The Grin of the Dark (15 page)

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.'