After Brock (5 page)

‘What do they look like?'

‘Well, they look like cartwheels made up of hundreds of bits of brightly coloured tissue paper. The roundness and brilliance symbolise the sun which the old Mayan culture put at the centre of everything.'

‘Well, isn't it? I wouldn't like to live without it.'

Dad doesn't respond to my little joke but goes: ‘I've been trying since forever to get a Barroletta, then earlier this year I had a lucky break. Met this bloke from Central America who struck me as really ‘simpático', Juan-Felipe. Knows Guatemala like the back of his hand, which remote village has this or that ancient tradition and so on. So he's bringing a pair of Barrolettas over for me. They'll cost me an arm and a leg, but there we are. Well worth stocking. Not that they'd interest the kind of customer I mentioned earlier, who's failed to turn up for his power-job. Or would they…? I wonder. One kind of kite man is potentially another kind, in my view.'

Dad does a hell too much wondering.

I let him wonder now without listening too attentively, second-nature to me once Dad gets going… Overhead is quite cloudless. Bright bars of sunlight stripe the still surface of the lake. All the people sitting or shambling about near me look as pleased with the afternoon as I am: the young mother with a toddler and her friend, both in burkas, the old coffin-dodger with a paper-bag full of stale bread for the ducks. They're like the original Mayan makers of Barrolettas: they're putting the sun at the centre of life. Not worrying their arses off whether Gordon Brown will be toppled by an insider coup, or whether the pound is holding its own against the dollar and the euro, or whether you have to get straight As in your exams to have even the faintest chance of getting anywhere in ‘the precarious global job market'. Far better, we (they and I) think, to concentrate on the mallards on the lake, their bottle-green heads glinting in the afternoon brightness. But every now and then those heads disappear, these birds upending themselves to keep cool.

To change the subject, or rather to change it back, I say, ‘What did
you
do when it was all over, Dad? Your A Levels, I mean. Was it hot like it is today? You go for a swim? Have a barbecue?'

If my dad hadn't deliberately fixed on somewhere as far away from London as the Welsh Borders when he left Mum and me, I might know the answer to this question, and others like it. Most guys know far more about their dads' life, and favourite pastimes, groups, books, football teams etc than I do about mine (and Dad's rather a talkative man, though he does also have unfathomable bouts of silence). But, ‘I've got to get away,' he said to Mum and me, ‘don't take this wrong,' well, how else could you take it? ‘I badly need my own space…'

For a moment I thought my mobile had gone out of range, as it sometimes does out of doors. I was expecting some reply to my normal-enough son-to-father question. ‘You still there, Dad?'

Dad goes, ‘Yes, still here, Nat.' But his voice is faint. Then there's another pause.

The phone feels heavy in my hand and lifeless against my ear. Then he says, ‘A swim? Well, hardly, Nat! I didn't take my A Levels in summer. I took 'em in dead of winter.'

‘Bit unusual, wasn't that, Dad?' I say, ‘at least for nowadays it would be.'

Dad answers me in the slow, remote voice I associate with the year I was just remembering, when I was twelve and he and Mum split up.

‘“Unusual”, Nat, is about right for my whole A Level year,' and his remoteness has, I realise, nothing to do with miles, or the quality of the line between South London and South Shropshire, ‘and unusual years mean unusual measures…' I can tell he doesn't want to talk any longer. ‘Well, give my love to Izzie – to your mum, won't you, Nat?' Yes, he's clearly dying to be shot of this conversation, and to return to his own thoughts, if not actions, about how best to get that macho retard to fork out six hundred quid for something he probably no longer wants. But then comes a little surprise. ‘I know I haven't asked you if you've done well in your papers, Nat. But I don't ask that sort of thing. Not ever, as you must've noticed by now.'

Noticed? Well, yes!

‘Give me a bell Sunday morning when you're about to get on the train at Euston, there's a good lad!'

     

Something in this talk bothers me. Why should anyone know when his dad did his A Levels and what the reason was? Whatever the reason in this case I now feel quite tensed up (probably a carry-over from this morning's exam paper), and I stretch myself out on the park bench which the old guy has now vacated, and go into relaxation. That means screwing my toes up tight against the sole of my foot (this is what Mum recommends from her own relaxation classes down in Camberwell), and trying to imagine myself into a peaceful state of being that contrasts with the present. Like an animal in hibernation or stretching out for a predator-free doze, such as badgers or foxes enjoy.

Nothing, I have found, is harder than trying to conjure up really different weather from what's around you. I attempt to picture my dad walking out of his exam room into the ‘dead of winter' but can't. Sun's too strong, sky's too blue, strips of light on lake too dazzling.

   

I heave myself into a normal sitting position to write all the above. I'm making an effort to be literate – impressive even – I do want to be a journalist after all so I'm thinking about my readers all the time rather than writing for myself. Yesterday I went and bought this notebook. I liked the marbled cloth covers, patterned with birds and cones, and it's thick enough to last me till I go off to Uni (if I do). Reminds me of the time when Dad ran the Sunbeam Press and produced stationery and diaries for special occasions. I could have anything from stock I wanted, and often I did. That was my childhood, that was. Long ago. Mum said a funny thing the other day: ‘It's not till you get to middle age that you start thinking about your childhood.' Well, I do think of mine sometimes already, how it ended, as everything around me did, when old ‘Uncle' Oliver Merchant died, though Dad would often say – when he was winding the Press down, and preparing (as we now know) to leave Mum and me – ‘It all came to a halt when Oliver married Rosie Roberts, and she decided she wanted to be a business woman rather than a chorus girl!'

Not much point in thinking about all that now. Dad's been in Shropshire nearly six years, back in the Marches where he came from, is independent of us, and running High Flyers.

   

11.30 pm. Yes, Night Thoughts, like the title of that famous old book of poems. Simply cannot settle down to sleep. Too warm and far too much to think about. Afternoon provided me with an experience I may have made sense of though I can't be at all sure. Writing it down might help.

   

From the lake in Brockwell Park I walked up to the big Victorian house in Tulse Hill where Josh lives. Wish I did too, well, much of the time I wish this. My mum worries about mortgage repay-ments, and all she's got for her borrowing is a small flat in a purpose-built block a bit too close to Herne Hill Station. Of course what's important about Josh's home is not its position or architecture or market value, though Josh will tell you these any time (partly because he believes that sub prime and the Lehmann Brothers mark the end of our ‘capitalist era', and partly because he likes to). No, it's the house's atmosphere that counts with me. The man the kids call Strop and the woman they all call Strum in their private rhyming slang, but to the outside world Doctors Daniel Malinowski and Joanne Pargeter, of King's College Hospital, each brought children into this rambling place when they married (or whatever), so I'm never sure who's Josh's real brother or sister and who's a step-one. (An exaggeration, I know perfectly well.)

The hall of the house felt good and cool after the Turkish bath heat of the afternoon. There's a bay tree in a tub, and often I like to rub my fingers against its leaves and then hold them to my nose.

‘Hi Matt,' said Josh's older brother, Rollo, as he let me in. Rollo often calls me this, not caring what his brother's (in fact
step-
brother's) best mate is really called. From the little sitting room at the back of the hall came the strains of a violin playing the kind of music I think of as ‘mathematics made sound'. It nearly always turns out to be Bach. The violinist had to be Josh's (real) sister, Emily, who doesn't go to our school but to a private all-girls' one nearby. Though younger than Josh and me, she can do many things very well – talk away in French and German, execute classical ballet steps – so that, for all her quietness, she intimidates me. And guys mustn't be intimidated, ever. I intend some time to do or say something that impresses, or at least surprises, her. Hearing this music had the same effect on me as seeing those ducks upending themselves in the water; it refreshed me, eased my tension a little.

‘Josh, you know, won't be free to come downstairs for at least a quarter of an hour,' Rollo told me, ‘he's busy.'

I went up to the bay tree, doing that thing with the leaves that I like, ‘By the way Josh did text me just now saying come right over!'

‘I know, I know,' said Rollo, ‘I was there. He's finishing his black belt practice, his test's next Thursday.' He looked me up and down as if to ask where my training and ambition had deposited
me
. ‘But Emily'll be finishing any minute now.' He gestured in the direction of the door from behind which the sweet mathematical sounds were still coming. ‘She's having a private lesson with – with Dr Pringle, no less!'

‘Really?' Only thing I could say.

‘Many, Matt, would give their eye-teeth – and maybe their pudenda as well – to have Dr Pringle teach them. He's consulted by God knows how many high-profile musicians and organisations all over the world,' his voice lingered a little on these words, like it was he who was so famous, ‘but he prefers just being a wandering violin teacher, bringing out his pupils' gifts to the full wherever he goes. So it's great for Em for
him
to be giving her lessons.'

Listening to too much brother and sister talk is a pain in the arse for an only child like me.

‘Well, it sounds… er, beautiful. Bach?'

‘Matt, who the hell else could it be? It's the
Chaconne
from Partita Number 2 for solo violin. In D minor.'

Was there anything this guy didn't think he knew? Standing opposite each other on the marble tiles of the hall floor, we both seemed to realise that the chance of the two of us having a good conversation was zero, so we listened in silence to the music for at least three or four minutes until it came to a stop – like some formula worked out to its close, or bird song that could end in no other way… Rollo, I should have said at the start of this page, must have timetabled leisure for himself this hot afternoon, because he was bare to the waist, and below that wore blue-and-green striped shorts.

‘Em will be out now,' he said, ‘maybe you'll get a chance to talk to her, Matt.'

‘
Nat!
' Well, I owed it myself to remind him once, didn't I?

‘Sorry?'

‘Nat, N.A.T., short for Nathaniel. Not Matt, short for Matthew.'

Rollo threw his head back in amusement. ‘I know,' he said, ‘it's just that you don't look like a Nat – and I happen to know quite a few – whereas you seem like a
Matt
in every move you make.'

Luckily for him, the door opened, and first Emily, in jeans and a blue-and-white tank-top, and then this great Dr Pringle stepped into the hall, the latter carrying a violin case. I realised from his way of carrying himself and the sweat on his high domed forehead that the beautiful
Chaconne
I'd just heard had been played not by Emily but by himself.

‘Dr Pringle, good afternoon! Em, an admirer of yours is here,' said the infuriatingly officious Rollo, ‘he's called Nat!' and he gave me a little wink as he delivered my name correctly, ‘these last minutes he's been standing here listening, spellbound.'

‘Then it's Dr Pringle who's spellbound him, not me,' said Emily with the honesty I might have expected. She didn't, I'll admit, sound as if she cared whether she'd had an effect on me or not. I'm just Josh's undistinguished mate from down the road, Herne Hill way. ‘He was playing the Bach piece as it should be played, I just fumble through it. For now!' She clearly had all her complicated family's determination to get things perfect… ‘Dr Pringle, this is a friend of my brother, Josh,' (there we went!) ‘Nat Kempsey.'

And on hearing this Dr Pringle did a double-take. I've read many times about double-takes but I have never seen one in reality. Now I was faced with the genuine article. For a minute I thought the man was going to fall backwards. He clutched at his violin case as if for support.

‘Who? Who did you say?'

‘Nat Kempsey,' repeated Em.

‘Kempsey?'

‘Yes.'

‘Nat?'

‘Yes, that's right.'

Were we going to go on like this for ever?

‘Nat Kempsey!'

Well, it seemed we might… the man thrust his head forward towards me like a tortoise, his small bright eyes examining my face for… well, I couldn't guess what.

Not the usual reaction to my name, if such a thing exists. Feeling I should answer for myself now, saving Emily any further embarrassment, I said: ‘'Fraid she's right, Doctor! I'm Nathaniel Robin Kempsey, usually known as Nat.'

‘
Robin?
' was Dr Pringle's weirdo response to this, ‘Robin! Yes, it would be! Of course it would be Robin!'

I swear the guy looked and spoke like he was going to burst into tears. I will try and set down my impression of his appearance.

Tall and in his mid-forties (but I'm not good at older people's ages). Good head of hair, which I think is what's called strawberry blonde, with one or two grey streaks. Very pale blue eyes, like someone had taken hold of watercolour blue paint and then put in rather too much water (that's not original; some arty woman once said it about my grey eyes). Long, strong arms (short sleeves this afternoon) and hands with the muscular fingers you'd expect in a musician. Clothes – dark blue sports shirt and white chinos, both slightly rumpled; the man's clearly not an ironing fanatic like I am. He has the face of a man of acute intelligence and many worries. It was now twitching with emotion. But
what
emotion? I'm reminded, as I try to bring him to life on this page, of one of those characters you often find yourself sitting beside on the tube or bus who's suddenly troubled by something: the train slowing down between stations, its lights flickering; the sight of a large unattended parcel…