Mr Toppit (8 page)

“About what?”

“She hasn’t been down?”

“No, I’ve been waiting here.”

There was a pause. “How old are you? Twelve?”

What did that have to do with anything? “Thirteen,” I said. “Actually.”

He breathed out and shook his head. “We’re trying to get him stable. Your father.”

“You mean with crutches? Because he’s unsteady on his legs?”

“He’s sustained severe trauma, I’m afraid. The situation is very serious.”

My voice squeaked, “But he’s just broken his leg!”

“Among other things, yes.”

I didn’t know what to say. The story I had constructed was slipping through my fingers. If I could just hold it together, everything would be fine. Arthur had broken his leg. He was unsteady on his legs. He was unstable. It had been pretty traumatic but it’s all right now. Well, let’s be honest, it’s been severely traumatic but he’s on the mend. Close call. Yeah, close fucking call.

I might have kept the story in one piece, but then he said something so awful as he was leaving that I felt the blood
draining out of my face, felt myself falling down and down and down, like in an awful dream. “Well,” he said, “you’re going to have to be a
very
brave lad.”

The worst thing was that it felt like my fault. What had been a simple broken leg that would take only a lick of plaster to fix had been worked up by me into something more serious so I could get out of school. If I had stayed there to face the music with Adam everything would have been all right. As it was, I had jumped out of the story in which I belonged into another story where I was not meant to be, in the process tampering with the natural order of things, the way it had all been meant to play out.

Adam once told me about a science-fiction story he had read in which someone traveled back through time with strict instructions not to alter anything in the past. Without knowing it, he did something that seemed inconsequential, like fart or tread on an ant, and when he got back to his own time the earth was a nuclear wasteland or ruled by man-eating cats or something. I preferred to think about that because it was so absurd rather than the other example of thinking something into existence that had sprung into my mind: at the end of
Garden Growing
, the third of the Hayseed books, Luke dreams of a bird dying—
Sometimes Luke dreamed in color and sometimes he dreamed in black: different shades of black: dark black and light black and all the blacks of the rainbow. The crow in Luke’s hands was black
 … —and when he wakes up in the morning, to a silent and deserted house, he looks out of his window and sees the field that leads to the Darkwood black with the bodies of dead crows. Mr. Toppit has made his dream come true.

The panicking Luke runs through the house trying to find his parents:

Along the corridors, across the passages, up the stairs, through the rooms, Luke’s feet ran so fast that they were going faster than he was. He could scarcely keep up with them. They made no sound on the carpet and they made no sound on the bare floorboards. Doors slammed silently behind them, curtains flapped noiselessly in the silent breeze. Luke could hear himself shouting, but only at a distance: he was moving so quickly that his voice was always behind him. Where were his parents?

   Sometimes, deficient though they may be, they’re who you want and there’s nothing you can do about it. I had to go and find Martha. I didn’t feel precisely the panic that the other Luke did, but I felt the grimmest kind of foreboding. Actually, I felt simply alone. I now realized that Martha’s nonappearance was another thing to be thrown into the murky pool in which “severe trauma” and “trying to get him stable” and “very serious” were swimming around hungrily like sharks searching for something to devour.

In the corner of the room there was a small basin with a mirror next to it. I splashed cold water on my face before I realized there was no towel so I had to dry it on my sleeve. Then I unzipped my trousers and peed in the basin. What was nice was that it was exactly the right height, which made me feel a little better.

When I reached the ground floor the lift doors opened with a metallic
ping
and I was back in the entrance foyer where I had started out. I went over to the boxed-in office in the corner and tapped on the glass. It wasn’t the same man who had been there when I had first arrived. This one looked more like a security guard: he was dressed in a blue uniform with a cap. He slid open a panel.

“I’m trying to find out about my father,” I said breathlessly. “They told me to wait and—”

He cut in: “You shouldn’t be walking around unaccompanied. How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Where are your parents?”

“That’s who I’m trying to find. I’m Luke Hayman. My father’s Arthur Hayman. He’s the one who’s ill, who’s a patient. My mother’s called Martha Hayman.”

He tilted his head in the direction of the far corner. “She’s been sitting over there.” I turned. There was a row of empty chairs.

“Who?”

“Your mother. The American lady.”

“No, she’s—”

“Black dress?”

“Well—”

“Dark hair?”

“Sort of brownish but—”

“She’s been sitting over there. She was here a second ago, asked if there was any news about Mr. Hayman.”

“But my mother’s in the ward with my father. And she isn’t American.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s her bag on the chair. Maybe she’s gone to the toilet.” I was really beginning to dislike him. I went over to the chairs and looked at the bag. It was made of black canvas and it said on the front in white lettering,
KCIF MODESTO—A SMOOTHER SOUND
.

“This isn’t my mother’s bag,” I said, over my shoulder, but his chair had swiveled round and he had his back to me.

I had no idea what to do next. Short of locking myself in a lavatory and screaming with frustration, I had run out of options. I sat down and stared into space. After I had been there a
few minutes, my gaze tilted to the bag on the chair next to me. The top was bulging open and, without moving, I tipped my head sideways to see inside it. Glancing to check that the man wasn’t looking, I put my hand inside and felt around. It was like one of those games you play in the dark when you pass along a peeled grape and say it’s someone’s eyeball. There was a small box near the top of the bag, rectangular with a shiny surface. My hand pushed further in, passing what felt like damp tissues, a pen, and a thin book before it hit something at the bottom. It felt a bit sticky and I snatched my hand out fast. My fingertips were brown. Cautiously, I raised them to my nose and sniffed. It was chocolate.

Saliva flooded into my mouth. It seemed like hours since I’d had anything to eat. The man was turned away from me and had his feet up on a table in front of him so I felt justified in raising the bottom of the bag and shaking it so that things slid out onto the chair. The rectangular box turned out to be Tampax, and I pushed it back in as I pulled out what had been a giant bar of chocolate. At one end, the paper and silver wrapping had been torn off. I got out a couple of chunks and ate them.

Then I shoved everything back into the bag. As the chocolate went in, it pushed out the corner of what looked like a notebook. I was about to press it back when I noticed “Hayman” written on it in blue ink. I was so amazed that I stopped breathing for a second or two. I opened the book. Page after page—line after line, down the side, in the corner, upside down—was filled with two words: Arthur Hayman.

The lettering was in different sizes and styles, sometimes in capitals, sometimes in both upper and lower case. In places, the words were surrounded by boxes with ornate curlicues and flourishes. I didn’t even care whether the man in the glass box
saw me or not. I just dumped everything from the bag onto the chair and searched through it all. Apart from the Tampax, the chocolate, and the notebook, there were some pens, a nail file, a key attached to a metal ring with the number
14
on it, a map of the Underground and—I pulled away my hand—a lot of scrunched-up pieces of tissue paper stained with blood.

I picked up the notebook again. The pages before the Arthur Hayman ones were relatively normal. There were a lot of calculations, which I guessed were conversions from pounds into dollars, and bits of travel information like “Nearest subway: Lancaster Gate,” the name of an hotel with a phone number, and various things ticked or crossed out, like “Call Alma.” Turning to the Arthur Hayman pages and those after them was like going through a door and entering a different world. There were doodles and little sketches, some just scrawls and others quite carefully done, all variations on a theme: a man and a child. Oddly he seemed to be a kind of Red Indian chief with a big headdress made of feathers. The child was a little girl, and while his face was quite carefully drawn, both head on and in profile, the child was a sort of silhouette with no features. The most finished of the drawings took up nearly a whole page of the notebook and showed the man and the child standing: he was tall and thin and she was tiny, hardly taller than his knees; they were holding hands. Running alongside all the sketches were the lines of a poem. They had been crossed out and rewritten all over the place, but a little portion of it was finished and written out neatly:

It was like
Hiawatha
, only it wasn’t. “Haymanito hears her calling …” I repeated the line aloud several times, then put the notebook, along with everything else that had spilled out onto the chair, back into the black bag as quickly as I could. I felt a strange sense of revulsion and couldn’t wait to get it all off my hands. Just reading that poem had made me feel embarrassed, as if I’d been caught breaking into someone’s house. But it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. The frightening thing—the inexplicable thing—was that it was like breaking into a house you’d never laid eyes on, in a country you’d never been to, and finding it filled with your belongings.

So, there I was, sitting on a stackable black plastic chair in the foyer of a hospital into which my father, who might or might not be in a dangerously unstable condition, and my mother appeared to have vanished, and I was surreptitiously going through the bag of an obviously unhinged woman, who might or might not be American and whom a security guard believed might be my mother. The opportunities for confusion were endless and I wanted something to be simple. Then amazingly—for a second—it was. There was an echoey
ping
and a light went on above the lift. The doors parted and there was Martha.

For a few seconds she didn’t see me. She seemed rather small and old, and was apparently having difficulty with the lift: she was peering around her in a confused way, as if going through the open doors in front of her might not be the best way of
getting out, as if, in fact, there might be several other exits that she couldn’t find. Then she stepped out tentatively, looked up and saw me. I could tell that whatever the news was going to be, it was not going to be good.

I got up from the chair. It seemed to take a long time. I began to walk across the foyer to where Martha was standing and, at that moment, a number of things happened: a clanging ambulance squealed to a halt outside the entrance and the man in the glass office swiveled round to look; a troupe of chattering nurses holding clipboards banged through the double doors that led from the wards, their heels clicking on the lino like tap shoes, and crossed the foyer in front of Martha. It had been silent for such a long time that the noise was deafening, as if someone had turned up the volume too loud.

As I was moving past the glass office, the man’s eyes met mine and I saw something in them that made me snap. Before I knew what was happening, I had veered away from the straight line that led to Martha and I was beside the glass office banging with my fist on the sliding panel. The man was astonished. The nurses stopped in their tracks and turned towards me. I clawed the panel open and stuck my head through the gap. He drew backwards as I shouted, “That’s my mother, you silly, stupid man! There she is! That’s her! She’s not American!” At the same time, I shook my outstretched finger in Martha’s direction—but she was obscured now by the nurses. My nose was dripping and my mouth was filled with mucus. I had a vision of myself as a squalling, purple-faced, newborn baby. I slammed the panel shut with such force that the glass cracked and half of it fell out, shattering on the floor.

The ambulance that had stopped outside had disgorged three paramedics who were helping an old woman with a
bleeding face through the entrance, and the man—grateful for the distraction—leaped from his chair and ran out of the door at the back of his office to help. The nurses were watching me, and as I moved towards them, they parted silently like a curtain. They ended up flanking Martha, looking nervously at this deranged child who probably had a carving knife hidden about his person. Everything was silent again, apart from some whimpering and shuffling as the injured woman was brought into the foyer.

Martha’s face was blank, her mouth slack. She seemed exhausted. Her eyes closed and she made a guttural sound in her throat. When she opened her eyes, her mouth began to tremble and her face crumpled. “Oh, baby, where have you been?” she said, in a thin, squeaky voice. “Where were you? Why didn’t you find me?” She looked me up and down. Tears were streaming over her cheeks. I couldn’t speak. A medium-size golf ball had lodged itself temporarily in my throat. Then she let out a long groan as if she was in pain. “Why do you always dress so horribly? You look so
weak
!”

As the man from the glass office passed us, leading the way for the three paramedics who were supporting the old woman, I thought I saw a smirk spreading across his face.