Sleep came easily. Saul dreamed of being cold, and woke once in the night to pull his duvet closer. He dreamed of slamming, a heavy beating noise, so loud it pulled him out of sleep and he realized it was real, it was there. Adrenaline surged through him, making him tremble. His heart quivered and lurched as he swung out of bed.
It was icy in the flat. Someone was pounding on the front door.
The noise would not stop, it was frightening him. He was shaking, disorientated. It was not yet light. Saul
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glanced at his clock. It was a little after six. He stumbled into the hall. The horrible bang bang bang was incessant, and now he could hear shouting as well, distorted and unintelligible.
He fought into a shin and shouted: ‘Who is it?’
The slamming did not stop. He called out again, and this time a voice was raised above the din.
‘Police!’
Saul struggled to clear his head. With a sudden panic he thought of the small stash of dope in his drawer, but that was absurd. He was no drugs kingpin, no one would waste a dawn raid on him. He was reaching out to open the door, his heart still tearing, when he suddenly remembered to check that they were who they claimed, but it was too late now, the door flew back and knocked him down as a torrent of bodies streamed into the flat.
Blue trousers and big shoes all around him. Saul was yanked to his feet. He started to flail at the intruders. Anger waxed with his fear. He tried to yell but someone smacked him in the stomach and he doubled up. Voices were reverberating everywhere around him, making no sense.
‘... cold like a bastard ...’
‘... cocky little cunt ...’
‘... fucking glass, watch yourself...’
‘... his son, or what? High as a fucking kite, must be ...’
And above all these voices he could hear a weather forecast, the cheery tones of a breakfast television presenter. Saul struggled to turn and face the men who were holding him so tight.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he gasped. Without speaking, the men propelled him into the sitting room.
The room was full of police, but Saul saw straight through them. He saw the television first: the woman in the bright suit was warning him it would be chilly again today. On the sofa was a plate of congealed pasta, and a half-drunk glass of beer sat on the floor. Cold gusts of air caught at him and he looked up at the window, out over houses. The curtains were billowing dramatically. He saw that jags of glass littered the floor. There was almost no glass left in the window-frame, only a few shards around the edges.
Saul sagged with terror and tried to pull himself to the window.
A thin man in civilian clothes turned and saw him.
‘Down the station now,’ he shouted at Saul’s captors.
Saul was spun on his heels. The room turned around him like a funfair ride, the rows of books and his father’s small pictures rushing past him. He struggled to turn back.
‘Dad!’he shouted.’Dad!’
He was pulled effortlessly out of the flat. The dark of the corridor was pierced by slivers of light spilling out of doors. Saul saw uncomprehending faces and hands clutching at dressing-gowns, as he was hauled
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towards the lift. Neighbours in pyjamas were staring at him. He bellowed at them as he passed.
He still could not see the men holding him. He shouted at them, begging to know what was going on, pleading, threatening and railing.
‘Where’s my dad? What’s going on?’
‘Shut up.’
‘What’s going on?’
Something slammed into his kidneys, not hard but with the threat of greater force. ‘Shut up.’ The lift door closed behind them.
‘What’s happened to my fucking dad!’
As soon as he had seen the broken window a voice inside Saul had spoken quietly. He had not been able to hear it clearly until now. Inside the flat the brutal crunch of boots and the swearing had drowned it out. But here where he had been dragged, in the relative silence of the lift, he could hear it whispering.
Dead, it said. Dad’s dead.
Saul’s knees buckled. The men behind him held him upright, but he was utterly weak in their arms. He moaned.
‘Where’s my dad?’ he pleaded.
The light outside was the colour of the clouds. Blue strobes swirled on a mass of police cars, staining the drab buildings. The frozen air cleared Saul’s head. He tugged desperately at the arms holding him as he struggled to see over the hedges that ringed Terragon Mansions. He saw faces staring down from the hole that was his father’s window. He saw the glint of a million splinters of glass covering the dying grass.
He saw a mass of uniformed police frozen in a threatening diorama. All their faces were turned to him.
One held a roll of tape covered in crime scene warnings, a tape he was stretching around stakes in the ground, circumscribing a piece of the earth. Inside the chosen area he saw one man kneeling before a dark shape on the lawn. The man was staring at him like all the others. His body obscured the untidy thing. Saul was swept past before he could see any more.
He was pushed into one of the cars, lightheaded now, hardly able to feel a thing. His breath came very fast. Somewhere along the line handcuffs had been snapped onto his wrists. He shouted again at the men in front, but they ignored him.
The streets rolled by.
They put him in a cell, gave him a cup of tea and warmer clothes: a grey cardigan and corduroy trousers that stank of alcohol. Saul sat huddled in a stranger’s clothes. He waited for a long time.
He lay on the bed, draped the thin blanket around him.
Sometimes he heard the voice inside him. Suicide, it said. Dad’s committed suicide.
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Sometimes he would argue with it. It was a ridiculous idea, something his father could never do. Then it would convince him and he might start to hyperventilate, to panic. He closed his ears to it. He kept it quiet.
He would not listen to rumours, even if they came from inside himself.
No one had told him why he was there. Whenever footsteps went by outside he would shout, sometimes swearing, demanding to know what was happening. Sometimes the footsteps would stop and the grille would be lifted on the door. ‘We’re sorry for the delay,’ a voice would say. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as we can,’ or ‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘You can’t keep me here,’ he yelled at one point. ‘What’s going on?’ His voice echoed around empty corridors.
Saul sat on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
A fine network of cracks spread out from one corner. Saul followed them with his eyes, allowing himself to be mesmerized.
Why are you here? the voice inside whispered to him nervously. Why do they want you? Why won’t they speak to you?
Saul sat and stared at the cracks and ignored the voice.
After a long time he heard the key in the lock. Two uniformed policemen entered, followed by the thin man Saul had seen in his father’s flat. The man was dressed in the same brown suit and ugly tan raincoat.
He stared at Saul, who returned his gaze from beneath the dirty blanket, forlorn and pathetic and aggressive. When the thin man spoke his voice was much softer than Saul would have imagined.
‘Mr Garamond,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead.’
Saul gazed at him. That much was obvious surely, he felt like shouting, but tears stopped him. He tried to speak through his streaming eyes and nose, but could issue nothing but a sob. He wept noisily for a minute, then struggled to control himself. He sniffed back tears like a baby and wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve. The three policemen stood and watched him impassively until he had controlled himself a little more.
‘What’s going on?’ he croaked.
‘I was hoping you might be able to tell us that, Saul,’ said the thin man. His voice remained quite impassive. “I’m Detective Inspector Crowley, Saul. Now, I’m going to ask you a few questions
...’
‘What happened to Dad?’ Saul interrupted. There was a pause.
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‘He fell from the window, Saul,’ Crowley said. ‘It’s a long way up. I don’t think he suffered any.’ There was a pause. ‘Did you not realize what had happened to your dad, Saul?’
‘I thought maybe something... I saw in the garden ... Why am I here? Saul was shaking.
Crowley pursed his lips and moved a little closer. ‘Well, Saul, first let me apologize for how long you’ve been waiting. It’s been very hectic out here. I had hoped someone might come and take care of you, but it seems no one has. I’m sorry about that. I’ll be having a few words.
‘As to why you’re here, well, it was all a bit confused back there. We get a call from a neighbour saying there’s someone lying out front of the building, we go in, there you are, we don’t know who you are ...
you can see how it all gets out of hand. Anyway, you’re here, long and short of it, in the hope that you can tell us your side of the story.’
Saul stared at Crowley. ‘My side? he shouted. ‘My side of what?
I’ve got home and my dad’s ...’
Crowley shushed him, his hands up, placating, nodding.
‘I know, I know, Saul. We’ve just got to understand what happened. I want you to come with me.’ He gave a sad little smile as he said this. He looked down at Saul sitting on the bed; dirty, smelly, in strange clothes, confused, pugnacious, tear-stained and orphaned. Crowley’s face creased with what looked like concern.
‘I want to ask you some questions.’
Once, when he was three, Saul was sitting on his father’s shoulders, coming home from the park. They had passed a group of workmen repairing a road, and Saul had tangled his hands in his father’s hair and leaned over and gazed at the bubbling pot of tar his father pointed out: the pot heating on the van, and the big metal stick they used to stir it. His nose was filled with the thick smell of tar, and as Saul gazed into the simmering glop he remembered the witch’s cauldron in Hansel and Gretel and he was seized with the sudden terror that he would fall into the tar and be cooked alive. And Saul had squirmed backwards and his father had stopped and asked him what was the matter. When he understood he had taken Saul off his shoulders and walked with him over to the workmen, who had leaned on their shovels and grinned quizzically at the anxious child. Saul’s father had leaned down and whispered encouragement into his ear, and Saul had asked the men what the tar was. The men had told him about how they would spread it thin and put it on the road, and they had stirred it for him as his father held him. He did not fall in. And he was still afraid, but not as much as he had been, and he knew why his father had made him find out about the tar, and he had been brave.
A mug of milky tea coagulated slowly in front of him. A bored-looking constable stood by the door of
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the bare room. A rhythmic metallic wheeze issued from the tape-recorder on the table. Crowley sat opposite him, his arms folded, his face impassive. ‘Tell me about your father.’
Saul’s father had been racked with a desperate embarrassment whenever his son came home with girls.
It was very important to him that he should not seem distant or old-fashioned, and in a ghastly miscalculation he had tried to put Saul’s guests at their ease. He was terrified that he would say the wrong thing. The struggle not to bolt for his own room stiffened him. He would stand uneasily in the doorway, a grim smile clamped to his face, his voice firm and serious as he asked the terrified fifteen-year-olds what they were doing at school and whether they enjoyed it. Saul would gaze at his father and will him to leave. He would stare furiously at the floor as his father stolidly discussed the weather and GCSE English.
‘I’ve heard that sometimes you argued. Is that true, Saul? Tell me about that.’
When Saul was ten, the time he liked most was in the mornings. Saul’s father left for work on the railways early, and Saul had half an hour to himself in the flat. He would wander around and stare at the titles of the books his father left lying on all the surfaces: books about money and politics and history. His father would always pay close attention to what Saul was doing in history at school, asking what the teachers had said. He would lean over his chair, urging Saul not to believe everything his history teacher told him. He would thrust books at his son, stare at them, become distracted, take them back, flick through the pages, murmur that Saul was perhaps too young. He would ask his son what he thought about the issues they discussed. He took Saul’s opinions very seriously. Sometimes these discussions bored Saul. More often they made him feel uneasy at the sudden welter of ideas, but inspired.
‘Did your father ever make you feel guilty, Saul?’
Something had been poisoned between the two of them when Saul was about sixteen. He had been sure this was an awkwardness that would pass, but once it had taken root the bitterness would not go. Saul’s father forgot how to talk to him. He had nothing more to teach and nothing more to say. Saul was angry with his father’s disappointment. His father was disappointed at his laziness and his lack of political fervour. Saul could not make his father feel at ease, and his father was disappointed at that. Saul had stopped going on the marches and the demonstrations, and his father had stopped asking him. Every once in a while there would be an argument. Doors would slam. More usually there was nothing.
Saul’s father was bad at accepting presents. He never took women to the flat when his son was there.
Once when the twelve-year-old Saul was being bullied, his father came into the school unannounced and harangued the teachers, to Saul’s profound embarrassment.
‘Do you miss your mother, Saul? Are you sorry you never knew her?’
Saul’s father was a short man with powerful shoulders and a body like a thick pillar. He had thinning grey hair and grey eyes.
The previous Christmas he had given Saul a book by Lenin. Saul’s friends had laughed at how little the ageing man knew his son, but Saul had not felt any scorn—only loss. He understood what his father was trying to offer him.