He found their phone number on a scrap of faded paper folded into the back of an old diary that he has carried around with him for years. He knew where it was straight away when he needed to get the number, as though he had known somehow, all through the years, that this moment would come; the chance for atonement.
Atonement? Well, that is the word that came to him. Vernon’s mother had sounded wary on the phone at first, then brightened when she remembered who he was and had listened to what he had to say, that he’d had enquiries about someone wanting to do something with Vernon’s work. Vernon’s work? She sounded bemused. The music he made, his sketches and notes, his writing, he explained. Publish it? Yes, possibly. Release it, display it, make it appear in some form anyway. Rob, as one of his closest friends around that time, was helping them to compile his output.
Christine had that half-embarrassed air talking about these things, it was all so beyond her, Vernon’s University friends and people from London and the world of art. Of course she would dig it out for him, of course he could come down and look at it, only Jack wasn’t so well at the moment, chemotherapy on a Monday and sick with the side effects for a few days. He would love to have a chat too, she was sure, only would Rob mind waiting till later in the week, was that possible? Rob felt a catch in his chest at the implication that he was important somehow, busy, that she didn’t like to ask and was prepared to accept things on his terms, and he wanted to say to her, listen, I am no one and I am coming down there to steal from you anyway, to take what your son left in your safekeeping, the son who someone should have been looking after, supporting, helping out. I am going to take it off you and sell it on to someone else, to some lazy, entitled, talentless London cunt who can’t come up with any ideas himself and wants to live off the labour of others.
He didn’t say that, though, simply arranged the best time to come down, sensed she wanted time to get the place looking right, anxious about clever people visiting her house and looking down on her perhaps. All Vernon’s things she said, were away up in the attic, they would take some digging out and she couldn’t get up there herself to do it. It might not be an easy job getting all that lot down, it might need a day or two. She was happy to put him up for the weekend. Rob agreed, felt rude refusing, though he would have liked to be away sooner, told himself that any money he made he would divide among them anyway. They are in no position to do anything with Vernon’s work. If I don’t act as the intermediary eventually Hargreaves will track them down, maybe they will get nothing at all, except a bit of smooth talking.
So that’s his excuse is it? He shifts his legs around, can’t get comfortable, the painkillers up in his bag in the luggage rack, can’t face getting up to get them, decides to just ignore it.
He remembers Vernon, naked, blue lipped on the lino covered floor, unconscious for three days during the cold winter of ’95, Rob and Howard out of their minds on some hideous cocktail of pills, tabs and powders, terrified that this time he was dead, but unable to get themselves together enough to call an ambulance, Howard spending hours squatting over him, his belly straining against the fabric of his t-shirt, staring at Vernon’s profile and muttering away angrily.
Jesus. They went too far. Still, he didn’t die, did he? But he was weak and feverish for a fortnight, lying on the mattress in the living room, clothes heaped up on him to keep him warm, drinking the Lemsip Howard shoplifted from the Co-Op on Barton Lane. He lost even more weight then, he was fucking thin, his cheeks hollowed, his eyes ringed, so pale he took on a greyish tinge. Even then he kept scribbling in his books, sketching out what he had seen on his travels. He said that it was good Howard kept looking at him, that without someone watching him, guaranteeing his existence, he might have disappeared for good this time, they might have nodded off and awoken to find he had melted away in the cold, nothing left of him but a shadow on the floor.
If they had still had access to Nick’s equipment no doubt he would have produced something amazing too, back from that long a trip. Aye well, but Nick had gone, Paula too, they had prospects, possibilities, but he and Vernon … Is he angry? Well, of course he’s angry, he’s always been angry for the ones who get left behind, who stay stuck, pathetically, in lives others can enter and leave at will. Hargreaves is one of them, of course. One of the worst sort, at least with Nick and Paula they were all friends for a while and looking back, for them it was a wise move to get out while they could. Crash and burn time, the Crescent going, everyone had been scattered already.
He kicks his legs out, winces, shifts, his guts churning, his heart so soured he can taste it in the back of his throat.
The train hits Morecambe Bay, the tide in, the water up perilously close to the tracks, the scraped, silvered sky low and bellying closer, the sea dimpling furiously. All very biblical.
Atonement for what?
The house smells as though someone is dying in it despite the fact that she has made every effort to spray and scrub and hoover it away. He can detect it, filtering down from the upstairs bedroom, almost feel it, the dim panicked pulse of a life collapsing in on itself. Christine has brought out the best tea things on a tray and set them up in the living room. He recognises the same three-piece suite they had twenty years ago when he was last here, wrecked and stumbling about. She came to the top of the stairs and shouted down to the two of them to keep the noise down, people had work tomorrow.
He wishes he was worth the effort she’s made, looked a little more presentable at least, wasn’t so obviously a mess. He shouldn’t have said he’d stay the night, should’ve just got in, got the stuff and got out of there as quickly as possible.
She has questions, of course, how often does she get to talk about her child, her son? And now with her husband almost gone too, though he has never wanted to talk about him, just presses his lips together and shakes his head. She’s eager, he can tell, to hear stories, anecdotes, scraps and snippets of the life he had, utterly unknown to her after he went away to Manchester, drifted, never came back.
There are things he could tell them that they wouldn’t believe, how Vernon used to go into a kind of trance and as long as they were around and could see him he appeared to stay, solidly, physically in the world but if they left him for too long he disappeared, just wasn’t there anymore, and would reappear later, in strange places. After a while, he began to disappear sooner and for longer, until he could will it, and they would leave cassettes running in the same room as him, recording, and when he returned they would be filled with the most extraordinary sounds, the music of another world. Sometimes he would go to Nick’s shitty old computer set up and emerge later with these insane tracks, with sounds that seemed to have been dragged back somehow into the present or raised up from some primal floor. He was gifted, a voyager, one who travels, projects, and whose life is foreshortened by his gift, this privileged access to realms outside and beyond us.
Do you know these things about your son? These incredible things that at a distance of twenty years even Rob doubts can really have been true.
Was his life foreshortened by his gift? Well, you and Howard didn’t help matters, did you Rob? Maybe he would have been better off going away with Paula Adonor. You did your best to sabotage that relationship, didn’t you? Maybe he needed her help.
He feels, taking the teacup in one shaky hand and careful not to spill anything, a surge of guilt, explicit, unmuffled guilt.
Aye, he should have been down here sooner, he should have come down after Vernon vanished, to offer a few words of comfort, to condole with them. It’s hot in here, has she got the heating on? He’s sweating. He’s tempted to take off his jumper, one of his layers, his many layers, and yet he finds he too has questions of his own as the conversation progresses.
What was Vernon like as a boy?
He was shy, she said, you know we could never find him, he always used to disappear off, he was so quiet sometimes you would just forget about him and he would steal off, even when he was a baby, he used to get out of his crib somehow and we could never figure out how.
Rob smiled, almost chuckled. And the last time they saw him?
Well, she said, he just turned up out of the blue. I was looking out of the back kitchen window and suddenly, typical of him really, she half laughs, I saw him coming out of the outhouse back there and I said, Vernon, what are you doing in there, you know, and he said well I thought I’d just have a look and see if you left the key in the usual place because I didn’t want to disturb you and I said, disturb us, son? You wouldn’t be disturbing us, we want to see you, but why didn’t you phone, let us know, I had nothing in and he didn’t stay long anyway. I think he was on his way up to see you love. He was thin, I think he was dossing down on people’s floors or in a van or something at that point and his Dad was at work so he gave me a hug anyway and left all his stuff here for us to store, then he went off.
What about you, love?
Aye well he caught me when I was up in Aberdeen and living back at my Mum and Dad’s for a wee while.
I wish he had just come back here to stay with us. I don’t understand why he didn’t come home.
I think he was ashamed. He felt he’d disappointed you.
Well, we would rather have had him here, we would rather have had him still with us, love, she says, her eyes wide.
Well, that wasn’t the happiest of times for any of us, lots of conflict between me and my old folk.
Don’t you get on, love?
Not so well, no. We’re not close.
She nods sympathetically. Rob shifts in his seat.
Well, she says hurriedly, you’ll want to have a look at Vernon’s things.
It’s all up in the attic. She hasn’t been up there for years, Jack can’t get up there anymore, in his condition, she thought maybe it was best if Rob went up to have a good root around, save her trying to get stuff up and down the stepladder, which she never feels safe on anyway.
Sure, sure, Rob tells her, pained at the idea of climbing steps and carrying ladders, lugging bags and boxes around. He goes out to the garage and gets the ladder, Christine chattering anxiously behind him the whole time, up the stairs to the landing, detaching and telescoping the two halves, locking it in place then climbing the paint splotched rungs and gingerly easing the attic door aside.
Watch your eyes for dust love, Christine advises him as he pushes up on the recessed panel and a film of grey and white grit falls softly down into the creases of his screwed up face. He lifts it and puts it to one side on a square of bare hardboard, finds the light switch and turns on the bare, dim bulb hanging from a cord nailed to one of the roof beams.
Here we are, a series of neatly stacked boxes. All Vernon’s old comics are up there from when he was a boy, and records and books, oh and there’s even toys he used to have, there’s a Snoopy up there somewhere but I don’t suppose that’s what you’re looking for, is it, love? Anyway, I’ll make some tea, Jack will want a cup anyway, and with that she is heading back down the stairs, leaving Rob crouched in the attic’s tented shadows, his heart pounding from the exertion, from a sense of trespassing, from anticipation.
In one of the big wooden drawers stacked up behind the bags of clothes and bedding he finds the shoebox, the lid split at the corners and held together with a couple of elastic bands that snap the moment he tries to ease them off. He opens the box and sees the envelope there labelled V. C. 96 1–5 4, lifts it out, sees that underneath there’s a video cassette with a post-it note stuck to the front, a single word on it.
Rob.
The hair stands up on the back of his neck, he heard Vernon’s voice then, clear as day, call his name, and an image flashes up in his mind of someone squatting down in the shadows behind him. He waits, nothing but the sound of the father’s laboured breathing in his sickbed below, the mother down in the kitchen busying herself yet again with the tea things. He turns and there is no one there, of course.
Vernon, he says, and shakes his head. What are you up to, what have you been doing? Picks up the video, strokes it with his thumb.
They have said he could stay in Vernon’s old room if he wanted too, and somehow sensing that it would comfort them to have the room used again, to have someone in there, just for the night, he agreed.
He can’t sleep, that video, left for him, he knows what it will be, Beaconfields.
Eyes closed he tries to recall the day. Even dipping a toe back into the past, sensations surge through him. Bright fragments, each with its own special heat and light, its own density and weight, its own half exultant, half pained corona of light, the infinitely variegated shapes and tastes of loss.
He turns over in the bed and opens his eyes, sighs out loud. The rain comes on suddenly, against the window, bouncing off the road.
And if Vernon were still alive would that make it all alright somehow? Would the world be different, less regrettable, less bitter, more filled with joy, would universal brotherhood reign? Better never to have loved life and believed in change than to be abandoned to this desolation. Night thoughts, crowding back in on him now. He has no laptop, no endless stream of text and tweets and uploads to distract him, he feels smothered suddenly in memory, half drowned in his own past, and halfway there, soon enough he will be like Jack next door, bedbound, dazed, drugged up, almost fully sunk. Is that what life is? A short bewildering surge upward, and then a long, baffled submergence.
He was in the back of the van all the way down from Manchester smoking weed with Sarah and Jerry, Nick driving, Paula and Vernon crammed into the front seat, everyone in a good mood, and then they crested that hill and they saw the valley below them, the rave already up and running, the bowl half full and cars down there pulling in. Vernon turns off the tape player, they wind the windows down, the air rushing past, everyone’s hair flying about, the thud of the bass bellying up between the valley walls. Then Jerry is rubbing Rob’s head and saying in an exaggerated Manchester accent, oh my god, yes, my son, come on, and Vernon looking back says, these times, these times, these times, his eyes misted and, oh, the future!