In the Falling Snow (24 page)

‘Pride?’

‘Pride about what, Keith? Look at us. The sons of Empire. The men who came to this country to make life better for ourselves. What have we got to be proud about, aside from the fact that we’re still alive? Have we made this country a better place for you? You can be honest and tell me, have we? And look at how we’re living after all these years. When your mother and father come to this country, you really think that either one of them expect to die here?’

He looks around at the men and women in the room, some filling in forms, others watching television, some medicated and asleep, and Baron’s words make sense. But he knows that this is not the whole story.

‘What about the children, Baron? Some of us have gone on to college or university and we’re doing okay.’

Baron laughs quietly to himself.

‘Keith, you aside, you see any children here? Man, the kids don’t give a damn, and I don’t blame them. I got daughters and sons and so on, but we don’t really keep in touch, or anything like that. A lot of the kids doing just fine, and some of them getting through in spite of us, not because of us. Why you don’t ask your father what he thinks of his time in this country?’

He looks across at his father, who is trying to help a man with a passport form. Baron is right. He should ask his father what he thinks of his time in England. In fact, there remain a lot of questions that he should ask his father, but this morning’s outburst does not fill him with hope that his father will ever talk honestly with him on any subject.

They are sitting quietly together watching
EastEnders
on the television when his mobile rings. Aside from texting Annabelle on the first night to let her know where he was, he has had the phone turned off as he wanted to leave London behind. However, after they returned from the Mandela Centre he decided to check and see if he had any messages and he realises that he has obviously forgotten to switch it off again.

‘Is that Keith?’

Annabelle sounds unsure of who she is speaking with.

‘Annabelle? Just hang on a minute, okay?’

He stands and leaves his father alone in front of the television. He shuts the kitchen door behind him, and turns on the kettle before taking his hand away from the phone.

‘What’s the matter? Is everything all right?’

‘Not really. Look, I think you might want to come back to London.’

‘Well, I can come back in the morning. What’s the matter?’

‘Can’t you come back now?’

‘Now? What’s going on?’

‘Laurie’s down at the police station, and they’re questioning him and his friends. Somebody got stabbed.’

‘Stabbed? But Laurie’s okay, right?’

‘He’s fine, but they’re saying he was involved. Look, I think you should come back.’

‘Oh Jesus. I’ll get my things together and call you when I’m on my way.’

‘Are you still with your dad?’

‘Where else am I going to be?’

‘Look, hurry, will you? I’ll wait to hear from you.’

He closes the phone and takes a deep breath. It is probably too late for a train, but he knows that the buses run till well after midnight. As he steps back into the living room he sees his father staring up at him with a look which suggests both curiosity and indifference.

‘That was Annabelle. It looks like I’ve got to go back to London.’

His father sucks his teeth and shakes his head, making it clear that he doesn’t understand why his son is obeying a woman to whom he is no longer married.

‘It’s Laurie,’ he says. ‘Annabelle says he’s got into some kind of trouble.’

His father tosses his head slightly. ‘The woman don’t know how to raise a black child.’

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other and decides to ignore his father’s comment. ‘Listen, Dad, I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk more.’

‘You had something more you wanted to talk to me about?’

He sits by the window of the half-empty bus, and stares across the central reservation at the traffic that, even at this hour of the morning, is charging in the opposite direction and away from
the
capital city. Initially, the bus was cold, but a woman sitting near the driver made a fuss of putting her coat back on, and then her scarf and gloves, and then eventually getting up and speaking with the driver who turned up the heating so that it is now positively tropical. He suspects that his father is not well, for he can see it in his eyes, but he knows that there is only so much that you can say to a man such as his father. He continues to stare at the bright, undimmed, car headlights that flash by in the opposite direction and he chastises himself for not remembering to search in the cardboard box for a picture of his mother. The bus begins to slow now as they approach the end of the motorway, and he stands up and takes his bag down from the overhead rack. He could always send his father a stamped addressed envelope and ask him to mail a photograph to him. This would minimise the awkwardness, and his father might even feel inclined to respond, although the more he thinks about it the less likely it seems that his father would ever bother to go into his son’s old bedroom and deliberately re-engage with his past.

He stands in the lobby of the police station with a distressed-looking Annabelle. He feels somewhat tired, but he is also irritated for although it is three o’clock in the morning these people haven’t bothered to provide any chairs where they might sit down. Annabelle has been here for six hours. She told him that she has repeatedly gone out to the car to try and calm herself down, then come back in to talk with the officer on duty, who keeps repeating the same nonsense about Laurie already having a lawyer with him, so he can’t have anybody else in the interview room. Sensing her frustration rising, he touches Annabelle on the arm.

‘Look there’s a KFC down by the green that’s twenty-four hours. Let’s have a coffee in there.’

He turns to the young officer on duty, who looks as though he is barely out of the academy.

‘You’ve got her mobile number, right?’ The young officer nods. ‘And you’ll call if anything happens? We’re not going to be more than twenty minutes or so.’

‘Don’t worry, sir I’ll call. Go and have your cup of coffee.’

They are the only ones in the KFC, and he carefully balances both cups of coffee on the tray as he sits heavily on the plastic seat opposite her. The slick floor has recently been mopped so the smell of cleaning fluid is overwhelming.

‘Looks like your taking Laurie to the South Bank and talking to him didn’t help much.’

‘You make it sound like it’s my fault.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ She shakes her head. ‘Keith, I don’t know how much more of this behaviour I can take. No wonder I had to get out of social work.’

‘Well we’re not his social workers, we’re his parents.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Keith, I know that. I was just making a point about dealing with stress and young people. Why are you being so difficult?’

She sips at the coffee, then screws up her face in disgust.

‘Do you need more milk?’

‘I don’t think anything is going to help with this stuff. It must have been sitting there for days.’

‘What do you expect from KFC?’ He pushes his coffee away. ‘Are you sure they’re not going to charge him?’

‘That’s what the young man on the desk told me. It appears that two boys have confessed to stabbing the lad, but Laurie is some kind of friend of theirs.’ She pauses. ‘Anyhow, he told me that he didn’t do anything, and I believe him, but he simply shouldn’t be hanging around with hooligans like that.’

Annabelle takes a sip of her coffee, and then she opens another
sachet
of sugar and slowly stirs it into the drink with a wooden stirrer.

‘Look, Keith, I don’t know what else to do with Laurie. Except, I was thinking, what about going on holiday with him?’

‘Who? You and him?’

‘No, the three of us. We could maybe take him somewhere over Christmas and try to show him something else.’

‘You mean that we care for him?’ He pauses. ‘Annabelle, there’s no need to look at me like that. You’re the one who keeps implying that since we split up he seems to have got lost somewhere between the two of us.’

‘Look, all I’m saying is that we should consider taking a break together, but if you don’t want to then that’s fine. If Mummy wasn’t so out of it I’d have probably suggested that she join the two of us on a skiing holiday or something, but that’s no longer an option so I’m trying to be sensible. I’m trying to include you, Keith.’

‘What about Bruce?’

‘That’s pretty much over.’ She pauses. ‘Are you happy?’

‘It’s none of my business.’

‘I don’t care what you say, he’s a nice guy. But I’ve got other priorities, as should you.’ Again she pauses. ‘Our son, Keith.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Annabelle.’

‘Well pay attention.’

‘Listen, we’re both tired. Can we talk about this in the morning? Right now let’s just go back to the station and get Laurie. This coffee stinks and I’d like to be there when they let him out.’

They step out of the KFC, and into the eerily quiet street. Right outside the twenty-four-hour kebab shop, he notices a badly parked top-of-the-line Mercedes which strikes him as strangely incongruous. As they pass by he can see that the alarm is primed, for an energetic sequence of flashing red and amber
lights
illuminates a monitor on the dashboard. Annabelle’s phone begins to ring and she dives quickly into her handbag and retrieves it. He watches as she listens and nods her head, and then she flips the phone shut.

‘Apparently he’s ready to go home now.’

‘Was that the officer on the desk?’

She shakes her head. ‘No, the lawyer. He says there are no charges, but he’ll wait until we’re there to explain more fully.’

‘Jesus, that’s big of him.’

‘Keith, do me a favour and try to go easy on Laurie. He was scared when I saw him earlier. He’s not as tough as he makes out. In fact, he’s still a boy in lots of ways.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying he’s not you, Keith. We didn’t bring him up like you were brought up, remember? No white working-class estate and National Front kids on every other street corner. In fact, sometimes I don’t think he’s very streetwise at all.’ Annabelle looks closely at him, and then she opens her arms wide. ‘All right, I admit it. I can be a bit of a wimp. In this sense he’s my son, I get it.’

He nods, and then notices the light on her face. She is standing directly beneath a lamppost.

‘The truth is, I just don’t want you to forget that he’s my son, too, warts and all, and that makes him softer, okay?’

He lies in his own bed for the first time in three days and he thinks of Annabelle standing beneath the lamppost. She is still a beautiful woman, even though her black hair is now totally grey, and the veins on her neck and on the backs of her hands seem to be much more prominent than in the past. As far as he is concerned, Annabelle still looks like the posh teenager he met all those years ago on that night at the theatre. Serene, composed,
and
long before she leaned over and began to speak he had an idea of exactly what she would sound like.

When he and Annabelle reached the police station, Laurie was clearly surprised to see his father with his mother.

‘You all right?’

Laurie looked at his father and nodded in response to the question.

‘You must be knackered.’

Again his son nodded, and then Annabelle hugged Laurie tightly. He turned to the young officer on duty.

‘We can go now, right?’

‘Yeah, you can take him away. Your lawyer had to dash off. He says to call him in the morning.’

He stared at the officer, and wanted to say something in response, but for the sake of his son he decided to leave in silence.

Annabelle opened the passenger door and let Laurie climb into the front seat. She shut the door after him and then turned to face her former husband.

‘I can give you a ride home, if you like.’

‘Don’t worry, but thanks. I’ll have no problem walking it.’

‘Are you sure?’ He nodded then lifted his sports bag up and on to his shoulder. ‘So, what time can you come by tomorrow?’

‘You mean to talk to him again?’

‘Keep your voice down.’ Annabelle glanced quickly at Laurie, who was slumped in the passenger seat. ‘I don’t know what else to suggest, Keith. I’m going to have a sit down with him in the morning, but he really needs to hear it from you. And I don’t mean going to football or to the cinema. I mean really sitting down and talking to him.’

She turned from him and looked again at their son, who had tilted back the front seat and balled up his jumper into a temporary pillow.

‘Maybe take him to your flat.’ She paused. ‘It’s only a suggestion, but we have to do something to keep him in our sphere.’

‘“In our sphere?” What kind of talk is that? He’s not an orbiting planet, you know. He’s our son.’

‘Keith, I’m too tired to play semantic games with you. You know what I mean. He maybe needs to spend some time with you. Maybe he needs to stay with you for a while.’

‘Of course I’ll talk to him.’ He paused. ‘I’ll come over in the morning, but it won’t be early.’

‘Look, I should get him back home.’

Annabelle smiled quickly, and then she turned and climbed into the hatchback. The sound of the door slamming echoed ominously, and then lingered. He watched the lights snap on and then he heard the engine sputter to life. Only after she had pulled away, and passed out of sight, did he turn and begin to walk slowly through the gloomily silent streets of west London. As he crossed Uxbridge Road he saw a young couple on the other side of the street that, judging by the way they were laughing and looking at each other, had clearly just made love. They were still naked although they were now fully dressed. He tried to look inconspicuous, but then it occurred to him that they hadn’t even seen him. He moved his bag from one shoulder to the other and tried to stay out of the early winter gusts as he ducked his head and pressed on towards Wilton Road.

HE SLEEPS LATE
, but it is the sound of somebody practically leaning against his doorbell that finally wakes him up. He rubs his eyes and then throws back the covers. Who the hell could it be at this hour? People don’t just drop by unannounced. Well certainly not to his place. When he lived with Annabelle the postman would occasionally call with boxes of manuscripts for her to read, but even he seemed to understand that it was best just to leave things on the doorstep. Stretching out a hand, he picks up the alarm clock, and he is surprised to see that it is now nearly twelve noon. He pulls on his T-shirt and his boxers, before opening the bedroom door and passing into the living room. He crosses the room and looks out, but unless he actually opens the window and leans forward it is impossible to see who is at the door. The sound of the doorbell is still ringing in his ears, and so he drowsily grabs a pair of tracksuit bottoms and then steps into his training shoes without bothering to undo the laces. He lumbers down the stairs and opens the front door, and
he
immediately recognises the man standing before him as Danuta’s friend, Rolf, but it is difficult to know if the agitated individual is frightened, or slightly crazed. His hair is ruffled and matted, as though he has not slept in days, and his thin khaki anorak is clearly inadequate on such a bitterly cold day.

‘Danuta is gone. Do you know where she is?’

So, the young man has no time for introductions. For a moment he thinks about chastising him, but given the distracted look in Rolf’s eyes he deems it politic to just answer.

‘I saw Danuta maybe three or four days ago. Is she all right?’

‘This is a serious matter.’ Rolf takes a small step forward. He raises a finger. ‘Do you know where she is?’

He now understands that there is no possibility that he will be inviting this hot-tempered man inside, so he makes sure that he can slam the door shut if necessary.

‘I’ve just explained, I haven’t seen Danuta in a while. She told me that she was going to check into a hostel, apparently the same one that she stayed in when she first came to London. Have you tried there?’

‘She spent one night there, but nobody has seen her since then. Did you go somewhere with her?’

‘Go where with her?’ He laughs now. ‘I’m here. I’ve been away, but it had nothing to do with Danuta.’

The man takes another half-step towards him. ‘I come here every day to look for both of you. Because you are a rich man, you think this is funny?’

‘Look, Rolf. It is Rolf, isn’t it? Maybe she’s gone back to Poland. Have you checked with her friends or family back there?’

‘Do you think I am stupid?’

Rolf speaks with an accent that becomes heavier and more difficult to understand the angrier he becomes.

‘Nobody said that you were stupid.’

‘She gave me a telephone number in Poland and I called. Apparently, her husband and three children left Warsaw last year. The people who answered the telephone had no address for them, and they did not even know that Danuta was in England.’

‘She has a husband and three children?’

‘You are just as foolish as she said you were.’ Rolf laughs and then he shakes his head. ‘Of course she did not tell you.’

‘What do you mean?’ He opens the door a little wider. ‘I don’t think I’m following you.’

‘She told everybody at the language school that you were in love with her and also obsessed with some stupid book about music.’ Rolf points. ‘Maybe she took your things too?’

‘Took what things?’

‘I let her stay with me, and I slept on the floor next to her like an idiot. She pays no rent. I buy all the food, I buy presents for her, and then she takes my wallet and my credit card and disappears. I am not a rich man like you. I work in a building site and to begin with I am a rough sleeper in England. Anywhere so long as I can sleep, under bridges, in the park, I do not care. But then I get a room. A room with a divan, and I wash, cook, eat in this one room, but this is not civilised even if it is how the English do it. Then I must get a second job as a cleaner to pay for the stinking room, and so I invite Danuta to share my room and come and help with the cleaning job, for she is not happy. I help her, but then she takes everything. I thought she had come to you, or maybe she has done the same thing to you, I don’t know?’

The Polish girl did nothing to him, except provide a distraction. He was tempted. Can he admit this? Will this make him Rolf’s enemy?

‘I asked her to leave, but not because she took anything. Look, do you want to come inside?’ He moves to one side, but Rolf stares blankly at him.

‘Come inside for what?’

‘Well, it
is
cold.’

Rolf shrugs his shoulders. ‘I am not cold.’

‘Well I am.’ He looks at Rolf, who continues to stare back at him. He can see that the teeth of the plastic zip on Rolf’s anorak are misaligned, so that the front of his jacket is poorly secured and exposing the overwrought young man to the biting wind. He decides that he will not bother to point this out to Rolf. ‘So she used to laugh at me?’

‘Well, you waited outside the language school for her.’

‘Only once. Perhaps twice, but I didn’t know that she was married with children.’

‘Danuta uses men. She is not a respectable woman.’

‘I see. Well what about the police? You could report her as a missing person. They must keep files on such people.’ He can feel Rolf’s eyes boring into him. ‘Well she
is
missing, isn’t she?’

‘I just want my things. My CD player, my DVDs, my sunglasses, my watch. She took one thousand pounds of my money from a cash machine and now she is gone. I have only my clothes, but why should the English police care what one foreigner does to another foreigner? She is probably somewhere in Poland with her family, so what are your English police going to do? I will tell you the truth, English attitudes disappoint me. Do you know what it is like to stand in a shop with money in your pocket and discover that nobody wants to serve you? Telling you with their eyes before you are even asking for anything. Do you know what this is like or how it feels?’ The man points to his head. ‘Can you imagine this?’

He wonders if he should offer Rolf some money, but maybe this is part of some elaborate ruse that Danuta and Rolf have concocted together. He looks again at Rolf, who exudes both anger and hangdog confusion in equal part. A watery line of
sweat
decorates the young man’s upper lip. No, he is sure now that Danuta has stolen from this Rolf, and that the poor fellow is not going to get his money back. One moment of weakness, such as offering to let her stay at Wilton Road while he went away, or even falling asleep while she was under his roof, could have led to his being the one who was frantically charging about London in a futile attempt to track down his possessions. Finally, he has been the recipient of a stroke of good fortune, but it seems somewhat insensitive to revel in the moment while poor Rolf hops anxiously from foot to foot before him. He decides that he should offer Rolf a few pounds to help him out, but before he can frame his proposal in a manner that suggests kinship as opposed to charity, Rolf offers a hand, which he shakes.

‘Okay,’ says Rolf. ‘I will leave you now. I am sorry to disturb you.’

‘It’s not a problem. I’m just sorry this has happened to you.’

Rolf looks as though he is going to say something further, but the distressed-looking blond boy simply turns on his heel and half walks, half runs down the path and then disappears from view leaving him marooned on his own doorstep.

He pours the hot water on to the instant coffee granules and stirs vigorously, then he carries the steaming cup into the living room. At least crazy Rolf has enabled him to get out of bed before any more of the day is wasted. He pushes the magazines and articles about hip-hop to one side and he rests his cup of coffee on the table. He had deliberately left the research material there before going north to see his father, his rationale being that the sight of the books and papers might give him a rolling start back into the book once he had returned, but suddenly he is embarrassed. This book will never be written. He hears himself say the words out loud. This stupid book will never be written. He wants to pick up the magazines and articles and dump the
lot
of them in the tall swing bin in the kitchen. Just clear everything out right now and stop messing about. It’s not as though he has been getting out of bed in the morning with a burning desire to revise what he has done the previous day, before enthusiastically pressing on to a new chapter. This has happened maybe twice, or at most three times, but during the past few days with his father he hasn’t given the book a second thought. Now that he is once again faced with the evidence of his self-appointed task he feels slightly nauseous. He stands and gathers up the magazines and articles, and then he opens a drawer and pushes everything in. It is a sort of halfway compromise between actually throwing the stuff out and temporarily getting it out of his sight, but having made the material disappear from view he now feels relieved. The books that are stacked like a precarious chimney on the floor beside his desk will have to wait. They are not so easily dispensable. He picks his watch up from the coffee table and he is startled to be reminded of the time. He will take a shower and get dressed, and then he knows what he must do.

He arrives at Annabelle’s house feeling slightly light-headed. On the way over he stopped in at the Queen Caroline for an early afternoon pint of lager, having felt the need to steady his nerves after the unannounced visit from Rolf. He understood that narrowly escaping being ripped off by Danuta should be seen as a wake-up call, reminding him that he has to drastically change his behaviour, but he remains confused. If Danuta really has a husband, does this man know what she gets up to in England? Probably not, he decided, but then again, how does she manage to dupe him, and everybody she meets in England? There must be some small oasis of honesty and integrity in the woman’s life. Attending the language school in Acton, and pretending that she’s learning English so she can open an international
kindergarten,
and claiming to have to hold down a cleaning job at night to pay for all of this, are most likely familiar lies that she is used to spinning. There must be all sorts of desperate men who are eager to restart their lives and who would give anything to do so with a striking woman like Danuta by their side. Not just good-looking Latvians such as Rolf, but wealthy Arabs from the Middle East, and even Japanese business types. He carried his pint of lager from the bar and found his familiar seat in the corner of the pub, but immediately realised he would have to tune out the noise of two lads seated nearby who were trying to program their mobiles to ring to rap ditties from a menu they were busily sampling. The pit bull terrier at their feet sat impassively, with one Doc-Marten-clad boot clamping the dog’s lead tight against the beer-sodden carpet. It is hard for him to see where, exactly, he might fit into Danuta’s scheme of things, but Rolf was probably right when he claimed that she was just fooling with him and waiting for the opportunity to rob him. But she didn’t take anything, which means that it is still possible that some part of her simply liked him for who he was. A mobile phone Frisbee-ed across the pub and clattered into the wall, and the two lads collapsed into a heap of uncontrollable laughter. The pit bull terrier sprang to retrieve it, but the lead remained trapped beneath a booted foot.

He will have to change his behaviour, which is not an altogether comfortable thing to admit, but it is true. He is in his late forties, and shamelessly flirting with young women is bound to land him in trouble. For over an hour he sat and quietly sipped at his pint while he thought idly about how to make changes to his life, and as he did so he half listened to somebody else’s questionable jukebox selection. He remains open to being persuaded that contemporary pop music has some virtues, but whatever they might be they continue to reside beyond him. Having finished
his
pint he stood up and, carefully avoiding the dog, he crossed to the bar and returned the empty glass and then, politely declining the barman’s routine offer of a top-up, he walked out.

Annabelle opens the door and he can see that she has been crying. The delicate skin beneath each eye has darkened as though bruised, and her eyes are moist.

‘He’s gone out.’

‘Gone out where? I thought we were going to have a talk with him.’

‘Do you want to come in?’

She leaves the door and walks back into the house. He wipes his feet on the doormat before stepping inside and quietly closing the door behind him. Annabelle has already disappeared, and so he walks down the short corridor and into the kitchen, where he discovers her leaning against the cooker.

‘He just said that he had to go and sort something out and so he left. I told him to wait for you to come round, but he said that he didn’t have time and that was that. Off he went.’

Annabelle looks exhausted, and her bottom lip begins to tremble as though she wants to cry again. He knows that she should be at work, but he assumes that she has already phoned in and informed her colleagues that the BBC will just have to manage without her today.

‘Do you want me to go and look for him? Maybe he’s hanging out by the Westway where you found him with that group of kids with mountain bikes.’

‘And if he’s there what are you going to do? Smack his bum and bring him home? He’s seventeen, nearly eighteen. I just want to know that he’s all right, that’s all. Is that too much to ask? But nothing ever changes, does it? He’s always got to do things his own way. Even as a baby, he always slept soundly, but never when I wanted him to. No wonder I always felt tired or ill.’

Annabelle snatches a pastel-coloured tissue from a box on the kitchen counter top and she quickly dabs at her eyes and then blows her nose.

‘So you don’t think I should bother going to look for him then?’

‘I don’t see the point. I’ve called and he’s not picking up, so I suppose we’ll just have to wait here until he comes back. Would you like a cup of tea?’