After Z-Hour

  The three adults were standing against the dark wood of the organ loft. My grandmother was holding Gareth’s hand. She was crying, her lips pressed tightly together. He was crying too, looking around the empty church, his eyes bright, not wanting to be seen weeping by strangers. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Grandfather pulled a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and held it out; Gareth waved it away and covered his eyes for a moment with his arm, took several deep breaths, nodded at something Grandmother said and squeezed her hand. His face, when he turned to look at me, is caught in my mind still—skin pale and opaque, like sculpted wax, eyes and nostrils red-rimmed, a grey shadow under his mouth and two long streaks of shadow from his jaws up his cheeks. The look in his eyes: guilt, desperation, despair.

  We walked back down the hill. I collected acorn cups and winged seed pods from the sycamores. We stood at the foot of the steps and my grandfather went to get the car—he didn’t want Grandmother crossing the busy road.

  While we stood there, gazing down the long hazy street that led away from the hill, something happened, something important: a freak gust of wind found a collection of dead matchsticks and swept them around on the pavement with a strangely melodious sound. For a moment I forgot everything I knew. I had lived to hear that sound, and the world existed to produce that sound at the moment I was listening.

  My grandparents’ house overlooked the shallow glassy harbour, on the long winding road out of the city. While the adults talked I walked around the house. It was eccentric, with high ceilings, heavy doors, asymmetrical rooms and corner fireplaces. From the kitchen door a covered walkway ran to a shed, my grandfather’s study. I peered through the glassed door at the books lining the walls, the cluttered desk, old black-keyed typewriter, and what looked like a collection of stones with the shapes of ferns and shellfish moulded into their surfaces.

  I went back to retrieve a half-eaten apple I had left on the table in the hall. The adults were talking about me so I listened.

  ‘He does seem a little quiet, but he’s off playing at the moment.’ My grandmother’s voice.

  ‘Into everything too, most likely,’ said my grandfather.

  ‘So? He seems all right at the moment, but he’s been unapproachable for months. I’m afraid he’s becoming autistic. He sits around doing nothing for hours, seldom talks, and flies into rages when things aren’t exactly the way he wants them to be—’

  ‘Losing his mother probably gave him an awful shock.’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. He needs a stable home and I can’t give it to him right now.’

  Stillness, the incisive ‘clink’ of a teacup being replaced in a saucer. Then, ‘When we have taken Keith off your hands what will you do?’

  ‘Go back to the States and try to get a decent job. And I’ll keep in touch with Jenny, try to persuade her to come back.’ Gareth’s voice lifted again. ‘But I’m angry with her, not for leaving me, but for just pissing off without taking Keith—the poor kid.’

  ‘We’ll do our best to take care of him, Gareth, till you’re back on your feet,’ my grandfather said, evenly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘How long will you be staying, dear?’

  ‘Not long—I’ve got a possible job to look into. I just wanted to bring Keith home.’

  ‘You ought to stay till he adjusts—we’re strangers to him.’

  ‘I doubt he’d even notice.’ Bitterly.

  I’d sucked the flesh of the apple arid. I walked into the room and put the apple on my chair. They looked at me uncomfortably. I settled on the floor next to a bowl of chocolate biscuits and ate one.

  ‘Keith?’ My father called. I didn’t look at him.

  ‘Keith?’

  The ground I was sitting on was lifting itself, a swelling mountain carrying me up into thin air and perpetual light.

  ‘Keith? See, he isn’t even listening.’

  ‘Keith, dear?’ My grandmother tried; she got down on the floor beside me. ‘Keith?’ I looked at her.

  ‘Do you want another biscuit, dear?’

  I licked my fingers, retrieved the apple and bit into it. She drew back, her face worried.

  ‘See.’ My father sounded spiteful—and triumphant.

  The following afternoon they drove him to the airport. It was raining and cold; the little planes came and went. There was delay; Grandfather was worried that I might he hungry and bought me a bag of chips. I cut the corner of my mouth on one. It stung. I sat between my grandmother and father, testing the cut every so often with the tip of my tongue.

  When it was finally time for my father to go he picked me up, kissed me on the mouth, then thrust me into my grandmother’s arms and hurried away.

  Back at the house at the bay, my grandmother put me down in front of my grandfather’s armchair and busied herself in the kitchen. Grandfather kept looking over his paper at me and clearing his throat. Then he got up to lay a fire, describing to me what he was doing, and different methods to get a good fire going.

  At sunset, the whole sky shone gold, as though the sun had melted.

  Once the meat and vegetables were on, my grandmother came into the lounge and stood wiping her hands back and forth across her floral apron, looking at me.

  ‘What are we going to do with him, Hugh?’

  ‘Send him to a decent school.’

  ‘Oh you don’t think it’s the fault of that Montesorri place, do you?’

  ‘Who knows.’

  ‘How do we get him to talk? He doesn’t seem to hear anything we say.’

  My grandfather cleared his throat again and fixed me with his gaze. I looked away out the window, then suddenly recalled clearly Meredith reading to me out of a comic, the second-to-last issue of Killraven, a Marvel classic: Look at it out there in the sunsets and dawns. You see it, you have seen it before—

  ‘I can hear you,’ I told them.

  ‘Can you indeed?’ My grandfather covered his surprise with sharpness.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And are we going to be able to get on, young man?’

  I nodded, struggling to tell them something. ‘Jenny said I could stay with my father. I wanted to stay with her and Mere and Owen too. I have a dream where I’m walking and I’m very tired, but he won’t pick me up.’

  My grandmother gasped and snatched me to her. She squeezed me, sobbing.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I said. My world began to shrink, to become a child’s world again. Beautiful thoughts, bright shapes scattered. Strength and certainty bled out of me.

  ‘We’ll take care of you Keith.’ My grandfather took my fist into his hand.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  My father worked for a number of years in Venezuela, though my grandparents were pretty hazy about what it was he was doing. We never wrote to each other—I wasn’t able to write to him right after he left me, so we never formed a habit of exchanging even the barest details about our lives. I wouldn’t have known what to say to him anyway. I had been happy and held, loved unconditionally, then suddenly put aside. My grandparents gave me a good home, and loved me, but they could never restore my confidence in myself.

  At five I never wondered whether I could hold my world together; I never dreamed I couldn’t. I had an innocent, untried sense of my own power. The world made sense, it was secure, promising. A feeling of reassurance always followed anything that hurt or unsettled me.

  When I recovered from the initial shock of my mother and father’s abandonment, I began to work to put my world back together, feeling always that, firstly by my quietness and politeness, and later by my friendliness and hard work at school, I was constantly remaking myself, cementing myself together with the love and approval of others. As a child I had no aims. Yet by the time I was nine I was an adult—and like an adult I had begun to invent aims in order to give my life a sensation of forward impetus. It was artificial, this idea of a goal to be attained; now I understood that I was there as a child, living in that faith which was a part
of me. Yet, though I might know this, still I would carry on under the same compulsion, trying to find a way of looking at life that would reveal a pattern of order rising miraculously out of incidence.

  Gareth made a short visit when I was eleven. I was so worked up about it that I made myself ill and spent the whole of his visit in bed, too shy to talk to him.

  Four years later, when I was fifteen, he invited me to his house in Mexico, to stay for six weeks—or as long as I wanted. He had a new life, a wife, another child, and a good job (working for a bad man). He didn’t expect anything so fairytale-like as to successfully absorb me into his family. But he did expect to be able to make amends, and make friends.

  I stood by the window, the wooden shutters screening the daylight, closed over a view of the beach and a deadly heat, like a shield over the heart of a reactor. He came in behind me. ‘Aren’t you going to make your bed, Keith? You’ve been spoiled.’

  ‘I’m going to make it. Then I’m going to pack.’

  He moved closer to me, asked, ‘Why’s that?’ Cautiously concerned.

  ‘I don’t feel like staying.’ A weak protest, it made me feel weak.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I can’t stand it here anymore.’ I swung around. After staring into the light through the slats, the room was black, banded with green—I could barely see through the after-image of the shuttered window. Beyond the green bands my father in his white suit was a pale blur, a spectre. ‘I can’t stand you anymore.’ I felt frightened by what I had said, as we do when we express strong emotions to people we feel strongly about—but he didn’t care about me, so what difference would anything I said make?

  Hating the silence after my words, and feeling desperate, I began to tell him what I had been thinking about before he came into the room. ‘A few months ago I was sitting in a cinema watching Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. Almost every woman in the audience was weeping, and I thought to myself, ‘Yes—this is what it’s all about: betrayal, alienation, abandonment—only the film was about a mother and daughter, not a father and son. You know, you’ll never have any idea of the damage you’ve done me, or the good. I can’t even distinguish one from the other anymore.’

  ‘Keith, I had reasons for doing what I did. You shouldn’t resent me—’

  ‘Yes, you had reasons. It made sense to you, but it’ll never make sense to me.’

  ‘It shouldn’t have to make sense.’

  ‘It has always had to. But I can’t make it make sense. I’ve learnt that, when it’s most important, I can’t do anything for myself.’

  ‘That’s not true Keith.’

  ‘How the fuck would you know what is or isn’t true about me?’ I yelled. Then I took a deep breath. ‘I get that you think you can say all sorts of vague and gnomic things from the mysterious advantage of your age and experience.’

  He spread his hands helplessly. ‘I’m not trying to patronise you. But you should try to understand.’

  ‘I do understand. I understand that I couldn’t make any difference. What else do I need to understand?’

  ‘That I couldn’t either,’ he answered calmly, almost smugly. ‘Perhaps when you’re older you’ll learn a little more compassion.’

  ‘My compassion’s worn out, I felt so sorry for myself for years.’

  ‘You still do.’

  ‘I’m missing the self-confidence and faith other people seem to have. Other people’s faith is inside them—mine’s like a fortified embassy I put into other things and people.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Keith.’ He looked hangdog.

  I said, I thought very evenly, ‘Why didn’t you love me?’

  ‘I did love you. We both did. But it was an impossible situation. You are old enough now to be able to understand that.’ His tone compelled me to say I understood, even if I didn’t.

  ‘You hurt me. How about you understanding that?’

  ‘You were a tyrant!’

  I could see him clearly now. His fists were clenched, his flushed face wore an expression of righteous anger. My mind tinned, focusing like a lens, like a burning-glass.

  ‘All children are tyrants.’

  ‘You wanted things to be the way they couldn’t be. How do you think I liked being regarded as some sort of deity? It’s a hell of a thing to have to live up to.’

  ‘You could have at least been a father,’ I said calmly, cheaply. I felt I was gaining the upper hand.

  He pushed the hair back from his forehead, the gold ring on his little finger gleaming amid the black strands. He looked perplexed.

  ‘You’re feeling guilty,’ I heard myself say, matter-of-factly, as though reporting the results of an experiment. My disillusionment and despair were receding, my anger turning into malice. I cast around in my mind, as someone in a struggle might fumble for a weapon. ‘Don’t think I don’t remember how you came into my room one night with a gun,’ I said, for the first time in my life really confronting the scene in the dark bedroom of the Los Angeles house.

  He sank down on the edge of the bed, stricken. He put his head in his hands.

  He had forgotten or was sure I’d forgotten.

  ‘I suppose you were thinking of doing away with me and yourself,’ I said. ‘That’s a big responsibility, Dad.’ I waited, but he didn’t say anything. I went on, ‘You know, I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t thinking, “Don’t do it.” I trusted you.’

  ‘Don’t you see? I had to send you away or I would have hurt you. I was crazy, Keith.’

  ‘I trusted you,’ I repeated softly. He shuddered and looked up, responding to something in my voice. I pulled open the shutters and sunlight spotlit his face. His tan, bloodless, ageing face. Squinting into the light, he looked like the frightened prisoner in a spy movie.

  I said, ‘You want my forgiveness and friendship, but you won’t get it. You don’t really need it—you are doing very well here, with your family, book-keeping for that crook.’

  ‘You pass judgement like you think you’re some kind of god.’

  ‘An idol? Yeah, and you didn’t break me—oh, you needn’t look at me like that, I said it that way because I’ve just discovered it’s true. You didn’t. Here I am.’

  A gust of hot wind blew in through the open window, sudden and powerful, as if from some fiery explosion. I began to feel tired and sick. ‘You know, I’m doing fine for friends and supporters—I’ve got a whole fan-club.’ There came into my mind then, and made me smile, my instructor’s joking words before my first parachute jump: ‘You won’t have to worry if it doesn’t open Kelfie, the clouds would catch you if you fell.’ The memory of his remark picked me up and carried me through the moment, despite my tiredness. I said, ‘I don’t need you.’ I pushed off the windowsill where I’d been leaning and strolled over to the dresser, pulled open the top drawer and started packing. I couldn’t feel my body, my head seemed to be drifting atop a column of smoke. Surprisingly, although I couldn’t feel them, my hands were still working adeptly.

  My father sat watching me. ‘You can come back any time, Keith.’ He sounded exhausted. ‘You’re always welcome.’

  The waves drift in, red in the evening, to the harbour wall. The water in the lee of Rabbit Island is as smooth and bright as a sheet of brass. My grandmother crosses the road to where I stand, my back to the traffic and face to the sea. She takes the card out of my hand, reads it, says: ‘Keith, he could come back any time.’

  But where could either of us come back to? The house belongs to someone else.

  The coffee didn’t revive Basil for long. As soon as he put down the mug he was yawning again. It was my turn with one of the cups; the billy was half full and still simmering in the fireplace on its platform of logs. I shook some instant coffee into the mug and Hannah lifted the billy from the flames, her hand protected by her wet woollen hat.

  Ellen was telling Hannah about Jill’s nightmare, or rather giving her an account of my ‘scepticism’. Hannah, who may have been sceptical herself, was nodding sympathetically. Jill
looked self-conscious. I sat, smiling at them all, knowing Ellen thought I was feigning nonchalance to hide hostility. Sure—if they were prepared to be angry with me, then I was allowed to be indifferent to their interests. Their low opinion would sanction my bad behaviour.

  Basil was dozing, his eyes closed, eyelashes still fluttering slightly. Soon he would be asleep, cast down like a stone to test the depth of a mineshaft.

  ‘Simon missed out on coffee,’ Hannah said.

  ‘The sleep will do him good.’

  The women looked at me in puzzlement, wondering whether this was concern, or an attempt at conversation. I wanted Wrathall to stay asleep—he might spoil everything. I suspected he had too much self-centred gravity in his character to be helpful in this situation. This experiment.

  I wanted to learn something, and felt that this might be my only opportunity in an age of noise, distractions, proscribed imagination and inattention, an age where as an intelligent, educated person I was only sufficiently powerful. This—house, storm, closed road—was my element. Out in the world I was at ease. But here I was alive, surrounded by a warm crowd of ideas and possibilities, knowing that even to surrender myself to the circumstances would not endanger me—I couldn’t be endangered, not just because I have a strong will and, inside myself, a great hinterland of anger from which strength flows like an endless army, but because here I was whatever could endanger me. It was all like me. All mine.

  I put the coffee cup back on the hearth and lay down. Hannah was feeding strips of bark into the fire, squinting at the crackling sparks. Jill and Ellen were both watching me, as if through one-way glass, watching so intently they had forgotten they could be seen. Like in a movie, when the drug is taking effect and the unsuspecting victim notices the look of intent on the villain’s face.

  Jill asked, ‘What did you say, Kelfie?’

  ‘Did I say something?’ My voice was husky and words slightly slurred. They were all a picture now. Before my eyes the room and figures by the fire seemed artificial, arranged like a diorama display in a museum—an illusion encased in glass, a carefully assembled illustration of another time, a vanished place.