Mercy Seat (12 page)

She left us to find her purse, then headed out without a word.

Do you want breakfast? Jenny said eventually.

No. I'll just get a coffee.

A young seagull, almost full-grown but still in its grey herringbone plumage flapped onto the sill. I moved to close the sash window and it launched itself back into the air with a scream.

Christ, it almost flew right in, Jenny said, startled.

I glanced down at Michael to see if he'd noticed, but his eyes were shut fast.

The helicopter reached the headland, then swung back across the mouth of the bay. It was farther out now, and the sound of it was much fainter.

The phone in the corridor started ringing. I'll get it, I said.

Hey, Luke, Anzani said when I answered it. I need a favour, ok? I need someone to drive my van for a day or two. How would you like that? Just a few days. It's better money than the warehouse. You know how to drive, Luke, eh?

I told him I did, but didn't tell him that the last time I'd driven anything other than the tractor on Pugh's farm was when I took my driving test almost three years before.

It's just deliveries. A few afternoons. My boy can cover some of the time, but not all, you know? My real driver, Mike, he's off in the hospital for a couple of days.

Ok, I said, that should be fine.

Good. I'll need you tomorrow at three.

When I went back through and told Jenny the arrangement she said she thought it was all right. Now that she was taking more holidays it wouldn't be so awkward with Michael. It means he'll have to come with us if Christine and me go anywhere, but that's ok, she said. She knew we had a baby when she decided to come.

Well. I don't think she'd mind anyway.

Jenny didn't answer. I could tell she was still angry, or hurt, from what I'd told her the night before, but I could think of nothing I could do or say about that. I wondered if she might confront Christine at some point. Clearly she
hadn't yet.

I'll make coffee, I said, and with that Christine opened the door and brought the shopping in.

Chris, we'll have to change some of our plans for the week, Jenny said flatly.

Why? What's wrong, her sister replied, but without a trace of disappointment or surprise.

Luke has to work some afternoons now. Anzani phoned when you were out and asked him to drive the delivery van this week, so he won't be able to look after Michael.

It's not a problem, Christine breezed.

I stared at her. I don't think I'd ever seen her so relaxed and carefree-looking. She seemed a completely different person to the inscrutable drunk of the night before.

Where do you have to go in the van? she asked, facing me with a bright, open smile.

I don't know. From what he said, mainly in town, but he sells wholesale to quite a few places so he'll probably have me going out to some of the villages, too.

Well, I could help Luke some days, she said to Jenny, looking her in the eye. I could be his navigator. I'd like to see some of the little places out of town. Would you mind that? She turned to me again, so that it wasn't clear which of us she'd addressed the question to.

That's fine by me, I said.

Is that all right? she asked Jenny directly then. Do you mind?

Jenny turned away, back to the window and the sea. There was no sign of the helicopter now. She squeezed Michael and rocked him gently. No, she said. Why would I mind?

Six

It seems strange and defeating to me, the older I've become and the more I've seen, that while the life of the mind can be so mysterious and subtle, the life of the body is as comic and crude and predictable as graffiti. The one life carries the other into all kinds of slapstick and disasters, over and over again; and the body's is the stronger life, and does the carrying, whatever else we like to pretend. And for everyone other than fanatics or saints, there seems to be no other way to love.

My father left my mother the morning she caught him hunched and grunting over the brassy blond manageress of a caravan park in Porthcawl. We'd gone there as usual for our yearly holiday and he'd been late coming back from her office, where he'd said he was going to complain about a leak in the Gents toilet block. They were using her desk, my mother told me later that night, babbling more to herself than to me in a stunned, mechanical attempt to make sense of this thing that she'd stepped onto like a landmine.

I don't know if my mother would have forgiven him in time, or at least grown to tolerate the memory, because he never gave her the chance. He declared his love for the woman – a youngish widower called Mrs Hooper who'd been left the fairly lucrative business – and refused point blank to take us home. Instead, he paid for the big black
taxi that ferried my mother and me away, exhausted and dazed after a night of tears and rain that I still can't bring to mind without feeling physically ill.

When I was nine, a couple of years after this, he took it into his head that I should visit for a weekend in the summer holidays, more from a sense of entitlement than any serious desire to spend time with me I think, and against my mother's raging and pleading I agreed. The chance of gaining any kind of recognition from him overrode every other instinct and pressure.

There was no chance of it reconnecting us, of course. He'd diversified the business by buying up a pub just down the road from the caravan park – The Oak – and I spent most of the weekend in the beer garden there, where a tall, spreading oak tree did in fact grow and shade the lunchtime drinkers. I whiled away the hours reading the American comic books that my step-brother owned and had been instructed to share with me. I'd had my own instructions from my father on arrival at the bus station: to ‘make damn sure you make an effort with him, and don't take advantage just because he's not the full shilling, and get along nice.'

It wasn't difficult to obey. Jason, the woman's only child, was three years older than me in age but simple-minded and good natured. Left alone with him in the beer garden for the first time he told me that I could learn his name best by thinking of it as Jasun. Jasun-up-in-the-sky, he explained. We pored over well-thumbed copies of The Silver Surfer together – American comics were exotic to me, though I'd seen other boys at school reading and swapping them of course – and I read the more complex pieces of dialogue out loud for him, as utterly swept up by
the grand, melancholy plots as Jason. At night I took them to bed with me and read them cover to cover again until I fell asleep, already in a dream of gliding in silence, silver skinned, nameless, history-less and utterly alone, through an ocean of rolling planets and stars, none of them home.

When the weekend was over I knew in my boy's heart that the experiment, for all my wild, desperate hopes, had failed. My father had been at an utter, shamefaced loss whenever he'd run out of excuses about the busyness of his work and simply had to make some kind of conversation with me. Maybe it was delayed guilt for that awful, endless night I'd spent unable to comfort my broken mother in the caravan, or for the pitiful cowardice he'd shown in ordering that taxi for us, or maybe it was plain, male boredom; either way, I know we both felt the strain of having to pretend that the visit might be repeated, knowing full well that it wouldn't.

Just before my mother's death my father abandoned his second family for the gold mines of Australia, and nobody from those days, as far as I know, has ever heard from him since.

Before Michael was born, and for months after, I used to wake in the early hours worrying, having had no kind of fatherly example to follow. And God knows I was right to be afraid. But I didn't imagine I could lose him so completely; lose him as if I'd let him vanish into space. Michael, Michael: my father's own name, who vanished to the other side of the world, into another continent's dusty ground. And Michael my only son. Where are you now? Where have you gone? Jason, we could have named him if I'd known. Another poor Jason-up-in-the-sky.

*

I remember Jenny waking me once, when Michael was nearly due and we hadn't long moved into our rooms at Bethesda. She was sat up in bed, shivering, but not making any noise except for her breath catching and giving. When she saw I was awake she stopped juddering and just sat hunched over in the bed, not answering when I asked her what was wrong.

In the end she said, I had such a vivid dream that you were dead. Lying beside me dead. All blue and cold.

By the time she'd brought herself to speak I could feel myself drifting back into sleep, so I made myself sit up alongside her.

Don't sit up, she said, but I stayed there anyway.

It was the first time in months that Jenny had been woken by a nightmare. When we first started living together it happened every couple of days or so, and if it wasn't that, it was talking wildly in her sleep, whole strange arguments and bargainings, even when she was supposed to be knocked out with pills. I dreaded it, but it had gradually got better, and because there was nothing that seemed to disturb the surface of her waking life I quickly forgot each episode in the routine of the daytimes that followed.

I couldn't get out of the dream, she said now, even though I knew I was dreaming, and when I woke up properly it was so quiet I really felt it was true. I was so afraid. I was too afraid to move and touch you. I didn't know what to do. Christ, she said, then started half laughing, half sobbing. She stopped quite quickly and straightened her back for a big, clearing sigh. I'm wide awake now, she said. I'm so thirsty.

I'll get some water, I said. It was a warm, airless night and my mouth was parched too.

Don't put the light on, she said.

Are you sure?

Yes. Don't, please.

I touched her arm to reassure her, then climbed out of bed.

Make tea, she called softly as I got to the bedroom door.

I boiled the kettle in the living room and made two mugs of weak tea. I carried them back through into the bedroom, leaving the door open behind me so enough light would get in to show me what I was doing.

We sat up another hour or so and Jenny ended up talking about her father, and how her mother, every morning for months after the split, made the two girls promise to tell her if he ever turned up at the school to try and see them, or if he ever gave them any cards or letters to read. I remember I was surprised and interested because it was something she hardly ever mentioned. She told me that after a while Christine rebelled and started going into hysterics every time she was questioned about him, and it seemed that he must have been seeing her somehow because when the appeal for custody came through she started the long, remorseless mutiny.

Did you want to go with him too? I asked.

Even in the gloom I could see her staring at me as if I were mad. No, she said. I knew by then he was a monster. I was old enough to understand.

I didn't ask what she meant, though now of course I wish I had. Maybe everything then would have turned out differently, all the rest of our lives. But I didn't, and I never did; I was too wary, or innocent, or lazy, and what
happened to us happened. Maybe I resisted knowing because we'd both seen so much damage caused by love already in our parents' lives and more than anything I wanted our own lives to escape all that, to not get too close and become infected. I don't know, and didn't know then, but it was one of those lonely, unsignposted crossroads in the life of the mind. Maybe the old Blues singers were right, and the devil waits there for us, patient, under a big empty sky, kicking his heels in the dust. Instead I asked, why did Christine want to go with him?

She pinched her lower lip between her front teeth and shook her head. It was Christine he wanted. And she was younger. Maybe she didn't know any better. And we were terrible to each other, you know, the way sisters can be. Maybe she wanted to get away from me.

That was one of the very few times before her father's death that Jenny ever mentioned Christine. For a long time after I'd got to know her she was happy for me to think she was an only child – her mother too, on the few occasions I met her – and I remember sitting in bed that night wondering if she'd tell me anything more about this shadowy, wilful little stranger now that she'd got onto the subject, but it didn't happen. And as so often in the years to come, I failed to help bring anything into the light. She fell silent for a while and finished her tea.

I'm frightened about this, too, she said eventually, and let her hand drift over her stomach.

In the dark, an image of what was under her palm came into my mind – a tiny, stubborn, blind clot of tissue, feeding on the blood. I swilled back the last of my tea.

I'm scared I won't be allowed to keep it, like a punishment, she said. She avoided looking at me. Do you
know what I mean? Do you ever feel that too?

A punishment for what? I said. That doesn't make sense. You can't think like that.

I know it's mad; that's sort of what I mean.

I didn't mean it like that. I didn't mean mad; I meant stupid. Pointless.

There was quiet between us for a while, and I wished I hadn't answered her at all. I'm sorry, I said at last. I didn't mean that you were stupid. I just meant that I didn't understand. I don't like it when you talk like that. I don't know what to say.

She reached out for a tissue from the bedside table and blew her nose. I'm just tired of losing things, she said. I'm sorry too. Let's go to sleep. I just wanted to tell you, that's all.

Seven

Before we leave to meet Jenny at the Half Moon I feed Michael and that helps to quieten him down, though he gets big, upset hiccoughs from the baby food and he only really settles when I start strapping him into the pushchair. It often works like that. Sometimes when he's really playing up we just strap him in and push him round the room, out into the corridor, up and down the scraggy carpet until he sleeps. He stares at my fingers now as I fasten the last buckles across his chest.