The Messengers (16 page)

“Jesus,” Joe said in a hushed voice as we went down the steps to beach level.

The skate park was set back from the beach and had two quarter-pipes and a ramp in the middle with rails. Groups of kids stood at the top of the quarter-pipes, waiting, watching, laughing. There were two or three kids there who were incredibly good. A guy on a stunt bike who could go head over heels and spin the handlebars in the air. All that stuff.

Joe looked up at them with such awe that I thought he might fall over backward.

“You coming in?” Max said to Joe.

“Nah,” said Joe, trying to act nonchalant. “I think I might watch for a bit.”

Max took his board over and bumped fists with a few of the other boys, did some tricks. He looked like he knew what he was doing.

“Your cousin is
amazing
,” Joe said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“This whole place . . .” he said, looking out over the beach scene, the girls with knots in their T-shirts, the volleyball players in the sandpit, the day-trip drinkers, the reggae band outside the beach bar, the man making chalk drawings.

“Helmstown? Good, isn’t it?”

Another little suspicious glance broke through, but before he could ask why I was being so nice, I spoke up. “Hey, let’s go around the other side and get a better view.”

We strolled over, the rumble of wheels occasionally broken by the silence of someone leaving the ground. We stood near the man who was chalking a picture on the black tarmac. It was stunning. A blazing, fiery sun in orange and red, with a guy on a skateboard suspended in front of it. The guy on the board was left blank, so the tarmac made him look like a shadow across the sun. It was so good that for a moment I was distracted from the nagging sense that I recognized the style.

Then I looked at the artist, hunched over his work.

He was wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses.

Peter.

I turned to look at Joe, but he wasn’t there. A few not very pleasant thoughts passed through my mind until I realized he was standing behind me. He took a step toward Peter. A step toward his dad. And he stared at the chalk.

“What do you think?” I said.

Peter stopped drawing and waited for the answer.

“Awesome,” Joe whispered.

“Awesome,” I said, loud enough so that Peter could hear.

Peter took a deep breath. I could see his hand shaking, the red dust picking out the pattern of calluses on his skin. “Do you think so?” he said. He didn’t dare look up.

“Yeah,” said Joe. “The way you’ve done the thing with the figure, leaving him blank.”

I watched the rounded ends of Joe’s trainers shuffle toward the giant sun.

“Thank you,” Peter said. His voice was quivering, and it seemed like a strange scene to me: this strong man kneeling on the pavement, unable to make eye contact with a young boy. “You sound like an expert.”

“Not really,” Joe said with a shrug. “You know, I like art, but not the way they teach it at school.”

Peter smiled broadly. I wondered what he could hear in the boy’s voice. Whether he could hear Rowenna’s accent. “What’s your name?” Peter said.

“Joseph. My mates call me Joe.”

“Can I call you Joe?” Peter said.

“Sure,” Joe said, sounding quite pleased.

Peter placed the small piece of red chalk on the ground, next to the image. He took a while to make up his mind, to fight off his fears, but eventually he did it.

He looked up.

I could tell Peter was close to tears. His mouth was open and dry. He managed to smile, and Joe, who had no idea of the meaning of the moment, smiled back.

“What’s
your
name?” Joe said.

“It’s . . . it’s Paul,” Peter said.

“Cool,” Joe said.

Max came over. “All right?” he said to me. He didn’t notice Peter and instead turned to Joe. “So, like, are you going to come in or what?” he said, pointing to the skate park.

“Oh. I mean I’ve not really . . .” Joe said. I’d never seen someone want to do something so much in my life.

“You’re not going to get better standing there,” Max said. “Come on. You can meet some of the others.”

He gestured to the boys at the top of the quarter-pipe, and they raised their heads and nodded.

Joe looked at me and I shrugged.

“I guess,” said Joe. He was trying not to smile, but he was failing miserably. He took a big breath of salty air and followed Max up to the quarter-pipe, where he struggled through a couple of complicated handshakes.

I waited a few moments and then turned to Peter. He was in a heap, the breeze pulling little wisps of colored dust off the chalk. He looked at me, and for a moment I was convinced he would shatter into a thousand pieces. The world is too much for some people.

“You OK, Pete?” I asked.

“I think, for the first time in a long while, the answer to that question might be yes.”

He took his sunglasses off and looked at me. His eyes were red and swollen, but they were full of something like relief. I took a bottle of water out of my bag and gave it to him. He put it to his lips and drank.

“So,” I said, “this could be the start of something.”

“I don’t know,” Peter said.

“But we managed to save those people and —”

“It’s too early, Frances. What about Charles Gregan? We don’t know what will happen next.”

“Nobody does, Pete. That’s life. But you can take it slow.”

“He’s a good boy,” Peter said. “At least I know that. So much of his mother about him.”

We turned to watch Joe coming down the pipe, his eyes wide and his T-shirt rippling. To me, people on skateboards always look strange, because they’re standing sideways. As if they’re trying to move without you noticing. As if they’re jumping the queue. But there was something quite graceful about Joe. “He’s not bad,” I said.

Peter laughed, but he couldn’t quite reply. He lit a cigarette instead and rubbed his eyes.

The sun became clouded. Only Peter’s chalk sun still burned bright. The stunt bikers were like silvery fish coming off the ramps, and the rumble of wheels went on and on.

Joe was coming down at quite a pace, his confidence growing with the encouragement from Maxi and his friends. But then he tried the rail and slipped. His ankle buckled, and he hit the ground.

He tried to stand up and be brave, but he collapsed again as soon as he put his weight down.

“Shit,” I said.

Peter and I ran over to him and nudged through the crowd. Peter put his hands out toward his boy, but then took them back, as if he might turn Joe to stone if he touched him.

“Are you OK, Joe?” I said.

He whispered so quietly, I could barely hear him. “No,” he said, and I could see that he was no longer pretending that he wasn’t an eleven-year-old. I could also see that the ankle had swollen badly already. I looked daggers at Max, who shrugged. “Shall we call an ambulance?” he said.

“No,” said Joe. “I’ll be fine. It’s probably just sprained.”

“Call a taxi,” I told Max.

“Where we going?” Max said.

“Joe and I are going to the ER,” I said.

“You need help getting him up the steps?” Max said, pointing back to the seawall.

“I’ll do it,” Peter said.

I looked at him. “Right,” I said. “Let’s get him lifted.”

Peter and I took hold of Joe by the shoulders and helped him onto one leg. The three of us struggled up the steps, Peter with his son’s skateboard under his free arm.

“We’re going to need some help on the other side,” I said to Peter as we waited for the taxi.

Peter nodded.

When the car came, we carefully slid into the back and I put Joe’s leg over my knees.

He smiled weakly and took out his phone. “I have to call my mum.”

I looked at Peter, but he just closed his eyes. I suddenly felt a sense of regret, as though I’d made everything move too fast. Things were getting out of control.

A cloudy dusk came on quickly. Other lights shone: the locked-door lights in the taxi, Joe’s luminous watch, the orange streetlight sliding over Peter’s face as he looked at his son. The hospital was boiling hot, and the sickly strip lighting picked out every gash on the early Saturday boozers. Day-trippers whose day trips were slipping into a bad place. Like Joe’s.

We signed in at the desk, and I sat in a seat across from Joe and held his foot up on my thigh. “You’re supposed to do rest, ice, compression, and elevation,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said.

Peter paced up and down, looking for staff to harass. He couldn’t cope with seeing Joe in pain.

Eventually he sat down on the rubbery seat next to his son. It made a rip-roaring fart noise. Joe held his serious, mature face for about two seconds, but then he couldn’t help himself. He laughed. It was a good, infectious laugh, and I caved, too. Then Peter did. He stood up and sat down again, and the noise was the same. He turned to the miserable old guy sitting on the other side of him who was holding his wrist, and he said, “I’m in for gas — what are you in for?”

Joe totally cracked up then. The nice thing about his laugh was that he had tried to resist it. It made him helpless. Within a few seconds, a good percentage of the people sitting there were laughing along with him, even if they didn’t know what the joke was. I could have sworn I even saw a smile on the face of the old fella with the dodgy wrist.

I had my back to the door, so I didn’t know why Peter and Joe stopped laughing so suddenly. I figured there were only a couple of options — either some poor guy had walked in carrying his own head or Joe’s mother had arrived.

I looked over my shoulder. She had a kind face, and she’d dyed two blond streaks into the front of the black hair that Peter had written about in the letter. She bit her lip and scanned the waiting area.

I looked back at Joe and Peter. Joe, who still had his foot on my knee, waved at his mother, and Peter looked down at his hands, which he’d folded on his stomach, as if he were trying to stop the blood coming out of a bullet hole.

“Mum!” Joe shouted.

“Oh, Joseph!” she said. Her flip-flops slapped the floor. She came toward us, but she only had eyes for her boy.

“Honey, are you OK?”

“Yes, Mum. I fell on my ankle at the skate park — that’s all.”

“What were you even doing there?” she said. She didn’t sound angry, just confused.

“I was . . . nothing. I was on my skateboard. Frances and Paul brought me in,” he said.

“Thank you,” Rowenna said to me distractedly.

I couldn’t speak. I could barely even nod, because I knew what was coming.

She looked up at Peter, and the word
thanks
got sliced in midair. Her eyes widened, and she took a big step back. Her hand went up to her mouth. “Peter,” she said. She said it with love, but that might have been accidental.

I knew it wouldn’t last, anyway.

I kept my eyes on Joe. Looking at anyone else was pretty much unbearable. But I was interested, too. I wanted to see what it was like to recognize your dad for the first time. He couldn’t quite take it in. “You said your name was Paul,” he said.

I suppose he had an image in his head of his father. A cross between various film characters and the stories his mum had told him. Just the way Johnny had given me an image of our dad. But now he was faced with the truth. He looked between Rowenna and Peter. “Mum?” he said.

She dropped her car keys, and the noise of them hitting the floor seemed to shake Peter to life.

“I’ll leave,” he said. He still didn’t look up. He just stared at his cupped hands. Then he stood. “He needs treatment. I just wanted to make sure he was OK.”

Rowenna made a strange gasp, almost a laugh. “You wanted
to make sure he was OK
?” she said. “Peter, where the hell have you been?” She looked him over. “What
happened
to you? Why didn’t you . . . ? Oh, Jesus.”

She began to cry. She tried to apologize to Joe, but she couldn’t get the words out. The atmosphere and the confusion (and probably the pain) had got to Joe, too, and he was also tearing up. He put his hand on his mum’s arm.

Peter didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at anyone. He just turned around and started walking down the corridor.

“What, you’re just going to . . . ?” Rowenna said, but he didn’t hear.

It had all gone wrong, and there wasn’t much doubt whose fault it was.