The Long Forgotten Page 12

  ‘What he means is, it’s proving perilously difficult for us to access the crash site. Weather conditions have been tricky, to say the least.’

  ‘But you have managed to record some remarkable pictures,’ the host says, an ill-timed camera cue catching her reading from her notes.

  ‘That’s right.’ The picture cuts to subdued blues and fuzzy browns, murk suspended in the water. ‘This is footage from an unmanned craft we were able to send down to the ocean floor. Obviously it’s quite hard to see what’s what. That there, the large strip of fuselage’ – it looks like a rusted upturned pigsty, almost entirely obscured by barnacles – ‘is a part of the plane’s cockpit, still intact, it seems.’ The camera moves to what is indisputably the corroded structure of two wheels, separated by a stanchion of metal pipe, like a crucifix, with a flag of seaweed floating ethereally on the drift. ‘That appears to be the landing gear,’ she says, ‘and from what we can tell the actual body of the plane is scattered across some considerable distance, maybe half a mile or more.’ Cole thinks of skeletons strapped to their seats.

  ‘But the black box isn’t able to tell you what happened?’ the host asks. The camera cuts back to Professor Cole in the studio, a frost of sweat descending his forehead, as he defers the topic once more to Dash with a nod, so that beads land on her dress.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘for the moment it looks like we might not be able to get any more information from the flight recorder. It’s damaged in the extreme. You might say it has forgotten.’ There is more laughter, the audience apparently glad that things have set at least one foot back on the safe terrain of light entertainment. The host returns her practised glare to the camera lens.

  ‘It appears Flight PS570 might just have fallen from the sky. And why? We may never know. For with the finding of the fuselage it is finally confirmed, as if it ever needed confirming, that there were no survivors. Regardless, this story continues to captivate, and after the break we’ll be talking to someone you may have read about in the newspapers, who claims to have witnessed something strange on the day flight PS570 disappeared.’ Hairs rise on Cole’s forearm. He strokes his fingertips across them. Could be Braille, he thinks, or Morse code; writing on his skin. A cutaneous signal, a warning, a memo to put a stop to this whole shambolic circus once and for all. As the music blares once more, they are joined by a woman whose soft blonde tresses hang at waist length, splitting at the ends. In her hand is a glass, the surface of the water trembling.

  ‘This is Anna Gray. Now, Anna is a little nervous . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Anna says. James leans over, his thinning hairline intruding on the shot.

  ‘Don’t be. I have that effect on people.’ He pats her lap, sending a snicker through the audience in a way Cole finds quite objectionable. Anna pretends to giggle, then fiddles with the microphone attached to the lapel of her pristine mauve cardigan, clearly bought for the occasion. The floor manager’s shadow can be seen on the monitor, frantically trying to discourage her from behind camera, but to no avail. The host shows a perfect set of white teeth to the actor, who sits back, happy with his input, as Professor Cole rolls his eyes as if he is about to squeeze drops into his pupils.

  ‘But Anna, you have a very interesting tale to add to the mystery of flight PS570?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When I was six, my father lived on the Cornish coast. You couldn’t get a good television reception then, and there was very little to do. No video games, like there are now.’ More laughter. ‘And my mother was allergic to most animals, they made her face itch and swell, so we couldn’t have pets. Plus I was an only child . . .’ The host dabs a fingertip to her ear, eager to hurry Anna along.

  ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘Well, early most mornings I would sit in the window. One morning, I remember that I saw what looked like a star, except it was light, and it was moving, and it was on fire. I called my father to come and see, but he was too busy. It went along sideways, then it seemed to spin and slow and come down to where the ocean was, which I could hear but couldn’t see, and then it disappeared.’

  ‘So you think you might have seen flight PS570 crashing?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, of course. I was too young. But it all comes back to me now, since I saw the professor with the black box, and found out the route the plane took.’ She warms to her role. ‘I even made a wish on a shooting star, like they do in Disney movies.’

  ‘They?’ Professor Cole asks.

  ‘Princesses,’ Anna stammers.

  The host faces the audience.

  ‘But that’s not all that makes your story remarkable, is it?’

  ‘No, I suppose . . .’

  ‘Tell the folks at home what happened to you later that day.’

  ‘I was out on the beach collecting shells in a bucket. There was nothing unusual about that, I often did it, and I hadn’t wandered very far from home. That’s when I saw a man. He was dripping wet, like he’d just been swimming in his clothes.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t dare go close. I was scared, I think. He had blood on him. I remember where it had mixed with salt water, so it was like a deep-red goo in the cuts on his arms. And he was carrying some kind of box, or something. I was maybe twenty metres away, when I shouted hello to him.’

  ‘And what did he say?’ the host says, loading that final word with emphasis to skilfully pump the anecdote for drama.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. He just walked away. But I have never forgotten his face.’

  ‘It would make an excellent movie, and I know an actor who is made for the role,’ James says. The audience titter, expanding his grin until he sees, from the corner of his eye, Cole frantically shaking his head.

  ‘Bullshit.’ Cole’s stool scrapes backwards across the faux kitchen floor. ‘If you were six years old, you’d barely remember your own mother’s face if it was the last time you saw her, let alone a fleeting glance of a stranger on the beach.’

  ‘Mr Cole,’ the host says.

  ‘Professor Cole. I’m a professor. Not a talking head on a panel show, or whatever this is.’ The audience gasp, as though sharing one big mouth. Dr Dash hides her face in the folds of her turquoise neckerchief. ‘What you’re telling everybody is a fiction invented in reaction to the saturation of the story in the news, and the producers of this show know it. They know that people will watch it and believe it. This is not how memory works. It’s how the media works.’ He unclips his microphone and throws the battery across the pinewood counter. Feedback squeaks through the studio, shrill enough that members of the audience in the front two rows shield their ears. He turns to the host. ‘Now, if it’s all the same, I’ll leave you to it. I won’t be talking about flight PS570 again.’ He faces Anna, who appears close to hyperventilation. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Gray, for my outburst,’ he says, and exits the studio through the pretend door. Dr Dash mouths the word ‘sorry’ into camera, and the house band stumbles through the opening bars of the show’s theme tune, woefully out of time.

  TWELVE

  Despite it being early in the morning the television in the communal room of the nursing home is so loud it vibrates. Rita’s voice is louder still. There’s a thickness to its middle frequencies when she shouts that make it seem somehow solid. More than a noise. An object. A baton, beating Dove about the head. Beating him back into the present. At first the words don’t make any sense, but as she repeats them they right themselves until he understands.

  ‘Come!’ she’s saying. ‘Come quick!’ Not to Dove. To someone else. But close to Dove’s ear, close enough that it forces him out of Peter’s memory, and suddenly he is back in his own body, at the feet of an old man in a care home, cheek pressed against the gnarled wool of his slippers. Except the old man is standing now. He is standing for the first time in decades. And when Dove looks up at the old man’s face, he sees it not as it is, but as it used to be, becau
se he knows who the old man is. This is Peter Manyweathers. This is the man whose life he is remembering. The man who had once loved his mother, Harum.

  Rita wraps her arms around Dove’s midriff and yanks upwards, like she’s trying to expel a bone from his throat.

  ‘Oh my Lord, are you OK?’

  ‘I don’t know, I . . .’ The pain in his head still hangs there, the lingering din of a cymbal crash. She pulls harder.

  ‘I’m not talking to you.’

  And now Dove is behind her, looking up at Peter Manyweathers, whose arm is raised, finger pointed towards the window, at the flowers beyond the glass. Stranger still, Dove realizes he can name them. Each and every one of them. Not just the blush crowd of a rose bush, and two imperious sunflowers, but fists of billowing lilac hydrangea, parades of globe thistles and cherry-red fuchsia hanging like the unworn hats of fairies. All this knowledge he never learnt. The things Peter remembers.

  ‘Quickly!’ Rita shouts. Two nurses rush into the room, the second of them with a half-cocked fire extinguisher held above his head, which hits the ground and rolls into the centre of the rug when he sees Peter, and suddenly everyone is standing completely still: Dove, Peter, the nurses, until Rita cajoles her two colleagues into circling Peter, ready to catch him if he falls.

  ‘What did you do?’ she says, with a panicked glance over her shoulder in Dove’s direction. He tries to answer. But his tongue is thick and heavy. He can do nothing but look at the blank expressions of the other residents and wonder what it is they see.

  ‘Just relax,’ the first nurse says, ‘just relax and everything is going to be OK, Zachariah.’

  ‘That’s not his name,’ Dove says, clinging tight to the arm of a cracked leather sofa.

  ‘What?’ the second nurse asks.

  ‘His name is Peter Manyweathers.’

  ‘And who the hell are you?’

  ‘My name is Dove Gale. I’m his son.’

  So it is with this that Dove meets his second father; the only one he has left.

  Maud’s reaction to Len’s death was one of astonishing pragmatism. All those things he used to do. Tending the garden. Feeding the animals. Painting the sills. These were her pastimes now. ‘He is working through me,’ is what she always said. ‘It’s not me that has to get out of bed in the morning. It’s always me and him.’

  Whereas, despite her grief, her response was wholly constructive, Dove’s was entirely the opposite. The anger he’d begun to tame before Len fell ill was renewed and potent.

  He was expelled from secondary school when his headmistress called the police saying he’d threatened another kid in art class with a pair of scissors. Even immediately after the incident he had no recollection of what took place. Maybe he threatened him. Maybe the kid deserved it. Maybe he did what many had before: mocked Dove’s name, or the colour of his skin, or the fact that he was adopted, or even Len’s death. All these things were of value in the cruel currency of the playground. What surprised him least was his own violence. It had always lurked. Len’s death just gave it an outlet.

  They lived far enough away from any other school that if he was to remain in public education they’d have to move house. Maud didn’t consider that an option. These walls were Len’s arms around her. So after Dove’s expulsion, she homeschooled him instead, and he found a certain relief in knowing he wouldn’t have to try to make friends any more.

  As a young woman Maud had worked as an accountant for a local newspaper, and she retained a deft understanding of basic mathematics. Her efforts to instil the same in Dove were largely wasted. When he looked at numbers on a page the ink moved, jiggled and webbed together into a frustrating, indecipherable mess. Most lessons ended badly and at a time dictated by his temper. But Maud persevered, developing methods Dove could use to stifle his frustrations before they became outbursts of rage. Closing his eyes. Breathing deeply. Reminding himself that he wouldn’t be abandoned again. Saying it, over and over. Eventually it yielded fine and unlikely results. He achieved good enough grades to attend a college a fifteen-mile bus journey across the moors that to him felt like long-haul travel.

  Once there he largely kept himself to himself. That’s not to say he was lonely – he had a few casual acquaintances that he purposely kept at arm’s length. But the time spent alone was put to good use revising in the library. Acing his exams left him with a shortlist of university offers he could afford to take only because of the small sum of money that remained when selling the house became an unfortunate necessity. He protested, but Maud said moving into an assisted living facility had come to make sense. Besides, it wasn’t like an old folks’ home. She’d have her own kitchen, a small garden and, more importantly, her independence. And, crucially, it would be worth it for Dove’s sake. She said she identified his great potential as a journalist, or writer of some kind. She’d known talented writers herself from working on the newspaper, some of whom had subsequently written novels or collections of essays. Many had been her friends for long periods. What she identified in all of them was a quality she believed she also saw in Dove – an innate instinct for empathy married with the need to remain in some way apart from their subject (which was always people) in order to survive. To lock themselves out while plugging themselves in.

  Maud stood at the rim of the vegetable garden. There were still two weeks before Dove was due to leave for university in London. A pleasant spring had given way to a warm summer and now autumn was approaching, but the carrots, cabbages and turnips she planted had all failed to grow. Her only plausible explanation was some strange disease she couldn’t name causing the taproots to decay before they’d properly developed. The few vegetables she’d found were small and misshapen, abandoned attempts at living things, never fully formed from the outset.

  Dove held a basket that so far contained little beyond soil and leaves. Maud edged her walking frame up the path towards the back door and they went inside. He sat her down in her favourite armchair and arranged on the trestle table beside her the familiar array of objects that had come to define her widowhood. A delicate silver cross on a chain (they never talked about it, but Dove caught her praying once or twice), a dog-eared deck of cards for solitaire, and Len’s pipe, which hadn’t been cleaned and to this day retained the faint aroma of tobacco that used to announce his entry to a room. Then Dove returned from the kitchen with a plate of cheese sandwiches on springy white bread, and a pickle so tart it stung their nostrils.

  He looked down at the half-eaten crusts in his hands.

  ‘I can see you fretting,’ Maud said, setting a crumb-covered plate down beside her. ‘You only don’t eat when you’re fretting.’ This was a marked point of difference between Dove and Len that he’d always struggled to comprehend. Len had not indulged in more than a second of introspection in his entire life.

  ‘I’m not fretting,’ Dove said. This was a lie. The prospect of leaving her alone had been chewing him up for months. Wouldn’t he be consigning her to the fate he feared most?

  ‘Go, for goodness’ sake. I want you to. Len wanted you to. Go to university. You think I’m going to fall over and die the minute you walk out of the door?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then go. Otherwise all that teaching I gave you is a waste.’

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. Maud shivered, coiled a blanket tight around her thighs.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ve got my new room to decorate and all those other widows to chat to. And when you come back to visit, which had better be all the time, I’ll have a whole lot of sandwiches to prepare.’ She smiled, toothily, theatrically. It was a running joke they shared, to answer the other’s question without really giving an answer at all. But Dove wasn’t in the mood for joking, and she sensed as much, sipping loudly on her tea. ‘Come on, Dove,’ she said. ‘You know I’ll be fine. You know you have to go.’

  He sighed. She was right, of course. He had to go. But w
ithout Maud he’d have no one. He’d be where he was at the start. And this is what made the fear unfold in his gut. The fear that would inevitably turn to anger, if he didn’t stay in control, as she’d taught him.

  The fortnight they had together after that passed quickly. Soon they were standing in the doorway of the house, the hot pall of smoke in the air from a bonfire somewhere on the hill behind which he’d soon disappear. It was almost time to go. Maud threw her arms around him. Her flesh pressed against his neck. The looseness of her aged skin, slack muscles, creaking joints. The tightness with which she held him, the ache it must have struck through her bones. All these things in fragments; memories much easier to carry as shattered pieces of a whole.

  ‘You have your smart shoes, for lectures?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course. I shined them.’ He didn’t have the heart to tell her he wouldn’t need smart shoes for lectures, but the longer they stood there with her asking him questions, the longer they would be together.

  ‘And your winter coat?’

  ‘I packed it.’

  ‘The big one? With the fleece-lined hood? I know they say it’s warmer down south but that’s nonsense if you ask me. Len and I took a young boy we fostered down to London once because he was obsessed with the soldiers that stand outside Buckingham Palace. You know, the ones with the big black hats and red tunics. Anyway, it was cold enough to freeze the you-know-whats off a brass monkey. I swear the Thames iced over. So . . .’ She suddenly wilted, on the verge of tears, and made the sign of the cross; her crooked, swollen knuckles.

  ‘I promise I packed the big coat. With the fleece-lined hood.’

  A chill was blowing under the door, the occasional leaf skittering beneath it.

  ‘I can fix that draught for you,’ Dove said.

  ‘Nonsense. There is nothing here I can’t do myself.’