The Paperchase (12 page)

They were innocuous memories. It was impossible to square them with Patrick’s crazy letters – one to my father had ended ‘Watch out, short man’ – or with the writing in the notebook. Either I had been wrong to see the fragment as a clue, or it was just too dense for me to unravel.

‘That was awesome’ was Nathan’s verdict on the movie. ‘Were you scared when the girl looked in that mirror and saw the face of the demon?’

‘Not really,’ I said – honestly, since I’d been asleep at that point.

‘Me neither,’ said Nathan.

It was almost five by the time the film ended, but it seemed
later. Thunderclouds had taken over the sky, and the rain, which had been desultory as we sat with Terry under the
skylight
, crowded my windscreen faster than the wipers could clear it. The drops threatened to tear through the car’s ancient plastic roof.

‘Cool car,’ said Nathan.

We drove back under the raging canopies of trees. At the intersection with the road to Patrick’s house, a man was
standing
with his thumb out for a lift. He was wearing a black bin-liner as an improvised mac. For a moment my headlights illuminated his pale, unshaven face and the dark arch of his loosely open mouth. I saw him for less than a second, but it was enough for me to remember him later and recall myself thinking: He’s got a long wait.

NATHAN AND I RAN
the few yards from my car to the Fernshaws’ porch but still got drilled with big cold bullets of rain. Mrs Fernshaw opened the door just as another clap of thunder struck. It was odd to see it register in her face. I
wondered
what it must feel like to her.

Mike Winks, Terry’s boyfriend, was ensconced in a chair at the dining table. He turned out to be a paunchy academic in a moth-eaten cardigan – or at least I remember him in a
moth-eaten
cardigan, but I can’t be sure I didn’t make it up afterwards because it was an article of clothing that would have suited him so well. He was a couple of years older than me. His pale, saggy face suggested a constitution that had consumed too much caffeine, smoked too many cigarettes and spent too many hours in a dusty carrel up in the book stacks.

The three of them had been chatting. Terry, whose white jeans had been magically renewed, sat beside him, resting her hand on his knee, and looking at him with evident adoration.

‘Aha, Nathan! Remember me?’ he said, getting up and
holding
out his hand. His voice was pleasantly hoarse. ‘Imagine: If a man who shakes hands up and down meets a man who shakes hands side to side, what will happen?’

Nathan looked perplexed but he extended his hand all the same. As they shook, their clasped hands went round and round in circles.

Mrs Fernshaw was baking macaroni. This time, when she invited me to stay to dinner I accepted immediately. I felt heavy-hearted at the thought of going back to my empty house. The Fernshaws’ tiny home seemed full of life and
companionably
cosy. Winks was brandishing a bottle of red wine and pouring it into tumblers. Even the light from the television in the other room seemed to crackle round the walls like flames from a hearth.

‘This is nice,’ I said. I didn’t speak much during the meal, which was conducted two-thirds in sign. Winks joked and teased. He was easygoing and likeable. Even when he was just talking to me he had the odd mannerism of signing his words as he spoke. He wasn’t dashing, but there was something
reassuring
about his presence. He had that odd American gift – or is it a kind of insensitivity? – of talking all the time and still seeming able to form a distinct and favourable impression of your personality.

Mrs Fernshaw – Winks called her Harriet – chased us out of the kitchen while she and Terry cleared up. The rain had stopped. Nathan was back in front of the television. I went out to the porch with Winks while he had a smoke. We kept the lights off to discourage the biting insects, and the darkness gave our conversation some of the intimacy of the
confessional
.

‘I met them doing research for my thesis about five years ago,’ he said. ‘It was me who encouraged Terry to go to
Gallaudet. Now she’s planning to go to med school. They’re quite a find. We used to think the indigenous sign
communities
of the islands were extinct. We had an idea that some of the signs got adopted into ASL along with a lot of French. But what we’ve got here is a living link with the nineteenth-century deaf islanders, possibly even further back than that, maybe to seventeenth-century England. But that’s not a conjecture that a respectable academic would want to stake his tenure on.’

‘Is that your plan?’

‘I made it this year. I should say
we
made it. We’ve been together about a year. People had researched the deaf
community
on the island before but they kept missing the Fernshaws. I’ve got a hunch it was something to do with the old man. They don’t talk about him much, but I gather he was pretty much of an asshole.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He died when Nathan was a baby. He was a fisherman. Hell of a tough guy by all accounts. Freak accident. Man works his whole life at sea and then drowns about twenty feet from shore. They don’t like to talk about it. It was a shame. That whole thing – sign, fishing – it’s all going. It’s all gone, practically. This place is turning into Long Island. Used to be it was far enough away to keep it special. But nothing’s far any more.’

‘No,’ I agreed, but I was thinking how far we seemed in that darkness from any life I knew properly. ‘How many people still use the language?’

‘This is it. A speech community of three. Maybe the world’s rarest living language. That’s what made the work so special.’

‘I know someone else who says his wife knows it.’

‘Who?’

‘Mr Diaz, he’s a lawyer in Westwich.’

The tip of his cigarette glowed brightly as he inhaled. ‘Well, I’ve checked out everyone who has ancestors on the island. Diaz is obviously not an island name. You know her maiden name?’

‘Nope.’

‘Thing is, she may know some signs, but that’s not the same thing as speaking the language. I can get us two beers in Tijuana, but that doesn’t mean I speak Spanish. People here like to say that everybody here spoke sign language. I don’t think it’s true. Everyone knew a couple of signs, knew enough to lip-speak so they could be understood. In LA, a lot of people can tell their maid to “
limpia
el
baña
”. It hardly counts as speaking the lingo, does it?’

‘My uncle had a couple of manuals of the language in his library,’ I said, to change the subject. With academics, you sometimes stumble on to some innocuous topic that turns out to be the pet rock they’ve been stroking for twenty years. Once Laura mentioned we’d just been to see
Hamlet
to an
academic
at a dinner party and we got three-quarters of an hour of
ur-texts,
Bad Quartos and printer’s errors.

‘Really? Why’d he have those?’

‘Local interest, I suppose.’ I realised that Winks assumed my uncle was English. ‘He was from Boston. He lived on the island.’ Mentioning Patrick made me remember the house, like a pile of a homework that I had left undone. The wicker rocker creaked as I stood up.

‘In the old Captain’s house?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Funky-looking old place.’

‘Well, you should drop round some time.’ I had begun to get ready to leave.

‘We’ll do that. Nice meeting you, Damien.’

‘Likewise.’

To their obvious pleasure, I thanked Terry and Mrs Fernshaw with a sign that Winks had shown me, then I went into the television room to say goodbye to Nathan.

‘See you, mate,’ I said.

‘See you. Thanks for taking me to the movie.’ He didn’t look round from the TV, but I felt so embarrassingly moved by his spontaneous gratitude that I didn’t know where to put
myself for a second. I stood there long enough for him to turn to me with a puzzled expression, as if to say: Still here?

‘I’m off then,’ I said redundantly.

Winks stopped me by the kitchen table. He had his arm round Mrs Fernshaw. ‘Harriet says she remembers your uncle,’ he said. ‘It was your uncle, right?’

‘Patrick, yes.’

Mrs Fernshaw made a quick movement, drawing her hand over her face and pointing at me, nodding all the time, in a gesture that can only have meant: Yes, your face is familiar. I felt she wanted to say something more about him and I waited for a moment on the step. She hesitated, then smiled and turned away.

As I got into my car for the short drive home I was
thinking
to myself that the real risk in spending time with other people was that you might find you liked it. That was the
dangerous
outcome Patrick had ended up protecting himself against.

The grass on my lawn seemed to have grown during the afternoon. The blades were loaded with rain and brushed water on to my feet and the bottoms of my trousers. I tried to avoid getting my shoes soaked by picking a path along a slight ridge in the roll of the lawn where the grass was shorter and less like a brush full of wallpaper paste. I was so absorbed in finding my way in the dim light that I had virtually reached the porch before I noticed that my front door had disappeared.

The gap that remained was perfectly neat, but there was a suggestion of violence in its absence – like a missing tooth, or an empty sleeve pinned to the front of a veteran’s jacket. It was only when I got closer that I realised the door had been taken clean off its hinges and laid flat inside the entrance.

I CALLED THE POLICE
from the Fernshaws’ house and waited there for the patrol car to arrive. I had thought of going in by myself, but my natural timidity and a reasonable fear that whoever had knocked the door in might still be inside soon put an end to that plan. I had been thinking about the bit in
Cross
My
Heart
and
Hope
to
Die
when the caretaker of the school gets out of bed in his pyjamas to check a door banging in the attic and ends up impaled on a flagpole.

Officers Santorelli and Topper from the local force
followed
me back up the road in their car and we investigated the house together.

‘When did you become aware that your property had been burglarised?’ said Officer Santorelli.

‘An hour, half an hour ago. Whenever I called.’ I was
distracted by the figure of Officer Topper, who was creeping through the kitchen with his long-handled torch held in that odd overhand grip that seems to be an obligatory part of police procedure, along with resting your thumbs in your belt loops and having a swaggering-buttocked waddle. I switched on the main light and he gave a slight start which he tried to conceal.

‘Apart from the damage to the front door, have you noticed any damage or items missing?’ said Officer Santorelli.

‘Hey hey, what’s this?’ said Officer Topper, playing his torch over the vitamin pills in the bathroom. ‘Looks like
someone’s
been after your pharmaceuticals.’

‘No, that was like that,’ I said. ‘There’s no room in the
cupboard
.’

‘Entry was gained via that. I’d guess egress was made via the same route,’ said Santorelli, pointing at the front door. He made ‘route’ rhyme with ‘grout’. ‘I’m going to take a look upstairs. Wait down here and see if you can find anything missing.’

The house looked much as I had left it – or, more
accurately
, as Patrick had left it. The burglar had opened some of the cupboards in the library, but didn’t seem to have made it as far as the second storey of the house. The hard part was
figuring
out what, if anything, he had taken. It took a peculiar kind of mental effort to look at everything that Patrick had gathered under that one roof and try to determine what wasn’t there. It was hard to imagine which, if any, objects would appeal to a burglar. It didn’t seem likely that someone would have bothered making off with an ice-cream scoop, or a set of hub-caps decorated with the Coca-Cola insignia.

‘British?’ said Officer Topper shyly.

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

‘You’re British.’

‘That’s right.’

Officer Topper looked pleased with himself. ‘I thought I detected an accent. What part are you from?’

‘Wandsworth,’ I said. ‘But my family’s originally from the States.’

He nodded knowingly. ‘My own family hail from up Norfolk way. The Thetford Toppers. The name Topper comes from “de Pearce”. My ancestors fought alongside Richard the Lionheart in the Holy Land. That there’s my crest.’ He held out a ring as big as a knuckleduster so that I could peer at his coat of arms. ‘A serpent couchant on a ground of gules,’ he said.

‘De Pearce – I think I’ve heard tell of their deeds,’ I said. ‘Will you and your colleague be dusting the house for prints?’

‘Unfortunately we’re seeing a lot of these seasonal break-ins,’ said Officer Santorelli when he returned. I explained about the derelict I had seen in the rainstorm. Santorelli made notes and then told me I would be contacted by a counsellor who
specialised
in helping the victims of crime.

I walked the policemen back to their squad car and then tried to go to sleep under the life mask of Keats in the summer kitchen. Although I felt indifferent about any losses, I had
misgivings
about sleeping in the house until the door had been strengthened and put back on its hinges. There was the unpleasant possibility that whoever had broken in might return to find something he had missed the first time. The summer kitchen had a sturdy wooden door with a porthole. It looked like something you would find on the wheel-house of a
tea-clipper
and felt solid enough to withstand a typhoon.

I was scared, of course, because of the burglary, but I also felt disappointed and angry. I turned on to my side in a futile effort to get comfortable in that narrow bed. I felt the weight of the possessions in the main house exerting a gravitational pull on me. I was a swimmer unable to free himself from the vortex of a sinking ship.

Irrationally, the break-in seemed to confirm all my misgivings about living in the house. This life wasn’t what I had imagined, I thought ruefully. I had turned out to be the beneficiary of a dusty, fusty, overcrowded, high-maintenance, accident-prone wooden shack of a building. The house was a tar baby.