Like Father (4 page)

6 Two telephone calls

His father called on Friday after school.

Danny, alone in the flat, took the call. Oma was out in the greenhouses, Val was leading a meditation session in the old chapel and Josh was with one of the other Hope Springs parents.

He picked up the phone and said, “Yuh?” He wandered through to the living room and sat with his feet over the side of the chair.

“Danny, it’s me.”

Danny froze, then gathered himself. “Dad,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“As ever,” said his father. “Well, no, actually. That’s not quite true. I have some news.”

At these words, Danny tensed as if a pulse of static electricity had buzzed across his skin, his scalp. News. His father never had news. He felt as if he were in a crowded room, everyone waiting for the next words.

“Hmm?”

“That book you found. The journal. Mr Peters got it on Wednesday. Thanks for that. He came to see me today. He says it throws everything into a new light. He says that if they’d had that as evidence when they were assessing me things would have gone differently. He thinks it might be enough evidence to appeal on the grounds that I was never in a fit state to be tried in the first place.”

“You mean... he’s going to get you out?”

“No, not get me out.”

He did it, after all. Danny’s father had killed five people, three of them simply because they had been in the way. There had never been any question of that.

“But I might go to a hospital instead. They might be able to treat me for... for whatever it is that went wrong.”

Danny was silent. This was the closest his father had ever come to talking about what had happened to him that night, and in the weeks leading up to it. He wasn’t sure if that was good or not. Some things might be best left un-probed.

“You still there, Danny?”

“I’m still here.”

“You’re not pleased?”

“I’m not anything.” It was all going to be stirred up again. Wounds re-opened.

If only they had left those boxes undisturbed. If they had not found the journal there could be no chance of an appeal.

“Listen, Danny. Hold on in there. Do you hear? There’s not much time left on my phonecard. I’ll call again when I get another one. Are you okay, Danny?”

“I’m okay.” But by then he was talking to a dead line, his father’s card having run out.

~

He had to say something, but he wasn’t sure how.

“Dad called,” he said finally. The simple option.

Val looked up from her salad, then back down again. Oma watched him carefully.

“He says Mr Peters thinks he has grounds for appeal.”

Val speared a slice of boiled egg, then let it drop.

Oma was beaming, clasping her hands together as if giving thanks to the heavens. “Is happy day,” she said. “Ja?”

Nobody said anything.

“You get your wish, Danny,” Oma continued. “You wish things could be how they were. You remember? Like old times. The family together. All happy. Ja?”

Things could never be how they were. Was she blind to that? Couldn’t she understand what her son had done? Danny was about to point out that his father wasn’t going to be set free, just like that, but Val got in first.

She gave a kind of strangled grunt as she stood from the table, knocking her chair back against the sideboard. Startled by the sudden loud noise, she looked to the doorway in case it had woken Josh. Then she put her hands to her face and gasped, “No.”

Tears ran through her fingers, and across the backs of her hands. “No,” she said again. “Can’t you see? How could we ever be happy families again?”

Oma rose and went across to her. She made a little beckoning gesture and held her arms wide. When Val didn’t move, she went to her, and took her in her arms. She started to hum one of her German folk tunes, and instantly the atmosphere grew calmer.

She looked at Danny and winked, as if they two shared a secret. She really seemed to think that this was the start of a
new
start, that things could somehow get back to how they were.

Danny went to his room and opened his envelope to remind himself why that could never ever be so.

~

Saturday mid-morning and the phone went again. They didn’t get many calls here. Their friends were mostly within Hope Springs, and they didn’t need to use the telephone to talk to them.

Danny answered. He half-expected it to be his father again, with the latest developments, although it was unlikely anything would have happened at the weekend.

“Yuh?”

“Hello, could I speak to Danny Smith, please?”

“Speaking.”

“Danny. You sound different on the phone. It’s me, Cassie Lomax.”

Danny’s mother was mouthing
Who is it?
He put a hand over the phone and said, “A friend.” She raised an eyebrow, and returned to cleaning Josh.

Danny went into the living room with the phone. “What was that?” he said, as Cassie had carried on talking during his exchange with Val.

“I
said
, I’m out in the village right now and it’s lovely and sunny and I’m like, let’s call Danny and see what he’s doing. You want to come out? I mean, not
go out
. I’m not asking you on a date or anything. I mean, it’s nice and I thought you might want some fresh air, and I can talk too much and you can do your strong silent bit and all that. A right pair, we are. I’m down in the church car park right now. What do you reckon?”

He was smiling. He’d held the phone away from his ear while she talked, listening to her from a distance. He’d never known anyone like Cassie Lomax.

“Okay,” he said. “Five minutes.”

“Okay. Five minutes.”

He pressed the disconnect button on the phone’s handset, and leaned back in his chair. A few minutes later he was heading out down the main driveway, under the lime trees, the bluebells now fully out in bloom.

7 What Parents Do

The church was right next to Hope Springs. The community’s grounds were enclosed by a two metre high wall, which formed one side of the triangular church car park. The road formed the second side and the vicarage railings the third. The entrance to the churchyard was at the top of the triangle, and Cassie was sitting on one of the benches inside the lychgate, in the shade of its roof.

“Just as well it’s not a date, ’cos I haven’t made much effort,” she said, coming out into the sunlight. She was wearing a baggy green tee-shirt, and jeans that were faded down the front and dark on either side. “So, where are we going, then?”

Danny stood there, mouth part-open. “I...”

She laughed. “Come on,” she said. “Take me through the grounds of the school. I’ve never been there. I want to see if it’s like they say.”

When she said “school” she meant Hope Springs. Villagers still called it Wishbourne Hall School, even though it had been run by HoST for something like ten years now.

“What do they say it’s like?”

She was past him already, so Danny turned and trotted to catch up.

“You’re all naturists,” said Cassie. “And devil worshippers, of course. You dance naked under the full moon and sacrifice babies to The Dark One Below. You grow pot in the greenhouses, too. And there’s lots of brainwashing going on all the time, of course. That’s what you’re like. It’s what everyone says so it has to be true, doesn’t it?”

“Through here,” Danny pointed to a small trail through the trees, cutting away from the main driveway.

“So what’s it like, then? Living in a commune. Does everyone wear sandals and have long beards and things?”

“Only the women,” said Danny. “It’s not a commune, really. It’s an experiment in sustainable living. We recycle everything we can. We grow a lot of our own food. We treat our own sewage and generate our own electricity. People come from all over the world to learn from Hope Springs.”

They passed some houses. “These are all private homes,” Danny told her. “Nothing to do with Hope Springs. When the school closed down they sold off some of the land for building and put the money into the Hope Springs Trust.”

They came to a clearing in the trees. From here, they could look over the vegetable plots to the main school building, Wishbourne Hall, a solid, red-brick construction with narrow windows that made it look vaguely monastic.

“That’s good,” said Cassie. “I made that eight or nine.”

Danny looked sideways at Cassie. She was waiting for him to ask what on earth she meant. Smirking. He looked down, and walked in silence.

“Sentences,” she said, finally. “All in a row. Don’t stop. Go on: tell me more. I want to know about this place. It’s like, another little village stuck slap bang in the middle of Wishbourne. Different rules.”

“We have an open day in a couple of weeks. You’re early.”

They came to the lake and followed the path around one side.

“So where are they, then?”

Again: waiting for him to ask what she meant.

He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.

“The springs. It’s called Hope Springs. There must be springs.”

Danny had never thought of it like that. “There’s a stream,” he said. “It runs into the lake. The spring must be up the hill somewhere.”

“So, it’s Hope Streams, then, really. Or Hope
Stream
. Not Hope Springs at all. I might come and change it one night, on the sign at the bottom of the drive. Cross out the ‘Springs’ and write ‘Stream’. Just for the sake of accuracy. So what are you doing here? How did you end up in a place like this?”

“Things got tight,” he said. The official version of events, as far as anyone here knew. “Dad lost his job. We couldn’t afford to stay in London. Mum sold up and bought a stake in Hope Springs Trust and a lease on a flat in the Hall.”

“What about your dad?”

Danny stared at her. What did she know? What had she heard?

“You’re like, your dad loses his job but it’s your mum who sells up and buys into the kooky club. There’s a jump there. A gap in your story.”

He swallowed.

“They separated. It’s just me, my gran and my brother, Josh, now.”

One of the willows had a big branch that split off from the trunk just above ground level and swept out over the lake where the stream rushed in. Cassie stepped out onto it and sat with her back against the main trunk.

“Parents,” she said. “Larkin was right, wasn’t he?”

Danny looked at her, lost again.

“Philip Larkin. The poet. They mess you up. That’s what he said parents do. They fill you up with all their faults and then they give you some more, too. Only he said it better than that in the poem. There’s a lot of truth in poetry.”

Too much truth, perhaps, thought Danny.

“There was a crow sat on a plough,” he recited. “He hasn’t gone, he’s still there now.”

Cassie snorted out a laugh, and shifted so that Danny could sit with her. “Like I say,” she said. “A lot of truth. Your crow poses the big question of existence: why are we here? Simple. It’s because we haven’t gone. Poetry has all the answers.”

“Your parents?”

“Divorced.”

Danny leaned down to pick up a stick, then sat tracing shapes in the water with it.

“Everything was fine,” said Cassie. “They’re still best friends. But one day Dad just announced that he’d decided he was gay and that was it. Not a lot you can say to that. I didn’t tell anyone for ages. I used to just tell people he was in prison, but I couldn’t do that once he started visiting with his boyfriend. It took a bit of adjusting, but it’s cool now. Are you shocked?”

Not shocked, just confused. Thrown off guard. She kept asking difficult questions, saying things that made him uncomfortable, like the claim that her father was in prison. Too close to home. Also, he was aware of how close they were sitting.

He stood. “Shall we look for the spring?” he asked.

They followed the stream. It was easy enough at first, but then a wide bed of nettles and brambles made them leave its course for a while.

Farther up the hill it ran between two fields, lined on one bank by a barbed wire fence and on the other by another row of willows. When the going became harder, Cassie kicked off her shoes and went ankle-deep in the water. “Come on,” she said. “It’s bleeding cold, but it’s okay.”

Reluctant, Danny untied his trainers and removed them, and then his socks. He stepped into the water and yelped. It was like ice, and the stones were hard and bit into his feet like rounded teeth. He danced onto his other foot, and instantly the sensations were repeated.

He backed out of the water.

Cassie came laughing after him, and they sat on the crumbling grassy bank, drying their feet in the sun.

“Know what my name means?”

“Hnh?” Danny had been lying back, eyes closed against the bright light. He turned his head and squinted at Cassie.

She had produced some wraparound shades from somewhere and was just putting them on. “My name,” she prompted him.

“I thought they were calling you ‘Kathy’ at first,” said Danny.

She laughed. “Yeah. And everyone had a lithp, mithter Thmith.”

“Cassie. Cassandra? Greek, isn’t it? Or Roman.”

“Very good. Cassandra Jeanette Lomax. Daughter of the king of Troy. Cassandra was, that is. She’s like, the most drop-down gorgeous of all his daughters. Okay. You don’t have to say anything at this point, Smith. Okay? The god Apollo, he gave her the power of prophecy if she’d like, you know, give him a quick tumble in return. But she was a tease, was Cassandra. Once she had what she wanted, she dumped the guy, but you don’t want to be doing that to a god, so he turned his gift into a curse. He made it so that no-one would believe her when she told them something was going to happen, even though she was always right. So she went through her life with no-one believing her. She even foretold her own death, but they didn’t believe that, either. Damned gloomy name to give your first-born, if you ask me.”

Danny shifted on the grass, but said nothing.

“So. Aren’t you going to ask me to look into the future? That’s what people usually do when I tell them the Cassandra story. You say you’re just like everyone else, but you’re not asking the obvious question.”

“Maybe I don’t want to know the future,” said Danny. It was like the astrology: nonsense. But he liked her talking, even so.

“You know what I think? I think maybe someone’s put a spell on you. Maybe even Apollo himself. He’s taken your tongue, cursed you to talk in as few words as possible. One day someone will break that spell and you’ll start to talk and you’ll never stop.”

She had done it again! Another innocent choice of phrase that cut right to the dark depths of his secret past.
I’ll have their tongues
, his father’s journal had said. He had wanted to stop people talking, stop the voices that plagued him, and so he had removed his victims’ tongues.

“You okay?”

“I’m okay. Just some things I’d rather not think about.”

“Okay. You want to kiss me?”

She was looking down at him, leaning on her elbow. She looked nervous, suddenly.

Danny nodded.

“No tongues, mind.” She leaned down and her lips pressed against Danny’s.

He didn’t know whether to close his eyes or not, so he narrowed them. He saw his own eyes in her shades when she was close. He didn’t know whether to breathe or not, but then it was over, and she had pulled back.

“Did it work?” she asked.

He looked at her. This was another one of her questions he didn’t understand.

“The kiss breaks the spell. Or at least, it does in the stories. It turns the frog into the handsome prince. It wakens the sleeping princess.”

Another one of her games.

“You’re supposed to start talking now that your spell has been broken.”

He shook his head, grinning. He couldn’t keep up. “You know what
my
name means?” he asked. “Do you know what’s special about it?”

“Daniel Smith. Let’s see. It’s not obvious, is it? There must be a thousand other Daniel Smiths out there. Daniel. Something biblical. Isn’t it the name of one of the books in the bible? They could have called you Leviticus, I suppose... And Smith. Someone who makes things. Blacksmith. Locksmith. Silversmith. It means you have traditionalist parents who chose you a good biblical name, and that somewhere in the past you have an ancestor who did things with his hands. Am I right?”

“Maybe. But you missed out what it hides. It’s not really Smith – it’s Schmidt. Or at least, my Gran changed her surname to the English equivalent when she came to England. She came here in the 1960s with her two brothers. They managed to cross the Berlin Wall from the communist part of the city. The three of them made it but their sister didn’t. She came much later. They didn’t know she was still alive, until she turned up on the doorstep one day. She’s ... dead now.”

“Your gran. Is she the one who lives with you now?”

Danny nodded. “She’s a Smith officially, but we still call her ‘Oma Schmidt’ at home. That’s German for Grandma Smith.”

Cassie giggled. “Sounds like an apple! Granny Smith. That’s biblical, too: the apple in the Garden of Eden. Temptation. Original sin and all that.”

He was getting used to the way Cassie’s mind raced off in so many different directions. Sort of.

Rather than follow the course of the stream back down the hill, they cut through to the track that led down from Moreton Farm.

“You can hold my hand if you like.”

He did. Her hand was tiny in his. It made him think of Beauty and the Beast.

“You know what I think?”

She was going to tell him, he was sure. He waited, and she continued.

“I think that one day you might actually trust someone enough that you’ll open up and tell them all the things you’re always so careful to keep locked up inside.”

“I don’t believe you, Cassandra. I don’t believe anything you tell me about the future.”

She smacked his arm with her free hand.

They came to the gate at the top end of the Hope Springs grounds. Danny opened it and held it for Cassie. Once in the grounds, he didn’t take her hand again.