"Where is your father?"
"Dunno. Mum said he works on an oil rig."
"You met him?"
"Not yet."
We sat up talking, then fell asleep where we were. His mother came late the next morning. I was turning sausages in the pan. The doorbell rang. She had cans of lager in a white plastic bag and looked tired.
"Here you go," she said, handing over the bag. "Just to say thanks."
The ground was black with rain. Danny"s slippers squeaked on the doorstep. The house was quiet again.
I went upstairs.
Sat in my bedroom.
Drew the curtains.
Lay down with my eyes open.
Quite soon, I saw Danny dragged from his bed.
The officers kept order.
Screams outside, then gunfire. Neighbors peek into the street through lace curtains. Danny is separated from his mother. It"s not in black and white like films, but in color like real life.
Different people are pulling his arms. His slipper comes off, then his mother is shot in front of him. Her head opens. Something white. Her hair is clumped. Danny"s small fists closing and opening.
It"s how we might have met. It"s the job I could have been given. Something I could have been ordered to do but wasn"t. I did other things. I wore the uniform. I marched. Saluted the Fuhrer. Loaded my weapon. Fired my weapon. And there was always blood, always somebody"s blood.
I vomited on the carpet. A thick paste. I fingered my coa.r.s.e gray hair and the bare, misshapen area where nothing grows.
I stood in a cold shower. Lost feeling.
Those days, I often punished myself, but nothing changed.
Downstairs, I stared at the almost empty teacups on the counter. Still warm. I conjured his slippers. His small feet. Racing-car pajamas. His gentle eyes asking, Where is your head? There was something to him, like the boy in Paris who brought cakes to the park for me and the other homeless ones.
Now another child.
No: Another small G.o.d. And Mr. Hugo is the child over there, on the sofa, with tea, and someone to sit with in silence, night pa.s.sing.
I had been woken from my dream by someone else"s.
II.
DANNY USUALLY CAME after school. His mother didn"t mind because she worked late. I made something for him to eat. Danny"s favorite was fish fingers, beans, and American-style french fries. He took the french fries from the freezer, then arranged them on an oven tray. The fish fingers had to be cooked slowly or were cold in the middle. Danny watched television, laughing from time to time. I listened through the serving hatch and felt light, felt unafraid.
Then we ate together. A man and boy eating: I felt echoes from long ago. The knife and fork were too big for Danny. I thought of the knife. Remembered the knife. My father kept it on the mantelpiece. I should have buried it. Then Danny interrupts. Always more ketchup, Mr. Hugo, always more brown sauce. He puts vinegar on his french fries, then on mine. I don"t like vinegar, but it"s too late and would just hurt his feelings. Danny always saved one fish finger for last. I never knew why.
I cleared up after he left. Sometimes I left the dinner plates until next morning. Beans hardened against the ceramic were almost impossible to remove, but felt light, felt unafraid.
One afternoon, Danny brought new pencils, and so before children"s programs, we made drawings.
"Your clouds are good. It"s like you stole them from the sky."
Silence.
Strokes on paper like sighing.
"That"s impossible," he said.
"What is?"
"To steal clouds."
"I know, I just meant it"s a nice drawing."
"I draw a lot in school. I wish we just drawed all day but we don"t."
"What else do you do?"
"Dunno," he said.
"You don"t know?"
"Stuff that"s too hard."
"Like what?"
"Like reading. I"m just not good."
I thought for a moment. "Many things are hard, Danny. Life comes at you in pieces sometimes too big to avoid."
He seemed hurt.
Dinner was boil-in-the-bag fish. Peas. Bread and b.u.t.ter.
I watched him push peas off the plate. He said he didn"t like fish when I knew he did. I think I understood then what was going on.
His mother hadn"t come by the time Carry on Laughing had finished. The ten o"clock news started. We listened to Big Ben and the headlines. Danny said everything in the world was going wrong.
Then his mother called. She said the old person she looked after was still bad.
I asked Danny if we might draw a little more. His eyes were fixed on the television.
"Mum will be here soon," he said.
"Come, Danny, let"s draw, because there"s something I can"t figure out."
"What"s that?"
"Just lines."
"Lines?" he asked. "The ones you draw?"
I nodded yes.
"Lines are easy," he said. "Want me to teach you how to do them?"
By midnight, when his mother rang the bell, we had pages and pages of lines in felt-tip pen.
"They"re not as straight as I wanted," Danny said. "But you get the idea."
"They"re straight enough for what I am doing."
"What are you doing that needs not-straight lines?"
"A book."
"What"s it called?"
"The book of lines."
A week later we worked on curved lines. Then after that we played games with sounds, and gave each shape its own voice. We marveled at how the shapes can tell you that someone is hungry, cold, afraid, bored, or disappointed.
I tried to convey to the boy how people"s lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
Danny listened to all.
Weeks pa.s.sed until, tying lines into shapes with his pencil, Danny recognized them from school and was suddenly reluctant to go on.
I"m not proud to admit that I bribed him with bars of chocolate, but we were so close by then-he knew the voice of each letter, and so it was just a matter of confidence, which would come with practice.
Two months later, a breakthrough over bedtime drinks.
After ten minutes of staring at a container of chocolate powder, the word instant burst through Danny"s small lips.
He ran around the house screaming.
Not long after that, his mother gave me permission to take him to the library, where Danny taught Mr. Hugo about dinosaurs, comets, gold miners, and steam.
When Danny turned twelve, his mother fell in love with a Scottish man, and they moved to Glasgow. He was doing well in school by then, and had a special friend called Helen. She had red hair and a deep voice. Her father worked in a bank. A very important man, Danny said. They came around after school. A polite boy, Danny was-always made sure she had enough to drink, enough to eat, and somewhere to rest her feet when they watched television. He must have explained early on that Mr. Hugo"s head might shock, because when we met, Helen"s first words were: "Isn"t it nice how people are all different?"
She didn"t ask what happened, and I"m glad she didn"t because I can"t remember everything. I know I woke up in a French hospital in a body I didn"t recognize. I know some of the things I had done because there were faces that haunted me. And I know that the missing part of my skull was in Paris, splintered into pieces too small to find.
After Danny and his mother moved away, life was quiet again.
Television, weather, tomatoes, nightmares . . . watching all through the curtains.
Then. One morning, a month into the silence, I woke in the early hours. Winter, but I went outside and stood on the back patio.
The air was frigid. I moved my arms in the silvery outline of dawn.
Could smell rain coming.
A stick of Danny"s chalk glowed from a crack in between the paving.
I got down on my hands and knees and drew straight lines on the stones with the chalk. Then I drew curved lines and made letters. Then I bunched letters into words and made sentences. Soon the patio was covered: . . . Swing of Danny"s legs from park benches. Frying chips and putting ketchup on them. Running up and down the stairs. Mother"s shoes on doorstep moment before bell. Socks coming off. Spoon stirring tea. Drying forks and putting them in the drawer. An anchor of hair on his forehead. Hot chocolate. Falling asleep in chairs. Danny"s face at the window. The door handle turning itself. Squeaking slippers on the step. Kettle rising gently to a boil.
Rain fell but I kept going.
Soon the drops were falling faster than my hand could write, but I went on, I continued until there was nothing to see, nothing to read, nothing but the single moment of pressure with nothing before and nothing after.
This was Danny"s gift.
SeBASTIEN.
SAINT-PIERRE, FRANCE,.
1968.
I.
SeBASTIEN LOOKS OUT the cla.s.sroom window, but doesn"t see pa.s.sing cars, or brown leaves like claws on the sidewalk attached to nothing. He can reach for things without touching them. Thinking and desire are one.
After school, he will take Hayley to see the iron skeleton he found in the woods. He wants to find a corner of the playground and hug her all lunchtime-hug her so tightly that she becomes a part of him. Instead, later on, she will trail him through the woods to the skeleton behind the farm. There she will love him the way he has seen in films, especially the ones he watches with Grandma on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when the room flickers and the music is heavy. The actors" faces are soft and gray. It begins with a single dance. And then a telephone call.
Unwashed sheets hang in the sky. They smell of salt from the sea. It"s been raining since early morning, but will turn to snow when the bell rings.
Sebastien awoke to rain on the window like a thousand eyes. The wind was gusting. Birds blown off course. Teddies blown out of bed. They all have names and behave differently. He likes to hold one at night. It gets him through.
The lights in the cla.s.sroom are always bright and warm. The cla.s.s mice, Tik and Tok, are sleeping. Their fur is tight. Sebastien"s hair sticks up in the morning. Only water keeps it down.
He likes to draw for ten minutes before school. Sometimes when he sharpens his coloring pencils, the lead breaks off and he"s back where he started. His mother shouts at him to get dressed, but he"s looking at the hollow socket. He can feel what is not there.
His drawing is unfinished.
The outline of another world.