Mercy Seat Page 9

  A good night then?

  He grinned slackly. Yeah. A good one. He took a big slug of water and grimaced as it went down.

  Jenny was still sat up in bed when I got back. The main light was off but she had the tiny lamp that popped up out of her radio alarm clock still on, angled onto the side of her face. She was reading a magazine but folded it closed as soon as I came through the door. She watched me undress, then followed me with her eyes as I rounded the bed and climbed in beside her.

  Has everything been all right today? she asked as soon as I was settled. I’m sorry we went out tonight – it spoiled things, didn’t it?

  I shrugged. It was ok, I said. It was good for us to get out, maybe. A bit of a break from looking after Michael.

  Jenny looked away, worrying at a nail with her teeth. Chris was strange, though, she said eventually. She went quiet on the beach, and then stayed moody all the time after that.

  I kept quiet. I hadn’t heard Jenny criticising Christine at all during her visit before then, and suddenly I got the feeling there was something starting to push under the smiles. I was unnerved, and curious, feeling the change in Christine too, but just shrugged again. I didn’t want her to go on.

  Well. Maybe it’s just me, Jenny said.

  I don’t know. I think everything’s ok.

  She must have drawn blood then because she winced and sucked at the corner of the nail. I don’t know, she said. It was like the old Chris was maybe coming back again.

  Down on the seafront a car skidded, revved madly and roared off again along the prom. Anyway, Jenny went on, inspecting the nail she’d torn, I’m going to take a few more days off work. Do you think that’s a good idea?

  I had a couple of long afternoon spells at the warehouse fixed for the week ahead, and at first we’d planned to let Christine look after Michael while we were both out. I understood what Jenny was hinting at now though – she didn’t want Christine alone with Michael anymore.

  It’ll mean you don’t have to entertain her all on your own, she said. It wouldn’t be easy for you if she had another moody day like today. And I can take care of Michael so Chris can go out and not get bored. What do you think?

  I’m easy, I said, wondering what I actually felt, but not able to name it. I realised I was scratching where the sores had been, raking up the small scabs around my middle. I stopped and let the skin burn.

  It means I won’t have any more holidays left, but this is our holiday in a way – having Christine to stay and taking her out to places like the beach and the pub. We wouldn’t do that normally any more, would we? Not with Michael.

  No.

  She was quiet for a minute or so, then reached across and snapped the little alarm clock lamp down. She curled herself into a foetal position and wedged her pillow more comfortably under her head. I’m so sleepy, she mumbled. It’s been a long day. She yawned and shifted the pillow again. I can’t believe we were on the cliffs this morning. Then she was still.

  I stayed sitting up, staring into the dark, digging at the skin again where it was flaming.

  That dog was terrible, wasn’t it? Her voice was drowsy and distant now, muffled by the pillow. I thought it was going to bite Michael. I really did. That stupid man. I wanted to kill him.

  I could hear her breathing when she wasn’t speaking. It seemed to come straight from the back of her throat, like every breath was a sigh.

  Jen, I said.

  What?

  I was talking to Christine in the church. Is it right that he used to take you all around the country visiting churches when you were small? I mean when you were all together, as a family.

  She thought about it for a moment, then snorted. No. That’s nonsense. Why on earth would she tell you that?

  I knew I had to carry on then. She told me something else, too. She said your father committed suicide. When she was looking after him, after the last heart attack.

  For a few seconds the breathing went on the same as before. Then there was silence.

  Did you know? I went on. Is it true?

  She lay still for quite a while, and I stayed sitting upright, staring at the red digital numbers on her clock radio. I watched the colon between the hours and minutes blinking with every second. I felt dizzy, and vaguely frightened.

  I don’t know, she said at last. But she had no right to talk to you about it, without me there. And you had no right to let her. She blamed me, didn’t she?

  I put my hand out and stroked her shoulder but she tensed and kept her back to me.

  Don’t bother answering, she said flatly, still speaking into her pillow. I know she did. I know. Oh Christ. She made a strange sound in the back of her throat and I realised she was biting back sobs. I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, she said, recovering her breath. You remind me of him sometimes, she said heavily. The way he was before he turned so religious and strange. I read once that it can happen like that. You can keep falling for your father, even when you hated him. Maybe especially when you hated him. She took a deep breath and choked another sob back. And you remind me of her.

  I don’t know how long we lay there then, not moving, hardly breathing, even. I had no idea what she meant, and was lost in thought, puzzling over it, for what seemed like a long, black time. But then there was a noise from Christine’s room, just a faint judder as something, maybe a naked foot, moved on the floorboards, and immediately I was aware of everything around me again, and was straining to listen. A faint line of light showed under the door. She was still awake, maybe reading; or listening, like me. Jenny was shivering, I realised, though to me the air was uncomfortably warm. I shifted closer, edging my skin against hers. There was another sound from behind Christine’s door, a softer, scraping noise this time. Maybe she’d pulled something – a book maybe – over the floor towards her, or pushed it away.

  Jenny, I said softly.

  What?

  I moved my hand down along her arm, onto her hipbone, prominent and smooth, then around and between her thighs. She turned her head towards me a fraction so I leaned closer and kissed her cheek, her neck, the lobe of her ear.

  Luke, she said sadly, but I didn’t know what she meant by it.

  I must have slept at some point because the next thing I remember is waking to the sound of the apartment door clicking open and shut. I was still flat on my back on top of the covers but Jenny was beside me now, curled under the sheets, her back to me. At first I wondered if I’d dreamed the sound but when I raised my head to check Christine’s door I could see it was just ajar. Maybe she’d opened it in the night as we slept, or maybe the draught from the main door had nudged it off the catch. I let my head drop to the pillow again and waited for the sound of her returning. I wondered if Jenny was awake too. Her breathing was shallow, which made me unsure, but it was steady and slow enough. Upstairs the flush hissed faintly and I angled my face towards the main door again, waiting to watch her stepping through it.

  It was well in to the morning when I woke. Behind the door – closed tight again now – I could hear Jenny’s muffled voice, then Christine’s. I got out of bed, dressed quickly and went through to join them. They were both dressed and standing at the window, Michael in Jen’s arms. The window was open and through it I could smell the sea and hear the steady chop of helicopter blades. Because of the noise neither of them noticed me behind them until I was almost at their shoulders, then Jenny caught sight of me and moved aside without saying anything.

  About half a mile out from the beach a yellow rescue helicopter was thumping over the water. It hovered for a while then swung out slowly toward the headland. I imagined Christine swimming out there just a few hours before: the speck of her head making its way almost invisibly amongst the dark crests and swells.

  I’m going to the shop, Christine said. Do you want me to get anything in particular?

  No, said Jenny. Just bread and milk.

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

&nbs
p; 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.