Breaking Light (3 page)

He would have liked to have a dog. He averted his face but knew that the new boy had seen it already.

‘I would have kicked back at them, if I were you,' the younger boy persisted. ‘Right here.' He pointed at his shins.

He didn't know what to say but dug the heel of his boot into the lawn. Then, because he had no better alternative, he scrambled after the new boy, who was now walking back towards the schoolhouse. The situation was altogether unsettling and he did not know what to make of it. The boy had seen for himself; he must know by now that he was a freak.

‘I'm Michael.'

He looked up and then quickly down again. What did it all mean? He could feel a warm patch where the boy's hand had rested on his arm.

‘What's your name?' the boy who called himself Michael asked helpfully.

‘Gabriel,' he whispered.

‘What?'

‘Gabriel –' this time a bit louder – ‘but my uncle calls me Gabe,' he managed and at once regretted revealing the nickname. It sounded awful. And his voice.

‘What happened to your face?'

‘I am a mutant,' he volunteered, in case this was what was wanted.

‘A what?'

Did this new boy, who looked so normal – pretty even – really not know what a mutant was? It amused him and he decided to take a more scientific approach.

‘I am a harelip. That's why I have the face of a bunny. My palate is cleft. That's why I speak like an idiot. Sometimes.'

‘Oh,' Michael said, and after a moment's hesitation, ‘Can I see?'

Gabriel recoiled as Michael's face came up close to his. No one, apart from Mother and Uncle Gerry, had ever been that close to him before. He tensed as Michael looked at the hole that ran like a dark gutter from his mouth and into his malformed nose. Suddenly he wanted to protect Michael from it all.

‘It won't happen to you,' he assured him, and added, ‘I was born this way.'

‘Fab!' said Michael.

They started walking again. A group of daisies had opened their eyes to the grey day but the March wind was chilly. Gabriel glanced sideways at the boy who walked beside him across the grass. His school uniform seemed very clean and he had thick brown hair that curled a little at the temples. It was like a tight woolly hat or like the painted-on hair of Pinocchio, Gabriel thought. His eyes were brown, almost familiar.

Michael looked up and smiled. ‘Would you like to come back to my place one day after school? You can try my friendship machine, which decides whether we can be friends or not.'

‘I'd like that very much.' ‘Tomorrow then,' he said and started running.

Gabriel remained, dumbstruck, but suddenly remembered: ‘Where do you live?'

‘Oakstone,' Michael called back without stopping.

Then all was quiet again, apart from the river, which whispered to Gabriel. ‘Stick to your own kind,' it sang. ‘He is too good for you.'

*

Mr Askew pushed open the metal gate in the low wall that surrounded his new home. He had left the gardening implements
in the allotments, as he hoped to be back after lunch. He didn't really need an allotment, of course – the garden at Oakstone was so large – but he preferred to keep the lawn, which stretched from the house to the garden wall, intact. It was the kind of lawn where gazebos were raised and ladies got their heels stuck after too many glasses of Chardonnay and where you couldn't find your mini gherkin when it fell off the canapé. To Mr Askew, it served as a barrier and kept him apart from the community, perhaps even safe. It was fringed by a screen of ancient elms and oaks, which rustled gently in the summer and creaked hesitantly throughout the winter. He walked up the gravel drive and recognised that his old, beaten-up Skoda looked out of place. There were weeds in the gravel and the house itself looked curiously unlived in. The green door, so familiar by now, opened up on to the lovely hallway with its floor of diagonal limestone tiles inlaid with black marble diamonds. He sighed as he looked around at all the boxes still waiting to be unpacked. He lifted one, marked ‘my books', and carried it into the drawing room. The drab winter sun filled the room with an acceptable light. He pulled out his penknife and cut the Sellotape around the box. There it was, the backlist of his academic career, thirty years of research, his only defence against the ‘publish or perish' device. He smiled as he read their titles – how ridiculously pretentious and wide-eyed they all seemed now:

He opened the last book at the title page, where he saw his own name: an apparent achievement. He hesitated briefly before moving on a few pages; there, solitary in the middle of all that whiteness, was the dedication. He could see now that it looked wrong, exposed and exposing. He shut the book and dropped it back into the box, pushing it into a corner of the room where he might forget about it.

He felt drained suddenly and settled into one of the armchairs by the cold fireplace. He might have nodded off for a moment and the room seemed bleak when he opened his eyes. No, my world is not dull, he thought to himself. It is alive with the thoughts I feed into it. In the shallows of my mind I paddle in the pools of memory. Will somebody come and find me here or have I been abandoned, left behind at the end of the day? Sometimes, he realised, he could not distinguish between the floating of his dreams and the wash of the wind across the moor.

A bird was singing outside the French windows, perhaps an optimistic blue tit or a blackbird showing off. He thought about what to have for lunch. His appetite was no longer what it once was and food now bored him. Ah, well, he thought, I'll have some soup from a tin. Retirement didn't bother him – in fact, he relished it. All those years of commuting on the bus from his flat in Swiss Cottage through the congested capital had been hateful. The bodies of strangers, pressed against his, their morning breath on the close air. He had been a timid teacher and the various institutions, departments and centres that had hosted his subject
over the years had realised that they would be better off keeping him on research grants. He had never been ambitious in the way his colleagues were. Nor did he feel that his time in academia had been wasted – his focus had always been on
finding things out
. And it was so much simpler to live in the intellect. His accomplishments, which were largely based on an early experience of what his colleagues called ‘fieldwork', had been achieved over a long time. His reputation had initially only been acknowledged within the small group of academics who shared his interests and so he had somehow managed to hold on to his privileged position as a relatively vague, easily forgotten and anonymous figure on the periphery of academia. It was easy to convince others that he lived for his research, so that no one ever asked the question, ‘What else?' His natural curiosity and urge to
understand
had resulted, almost accidently, in an international reputation.

Mr Askew smiled grimly as he thought of his leaving party the previous year. It had been held in the senior common room at his latest hosting institution. A bewildered group of staff and a few postgraduate students, whom he may or may not have come into contact with, had turned up to slump against the wood panelling. A selection of drinks had been put out on a table, closely monitored by Mrs Bail, the secretary who was unusually good with figures. The furniture was the usual mix of standard-issue convenience and mock medieval. On entering the SCR, he had shuffled straight to the drinks table and asked for a glass of red wine.

‘Will that be Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay, Professor Askew?' asked Mrs Bail, pulling at her cardigan to cover her large bosom.

He looked down at the dismal array of bottles and Tesco juice
cartons and sighed. ‘I'll have the Cabernet Sauvignon, please.' Lowering his voice, he suggested, helpfully, ‘The Chardonnay is white, my dear.'

Mrs Bail looked up at him with steely eyes. ‘Is it, now,' she muttered. ‘I can't quite see why one has to make a fuss about it.' She poured the wine. ‘The nibbles are over there.' She pointed towards a table at the other end of the room where a couple of the postgrads had lost themselves over plastic salad bowls of salt and-vinegar crisps and Bombay mix.

He thanked her and looked around for somebody to speak to. Professor Bradbury, the current head of department, was being talked at by Dr Chatterji, an eager visiting researcher specialising in transvestites. Bradbury, who was a head taller than Dr Chat-terji, was looking far into another world where people did not bother him. He had a great vision for the department but no one quite knew what it was. His near-black hair was permanently tousled, as if his
gebiet
was adventure sports rather than the early history of leprosy.

Dr Rochester, wearing ostentatious red corduroys and a green tweed jacket, was sharing a joke with one of the male research assistants, Mr Wilson, who wore a low-cut T-shirt, showing some of the hair on his chest. Rochester was the current star of the department. His professorship would not be far off, although he was still in his thirties. He had written a book on the inter-breeding of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, which had been made into a TV documentary by Channel Four. Rochester himself had presented the documentary, striding tall along dried-out wadis in Jordan. He had worn a linen suit and a panama hat, which, at the time, struck Askew as pretentious, but which had earned him – Rochester, that is – quite a following amongst the
postgraduates. Presently, he was leaning over the handsome Mr Wilson, whispering something very close to his ear.

‘Professor Askew?' Askew recognised one of the postgraduates he had supervised on occasion. Was it Catherine – or Kate? He smiled at the young woman, who could helpfully be described as frumpy; he thought he recognised in her dress his own efforts at indistinctness.

‘I just wanted to say that I'm very sorry that you're leaving.' She said it quickly, but could not prevent the blushing spreading from her throat.

‘Oh, well, that's … that's very nice of you.' He was taken aback. ‘Thank you, but I'm sure this will be a livelier place without my dead freaks.' It was meant as a joke, but Catherine or Kate looked up, appalled.

‘How can you say that? Your research has changed my life,' she said earnestly.

Askew didn't know what to say; she looked like a normal enough person. Was she mocking him? He frowned and she saw it.

‘Now, I'll have to deal with him.' She nodded towards Rochester.

He followed her gaze. ‘Dr Rochester is a man of some standing now, you know –' he did not know what else to say – ‘and of such positive colours,' he managed.

She suddenly looked close to tears and, to soothe things, he added, ‘Quite on the make.'

‘Well, exactly,' hissed the earnest girl. ‘He's a self-obsessed, narrow-minded prat who sleeps with everything in trousers.'

‘Oh.' Without thinking, he looked down at her full skirt and sensible shoes.

‘You, on the other hand,' she continued, ‘are an awkward dear with no ambition and that's why you have never been of much interest to anyone except people like me.'

‘Oh,' he said again.

‘And I mean that in the best possible way,' she added.

‘Yes, yes, of course you do,' he said politely, but wasn't quite sure.

‘Ah, well, I must dash,' she said, suddenly cheerful. ‘Mustn't miss my karate class.'

He nodded; he had obviously got her wrong.

‘Anyway, it was great talking to you – I feel a lot better now.'

He watched with a sinking heart as she left the room, her wholesome canvas tote bag bumping heavily against her thigh. Too enclosed from the beginning, the senior common room seemed further reduced by his sudden loss of poise. Yet he could not bring himself to leave; something was expected of him. He needed to stay so that they could settle their minds and do their reluctant duty towards him. He swallowed the rest of the wine and looked towards Mrs Bail, who was still guarding the drinks table, her face and body blown up with the importance of her task. Fortunately, he caught the eye of Dr Lamont, a sweet man of insubstantial presence, red hair and intelligent gaze. Lamont winked at Askew and picked up two glasses of red from the table.

‘That Bail woman is a fearful old brute, isn't she?' said the wizened Scotsman as he handed Askew a drink.

Askew raised his eyebrows and took a sip of the wine.

‘So, do you think the Dark Lord will make a speech?' Lamont nodded towards the head of department, who had managed to detach himself from Dr Chatterji and was currently training his opaque eyes on Caroline Manners, an American postgraduate
with ample endowments, including a healthy grant from a Midwestern college.

‘I'm afraid he might …' Askew sighed unhappily.

‘Ach, cheer up, old pal; you're out of all this now.'

He frowned.

Lamont clinked his glass against Askew's in a solemn toast. ‘Congratulations. You have survived thirty years in the beehive of academia.'

‘Yeah, well …' Perhaps he and Lamont could have been friends; the thought made him feel sad.

‘What are you going to do with yourself?'

‘I'm going back to where I started to try and figure things out.'

‘Ah, this is what we all hope to extract from retirement: an end – a conclusive end – to the long wait for fulfilment; a revelation of truth …'

Askew laughed. ‘Well, it's either that … or I'll go for long walks on the moor and sit down and look at it as I imagine one would look at the sea.'