Black Chalk (18 page)

When Denret came back, I sought him out, and with more strength than I'd used in a long time, I told him that we ought to do something. For the first time, I saw surprise etch two deep lines along his brow, but it only lasted an instant.

‘Yes,' he told me with his usual force. ‘I have a project you can help me with.'

Denret prized my English – with me as a translator, he could expand his operations to new markets. We weren't working within the law, but we weren't far from it either. Just like one would in a normal framework, we were buying and selling legal goods, putting people in touch for an introduction fee, and running errands for those who would pay. The only difference was that the goods we dealt had dropped off the normal circuit, that we weren't signing receipts. Still, I was so eager to do something well back then, that if Denret had told me we were going to trade cocaine, I would have asked him why we weren't adding crack to our inventory.

Unloading trucks at two in the morning, driving vans down little country roads, organising drops and collecting money, shadowing our competitors and ensuring they weren't shadowing us – for months, I enjoyed following Denret's lead.

I followed him until he went too far. On the 8th of April 2007, he deemed that we were betrayed, that he was betrayed, and decided to retaliate. When in the right, he was unstoppable. I skirted and evaded and he spent the night at the gendarmerie and they barely knew half the story – I couldn't help Denret, and in any case, he'd only ever used me for his own purposes – and I expected the gendarmes to come for me that night, or in the middle of the next, as they were wont to do, and I decided to leave. I narrowed my life down to a single suitcase, and made for Marseilles, where a friend had told me he could find me a job in the port.

***

My first two days in Marseilles, Julien put on a black t-shirt, clasped two gold chains around his neck, and went out to work. I spent both days researching the Foreign Legion: how to join, what being a legionnaire meant. This time, I could run away and come back with a new identity. On the evening of the second day, he told me he'd found me something. ‘You spend a month working nights, and then you'll get day shifts.' I remembered our gloves, hats, precautions – had we really done so much harm? – and I put the Legion to the side.

Dividing my days between a job in the Port de Marseilles, and the one-bedroom flat I took near the Vélodrome, I started to feel dirty. The twenty-one-year-old boy who'd arrived in Chamonix was nothing like the twenty-five-year-old man watching sitcoms on a torn armchair. Dirt had seeped into the boy's bones and made him a man. Dirt in everything that ought to be beautiful. After Marie, I could never again believe in the purity of love. I would always second-guess it. After Denret, every man was out to use me. I still half expected a gendarme to come and knock on my door, and ask me where I'd been on the night of the 8th of April 2007.

In England, if only I could get over my apprehension, I could go to a good university, rely on a well-connected family, find myself a good job. The last few years had been so full that the shooting had become a distant memory. An item in my past, yes, but one that almost belonged to a different man.

***

After three months of night shifts, the stevedores moved me to day shifts, and I settled into a comfortable routine, split between work, my flat, and a bistro next to the port.

On the 19th of December 2007, my father rang the bell of my apartment. His auburn hair gone grey, a box of chocolates in hand, his skin duller than it used to be. The man who'd scored countless centuries for Hornsbury CC looked unable to swing a bat.

‘I didn't think you'd want flowers, and there was a chocolaterie near my hotel.'

I kept my arm across the doorway. ‘How did you find me?'

‘Your mother,' he said. He appraised the situation. ‘Will you let me in?'

The question shook the surprise out of me. I accepted the chocolates, and waved him through the door. He asked me how I was, and, settling into small talk, I listened intently to every single one of his words, his intonations. I imagined him relating the most minute of details to my mother, and for a fleeting moment, they were both in the room, in my space. But then my father's presence took over, his formal brevity, and with it, I fell back on my old comfort with his ways. Later, while he was sitting in the only sound armchair, he summed up the reason for his visit in a few words.

‘It's your mother, you see. James has had some problems of late. They're over' – he knocked on the wood of his chair – ‘we hope, but your mother… She's not as strong as she used to be.'

Seeing my aged father mentioning problems, the image I had of my family suddenly shifted, a depressed void in its stead. My mother was closing on sixty, I realised, and I tried to imagine what that meant. But the image that affected me most wasn't the one I expected: I'd left my brother just as he was hitting puberty, as an already rebellious thirteen-year-old. He was now twenty, the same age I had been when I was working with Sally in the Pacific. I couldn't picture him taller, broader, hairier.

‘What problems is James having?' I asked my father.

He drew a deep breath, averted his eyes, but then, true to the man I had always known, he looked directly at me.

‘James fell in with the wrong crowd early on, Nate. It was my fault. I should have realised, but I thought he was acting like a difficult sixteen-year-old boy—'

Seven years on, I was only going to listen to him if he gave it to me raw. I interrupted him:

‘What sort of problems, Dad?'

He waited to see whether I had any more questions before he went on:

‘Drugs. He smoked cannabis with his school friends. And then he went out with a girl who did heroin. Liz realised what was happening, and we pulled him out of that school before he had time to become fully addicted. She did everything she could to help him. For a while, it worked. He passed his A-levels and got into UCL.' He paused, and frowned. ‘He didn't want to, but we thought it was too good an opportunity. For the first year, he was fine. But then he met the wrong sort of people again, and…'

My father's voice trailed off, and his chin dropped. I didn't ask any more questions. Before he left, he asked me whether I could write my mother a letter, if only a few lines. I hesitated out of habit. But then, faced with my father's rational presence, I asked myself why I wasn't answering her, and I couldn't settle on one sound reason. My hesitancy cast into absurdity, I took a piece of paper out, and writing big so the page would look full, I wrote: ‘Hello Mum, Dad just brought me chocolates. I don't think he thought too much about it, because there are plenty with liqueur in them. Perhaps he will learn one day… I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.' I thought about signing Nathan, but I didn't think she would understand, so I gave her a big sprawling ‘Nate'.

Two weeks later, my mother wrote me a letter:

I received the best Christmas present I could have hoped for. I'm very grateful to have such an enterprising son as you, darling. Your father told me all about seeing you, and he mentioned your travels. You know the world better than us.

Later in the same letter, she wrote:

James was in Oxford for Christmas. He spent the morning of the 25th with us. He looked very pale. He told us he wants to get better, but that he's not ready yet. Perhaps it would help if you wrote to him.

That letter moved something deep in me. Seventeen years of love and care and comfort. With each winter, I'd laid slabs of ice on all that had gone well before it had all gone bad, and now they'd tricked me, and I'd let myself be tricked, and we'd reopened a narrow treacherous channel across our distance.

Before responding to it, I took three days off work and went skiing in the Pyrenees. It was on a chairlift after a great powder run, as the sun's rays glanced off my shoulder, that I decided that I couldn't hide behind Nate the teenager forever, that whatever there was with my parents, I was now man enough to deal with.

Pen in hand, I felt as though I'd made a decision but I hadn't quite worked out what it entailed. I wrote that I was thinking of coming home, but that I was unsure of what I could do. My mother's response was more like the woman I knew: she'd researched the subject, and presented me with a list of options, nuancing her enthusiasm with sentences such as: ‘If you still find physics interesting', or ‘Perhaps you aren't interested in university anymore, in which case.'

For some months, we exchanged handwritten letters, never an email. My letters mentioned hazy ideas, and spoke of my father and my brother as if I had seen them the previous week. Hers, on the other hand, were far more concrete. I wondered whether I wasn't too old to go to university, and she was quoting studies on mature-age university students. I talked about living in London, and she spoke of opportunities and median house prices in Reading.

Just as I was becoming comfortably entrenched in the position of the soon-to-return son, she wrote about an incident between James and my father that happened the day after my brother came out of a Berkshire rehab clinic.

Your father went to speak to him before dinner. He normally listens to him, but not this time. They had a few words, James packed his bag, and then he left.

Later on, she added:

We're getting too old for James. He doesn't listen anymore. But you remember how he looks up to you. Perhaps he would listen to you.

Everything in the letter was veiled, but that only made it worse. The overall tone, the reference to James listening to his father and hence not to his mother, and the ‘few words', which I knew to mean that they'd had a fight. I pictured my brother, stubble on his chin, hitting the man he'd once have never dared touch. Shocked, I looked online for plane tickets and bought them that night.

Two weeks later, in late May, I left France. She was waiting at the Heathrow arrivals, holding hard onto the railings. When she came to hug me, she didn't walk with the same purpose. There was a hesitancy as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other that made me want to protect her. She covered my cheeks with her palms, and traced the contours of my face with the tips of her fingers.

‘This is new,' she said, as she brushed a crease on my forehead.

***

The first time she made a suggestion, she shrouded it deferentially. I'd imagined that I would have to rise up and tell her I couldn't be dealt with that way now that I was twenty-six. But instead, I realised how frail her hands looked and did what she said.

Coming home, even if we no longer lived in Hornsbury, brought the ghosts of the shooting to the fore of my consciousness. Now that I drove past streets in which Jeffrey and I used to play, now that I saw a shop in which I bought Anna a present and Eric a card, I realised I had to do something quickly. There was a dark grey mass radiating heat in a corner of my mind: every time I came close to it, I shrunk away like a hand getting too close to a hot plate. And it was growing a tongue: the sort that's normally rolled neatly in between two sets of fangs, but which jumps out further than an iguana is long when it darts at a firefly. The early hours of morning were the most dangerous: the tongue licked me with its stickiness, and they were shaping themselves around Mr Johnson's desk, the window he would look out of. They were gathering strength. I had to stop them. I'd heard the solution a hundred times before: bring them out into the light of day, and they will wither. And so, I decided to write the events that led to my departure as they happened.

The day I wrote about leaving Oxford, these visions had gone past Jeffrey's red bag, all the way to Eric's black button-up shirt. And unlike the hazy memories I had when I wrote, they were vivid – I was in them like I'd been in the classroom eight years ago.

After a week of writing, my life changed. Now, four months on, everything that happened to the man who called himself Nate, and to the one who calls himself Nathan, seems like a sad joke. A dash in a history book – the sort that a good eraser can remove with a quick rub. Bye, bye, Nathaniel Dillingham.

Almost four months ago, the day after I finished my account, I left my parents' North Oxford home and rode down the Banbury Road to meet a man my mother had called. After months of meandering letters, my mother had welcomed me home with a folder six inches thick, topped with a three-page handwritten summary. It took me a week of paper shuffling and jargon decoding to reach the same conclusion she'd laid out for me at the start – a condensed course the university's Department for Continuing Education offered over the summer, which would gain me a year in three months' work. There was one problem: I didn't match their requirements. ‘Criteria are more flexible than you'd think,' she told me. And so, on a morning announcing summer, under white and wispy clouds, I locked my bike to a wrought iron fence, and I went to meet my mother's colleague to ask him whether I had a future beyond raking sand. A tall, thin man with a crane of a neck, he kept on crossing and uncrossing his legs.

‘You look like Liz,' he said, and when I told him I hadn't even finished school, he held a single finger in the space between my eyes and his glasses.

‘With what you've told me of your education,' he cleared his throat, ‘and more importantly, with your life experience, it's my opinion that you should be able to put together a successful application.'

He opened a drawer and found just the folder he was looking for. While I perused through the structure of the course, three evenings a week, he told me what I needed to do to put together a strong application.

‘It started this week, but don't worry, you can catch up.'

And with that, I realised that what I'd anticipated, the possibilities my country, my town, could give me, might just come true. As I came out of the meeting, I stopped on the sunny concrete steps and gathered my thoughts between two clouds. They were coming from all directions – a sense that I hadn't earned this opportunity, glee at its possibility, a fear of success. Rather than rush, I decided to clear my mind, and spend the afternoon in town.

***

To all intents and purposes, Oxford had stood still. These were the streets I'd walked as a child and roamed as a teenager. There was the first pub I'd been served at, when I was fifteen. And there, a bit further down Broad Street, was Blackwell's, the bookshop my mother used to usher me into whenever she needed more time in town. But I felt out of place. Peckish, I walked into a café outside of Balliol. The counters were full of cheesy paninis and meaty pies. There was a queue of eighteen-year-olds waiting for their turn, all eyeing the white white bread, the white white cheese, and the pale tomatoes as if they were a treat. I walked out.

A limousine pulled up outside Balliol and three black-clad bodyguards spilled onto the street, spreading out according to some mysterious design. Like them, I waited for an important man. Two minutes later, I decided that they were more patient than me, and I locked my bike outside the Trinity gates. A slick-haired man broadcasting to all and sundry: ‘Go inside the colleges and see where they filmed Harry Potter.' Making my way down Turl Street, I walked around three separate groups of American teenagers, all marching up the street four abreast, all sporting the same hoodie. My steps retraced those I'd taken as a boy, and I found myself in the Covered Market. Some of the shops I remembered had closed and been replaced by others just like them. And there, down one of the middle aisles, was Georgina's, the café in the market's eaves I used to take Anna to. Its door stood red and wonky, a wrapped gate.

Because it scared me, I climbed up the steep steps and peered through the wooden beams. New posters lined every inch of wall space. Amélie smiled her devilish smile between two James Deans. I waited at the counter behind two twenty-year-olds in pink trousers and tailored shirts, hesitating between the bean and Greek salads. When my turn came, a blonde girl with a kind face asked me what I wanted. I reached into my wallet and fumbled. She spread my coins over her flat palm and studied them. I'd given her euros.

‘Have you been living in Europe?'

I looked at her. She was standing on the tip of her toes, a green bandana holding her hair back.

‘In France,' I said, handing her the right amount in sterling.

I took my quiche and salad to my table, pushed two used mugs to the side, and sat so I could face the rest of the room. A couple was sitting at the table Anna and I used to sit at. He was picking food out of her plate. Their scene should have brought up a crowd of memories, but I found myself calm.

The folder I'd been given had a picture on its cover: three women, two black and one white, and an Asian man, laughing with their heads tilted back. I rested the point of my pen on the empty space to the right of the picture, and a swirl became a woman's face. Her hair flowed and rested at her feet, her chin drooped, and her mouth hung open.

Between mouthfuls of feta and olives, broccoli and stilton, I skimmed through the folder, annotating its pages with my sketches.

‘Can I take these away?'

I looked up and saw the blonde girl by my table pointing at the used mugs. For the first time, I studied her properly: the curve of the hip hidden behind her apron, her t-shirt wrinkling as it clung to her skin, and her lips, puckered together and ever so slightly open. I had her face down to two master lines: one completing an oval before scribbling her hair into a ponytail, another following her mouth, closed with its edges blossoming into a grin.

‘Of course,' I mumbled.

As she bent forward, I tried not to look at the line between her throat and the swell of her breasts. She noticed the folder:

‘Are you an artist?'

I made sure she was serious.

‘No, I just draw a little.'

‘You're very good.'

I grimaced, a little embarrassed. Both mugs in her right hand, she traced the lip of the blue one with the fingers of the left.

‘Do you draw?' I asked.

‘A little but I'm not very good at it. I can't draw like that.' She pointed at my doodles.

The compliment seemed genuine, and I was all the more embarrassed for it.

‘What are you good at?' I asked.

As if she were considering all of the question's implications, she cocked her head to the side, her eyes on the ceiling. While she thought, the tip of her tongue pushed out of the corner of her mouth, and a strand of her hair buckled slowly over her head until it landed on her right shoulder.

‘I write poetry,' she finally said.

‘Oh.'

She righted her head, smiled, and her seriousness was gone, making way for a merry warmth. She even laughed a little before she glanced back at the counter and saw someone waiting. As I finished my lunch, I spent more time observing her, and once or twice, our gazes crossed. I tried to draw without making it too obvious that she was my subject. Half of the times I stole a peek at her, she was laughing. The other half, as she reached for the salads with a large spoon, or as she walked back from the kitchen, a cup of hot chocolate in hand, her face was a picture of concentration.

She took her apron off just as I was gathering my things. If I slowed down enough, we'd leave the café together. Seeing her edge past the counter, I stuffed my folder in my bag and hurried towards the stairs. I looked over my shoulder: she was talking to a colleague, exchanging goodbyes, it seemed, but I couldn't be sure. Two customers were staring at me – yes, I was blocking the entrance and I had no reason to be there. Putting on a purposeful air, I made my way down the stairs. Outside, on the paved aisle, I felt a pang of regret and reached inside my bag as if I'd forgotten something, convincing myself that I really was searching for something, even though I didn't know what. Everyone walking past seemed to have their eyes on me.

The two pink trousers came down the steps to the sound of their light banter. I moved to let their questioning looks pass. Just as they reached Ben's Cookies, I heard the girl run down the steps, a duck of an umbrella in hand. Her face opened up for an instant when she smiled at me, and then she was looking right, looking left, calling out, hurrying towards them. Hurrying away from me. The pimply pink trousers clutched at his leg, as if to make sure it really was his umbrella. After she gave it to him, she turned around and walked back towards the café. My initial relief gave way to a touch of nerves.

‘Hey,' I said, my hand still in my bag. ‘Here it is.' I pulled out a pen.

She stopped next to me, studying my brandished pen.

‘Are you finished for the day?' I asked.

‘No, I'm going to buy vegetables. We ran out of tomatoes.'

She spoke with such enthusiasm that, for a second, a basket full of plump vine tomatoes sprung up in my mind. Then I realised that she was standing close, that her feet were facing me, and I once again felt that I couldn't speak properly.

‘When do you finish work… normally?' I asked.

‘Half past five, that's when the whole market closes.'

‘And what do you do after that?' I rushed to ask before I could stumble.

‘Well, it depends on the day. Sometimes I go for walks. There's a park I like to go to near my home. With a reservoir and some swans.'

Water glittered around a flock of swans, and dread weighed down my chest. Taking a quiet breath, fearing the step, I plunged in:

‘What are you doing tonight?'

Once again, she cocked her head and looked up, puckering her lips together.

‘Well… I was thinking—'

‘Do you want to go for a drink?' I interrupted her.

She smiled instantly and I felt relieved. The rest of the conversation seemed so smooth compared to that start. We flowed from names to a time and a place.

‘Nathan,' she said. She repeated it with more emphasis on the first syllable. ‘Nathan.' She seemed to like it better that way. ‘I'm Leona.'

‘Leona,' I said, my tongue slipping slowly from my palate to the floor of my mouth. The name sounded both familiar and exotic.

As she searched her bag for her phone, a notebook popped up precariously. I grabbed it before it fell out, and looked at the eerie postcard she'd pinned to the brown leather. It was a reproduction of an otherworldly painting: in washed colours, a red poppy field by a grey sea, distant waves foaming against the sand, and a blonde girl in a white dress curled up on herself, sitting over the frame of a young man, dead and naked. I looked closer: he was a hairless giant lying limp over winter-green hills, enclosed in a coffin-shaped frame. A withering poppy in each hand, her eyes closed, she faced the ground with a look of ecstatic mourning.

‘Nice, isn't it?' she said.

I looked at Leona's broad smile.

‘So what's your number?' she asked.

She typed my number into her phone with the uttermost focus, her head not cocked as far as earlier, her tongue still sticking out. From the warmth of a smile to the focus of her cocked head – it had only taken an instant. In her, two contrasting emotions could coexist, I thought. And for some reason, that left me awed.

***

I remember the rest of the day in bursts. I know that I waited in town, strolling along the Isis, settling down over a cup of coffee in Blackwell's. From 6 p.m. onwards, Cornmarket was full of chubby white kids in Adidas trousers and England football shirts walking around with pimply faces and KFC paper bags. At the start, I felt rather proud of my upcoming date, but as the image I had of Leona faded, I started doubting whether I was in fact attracted to her.

I was anxious when I saw her loping down the High Street to meet me, a dress of reds and blacks shimmering in the dusk. She leaned towards me, her head going for a space by my shoulder. Unsure of what she was doing, I reverted to my French habits and kissed her cheek. She froze for an instant, and in that moment I realised she'd gone for a hug, but before I had time to apologise, she'd offered me the other cheek and leaned back as if that were what she'd intended to do all along.

I looked at her relaxed smile and, with a pang of nerves, I realised how lucky I was. Strolling over Magdalen Bridge, I noticed the way she moved and the pang tightened. Such flow: in her upright posture, in the suppleness of her limbs, like a cat patrolling its fief from the top of a wall. In the way she climbed on her toes as she walked, the easy swing of her arms – I wanted to stop one of those arms and put my hand in hers right there, while we were looking down at the Cherwell and talking about May Day, but I didn't dare.

The flow spread to the way she talked, to her bucolic descriptions of France. Yes, I found the words interesting, but now that I'm writing them down, I realise they didn't fascinate me of themselves. Rather, it was the way she seemed to put her whole self into every word, whether it be a passing joke or a key memory.

‘—They had a house near Rouen. My grandfather used to mow the lawn, and we could ride his tractor. I loved sitting on his lap. He let me steer the wheel—' she said, and I was with her, smelling cut grass, imagining a creek and an old stone table covered with moss. With a girl as easy-going as that, I could share the strangest of my ideas.

When we entered the bar, she stopped talking, marched three paces in, and swivelled slowly, her gaze taking in the whole of her surroundings. Oblivious to anyone around her, she pivoted around her left foot, and for one instant, I had all her grace to myself. She was with the room and I was with her. Suddenly, I doubted that a girl floating happily through life could like the sort of man who'd been a ski bum in the mornings, a black market entrepreneur in the afternoons, a drunk in the evenings; a man who had trouble sleeping now that he'd gone clean.

Later, as we were finishing our first drink, I found out that she was nineteen, that she was studying French at Brookes, and that she had over four months of holidays before her second year started.

‘I'm saving up for my third year. Paris is expensive. What about you?'