J (2 page)

The action was not commemorative in intent, but it often reminded him of a cruelly moonlit night many years before, when after a day strained by something – money worries or illness or news which the young Kevern gathered must have been very bad – his sardonic, creaking father had kicked the runner aside, raised the hem of his brocade dressing gown, and danced an enraged soft-shoe shuffle, his arms and legs going up and down in unison like those of a toy skeleton on a stick. He hadn’t known his son was on the stairs, watching.

Kevern pressed himself into the darkness of the stairwell. Became a shadow. He was too frightened to say anything. His father was not a dancing man. He stayed very still, but the cottage thrummed to its occupants’ every anxiety – he could sense his parents’ troubled sleep through the floorboards under his bed, even though he slept in a room below theirs – and now the disturbance his fear generated gave his presence away.

‘Sammy Davis
unior,’ his father explained awkwardly when he saw him. His voice was hoarse and dry, a rattle from ruined lungs. Because he spoke with an accent even Kevern found strange, as though he’d never really listened to how people spoke in Port Reuben, he released his words reluctantly. He put two fingers across his mouth, like a tramp sucking on a cigarette butt he’d found in a rubbish bin. This he always did to stifle the letter
before it left his lips.

The boy was none the wiser. ‘Sammy Davis
unior?’ He too, religiously in his father’s presence – and often even when his father wasn’t there – sealed his lips against the letter
when it began a word. He didn’t know why. It had begun as a game between them when he was small. His father had played it with his own father, he’d told him. Begin a word with a
without remembering to put two fingers across your mouth and it cost you a penny. It had not been much fun then and it was not much fun now. He knew it was expected of him, that was all. But why was his father being Sammy Davis
unior, whoever Sammy Davis
unior was?

‘Song and dance man,’ his father said. ‘Mr Bo
angles. No, you haven’t heard of him.’

Him? Which him? Sammy Davis
unior or Mr Bo
angles?

Either way, it sounded more like a warning than a statement.
If anybody asks, you haven’t heard of him. You understand?
Kevern’s childhood had been full of such warnings. Each delivered in a half-foreign tongue. You don’t know, you haven’t seen, you haven’t heard. When his schoolteachers asked questions his was the last hand to go up: he said he didn’t know, hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard. In ignorance was safety. But it worried him that he might have sounded like his father, lisping and slithering in another language. So he spoke in a whisper that drew even more attention to his oddness.

In this instance his father needn’t have worried. Kevern hadn’t only not heard of Sammy Davis
unior, he hadn’t heard of Sammy Davis Senior either.

Ailinn would not have said no to such a father, no matter how strange his behaviour. It helped, she thought, to know where your madness came from.

Once Kevern had closed and double-locked the front door, he knelt and peered through the letter box, as he imagined a burglar or other intruder might. He could hear the television and smell the tea. He could see the phone quietly pulsing yellow, as though receiving dialysis, on the hall table. The silk runner, he noted with satisfaction, might have been trodden on by a household of small children. No sane man could possibly leave his own house without rearranging the runner on the way out.