Chapter 18
When Tom woke up, it was like swimming to the surface of a deep lake, pushing up through the weeds into the light.
He was breathing fast, and someone’s hand was on him.
He cried out when he realized he still couldn’t see, although in fact he could make out figures, the wall of his room; and then he shouted, because he could tell Helen Caught Bathing had been moved and his drawings were exposed.
But no sound came out, and the hand that stroked his hair was cool, the palms callused.
‘Jenny! Where’s Gordon? They were after Gordon!’ he tried to say, but his throat was so dry it came out in a rasping whisper.
‘Darling boy,’ said the voice, and Tom blinked again. ‘Well, well. What on earth have you been up to?’
Tom shielded his eyes from the light, which was too bright, and saw the outline of a figure standing before him. He closed his eyes again. He was so tired. ‘You’re not real,’ he said.
‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ said the voice he knew so well, and a warm hand enclosed itself around his smaller one. ‘I brought you a present, old boy, and I was hoping very much to give it to you. But perhaps you’re right, in which case I should vanish.’
‘Dad!’ Tom cried, struggling slowly up in bed, flinging his arms around his father, who, stiff with astonishment at first, hugged him back after a while, so fiercely that Tom scarcely had any breath left and simply clung to him, too weak to do more.
‘Dad! You’re really here.’ He felt dizzy, like he’d fallen over, even though he was lying in bed.
His father laughed, his kind, gentle laugh, as if it had been five minutes, not more than three years, and then, as he realized Tom was crying, said, ‘Shh. Here – I say – I’m here, Tom. I’m here! Shh. It’s all right, old thing. Yes, it’s all right.’
‘What happened?’ Tom asked his father a little later. ‘I don’t remember. Anything.’
His father told him what he knew: Tom had been knocked to the ground when the Teddy Boys started chasing the Black men and the white woman who was married to one of them.
There had been running battles with white boys on the streets, people attacked, shops looted.
The force of the second petrol bomb had knocked Tom backwards, and he had hit his head. They couldn’t wake him up.
No one could find Henry, so Gordon and his friends had carried him back to the house on a makeshift stretcher: a door a friend of Gordon had taken from a ransacked shop on Blenheim Crescent.
They bore him back down Ladbroke Grove, stepping over the glass from smashed milk bottles and broken windows, looted fruit and veg; rubbish and sheets of discarded newspaper flew into their faces in the hot, tundra-like summer wind.
Jenny had been in bed, still ill with this flu that had laid her low for so much of the summer, but she had struggled downstairs, fainting when she saw Tom, carried in Gordon’s arms, and so they’d had to bring her round too.
When she came to, she joked that she’d just wanted to be carried upstairs as well.
She’d made Gordon and his friends tea while they waited for the doctor.
When he arrived, Tom was still unconscious, and the doctor had said his father should be contacted, just in case.
So Jenny had done so, sending a telegram, then making a telephone call, placed to Mrs Fairly, the farmer’s wife down the way, and the next day Tom’s father had arrived, having caught the first train down.
But Tom was asleep, Jenny was back in bed, and Edward had to near-enough bang down the door before Henry let him in.
At first Tom didn’t remember any of it, but then he started to piece it all together, extraordinary events popping up in his brain like road signs as he tried to speak, to see properly.
In his little room, a festive atmosphere developed.
Tom apologized for scribbling over the walls.
Jenny said that was fine, and started to cry, then laugh rather manically.
Edward opened a bottle of cherryade; Jenny produced some more Fry’s Turkish Delight; Henry suddenly appeared – apparently someone had tried to steal his wallet and he’d had to give chase, which is why he’d ended up far away from Tom – and Edward told a funny story about his journey down, Henry chiming in afterwards with a story about having his pocket picked after D-Day, on leave in Leicester Square.
Tom, sitting in bed and smiling along, could not quite believe it; they were all there, in this little room, for the first time, together. A sort of family.
So he did not tell them his head ached dreadfully now; when he sat up black spots danced in front of his eyes, growing larger, obliterating more of his vision, and he couldn’t seem to blink them away.
‘I hoped I’d see you again, my darling boy,’ his father said when it was just the two of them again. ‘But I didn’t expect it would be this dramatic. You could have just dropped me a note!’ He gave a rather forced hearty laugh.
Tom closed his eyes. He felt less dizzy and sick that way. ‘I didn’t see the point.’
‘I rather got that impression,’ said his father, which Tom, through waves of confusion, found rather a strange thing to say. ‘Well, I’m here now.’
‘You won’t go, will you?’ said Tom. ‘Not … right away, I mean,’ he added, trying to sound brave. ‘But stay, just a little bit.’
‘’Course I will, Tom!’ his father said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ His voice sounded thick, and strange. He looked older too. His thick dark hair was streaked with silver, and his five o’clock shadow, always prominent, was noticeably less so now. Tom clutched his father’s worn, callused, dear hand.
‘I wish you’d written,’ he said eventually.
‘I did, old boy. Every week. And I was rather sad when you told Jenny you didn’t want to hear from me.’
Tom kept blinking, unsure as to whether he’d heard right.
‘Dad – that’s not true.’
‘It is, my boy. She wrote me an extremely firm letter.’
Tom struggled to sit up straight. ‘No, Dad. Jenny told me – she said you didn’t want to hear from me. She said you’d said it was easier not to write. That I should write you one letter and then a clean break was best.’
‘She – no, I didn’t do that, Tom. I wouldn’t ever have done that.’ His father said something under his breath. ‘All this – you – oh, Jenny. I didn’t say that. I wrote to you at least once a week, for months.’
‘But I didn’t get any letters from you. None. I just thought you’d – stopped bothering.’
‘God dammit, Tom, no. God, Jenny.’ Edward climbed out of the bed. Tom watched him, trying to quell the rising tide of panic over the black spots that kept arriving and vanishing in his vision, like blots on a reel of film.
‘Dad –’
‘Has she mistreated you, Tom?’ He caught his son by the shoulders. ‘Beaten you? Has Henry – done – done anything?’
‘No, Dad, honest.’ said Tom. ‘We keep ourselves to ourselves. I do most of the cleaning and the cooking, though, neither of them knows one end of an egg from the other.’ He paused, waiting for his father to laugh.
‘They’re mostly in their rooms, Dad – I’ve no idea why they wanted me with them.
They’re really not very interested in children. ’
‘She promised me –’ His father was standing up in the small, cold little room, his fist pressed to his forehead. ‘Did she say anything to you? Anything about your mother? And me?’
‘No, Dad.’ Tom could not see his father’s expression clearly enough – he could not see anything at all beyond blurred, expansive shapes, like large woolly monsters. ‘No, but she’s sad. She cries a lot. She gets letters from Gordon once a month, and they make her cry.’
‘What kind of letters?’
‘I don’t know.’ Tom paused. ‘I saw one once. She left it on the sideboard. It had an American stamp on it. I don’t know why they can’t come straight to the house.’ His father was very still. Tom said, faltering, ‘Once she didn’t get any for ages and she went to bed for a whole week.’
His father was quiet for a while. He stared out of the window, across the rooftops, where smoke from fires and police sirens filled the air.
‘Ah, Tom. I’m sorry. What a fool. Yet again.
Listen to me. Jenny’s played a trick. On both of us.
She likes being the one at the controls.
Only she’s very bad at it. But, you have to understand, she was doing it for the best. For the best. God dammit –’ He caught his son’s hands. ‘Never again, you understand?’
‘Yes,’ Tom said. He wanted to say more, but his vision was so blurred and dark now he could hardly see, and he sat back, catching his breath.
‘Nothing will prevent our being in touch now. Don’t worry. You’re my son, and I shouldn’t have bloody well sat back and accepted it all. Trust me, it’ll be different. I’ve found you again. Don’t worry –’
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, my boy?’ His father dropped to his knees beside Tom’s bed. ‘What is it?’
‘Dad – you’re vanishing,’ Tom said.
The blackness was burning through the drawings of the cottage and the hills, it was burning through the wall and his quilt and his father’s strong, tanned hands. Everything, slowly, was vanishing.
‘Ah, you poor thing. I shouldn’t have – I’ll speak to her. Don’t worry. You’re tired, my boy. Rest up,’ his father said.
‘No, Dad,’ said Tom, his voice small. ‘Everything’s going black. I – I can’t see you any more.’
‘What?’
‘You’re melting away. Like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. I can’t see you. I can’t see you at all, Dad –’
His eyes hurt from blinking; he heard his father swearing under his breath, the scraping of the chair on the splintered wooden floor, the retreating thunder as his father ran downstairs, roaring for Henry and Jenny, his voice thick with anger, with terror.
He was alone in the room again, and now the darkness would not shift. It seemed to have settled over his sight, like night falling.