Her kisses, when he leaves, always have a force to them, impelled by a sense that this could be the last time.
‘That would have been on the news.’
‘The CIA might have been keeping it quiet.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. They might have imposed a security blanket.’
‘I think the word you’re after is blackout.’
‘Oh, yeah. But it’s quarter to six in the morning. I can confuse blanket and blackout. Because I’d like both.’
‘How’s Jamie?’
He hears her rearranging the pillows.
‘He’s OK. He was happy enough after school yesterday. Only got upset at bedtime that you weren’t here. Did you read his note?
‘Note?’
‘His picture. I put it in your suitcase.’
He gets up off the bed, still holding the phone. ‘What, as a surprise?’
A soft beat, her patience diffusing. ‘No, I told you it was in there, yesterday.’
‘Oh sorry, I –’
‘It’s OK. You were in one of your nervous flaps when you were leaving. I knew you weren’t really listening.’
‘Hold on, I’ll go and have a look.’
‘It’s in the zip-up pocket. In the top bit.’
He goes over to the suitcase. It is there, a white envelope with the word ‘DAD’ written on it, in Jamie’s painfully immature handwriting. Inside is a piece of asymmetrically folded A4 paper, on one half of which Jamie has drawn a chess set. The figures are not arranged on the board, but around it. They are not rendered exactly, as they would be if Jamie was an extraordinary Asperger’s child, but randomly: it is difficult to make out which are pawns, and which are major pieces. They look like chess figures in the wind.
Jamie has not written anything to go with his drawing, but on the facing half, in Stella’s looping hand, it says: ‘Have a good trip, even though it’s for a sad thing. I love you. J xxx.’ Harvey holds the note in his hand, and feels his heart crack with love.
He comes back to the phone. Before he speaks, having heard him pick the receiver up, she says:
‘That’s exactly what he told me to write.’
‘It’s really nice. Did you suggest the chess thing?’
He says this knowing that both of them would rather their son had chosen the subject himself, thereby indicating that he has, of his own volition, noticed something about his father’s interests.
‘I may have done,’ she says.
She yawns. He sees their bedroom, dark and warm: Stella makes everywhere cosy. They live in Kent, in a cottage on the North Downs, which would be idyllic were it not for the proximity of the M2. Wooed by the oldness, the Englishness, of the place, Harvey had succumbed easily to the previous owner’s trick of enclosing the front garden with a series of tall hedges, obscuring the surrounding countryside. On a final visit before completion, while visiting the upstairs toilet, he had noticed a somewhat busy road in the middle distance, but, infatuated with the place, and too frightened to disturb at this late stage the serious business of property transaction, had put it out of his mind. Now he spends much time in the garden, trying to gauge exactly how loud that muffled roar is, trying to work out how he couldn’t have heard it before, and trying to think himself into Stella’s method of imagining it’s the sound of the sea.
‘I still think you should go back to sleep.’
‘I said: I’m awake now. Look, don’t worry about me. Did you sleep on the plane?’
‘No. You know I can never sleep on a plane.’
‘You should have flown business …’
‘That’s what Freda said …’ A momentary silence follows this: Harvey assumes she has taken the comparison with his father’s wife as an implicit rebuke, which he had not meant, at least consciously. There is an awkward pause, such as can happen even between couples who have been together for fourteen years, and for whom blips of silence are not generally registered. He waits, wondering if it might be possible over the phone, in another country, to hear the sound of the M2.
‘Well, anyway, darling …’ says Harvey, eventually, feeling the spasticity of words said to break such silences, ‘… I’ll call you later.’
‘OK. I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
It is the truth, however fast it makes his heart dip.
* * *
My daddy seemed a bit better today. The nurses sat him up in bed, and they took off that see-through mask he usually has to wear over his mouth and nose. He didn’t have it on for ages (later on Mommy told me it was over five minutes!). He still didn’t say anything – the nurse had to put the tube back into his neck while he had the mask off, so that probably didn’t help – but Mommy told me to come over and hold his hand. It made me feel a bit funny, because I haven’t held Daddy’s hand before for so long. After a while I started to notice some of the weird things about it: how he’s got loads of these big brown patches (and some black spots) on the top side and how the bones seemed to be poking through the skin, so that it was a bit like holding a skeleton’s hand. The tops of his fingers (around the nails) look sort of yellow, like he’s bruised them or something, and his nails are really long too – I remember Mommy telling me that Daddy’s nails grow really quickly, and he always forgets to cut them – especially the thumb ones, which were so long they were kind of gross. You might think that nails wouldn’t grow when you’re asleep all the time, but they do.
Sometimes this happens, that Daddy’s skin and stuff makes me feel weird. I’ve noticed before that his skin isn’t like mine – obviously! – or Jada’s, or even Mommy’s, but I guess I’ve kind of gotten used to it. I didn’t really notice it at all until Jada said to me that time that thing about how my daddy’s skin looked like it had lots of little holes in it. I said shut up, stupid, like I always do when she says something like that, something just meant to be nasty, but afterwards I couldn’t help looking and it made it hard to forget because I could see what she meant, sort of. His skin looks more like a net than skin; it kind of looks like bits of skin knitted together around all these tiny holes, like wool looks like close up.
His skin looks even more like wool now, because he’s got all these little white hairs coming out of it. Mommy told me it’s difficult for Daddy to shave now – well, it’s impossible for him to shave, but it’s not even easy for anyone else to do it! They’re so worried about cutting him. But he has lots of little white hairs coming out of the tops of his hands, too, even on his fingers, and he never shaved those even when he wasn’t in hospital. I suppose you would need a special kind of tiny shaver to do them, and I don’t know if you can even get them in any store. I got this really funny idea in my head, that I wanted to turn his hand around, and play round and round the garden with it, even though I haven’t played that for years, not since I was a really tiny baby – but still, when I thought about it, I remembered how I used to like it so much, the tickly feeling so nice, as the grown-up’s finger goes round and round, watching it and feeling it at the same time, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the bigger tickle up the arm. I didn’t do it with Daddy’s hand – I mean, I knew it’d be a stupid thing to do – and, besides, I don’t know if he can actually feel a tickle when he’s so ill and dying and everything.
After Mommy told me to hold Daddy’s hand, her cellphone rang, and she was on it for quite a while (you aren’t really meant to have your cellphone on in the hospital, but I think it’s OK for Mommy to keep hers on because Daddy’s so famous). I held his hand and tried not to think about how weird the skin on it was: I tried to look at his face instead, but that’s even weirder really, because Daddy’s cheeks