Ex Page 6

  ‘What about all this?’ her expansive gesture appeared to include the entirety of human existence, which was slightly beyond Elissa’s brief.

  ‘I can give you a swimming lesson and we can keep your things in my office, which I will lock,’ Elissa replied. ‘I can’t help with all the rest.’

  ‘What if you forget?’

  ‘Forget?’

  ‘Forget to lock the office or lose your key.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Elissa proffered her hand and the woman snatched it greedily as if she intended to keep it.

  ‘You might forget me.’

  ‘I won’t.’ She held the woman’s hand in both of hers.

  But Daniel’s mother knew she would. She had become bereft – a mother without her children, a wife in a fictional marriage and now a mermaid who couldn’t swim.

  *

  Jonah’s telephone dragged him roughly from the brink of sleep. He stared at the caller display and contemplated evasion but Bernice had already discovered all his hiding places.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m where you left me.’

  ‘I left you on the edge of a cliff and told you to jump.’

  ‘Well I didn’t like that advice,’ said Bernice.

  ‘But that was yesterday, surely…’

  ‘Obviously I haven’t been there ever since. I have to talk to you about the list.’

  ‘The fucking list. I destroyed the fucking list, I rammed it down the toilet and then I rammed your head down after it.’

  ‘That didn’t work, I’m afraid, apart from making me permanently deaf in one ear and making me want to vomit when I hear your voice, it didn’t work.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Jonah.

  ‘I want you to save the one man left on the list. I want you to get in my way and I want you to stop me doing this a third time.’

  ‘Don’t you mean a second time?’

  There was a muffled incoherent noise, like the mewling of a poisoned rat before it dies.

  ‘’fraid not.’

  The noise became louder, imploring. Bernice grunted with effort as if shoving a huge weight away from her towards the edge of the cliff and then there was nothing.

  ‘So,’ she resumed, breathlessly, ‘will you stop me?’

  ‘What have you done?’ But he knew all too well what she had done.

  She had just pushed Darth Vader off Beachy Head.

  Chapter 14

  Saturday had arrived as Saturdays do and Daniel had woken at 4am to find his father standing over his bed, sharpening a meat cleaver and singing the aria ‘One Fine Day’ from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Nothing out of the ordinary there then.

  ‘Up we get,’ said M, whipping off his duvet with the speed and dexterity of a thirty-two stone bullfighter and leading Daniel out of his bedroom by his wrist. He had never held Daniel by his hand. Holding Daniel’s hand would have promised a degree of intimacy that his father had no facility to deliver – that particular cupboard was bare.

  ‘Shall I get dressed, Dad?’ asked Daniel as M dragged him down the stairs of their house towards the front door, ‘because I’m only in my pyjamas and it’s quite cold.’ M paused and looked down at him. His eyes seemed to soften for a moment. ‘I never wanted this, but this is all we have left, you and I. It’s what we are.’ In that moment, the calm waters which still filled some of the tidal pools in M’s heart were finally swept away and the bitter current that carried them left no way for them to return.

  ‘What is the meat cleaver for, Dad?’ asked Daniel, already aware that this was a question to which he did not want a response. But he had come to realise that no matter how bad answers might be, surprises were far, far worse.

  ‘For little fingers and CCTV cameras,’ replied M, looking at him as if this had been obvious. In many ways, it had been.

  *

  ‘This is the mountain that you will be climbing,’ said M gesturing towards nothing that was remotely mountain-like as far as Daniel could see but plenty of things that had the potential to cause him irreparable harm.

  M had driven them to St Pancras station and had parked just outside the multi-storey car park. Realisation dawned upon Daniel in the manner of a veal calf, exposed to light for the first time, only to discover it was the neon glare of the slaughterhouse.

  The Austin Allegro struggled up the ramps of the car park to the top level, encumbered by the combined weight of expectation and M’s arse. After disengaging said arse from the long suffering driver’s seat, M waddled over to the nearest CCTV camera, hacked it from the wall with a single blow of the meat cleaver and crushed it underfoot as if it were a fag butt. He was looking at Daniel’s life vest with unaccustomed satisfaction. It occurred to Daniel that his father was much more interested in the falling aspects of climbing than the ascending parts.

  At the edge of the car park balustrade, Daniel and his father paused and wordlessly shared a glance over the top into the abyss.

  ‘Off you pop then, Daniel,’ said M, gesturing vaguely towards the wide blue yonder, ‘show me what you’re made of.’

  ‘What if I get to the bottom, Dad, can we go home?’

  There was a further period of silence whilst Daniel and M looked over the balustrade, their eyes following each of the six floors of sheer concrete, down to the frost-licked pavement far below where a cat had paused to probe an errant ear. It looked like a furry ant. There were indents in the surface of the concrete but they were no more substantial than a day’s growth of stubble. Spiderman would have struggled with this task, little boys in pyjamas weighed down by life vests had no need to apply.

  Daniel looked back at his father – his question was redundant. From the impatient manner in which M was tapping the meat cleaver against his thigh he did not think he had time to launch an expedition to locate his father’s better nature.

  So this was fear.

  Daniel climbed on to the edge of the balustrade and lowered himself onto the first of the more prominent bricks. His fingers and toes were small enough to gain some purchase and with desperate precision he edged down inch by inch.

  After two minutes he had actually begun to believe that he might make it all the way but without warning he lost his grip and began to slip and then fall backwards. With every sinew in his body he tried to remain connected to the wall but soon his only foothold was in thin air which is, by and large, less substantial than concrete.

  M saw his son begin to fall and a smile passed across his face like a newly dawned sun. He swirled the feeling of fulfilment around his mouth like a delicious Belgian chocolate but there was a lingering aftertaste of something unfamiliar – regret? His life was like an express train without a destination, a race horse with no finishing line. He had cradled his dead son in his arms and now he could not escape from death, it clogged his pores, impeded his every breath and his only choice was to deliver his burden to Daniel. So not regret, no, but also not resolution.

  Daniel had stopped falling. Gravity’s embrace was inexorable and yet he had defied it. The life vest had snagged on a light fixture, leaving Daniel suspended twenty metres from the pavement.

  ‘Ohforfuckssake,’ said M and not without due cause. He began to run towards his car but whilst his feet were willing, the ham hocks that now occupied the positions his ankles used to be in showed little inclination to follow suit. He turned back and leaned over to get a better look at what was holding the life vest in place but it was what he heard that persuaded him to head back to his car again. The life vest was ripping apart under Daniel’s weight.

  M reached the penultimate level of the car park to find his son just over an arm’s length below him. Part of the life vest had been shredded and the part which remained attached to the light fitting would bear Daniel’s weight for only a few seconds more. M found himself reaching out a hand as Daniel looked up and reached out his own. As they extended their reaches, their fingertips touched, before the life vest gave way and Daniel fell again, cl
awing for the hand of the man who had killed him.

  Daniel’s father looked beyond his extended grasp towards the area of pavement where his son would shortly explode only to see it filled by a milk float.

  *

  The milkman’s usually unremarkable progress was impeded as a 1974 Austin Allegro screeched to a halt across his path. The entire car appeared to resonate as a behemoth struggled to escape from behind the steering wheel and gradually unfurled itself out of the driver’s door.

  The enormous unit that was Daniel’s father walked directly up to the milk float and motioned a single meaty hand skywards.

  ‘Couldn’t lend me a hand, could you – there’s a child on your roof that belongs to me?’

  The milkman stepped up on his seat and peered onto the roof of the float where a boy in pyjamas was sitting. The boy waved at him apologetically. The milkman pulled away as if slapped in the face, checked the milk float roof again where the child was still waving, reached up, grabbed the child and handed him down to his father.

  ‘Where…?’ was the milkman’s sole contribution.

  ‘Fell off the car park, sleepwalking again, he’s a bastard for it,’ said Daniel’s father as he deposited Daniel rather too vigorously into the passenger seat.

  They were both shaking as the Austin Allegro threaded its way back through the ice kissed streets of North West London. Daniel looked at M’s expressionless face, his eyes illuminated like tiny neon shop signs as he reached behind Daniel’s seat and handed him a blanket. He glanced at Daniel and said, ‘This changes nothing,’ but the snow globe they occupied had just been shaken vigorously once again.

  Chapter 15

  It was the morning of the accident (again).

  Daniel’s mother lay in her tiny bed in her tiny bedsit, legs clasped to her chest in the best approximation of sleep that her brain would currently facilitate. The dream was set on loop, it had devoured her piece by piece until she had become unidentifiable. Sleep was nothing more than a conduit.

  She was in the car on the way to the Royal Free hospital with Daniel performing a passable breaststroke in the amniotic fluid of her womb whilst Saul, then her only child, sat in the back seat singing to himself.

  Daniel’s mother experienced the world as if her eyes were covered by a veil woven from the silk of poisonous spiders. Written words fell from her ears like tiny font-shaped raindrops, traffic lights fired transparent lies into her hair which she could never wash out, zebra crossings were gateways to heaven and Hades. Some would have considered this a handicap to driving, but Daniel’s mother had checked the Highway Code only that morning and since there was no mention of any of these hazards she considered that she was good to go.

  Saul resided in the rear-view mirror and that was how she remembered him, in reverse, imprisoned in a letterbox of glass. His eyes fell on hers; it was all he could offer her from where he sat. They were the eyes of a child who is blind to the inadequacies of the human condition. Returning to the road, she saw too late that she had gone straight through a red light and a bus was bearing down on her like a slack-jawed lion, inches from its prey. She slammed her feet onto the brake and the accelerator at the same time and the Austin Allegro performed a vehicular pirouette, avoiding the bus by the width of a coat of paint and sailing through the intersection to the other side. And all the while, Saul’s smiling eyes, oblivious and unquestioning, kissed hers, his voice adulterating a half-glimpsed nursery rhyme.

  The car mounted the pavement, scattering a cluster of pedestrians like a pile of protesting autumn leaves caught by a sudden gust of wind. Daniel completed another length of breaststroke with a backflip and kicked out with both feet to launch himself forwards once again into the dark waters of their mutual DNA. She could see his heels push out of the fabric of her smock and gasped at the audacity of the pain. The cramps which had been staccato had now assumed the rapidity of machine gun fire.

  ‘Saul.’

  She turned around in her seat and reached out a hand for her little man. Sometimes she dreamt that she had held him, in those few moments, felt him breathe laughter onto her face, that she had warned him about the treachery of life, how to navigate the forests of carrots and sticks. But she could no more reach him now than she did then.

  As the car careered inexorably onwards she touched her legs, warm and cold at the same time. Her waters had broken. She looked into the face of the traffic warden who was screaming at her through her driver’s window, at the taxi driver, at the policeman. She was a goldfish and this was her bowl – she swam for their entertainment and within her Daniel swam no more.

  She pulled into a line of slow moving traffic, hitting the rear bumper of a camper van and turned into the path of an oncoming motorcyclist who embraced the passenger side of her car and crumpled onto the unforgiving tarmac. She had to reach the hospital but she no longer knew what a hospital was, it was a word, a destination which was all around her. The contractions were unendurable, she was giving birth in the driver’s seat of an Austin Allegro whilst driving at speed down the pavement of Haverstock Hill. Had it been 1965 she would have reached the Accident and Emergency Department of the Royal Free hospital with seconds to spare, but it was not 1965 and someone had put a supermarket in her way.

  The Austin Allegro entered Budgens through the main window, ruining the two-for-one disinfectant display and continued through the fruit and vegetable aisle towards the delicatessen. Impeded by a tower-high display of Ferrero Rocher and the deputy supermarket manager who had climbed it shortly before, the car took out the National Lottery stand, and eventually came to a halt in the middle of a Star Wars promotion. It had stopped because Daniel’s mother had finally applied the brakes and because the engine had fallen out when the car totalled R2-D2. When she looked down, she saw Daniel’s head had begun to emerge from between her legs.

  Saul had stopped singing.

  It was not anticipated when the Star Wars advertising promotion was designed, that Luke Skywalker would be hit by an Austin Allegro travelling at forty miles per hour through the fruit and vegetable aisle of Budgens in Belsize Park. No consideration was given, therefore, to the possibility that the Jedi Knight’s lightsabre would smash through the side window of a car and strike a child with such force that it would stop his heart.

  There were so many people swimming in Daniel’s mother’s fishbowl now – she screamed until she thought her lungs would implode but she could not make a sound. Constrained by her seatbelt, shoulders dusted with broken glass and Saul, his first kiss, his wedding day when he could not stop laughing, his own children whose faces mirrored his sleeping sigh, smashed into tiny pieces.

  The light had gone out behind his eyes and she could not remember how to turn it back on.

  Chapter 16

  If the quality of Daniel’s schooling experience was somewhat diminished by the despicable cruelty of Dorsal Grellman, the official school bully, then the explosion of his chemistry teacher certainly did little to mitigate this.

  Chemistry lessons in Daniel’s year were defined by superlatives. The unboundaried abhorrence which his chemistry teacher, Mrs Ritz, felt for Daniel’s only friend, Ferris, was surpassed only by Ferris’ love of Mrs Ritz and all things Ritz-related.

  On the first day of the school year, a sparkling new set of eight-year-olds had trooped into their first ever chemistry lesson. Brimming with early term exuberance, Mrs Ritz set the children what she thought would be a simple and exciting project which they would file away in their memories in the cabinet marked ‘inspirational teacher.’ They were to collect samples of everyday substances which they found in their home in a petri dish and these would be viewed under a microscope. The class would then write essays about what they had learnt.

  Mrs Ritz sighed with self-approbation after she had given out the project sheets and carefully wrapped petri dishes. She could almost hear the whir of eager young minds. Oh, she was good at this.

  A hand rose abruptly at the back of the class and begun
rotating like an agitated windmill. The hand was attached to a diminutive child who appeared to be wearing two pairs of glasses and three watches and was beaming at her in a way she found disconcerting. The boy was sitting next to Daniel M, who appeared to be shrinking down under his desk.

  ‘Yes…’ she checked the register. ‘Ferris.’

  The bespectacled child was demonstrably excited to be spoken to with a tone of voice that was not contemptuous.

  ‘We can take a sample of anything?’ asked Ferris.

  ‘Obviously ask your parents for their consent,’ replied Mrs Ritz. She thought she had seen Ferris shudder when she said the word ‘parents’. ‘But yes, any everyday substance you like.’

  ‘Anything?’ repeated Ferris incredulously.

  A frisson of discomfort burrowed down into the verdant soil which lightly covered the forest of Mrs Ritz’s sanity and began to take root. There was something about this child that was discordant but what could an eight-year-old find at home given one evening that could be remotely problematic? She chuckled to herself, smoothed down the pleats of her best grey skirt and smiled.

  ‘Anything at all, Ferris.’

  *

  The following morning 4c trooped into the classroom and as she had expected, their eyes were ablaze with barely restrained excitement. They carefully placed their petri dishes on the desks in front of them. Mrs Ritz had already set the microscope up so that the samples taken would be enlarged and projected on to a screen.

  ‘Johnstone Fenner,’ she shouted. A distended ginger face snapped to attention, regarded her earnestly and stood up with a sample which he described as ‘dog bits’.

  Each one of the slides was more mundane than the next but what should have been a joyous experience for Mrs Ritz was diminished by the feeling that Ferris’ eyes were burrowing ever deeper into her spine. She walked over to his desk but his petri dish appeared to be pristine and empty.

  ‘Why haven’t you brought a sample, Ferris? Everyone else has.’ She felt an inexplicable light snowfall of relief dust the cappuccino of her day.