A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better Read online

  for Nick

  SIDE ONE

  Two Weathers

  Until that dismal week in August, when every plan he made was an attempt to cancel out another and every word he spoke was a diversion or a lie, I believed my father was a good man, somebody whose blood was fit to share. It’s easy to say now that I was wrong about him, just as it’s easy to dismiss his prior accomplishments in light of what occurred. But I was twelve years old that summer—as callow a boy as you could find, raised in a quiet street, pillowed by it—and I couldn’t tell a grown man’s imperfections from his fatal flaws. Maybe this naivety of mine was wilful. Maybe I’d already fathomed the extent of his deficiencies, seen it in a glitter-smear of lipstick on his cheek one night when he came home, and decided to ignore it. The truth is, everything I know about his life is altered with each explanation of it, gets magnified to such a scale that I glimpse meanings in the grain that are not there. This isn’t my attempt to rationalise him, only to account for what he made me. I can give you honesty, if little else.

  That wretched week still slants the parts of me that should be upright, turns thoughts that should be clear and bright to murk. I’m not the Daniel Hardesty I was back then (by law, in fact: I changed my name when I was twenty) and yet I’ve been unable to erase the residue of him. How is it possible that a few short days of misery can corrupt a lifetime? How is it that we let ourselves be so defined by other people’s sins? All I know is, from the moment I was old enough to recognise his absence, my father had the most peculiar hold on me.

  He always had two ways of being—‘two weathers’, my mother used to say of him—and he could switch between them without warning, without reason. There was gentle Francis Hardesty who stood too close to me in pictures, who hooked his arm around my shoulder everywhere we went, clung to me as though afraid that I’d forget the colour of his eyes if they weren’t near. And there was the distant other, who vanished into upstairs rooms without me, who leaned in doorways with young women, pretending that he couldn’t hear me as they giggled at his whispers; the Fran Hardesty who planted me on barstools to play fruit machines with pocket change while he attended to his own affairs, who let me have only the outermost of his attention, his perfunctory concern.

  I loved him, and it shames me that I loved him, though everything he claimed to feel for me was just an affectation or a gesture of persuasion. I accept that this is not enough to vindicate my part in things. Still, when I think about that August week and what transpired, I know it is the fault line under every forward step I try to make. His mistakes are my inheritance. The rotten blood he gave me is the blood I will pass on.

  I can’t pretend to have been blessed with a prodigious memory for details, but I remember more than I care to, and there’s one period of my childhood I don’t need to recollect because it’s documented for me. Here, for instance, are the items that were in my father’s glovebox, catalogued the day his car was found by the police:

  One half-eaten pack of Fox’s Glacier Mints, the wrapper torn back in a coil. Wooden golf tees of assorted colour, all unused. Three black Grundig cassette tapes bearing his careful handwriting in green biro: Blue Bell Knoll, Treasure, Louder than Bombs. A pair of nail scissors, bent. A 275ml tub of Swarfega. One rumpled envelope containing a receipt from Bryant’s Coachworks for ‘repairs to rear side door’, dated 19th July 1993. A Volvo 240 owner’s manual in a faux-leather case. A box of Anadin in which every capsule had been thumbed out of the blister-pack. Thirty-four pence in change: a twenty, a ten, and two coppers. What else? The red wax belt from a Babybel cheese, gone hard. A broken pen from the Hotel Metropole, Leeds. An empty cigarillo tin.

  These objects were not introduced as evidence, but their images still pad out his case file like expired coupons in a drawer. They are all inconsequential now, and yet by virtue of their placement in his glovebox at a certain point in time they’ve come to bear significance. So much of the fine print of our lives goes disregarded until one unlawful action makes it all portentous, worthy of examining for clues, and I can’t help but scrutinise my past in the same way. As though the truth rests somewhere in these incidentals. As though what happened was a gradual accretion of small, ordinary things that no one thought to notice.

  Our village had a life before my father, too, of course. Little Missenden was the kind of place that people still referred to as a parish. It was a pleasant rest stop in the Chiltern hills, known best for its Saxon church and manor houses: sites of niche historical interest that drew occasional visitors from London and beyond. Flannel-shirted men would often stop by to paint watercolours, and I would stand behind their easels while they sketched, numbing them with questions. They never seemed to capture the same landscape that I saw. They drew trees with bold distinctive shapes, birds of no velocity, cottages with characterful faces, country lanes mottled with shade. The Little Missenden I knew was harder to convey, a picture of entangled spaces. It was a rutted loop of track on which I rode my bike, the crawl space I’d spent years working underneath our garden hedge, the coin spout in the public phone box where my figurines camped out on recon missions, the flagpole on the belfry of the church that I could see from every upstairs window of our house, the perfect sleighing camber of the fields I prayed for snow to cover every Christmas. Things like these are how you separate a home from its location. If I had the courage to return to them today, I know I’d find them changed—and changed is just another word for gone.

  The first change happened on a quiet Thursday morning, 17th August 1995, when I saw his old blue Volvo coming down our road like some dark clot inside a vein. I had woken early to look out for him, kneeling on the hardwood bench that spanned our guestroom window. For so long, the empty lane outside our house was just a dewy trail of bitumen, a parade ground for the crows, and I felt deflated every time I heard an engine revving in the distance that didn’t materialise on our driveway.

  My mother had spent weeks preparing me for disappointment: she wanted me to understand that Francis Hardesty, despite his many pledges and assurances, might not appear at all. ‘Your father does whatever suits him,’ she’d warned me. ‘If he lets you down, it won’t be personal. You’ll just have slipped his mind completely.’ I never liked it when she spoke of him this way. The more she levelled at my father in his absence, the easier it was to close my ears. He became less faulty in our separations. I believed that he would prove her wrong someday, demonstrate his true efficiency.

  That morning, she was waiting to receive him in the hallway. Perhaps she had been standing there for hours. When the bell rang, she was staring at the gilded clock over the door. ‘Seven thirty on the dot,’ she said to me, as I came downstairs. ‘It can’t actually be him. We mustn’t be awake yet.’ But we both saw the looming smudge of his body through the door glass, the pale disc of his face above the fabric of his shirt, the blackness of his hair. I had never listened so intently to the sound of our own doorbell before; it seemed to ring inside my head longer than usual—now and then, I come across another with the same artificial chime and its quaint music rattles through me.

  My father stood a moment on the front step, looking in. I wish I could describe him for you in a way that makes him seem a likely candidate for prison: tattooed fingers, skinhead, biker’s leather, someone who could overpower me with a simple shift of his blank eyes. But the fact is, Francis Hardesty was not striking in his build. He was five foot nine and lean—skinny isn’t the right word for him, because there was still a paunchiness about his middle. He dressed in polyester shirts and crew-neck sweaters, always plain or faintly patterned, and stonewashed jeans or navy cords that grew patchy where he kept his keys and wal
let. What gave him such an influence on people was the texture of his voice—it had a radio announcer’s fullness, soft where other men’s were sharp; deep and slightly murmuring. And he was handsome, too; handsome in an inadvertent way. His nose, for instance, had a bridge as hefty as a knuckle and yet the arches of his nostrils were slim and deft to counterbalance it. His eyes had a colour that I’ve not encountered since: a honeyed shade of brown with inner spokes of orange. He liked to stay clean-shaven, but if he let the stubble grow for longer than a day, it lent his face a different quality, kinder, less harassed. Somehow, his one eccentricity—a preference he had for cigarillos—gave him an air of poise, of single-mindedness, when it could’ve made him look pretentious. He was a loyal smoker of the Café Crème variety, except he thought that name was better suited to a pudding, so he called them Wintermans instead, as in, ‘One more Wintermans for me, then I’m calling it a night.’ The rims of his index and middle fingers were permanently yellowed by them; his clothes, his hair, his skin reeked of their musk.

  He was squinting at my mother on the threshold. ‘Kath,’ he said, giving a timid wave. ‘Good to see you. Is he ready?’ She had barred one arm across the doorway out of instinct, and he leaned to stare beyond it. ‘I hope you’re ready in there, sunshine. Get your things. We need to beat the traffic.’

  I was more than ready: bathed and dressed and full of cornflakes, my holdall packed the night before. I’d barely slept. But I was too elated by the sight of him to speak. It was so rare for him to live up to a promise that it left me partly disbelieving he was there at all. Also, blood was welling in my mouth and I didn’t want to open it. In my excitement, I had jumped down from the ledge and nicked my tongue with my hind teeth.

  ‘What’s the matter—lost your voice?’ he called to me. ‘Grab your things. Let’s go.’

  My mother handed him my bag. He sagged to the left, pretending it was too much load for him to bear. ‘How much has he packed in here?’

  ‘It’s mostly books, I think,’ she said. ‘I tried to make him scale back, but he’s stubborn.’

  ‘This must be the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’

  ‘Give it a few hours, he’ll need something to read.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing, Fran. Nothing.’

  I tugged my mother’s sleeve, showed her my tongue.

  ‘Ooh, that looks sore,’ she said. ‘What happened?’ She studied the wound under the light. ‘Okay. Get yourself a piece of kitchen towel and wrap an ice cube in it. Hold it on there for ten minutes.’

  I did as she advised—my mother had no medical expertise or training, but she always knew the best methods for treating minor injuries, and seemed able to draw answers from a vast resource of knowledge. At the time, I found it vaguely mystical, though, of course, it was maternal instinct and sound logic.

  When I came out from the kitchen, Francis Hardesty was gone and so was my holdall. I found him on the driveway with my mother, who was still in her silk dressing gown and slippers. He was bungeeing a clutch of short thin planks to the roof rack of the Volvo, and she was talking to his sweaty back while he got on with it. ‘There,’ he said, turning to her. ‘That better now? Do I pass the inspection?’

  She stepped away. ‘I don’t get why you didn’t put them up there in the first place.’

  ‘I don’t get why I can’t just store them in the garage.’

  ‘You don’t live here, Fran, that’s why, and it’s about time you got used to it. No more dirty boots in my kitchen, no more dumping off-cuts in my garage. No more taking liberties, full stop.’ At this point, she saw me coming down the path with the wrapped-up ice cube pressed against my mouth. ‘Everything’s loaded now. Just making extra space.’

  ‘We’re clear for take-off,’ my father said. He came and patted my head. ‘Take a seat and buckle up. I just need to go in and use the toilet, if it’s all right with your mother.’

  ‘Use the one downstairs,’ she told him, and he went off inside.

  I got into the passenger seat. The car was warm and fragrant with chemicals, the plastic of the armrest singed, as though the bare flame of a lighter had been held against it briefly. My mother knocked on the window, so I wound it down for her. ‘Listen,’ she said, stooping to my eye line. ‘Listen for a sec.’

  I don’t know how long this moment lasted—I didn’t watch the dashboard clock while it was happening—but it often feels as if it took place over one slow stretch of time between two blinks.

  ‘Look, you’ve heard all this before, but try not to get too disappointed if it doesn’t go exactly as you hope it will, okay? I mean, if you don’t get to meet the actors like he said—if Maxine whatshername isn’t there to meet you, or if you don’t get to see them filming—just don’t be too upset, all right? You’ll still have fun, whatever happens. Your dad can be quite funny when he wants to be, and the important thing is that you spend some proper time together. I know that’s important to you. So just enjoy yourself. Be good. Okay?’

  I smiled, hummed in agreement.

  She leaned in and took the wet kitchen paper from my hand. ‘Let me see that tongue.’ I pushed it out. ‘Well, there’s a proper lump, but it’ll heal. Drink plenty of cold water. And phone me from the service stations, just so I know where you are. It’s three and a bit hours to Leeds, if he keeps to the limit.’ She was squeezing the paper in her fist. ‘Hold on while I go and see what’s taking him so long. I love you, son.’

  ‘I love you, too,’ I said.

  She stooped lower, pointing at her cheekbone, and I reached up to kiss her there. The skin felt slightly oiled. I caught the candy-lemon scent of ‘Sunflowers’, her perfume.

  I put my seatbelt on and waited. All the books and card games I’d selected for the trip, my figurines, my camera, were stowed inside my holdall in the boot. I had nothing to occupy myself except a fresh anxiety for what was taking place in the house. Imagined arguments were much worse than those I witnessed; in the peace and quiet when my parents were alone somewhere, beyond surveillance, my hands would glisten with cold sweat and I’d get a queasy feeling in my gut.

  Before too long, my father came outside again, holding a blue coolbox. He was prolonging a dispute that must’ve started somewhere between the downstairs toilet and the front door. ‘No, come on, I’m on your side about this, Kath,’ he was saying. ‘Of course it isn’t fair. But I don’t see why you’re blaming me—you gave me two days’ notice. Two days!’

  ‘It would’ve made a difference, you being there. They like to see both parents at these things.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you. If there aren’t places, there aren’t places. The man was hardly going to change the rules just ’cause of me. If I was that persuasive, we’d be on the kitchen floor right now, believe me.’

  My mother crossed her arms and gave him an expression she usually reserved for cleaning dog muck from our footpath. ‘My god, you’re such a juvenile.’ Above their heads, the sky was dimming. A gloom slow-skated on the bonnet of the Volvo, passing right to left.

  ‘Or maybe you just take yourself a bit too seriously,’ Fran Hardesty went on. ‘And anyway, I’m not convinced it’s right for him. Those places only mess kids up, from what I’ve seen.’

  ‘You’re unbelievable,’ my mother said. ‘Have you not been listening to a word I’ve said?’

  ‘It’s your old man behind this, obviously.’

  ‘Fran. Stop. You’re making it worse.’

  ‘You always wanted him to go to Chesham Park.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I wanted a lot of things . . .’

  I needed a distraction from their squabbling, and my father’s glovebox always had such great potential for discovery: perhaps he’d brought a present for me and had stored it in there for safe keeping? Maybe there would be a photograph of something adult cut out of a magazine, or a dangerous object like a penknife I could hide and use in secret? But I found nothing interesting (see previous). The
giant road atlas of Britain was slotted in the gap beside the handbrake, so I drew it out and flipped to a page at random. I tried to lose myself inside the grid, in all the road numbers and junctions, all the places I had never been: Buckden, Little Paxton, Offord Cluny, Offord D’Arcy, Yelling—a town they must’ve named after my parents.

  I’d only studied two pages by the time I heard my father stamping down the path, calling: ‘Come and say goodbye, then, if you’re going to. We need to hit the road.’ The coolbox was buffeting his thigh. He was hot-faced and shining. I thought at first that he was talking to me, so I unclipped my seatbelt. But then my mother appeared behind him, coming round the passenger side. She opened the door and moved to kiss my temple. ‘Why haven’t you got that belt on?’ she said to me, and then towards the headrest: ‘Fran—what the heck? He hasn’t got his seatbelt on. What’s wrong with you?’

  My father said: ‘Give me a break. We haven’t even left the bloody driveway.’ He was making room in the back footwell for the coolbox.

  ‘Just make sure you drive safely. Take it slow. And please don’t swear.’

  ‘It’s all the other idiots on the road I’d worry about.’

  ‘Be extra vigilant.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ my father said, under his breath. ‘That’s bound to help.’

  She gripped my cheeks and shook me gently by the jaw. ‘Make sure you behave,’ she told me. ‘Make sure he behaves. Don’t let him feed you chocolate bars and Coke. And keep all your receipts.’ If there was one thing that displeased me about my mother, it was this: the way she used me to refract insults in his direction, as though it would disguise her meaning. ‘I’ll miss you so much, darling. Phone me every time you stop. Whenever you’ve a chance.’

  I promised—again—that I would.

  The driver’s door came open with a clunk and my father dropped into the seat. He gripped the wheel and straightened his arms, rolling his head until his neck gave a click. ‘Right, come on.’ He put the key in the ignition. ‘I should probably get fuel at some point.’