Lasting Damage (47 page)

‘The more the merrier,’ said Barbara, her tone flirtatious. She stretched out her arms, inviting a non-existent crowd to join them. ‘Though I warn you, I’m rusty. I haven’t done my tour guide bit for a while.’ Out came the voracious maudlin smile again; Simon tried not to recoil.

Nigel sighed. ‘I won’t be joining you,’ he said.

‘No one asked you to.’ Barbara slapped down her response like a trump card.

Simon followed her out of the room. Halfway up the stairs, she stopped and turned to face him. ‘You’re probably wondering why we don’t ask,’ she said. ‘For the sake of our emotional survival, we can’t give in to our curiosity. It’s much easier if we hear no news.’

‘It must take a lot of discipline,’ said Simon.

‘Not really. No one likes to suffer unnecessarily, or at least I don’t, and Nigel doesn’t. Any new information about our ex-son would knock three days off our lives. Even the most insignificant detail – that Kit went to the shop and bought a newspaper this morning, that he wore a particular shirt yesterday. Even if that was all you told me, I’d be in bed tomorrow, unable to do anything. I don’t want to have to think about him in the present tense – does that make sense?’

Simon hoped not, hoped it didn’t make the sense he thought it made.

‘We have to believe time has stopped,’ Barbara lectured him, as convinced of the rightness of her position as a political campaigner. ‘That’s why I go into his room every day. Nigel can’t bear it. Neither can I, really, but if I didn’t go in, I wouldn’t know for sure that it hadn’t changed. And someone has to keep it clean.’

She climbed the remaining stairs to the first-floor landing. Simon followed her. There were four doors, all closed. One had a large sheet of paper stuck to it, on which someone had drawn a black rectangle, sides perfectly straight, and written something inside it in small black handwriting. From where he was, Simon couldn’t read it.

‘That’s Kit’s room, with the notice on the door,’ said Barbara. Simon had guessed as much. As he moved closer, he saw that the sign was made of something thicker than paper – a kind of thin canvas board. And the words had been painted on, not written. Carefully; it looked almost like calligraphy. Kit Bowskill had intended the sign on his door to be more than a means of imparting information.

Barbara, standing behind Simon, recited the words aloud as he read them. The effect was unsettling, as if she was the voice of his thoughts. ‘Civilization is the progress towards a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.’

Beneath the quote was a name: ‘Ayn Rand’. Author of
The Fountainhead
. It was one of many novels that Simon wished he’d read, but never actually fancied reading. ‘This an intellectual way of saying, “Kit’s Room – Keep Out”?’ he asked Barbara.

She nodded. ‘We did. Religiously. Until Kit told us we’d seen him and spoken to him for the last time. Then I thought, “Sod it – if I’m losing my son, at least I can get a room in my house back.” I was so livid, I could have ripped the walls down.’ The electric tremor in her voice suggested she was no less angry now. ‘I went in there intending to strip it bare, but I couldn’t, not when I saw what he’d done. How could I destroy my son’s secret work of art when it was all I had left of him? Nigel says it’s not art, Kit’s not an artist, but I can’t see any other way to describe it.’

Simon was closest to the door – two footsteps away. He could have walked in and seen it for himself, whatever it was, instead of standing outside listening to Barbara describe it obliquely, but that would have felt inappropriate; he ought to wait for her permission.

‘Have you ever had your heart run over by a large truck?’ She pressed both her hands to her chest. ‘That’s what happened to me when I opened that door for the first time in eleven years. I couldn’t understand it at all – what was I looking at?
Now
it makes sense, now that I’ve got to know Kit a bit better, in his absence.’

Eleven years.
Number eleven again
. In spite of the heat, a cold shiver snaked down Simon’s back. Barbara must have seen the question in his eyes, because she said, ‘Nigel and I were banned when Kit was eighteen. He came home from his first term at university and that was the first thing he said. It wasn’t just us, because we were his parents – everyone was banned. No one set foot in his room after that – he made sure of it. He didn’t bring friends round often, but when he did, they stayed in the lounge. Even Connie, when the two of them used to come and visit, he never took her upstairs. They’d sit in the lounge, or the den. Kit had his own flat by the time they met – I don’t think Connie knew he still had a room here, one that was more important to him than any of the ones he actually lived in. You wouldn’t think of it, would you? Most people, when they move out, they move out altogether.’

Unless they had something they wanted or needed to hide, thought Simon. Most people couldn’t get away with saying to their girlfriends who lived with them, ‘This room’s mine – you’re not allowed anywhere near it.’ Come to think of it, most people couldn’t get away with saying that to their parents either. ‘In eleven years, you weren’t tempted to go in and have a look?’

‘I probably would have been, but Kit had a lock fitted.’ Barbara nodded at the door. ‘That’s a new one, with no lock, to symbolise the new admissions policy: my ex-son’s room is open to the public, twenty-four seven. I’ll show it to anyone who wants to see it,’ she said defiantly, then giggled. ‘If Kit doesn’t like it, let him come back and complain.’

‘You had the old door removed, the one with the lock?’ Simon asked.

‘Nigel kicked it down,’ Barbara told him proudly. ‘After the “big bust-up”.’ She mimed inverted commas. ‘It was the only way we could get in. Nigel said, “At least it’s clean”, which was a bit of an understatement – it was cleaner than I could ever get a room to be, that’s for sure. Kit bought his own hoover, dusters, polish, the works. He used to come round once a fortnight and spend a couple of hours in there, maintaining it – you could hear the hoover buzzing away. I don’t think Connie knew what he was doing – she spent so much of her free time round at her mum and dad’s, Kit could come here at weekends and she’d know nothing about it. Nigel and I used to feel sorry for her in her ignorance, shut out of something that was so important to him – as if we were the lucky ones, privy to his secrets, because we knew about his room even if we didn’t know what was in it.’

Barbara shook her head as pride gave way to frustration. ‘We were idiots, letting an eighteen-year-old child lock us out of a room in our own house. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t let Kit
close
a door against me, let alone lock it. I’d watch him like a hawk, every second of every day.’ She pointed her finger at Simon as if to fix him in place. ‘I’d sit by the side of his bed all night and stare at him while he slept. I’d stand next to the shower while he washed, even stand over him while he was on the toilet. I’d allow him no privacy whatsoever. He’d be horrified if he heard me saying this, and I don’t care. Privacy’s the soil that nourishes all sprouting evils, if you ask me.’

‘Can we have a look at the room?’ Simon asked, finding her repellent. If he’d met her before what she called the ‘big bust-up’, he would probably have felt quite differently about her. She’d have been a different person then. Simon would never have admitted it to anyone, but he often felt disgusted by people to whom exceptionally bad things had happened; his fault, not theirs. He figured it was something to do with a desire to distance himself from the tragedy, whatever it was. If anything, it made him try harder to help them, to compensate.

‘Go ahead,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ll follow you in a minute. I don’t want to get in the way of your first impression.’

Simon turned the handle. As the door swung open, the smell of furniture polish was unmistakeable. Kit Bowskill might not have set foot in his private sanctuary since 2003, but someone had been maintaining it to his high standard since then. Barbara. It was the sort of thing only a mother would bother doing.

‘Don’t fall over the hoover,’ she warned. ‘Unlike all the other rooms in this house, Kit’s actually has things in it.’ She laughed. ‘I got rid of the bulk of what Nigel and I owned about six months after Kit gave us our marching orders. If we didn’t have a son any more, there didn’t seem much point in us having anything.’

The door stood half open. Simon pushed it all the way and walked in. The room was full without being cluttered: bed, two chairs, desk, wardrobe, chest of drawers, a bookcase against one wall with a Dyson vacuum cleaner next to it. Between the bookcase and the too-small window there was a line-up of cleaning products – for glass, for wood, for carpets – next to a grey plastic bucket from which six feather-dusters protruded, a mockery of a vase of flowers.

At first Simon thought the walls were papered, because every inch of wall space was covered, and the ceiling. He quickly saw that it couldn’t be paper; there was no repeated pattern. No designer, not even the most radical, would create something this convoluted and bizarre.
Photographs
. Simon realised he was looking at hundreds of photographs, melded together in such a way that you couldn’t see the joins. Maybe there were none; Simon couldn’t see lines where one picture started and another finished. How had Kit done it? Had he taken all these photos and had them made into wallpaper, somehow?

They were all of roads and buildings, apart from the ones on the ceiling. Those were of the sky: plain pale blue, blue streaked with white cloud, grey flecked with sunset pinks and reds; a deep blue with part of the moon in one corner, a curve of uneven glowing white.

Simon moved closer to the wall; he’d spotted a street he recognised. Yes, there was the Six Bells pub, the one near the Live and Let Live, where he’d met Ian Grint. ‘Is this . . . ?’ Turning in search of Barbara, he found himself looking at the books on the shelves instead. They were lined up in neat rows, their spines exactly level. From their titles, Simon saw that they had a subject in common.

‘Welcome to Cambridge in Bracknell,’ said Barbara.

Histories of Cambridge, books about the origins of the university, the boat race, Cambridge’s rivalry with Oxford; about famous people associated with the city, Cambridge and its artists, Cambridge and the writers it inspired, the pubs of Cambridge, the gardens of Cambridge, its architecture, its bridges, the gargoyles on the college buildings,
A Cambridge Childhood
, Cambridge college chapels, Cambridge and science, spies with a Cambridge connection.

Simon saw the words ‘Pink Floyd’ – had he found a book that broke the pattern? No, it was
The Pink Floyd Fan’s Illustrated Guide to Cambridge
.

At the far end of one shelf there was a pristine copy of the city’s
A–Z
– an old one, if Kit hadn’t been inside this room since 2003, but it looked brand new. On the shelf above it, Simon saw a row of Cambridge
Yellow Pages
and telephone directories.

He was aware, suddenly, of Barbara standing beside him. ‘We knew he was fond of the place,’ she said. ‘We had no idea it was an all-consuming obsession.’

Simon was reading the road signs in the photographs: De Freville Avenue, Hills Road, Newton Road, Gough Way, Glisson Road, Grantchester Meadows, Alpha Road, St Edward’s Passage. No Pardoner Lane, or at least none that Simon had seen yet. He looked up at the pictures of the Cambridge sky. Thought about eighteen-year-old Kit Bowskill, unwilling to sleep under its Bracknell equivalent.

Connie had been wrong. She’d told Simon that Kit had been in love with someone while he was at university, someone he wouldn’t tell her about, whose existence he flat-out denied. For obvious reasons, she’d suspected it was Selina Gane.

It wasn’t. It was no one. The love Kit Bowskill had been intent on hiding from his wife – so strong that he either couldn’t put it into words, or was unwilling to – was not for any individual inhabitant of Cambridge. It was for the city itself.

Barbara was doing her tour-guide bit, as promised. ‘This is the Fen Causeway – Nigel and I used to drive along it when we went to visit. King’s College Chapel you probably spotted. The Wren Library at Trinity. Drummer Street Bus Station . . .’

Simon was aware of his breathing and not much else. Like Kit Bowskill seven years ago, he could think about only one thing.

‘Are you all right?’ Barbara asked. ‘You look a bit worried.’

18 Pardoner Lane
.

Kit Bowskill, who hated to fail, had found his perfect house in his perfect city. His parents wouldn’t give him the money he needed, so he hadn’t been able to buy it, but someone had bought it. Someone had succeeded where Kit had failed.