Significance (17 page)

The house was quiet. Aaron must still be asleep. On waking he usually began the day with a sort of howl of protest. Where did that come from, that attention
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demanding noise? Was it some terrible knowledge of himself as a creature locked forever in a mind deprived of true human communication? Or was it like the cry of a baby? An instinctual animal response on waking to find himself alone? No one would ever know. Not his mother, father or brother, nor Marilyn herself. All they knew was that the nerve
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shattering sound must be attended to, that it wrenched one from sleep and sent one colliding towards the noise, soothing and shushing, until eventually, he shut up.

How different it must be when the cry is that of a baby, when the sleep
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broken nights are rewarded with the looks and sounds of love, when the light of recognition begins to burn in the child's eyes, when it smiles and gurgles and finally begins to speak.

Soon, if everything went okay, she would know exactly how it felt to be a mother.

She picked up her wrist watch and put it on before looking at the time. Almost nine o'clock. An alarmingly late hour for Aaron to still be asleep. It passed through her mind fleetingly that he was dead, and this idea inspired hardly any sorrow in her, which in its turn sickened her.

She reminded herself that thoughts are only thoughts; the brain an engine of conscious and unconscious needs, desires and wishes, tempered by a moral code that grew as much from nature as nurture.

She leaned over and kissed Scott, he responded by murmuring and making a vague blind kissing moue at the pillow.

‘Scott,' she said in a low voice that was not quite a whisper, ‘wake up. It's nine o'clock.'

He grunted then snuggled closer.

‘Scott! Aaron's not awake.'

‘Good,' he murmured. ‘Come here.'

‘Scott.' She nudged him. ‘Go and check on Aaron!'

Groaning, he sat up and she watched as he lingered on the edge of the bed rubbing his head as if he was brushing leaves from it. Then he stood and pulled on a pair of cream
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coloured chinos and trudged out of the bedroom calling ‘Aaron? Hey, Aaron? S'morning, Aaron.'

It was soothing to hear his voice as it travelled away from her. She found herself thinking of his voice as an arrow projected towards their shared future, as if he had gone out of the room to find their baby. She laid her palm over her stomach, it was still almost flat, the skin taut, and yet she sensed that under her hand, under the wall of muscle, deep within her, a new life was growing.

In seven more days they'd be packing their belongings into the hire car and setting off for Paris and from there onto the plane that would take them home. Scott and Aaron's parents would be at Ottawa Airport to meet them. They'd part company on the concourse, Aaron going home with his parents, while she and Scott, with sighs of guilty and exhausted relief, would go gratefully to their old car, their old life, their beautiful, unfettered freedom. And maybe, as they'd done before, they'd celebrate their release by going to an expensive French restaurant and ordering all that food they had been unable to have in France, and they'd pretend they were in Paris and Scott would suggest they have champagne and she'd say no and then she'd tell him about the baby.

She heard Scott running heavy
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footed down the stairs, the squeak of his hand on the varnished banister and the sound of doors opening and closing downstairs. Then someone, it must have been Scott, criss
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crossing the passageway. No more voices, just this frightening flurry of urgent movement.

Marilyn hurried out of bed and was pulling on her dressing gown when the footsteps pounded up the stairs again. Scott was at the bedroom door, wild
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eyed and breathless.

‘He's not here! I can't find him.'

‘He must be here.'

‘I can't find him.'

‘But he can't get out, unless…'

‘I think I might have forgotten to lock the front door.'

‘Oh, God.'

Together they searched the house calling Aaron's name over and over. They looked in wardrobes, under beds. Minutes ticked by. They checked the front door; it was unlocked and the key had been left in it. They looked hopefully out of the front windows thinking they might see Aaron standing resolutely at one of his favoured places on the street outside, but there was no sign of him. Then they hurriedly dressed and went in search of him.

Afterwards they considered that they should have headed in different directions, or that one of them should have stayed in the house in case he returned, but they were not quite thinking straight. Not then. It was only later that they came to this opinion, even though it was useless by then to think that if they'd been more analytical they'd have found him sooner.

At first they only walked the streets, turning this way and that, scanning the length of the side roads as they came to them. Without saying as much, both expected to find Aaron fixed to some spot, locked into the strange stillness that overcame him when he went out ‘to play'. But they also worried (though again neither of them spoke their fears aloud) that someone had found Aaron and done something to him. Their imaginations separately concocted a similar array of demons; men who might abuse or rape him, or youths who might taunt, torment and beat him. Others who might misunderstand his strange behaviour, who might accuse him of watching children in a playground, or women who thought he was stalking them. The possibilities were endless and awful.

After much fruitless searching they began to stop people in the street and ask if they had seen a tall, blond, young American man. They said American as it seemed to simplify the matter, and without wishing to split hairs, Canada was part of the North American continent. Scott said, ‘We've lost my brother, he is ill; he may appear strange or frightened.' But people shook their heads or shrugged.

One suggested they should call the police. Another, a postman, took their cell
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phone number and promised to ring if he saw him.

While they were doing this, they began to hear at first one, then two, then three distant sirens.

At first the noise did not register with either Scott or Marilyn. They were merely a part of the soundscape of a small town or big city, as unremarkable as a lorry's air brakes, or car horns, or the rattling of a metal grille, or human noises; a cough, a shout, a sneeze, or music, angry rap spat out in fever
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pitch French, blasting from a sleek black car with the windows down. Nothing to do with them, nothing to do with this urgent searching.

Then Scott stopped walking abruptly, caught Marilyn by the wrist and stopped her too. They gazed at one another as the last of the sirens licked at their ears, poured themselves through their ear canals, vibrated at high pitch on their ear drums where, instantly, intricate nerves sent the message of the sounds to their brains, and finally they understood the implications of the noise and what it might mean for Aaron.

‘Oh, Christ!' Scott said.

Marilyn shook her head. ‘No. Oh God, no. It can't be.'

Both momentarily pictured themselves arriving back at Ottawa, Scott's mother and father standing at the arrivals gate, their faces scrubbed
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looking, beaming smiles of welcome, their eyes searching at first cheerfully, then confusedly, then desperately for their baby boy.

And Scott saying, ‘Mum, Dad…'

He'd keep a tight hold of Marilyn's hand as he said it. His palm would grow sweaty. He would hold her hand like a slick knot of bone and flesh; hold it so tightly it would hurt. But that wouldn't matter because at least it would arrest his own hand's palsied trembling.

Then Scott, his voice breaking, creaking and ragged would say, ‘We lost him. Mum, Dad, I'm so sorry.'

Those were the exact words ‘we lost him'. The phrase was precise, correct, having a double meaning and in this instance the two meanings collided. ‘We lost him' as in we could not find him, and ‘we lost him' as in he died.

Neither Scott nor Marilyn spoke for a moment; they just stared at one another as the siren faded away. Then Scott's cell phone rang.

Later, remembering that moment, Marilyn would recall a line from a poem by Sylvia Plath, ‘the dead bell, the dead bell, somebody's done for.' Once it had been church bells that sounded the clamour of celebration and the call to worship. At other times they signalled warning. Now the sounding bells are everywhere; clanging, wailing, shrieking, electronically bleeping, ringing, challenging one another for precedence. Scott's phone was ringing and it took a moment for him to register what the sound was. Fearfully he pulled it from his pocket. Who would be ringing him here and now? His parents? He damn well hoped not.

‘Hello?'

A stranger's voice spoke to him.

‘Monsieur, it is the postman. We spoke a few minutes ago on the street?'

‘Yes, yes. I'm sorry, I'd forgotten.'

‘I think I may have found him…'

Dreamer

Joseph had woken in his hotel room with the phone call from the previous night in his mind in almost complete detail. He had been expecting the call, had been reassured by his teachers that, with his attendance record and exam results he was sure to be accepted at his choice of college and was certain to receive funding.

There had been moments when he'd accepted this possibility, but even more moments when he pushed the idea of such happiness away. ‘Hope makes us vulnerable; it weakens us when we must remain strong and resolute.' He had read words to that effect long ago in a story in his own language. Or perhaps it had been something from Greek myth or even an American movie.

Whichever it was it seemed it no longer mattered. No need to caution his imagination any more, no need to picture himself working the land from sunrise to sunset and only then to barely scrape a living. However, as Joseph's father worked at a bank and his mother was a schoolteacher, he asked himself why he imagined he could fall so low. Perhaps this had to do with how high he could dream. That, and a deep sense of his identity and history.
African nations, no matter their long histories; the patterns of colonisation, independence and seemingly bright futures, could erupt into turmoil overnight. The same could befall European nations, or any country in the world for that matter, and yet somehow, in Joseph's view, Africa felt more vulnerable.

Not that Joseph was really drawn to politics; instead his chosen profession of medicine demanded that he see neither skin colour, nor borders, nor religion, nor tribe, but only sick and injured people who needed his help.

His plan was three
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fold; graduate from Medical School in London, then go (almost certainly) to America to further expand his practice and accumulate a decent amount of money, then lastly return home to Africa and set up his own clinic in the small town where he grew up.

And yes, noble and self
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sacrificing as these aims were, he also saw in the swirling snows of the glass globe of his dreams, a beautiful wife who was as intelligent and dedicated to her career as he was to his. He imagined her with a high proud forehead, sculpted cheekbones, gleaming, deep
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set eyes and skin the colour of a betel nut. And he saw the children they would have, and his children's children, and himself fifty or sixty years hence, his black hair transformed to a dignified smoky grey, sitting on the porch of their house overlooking the fields he owned, and in whose rich earth he nurtured grain and vegetables, flowers, horses, grandchildren. The orange sun setting, his work done.

While he lay in bed allowing the full tide of his dreams to wash over him, it occurred to him that they still might yet be dreams and so after checking the time and calculating the hour back home, he rang his mother just to be certain.

‘Mamma? Was I dreaming?' he asked, and she laughed.

‘No, you weren't dreaming, and by tonight half the town will know. Your uncle is writing about it for the newspaper. I gave him your graduation picture.'

‘Oh, I'm so happy; I don't know what to do with myself.'

‘Read a book.'

‘I should, but, oh, I feel like running, dancing, singing.'

‘Read a book, Joseph.'

‘Ah, Mamma, you're the best. Love you.'

They said their goodbyes and Joseph picked up the anatomy book he'd brought with him.

Learning never ceased. It only stopped when a person made it stop. Joseph would never stop. Never rest. In order to be a doctor his knowledge of the human body must be perfect. The human body was a country to be explored, mapped out, every bone and blood vessel and organ memorised by rote.

For purely arbitrary reasons, Joseph opens the book to those pages devoted to the workings of the throat and mouth. The book is not the kind of in
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depth one a young medical student would consult, but one designed for the serious younger reader or lay person. He studies the full
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colour diagram – mouthing the words which describe the parts; pharynx, oesophagus, tongue, epiglottis, hyoid bone, glottis, thyroid cartilage, vocal chords, trachea.