The restaurant is open now. You pay a fixed sum, and then you can eat as much as you want. There is silver on the tables, and white tablecloths, and white napkins. Slices of ham and cheese lap over one another. There is black bread and white bread with poppyseeds, there are rolls and pumpernickel and primrose-coloured Danish butter. Pitchers of orange juice are fixed into metal stands. The coffee is smoking hot. There is a bright pile of apples which nobody touches because it looks too perfect, or too expensive.
Two men sit facing one another at a litde table by the broad windows that look over the sea. From time to time they glance sideways, between mouthfuls, and drink in the grey sheen of the water, the bright, pale sky, the following gulls. They break open their boiled eggs, then shove them aside on discovering they are lukewarm. They swallow a mound of white bread and ham, then push their chairs back and ruminate over cup after cup of coffee.
One nods towards the horizon. ‘Clearing up,’ he remarks, but the other doesn’t answer. His face is raked and bruised from a bad fall out of his bunk in the early hours. He’s not alone. One of the crew has a broken shoulder, where a door broke loose and swung back on him, and many passengers are still down in their cabins, sleeping off drink and seasickness. Some you won’t see anything of all day.
Rain came on again, heavily, soon after daybreak. Sheets of it squalled along the decks, hosing them down. They shine, now, in the strengthening light. The ship has passed an oil rig, a container beating its way down towards Rotterdam, a German ferry. The two men watch everything, while their hands lie idle on the table, or pick up a coffee cup, or a cigarette. Only a few hours to go before they’ll be back on land and then they’ll be on their way south through Germany, and on to some ferry terminal in Belgium or France, where they’ll buy more tickets. They’ll be home by tomorrow night, and the job’s done. They wouldn’t have killed Johnnie, if they hadn’t been interrupted. They’d have marked him, that’s all, like they were told, and broken his legs. That’s what Charlie Sullivan paid them for, and that’s what they were doing. They were going by the book, right down to putting the note on the tray, which was a bit stupid when you came to think of it, leaving their calling card like that. He owed Charlie. It was an old debt, Charlie said, a bad debt, and he was buggered if he was going to leave it any longer. Johnnie was in the shit all round, everyone knew that. There were enough people looking for Johnnie, so this was a good time for Charlie. Johnnie owed him. No business sense, said Mr Sullivan, not like his brother. And he smiled hugely. He was quite chatty for once, though they knew that wasn’t necessarily a good sign. They know Mr Sullivan has a thing about people paying their debts.
‘All this is between ourselves,’ he’d said, flicking that look on them like he was stubbing a fag out on the remains of his dinner. And they nodded, Yeah, sure, Mr Sullivan, and squeezed their faces into the shape he wanted, because they knew he never forgot a face. Or anything else.
All the same they would never have killed Johnnie. It was just that one thing led to another, once they got interrupted. If he’d been travelling on his own, the way he was meant to, the way he told Charlie he was, it would have all gone right. They’d have got him back into his cabin, and someone would have come along and found him, once the ship docked. It’s not as if he’d have got stuck somewhere like Morocco, which it could well have been.
And by that time they’d have been on their way south. No one ever died of a pair of broken legs and a bit of plastic surgery. It’s the truth, if it wasn’t for her, Johnnie’d be alive. They know Johnnie; known him for a long time. He’s all right. They’ve got nothing against Johnnie, personally.
‘I can’t stand ships,’ says the man with the unmarked face. ‘Makes me feel shut in, sitting here. Put me on a plane any day.’
The other moves his hands on the table. He watches them take a cigarette and flick a lighter. Then he looks surprised, as if he expected them to do something quite different.
It’s not true that there are no stars in London. You have to look for them. You can’t just turn your face up, like you can in the country where the sky’s so big and bare. He’s been thinking about that on and off most of the night, driving down to London. I could still set up an observatory, he tells himself.
He knew he’d be coming back to London. He hadn’t needed that note of Anna’s to know where she’d gone. Sonia’d offered to come too, but he hadn’t wanted that.
‘You’ll miss your riding lesson,’ he’d said to her, and had the satisfaction of seeing a flush as dark as a plum on her fair face. She’d thought she could make a fool of him: well, she’d find out different. In a way though, he didn’t blame her. He’d lost interest, and she knew he had. It had been a mistake ever going up there with her. Sonia worked better part-time than full-time.
He’d known straight away Anna would be with Louise. He isn’t worried, he just wants to get there as soon as he can. He keeps thinking about something stupid: how thin Anna’s wrists are, how easy it would be to grab her by them. How light she is. How easy to pick her up and carry her away. But she’s not alone, and she’s got money. She’ll be tucked up in bed at Louise’s. If Louise had the sense to answer her phone herself, instead of leaving the answer-phone on night and day, he’d already know for sure that Anna was there. But Louise didn’t phone him. She won’t let Anna back to him without a battle now, he knows that. She’s got what she’s always wanted: proof. If she’s a bad mother, he’s no better. What’s Anna telling her now? Are they sharing Louise’s bed, with Anna whispering close that she doesn’t want to go back to Yorkshire, she wants to stay here, at home? He switches his thoughts away, and pushes the car forward to get through the next set of lights.
He pushes forward, because he doesn’t know what he’s hurrying to greet. It’s coming. It would meet him soon enough anyway, no matter how many minutes he idled on amber. It’s rushing to get where he’ll be. If he could stop and listen he’d hear the hiss of time speeding into fate, but he doesn’t stop. He’s got enough inside his own head to listen to, apart from the throb of Dylan on Not Dark Yet.
‘You’re notifying him as a missing person?’
Paul will nod.
‘That’s right. Your brother was known to us, as you’re probably aware.’
The lightbulb will hiss. The tiles will glare as they throw off white light. There will be too much light on the policeman’s face, and Paul will want to turn away from it, but he will keep on looking. The policeman’s skin will gleam as if he has smeared it with oil.
‘I’ll tell you something else. Since we’re alone, and this is just between ourselves. Off the record.’ He will pause, dandling his promise of information before Paul. Paul will tense, and lean forward slightly as if to catch what’s coming. ‘A fucking little toe-rag like your brother won’t be missed. And I only wish I could say that loud enough for him to hear me.’
Paul will remain leaning forward. Whatever message he’s been waiting for, it hasn’t come. He will make no reply.
He will wait any length of time he has to. He will ask anywhere. He will leave a message with a service which acts as go-between for missing persons and their families. And little by little, whatever it takes, he will find out.
He will carry his brother inside him for ever. They’re brothers, aren’t they? Closer than man to wife, mother to daughter, father to son. How can you climb out of the coils of your own DNA. ? All their genes are the same. They came from the same place and they’ve got their origins bedded in them. It’s like the light of a star, bedded in an explosion that happened millions of cold years before either of them was born. There can’t ever be any question of guilt or forgiveness between the two of them. It would be like trying to forgive your own right hand. When Johnnie comes back, Paul will be there. He’ll see him coming, no matter how much Johnnie’s changed, no matter which way the tide of wrong or right has flowed between them. He’ll recognise him, no matter how many years of change have piled on to Johnnie. He’ll see him coming far
off, and shade his eyes and squint into the sun while his heart squeezes small then springs inside his breast, Johnnie’ll doubt the welcome. He’ll lag back once he gets in sight of the house, fearing to come closer. But it won’t make any difference, because Paul will be running faster than he’s ever run in his life, crying out loud his brother’s name, racing to meet him.
There they lie, boy and girl, side by side, sleeping-bag to sleeping-bag. The backs of their hands touch: David’s right, Anna’s left. They shouldn’t possess any power, these two: the story of another packed London morning is unfolding without them. They are children, and they are sleeping in the garden, inside the little tent they’ve bought with money they dug up from a hole in the ground. They have no power over their own lives, so how is it that the sight of them can stop a grown man? But it does. Paul crouches on his hands and knees at the entrance to the tent, staring at the slight dew of sweat on the forehead of his sleeping daughter. She is not his daughter, he knows that, but still she looks like him. She looks like Johnnie. The cables of their relationship are twisted into her sleeping face, and so are the roots that the past puts down into the present. Anna’s face is still so soft that the knots don’t show.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t enter the tent and disturb the children. Perhaps he cannot. There is sweat on his face, too. It’s hot, and he’d like to wipe his forehead, but he doesn’t want to move.
He doesn’t move, but they have already left him. When a ship sails, the ribbon of water that widens between the travellers and those left on the quayside seems no broader, at first, than the ribbons they hold out to one another, to show they are still linked. But then the red ribbons fall, and trail from hands which have forgotten to wave. The water is a widening channel, then a gulf, and after a while it becomes the sea itself.
The children are turned to each other. Motionless, they are going somewhere he cannot go. Their hands meet, like a promise which will wait for years if it must, knowing that at long last it will be kept.
Helen Dunmore, With Your Crooked Heart
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