All Sorts of Possible (22 page)

It was like walking up to the sixth-formers at school.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ said Daniel as they all looked up at him and Bennett through red, rheumy eyes.

One of them, a woman with rickety teeth and a boil on the side of her neck, laughed and shook her head.

‘I’m trying to find a man. He’s got red hair,’ said Daniel again. ‘And a red beard too.’ But they just kept passing round the bottle of vodka, laughing loudly
as one when something landed with a
splat
between the shoulders of a raggedy man wearing an old blue donkey jacket, the rising laughter scaring the wood pigeons out of the tree above
them.

‘He carries a big darning needle with him,’ said Bennett.

‘Bobby,’ said one of the men absently, shading his face as he looked up at the two boys, and the others nodded. ‘Bobby carries a needle.’

‘Thinks he’s the fourth bloody musketeer,’ said one of the women and the others laughed, some of them slapping the ground because it seemed so funny.

‘Do you know where we can find him?’ asked Daniel.

‘Is it important?’

Daniel nodded. But they all blinked at him as if they didn’t believe it. ‘I think he can help me with something.’

‘We can help, can’t we?’ said the woman with the boil on her neck and the others agreed.

‘I think it’s just him.’

They looked at Daniel and Bennett, the lines in their faces inked with grime, their teeth marbled with brown streaks.

‘Try the canal,’ said a thin man wearing a dirty baseball cap and then he took a swig from the bottle. ‘He likes it there, says it reminds him of where he grew up.’

‘Thanks.’

Daniel reached into his pocket and dug out some pound coins and held them out, but the man shook his head and the others all started laughing as Daniel turned red and walked away with
Bennett.

The path beside the canal was brown and dusty, cracked into hexagons by the heat. The water was the colour of milky coffee. When Daniel bent down to try and see through it, he
saw it was swirling with tiny yellow grains, like dots of pollen. Bennett kicked a stone off the path and it disappeared through the murk with a plop, a single ripple vanishing quickly, swept away
in the flow.

They walked for some time, passing people coming the other way, overtaking others loaded with shopping bags or marshalling toddlers away from the water. When they reached the edge of town, they
sat on a lock gate and looked at the buildings around them. Old warehouses three or four stories high, with the windows blown out, and weeds with bright yellow heads growing out of the walls,
bouncing on their green stems in the breeze.

‘Have you been checking Mason’s phone?’ asked Bennett.

‘No.’

‘Maybe you should.’

Daniel saw there were ten missed calls from Mason, but no messages.

‘You’ll have to speak to him eventually,’ said Bennett.

Daniel didn’t know what to say.

The sound of coughing made him look up and he saw Bobby emerging from one of the warehouses, his dirty mackintosh wrapped about him with his hands in the pockets. When the man stopped and took a
swig of something, Daniel saw the sunlight glinting off the top of Bennett’s hip flask as he screwed it back on.

‘Grubby bastard,’ grunted Bennett.

‘Stay here,’ said Daniel. ‘You might scare him off.’

When Daniel walked up to the man, he smelt of the sea, but there was something sweet-smelling too. Like warm popcorn in a bucket.

‘Ahhhh,’ said Bobby and gave a bow. ‘The young gentleman from the train.’ He clicked his tongue against his teeth, making the
clackety
sound of a train. ‘I
believe your travelling companion was kind enough to furnish me with a drink.’ He waved the flask and laughed at Bennett who raised a finger in reply. When Bobby shuffled on past Daniel, the
boy put out his arm.

‘Stop.’ But Bobby didn’t, the dirty mackintosh creaking like a sail as he went. So Daniel walked on after him. ‘I need your help. I want to make the fit with you. I need
you to try and help me find something.’

The man stopped and licked his blistered lips. Played with a wisp of his ginger beard, rolling it between his fingers. ‘Make the fit? With me?’ And something caught fire in his eyes
as if the sun had lit something deep inside him.

Daniel nodded. ‘As much as you dare. Please.’ He took out the twenty-pound note he had been keeping in his pocket and all the change he had too. ‘This is all I have. I
don’t know anyone else who can help me.’

Bobby peered at the boy’s face as if staring through a magnifying glass that had cracked. ‘What do you want to know? What can I work with?’

‘I have something that can help,’ said Daniel and he held up the two pieces of Lawson’s business card.

Bobby’s tongue wiggled out of the corner of his mouth, like a leech looking for a spot to clamp down. ‘I’m keeping the hip flask; he can’t have it back.’ And he
gave a little wave at Bennett.

‘OK,’ said Daniel. ‘I’ll sort it.’

Bobby nodded and took the twenty pounds and the coins, dropping it all in a mackintosh pocket. ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ he said. ‘So let’s not screw it up.’ He
began shuffling through the knee-high weeds and grasses towards one of the warehouses, sending bees and butterflies swirling round his shins.

They sat on a bare patch of concrete with broken glass catching the sunlight all around them, like three people shipwrecked on a tiny desert island.

A bird flapped up through a large blue crack in the ceiling, and it took a while for the quiet to creep in again.

Bobby took the two pieces of the business card and looked at Lawson’s name. He eyed Bennett for a moment and then smiled. Bennett just grunted and shook his head.

‘Lawson found a flask,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s very special. He put it somewhere and I need to know where.’

‘Well, that depends on whether we can make the fit.’ Bobby closed his eyes. ‘Can you feel it?’

‘Yes.’ Daniel saw tiny golden sparks popping behind his eyes when he blinked, as if someone was holding a sparkler out in the dark of him. There was a familiar warm sensation in his
chest.

‘Tell me about this man you want to know more about.’

‘His name was Lawson. He was a vicar once. He lived in a house just outside Cambridge.’

‘And what did he look like, this Lawson?’

‘He was dark. Tall. Neat and tidy. He—’ Daniel stopped when Bobby’s hand reached out for his wrist and grabbed hold.

‘I see somebody.’ Bobby started to breathe more deeply, his breath oaty and sour as he leant closer to Daniel. ‘I can see a man in a bed. Machines blipping round
him.’

‘No, not him,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s Lawson I need to know about. He had a flask and I need to find it.’

‘I’ve got to work harder to see it,’ said Bobby. ‘I’m not as strong as I used to be. I’m all rusted up. Ginger on the inside too.’ He spluttered a laugh
and held on tighter to the boy’s wrist.

‘What can you see?’ asked Daniel.

‘The man in the bed is very ill.’

‘Not hi—’ Daniel paused as he thought about something. ‘What about this man in the bed?’ Daniel glanced at Bennett who was about to say something and then thought
better of it.

Bobby muttered sounds that didn’t make sense. ‘Open your heart,’ he said finally. ‘Open it as big as you can. As wide as a barn door pushed back. I can almost see
it.’

‘See what, Bobby?’

‘What’s going to happen to him.’

Daniel tried keeping his mind pure and clean and simple, his breath a knife that cut apart any thought as it came to him, good or bad or hopeful. But something was welling up inside him.
Bloating him. Something red and hot and angry.

‘I see him!’ shouted Bobby. ‘I see the blighter.’

‘Be careful,’ whispered Daniel. Bobby’s teeth were shiny with spit. He wobbled and held on tight to Daniel.

‘You found a good fit with that girl, Daniel. It gave you what you weren’t expecting, just like I said it would. It didn’t help your daddy though, did it? It didn’t do
that. It was telling you to let go of him.’ Bobby was juddering. His shoulders were jerking. ‘He’s going to die, your daddy. He’s going to die and there’s nothing you
can do to stop it.’

Daniel tried to shake off Bobby’s hand.

‘Let me go!’ he shouted. He felt Bennett’s hand trying to pull Bobby away. But the man was hooked on tight.

‘It’s the
what
not the
why
,’ screamed Bobby. ‘Tell me, Daniel. Tell me: who are you going to be when your daddy’s gone? Who’s the girl going
to be with this tumour in her head?’

Bennett yelled and swiped Bobby across the head and the man’s hand fell away and Daniel felt the connection between them cut off, like a plug had been pulled from its socket.

Bobby fell back and lay gasping on his side, his eyes flickering open and his head resting on the broken pieces of glass lying around them.

‘That’s all I can see,’ he wheezed. ‘Not Lawson. Not this flask you want. My mind’s a muscle. It’s out of shape. It doesn’t do what I want it to any
more.’ He found the hip flask in his pocket and took a long sip before holding it out to Daniel who shook his head. When Bobby managed to sit up, there were red spots of blood on his head.
Splinters of glass sparkled in his hair like the remnants of a frost.

‘Come on, Daniel,’ said Bennett. ‘Let’s go. He’s no good. He’s a nobody.’

‘Least I still got both hands,’ shouted Bobby and he roared with laughter as they crunched their way out of the building over the broken glass.

Something kept tightening in Daniel’s stomach as he walked quickly back down the towpath, like a screw was being turned deeper and deeper.

He took a bus to the hospital with Bennett to see his father. But when they got there they were told they couldn’t see him because the doctors were examining him.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Daniel. ‘What’s happened?’

Two of the ward nurses took him aside into a room and told him that his father had pneumonia. They told him that it was one of the risks of being on a ventilator and of being fed through a
tube.

‘But he’ll get better from that, won’t he?’ asked Daniel.

‘We’re treating the infection, doing all we can,’ said one of the nurses. The other one just nodded and smiled to back her colleague up.

‘We’ll come back later,’ said Bennett and he led Daniel away.

As they walked out of the hospital doors into the daylight, Bennett took his friend by the shoulders. ‘That Bobby’s a drunk, a tramp with an old rag for a brain. That stuff he said
wasn’t true.’ But Daniel wasn’t sure what to think. ‘You should go home to your aunt. Tell her about your dad. Talk about him with her and tell her how you feel.’

‘I’d prefer to hang out with you.’

‘Daniel, she’s come all this way to look after you. She didn’t have to, did she? She could have said no and stayed in California. I think she must love you very much. Remember,
it’s hard for her too, being with you, being with a person she doesn’t know. She needs you to tell her how to be with you or else she’s just guessing. And people make mistakes
when they guess at things. That’s just the way it is.’

When Mason’s phone went off in Daniel’s pocket, he checked it again. ‘I can’t tell her about Mason. She won’t be able to help with that.’

Bennett frowned. He scuffed the ground with a shoe. ‘My brother’s having a party tonight. He has some friends who are into trying out “stuff”.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re “alternative”.’ And he made two rabbit ears with his fingers. ‘New Age. At least some of them are. Last time he had a party some wacky things
happened.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘I wasn’t there. I think they got pretty drunk though and high. My brother said it was like a dream. I’m just telling you in case it might be useful. You can’t make the
fit with Rosie, and trying with Bobby was a waste of time, so why don’t you come along?’

Daniel nodded. ‘Thanks.’

‘But only if you go home now and see your aunt.’

Daniel shifted from one foot to the other like he was standing on hot coals.

‘James might be there too tonight. You can always speak to him.’

Daniel thought about that. ‘OK,’ he said.

When Daniel got home his aunt was out. She had left him a short note saying she would be back later, not mentioning where she had gone or what she was doing.

The words felt like little daggers on his tongue as he read them out loud the second time around to the pot plant on the kitchen windowsill. But he remembered what Bennett had told him and it
was like holding up a lens to the note that made him see it differently. When he read the words out loud again, they didn’t hurt any more. In fact, they sounded sad and upset, not curt at
all.

He wrote a message beneath hers, telling her about his dad’s pneumonia and saying he would be out tonight at a party at Bennett’s house. He signed it with an initial, D. Someone
moved his hand for him and put a couple of kisses next to it and he immediately wished they hadn’t. But there was nothing he could do once it had happened.

By the time Daniel had cycled to Rosie’s house, Mason had called fifteen times. But left no messages. He watched the streets warily as he pedalled, expecting the blue BMW
to turn out of one and start following him or for Mason to walk out of a shop and shout at him to stop.

Rosie’s house was Georgian, with plump red bricks separated by clean beige lines of cement. The white sash windows were full of sky. A bronze knocker hung from a black varnished door. The
house was set back from the road and Daniel wheeled his bike up the gravel drive, dotted with weeds and covered in tiny slicks of bird shit.

He waited, studying the glossy black door, and adjusting his head to see what small bits of him he could find in the shiny paint.

But no one came to answer so he rapped the knocker again.

He tried the wooden gate at the side of the house, but that was locked.

He stood in the driveway, watching a Frisbee riding the breeze in the street as two kids spun it between them, and then he got back on his bike.

When Agatha opened the door, she nodded, as if satisfied it was him she had seen through the spyhole, and held out a hand to welcome him in.