The Grin of the Dark

NINETEEN - SENIORS

I have to walk around the Harris building twice before I find the way in. The pillared Grecian building houses the museum and library and art gallery, and they're reconstructing it on behalf of the disabled. Contractors have walled off the massive steps that lead up to the main entrance. At first I miss a back door so rudimentary that it resembles an unpainted portion of a stage set. It leads into a lending library, where I'm confronted by shelves of books in Urdu. A computer printout on a door around the corner of the L-shaped room directs me into a circular vestibule. In the middle of the marble floor a giant figure is wrapped so thoroughly in opaque plastic that it's impossible to guess what the statue depicts. Somewhere behind the scenes, hammering and stony clanks suggest that another one is being sculpted. I climb one of a pair of marble staircases past a door marked THIS DOOR IS NOT TO BE USED to a circular balcony, which is a maze of plastic barriers and hulking chipboard pillars twice my height. While several of the pillars bear computer printouts saying THIS WAY, some of these appear to be or to have become jokes. I dodge around the obstacles into the reference library, where a tall young woman with black curls dusted by the renovation is standing behind the counter. 'You've got some newspapers for me,' I tell her.

'You're Mr Who again?'

'Lester. I spoke to you before, I think.'

'Not to me.' She begins to sort through items hidden by the counter. 'Local papers from 1912 and 1913? She's found you a couple.'

'Is one of them the Chronicle?'

'I thought she told you it hadn't been published for decades by then.'

How could I have misread or misremembered the name of the paper I bought at the fair? There seems to be no other explanation, and perhaps it will prove to be one of the newspapers on microfilm. I ask to look at 1913 first, and the librarian ushers me to a microfilm reader. As the slaty screen grows twilit she inserts the spool. 'Just give us a shout when you want the next one,' she murmurs. 'Well, not a shout, obviously.'

'I'll gesture if you like.'

I thought that was a little wittier than the collapse of her smile implies. 'I'll come and whisper,' I try undertaking, but she heads even more speedily for the counter. I wind the front page of the New Year's Day edition of the Preston Gazette onto the monitor. At once there's a dismayed cry, and the screen turns blank.

'It's crashed.' That was the cry, and for a moment I imagine that I'm staring at a dead computer. The room has grown darker than the overcast afternoon, and everyone who was working at a monitor is looking towards the counter. Somewhere large and stony, men and their echoes are chortling. 'I'll see what's happened. I don't think it's anything to laugh at,' the tall librarian says and hurries out of the room.

I seem to hear her footsteps multiply as they recede around the balcony. I could imagine that several versions of her are following various routes. By the time she returns, more than one customer has left the reading room. 'We're sorry, everyone,' she says. 'They must have drilled through something. We don't know how long they'll take to fix it.'

This drives out all the remaining members of the public except me. I haven't travelled half the day to give up so easily. I peer at the screen, which is playing a game of appearing to glimmer while it darkens further, until the librarian says 'I'm afraid we have to ask you to leave.'

'You surely aren't blaming me for anything.'

'It's a health and safety issue,' she says and removes the microfilm.

The rest of the building feels emptied even of laughter, unless that is biding its time. As I dodge around the chipboard pillars I have an unwelcome sense that someone may be hiding silently behind at least one of them. I hurry downstairs with my echoes, which are leaving me uncertain whether I can hear muffled chuckles, even when I press my ear against the door that isn't to be used. In the vestibule I pace around the figure shrouded in plastic, but of course nobody as tall is hiding behind it – nothing is. I desist when I notice that a man in overalls surely too large for efficiency is watching me from the balcony. His face must be pale with dust from the reconstruction, an effect that emphasises the redness of his wide amused mouth. I gaze at him for some seconds, which feel like a contest to discover who will move first, and then I head for daylight.

I blink and shiver as I step out beneath the grey wadded sky. The route to the station leads past an open market beneath a cast-iron roof. I'm not about to be tempted to search the tables and give myself no time to go home. All along the street beyond the market the stores are tricked out for Christmas, and some are emitting jolly songs. The merry competition merges into whiter noise as I follow one of the old side streets down towards Winckley Square.

Each side of the street is a rank of tall brown houses pressed together. Some of the rotund front windows are strung with coloured bulbs, others are occupied by trees that flare like warnings that the night is over the unseen horizon. In the cross-street where I used to live, two incarnations of Father Christmas squat on opposite roofs to confront each other with unyielding good humour. My parents' window sports a lone festoon so dusty that the bulbs seem in danger of sputtering out every time they light up. The edge of a step crumbles under my heel as I climb to the door, which is so faded it can hardly be called black, and poke the large round rusty bellpush.

I can't remember how the bell sounds, and I don't hear it. Nevertheless my father calls 'Someone's here' and opens the door at once. He's wearing an ancient pale-blue cardigan, of which the outsize wooden buttons are the only aspects to have kept their shape, and brown corduroy trousers with frayed muddy cuffs. Both garments have some trouble containing his stomach. His face is well on the way to round, and I wonder if its heaviness makes it hard to operate, since it bears no expression and produces none. Is it possible that he doesn't recognise me, or would he prefer not to? He appears to be so much more interested in the street behind me that I hardly feel I'm there. I'm opening my mouth in case that helps me think of a remark when he says 'Isn't someone with you?'

The sudden chill on the back of my neck isn't a breath. The plastic grin that meets me when I twist around belongs to Father Christmas on a roof. 'Not that I know of,' I retort.

'I thought you were supposed to have said on the phone you were bringing her.'

'I only said I'm living with her. She hasn't come today.'

'Oh.'

Before I have time to deduce what rebuke this contains, my mother cries 'Who's that? It isn't, is it?'

Her voice is faster than her approach. She repeats the questions and variations on them as she limps along the hall. She's dressed in the kind of discreetly striped suit she might have worn while she and my father were teaching. Over it she wears an apron striped like a portion of the suit viewed through a microscope. Her face surely can't be longer, but it's decidedly thinner, like the rest of her. I have the distracting notion that my parents have tried to emphasise their comical contrast, not least since her grey hair has grown maniacally uneven while his is reduced to a very few strands that barely span his piebald cranium. She stumbles to grab me, crying 'Come here. I knew you wanted to be home.'

Her hug is so fierce and bony that it's painful. It smells like a memory of Christmas dinner. Eventually she relents, only to redouble her force while my father watches like a viewer who has arrived too late to understand a film. At last she steps back to look me up and down. 'He's so much older, Bob. Whatever's been wrong, let's not let it be wrong any longer.'

My father shuts the front door, enclosing us all in dimness. I have a disconcerting sense of being confined somewhere smaller and darker until my mother urges us to the kitchen. 'What do you want to keep you warm?' she asks me as eagerly. 'A cup or something stronger?'

I could respond that the kitchen is hot enough. She's apparently too familiar with the old black iron range to have it replaced. Its heat is trapped by all the wooden panels that seemed to frown on my childhood, and even by the windows that would look out on the narrow L-shaped yard if they weren't opaque with condensation. 'Tea would be fine,' I say.

'Shut the door, then, if nobody else is coming.'

As she lifts a mug from the lowest wooden hook beside the thick stone sink and limps to the ruddy earthenware teapot, my father mouths 'Don't mind her. She's getting like that sometimes.'

I can't hear a word, but my mother swings around. 'What are you saying, Bob?'

'Watch where you're pouring for mercy's sake,' he says and stares at her until she relocates the mug with the teapot. 'Just bringing up your favourite subject. That's the family.'

The last remark is directed more at me. Perhaps it isn't as accusing as it sounds, because my mother says 'Now we're retired we'll have time for more of one.'

She plants the mug, still brimming despite the extended ellipsis it has scattered on the floorboards, in front of me on the oaken table that bears the childish start of my first initial, and then she giggles like someone a fraction of her age. 'Don't worry, we aren't expecting a little stranger, even though we still get up to mischief.'

'I don't want to know that,' I'm tempted to retort like some forgotten comedian. Instead I take a gulp of milky tea as she says 'I'm sure you can guess what we're hoping for.'

'She's on about grandchildren,' my father explains. 'She always is these days.'

'My partner has a son. He's seven.'

'We'll look forward to seeing him at Christmas,' my mother says. 'And I can't wait to show all our friends your dedication.'

What kind of performance are they expecting of me? Apparently I look bewildered enough for her to giggle again. 'Bob told me how you're putting us both in your book.'

I have to rewind quite a stretch of conversation to recall my actual words. I was planning to dedicate the book to Natalie, but I don't see how I can disappoint them, even though it feels as if my intentions have been diverted. I'm silently promising Natalie the next book when my mother says 'So you're here to research it.'

For at least a second I'm unable to mumble 'And I came to see you.'

'I'm so glad, aren't you, Bob?' Once my father grunts, either in agreement or in resignation, she says 'Hands.'

She reaches for my left and my father's right and nods at us until we join hands too. His is hot and moist while hers feels stripped down to its mechanism. I'm put in mind of a séance, because it's my early childhood, before she and my father parted, that she's trying to call up. I can't cling to my resentment now I've seen how much they've aged, but I grow uncomfortable as my mother squeezes the hands she's holding and waits not just for reciprocation but for my father and me to demonstrate as well. When at last she lets go of us, our hands immediately separate. 'Will you be talking to people up here for your book?' she appears to hope.

'I'm counting on the library. If there's any record of what happened it'll be there.'

'What do you think did?'

'A comedian by the name of Thackeray Lane took his act into the street and got arrested for it. Sounds as if he was too much of a laugh for the law, but there won't be anyone who'll remember now.'

'We do.'

Once again I feel imprisoned in a cramped dark place, and my face seems too unfamiliar to work. I want my father to tell her she's mistaken, but I'm afraid of how roughly he may do so. She giggles, which I don't find even slightly heartening. 'You ought to see your face, Simon. I'm not saying we were there.'

'Sorry, then, but how do you remember?'

'Bob's grandparents were. We were talking about it after you rang.'

'Did they say anything about his act that you remember?' I ask my father, and when he seems reluctant to speak 'Did he do a trick with balloons?'

'Never told me if he did. They used to say if I was bad they'd chase me like he chased them.'

'He was on stilts, wasn't he?' my mother prompts.

'Some kind of special ones, they must have been. I don't know if everyone had had enough or it was the end of the show, but he came down off the stage and got taller while he was chasing them. My granddaddy said he was so tall when he got to the door he had to bend nearly double and some children thought he was going to jump on them. Like a grasshopper with a man's face, my dad said.'

'I expect he just wanted to give them an encore. Like Simon said, he was there to make them laugh.'

'He tried hard enough in the street, according to my granddaddy. Maybe he wanted to win them back, but he still got arrested.'

This differs so much from the account I read that it sounds like an alternate take of the scene. 'What size was he then?' I wonder.

My father waits for my mother to finish giggling, though the question strikes me as less amusing than grotesque. 'His normal,' he says. 'A bit late if you ask me.'

'I'm sure he didn't do any real harm, Bob. If your grandma survived I don't see why anyone else should complain.'

'It didn't help her much, did it? I blame my granddaddy as much as him. Granted he mightn't have known what kind of tricks Simon's character was going to get up to, but I wouldn't have taken a woman to the theatre in that state.'

My mouth has grown dry with the overheated air. 'Which state?'

'She was about to have my dad.'

'Less than seven months pregnant, you said, Bob.'

'The same night she went to the show she had to be rushed into hospital.'

'You can't blame him for that,' my mother objects.

'All I know is my dad was premature, and they didn't have half the facilities they've got in hospitals now.'

'But he was all right and she was.'

'If you call it all right when nobody could be sure if she was laughing or crying. My granddaddy told my dad she kept being like that for weeks, and a nurse said she was while she was giving birth.'

'She was quiet whenever I met her. You could hardly get a word out of her.'

'Maybe it used her up.'

We've wandered into an area I can't define, and I'd rather not linger. 'Did they have anything to say about the court case?'

'My granddaddy thought he deserved a lot worse, and I got the idea she agreed with him.'

I seem to have run out of questions. I'm trying to make sense of the information when my mother says 'Shall we take him?'

'Where?'

She's helplessly amused by my duet with my father. 'To whatever its name is,' she splutters. 'The theatre. The Harlequin, wasn't it? It's still there.'

'That doesn't say it's open. I'm pretty sure it's not.'

'It might give you ideas anyway, mightn't it, Simon? It might make your book more real.'

She's so anxious to help me that she has overcome her mirth. 'Let me check what the library's doing,' I say.

'Being where it's always been, I should think.' She knocks her elbows on the table and props her chin on her hands, drumming her cheeks with her fingertips while she watches me wield the mobile. It looks as if she's fanning the gleam in her eyes brighter. When my father reaches to calm her down she drags her wrist away from him. I pocket the mobile once I've been informed a second time that the number is unobtainable. 'Was I right?' my mother demands in some kind of triumph.

'They don't seem to be operating today.'

'Stay over, then, or you can go when you're all here for Christmas.'

As I mumble ambiguously she raises her hands, exposing a face that I could imagine has grown bonier. 'Shall we go to the theatre, then?'

She could almost be proposing a night at a show. At least the excursion will take us out of the kitchen, which feels shrunken by the heat. As soon as I push back my chair she jumps up, and my father rises grudgingly to his feet. 'Let's see what there is to see,' I say as though I'm eager.