The Immaculate (29 page)

As he stood there another idea jolted him, as if he hadn't been in the position to consider it until now: when he got back to London, when he saw Gail, the first thing he would do would be to ask her to marry him.

He laughed out loud at the sheer wonder of the idea and punched the air with both hands. “Yes!” he shouted.
“Yes!”
His voice bounced away over the darkening landscape, conveying his glee to the world.

He carried his books into the house and arranged them lovingly on his bookcase. When he had done, he ran his hands over the smooth spines, his fingers jolting over the ridges between them. This was a ritual he could have performed only by himself. Gail loved books too, but even she would have regarded his actions as somewhat fetishistic. Jack did not know if he could have conveyed how much having all these books back on this bookcase meant to him. It had a significance beyond words. Even the arrangement of the brightly coloured spines seemed to form a pattern that was almost mystical.

He felt eager as he dialed Gail's number, anxious to share his good mood. Her phone rang four times . . . five. Jack had resigned himself to the fact that she was not there, was waiting for her answering machine to cut in, or for the phone to go on ringing as it had before, when there was a click and she said, “Hello?”

“Hi, Gail, it's me!” he cried gleefully into the receiver.

“Jack, hi!” Then abruptly her voice adopted a note of concern. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, course. Why do you ask?”

“Well, with everything that's been happening to you . . .”

“Oh, that.” He waved a hand in the air, as though batting away a fly. “No, that's all under control now.”

“Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“You're not just saying that to make me feel better? I've been worried about you, Jack.”

He thought of Patty Bates again. Should he tell her about this afternoon? Deciding against it, he said, “No, I'm fine, Gail, really. In fact, I'm better than fine. I'm happy. Coming back here has been really good for me, like you said it would be. I think I've finally laid my ghosts.”

She was silent for a long moment, as though taken aback, then said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean my father doesn't bother me anymore. I've found things out about him.”

“What things?”

“Last night,” Jack began, and told her everything, wanting her to share his elation. “It's almost like he left his soul behind. I feel like I'm really beginning to get to know him, to understand him. I only wish we could have been friends when he was alive. In some ways it's tragic, I suppose; such a waste.”

He heard his own voice cracking, and took a deep breath, cleared his throat, wanting to carry on, to explain and share the depth of his emotion.

A few moments later, he said, “I don't know. I find it so hard to describe. But it's like . . . like I've found myself at last.” He pulled a face into the receiver. “Do you know what I mean? I guess that sounds pretty corny, doesn't it?”

“No,” said Gail, “it doesn't sound corny. It sounds . . . it sounds great. I know how you felt about your father before. I'm delighted that it's working out for you. I told you it would, didn't I? Oh, I wish we could be together.”

“We will be,” Jack said. “This time tomorrow, with any luck.”

“I know.”

But she sounded so wistful that he asked, “What's the matter? Don't you think I'm going to come back?”

“Yes, of course.”

“So what's wrong?”

“Oh . . . nothing. I'm just being silly. Ignore me.”

Jack sighed. “Gail,” he said firmly, knowing she had something on her mind.

“What?”

“Spit it out.”

“Spit what out?”

“Whatever's sticking in your throat.”

She made a small sound, an ironic
hmph.
“You know me too well, Jack Stone.”

“True,” he said, refusing to be sidetracked.

She allowed a few more seconds of hissing silence to pass, and then said, “I just hope it is how you say it is, that's all. I hope you're not getting carried away with the situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well . . . you suddenly seem to have put on a pair of rose-tinted spectacles, forgotten all the bad stuff, the violence and all that. I hope you're not going to come down to earth with a bump.”

He thought for a moment and then said, “No . . . no, I don't think so. The violence was . . . was bad, there's no denying that. It was a wrong move my father made, a terrible mistake, as was the drinking and all the rest of it. But I think he's finally . . . apologising for all that, acknowledging it.”

“By writing stories?”

“They're not
just
stories, Gail. They're more than that. They're a legacy. I'm sure he left them for me. He wanted me to find them.”

“How do you know?”

He felt suddenly exasperated. Why did she have to question what he knew to be right? “I know, that's all. I just know. You haven't been here, you don't understand.” She remained silent. Jack pictured her face, furrowed with worry, and his anger eased a little.

“Look,” he said gently, “I know this all sounds a bit . . . I don't know . . . strange, maybe even slightly crazy. But this . . . this experience, Gail, it's a positive thing, and that can't be bad, can it? I'll still be the same person when I come back.”

“Only happier,” she said.

“That's right. Only happier.”

She sighed, as if conceding defeat. “I love you, Jack.”

“And I love you, too. More than anything. I'll see you tomorrow. And try not to worry.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Bye then.”

“Bye.”

“I love you, petal,” said Jack.

“We've done all this.”

“I know. We must be in a time warp. See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, bye.”

Jack put the phone down, feeling a little deflated. He had wanted to convey how significant he found the discovery of his father's notebooks, but sometimes the words were simply not there.

He considered calling Gail straight back, trying again, but what could he say to convince her that he hadn't already said? Sighing, he tramped to the kitchen. He spent the next ten minutes commuting between kitchen and sitting room, making tea, building a fire.

He closed the curtains, turned on the lamps and put on the Ennio Morricone CD he'd been playing yesterday with the volume down low. The music was nothing more than a murmur in the room. Occasionally the fire spat as it collapsed into itself in slow motion. Jack looked across at his laptop and felt a pang of guilt. He really ought to do some work before he lost himself in his father's thoughts, just a few hundred words to keep the wheels greased and moving. But the blue notebooks beckoned him. He'd been waiting all his life for their insight; they had to take priority. He poured himself a mug of tea and balanced it on the settee arm, then dragged the notebooks onto the cushion beside him. He opened the notebook to a story called
Floating,
which was dated 5/1/92 and almost immediately lost himself in its weave.

Only once, hours later, when an owl hooted outside, did Jack raise his head. Immediately, the warmth of the fire seemed to lay a hot film across his eyes, making them smart; a jabbing pain in his back made him realise how long his body had been locked in the same position. He groaned and stretched. His mouth tasted stale, his saliva thick as curd. The room around him seemed not quite there, like a faded painting or a movie vanishing in sunlight. Jack rolled his neck on his shoulders, wincing as his vertebrae crackled like paper. He switched off one of the lamps in the hope that it would ease his stinging eyes, then lay back on the settee, his feet dangling over the side, and continued reading.

Some time later he started awake. He turned his head slightly, stared at the brittle, blackened coldness of what had been the fire with complete incomprehension. What was he doing here? What time was it? What
day
was it, for God's sake? Jack always hated the feeling of disorientation upon waking up in a strange place. He often thought this was what it must be like to be senile, stumbling around blindly in your own head, unable to connect with anything.

He was cold, though he only discovered that when he tried to rise. And then he began shivering, as if someone had opened the front door, allowing freezing air to come rushing into the house. His arm had somehow got stuck beneath him and was jittery with pins and needles. One of his father's blue notebooks was standing on its end on the floor, the strip of paper used as a bookmark lying beside it. Jack's thoughts were still scurrying around like the Keystone Kops, trying to arrange themselves into some semblance of order. He leaned over the side of the settee and picked up the book. Turning it over, he blinked at the scrawled handwriting, feeling that if he could focus on something his confusion would pass more quickly. When he heard the door to the sitting room open behind him a sensation of extreme cold, like a blanket of snow, seemed to sweep over the settee and spread across his back.

For several long moments he literally didn't know what to do. He felt so bewildered, so out of it, that his brain seemed to stick, to refuse to make a decision. The door had opened slowly, as though the intruder were relishing the fact that he needn't rush. A thought suddenly came to him, strong and clear: Patty Bates that afternoon, pointing a finger and saying, “When it comes down to it, it'll just be you and me.” Jack slid forward off the settee and onto the floor, tucking in his head to make himself less of a target. Even as he rolled over, closer to the hearth, and reached out for the poker, he became aware that the light was beginning to dim in the room.

But it was not until his fingers closed around the poker that he realised that was impossible. The lamps did not have a dimmer switch; there was on and there was off, nothing in between. Jack finished rolling and jumped lithely to his feet, brandishing the poker, half-expecting to see Patty Bates standing there with a baseball bat. The sitting-room door was wide open, the hallway black, indistinct. But there was nobody there. Unless . . . unless he was crouching behind the settee.

Before he was even aware of the thought, Jack pistoned his right leg out at the settee, jarring it backwards. The light in the room was very dim now, and reddish, as if someone had draped a thick cloth over the lamp. The bulk of the settee met with no resistance. Had the intruder already left? Jack's clearing but still befuddled mind groped for an explanation: a burglar who'd thought the house was empty, no stomach for violence, getting the shock of his life to find Jack in the house, maybe legging it up Daisy Lane by now.

But what about the lamp? A faulty bulb?

And then he heard footsteps.

They were loud, steady, and they were approaching along the hallway. Jack's belly became a flock of birds seeking release. He hefted the poker in his hand, crouched behind the makeshift barrier of the settee. The owner of the footsteps stepped into the open doorway.

And there was no one there.

He gaped; surely he hadn't misheard? The footsteps had marched right up to the open door. There should be a figure filling that doorway now but there was no one. Jack was reminded of a poem that had always made him shiver as a child:

As I was walking up the stairs

I met a man who wasn't there

He wasn't there again today

I wish that man would go away

And then a voice whispered, “Jack.”

His hand spasmed around the poker. Not for the first time that day the saliva drained from his mouth. He swallowed, desperate to speak, gulped air that tasted coppery, almost electric. Around a tongue that felt fat and useless he managed to say, “Dad?”

There was no reply, but he sensed a presence in the room with him. The dim light flickered, causing shadows to balloon up the walls or to crouch like trolls in the corners. A tapping sound started up; it took Jack a moment to realise it was a resumption of the footsteps. They were getting closer—but how? This room was carpeted, and the footsteps sounded as if they were approaching across a hard surface. A splash of shadow appeared on the wall beside the door, and then another identical splash above it. Then a third . . . and a fourth. Jack made a sound, a kind of gasp, for all at once he realised what the splashes were.

They were footprints, and they were approaching not across the floor but up the walls, and now across the ceiling. Jack stared at them, openmouthed. They formed slowly, steadily, black as tar and yet insubstantial as shadow. They marched across the ceiling towards him and came to a halt immediately above his head. Jack murmured, “Dad? Is that you?” Receiving no reply, he stumbled on, “I've been reading your stories, Dad. They're good. Really good. Thank you for . . . for leaving them for me. I'm going to take some of Mum's pictures back to London, if that's okay. I . . . I wish we could talk. I wish you'd have told me about your writing. Maybe if you had, things would have been different. Maybe we could even have been friends.”

The footprints began, slowly at first, to fade. Jack jumped to his feet and cried, “No, Dad, don't go. Why won't you talk to me? Why won't you show yourself properly? I don't hate you any more, Dad. I don't hate you any more.”

The footsteps broke up, dispersed, like sand in the wind. The lamp brightened until its light was as strong as before. The door to the sitting room wavered a little, as if touched by a breeze. Jack ran to the door and into the hallway.

“Dad, come back,” he shouted. “Come back!” But the house was hollow and silent as a tomb. Shivering, Jack reentered the sitting room and closed the door. He lay down on the settee, hoping his father would return, but eventually his eyes slid closed and sleep claimed him until dawn.