Mr Toppit (19 page)

Just as he was leaving, he turned back to me with a grin and said, “This’ll amuse you, Luke. Your Doreen tried to flog me a copy of
Hayseed
number one, which Arthur had inscribed to her kid. She was most put out when I told her the books weren’t exactly in the signed-first-edition league. In her dreams!” He laughed. Actually, he was wrong. Five years later Jack’s book lay spread open at the inscribed title page, sealed in a glass case, bolted to the wall of Graham’s new office with tamper-proof brass screws.

I sat on the front steps as Lila was loaded into the ambulance. The remaining guests were getting into their cars, so when the ambulance went down the drive, there was a procession of vehicles behind it. The house felt very empty when I went back inside. I turned some lights on. It was getting dark. There was a forlorn pile of Lila’s pamphlets on the table, and a great boxful near the door. Terry was asleep on the sofa. The rug that had been covering Lila was lying on the floor, so I picked it up and draped it over him. There was no sign of Martha.

I found Laurie in the sitting room. She was slumped in a chair, quite still, as if she might be in a trance. A strange sound was coming from her, a kind of sibilant hum, as if she was muttering the same word over and over again.

“Where is everybody?” I said.

She jumped. “Sorry, I was on the moon,” she said. “Martha’s gone up to sleep.”

I sat down on the sofa.

“When are you going back to school?” she asked.

“Monday, I think.”

“Some week,” she said.

“I’m sorry you haven’t had much of a holiday.”

She got up and came over to join me. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said. She looked happy but sad, and her eyes were glistening. “I wouldn’t have changed this trip for anything. Of course I didn’t want what happened to your dad to happen, but I was proud to be with him. Oh, Luke, I knew there was something real special about him,” she said. “I felt it here.” She tapped her chest with a fist. “I can’t explain it. That day, that hot day in London, there was something in the air hovering over him. It’s in you, too. It’s a part of you. You probably can’t feel it like I can. Reading his books, I can see it just so clearly.”

“See what?”

“You’re so lucky, Luke. You’ll carry it with you wherever you go. It’s like a gift.”

“What kind of gift?” I said, slightly irritated. “A gift for what?”

Laurie seemed to be in a world of her own. “It’s like those crop circles. It just looks all mussed up when you’re on the ground, but when you fly, when you’re able to fly”—she made a swooping gesture with her arm—“you can see what everything means, you can see the pattern, you can see where everything fits in. That’s the gift.”

“This gift—do you have it?” I asked.

“It’s too early to tell.” Her hand reached for mine. “But you have it, Luke. I know that.” Then she said something really creepy: “There’s going to be a lot of people watching you.”

I’d had enough. I took my hand back. I was tired of everyone in the house behaving so oddly. “In the hospital I looked in your bag,” I said. “I saw what you wrote in your notebook—Arthur’s name over and over again, that
Hiawatha
thing.”

She didn’t ask how or why; she just nodded matter-of-factly. “My daddy used to read me
Hiawatha
when we played. He was the Indian chief and I was a princess,” she said. “Before I lost him.”

“But you weren’t writing about him, you were writing about Arthur.”

“Meeting your dad was very special to me.”

“Why? Was it because of what he said?”

“You mean about when you lived in Jordan?” Laurie asked quietly.

“You said you wouldn’t say anything.”

“I didn’t, honey. I haven’t.”

“What did he say exactly?”

“I told you. I thought he said something about living in Jordan. I could hardly hear him.”

I felt as if I was under water, holding my breath. “He didn’t say that. You misheard him.”

“Then what
did
he say?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“But you know,” Laurie said, “don’t you?”

“It was my brother’s name. He was called Jordan.”

There was wonder in her face. “So—”

I interrupted her. “Did he really talk about how proud he was of Rachel and me?”

“I couldn’t hear. I don’t know what he said anymore. I tried to hold on to it all, but I’ve gone back over it so often I’ve lost it … everything’s got so messed up in my brain,” she cried. She lowered her head and put a hand over her eyes. I could see her face trembling: she was trying to stop herself crying.

“Did he?”

“No,” she whispered. “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry.”

I couldn’t see her eyes: her hand was still covering them. She was sobbing now.

“I won’t see you again,” I said. “I mean tomorrow. I’ll be asleep when you leave.” I kissed her cheek. Her face was wet. “Have a good journey. I’ve never been on a plane.” I didn’t want to sound wistful so I added, “I’ve been to lots of places, but just on trains and things. I’d love to go on a plane, though.”

“Luke …” she said, but I kept moving towards the door. I didn’t want to go back and start all over again.

I wanted to find Rachel. She wasn’t in Arthur’s study, but I could hear her moving around in her bedroom above it.

“Rachel!” I called. “Do you want me to come up?”

She sounded flustered. “No … no. Hold on.” In a minute or two she appeared at the top of the stairs. She was holding two wine glasses and a full ashtray.

We looked at each other for a second and then she began to come down the stairs.

“I thought you were showing Graham the Hayseed stuff in Arthur’s study.” I tried to keep any inflection out of my voice.

“I did. Well, we made a start anyway,” she said briskly and brushed past me into the study.

I waited outside the door. “What are you doing?” Rachel said from inside. “Are you coming?”

What I was doing was fingering the envelope Graham had given me, feeling the little bump it contained. It hadn’t been stuck down properly so I didn’t feel too guilty about having looked inside. As she had come down the stairs I had been watching Rachel. Her hair had fallen across her face. At the bottom, she had tucked it behind her ears and I had seen the pearl stud in her left ear, and the tiny dot of an empty hole in the right one.

“No,” I said, answering her through the door, and even as she was calling my name, I ran upstairs to my room and shut the door. Once inside, I tore open the envelope, opened the window and threw the little pearl thing out as far as I could.

My rucksack, the one that had traveled with me from school to the hospital to Linton, was lying on the floor next to the bed. I had forgotten about it completely. I picked it up. I knew exactly what was going to be in there, and a small sense of excitement came over me, replacing the sick feeling that lay in the pit of my stomach. I opened the rucksack and pulled out Adam’s Dutch magazine.

It’s probably bad form to have a wank after your father’s funeral, but I honestly felt I deserved it. I opened the magazine to
the center pages where Dirk and Rex and Donna were. They felt like old friends. I propped up two pillows against the headboard, let my trousers fall to my ankles and lay down on the bed. I didn’t know how long it took other people, but I came very quickly: it was probably the stress. Then I saw something extraordinary: there was some spunk—not jets, of course, not yet, not so soon, but a fully formed white drop that sat on the end of my prick, viscous and strong enough to hold its shape. I leaned forward and moved it carefully onto the end of my finger. Against the light it was as round and perfect as a small pearl.

“Y de Darkwood viene el señor Toppit, y no viene para ti, ni para mí, sino para todos nosotros.”
When Rachel discovered that Laurie spoke Spanish, she had given her the Spanish translations—the only other country where the books had been published—and Laurie was flicking through them as she sat with a cup of coffee in the departure lounge at Gatwick. She was keeping all the books, the English ones as well as the Spanish, in her hand luggage, along with her notebook, partly to be able to look at them on the plane and partly to ensure their safety if there was a problem with the luggage she had checked in. You couldn’t be too careful. When she and Marge had gone to the Yucatán Peninsula for their year-before-last vacation, their bags had ended up in Santiago and it had taken four days for them to be rerouted to Cancún. The airline had said they would have to go back to the airport to get them when they arrived, but by the time Marge had finished with them they had agreed to transport them to the hotel and were practically offering to unpack them as well.

Laurie’s Spanish was a little rusty, but it came back to her as she read. A lot of Hispanics worked at Holy Spirit—particularly the cleaning staff and the girls in the kitchens, from whom Laurie had got some of the recipes for the food at Arthur’s funeral—but mostly she remembered Spanish from her childhood in Los Alamos, from the Mexicans who worked there or from the fruit sellers at the market in Santa Fe where she had played when Alma was having a drink after one of their shopping trips. That
Spanish was the only other language into which the books had been translated, and the only other language she knew, was another of the links that made Laurie question whether it was coincidence that she had come to England in the first place and had been walking down that street at the exact moment Arthur had had the accident. At first she thought her trip to England had been a voyage of discovery, but now she believed it was more like a series of reawakenings—an accumulation of events that seemed extraordinary and familiar at the same time.

What she did know was that it was more complicated than she had first thought. The clean line of her connection to Arthur—the chain that bound them together as strong and bright in her mind as newly forged steel—had been changed by everything she had learned about him from Martha, Luke, and Rachel. The pattern had intensified, mutating and expanding like a simple image refracted through a kaleidoscope. It was harder for her to control now, but it was becoming infinitely more beautiful, larger and more solid, forming a structure so complex and volatile that its expansion was stretching the surface and making it more vulnerable to attack from people outside—like the German woman called Lila. The last addition, the discovery of the child called Jordan, a child who seemed as lost to time and history as her own father, had changed the shape again, turned it inside out, like the most intricate cat’s cradle you could ever think of. Laurie had still not fully taken it in, and she was so tired that she knew no amount of zinging would clear her head enough for her to find its proper place in the structure.

A flight that had been scheduled to depart the night before had been delayed until the morning, and all around Laurie people were asleep in chairs or lying on the floor with their heads
resting on cabin bags. The restaurant where she was sitting was like a war zone. There wasn’t a table that didn’t have several trays on it, and the floor was littered with plastic cups, bits of food, and sandwich wrappings. When she brought her coffee to the table, she did nothing more than wipe the crumbs off the chair with a paper napkin and make a small space for her cup on the table. Once she would have cleared the whole thing, or stood by, trying to overcome her embarrassment, as Marge shouted at one of the waiters to do it. The truth was, she felt indifferent to it now.

When she had finished her coffee, she wandered through the departure lounge looking at the shops where you could get cheap liquor, cigarettes, or perfume. She wondered about buying Alma something, then thought better of it. Alma was not someone who received gifts gracefully and, anyway, there was nothing she needed or wanted. It would be much more productive to buy a large and expensive gift to keep Mrs. Detweiler sweet, but after the business with Alma’s so-called assault, Laurie didn’t think there could be anything in the gift shops at Gatwick that would guarantee her continuing residence at Spring Crest. She wasn’t sure that even Tiffany’s would stock something large or expensive enough for that. But there would be time to think about Alma when she got home: she wasn’t going to waste her last hour in England worrying about her. In fact, the sharp sense of dread about Alma she always carried with her had faded almost completely.

She stood at the newsstand for a while, then went into the bookstore and glanced idly at the displays. There were detective novels and thick, glossy best-sellers, souvenir books about Charles and Diana’s engagement, and piles of picture books about stately homes or pretty country cottages.

“Do you have children’s books?” she asked the man behind the cash register.

Hardly looking at her, he gestured dismissively towards the far corner of the store, but when Laurie got there all she could find was a jumble of cartoon annuals and stories taken from Disney movies piled on top of each other.

She went back to the counter. “Is that all you have?” she asked.

The man shrugged his shoulders. “There are some comics next to the magazines.” He had a squint and the thick aviator spectacles he wore accentuated it.

“I’m not looking for comics,” Laurie said sharply. “That’s the point. What about older children? They don’t want to read comics.”

“Over there. That’s all we have,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb.

The woman in the queue behind Laurie moved up and banged her book on the desk. “Excuse me,” she said rudely. “Do you mind? My flight’s been called.” She tried to edge Laurie out of the way, but Laurie stood her ground.

“I know that. I looked over there, but there’s nothing for older kids.” She was finding the man’s magnified squint rather distracting. It made him look like a mutant.

“We only stock what Central Distribution gives us.”

She nodded. “Okay. So what books can parents buy for their kids here?”

His voice was pointedly slow, as if he was dealing with a retarded person: “They can buy what we have there.” He pointed again with his thumb. “What Central Distribution gives us.”