again. It is his bedroom, with its big picture window. I look at it closely. It’s pretty bare, as yet undecorated or festooned with his bits and pieces. Is it the tree through the window? I study it carefully and in the background, seemingly running from the tree’s upper branches to the window frame, is a rainbow, faint but recognisable.

‘There’s gold at the end of that, Jonah. A pot full of gold coins. Maybe one day we’ll go and hunt for it, what do you say?’

I lie down beside him and watch the fish swim across the ceiling, too tired to move.

‘You know, Jonah, you are the world’s best listener. You never judge or contradict and I know that whatever I tell you remains sacred. Telling you my secrets and fears helps me to deal with them. Your grandfather admired that in you as well. Are you going to miss Papa? I am – stupid old sod.

‘You’d think it was impossible, wouldn’t you, not to know the first thing about your own father. I don’t mean his name – although even that was a fraud. Apparently, we’re Friedmans, but you know that already. Yes, I know, I prefer Jewell too.’ I look at him for some kind of reaction, but, of course, there is none. He’s just Jonah; surnames are superfluous in his world.

‘No, I mean who Papa was as a person. He knew me, knew who I was. He was so accurate, it hurt sometimes, Jonah. But him? He was always somehow just out of reach. You can’t not miss a man, a father like that, you see, because you’re forever running after him trying to do something that will provide the key to unlock him. Something to make him so proud that he’d trust you enough to let you in.

‘Pretty pointless in your book, I would have thought. You’re the most discreet person I know. What’s it like? I’d love to know. You seem to be so completely emotionally self-reliant. I hope you don’t mind me laying my crap on you some nights, but you’re the only person I can truly trust.’ I rub his back and squeeze his thighs, which loosens his nappy. ‘Oh! And you appear to have laid your crap on me this evening too. Let’s get you changed.’

I leave him clean, fresh and twiddling happily in the bed that just weeks before my own father lay dying in. Downstairs, I can’t even sit in his armchair. Is DNA really passed on? I can imagine a straight line descending directly from Dad to Jonah, but I can’t see where it would pierce me on its way down. I envision myself hanging on to that line by my teeth – extreme flossing. I must be full of shit from my mother’s mitochondria, there’s no other explanation.

So where do I go from here? Well, I’ll start with Highgrove Manor and take it one step at a time. I’ve existed as part of a trio for a decade now, two very different trios, granted, but very soon I’ll be a solo act again. Maybe I’ll go back and study; my brain has been so full of fantasy it would do me good to fill it with some hard, clear facts and well-constructed arguments. And maybe I should seek some help with the drinking. I panic at the thought of being told to stop completely, but the prospect of living alone and being left alone with the freedom to drink with impunity fills me with greater dread.

As I lie on the sofa, I toy with the idea of selling this house and moving close to Jonah’s school. There’s nothing to keep me here, after all. Solitude, with the received knowledge and understanding of what being totally alone means, is the opposite of where I saw myself less than a year ago. The trouble is, I comprehend that in my own way I’ve been a carer and a caretaker for a large part of my life and now – on a daily basis, at least – it’s only me, and it’s never only been me. I feel a certain responsibility to Maurice. Dad’s death is as great a loss to him as to me. But he’s somehow phlegmatic about death. I suppose at his age, it becomes a more natural part of living – and I’m too young for bowls. I hear the sound of feet slapping on stairs. Jonah is standing in the doorway.

‘Okay, you can have some more toast.’

School

Given Jonah’s propensity for strangulation, it’s safer to give him the back seat to himself, with Emma riding shotgun next to me. Yet he is strangely subdued – maybe serene – as we set off around the M25 toward the M40. Emma spends the journey with her eyes closed and her hands clasped tightly on her lap. Neither of us feels like talking, the silence less awkward than forced conversation.

It’s the second week of September, two weeks since the verdict arrived, and we’ve made acclimatisation visits since then; one for a day and one overnight for Jonah, when they had to wake him up at nine the following morning for breakfast – he’s becoming a proper teenager.

But today is the day.

Today.

Is.

The.

Day.

How do I feel? How will I feel?

I think the answer is straightforward. If he feels good, I’ll feel good. Anything less, I cannot contemplate right now.

Only two more miles.

He knows, I think. No, I’m sure he does. I can see in the rearview mirror that he is bouncing and the outside of his mouth has creased. He does know.

We pull on to the long driveway and stop in front of the wrought-iron gates for the fourth time and I press the entry button.

‘I have Jonah Jewell.’

‘Great, come through the gates and drive down to the big house where we’ll meet you and take Jonah’s stuff.’

‘Okay.’ We drive through and I’m ready to do a handbrake and spin away. Thank you for all your efforts on Jonah’s behalf but he’s all right now, really he is, look, watch, he can talk, he can read, dance, swim, sing, poo on the toilet, we’ll just go home, it’s fine.

I pull up outside the grand Georgian former manor house, gently wake Emma, turn round and watch him staring out the window. I get out of the car. It’s warm.

Emma follows and stands beside me, she’s biting her top lip.

The boot is already open and his belongings are being carried to his room in Bell House, when out steps the man himself – hair adorned with dayglo feathers, one apple in his right hand, another in his mouth.

Emma approaches him gently and crouches down, taking his left hand between both of hers. ‘I love you, Jonah.’

He takes his hand from hers and replaces it with a chewed-up apple, then leans his whole body back in the car until only his arse and legs are visible. When he reappears, it’s with a piece of silver tinsel. Emma walks to reception and I gently coax him toward the house’s open door.

Inside is a welcoming committee. The arrival of a new child in a school of only fifty is an exciting event and Jonah seems to sense it. At least twenty staff stand in a semi-circle smiling and calling his name and he stands very still, surveying the throng before beaming at them, with his half-eaten apple thrust in the air like an Oscar statuette.

‘Shall I take him?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Shall I take Jonah now? He can have lunch while his room’s being sorted out. He’s got school this afternoon.’

He’s going.

‘Yes, but I might need to …’ I pull Jonah to me and breathe in his smell, squeezing him until he pushes me away. ‘I love you so much.’

The keyworker has Jonah’s hand already and they are strolling towards a door on the left of the entrance way. My arm is in the air – a farewell, a salute. It won’t move, I can’t move it. Stuck, as in a plaster cast, joined to my waist by a metal support.

‘Ben,’ Emma says, softly. ‘We’ll see him very soon.’

This is too much loss, I have to force myself to remain still and repeat the mantra that has held me up throughout this painful process:
this is for Jonah, this is for Jonah, this is for …

‘JONAH!’

He turns as they reach the door and I catch up to them fumbling in my pocket.

‘I forgot this.’

I hold the crystal paperweight to his face. A rainbow of colours cuts across his forehead and I kiss it there and run my hands through his hair.

He takes it from me, smiles and skips away without looking back.

The ride home is deathly. Everything aches by the time I pull up to drop Emma off and we acknowledge our parting with a raised hand. Is that it? All I want to do is duvet dive. Johnny has arranged a night out of the house for me tomorrow, to ‘take my mind off things’. Short of a lobotomy, I see no solution. But tonight I intend to wallow, inebriated, in Lake Solitude.

I lie on the sofa all night, swapping texts with Maria and dozing, and only left the lounge to have a shower an hour ago. The passenger door is already open when I walk out of the house.

‘Up for it?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, you’re not going to be a miserable git, are you?’

‘You know me better than that.’

‘I know you.’

Johnny pulls away with a screech. His driving style diametrically opposed to the way he lives the rest of his life.

‘You all right for dosh?’

‘Yes, surviving. So where are we going?’

‘Amanda’s making dinner and she’s invited a friend along.’

I inwardly cringe. Not because of the quality of Amanda’s cooking, but on behalf of whichever poor singleton is going to be traumatised by the first night of my comeback tour.

‘Come on, Ben, crank it up a couple of notches. She’s a lovely girl.’

‘I’m really not in the mood for this, Johnny. Not yet.’

‘Look, it’s just dinner.’

We’re bumper to bumper down Heath Street, until he turns right and pulls up outside a four-storey Victorian villa – the bottom two floors are theirs. Amanda meets us at the door. She hugs me gently and whispers ‘sorry’ in my ear. Johnny has already passed us.

I can make out the back of a head through the lounge door as I take off my coat in the hall. The hair is dark and curly and cascades over the back of the leather sofa.

‘Uncle Ben!’

Tom flies down the stairs in a Superdry t-shirt and sweatshorts and almost knocks me over as we hug.

‘He’s missed you,’ says Amanda.

‘How’s Jonah?’

‘Jonah is … good.’

When he finally stops laughing, he asks: ‘When can I see him?’

‘We’ll meet in the park when Jonah comes home at half term,’ Johnny chips in. ‘I’ll arrange it with Uncle Ben. Now, go back upstairs and play on your Xbox.’

‘Will you save me some dessert?’

‘Yes, if you go up now,’ says Amanda.

He smiles at me as he scrambles back up the stairs.

‘Come and meet Rachel.’ Amanda grabs my hand.

I feel bizarrely unfaithful just being here and take her hand without looking. But they have sat us opposite one another and I realise as I take in the face beneath the hair that if I was still my fifteen-year-old self, she’d be the perfect identikit. She seems not remotely shy, in fact, she is staring at me. Johnny and Amanda are fiddling in the kitchen and I know that my earlobes are burning red.

‘Do we know each other?’ she asks.

This classic opener is a bastard. It means I have to look up and study her face and run through all the possible locations in which we may have met or conversed. Also, it requires me to say
possibly
.

‘You do look familiar. Where were you brought up?’ she asks.

‘Willesden, then Muswell Hill, you?’

‘The Suburb.’

I resist the temptation to ask which suburb. She uses the definite article, assuming I know she means Hampstead Garden
Suburb
and, of course, I do know she means Hampstead Garden Suburb, it just irritates me that she assumes I know and therefore can now draw all the conclusions necessary based on that one simple fact. I have drawn a conclusion, despite this. I don’t like her. This irritates me too. It continues unabated.

‘School?’ she asks.

‘Alexandra Palace, you?’

‘Henrietta Barnett.’

Of course. ‘Wouldn’t be from school then,’ I say, wanting it to stop.

But she evidently doesn’t. ‘University?’

‘Didn’t go. You?’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ She blushes.

This brief romance is over, it appears, I have fallen at the third hurdle – badly. Shoot me. ‘No, tell me, I may have had friends there who weren’t fuck-ups like me.’ I can’t help myself.

‘I never meant …’ she says.

‘No, of course not.’

‘Cambridge,’ she admits.

‘Nuh, got me there.’

Johnny rescues us with a bottle of fifteen per cent New World white.

‘Where were you at university, Johnny?’ she asks, as if checking she hasn’t walked into a rough pub in the wrong part of town.

‘Manchester. So was Ben. We shared a flat for three years. He was just testing your intellectual snob quotient!’

She squints at me and purses her lips. ‘Don’t tell me, you did Psychology?’ she says, smiling through her wine glass.

Johnny answers for me. ‘Politics.’

‘At the Polytechnic,’ I add.

‘Down with the proles, then?’

‘It’s where I’m most comfortable.’

‘Comfort’s underrated.’

‘As is sobriety. Johnny, refill, please.’

Am I being charming by mistake? She laughs at my anecdotes and smiles at me in between sips of the tomato and red pepper soup. I hear Johnny and Amanda giggle and catch their conspiratorial winks. I need to stop drinking before I succumb to enjoyment. Rachel saves me from such drastic and, frankly, impossible action.

‘Amanda has told me you’ve been having a bit of a hard time. I’m sorry to hear that.’

I don’t know how to respond, so I don’t.

‘Jonah sounds fascinating and he’s such a pretty boy.’

There is a photo of Jonah and Tom together and smiling, on the mantelpiece. It’s a rare image and I find myself searching it out. Melancholy invades.

‘Does he have a special skill?’

I know she means Jonah. ‘Sorry?’

‘Jonah’s autistic, isn’t he? Does he have something he’s amazing at?’

This is the question that always strikes me down, sobers me up and is asked by people who think Dustin Hoffman’s
Rain Man
is a textbook representation.

‘He rolls over when I tickle his tummy.’

‘Ben!’ Amanda scolds.

‘I’m sorry. No, he has no special skills to speak of, he’s not at that end of the Autistic Spectrum.’ I know she wants a detailed infomercial on the ins and outs of autism but the level of ignorance always leaves me shocked and determined to shock.

‘Not unless you count crapping in his pants, of course.’

She laughs at me. ‘This is going well, Amanda, don’t you think?’

And now, do I fancy her? Or am I just pissed and horny?

‘Sounds like he’s a character, your son?’

‘Yes, he certainly is. He’s completely non-verbal, no words at all.’

‘What, never?’ Rachel asks.

‘Well, he occasionally speaks to
very
pretty girls.’ Pissed, horny and flirting, it would seem.

‘I think I might like to meet this son of yours.’

Within moments of the cab pulling over, I feel the loneliness course through me like a sickness – sick at the thought of being touched by someone else, sick at the thought of never being touched again. It is a weird night, one of those high summer evenings that never quite go dark.

I sit on the low front garden wall and smoke a cigarette. And then another, dangling my keys from my little finger. Suddenly, I don’t want to go in, not to this house. Everybody leaves this house and now it is left to me. I drag myself to the front door and slip the key in the Yale lock. A rush of fetid memories assails me and the dark oppresses me. Tonight will be a night of whisky, television and sofa sleep – lights on. I need the noise, I need the voices. I need the company. I want my wife. I want my son.

‘I made you coffee. You shouldn’t
zarf
so much.’

‘Dad. What time is it?’

My eyes focus, and it’s Maurice. Not Dad. He and I stare at each other awkwardly and turn away again, in unison. ‘Eleven. Drink your coffee,’ he says.

I am coming to with a sense of unease, like there’s something crucial I forgot to do, that and a headache.

‘Jonah!’

‘The boy’s at school, remember? You took him up yesterday.’

I take a sip. My throat feels like a gorilla’s armpit. ‘Maurice, I appreciate the gesture, but you really don’t have to check on me every day.’

Maurice grunts. ‘Your father, he wrote stuff down.’

‘Stuff? What kind of stuff?’

‘Stuff. Stuff! Here.’

He passes me a mangled sheaf of flimsies, stained and ragged.

‘My tea is brewing,’ he says, making for the kitchen.

‘Maurice, what the fuck is this?’

He shouts from the hallway, ‘Read, just read already. I’ll explain later.’