Mercy Seat Read online

  Duw, they’re running now, eh? the fisherman calls to another much older angler just down from him. Really running, by Christ. He strips the line in expertly, working it fast to begin with, then slower over likely lies. Before going on I wait for him to lay his line out again, hearing the heavy lure fizz across the path ahead of me on each back-cast.

  Just before I reach the harbour one of the men hooks into a strong fish that doesn’t show itself at first but just ploughs deep downstream for the open bay. The man’s dressed more casually than the others – in denims and hiking boots, maybe he’d rushed to get to his spot on the river – and because he can’t wade deep it takes him a good five minutes to get the fight under control. Without a net, he tries to haul the fish into a shallow backwater where he can drop the rod and lay his hands on it. Twice he gets it on its flank in the back-eddy, and each time it spasms out into the flow again before he can make his move. On the third attempt it thrashes the wrong way and hurls itself against the steep bank where, after a stunned moment, it starts to pound the mud wall with its tail. The sound of it carries far enough upstream for some of the other fishermen to crane their necks and stare. The man in the denim jacket splashes down onto his knees to it, blocking my view. I see his arm rise and fall as he bludgeons it with a rock. It makes the same sound the fish made, beating its tail against the bank.

  Just past the mouth of the river I stop and watch the cormorants by the pier, thinking of the morning and of Jenny’s dream. It seems years since I woke; years since I stood in the bathroom hearing Clement’s dog barking in the yard below. One of the birds lifts its dark wings, as if ready to pronounce a benediction.

  As I pass the penny arcade at the front of the pier the swing doors sweep open, nearly knocking me back, and a gang of school boys, still in uniform, push each other out onto the prom, laughing and elbowing. Did you fucking see me, though? one of them keeps asking the others in a high, piping voice. They ignore him. The dummy fortune-teller in its glass booth jolts into life and starts going through its routine: the painted gypsy head jerking back, the wooden hand juddering over the crystal ball and a loud robotic voice promising All the fun of the future, all the fun of the future – inside! I follow the school kids along the road for a short while then turn left down the bay while they jostle and bicker straight on into town.

  Inside the entrance hall to Bethesda I can hear the Clements’ piano being played – first a few bars from some piano concerto, then Greensleeves. I stop to knock at the door and collect Michael, but on impulse decide to leave it for a while and give myself some time alone before taking him off their hands. For once there’d been no sign of Mrs Clement at the bay window. I move quickly up the first flight of stairs to get out of sight of the hall. On the second floor I pass the lanky, ginger-haired student on his way to the bath. He’s naked except for an off-white towel pinched round his waist and a pair of earphones trailing to the Walkman in his hand. He grins and I slip past him before he can speak. When I get to the apartment door I lean my forehead against it, hearing the blood knocking in my temples as I dig in my pocket for the keys.

  At first Christine doesn’t turn from the cot to face me. She waits, drinking in my surprise and silence, then, still keeping her back to me, says, I thought you’d be home. I came to find you, and you weren’t here.

  Jesus, Chris. How did you get in?

  The landlord saw me on the stairs. He said they were looking after Michael, so I took him and came here.

  You took Michael?

  Now she turns, but doesn’t leave the cot. You knew I’d come back. You knew I hadn’t left.

  I nod dumbly. She’s wearing the same clothes she wore the afternoon she arrived: the collarless, cream blouse buttoned to the throat and the simple, pale blue skirt like a patch of sky. My heart’s knocking in my throat and I have to pause before trusting myself to speak. How long have you been here?

  She shrugs. I don’t know, she says. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. When is Jennifer coming back?

  Not till late. She has to make up for the time she took off last week.

  Good. She runs a hand over her hair, but doesn’t come towards me.

  When I step inside I see that the bedroom door is wide open. There are cardboard boxes sitting on the bed: some of the boxes we’d stowed away for storage when we moved in. She’s emptied them out, I realise as I look more closely: the bed is covered with photographs, letters and documents – my driver’s license, even our birth certificates – unfolded and laid out amongst the jumble of images. When I turn to her, speechless, I notice that the cot is littered with them too: old photographs of my own and Jenny’s, spread over Michael’s blankets and even taped to the wooden bars, walling him in.

  I found them in your box-room; I was nosy, is all she says, and all I can do is shake my head and stare at the strange, random collage.

  Most of the photographs are Jenny’s – one of the two girls, her and Christine, sat on an almost empty, monochrome beach; a couple of Jenny alone with a black cat half the size of herself. Some of their mother, alone or with the girls. Some of their father, as a young man – one of him cloaked in graduation robes – and I realise with a start that Christine has added photographs of her own that she must have brought with her. I start gathering them up.

  Not yet. Please. Leave them a bit longer. I don’t believe in photographs, she adds flatly, but I wanted to see everything all at once.

  I nod, too bewildered to ask or care much what she means, and catch sight of a photograph of myself, as a small boy with my father. I’m sitting on a low red-brick wall, my father stood to my left in a dark security guard’s uniform – just one of his many short-lived jobs as I was growing up – arms folded stoutly. We’re in bright sunshine and both squinting so hard our eyes are completely hidden.

  You’re not glad to see me. You’re frightened. I knew you would be.

  I shake my head, still lost for words and distracted by the photograph. To the right of the wall there’s just a glimpse of the red and white chevrons marking some kind of security barrier. I have a sudden, sharp memory of balancing my body on it as my father moves it up and down for me, an improvised swing: the ground falling away from my feet and then the ride back to earth, as slowly as falling in a dream.

  Why won’t you come near me then?

  I lay the photographs back down on the bed and move to the cot, each movement feeling separate and awkward. Is Michael sleeping?

  Yes, she says, moving to block my view. Don’t disturb him. Her head tilts to one side and her eyelids almost close, as if a sudden drowsiness is washing over her, too. He’s peaceful, she says. She takes my hand and steers me to the sofa. The door to the box-room is ajar and through the gap I can see the mess she’s made of my books, files and papers.

  Don’t watch me, she instructs, and turns away to unbutton her blouse.

  Chris, I don’t know, I say, but still with her back to me she slips off her skirt and underwear, then curls her body foetus-like on the sofa.

  Hold me, she says, inching her body forward to make room for my body behind her.

  I lower myself on to the cushions and her knees straighten a little to make room, though her arms stay folded across her chest.

  For some time we just stay like that, listening to each other’s breathing and feeling the beating of each other’s heart. Eventually the sound comes of footsteps on the stairs and Alex’s door opens, then bangs shut. Soon the sound of his music begins to leak through the wall, a looping dance beat. His door opens and slams shut again as he heads upstairs to the kitchen or bathroom.

  You can’t love anyone, can you? she murmurs.

  I start to reply, but stop myself before making a sound.

  She reaches down to find my hand where it rests on her hip and guides it between her thighs, opening them enough to let me in before closing them again and trapping me there.

  Without moving my head I can see a top corner of the window and the grey wastes of sky beyond. Every time the
wind gusts a few drops of rain tap at the glass and the old sash window rattles in its wooden frame.

  Put your fingers inside me.

  She eases her legs apart again, just enough, and I do what she says, surprised at her wetness. I feel myself growing hard, despite myself.

  Deeper.

  Alex thumps down the stairs to his room again. The music dies and in its place comes the sound of his television. Voices fencing back and forth.

  You’re like me, she says finally, whispering. We should have been born with gills. She shivers and I rest my forehead against the back of her skull, breathe in the fragrance from the salty oils of her scalp.

  Jennifer won’t want to live like this for much longer. She won’t stay with you. You know that, don’t you? Michael is all that matters to her now.

  I close my eyes and remember again swimming after her into the bay at night. Turning my cold, bare body to look back at the world, floating clear of it, unable to fall.

  I was like a wife and a mother to my father, she says. I was everything to him, in the end. She presses her body harder against mine, as if for warmth, and shivers again. Jennifer was pregnant by that man, Bill Kerrigan, she says then, and he talked her into an abortion, not long before she met you. She’ll go back to him, I think, now she’s got Michael and feels like she can forgive him. Or someone like him. Someone from the real world.

  I don’t ask her how she knows. Some confession in a cafe, maybe, or some drunken heart-to-heart on one of the nights when I left them in the living room and tried to sleep through their low, muddled babble with Michael in the cot at my side. Yes – a night like that, I think, and I remember Jenny, the evening after Christine left, crying so bitterly, recalling those afternoons with Kerrigan, the father of her first child. It’s not about us, she’d said. You don’t have to worry.

  I lift my head clear of Christine’s dark, sleek hair and look down along the length of her body. Her limbs, stiff and blueish, seem shadowless and flattened, more like engravings than flesh in the iron light.

  It’s night when Jenny finally twists her key in the lock and pushes open the door to the apartment. She stands a little while on the threshold, in the dark, maybe sensing all the heartbreak and trouble that will flood in on all of us, unstoppably, with the simple lighting of the room.

  Luke? she calls. Luke? Then silence while her hand finds the switch, and silence while she stands confused in the bulb’s glare, noticing the photographs first, maybe, and Michael, still sleeping, his deep, deep sleep, lying motionless amongst them.

  Twelve

  The years make Russian dolls of our lives, nesting one self inside the other, a neat, coffined family of near identical forms – habits, needs, errors – that get heavier with the decades, more full of rattling ghosts. Inside we go, one self after the other, and each one forever; and if we could make out anything in there, where no light gets through, it would be the contours of our own head in front of our face.

  I like to think it was by accident that Christine stepped in front of a rush-hour bus, just weeks after returning to the house her father left her. But I did discover, much later, that she’d tried to commit suicide, three days after her father’s funeral, with the same sleeping pills she would use to make Michael sleep so deeply – almost too deep to ever come back, and maybe he never came back the same child – that long, grey August afternoon. But if she tried to die a second time, she failed, and lingered on for years, trapped in God knows what kind of limbo. Jenny and her mother refused to the bitter end to let the hospital turn off the machinery around her hospital bed. It was the only way they had to punish her, perhaps. Five years of that, before she managed to let go, sinking down to whatever currents carry us off into the dark.

  While Christine drifted alone inside her head, or more probably far beyond it, I made my way to France, Spain and Morocco, scratching a living on farms, vineyards and camp-sites as I went. By my second year of wandering I’d made enough contacts in the loose, almost casual small-time underworld of drifting pickpockets, petty dealers and tobacco smugglers to get better paid work – and as much solitude as I needed – tramping across the border with rucksacks full of contraband cigarettes, sometimes bricks of Moroccan hash. Occasionally I’d come across British newspapers left lying on benches or on the breakfast tables of cheap hostels, and it amused me vaguely to realise that my life had become some small flaking off of that long Thatcherite dream: self-sufficient, entrepreneurial, a busy little insect in the service of free trade. I used the network of pilgrim trails around the Baztan valley in the Basque country, wore a scallop shell in my cap, and was robbed occasionally, nearly murdered once on the banks of a small stream, but never caught.

  I slept more soundly in the hills, barns and pilgrim shelters along the Camino than in any of the other places I’ve known since leaving Bethesda, though even after long, exhausting days of hiking I often woke before daylight with Christine’s white face floating in my mind, or Michael’s.

  I came back once before she died, for my grandfather’s Baptist funeral under a daylong veil of soft valleys rain, and took the chance to visit her in the sterile little hospital cell that Jenny and her mother had condemned her to. I was surprised to learn from one of the nurses that she was visited every other day by her sister, who would speak to her at length, in private, as soon as she was left alone. I sat with her for a little time, the nurse in attendance, as she was obliged to be for a stranger, but couldn’t find anything to say. As I left, I explained that I didn’t want Jenny knowing about my visit. I won’t be back, I said, so she doesn’t need to know. It would just upset her. The nurse looked at me quizzically, but shrugged and said, all right then, if you think so. But if she ever checks the visitors’ log she’ll be able to see for herself. I can’t change that for you.

  No, I said. I understand, and smiled to reassure her, though if I could have paid every penny I owned to cover my traces, I would have. And I’ve often wondered since whether she kept her word, or if my saying goodbye to Christine became one last hurt I inflicted on Jenny before slipping like an assassin out of her life completely.

  By the time of my grandmother’s funeral, soon after, in bright March sunshine, Christine was gone too. Her ashes, I discovered later, were scattered by Jenny and her mother in the Irish Sea she’d so often swum in. So maybe there was some forgiveness, some kind of peace made, in the end.

  I was in my thirties before I came back to Britain. I had money in the bank from a thousand illicit border-crossings, and I rented a tiny flat in the great anonymity of London. I went back to studying and was amazed to find that the work I’d completed so many years before still counted for something, though I didn’t have the heart to go back to any of the subjects I’d thought about and written on in that small box-room at Bethesda. In fact, I changed my name and studied theology, and after graduation applied for a part-time doctorate in early Church doctrine and history, back in Wales, at a college whose windows faced the sea again. My thesis, along with my research, wanders on its way as obscurely as I once did; I have no intention of ever finishing it.

  I’ve no faith of any kind in God, and I know that my compulsion to devote so much of my thinking to religion must be, at bottom, a simple longing for the father I lost, and expiation for the missing father I so quickly became in my turn, though I feel no embarrassment about that need. And I wonder, too, if all my tracking down of God through his big, empty lair is a means of finding some way back to Jenny and Christine; a sense that there might be a thread left behind in the labyrinth where their father lurked, some human trace, lying all these years in the dark. Am I really like him, that half-mad, controlling, hypocrite believer, as Jenny claimed all those years ago? It’s possible she was right, I suppose: who else ever knew me? Is that why Christine – lost in her own private maze – tried to break through its walls?

  But it’s hopeless, I know, to think in these kinds of ways. It’s like trying to read the shapes of shadows in a cave by flooding it with li
ght. It comes from being too much alone, for much too long.

  Now, if I believe anything that can be put into words, it’s that there’s a kind of solidarity in the enormous, continuous effort the mind must make to see meaning in the world – to go on living, to keep the spirit alive in its shell – and the vast, impersonal energies that bind the atoms at their nuclear hearts. I imagine the universe, which is nothing if it isn’t one great idea, the one great archetype of thought, working hard to believe in itself, in the face of entropy and all its billion cooling stars. I think it’s tired, and can’t rest.

  There are two small Methodist chapels within walking distance of the cottage I rent – Hebron and Salem, one originally Calvinist, the other Wesleyan – perched on either side of the southernmost tip of Pembrokeshire, and they’re subject to entropy too, of course, lapsing into ruin one loose slate and one burst water pipe at a time. I like to attend one or other of their services most Sundays, watching and listening from a seat just inside the door, enjoying the faintly sung hymns, the mild, encouraging sermons, the bowed backs of the old people’s heads at prayer, the whisper and smell of rain from the sea, crossing the wet fields outside. The chapels have to share a minister between them, now – the Reverend Carys Bethell – a young, humorous, intelligent woman more likely to quote poetry, Karl Barth and philosophy than the Old Testament. The congregations are a pitiful contrast to her energies, of course: three or four of the faithful in each, fading away almost symbiotically with the rotting buildings they come to worship in. I don’t know what the elders in such a time-bound, traditional place made of being preached to by a young woman when she first arrived. But that atmosphere of timelessness operates both ways I suppose, and sometimes I wonder if they’ve even noticed yet. Is she slowly winning them round to some notion of a gentler, much more human God than the builders of these chapels would ever have recognised or even wanted? Or is she simply outlasting their frowns and gossip for a while, like the tallest candle in a power-cut?