Breaking Light (23 page)

Fortified, he lumbered on along the lane towards the bridge.

A single sparrow chirped like a bad phone line in the hedge.

*

After Uncle Gerry's funeral, leaving was easy. There was a time of waiting, of course – a few months of confusion and
frustration, until school finally finished – but all those sliding moments just served to increase the separating distance. So that, in the end, it
was
easy to leave; the lifeline, such as it was, had already been cut. He knew he must go away, but he had no idea where to – nor what his going away might lead to. Mother talked about university, but he could not think what to study. He had sent off all the appropriate forms, but could not remember what subjects he had listed, or what institutions. The whole idea seemed so utterly alien to him, as he had never yet believed in himself enough to take anything seriously.

Deciding on going west, as far as the coast, was directed as much by a romantic idea of the sea as by the practicality of being able to afford the train fare there. And he relished the challenge of walking the distance back, camping along the way.

‘Now, listen to me …' Mother would demand, and he would sigh and say nothing.

‘A young man like yourself needs to have a plan.'

‘Like me?'

‘All I'm saying is that you're not the kind of person who can fall back on the goodwill of other people – or a large family. Not at this time, at any rate.'

‘Well, then.'

*

One summer evening, when he was still building up the courage to leave, he was sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over
The Times
. Idly flicking through the pages, he considered, for once, his mother. She was busying herself by the cooker; her back was slightly bent these days, her features somewhat blurred or distracted – the way features become when you stop looking at them. She was wearing what looked like a man's cardigan
over the plain navy blue dress she wore for work, and he noticed that she had been biting her nails. Whose cardigan could it be? He didn't dislike her or resent her – on the contrary, they were vaguely friendly towards each other these days. It was just that he didn't know her – he didn't know who she
was
. How could he, when she had always kept things hidden from him? Over time, and through the loss they should have shared, the distance between them had become too vast, too arduous to cross. He realised that she was probably quite lonely. Just then, she looked up – not at him, exactly – and asked something or other, but vaguely.

‘Mm?' He pretended to study the pages more intently, and that was when he saw the article. The title caught his eye first –
The Last Freak Show in Europe
 – and then, below it, he saw the photograph, slightly blurred where the printer's ink had smudged, of the smiling showman in a tall hat, standing in front of a circus tent, his arms extended, palms facing up. Gabriel recognised him straight away – he hadn't changed much since Gabriel and Michael had visited Dr Buster's Sideshow on that night before the incident at the Giant's Table. He leant over the paper, oblivious, once again, of Mother, and looked closer at the photograph. There, at the back of the shot, barely visible, were those two golden girls – the Siamese twins that had fascinated him so all those years ago.

Gabriel began to read:

Gabriel looked up from the paper. He was vaguely aware of Mother addressing him, but he ignored her like one would a summer breeze. He frowned, unable to fully comprehend what he had just read – or, rather, why such an article would have been written now. It seemed somehow to be directed at him alone. A message delivered
aux mains
, for his eyes only. He wondered if anybody else would have noticed. Surely it must be a sign? He read on:

The feature had been written by a professor of medical anthropology in London, who was carrying out a research project on the last freak shows in Europe and the States. A
professor
. So somebody was actually studying the mystery he had once experienced? It seemed an incredible thought.

Suddenly he heard Mother's voice again, this time quite clearly:

‘I wonder, Gabriel, if you really know what you want?'

‘Look, Mum,' he groaned, irritated to have been disturbed, ‘did you know what you
really
wanted at my age?' He stood up and crossed to the sink to get a drink of water.

‘Actually, yes, I did.'

This surprised him and made him turn to look at her. She was watching him and he detected a look in her eyes that he had not seen before – something that flared once and settled. For a moment, he was confused to be looking down at her – he was so used to looking up.

‘What was it that you—' he began to ask, but she interrupted him.

‘What about your university applications? What if you're accepted – how will I be able to reach you?'

‘Don't worry; I won't get a place,' he replied, but not with such certainty this time, as he thought of the professor mentioned in the paper.

‘Oh, Gabriel. You're a clever boy … and you have such imagination.'

‘Oh, yeah? I thought you didn't like my
imagination
.'

‘Let's not argue,' she sighed.

‘All right,' he muttered, cheeks aflame.

‘I found Gerry's old sleeping bag and this rucksack.' She
gestured towards something that was hanging from the handle of the kitchen door. ‘I thought they might come in handy for your trip.'

‘Oh, thanks, that's really great.' He felt the purpose rising in him again and, for a moment, he thought that he could perhaps tell her after all – tell her what it was that he wanted, or, at least, what he hoped to find.

‘I
do
know what I want,' he tried. ‘I want to find out about things. I can't explain it very well. I want to know if there's something else. You know, something I haven't understood yet, some mystery that needs to be solved, that kind of thing …' His voice faltered as he heard, for himself, how ridiculous he sounded.

Mother smiled then, but sadly. He was older, she noticed – his body had hardened and the cuts on his knees had healed – but not old enough.

‘
Mystery
,' she said, shaking her head slowly. ‘A mystery is just an imitation of something we carry inside us – the urge to explore something we can never discover.'

‘But …' He was shocked and appalled by what she had just said. He had never heard her speak like that before. Perhaps he had misjudged her, thinking her stupid and irrelevant. ‘No, I won't accept that.' He winced at the hollow sound of his own voice, which somehow managed to fill the kitchen.

‘Ah, well,' she said then, without much emotion. ‘You'd better start packing.'

*

As the train left the platform at Exeter and Gabriel shoved his backpack on to the luggage rack and sat down on the hard seat, it was as if Mortford no longer existed – although part of him
realised that things might carry on as normal: Mother would get up in the morning, finding the milk bottle on the doorstep, boys would be taught in dimly lit school rooms, a farmer would be looking with jealousy at somebody's new tractor and the buzzards would soar over the moor, keeping an eye on what went on down there.

Oakstone had stood empty for a few years. Michael had been sent to boarding school shortly after Mr Bradley's funeral and Mrs Bradley had left at about the same time – no one knew where, but some thought she might have crossed back to the continent. A few times, he had sneaked into the gardens and peered through the French windows where there was a gap in the curtains; the furniture and the paintings of glorious ancestors were still there, but there was an empty feeling about the place, as if the house had been stripped of any significance so that all that remained was a set for a film or perhaps a staged tragedy.

But all that was no longer relevant – all Gabriel's roads were leading away from there. He put his hand on the seat next to him as if its polished wood might offer some kind of reassurance that this was reality. If Mother had been upset about him leaving, she had not shown it. But she had washed and ironed his shirts carefully and helped him pack the rucksack on the eve of his departure. A few times, as these preparations went on in the small cottage, they had brushed against each other and once, when they met in the doorway to his bedroom, she had held her hand to his cheek for a moment, and he had let her.

Where was Michael? Gabriel could no longer picture him – would he even recognise him if he saw him? He too might have left school now. The posh school. Had he gone to his mother in France or was he still in England? For a moment, Gabriel closed
his eyes and tried to imagine Michael at Oxford or Cambridge, as this was most certainly where he would have been expected to go. But, however much he tried, he could not conjure up an image of him amongst the Gothic limestone and the soaring stained glass. Nor would he let his mind turn off the safe path of memory to face again the Moor Cross Inn, where they had last met.

But no, he convinced himself, this was no longer relevant; his quest was altogether more personal. He rested his forehead against the cool surface of the train window and looked at the landscape. All through the south-west, the pastures were rinsed and silky after a summer rain that had sailed ahead of the train earlier that afternoon. The skies opened high now into an impossible blue and the waning breeze combed softly through fields of barley. As he travelled into evening, towards the sea, the setting sun warmed his face through the window and he relaxed. Grey towers of ancient churches reassured and time loosened its reins, bringing him further away. The sky – the vanishing sky – seemed to swell and swallow up the horizon and he let his shoulders sink, his hands slacken and relax.

This is how the journey began. He was travelling away; he was travelling towards. Looking for … Looking for what? What sort of a quest was this, and what did he hope to obtain as he set forth from Mortford?

Amongst the strangers on the train, he was a stranger to himself. He had no idea who he was and, as he looked into his own eyes reflected in the darkened window as the train raced through a tunnel, he found no clues. He was back again in that corridor of mirrors where this quest had first started.

Although it was a short journey, a few hours at the most,
because it was his first passage of this sort it felt endless. And, through this distance, the deepening countryside outside the window tried to convince him of its possibilities.

Travelling west, the engines of the train laboured on through the landscape that gradually lost its familiarity. At dusk – one of those numb nightfalls that make the landscape look sluggish – he was relieved to cross a great river. As he watched the dark waters from the bridge, he knew that it was too late to turn back.

He had few belongings. His backpack held a handful of shirts, socks, underwear, a wool cardigan, an anorak and some books he had taken from Uncle Gerry's cottage but never looked at. The sleeping bag was tied with straps to the bottom of the rucksack, along with a small primus stove and a water bottle. Mother had packed a stack of sandwiches and given him a five-pound note, which he kept in the otherwise empty wallet in the inside pocket of Uncle Gerry's tweed jacket.

*

As he stepped on to the platform at Penzance, he knew at once that this was different, that the adventure could begin. A lonely gull laughed overhead as he stood for a moment, taking in the scent of the sea – not the close stink of the shore, but the breath, the sigh of ocean – the salt breeze, the deep, deep water, the oysters in their shells, the metallic, the cold. And there were other smells too, connected with the seaside: deep-frying, rotting fish waste, and something else that he couldn't quite pin down.

He shouldered his backpack and walked along the quay into town, having decided to spend the first night in a B & B. The quay was dark but, here and there, tentative light sieved through thick curtains and painted the cobbles in smoky grey. A fine band of pink still rested on the horizon and the sky out there
was the same colour as the night skies of the illustrated Bible he had read as a child.

It took him a while to find a place with a vacancy, and the woman who let him in was brusque rather than friendly as she showed him to a tiny room at the top of a rickety staircase. She was a large woman, almost as tall as he was; her abrasive dark grey hair was tied back in a strained bun and her skin was a strange pale yellow. He smiled, wishing that he had kept the little moustache he had been growing over the scar. She left him alone then, closing the door before descending the stairs. He could hear her steps for a long time, as if the room was in a high tower, rather than in a harbour house.