Travelling in a Strange Land Read online

  ‘I met him on a dating site,’ she says and just for a second when I glance at her, her outstretched hands make it look like she’s sleepwalking. Sleepwalking with her eyes open.

  ‘Lots of people do that now,’ I say and I know it doesn’t sound good but it’s running across my mind that if she backs out now the chances of me getting paid aren’t great. Wedding no-shows leave nothing but chaos in their wake. ‘As good as anywhere else,’ I tell her. ‘And the sun’s out,’ I say as I go to stand at the bedroom window. Down below the wedding car is sitting at the pavement, light puddling in its polished blackness. Her mother calls again. ‘Listen; let me take one last photo of you sitting there. You look great. I can catch your reflection in the mirror so it’ll come out really well.’

  She looks at her nails for a last time before dropping her hands to her side and angles herself to the camera. But the first thing I see is myself in the glass and in that second before I move out of range I want to tell her that I can’t help because I can’t help myself any more and no matter what she decides it will only ever hold a promise, not any permanent assurance. And one of the few things I know for sure now is that nothing comes with a guarantee. But the only thing I say is, ‘Got it.’

  She takes one last look at herself and I hear her say with a lilt, ‘Bring it on,’ and I don’t know if the music I’m hearing in her voice is happy or sad but I too say, ‘Bring it on,’ and try to make my voice echo hers.

  At the roundabout take the second exit and stay on the A75. Keep straight ahead. I tell her that’s exactly what I intend to do. So yes, bring it on – the miles of snow-seamed roads unwinding to that empty house in Sunderland. To my left the hills and woods look mysterious and still. Most of the side roads I pass remain uncleared, some with only a narrow single track cut through the snow like someone has sliced through a wedding cake. I’m keeping my speed about or slightly under forty miles an hour which is going to make the journey longer but hopefully lessens the chances of disaster. And at intervals along the side of the road are vehicles that look like they have been abandoned and not yet recovered by their owners. I wonder where they found refuge when the worst of the snow hit. I need to stop to phone Luke to tell him that I’m coming and to take the leak I should have taken on the boat but there isn’t anywhere obvious because I pass lay-bys that are blocked with several feet of snow so I have to keep going. After about twenty more minutes I see, as if in a miracle, a partially cleared lay-by complete with a van selling hot food and a couple of parked-up lorries. When I turn carefully into it she’s telling me that she’s recalculating and the screen starts rebooting. I tell her to relax but she doesn’t listen, in a tizzy until I silence her. The van is blazoned with the name The Jolly Friar and its owner is wearing a white apron, a woolly hat and a scarf so long that it must be a health and safety risk any time he goes near the fryer. On his hands are fingerless gloves. Fairy lights circle the serving counter and a plastic Merry Christmas banner that looks as if it’s seen several years’ service is pinned below. A couple of lorry drivers are standing to one side eating burgers so big they’re using both hands, their heads jerking forward like pigeons each time they take a mouthful. The smell of cooked onions curdles the air but I’ve no stomach for such things at this time of the morning and order a coffee, thinking it best to keep the flask’s contents until later or an emergency. Despite the name on the van the guy serving is pretty dour and I regret telling him that I’m going to get my son because it elicits no response other than an almost imperceptible nod and he looks at the coins I’ve given him as if he suspects they might be counterfeit.

  Maybe business is bad, smacked in the gob by the snow. Maybe he was hoping to mint it big before the expense of Christmas. I try one last time.

  ‘You did well getting out and about today,’ I tell him.

  ‘Not expecting much business but every little bit helps keep the wolf from the door,’ he says as he rubs a cloth over the countertop without looking at me. ‘Wasn’t even supposed to be my turn but the son’s buggered off to Aviemore.’

  ‘For the skiing?’

  ‘Aye, the skiing and the getting banjaxed.’

  ‘Bad combination, skiing and drinking.’

  ‘He’s up early on the slopes whatever the night before. Says the cold clears the head. A good fry-up does it for me – no need to hurtle down any mountain.’

  I wish him good luck and want him to wish me it in return but he simply nods. I slip behind some trees near a couple of picnic tables and as I’m going I look up at the thick cluster of trees that stretches upward into the shadowed distance. Everything is silent and still and the deeper my eyes journey into the wood the deeper the silence and stillness. Even a small bird fretting a fine mist of falling snow doesn’t break the spell. If I had my camera I would take a photograph but wonder if I could even get close to capturing what is hidden in the moment. And I hear a voice, my personal satnav, telling me that despite all those hopes I harbour and have always harboured about what I could do and be with the camera, I’m not up to it. And its voice becomes my voice and it’s saying over and over, ‘Look this way please. Everyone smiling.’ Everyone always pretending to smile. I suddenly shiver.

  Something brushes a branch further up the slope and snow falls almost in slow motion. I know it’s Daniel even though I can’t see him. Standing perfectly still I stare and stare, trying to see him, but there are no prints in the snow only the white bark of the birch trees passing coldness to each other.

  ‘Hi, Luke, how are you now? I’m on my way.’

  ‘That’s good. How are the roads?’

  ‘Not so bad at the moment. Doable and I’m being careful. So how are you feeling?’

  ‘A bit better but still pretty ropey.’

  ‘And are you drinking plenty?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’ His voice is that of the exasperated teenager. There’s a pause and then he says, ‘It’s the first time you’ve ever encouraged my drinking.’

  ‘Very funny,’ I say, glad that he’s well enough to make a joke. ‘And you’ll be packed so we can do a quick turnaround and head back up here so we get a sailing home.’

  ‘I’m packed now. Ready to leave.’

  ‘OK, I’ll let you go and I’ll ring when I’m almost there.’

  ‘Dad, can you ask Mum to stop phoning me every five minutes. It’s doing my head in and she rings when I’m trying to sleep.’

  ‘She’s worried about you, Luke, but I’ll tell her. Any problems, you ring us. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ he says and then he’s gone.

  I call Lorna and try to do it as gently as possible but she gives out to me because it’s only natural that she’s worried and she wants to keep tabs on how he is and whether they need to phone for a doctor. She goes silent, which is always worse, until I hear her say that she’ll not ring until after lunch then asks me if I’ve eaten anything yet. I tell her yes and then end the call but what I’m thinking is, there has to be a way of loving your child that gets it right, helps them in whatever way they need but doesn’t do their heads in. Don’t know how you find that way. Happy families. Everybody smiling. Perfect little groupings – sometimes in their homes, sometimes in the studio, the children all shiny faced and well-off healthy. Sometimes they think black and white will make it classier, lend it an air of gravitas, permanence even. So who gets ownership of it if there’s a divorce? And when the children look back on it what do they see and how much does it match up to their memories? I have two photos to remind me. Both are black and white. Simple snapshots. Both with my mother. One in Santa’s Grotto taken in a Belfast city-centre store and one on a first bicycle. No sign of my father.

  Luke was never much into drinking. Got himself bladdered the night his GCSE exams finished. That was about the sum total of his teenage excess, at least as far as we know. One of his friends called me on Luke’s phone and I went to collect him at the locked back gates of a local park. Propped up by his friend who at least had the good grace to call and n
ot do a runner, a surf of empty WKD bottles round their feet and from somewhere deeper in the park loud shouts and sounds of revelry. Getting him over the gate was one of the most physically difficult things I’ve ever had to do with Luke. Getting him over a high and locked metal gate. ‘Put your foot there, Luke.’ Pushing and hauling – I’d never touched my son so much since he was a child and remember how strange it felt. ‘Now haul your left leg over.’ Trying to stop him breaking his neck, Luke losing one of his trainers in the process. Walking him.

  Telling him, ‘You’re not getting in the car if you’re going to hoop.’ His hooping as if on demand. Then, when he was finished, hooping again until finally there was nothing left. Walking him some more, trying to sort him so his mother didn’t see him in that state.

  We got off light with Luke – I know that now. And perhaps as a kind of an apology for the drinking night he turned up at the studio on results day with his list of successes. I didn’t hug him because we don’t really go in for that and probably haven’t touched him since that night at the locked gate but I did something that, if anything, felt more intimate – I took his picture. Sat on a stool, the piece of paper in his hand, I took my son’s portrait. And as I looked at him through the lens I remember that I didn’t want the moment to end, didn’t want to press the button. Just wanted to hold the moment there with him looking happy and me feeling proud. And wanting to say something but not knowing exactly what it was or how to say it so instead I took him out and we had a Subway.

  Strange names on the signs – Wigtown, Gatehouse of Fleet, Kirkcudbright. Stay on the A75. Then take the second exit at the next roundabout. My photo with my mother in Santa’s Grotto. It was either in Robinson & Cleaver’s or Anderson & McAuley’s, one of those old-fashioned Edwardian-style family stores that the new multinationals modernised out of existence. I don’t remember which one it was. Possibly the last time I enjoyed Christmas. Now, the word grotto seems not a world away from ghetto and that’s what it mostly feels like, shut in with high-walled predetermined expectations that never quite get delivered. Going so stir crazy you eventually escape only to end up walking round sales even though you’ve had a surfeit of stores and the gap between Christmas and the shops demanding more of your money is about five minutes and getting shorter every year. Our local garage was even open on Christmas morning. This year Lorna’s job in primary school as a classroom assistant didn’t finish until yesterday and I needed to be the one doing the running, getting everything in, ticking off the lists and then being handed new lists. And Lorna needs to rest up, build up her strength, and if I can bring Luke safely home that’ll be one less thing for her to worry about. This will be the first Christmas so it won’t always be easy but we’ve talked about it and we’ve got to pull it off for Lilly, who’s still young enough to get excited and entitled to have her expectations realised as best we can.

  The satnav goes curiously quiet but just as I’m wondering if she’s taking a coffee break she tells me once more Stay on the A75. Drive for five point four miles. I pass houses set back from the road that are temporarily transformed into Swiss chalets, only the presence of brick rather than wood confounding the impression. Some gardens have snowmen – snowmen waiting to fly through the air when everyone is sleeping. Luke always slept through the night a short time after he was born. At first a kind of mellow child mostly, then intensely curious about the world and when he’d exhausted his questions, outwardly at least, seemed willing to accept that was just the way it was, that there weren’t always answers to what he asked. But there is one question I’d like to ask him and it’s what goes on inside his head because I’ve never had any real insight into that and he rarely says or does stuff that gives you clues. After what’s happened that’s something more for me to worry about. You’d think that when you were the father of a child, a child you’ve brought up – well in the sense you were there when they were growing up, because I’ve come to believe that it’s mostly life itself that brings them up – that this would enable your understanding of them, that there would be an instinctive connection between you. At the next roundabout take the second exit. How many bloody roundabouts are there? But it doesn’t seem to work like this. And I think of my own father as I’ve started to do more often in recent days and perhaps I’m looking back trying to find whatever connection might have existed before it went missing.

  My hands splayed on the wheel. Large, broad-fingered copies of his. But his were useful in the work he did – a small-time jobbing builder who stumbled from one job to another to make a living and whose talk of making a killing was always linked to some final payday far in the future. A killing that never came before Parkinson’s cut him down, these strong, calloused hands shaking like the last of winter’s windblown leaves into a final helplessness. Mine are a hindrance, not well suited for pressing small buttons and anything that needs a delicacy of touch. A wind is picking up, breathing fine sifts of snow off the tops of walls and the roofs of cars. The branches of a row of fir trees have become a latticed framework of white. It was winter when I helped him work on Old Man Dobson’s place out on the Peninsula where the wind snarled off the Lough and sawed at our bones. I was sixteen, conscripted in the holidays, and sometimes I thought I’d be blown off the scaffolding while working on one of the gables. Dobson driving out every afternoon in his blue Merc and humiliating my father for some fault or other and when the job was done quibbling over the final payment and wanting money off for some supposedly slipshod piece of work. My father telling me as we drove home that with any luck some stormy night when the wind roared in off the sea it would take the whole bloody roof off and leave Dobson shivering under the stars. He wanted to erase the pain of the humiliation that I had witnessed and, although I said nothing much, I wanted to let him know that I was on his side so I told him everyone knew that Dobson was a tosser. It was the closest I ever felt to him. There was never a time in the subsequent years when he expressed anything as personal to me, or me to him. As a thin sleet of snow thrown from a passing lorry skims the windscreen I hear a voice say that maybe it’s only in the modern world that everyone thinks words are important. But in the following years it felt that the space between us grew slowly wider and then there’s no way back and it’s pretty sad and all too late. So I suddenly understand that biology and genes don’t actually bestow a connection, that whatever finally exists is only through what has been made with these same hands that grip the wheel and not just by a name on a birth certificate. And I want to ring Luke and tell him that I love him but can’t because he’ll think that I’m the one who’s ill, that I’m burning up with some fever.

  ‘And did you ever tell me that you loved me?’ Daniel asks.

  He comes silently so I never know the time and place but on this journey I’ve been waiting for him – I can’t be alone in the car for all these hours without him coming, despite the hoped-for protection from the music, despite the voice of the satnav. It’s often when I’m thinking of Luke that he comes. He’s wearing his black hoody with the hood up but it can’t stop me registering the pallor of his skin, the dark circles under his eyes. It’s those eyes I always look at most because they alone are able to reveal the truth.

  ‘If I didn’t tell you, I showed you every day and your mother must have told you so often you can’t have heard her any more.’

  ‘But it wasn’t true. It was never true, was it?’

  ‘You’re full of shit, Daniel.’

  ‘You know it’s true,’ he insists as he turns his face away from me and stares out through the glass and the light of the snow streams through him. His hands are tightened into fists that clutch his jeans. His right hand has a scab. There is a hole that looks like a cigarette burn in his sleeve.

  ‘You’d like it to be true because then you’d have someone to blame, someone other than yourself.’

  I can’t take his blame, can’t take it any more, because if I do it’ll beat me down so low that I’ll never be able to get up. But I have to t
ry and talk to him. Try to explain.

  That’s all that’s left to me now.

  ‘How you keeping?’ I ask, all the anger deliberately pushed from my voice.

  ‘I’m good, doing good,’ he says but the lies are in his eyes. ‘Doing even better if I could borrow some money. A little would do.’

  ‘You know I’ve got no money for you, big or small.’

  ‘Some love.’

  I go to tell him that if I didn’t love him I’d give him the money, give him whatever he asked, but he’s already gone and all I can do is hold the steering wheel a little tighter, turn the music up louder. ‘You’re full of shit,’ I tell him again even though he’s no longer there and without realising it I’m shouting. ‘Full of shit.’ And I slam the steering wheel with the palms of my hands then jump when I accidentally hit the horn. A few seconds later my phone rings. It’s Lilly and even though I shouldn’t I’ve answered it because a phone call could mean anything and I try to calm myself.

  ‘Hi, Dad, are you nearly there yet?’

  ‘I’m still in Scotland but I’m getting there. Is Mum all right?’

  ‘Yes. She’s lighting a fire in the front room. We’re going to toast marshmallows.’

  ‘She knows we’re not supposed to because we live in a clean-air zone.’

  ‘But it’s Christmas.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Knock knock.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Snow.’

  ‘Snow who?’

  ‘Snow skating because the ice is too thin.’

  ‘Very good. And you look after your mum. Don’t let her do too much. I have to go now. Back soon.’

  ‘Bye, Dad.’

  A surprise child. Out of the blue. A source of pleasure now but I don’t want to think about the future. I try not to think of it either when I have to take the pregnant shoots that some mothers-to-be now want because it seems scans aren’t record enough any more and thanks to Demi Moore they think it’s the thing to do. Some of them even bring a photocopy of the magazine cover where she’s standing with one hand supporting her fullness and the other covering her breasts. I always insist they bring their partner with them or a friend because I’m taking no chances of a misunderstanding and I do them as quickly and as tastefully as possible because any hanging around makes me feel uncomfortable, a voyeur rather than a photographer, and sometimes their hand isn’t big enough to cover what needs covered so then I have to suggest a type of drape. And there’s always photoshopping involved because none of us looks like Demi Moore when we’re in the buff. And it’s a bit delicate sometimes because I have to ask, ‘Do you want your tattoo in the shot?’ Mostly they disappoint me by saying yes and I feel obliged to lie that their butterfly, rose or dolphin looks like the business, rather than some crayon drawing Lilly did when she was four.