Set in Stone Page 11

  Jon nodded. ‘Good choice,’ he said. ‘Figurative scenes of huntin’, shootin’ ’n’ fishin’ just wouldn’t cut it these days, would they?’ And he smiled up at her, his eyes shining.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I mean no, they wouldn’t. That’s what I feel, too.’

  He nodded. ‘Are these the scrolls?’ He pointed to the silk hangings around the studio, each of them suspended from the ceiling on fine steel wire.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m ready to do the final touches, all the tiny brushstokes. They’ve taken me months and I’m almost sad to be finished. I’ve grown very fond of them.’ And she smiled at him, wanting to make up for any earlier stiffness on her part.

  ‘I can see why,’ he said, looking up intently. ‘They are stunning. So much work.’

  Just then, there was a bellow from the TV room. ‘Jon – c’mere and see this!’

  He glanced at Lynda. But this time, there was no complicity, no knowingness in his expression. Perhaps she had imagined it earlier. ‘Gotta go,’ he said softly.

  She watched him leave the studio. There was something odd about him tonight; something she couldn’t put her finger on. Then she heard the gusts of laughter from down the hall and shook her head at herself.

  Worrying again. Over nothing.

  Danny is fascinated by the surface of things.

  Glass. Water. The sheen of light on a lake. It’s what still draws him to photographs: what drew him in the first place. Even as a child, he loved the shine on his dad’s black-and-white family photos; the shine that glides over the stories they told. And even more, the stories they didn’t tell.

  As Danny grows older, these untold stories become more and more important. They keep on rising to the surface, breaking through the glossy coating that has kept them captive for all those years. A while back, no more than a year or so, Danny spent long evenings poring over the shoebox of photographs he had taken – stolen, really – from his mother’s airing cupboard. It had happened on the last occasion he’d set foot in his family home. Over a quarter of a century ago.

  He goes back, by appointment. He remembers how grudgingly Robert lets him in. ‘Ten minutes,’ his brother says. ‘That’s all you have. Don’t make me come and get you.’ He waits at the bottom of the stairs until Danny opens the door to his own bedroom.

  Danny has decided to make plenty of noise, opening and closing wardrobe doors, dragging a chair to stand on, slamming boxes onto the floor. After a few minutes, he stamps his way across the landing to the bathroom. On the way back to the bedroom, a quick glance over the banisters shows that Robert has retreated from the hallway.

  Quickly, Danny partly opens the door of the airing cupboard. He knows just when to stop to avoid it creaking. He used to hide his dope in there, years back. Emma had caught him, once.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Her eyes had been wide.

  ‘Ssshh,’ Danny had said, his fingers to his lips, warning her. ‘It’s some of my special cigarettes. I don’t want Robbie to find them. He’ll smoke them on me like he did before.’ He liked having Emma on his side. And she didn’t know which of his stories were made up and which weren’t.

  ‘Can I try one?’ Her nine-year-old face had been full of mischief.

  She’d always made him laugh. ‘Maybe, one day. But you have to keep the secret, okay?’

  She’d nodded. ‘Okay. But promise I can try one?’

  He’d grinned. ‘I promise. But you’ll have to be a bit older. Mum would kill me.’

  ‘I won’t tell, you know that!’ Emma had been indignant. ‘I never tell. I’m good at secrets.’

  ‘I know you are,’ he’d said. ‘That’s why I’m giving you this one.’

  And in the process of hiding his dope, he discovered the box of photographs. And the other one – a smaller, sturdier box, hidden right at the back, under the bath sheets.

  After things fall apart, those pictures haunt Danny, particularly the ones with Emma. He wants them. He can’t explain why he wants them so much. Partly, he knows it’s because they’d be precious to the others, and he isn’t letting them get their hands on them. Why is he the only one to get punished? Partly, too, he feels that if the pictures are his, if he has control of them, then he might be able to change the ending.

  He lifts the box very carefully now off the top shelf. He freezes for a moment, thinking he hears Robert’s step in the hallway. Nothing. He breathes again. He knows that this box is a fragile thing, donkeys’ years old. The cardboard will need to be folded in on itself, flattened, in order to contain the photos safely.

  He flips the lid of the second box now, and pulls out the contents, three small packets. He replaces the empty box under the bath sheets, pushing them well back towards the wall of the cupboard. The envelopes he stuffs into the waistband of his underpants. He’s worn his baggiest jumper for the purposes of concealment. Then, soundlessly, he moves back into his bedroom and continues his rummaging and his packing.

  He comes downstairs, just a bit over his allotted ten minutes. He has his rucksack on his back, filled to bursting-point. He hefts a black plastic bag over his left shoulder, shoving the rucksack to one side so that he can balance both across his broad back. The sack is filled with clothes and shoes and personal bits and pieces, the flattened box of photographs safely at the bottom. He knows Robert will not look. He is much too much of a gentleman for that.

  As soon as he hears Danny’s foot on the stairs, Robert appears in the hallway. They look at each other. Robert’s face is grey, he notices, with a pronounced five o’clock shadow.

  Danny spreads his hands, a gesture of innocence, of resignation. ‘Want to search me?’ he asks softly.

  Robert’s face flushes. Danny sees his fists clench, the way they used to when Robert lost a fight back when they were kids. Or when Danny had succeeded in goading him to lose his temper. Pansy, he used to call him, and watched his brother’s rage ignite.

  ‘Just go, Danny,’ he says, tiredly. ‘Go now.’

  Danny, there and then, decides to try one more time, just for the hell of it. He settles his feet more firmly, stepping a bit wider, squaring up to his brother. ‘I’d like to see Mum before I go.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ Robert holds up one hand, a cartoon Mr Plod. ‘I’ve already told you.’

  Danny settles his rucksack more comfortably across his shoulders. ‘Who gives you the right?’ he says. But Robert does not respond. Danny waits, but this seems to be some sort of new tactic on his brother’s part. The Silent Treatment. Danny tries again. ‘So,’ he says, ‘I’m being cast out into the exterior darkness. Just like that.’

  Robert looks at him. Shock registers, yellowly, across his features. Danny is interested to see that. He’d never known before now that shock had a colour.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Robert says. He shakes his head in that maddening, superior way he has. ‘I really can’t believe you. Have you still got no idea what you’ve done?’ He stares at Danny. Then something seems to occur to him, and he changes tack. He becomes all brisk, almost businesslike. ‘Nobody’s casting you anywhere,’ he says. ‘You’ve done this all by yourself. As usual. And you’ve torn this family apart.’

  His tone is flat, dismissive, without emphasis. He might almost have said ‘You forgot to close the door again.’ Danny wonders why Robert does that: he speaks of important things as though they are of no significance at all, as though Danny is of no significance at all. He feels as though Robert has just waved him away, as though he is a fly that keeps circling, pestering others.

  Danny has his reply ready. He has been waiting for this opportunity to deliver it. He opens his mouth to speak but his brother’s response surprises him. He has to admit that.

  Robert shakes his head and smiles a slow smile. ‘No more talking, Danny. No more listening to you convincing me that one and one makes five. I’m not falling for poor vulnerable Danny, Danny who always means well. Not any more. Now leave.’ He opens the front door. ‘Go,’ he s
ays. ‘And don’t come back.’

  Danny feels caught off-guard. That has never happened before.

  Robert is looking past Danny, as though there is already something compelling over his shoulder, something that Danny keeps getting in the way of. His new future, perhaps. One without Emma and now, one without him.

  Danny can feel the pulsebeat beginning to gather in his ears. ‘You’re all sorted, then,’ he says softly. ‘Got the whole lot of it to yourself now, haven’t you? And a new girlfriend, an’ all.’ He gestures towards the house and garden, a sweep of his arm encompassing all that he sees, and more. ‘Maybe I did you a favour.’

  Perhaps it’s turning his head that does it; perhaps it’s because his vision is already clouding over with rage, pinpoints of black and white dancing madly. Whatever it is, he doesn’t see it coming. Robert’s fist catches him just under the right eye, and pain explodes in great scarlet sunbursts, no matter what way he looks. He staggers, trying to right himself, to find his balance somewhere between the pull of the black plastic bag, the rucksack, gravity. He falls, sprawled on the driveway, arms and legs every which way. He can feel his hands already smarting, bits of the tarmac lodged in the soft flesh just below the thumb. Instinctively, he tries to protect the packets that are threatening to unleash themselves from the waistband of his underpants.

  He looks up. Robert is standing over him. His face is contorted. Not with rage, Danny is surprised to see, but with something else. Something that has rage within it, but more besides. Tears roll freely down his brother’s face, a face that is now flushed with high spots of colour on each cheek.

  ‘Don’t you ever darken this door again,’ he says, ‘or I swear to Christ I’ll kill you. I mean it.’

  Danny has scrambled to his feet by then. ‘Fuck you,’ he says evenly, and walks away. He makes it to the bus stop in less than five minutes. A good, steady pace. When the bus comes, he swings himself aboard and dumps his stuff in the luggage section. He begins to feel in his pockets, to see if his John Player Blue and his lighter are still there. He hopes he hasn’t left them behind him, scattered in the flowerbed, or something.

  As he shifts on the seat, a girl opposite turns to look at him. He catches her eye and she looks away, quickly, a pink flush beginning just along the fine line of her jaw. Danny smiles to himself. The three packets are still there, still safely hidden – and a girl has just half-smiled at him. A gorgeous, sexy girl. They are the only two on the bus – at least downstairs. He moves towards her, pulling his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. He bends his head to the level of her ear. She doesn’t even turn round, although he knows she knows he’s there. Her heightened colour tells him that.

  ‘I get off after two more stops. That’s where I live. I’d love to buy you a drink.’ He watches as her shoulders stiffen. Now for the best part. He allows his voice to falter, just a little. ‘I mean no disrespect. I think you’re beautiful. I won’t disturb you again.’ He makes to move back towards his seat, but hesitates, just before he goes. He allows his voice to drop even further. ‘If you’ll join me, I’d consider it an honour. My name is Danny Graham.’

  For the next couple of hundred yards, he watches her. He can see the indecision written all over her bent head, her shoulders. He knows she’s dying to look back at him, but she won’t let herself. He’s in with a chance, here. He can feel it.

  He’d kill for a smoke, though. Must have dropped the cigarettes when Robert hit him. He pats the three envelopes for reassurance, their bulky presence making him happy all over again. Five hundred quid in each, part of Mum’s secret stash. She was always hiding money, always. Rainy days loomed large in her philosophy.

  Well, it’s pouring now, as far as he’s concerned. And these will see him home and dry. Not a bad day’s work, all in all. He pats his cheek where Robert has hit him – a punch that carried surprising weight for Pansy. It feels as though it will grow into a right shiner.

  Fuck him, fuck them all. He doesn’t need them.

  The bus pulls into his stop. The girl makes no move. She keeps her head bent, her hair falling like a dark curtain over her cheek. Danny hoists his stuff onto his shoulders and eases himself off the platform onto the waiting kerb. His leg still hurts since the accident. His foot is badly swollen where they said some small bones were chipped. Not that anybody gives a shit about that. And his face hurts, too. He is reminded of just how much as the pain seems to jolt up from the pavement and lodge somewhere around his eye. For a moment, pain is all he can think about. As the bus pulls away, something tugs at his sleeve.

  He turns, already having forgotten her. She is smiling up at him.

  ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I’m Julie, and I’ve never done anything like this before.’ Her smile is tentative, but her eyes are like a blue flame. He knows desire when he sees it.

  He takes both her hands in his. ‘Julie,’ he says, savouring her name, ‘I’m so glad you decided to join me.’ He gestures across the green. ‘I live just over there. Let me dump my stuff in the house and we’ll go and have a drink.’ He pauses, as if it has only just occurred to him. ‘But, please, why don’t you wait for me in Reilly’s, in the lounge.’ He points to the pub on the corner. A dump. Even from this distance. ‘There’s no need for you to come to the house.’ And he shifts the rucksack, making sure to stumble a little under the weight of the black sack.

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Let me help you with some of that. It’ll only take a minute. Besides, I don’t like sitting in pubs on my own.’ And she smiles at him.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure?’

  She nods.

  ‘Okay, then. Let’s go.’ He leads the way across the green. The flat is reasonably clean, the bed made, and there is at least one bottle of plonk in the cupboard in the kitchenette.

  They climb the stairs to his place, pain lighting up his face with every step he takes. She looks younger in the bright light of the flat, but he doesn’t care. They drop the bags on the floor in the tiny living room and she comes to him easily enough.

  He calls a taxi for her afterwards, at her insistence. She won’t stay the night. Seems edgy, anxious to be gone. That’s fine by him.

  When Julie leaves, Danny upends the plastic sack onto the bed. He holds onto the two bottom corners and shakes the stuff out, most of it landing where he aims it, some of it slithering across the floor. He rummages for cigarettes in the bedside table, lights one and sits cross-legged on the rug. He pulls the box of photographs towards him and scatters the contents all around him. He pushes them back and forth, waiting for the ones he wants to come to the surface. He watched someone read Tarot cards once. He likes to think that this reading of photographs is kind of the same thing. It’s just another way of seeing the future in the past.

  Now Danny’s eyes alight on one particular photograph, one that has made its way to the top of the black-and-white landslide on the floor. He sees the old rambling house, his family home, bathed in the sunshine of early childhood summers. Were all those summers sunny ones? That’s how they seem now, although he is sure some sort of meteorology anorak would tell him different.

  The tartan blanket is on the front grass – what his mother grandly likes to call the lawn – in the same way that she says ‘lounge’ for other people’s ‘sitting room’ and ‘lavatory’ instead of ‘toilet’. He sees the three of them, Robbie, Danny and little Emma, having a picnic. Emma likes to pour, the pink teapot full of MiWadi orange, a teddy bear emblazoned on its potbellied surface. Other, smaller teddies decorate the tiny plastic teacups and plates that occupy all of Emma’s attention. A drink of orange and a plate of biscuits: all the delights of a summer afternoon. Sometimes, ice cream – but that tends to come in fat wafers, the ice cream melting, sometimes running in a thin white river down your arm.

  His mother emerges from the front door, smiling, a damp cloth in her hands to wipe their hands and faces. Danny’s most of all: he always manages to drop everything on his clothes – ice cream, orange drink, biscuit cr
umbs – and that always makes her crease her forehead crossly, two little lines springing up in the space between her eyebrows . . .

  But wait – there’s something wrong with this image. When Danny looks at the familiar photo again, he is not there. For a moment, he feels confused. He knows that he was there, but in the photograph, he is missing. And yet he can remember the day clearly. Robbie and Emma are on the blanket and there are three doll-sized cups, three plates, a scattering of biscuits, all captured, frozen by the glossy weight of photographic paper. He realizes he must have been standing on the edge of this scene, a scene recorded by his father, like all of the others, proud of his new Leica. Danny is outside the frame, on the edge of the happy family action.

  He starts to rummage again now, looking for other stories, other days. He comes across Robbie’s First Holy Communion, his Confirmation, his first two-wheeler. The firstborn, the favoured one, the one-who-could-do-no-wrong son. And there are others, too. Robbie’s first day at secondary school. Robbie in the first eleven. Robbie in the local choir, for Christ’s sake. And, by extension, these photographs tell Danny’s story, too, by the act of omission. Oh, sure, the school photographs are all there. The ones that got taken by other people. But he’s missing from too many of the family ones, as though he’d been cut adrift long ago. All the important ones are of somebody else.

  Sins of omission . . . he remembers Mr Lennon at school, his voice booming as he warmed to his theme. The not doing of something can be equally as sinful as the doing. Even worse, thinking about doing something bad – even if you don’t end up doing it – is as bad, as sinful as if you already have.

  Then why not go ahead and do it anyway, and enjoy yourself, sniggers Blue O’Dwyer, hiding his mouth behind his hand. But he isn’t quick enough. Old Lennon catches him, makes him repeat what he thinks he has heard. Blue doesn’t have the wit to deceive. There is no way Loony Lennon can have heard what he’s said, not at that distance. All he’s seen is the tilted head, the hand to the mouth: all he has is the conviction that words have been spoken. Blue ends up getting three of the best for that. Never could keep his mouth shut.