The Northern Clemency (93 page)

“I don’t think so,” he said in the end. He was, quite firmly, between her and the front door.

An hour and a half before, she had let him into her flat, had said, “Remind me,” with a faint stirring of memory. “And how did you get in?”

“I used to live opposite you, in Rayfield Avenue.”

“Oh, right,” Sandra said. “Sheffield. So—welcome to Australia. You should have phoned, though. Are you here on holiday?”

“I tried to phone,” the man said, “but I never got anything but the answer-phone message. I thought it would be best to turn up and surprise you.”

“You’ve certainly done that,” Sandra said. “Are you here on holiday?” she asked again.

“Where shall I put these?” Tim said, holding her bags of shopping. “I’m here for ten days. I flew in yesterday.”

“It’s nice to see you,” Sandra said. “But you should have phoned. I might easily not have been around, and it’s not all that convenient now—I’m going to have to rush out in an hour or two.” She paused and looked at him. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I remember you.”

He stared at her. “I never thought you wouldn’t.”

“Well, I do.”

“You sound—” He stopped, looked away from her, as if thinking of the right word.

“I’ve got to sound pretty Australian,” Sandra said. “I know, if that’s what you were about to say.”

“Australian?” Timothy said, turning with a wild expression in his eyes.

“Is it the jet lag?” Sandra said, and tried what she used to call, jokingly, a light sociable Manly laugh. This was an old acquaintance, dropping in from England. “You seem pretty confused. It can really mess with your head. You’re in Australia.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” Timothy said. “When you said—what you said—and I said—I said you sound—you sound like it’s surprising, like it’s some feat of memory that you remember me at all. I wasn’t going to say you’d got an Australian accent.”

She wandered over to the kitchen, kicking off her shoes against the breakfast bar, poking them back upright with her toes as she went. She opened the fridge door and began to put away the groceries, which Timothy had left on the kitchen counter. “Do you want a beer?” she said. “They’re cold.”

“No thanks,” he said.

“Well, I’m going to have one, if you don’t mind,” Sandra said. She wondered what she was supposed to do with this guest; how she could get rid of him. In his behaviour it seemed as if she had invited him round, and instead of him explaining what the hell he was doing there, he was waiting for her to unveil the surprise outing she’d planned. She could hardly remember him; there was an obvious explanation for why he was here, but she couldn’t imagine he was a likely ambassador from
any source. She’d half expected someone to appear like this, but she’d expected, really, her brother. “What are you doing in Australia?” she said, pouring the beer with a judicious eye down the inner slope of a glass.

“It’s hard to say,” he said.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “I don’t know why I came to Australia. I just came and I stayed. I thought there’d be kangaroos everywhere. That’s the only idea I had of Australia. But I stayed anyway. Have you just got here?”

“Yes, only this morning.”

“You
must
be jet-lagged,” Sandra said, sitting down on the edge of an armchair. “And you came straight over to see me?” She had a bit of a sinking feeling. “I’m really flattered.”

“I thought I wouldn’t waste time.”

“And are you going to travel?” Sandra said, seeing in this a way to turn this obviously pointless visit into a purposeful one, and to get rid of what might be a clinging self-invited guest to Perth, Darwin, the outback, Ayers Rock, or Uluru, as it was called these days.

“I hadn’t thought,” Timothy said, and tried a smile in response to hers. Like those trick two-dimensional portraits, his eyes followed her as she moved about the room, tidying up. “I’ve got two weeks. Where would you go, if you were me?”

She hadn’t been a great traveller herself since she arrived here. “Well,” she said. There’d been trips with boyfriends to the Blue Mountains, now and again. There’d been the odd week on the Gold Coast. A few times she’d had to go to Darwin or Hobart to sort out the regional offices there—she’d always meant to stay on in Tasmania especially. There’d been that bloke from Melbourne she’d met at Irene’s—he’d been Greek, her cousin, not a dentist—who’d seemed quite interested. For his sake, she’d spent half a dozen weekends in that unexpectedly Manchester-like city of industrial magnates and over-endowed palaces of art and insurance; in the end, she’d concluded that she’d always have to spend evenings with him chewing over where he’d gone wrong with his ex-wife, and called an end to it. There’d been, too, a girls’ week in Fiji—they’d all taken half a dozen different bikinis, one for each day and the white one for towards the end when they’d got really brown, where they’d seen nothing of Fiji except a vast piss-cloudy swimming-pool of inlets and artificial waterfalls and flumes and lagoons, densely fringed with skirted waiters bringing cocktails to a hell of a lot of other Australians. It had been a blast. “I’m not much of
a traveller myself,” Sandra said, “but you ought to see as much as you can. Ayers Rock. The Great Barrier Reef. The Blue Mountains.”

Timothy’s eyes went beseechingly over her face, not looking at her, but as if searching for imperfections. “I hadn’t really made any plans,” he said.

“I must have changed a lot,” Sandra said. “Would you have recognized me?”

“Oh, yes,” Timothy said, with fervour. “I’d have recognized you.”

That look, as of a spaniel being promised a held-up biscuit, had not left the man’s face since he’d arrived. It seemed to be exaggerated by the fact that he had nothing in his hands, not even a drink. Sandra got up hastily and, without asking, went to the kitchen cupboard. She got one of the heavy blue Czech tumblers for whisky and, without asking, filled it with ice and a mixture of lemonade and orange juice from a carton. “Try this,” she said, handing it over as if the drink was some secret recipe, handed down through her family.

He took it with surprise, but he took it, and sipped it cautiously. His eyes never left her; she realized that she’d handed it over and stood there watching him, like a strict-but-kind nurse. It occurred to her that, after all, she only had his word for who he said he was: the grown-up version of a little boy she barely remembered. He could—she supposed—be anyone. Looking at his sallow awkward English freckled skin hanging off his cheekbones, his awkwardnesses at elbow and knees, she could discern no clue to a lost memory of anyone. She just could not call the face to mind; only a single memory.

“I remember,” Sandra said slowly, “the first time I saw you, you were screaming and shouting.”

“I don’t know about that,” Timothy said.

“I remember,” Sandra said. “It was the day we were moving in. Your mother came out of the house with a snake in both hands, and you were behind her, trying to get the snake off her, and screaming your head off. And she sort of threw it down and stamped on it, and you went into hysterics.”

“Yes,” Timothy said. He looked disinclined to think of this as a funny episode. “I remember.”

“It was the strangest thing to see when you’re moving in somewhere new,” Sandra said. “At first I thought—I didn’t know anything about the North—at first I thought, just for a moment, that there must be snakes in the north, like in that story you read at school, with the mongoose, and your mother had just found one and thrown it out.”

“That wasn’t it,” Timothy muttered.

“No,” Sandra said. “I guess it wasn’t.”

“Are there snakes here?” Timothy said, and suddenly she saw him as he had been, grinding out questions like a rusty machine, hardly caring what the answer was, whether there was any answer.

“Not that you’d notice,” Sandra said.

“Eight out of the ten most venomous snakes in the world,” Timothy said, “live in Australia. And the most venomous of all is the inland Taipan.”

“Is that a fact?” Sandra said.

“It is,” Timothy said, coming out of what might have been a small trance of memory. “I’d forgotten I knew that. I used to be mad keen on snakes when I was a kid. That’s what all that was about.”

“The—” Sandra mimed Katherine, a snake above her head in both hands, flinging it down, stomping on the head, grinding her heel round “—whole performance? I never really heard the story.”

“There wasn’t much to it,” Tim said briskly. “I got crazy about snakes. You know how some kids always have some passionate interest on the go.”

“I guess so,” Sandra said.

“Well, with me, it was snakes. I don’t know why!”

“I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

Tim shrugged, finished his lemonade and orange juice in a single gulp.

“I got interested,” he said, in a more reasonable tone. “I read a lot about snakes. I used to dream of finding one of those English snakes, an adder or a grass snake, down on the lower crags, you know?”

The lower crags: something very like a memory started up in Sandra. It was as if, on an old automatic gramophone, the needle had come to the end of an LP, had lifted, returned, lowered and once more begun to play unsuspected, familiar strains. The lower crags: this man was who he said he was.

“But you never see snakes in England, or hardly ever,” he went on. “You have to get exactly the right terrain, and not often even there. So when I say I was interested in snakes, I mean I read about them in books. I borrowed books from the library—there was one I didn’t take back for a year and a half, and then I didn’t take it back, my mum found it and took it back, and I didn’t get any pocket money for a whole year, really, not just a threat, I really didn’t. I used to sit up and learn all their names, their Latin names, the inland Taipan is
Oxyripidus
something. I
found out all about their habitats and what they ate, and how endangered they were, because most snakes are endangered to some degree. But mostly I wanted to have one of my own. Not a venomous one, I wanted a yellow python, and you could get them in this shop in Sheffield I knew about. I knew my mum and dad would never let me have one—well, my dad, maybe, he’s got his hobbies and interests, he’d have understood, but my mum never would have. I saved up for about two years, I reckon.”

“That was before you had your pocket money confiscated, I suppose,” Sandra said, not greatly interested.

“Yes, of course,” Timothy said. “That all happened long afterwards. I’d forgotten about the library book by then.”

“Oh dear,” Sandra said.

Timothy looked at her; she buried her expression in a glass of beer. “It wasn’t enough, though, I had to make up in other ways. I took a couple of pounds from my dad’s wallet every now and again. And then once, this never happened to me before and never since, I just found a five-pound note on the Manchester Road. You know how children are, how superstitious, and I thought that meant I was supposed to buy the snake. But of course my mum, she’d never have let me have one, so at first I just asked the man in the shop if I could have a snake of my own, there, to visit, which he wouldn’t sell. And he did, and I went down there, but after a bit, you have to have the snake with you all the time, don’t you? So I had to sneak a vivarium into the house, and put it under my bed, and then finally, when I knew no one was going to be at home, I went and collected Geoffrey, he was called Geoffrey, he was a yellow carpet python. I thought I’d be able to keep him there without anyone noticing, feed him on frozen mice, you get frozen mice from pet shops quite easily.”

“Are they still frozen when the snakes eat them?”

“No, you defrost them first,” Timothy said. “And some snakes won’t eat dead mice at all, you have to feed them live ones. So I had this snake underneath my bed, and I suppose it was starting to smell a bit in there, quite quickly—my brother, Daniel, he went on about it. And then one day I thought I’d take Geoffrey out to show him the new people moving in opposite—”

“Oh dear,” Sandra said. “I knew this was all going to be my fault somehow.”

“It’s not your fault,” Tim said. “It was your mum, she saw Geoffrey
and she told my mum, without knowing he was a secret, and then, well, you saw the rest.”

“Right,” Sandra said. They were silent for a moment. Sandra remembered not so much that, but that Katherine’s husband had run off, that that was the first thing she’d announced, and a week later he was back again. It had taken ages for them to speak to each other, the two families, without embarrassment. For Timothy it was all about his stupid snake. “How is everyone in Sheffield, anyway?”

“Well,” Timothy said. “You know, I think I will have a drink. A proper one.” Sandra got up, and without asking further, fetched him a beer from the fridge, handed it to him with a fresh glass. “Your mum—well, you know about your mum …”

“Yes,” Sandra said. This was what she had been expecting, and she sat down heavily, with a set look on her face. “She’s making a good recovery. It was quite serious.”

“It was quite serious,” Timothy said. “They thought she was going to die, my mum says.”

“She’s recovering well,” Sandra insisted. “My dad’s been keeping me up to date. I would have come over, but I don’t know what I could have done and, thank God, it worked out for the best.”

“You know,” Timothy said, “I don’t think anyone understands why you didn’t make more of an effort. It looked to most people as if you didn’t care.”

“Or it’s working out,” Sandra said. “She’s getting better all the time. She’ll be leaving hospital before too long. I’ll come over soon. So people like you can just—”

“It didn’t look very good,” Timothy said. “People were surprised.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Sandra said. “Who was surprised?”

“Well, most people,” Timothy said. “Most people were surprised that you didn’t come over. That’s what I meant.”

“I can tell you, my dad completely understood,” Sandra said, who knew exactly what Timothy had meant, having expected it for some time. “He said straight away, he’s gone on saying, he didn’t expect me to come over.”

“That’s exactly what you would say in the circumstances,” Timothy said. “I don’t know whether he would have meant it.”