The Story of My Face (27 page)

Dear Natalie, Pekka is delivering this so you can't say I'm not keeping my side of the bargain.

Thank you for your invitation.

I want to see this thing through so I will be there, of course.

I apologise for my handwriting, but my typewriter is broken.

Yours sincerely,

Christina.

Her letters are in fact very carefully formed, horribly neat.

Each sentence, now that there is punctuation, begins on a separate line, as if a lot of thought and effort has gone into making it. I imagine her, sitting at a huge table in a frilly, electric-lit kitchen, bent over the paper with the tip of her tongue between her lips as she writes, the way children do.

‘What is the bargain?' Heikki asks.

‘I've no idea. I never made one.'

‘And what does this mean? What is the thing she is seeing through?'

It could be anything, I tell him, or nothing. It could be a threat to punish me. It could be that she is giving me a chance not to do what she expects me to do –

‘And if you
do
do it?'

‘I don't want to think about that,' I say. ‘It's maybe something so personal it's impossible to understand. Some little thing. . . .'

‘I see,' he says, and must of course be talking about something other than what I have told him, which no one in their right mind could understand. And I am terrified, from the look in his eyes, that he will want to know all the things I am not ready to tell him.
Please
, I think at him through my turned back, please remember: I am the one who asks the stream of little inconsequential questions that add up in the end (or sometimes doesn't need to: I just get told, as if by osmosis). I am the one who wants all the useless details, who stumbles on the half-forgotten secrets – I always have, I always will. In the end, it's what I do. And until
I
change the sign, this is a one-way street –

‘My ex-wife is a difficult woman, very extreme,' he tells me, in a simple, straightforward kind of tone: proving my point, I think at first. But then, I realise, as he sits down at his desk and ignores me, that he is thinking things I can't know back at me, and I don't know what will come of it.

30

In the last of the daylight, we turn left at the lights, enter the familiar sequence of domestic rights and lefts that brings us – all of a sudden, it seems after the long hours of being on the way – home. John Hern gets out, opens the gate, drives onto the paved driveway, keeping close to the right-hand side, and stops again. We look out of our respective windows, feeling the silence between us – already long – deepening now that the engine is quiet.

It must have been raining here: the garden can hardly contain itself. Bushes and flowers are entangled and competing with weeds for space, everything is about to burst from its boundaries. The lawn is dotted with daisies and clover, the joins between the paving-stones filled with moss and grasses. In the midst of all this growth, the house itself stands stalwart, unaffected, its curtains and windows closed. Inside it, the air must be hot and still, there will be a fine layer of dust on the surfaces of tables and window-sills. The fridge will be silent, switched off with its door propped open, the electricity stalled at the meter. The house is resting, gathering its strength. We in the car are exhausted, the backs of our legs numbed and stuck to the seats, yet unwilling to leave; it's as if we might stay here until the extravagant vegetation invades the vehicle itself, and forces us out.

Then I break the spell by leaning forwards, pushing my shoulders between the front seats. The air stirs, alive with the possibilities of words.

‘Can I stay?' I ask.

‘Oh hush, child,' Barbara tells me, quickly turning round. Her voice is soft as fluff, its fabric finely unravelled. She reaches out and loops a strand of hair behind my ear, the way she is always doing now. ‘Now is not the right time,' she says. There will be one, then? John Hern switches the engine back on.

‘You'll have to go straight home,' he tells me.

‘They won't be expecting me.' I reach through the gap, touch his arm as he feels for the hand-brake.

‘No need to drive there. She only has the one bag,' Barbara tells her husband. ‘I'll walk her home.'

‘I will,' Mark says.

‘No,' his father tells him, ‘you can help me,' and cuts the engine again. Barbara opens her door. I lean back in my seat. Suppose I refuse to go? When Barbara, now carrying my duffle-bag, opens the door, I still don't move.

‘You haven't done anything wrong,' she says. ‘You mustn't worry. We're all tired . . . Maybe you can come and see us in the morning.'

I turn to Mark, look him full in the face. I study him hard, my eyes moving minutely from side to side, up and down. The asymmetrical eyebrows still frown at me but they are bewildered now, not hostile. Tired, shadowy eyes, their pupils pit-black. His lips are slightly parted, the very tip of his tongue just visible. He's changed, though he's also the same.

There's an emotion radiating from me, an intense alarm, a shrill, unvoiced scream far larger than the occasion warrants – this is not my family, after all, not my disaster. He looks steadily back at me.

‘I don't know what to do,' he tells me, touching my shoulder. I scramble out of the car, taking with me my panic, but also my warmth, my smell of crushed grass and salt. Barbara and I link arms as we walk back to the gate.

Will Sandra be in? Who else might be there? There is no way of knowing. No way of imagining what it will be like to have the two of them meet, what on earth I can say to either of them to explain my lies – I just push the thought of it right away, and take the walk one step at a time, looking at the houses and gardens, just as I did the first time.

John makes his way to the house. Mark is to brace the caravan, take the keys from the ignition, bring the bags into the hall and leave them there, as quickly as possible. He waits in the car a few minutes before climbing into the caravan, pulling open the lockers, dragging the bags out so that they land heavily on the floor; the caravan shakes with each one; he waits for the last vibration of each impact to still itself before reaching for the next bag. His mind is empty: he keeps it that way by filling it with the sounds and sensations of the task. He carries the bags one by one into the house and, bending carefully at the knees, sets them down in a row. His father is nowhere to be seen.

When he has finished the carrying he sets to work on the van, unhitching it, then squatting by each corner for a few moments, moving round every few turns to keep the balance right, giving himself over to the click of the ratchet in the jack. Then, when there's nothing else to do he walks slowly to the house and counts himself up the stairs. He can hear his father in his parents' bedroom; he almost knows, before he steps in, that he will see the bed pulled from its place by the wall, roughly but thoroughly stripped, the linen piled on it and topped with his parents' prayer books and Bibles. The other contents of the cupboards in the bedside tables have been emptied on the floor, as have those of the two chests, the drawers of which are in a rough pile next to a drift of white lining-paper and their mounds of underwear, night-shirts, stockings and socks. His father kneels by the wardrobe, emptying it of shoes. When he sees Mark he pulls himself to his feet, removes an armful of Barbara's clothes from the hanging rail and throws them on top of the bed.

‘I am searching it out,' he explains, breathing hard from the effort of his actions, from the greater effort of his feelings. His shirt is unbuttoned, underarm patches of sweat spread unevenly across his chest. The lack of a beard is still momentarily shocking, perplexing in the way it makes his face both harder and more vulnerable. He stands there by the bed, waiting a moment, as if perhaps he wants to be stopped.

‘Do we have to do it now?' Mark asks. ‘I mean, if it has been here so long? In the morning, maybe –'

‘A hidden image has more power than a public one,' his father says, still breathing hard. ‘Don't you think so?' and Mark nods; he does in some way agree, though not with the consequence; to save his life, he could not explain why. But during this brief exchange his father seems to grow less alien as he engages in the familiar act of weighing and judging the matter in hand, showing himself to be in some small way right.

‘Where do you think she would put such a thing?' he asks.

‘I don't know,' Mark says. He has never hidden any material thing, nor anything at all until he began, so recently, to hide the facts of what took place on the beach and the new uncertainty of his belief, by simply not putting them into spoken words.

‘You're a good boy,' his father says, smiling now. ‘Help me. We'll look everywhere, in all the rooms of the house. If any images are here, we will find them out and destroy them. Then, things can begin to return to the right way they have always been. . . . The loft cupboards, your bedroom, the spare rooms – you do those. Be careful. Look under the paper in the drawers, along the edges of the carpets, see if they have ever been pulled up. It could be very small. . . .'

Mark stands there.
Even if you are right
, he thinks,
this is
wrong
. The thought makes him frown.

‘What's the matter?' his father asks.
I want to defy you, to your
face
, Mark thinks, but he's scared, without his mother in the house, not quite able to act.

‘Please –' his father says, gesturing at the bed, the wardrobe, ‘there's so much to look through.'

‘I don't know how to,' Mark says. He feels the weight of his father's hand on his shoulders, guiding him through the door and into the smaller spare room. The pink curtains are open; the electric light sours all the colours and sets the fragile, manmade objects against the inky sky outside. The plant on top of the paraffin heater is dead. The lid has not been replaced on the sewing machine and two long white threads dangle from bobbin case and needle, as if a piece of sewing has been hastily removed: something he has seen his mother do countless times, biting the threads because picking up the scissors will take too long.

‘Just open everything,' he is told.

But there's nothing in here!
he thinks back.

Yet there is, and it's surprisingly easy to find. He sits on the bed. Two books lie on the wicker table beside it. He reaches for the one underneath, not the prayer book but the leather-bound Testament. He doesn't even have to shake the pages, because the corner of an envelope pokes carelessly out, and inside that, he knows, is the photograph. He holds the envelope long enough to notice its thinness, that the flap is merely tucked in, and that the edges and corners are scuffed. Then he slips it back inside, closes the book and begins to unmake the bed. As he removes each layer: the green candlewick spread, the pink Witney blankets, the paler pink brushed-cotton sheets, he folds them and puts them on the chair. When he has finished, he puts the two books on top of the linen, in the way his father had in the other room. He lifts the mattress, leaves it propped against the wall. He notes, as if he were someone observing his own behaviour, that he is leaving evidence of a pointless search and that he has not yet called his father. Will he? He's not sure what he will eventually do, but clings for now to the fact that it is possible, at this stage, to say that he hasn't
seen
the photograph. He
hasn't
seen it. He
knows
it is there, but he hasn't
seen
it. His father would make mincemeat of this and he could do the same if he chose, but he does not choose, because from a certain, limited perspective not seeing makes a difference. It makes a small shelter, a scrap of gentle shade in the glare of what is happening. He puts it to himself that it is possibly necessary to finish what he has been asked to do in order to know what to do next.

So he goes to the cupboard, mechanically removes the ironing-board and the iron, then the cover from the ironing-board and the loose piece of carpet from the cupboard floor. His father comes in as he is doing this and announces that he is going downstairs. If Mark finds anything, he says, he should turn it face down, call him immediately: has Mark heard? He's encouraging now, almost tender. There's a smell of work about him, salt, heavy. His voice is rougher.

When he's gone, Mark sits on the floor with his back to the wall. From this angle just indigo treetops and violet sky are visible through the window. He gets up, opens it, sits down again. From below comes the sound of drawers pulled open, furniture being dragged from its place, books thumped to the floor in chest-wide piles. Between these abrupt noises are bouts of concentrated silence, during which, presumably, his father leafs through the books, or looks quietly into the spaces he has made. If he lets himself, Mark knows, he will either retch or faint. It's tempting to create his own emergency, but he suspects that, short of suicide, he could do nothing big enough to distract his father. He leaves the room and wanders into the next, then the bathroom, ruffling their surfaces without any serious intent. Finally he shuffles though the folded towels and sheets in the airing cupboard, noticing only too late, because he's not really looking, that his hands are filthy. He returns to the bathroom, washes them. The water is cold because his father has forgotten to put the immersion heater back on.