The Kind Folk (10 page)

The ultrasound technician is a brawny woman whose breasts expand her overall like an emblem of motherhood. As she hands over the photographs she says "He likes an audience."

"We're both performers," Sophie tells her. "I expect it's in his genes."

"I only heard your song once and I bought your album," the technician says and turns to Luke. "And what are you famous for again?"

Luke is gazing at the handful of photographs. He knows this is how scans look—the baby's bones glowing white through blurred grey flesh—but the images seem reminiscent of a vision, of spying into somewhere hidden from the world. "I imitate people," he mumbles.

"Luke's a comedian."

"He's one of those all right," the technician says and relents. "I should think you're looking forward to making your baby laugh."

Luke can't contradict this, but he's still intent on the photographs that reveal he and Sophie have a son now that the evidence is no longer hidden by the cord. "What did you mean about liking an audience?"

"He was just very lively. I don't mean the scan was affecting him."

"I knew that was what you meant," Sophie says.

"You've nothing to worry about that I can see, and you don't need me to tell you that goes for Luke's background as well."

Luke wishes he didn't have a reason to speak. "We don't know that any more."

"Pardon me?"

"We've found out the couple who brought Luke up aren't his parents. They didn't even know themselves." More comfortingly than Luke thinks is required Sophie adds "It wasn't here the babies were mixed up."

"I see." The technician spends some time in doing so and then, with an extra blink at Luke, says "Let me just have a word with someone."

As she leaves them alone Luke tries to concentrate on Sophie and the photographs, but he's thinking of Terence's journal. On his way home from the churchyard yesterday he stopped the car to search the ledger for a drawing he was sure he'd glimpsed. It's a perfunctory image of a hand with the little finger and the index pointing directly away from each other while the thumb rests across the palm and the raised middle fingers are pressed together. So Luke had seen it before he had his vision in the churchyard, and he assumes Terence was doing his best to sketch something he'd found, most likely an architectural decoration. He did so opposite the Yancey reference, which dates from when Luke was six and a half, after which all the entries refer to locations rather than to anyone by name. It's the only version of the image in the journal, but Luke is troubled by the notion that he has seen its like somewhere else. He has made no headway with remembering by the time the technician comes back. "Can you speak to Dr Meldrum as you go?" she says.

The doctor meets them at the door of his office. He's tall but stooped, with a forehead so high it comes close to making his face look bisected by his unkempt eyebrows. "Ms Drew, Mr Arnold," he says. "Or is it still?"

"As far as we're concerned it is," Sophie tells him.

"Well, that simplifies matters a little. Will you come in? I have you on the screen." As Luke and Sophie follow him into the white room, where a computer appears to be struggling for space on his cluttered desk, he says "I understand from the lady who conducted the scan that you put on some kind of a show."

"Who did?" Luke demands.

"She remembered seeing you on television. Didn't you go on to learn who your parents were?"

"I suppose that's near enough to it."

"You might think of advising us directly of any alteration in your details." The doctor's faintly reproachful tone dissipates as he says "Do sit down. You're saying you'd prefer to retain the name we have for you."

"It's the only one I've got."

"Capital. Any question mark over your date of birth that you're aware of?" When Luke shakes his head the doctor says "I understand you're blaming some confusion at the hospital."

"Unless you can tell us," Sophie says, "how else the babies could have been swapped."

"There did use to be blunders of the kind once in a blue moon. They're one reason safeguards have been put in place, so please don't feel even slightly apprehensive on your own front." His eyebrows subside, having propped up a stack of wrinkles, as he says "Mr Arnold, your family. Not known, am I to put, or to be confirmed?"

"Whichever you think is best."

"It might be in the interest of your child to discover what you can about your origins."

"But you've seen Luke's history," Sophie protests.

"We have, and most exemplary it is. Be reassured that we've no reason to suspect his family has passed anything undesirable on to him." Dr Meldrum scrolls through the information on the monitor and says "He did see a consultant once when he was a child, but there was nothing amiss to speak of."

"The psychiatrist, you mean." Luke almost doesn't hesitate before asking "What does it say?"

"Nothing to frighten the horses. Your intelligence was well above the average. Your answers were articulate and uncommonly imaginative. You were unusually quick to identify cues and respond to them, that's to say to learn from other people's behaviour. Nothing wrong with any of that, Ms Drew, would you agree?"

"It sounds as if you were already on the way to being what you are, Luke."

"You seem to have had a little trouble with imaginary companions." Dr Meldrum is still intent on the monitor. "Your image of them seems to have been very vivid," he says, "but a few months later you'd completely overcome the problem. It was the main reason you were referred, and you didn't need to be seen again."

"The main reason as well as his dreams, you mean," Sophie says.

"No, those were part of it. The other problem that I'm confident Mr Arnold has left behind was a minor nervous habit, nothing more."

Luke feels absurdly apprehensive, as if his childhood state has been revived. "What habit?"

"Some kind of tic, I believe. Yes, there it is." He's looking not at Luke but at the screen. "The consultant mistook it for a muscular spasm at first," he says. "A minor compulsion to contort your hands. She explored the possibility that you meant to make some form of sign, but since you denied it she concluded the gesture was unconscious."

"Does she describe it?" Sophie says, and when the doctor finds no description "Do you remember, Luke?"

"Why would I want to?" Some of the trouble is that he does. He's hearing Freda protest "Don't do that with your hands, Luke, they'll stick that way" and "What are you trying to do? You'll damage them if you're not careful." Even if he's paraphrasing her words, there's no question of the shape his hands were straining to adopt. He has to assume Terence showed him some version of the sign, but where? If he has forgotten this for so many years, what else may be lying in wait in his mind? "I've no idea what it could have meant," he tells Sophie, which is true enough.

"Perhaps it was your way of fending off whatever you imagined was threatening you," says Dr Meldrum. "I'm sure you both have more immediate concerns, but do appreciate that we've found nothing untoward today."

Luke and Sophie thank him as he ushers them out of his office. Somewhere down the corridor that looks and smells scoured, a baby is wailing. Another one starts a thin imitation, and soon they're joined by a chorus. Sophie gives the clamour a wry smile and says "I'm sorry, Luke."

"What have you got to be sorry for?"

"I was hoping today might make up for not finding your parents when you thought you had."

"Of course it does." At least Luke can persuade her that he has left any disquiet behind. "He'll be bright, little Maurice," he says. "He already is." The infant wails fade into the distance as the automatic doors let him and Sophie out of the hospital. They turn their phones back on, and Luke's emits a sharp alert. He has missed a call from somebody unidentified who left no message. He's returning the mobile to his pocket, and trying not to wonder vainly how important the call was, when the phone begins to vibrate in his hand. Before it has a chance to ring he says "Hello?"

For some moments he's afraid his urgency has silenced if not scared away the caller, and then a woman blurts "Mr Arnold?"

"Luke Arnold, yes."

"You're the Mr Arnold who was on television."

"I'm one of them. I'm the one who turned out not to be one."

"I know." She sounds apologetic, but she already did, and more so as she adds "How have you been since?"

Sophie is questioning him with her eyes, and he can only wave at her; he would switch on the loudspeaker if it weren't for the noise of traffic on the road outside the hospital. "Why do you ask?" he says, pressing the mobile against his ear.

"I should think a lot of people who saw the show must have felt for you, Mr Arnold."

He doesn't think this is much of an answer; it's more like avoiding one. Before he can say so the woman enquires "Have you done anything about the situation?"

Is she some kind of counsellor? "What would you suggest?" Luke retorts.

"Have you been looking into it, I mean."

"I've been trying to find out where I came from."

"So you want to know."

Sophie is frowning at him, but he waves so fiercely she looks rebuffed. "Why shouldn't I?" he demands.

"That's not for me to say, Mr Arnold."

"True enough, but then why are you calling?"

She's silent, and Luke is afraid he has been too aggressive. He's about to prompt her when he hears her take a long breath. "I was a nurse at the hospital," she says. "I know what happened after you were born."

THE WATCHERS

She didn't give Luke her surname or a precise time to meet her. She told him to be in the park by eight, and he's still there, sitting at a picnic table that gives him a view of much of Greenbank Park. Ahead of him is an expanse of grass bordered by trees and railings, beyond which it's overlooked by houses on the far side of Greenbank Road. They're on Luke's right, while to his left a concrete path leads alongside a narrow lake almost the length of the park, and behind him is a children's playground. His vision has kept pace with the growing darkness, some of which is brought by clouds; the sky resembles the roof of a coal mine patched with huge wads of soot. Just the same, it's almost nine o'clock.

He keeps telling himself not to call Eunice, even though he managed to persuade her to reveal her mobile number. He doesn't know if she still works as a nurse, but perhaps her job has delayed her. Why does she need to meet him before she'll tell him what she knows? If she's watching him from one of the houses, surely she's had time to be as sure of him as this will make her. Anybody else could take him for a drug dealer or a customer, and perhaps that's why he feels spied upon. He peers at the houses, three-storey buildings with steep gables that each frame single windows, but nobody is visible. A distorted flattened face more than twice the size of his is mouthing silently beneath a gable, and a set of ground-floor curtains pulses with the glow of another television. He hasn't given up attempting to locate a watcher when he sees a light on the path through the park.

It's approaching at no great speed. It's so intensely white that it puts Luke in mind of the essence of the moon. A dull effortful murmur lets him realise that it belongs to a motorised wheelchair, beside which a large dog on a lead is trotting. Perhaps that will help Eunice to feel safe to talk, but as Luke lifts a hand the dog starts to whine and bark. "Good evening," the occupant of the chair says and even more sharply "Hunter."

"Good evening," Luke responds, having sighed at his mistake, because Hunter's owner is a man. The dog is baying now and snarling too, besides emitting a whine like the noise of an unoiled gate. The glare of the headlight clings to Luke's eyes while the chair coasts past the playground. "Hunter," the man commands and yanks at the lead, making the dog yelp, as the wheelchair coasts out of the park. Luke is turning back to the houses when he realises he's no longer alone. Somebody is in the playground.

Perhaps the dog wasn't barking at Luke after all. The newcomer is inside a climbing frame from which his long legs dangle as he pokes his face between the bars. He, if indeed it's a he, isn't on his own. A companion squats on a low seesaw, feet planted on the surface of the playground, and a third figure is sitting at the top of a slide, where his upper half is silhouetted against the dim field across the lake. The outline of his face is at least as starved as those of his fellows—so ill-defined that they're hardly discernible. Their silence and lack of movement suggest they're up to rather less than good. It seems unwise to stay close to them, and Luke rises to his feet, not too deliberately or casually or slowly or hastily, he hopes. When they don't move he retreats along the path.

There's a bench beside it about midway, facing the lake. He sits on it the wrong way round, thrusting his legs through the gap at the back. His view is mostly of the houses now, and he has to keep glancing both ways along the deserted path. Whenever he glimpses the playground its occupants haven't perceptibly moved, but suppose they think he's watching them? Their lack of activity feels like a threat he would rather not define, and he doesn't realise how much they've distracted him from consulting his watch until he sees the time is well on its way to ten o'clock.

He takes out his mobile before he sees how this may look. May the loiterers think he's calling someone about them? He shouldn't leave the park in case Eunice shows up, but she has had quite enough time to do so. As he brings the mobile to his ear a dial tone starts to trill, and as it repeats itself a mobile begins to ring in a house. It shrills twice and is cut off, and so is the sound at his ear. In a moment a woman's shadow swells up on the curtain at the window in the gable of the house almost opposite the bench.

The left edge of the curtain stirs as the woman leans towards the meagre gap. The curtain falls into place almost immediately, and the shadow ducks back. As it vanishes Luke jabs the icon to recall Eunice's number. The bell renews its twin trills at his ear, and the phone under the gable responds. It's cut off at once, and the light in the room is extinguished, pasting darkness like an emblem of secrecy against the window. The sight is too much for Luke. "Eunice," he shouts at the top of his voice. "It's Luke Arnold. You know I'm here."