Landed (14 page)

They take a left and a right and cross the humpbacked bridge, and once they are on the towpath of the canal Owen begins to breathe a little easier.

 

Electric-blue dragonflies blur across the water. Male and female mallards float: they seem to be waiting. A smell of parsley. Owen wipes his sweaty hairline. Holly's hand is slippery in his. Josh walks beside him, black rucksack on his back.

The sun is above, everywhere and nowhere. Owen raises his head with relief. He knows this is only the beginning, the initial step, the first hurdle. He feels euphoria, like the sky above him is his to float into. The vapour trail of a jet aeroplane curves across the blue sky, as if the pilot has discovered a navigational error, and is discreetly correcting it.

P
eople pour into the city, tired and hungry. They arrive and are lost, look around for guidance. Others are leaving. The concourse is a jostling swarm of criss-crossing paths. Owen and his children queue ten minutes for a ticket. Josh goes first. The barrier swallows his ticket, spits it out, opens its wings to let him through.

The waiting room is in the middle of the platform. Its walls are thick transparent plastic. Outside, old people tow trolley cases, their breath in the harsh sun condensing before them. Families huddle around bulging bags: bulky, shapeless men and women in sports clothes, children either too fat or too thin. Young men in oval mirrored sunglasses. Alternating tannoys – one voice computerised, female, the other a live man – clamour for attention. Inaudible information.

Owen, Josh and Holly are the only occupants of the waiting room. They sit apart, a triangle of passengers. Holly must have turned towards her father: he can tell from the sound of her voice. ‘Mummy said you're sick.'

Owen looks at his daughter and shakes his head. ‘She didn't mean it,' he says. Holly comes over and climbs onto his lap. Josh is across the room, kneeling on a chair, looking out. Beneath her green jacket Holly wears a red T-shirt with two black embroidered dogs on the front, a blue denim skirt, odd socks – one purple, one pink – pulled up as high as they will go,
almost to her knees. Sturdy shoes. Sweatbands on her wrists, her hair in plaits, hairgrips holding them to the sides of her head. Owen is grateful that at their school the children do not wear uniform. That bit less conspicuous.

Holly squirms around until she gets herself comfortable. The hook does not bother her. She lets her body relax into Owen's. With his left hand he strokes her arm. Holly takes it as her due: an expectation of sensuality. Owen realises she is studying his face, inspecting it closely. He breathes in through his lips and Holly peers into his mouth. ‘What happened to your tooth?' she asks.

Owen feels with his tongue, finds the gap at the front of his upper jaw. Lost it a month or two ago. ‘Sold it, like,' he tells his daughter. ‘Get good money for a decent tooth, know who to go to.'

Holly stares at him a moment, then seems to realise she'll get no sense out of him on this and says, ‘Let's talk about something. What shall we talk about?'

‘Anything in the whole wide world, girl.'

Holly thinks for a moment. ‘When you did meet Mummy . . .'

Owen frowns. He thinks, Anything but that, but says, ‘Yes?'

‘Before I was in Mummy's tummy . . .'

‘You mean when you were just a twinkle in my eye?'

‘No. Before.'

‘Before Josh?'

Across the room, Josh's body stiffens, alert to the conversation behind him.

‘Yes, fore Josh. Fore our sister. When did you meet Mummy?'

Owen sighs. ‘She was so beautiful, see,' he says, shaking his head. ‘First time I saw your mother,' he tells Holly, ‘she was wearing a dress so tight I found it difficult to breathe.'

Holly frowns. ‘But when?' she says impatiently.

‘When? Let's see.' He calculates, and decides, ‘Fifteen year ago.'

Holly grows exasperated. ‘But
when
?' she repeats.

Owen plucks a date at random. ‘The twentieth of November.'

Holly flushes with anger.

‘Tuesday, Holly,' Owen says.

Holly's small hands bunch into tight fists, and she raises one of them. Her eyes well up. Her skin is the colour of raspberry milk. She is about to strike him. But then she seems to pause, to steady herself, as if taking pity on his obtuseness. ‘But were it
after
?' she asks.

‘Yes,' he says. ‘Yes. That's right. It was after.' This, bizarrely, seems to satisfy her.

Josh turns around. Looking at Holly, he says, ‘Owen doesn't even
know
.'

Owen wonders what she meant. Did Josh know what she meant? He looks at Josh, who turns away.

Outside, families haul their items of dead luggage for ten or twenty metres, dump them down again and look around in every direction, unsure of where their train might come from.

Owen recalls when he and Mel married, his feeling of relief. And pride of conquest. She was his now, as he was hers. He knew – he was certain – that her brother, their friends, his own mother, considered him fortunate. At a certain moment during the wedding party he took a break from dancing and stepped out of the barn. He looked down into the valley from up in those hills he planned to take the children to now. Behind him the beats and the rapture. It struck him (and as it did so he knew that he would remember this moment forever, the cloudy sunset, silhouetted hills, shuddering music), it struck him that in pledging herself, her future, her very life to his, that in some
strange way Mel had evaded him. The girl he had pursued was not, could never be again, the woman he had captured.

Outside, a train comes. Another leaves. The waiting room begins to fill with people. Lone travellers, they speak into their mobile phones. The sound is different from the murmurous babble of conversation: composed of interwoven, overlapping monologues, it is more theatrical, with odd emphases and pauses.

‘This is ours,' Owen says.

Shuffling on his knees, Josh backs off the seat, turns and walks across the waiting room, pulling the supports of his rucksack over his shoulders. ‘I thought we was going on the bus,' he says, frowning.

‘Take the train for a change, is what I thought.' Owen stands up and half-lifts, half-tosses, Holly over and around his right shoulder so that she can cling to his back like a monkey. Josh shrugs. He lifts his sister's rucksack and loops it in his father's hook. Owen is able to carry it along with his own rucksack, leaving his left hand to cradle Holly's bottom behind him.

They walk to a platform, climb onto a train. Josh walks along the centre aisle. At the end of each carriage Josh pushes a button and the door hisses open. There are plenty of empty seats. The train had arrived from somewhere; people have spread out. Laptops. iPods. Paperback books. Companionable magazines. Dainty paper bags of coffee, sandwiches from the buffet car. Sachets of sugar, tiny tubs of milk. People gaze out of the windows.

They reach an empty carriage at the front of the long train. The driver, whose bull neck and the back of whose bald head they can see through a window in the door of his cab.

Josh sits, silent. Holly empties her rucksack on the table. The flotsam of a five-year-old magpie. A plastic beetle, a hairgrip, one dice, a pink pony, odd crayons, they tumble out, a domino, dented ping-pong ball, one of her mother's rings, which Owen
suspects may be valuable. Holly's bags were not bad places to look if you'd lost something. The last thing to fall out is Owen's old toothbrush. It disappeared around the time of the children's last visit, after which he'd had to get a new one. Why Holly had filched this he has no idea – she is too proud to admit theft, it would be no use confronting her, she'd deny taking it and become angry. Memento of him or merely a momentary covetousness? Neither makes much sense, but Holly is five years old, and she has her own logic.

Josh draws something in his notebook, shows it to Holly. Owen sees them exchange looks. About him? He feels aloof from them, superfluous. A paternal superfluity. The absence, the two of them, the broken triangle. He will mend it.

 

The lurch of a train. The judder and sway. It is hard to write by hand. Josh lets out little grunts of frustration when his pen slews across the page. Owen expresses his sympathy. The boy puts down the pen. It rolls over the table.

‘I want to text Mum,' Josh says. ‘Left my phone at school.'

‘It's okay,' Owen says. ‘She knows where we are.'

‘I want to talk to her,' Josh says.

‘And me,' adds Holly.

‘I don't have my mobile,' Owen tells them. ‘We'll call her later, from a phone box.'

 

Their train rumbles through industrial yards: stacks of iron, mechanical shapes of indecipherable purpose, parts less of machines than of giant puzzles; piles of sand, grit, gravel, like spiceyards, the ingredients of industrial civilisation. The yards appear deserted.

Josh watches with a brooding gaze. The train passes a park. A fluoro-jacketed gardener with red earmuffs is agitating
leaves with a blow vac, tidying the lawns by means of small tornadoes. You don't need two hands to do that job, Owen thinks. Bare trees, their trunks like stalks, look like they've been stuck into the ground rather than grown from it. At the corner of the park more trees have been planted, hundreds. They look like war graves, like the trees have died, but sticks and rabbit guards remain, a memorial for each dead sapling.

Windows cut into the roofs of houses. Suburban back gardens. Plastic toys abandoned. An upturned boat. ‘We've passed this way already,' Josh says. ‘We're going round and round.'

Is there an accusatory tone to Josh's voice? Does he blame Owen for being thrown out? He is disappointed that Owen did not stand up for himself more effectively. He witnessed his father assault his mother's boyfriend, receive a bloody beating and lose his last right of access as a consequence.

Holly has repacked her bag, is carefully zipping it up. ‘Look,' says Josh. In a large field, deep in long grass, white in the green, the letter H. A single set of rugby posts? Or all that is left of a HOLLYWOOD-type sign? ‘We've been here before,' Josh says.

Holly looks up. ‘Definitely,' she says, slowly, so that Owen can hear where the syllables join, each link. Her latest longest word, to be used at any opportunity.

‘You wasn't even looking,' Josh tells her.

‘I
were
,' Holly claims. ‘Don't be horrible.'

‘Whatever you say's whatever you are,' Josh says, in a faint sing-song.

The train begins a long skid to a halt. It stops beside an empty platform. The doors open. No one gets off. Other passengers stand up, look around. One or two step out, gaze up and down the platform, pull up their collars, hugging themselves. Light cigarettes.

The driver is reading a newspaper. Owen knocks lightly on
the window, and when the man looks up Owen opens his arms as if to ask, What's going on? The driver shrugs: I know no more than you, mate.

Owen and Josh stand on the platform, shivering smokers on either side. Holly joins them. It is always colder, Owen thinks, on railway platforms, there's invariably a cold cutting wind blowing through the station. He doesn't want to be stuck here. He wants to be moving. Is it easier for the police to find someone in hiding or in transit, on public transport? There is no announcement, nor sign of a guard. Every twenty metres stands a T-shaped streetlamp, like those crosses in certain crucifixions painted without the top section.

The wind tosses objects into the air – a crisp packet, a sheet of newspaper – and plays with them. The wind is solid, like the sea; birds are like fish, swimming through chunky air. A black hat reels above their heads. The children watch it, then look at Owen, as if he might explain it. Behind them, the train grumbles, and stirs. The driver must have received the order to proceed. ‘Come on,' Owen says. He takes Holly's hand, the trio climb back on. Passengers return to the same seats they'd occupied a quarter of an hour before.

The train pulls out of the empty station. Josh shakes his head, then he says to his father, ‘Are we going to see Nana?'

Owen finds he is unable simply to say, Yes. ‘We'll call her,' he says.

‘Why didn't we go to the coach station?' Josh asks. ‘We could have gone on the coach, couldn't we?'

Owen tries to remember whether or not you could get to King's Lynn by train. He thinks you can, changing at Ely. He knows they have visited his mother without him, more often than he has. He'd withdrawn from everyone.

Holly stands up. ‘I'm going to the toilet,' she says. Owen begins to gesture in the right direction, to save Holly walking towards the driver's cab, but she cuts him short with a smile. ‘I know, Daddy.' She sways past his right shoulder.