Birdman

7

That evening Jack sat at his desk in Ewan's room, gazing at the Windows 98 clouds on the screen. The upper branches of the old beech at the foot of the garden cast shifting, coppery shadows on the wall above him. He didn't need to turn and look to know how the new leaves almost concealed the rusting nails, deep in the flesh of the tree, and the few mossy planks: the remains of the tree house which he and Ewan had crouched in as kids, shouting to the roaring trains in the cutting below.

Sometimes, in his solitariness, Jack strained to remember how it was, how he was. Before. He had an image of a child, lighter than a breath, nothing to stop him floating away over the roof tops into the blue air.

And then — that day. Recollected as a set of jerky scenes spliced carelessly together, slightly grainy, as if he'd cheated and taken the memories not from real life but from a spool of 8mm film tucked somewhere in the back of his parents' attic.

It was mid-September, windy and sunny, and the dried planks of the tree house creaked as the beech, still soft and green with summer sap, bowed in the wind. Jack and Ewan had clashed. They had found four floorboards in a skip; Ewan wanted to build a watch platform in the southernmost branches of the tree, so he could see the trains swaying down the line from Brockley station. Jack wanted the platform at the north end, so he could look off down the track at the misty bridges of New Cross, see the faces of the city workers as they travelled home with their London Evening News.

Jack — an exasperated eight-year-old on a short fuse — shoved his older brother hard against the tree trunk. Ewan's response was ferocious and startling: he recovered his balance, extended sturdy arms and bulldozered, screaming, into Jack. 'I'm telling, I'm telling.' Spittle flew from his mouth. 'I'm telling Dad.'

Jack was caught off balance, sent reeling to the edge of the tree house, coming to a halt half on, half off the deck, his shorts ripped by a nail, legs dangling, the thumb on his left hand trapped between two planks. Pain made him furious.

'Tell then, you bastard! Go on. Bloody tell.'

'I will.' Ewan settled into resentful guilt. His eyebrows closed together, his bottom lip pushed out. 'I hate you, you scally. Bloody, bloody, fucking scally.'

He turned and clambered down the rope ladder, his face closed in angry concentration, and dropped into the railway cutting. Swearing loudly, Jack freed his thumb, pulled himself back into the tree house and lay there, breathing slowly, his throbbing hand sandwiched between his bare knees, angry and exasperated.

Beneath the tree house, where the banks of the cutting flattened into a wide band of undergrowth, the brothers had created a network of paths for their games, each route meticulously explored, mapped, named: a trampled cobweb spiralling out in the bindweed. As Jack watched from the tree house, Ewan chose the southern path, the one dubbed the 'death trail' because it skirted by a rusting immersion heater — 'See that, Ewan? That's an unexploded bomb. A V2 probably.' His clean, dark head bobbed a few times above the undergrowth, the mustard T-shirt flashed. He reached the clearing they called camp 1, beyond which lay the DMZ, demilitarized zone, the lethal V2 and land of the Gooks.

Jack lost interest. Ewan sulked too easily. It tired him. Angry and in pain he slid down out of the tree and went inside to complain about the black-and yellow half-moon bursting under his thumbnail.

Afterwards it was the tree house which cut their mother more deeply than anything. Caffery could see her now, a thought or memory having halted her mid-oven cleaning or mid-washing up, to send her stiffly into the garden, where she would stand, staring at the tree, pink rubber gloves dripping suds into the grass. The last place she'd seen her son.

And then the half-hysterical, helpless outbursts to her husband. 'Explain that tree house, Frank; if it's still there then why isn't he? EXPLAIN IT, Frank! Tell me.'

And Jack's father would cover his ears and sink into the armchair, the sports pages bunching up on his lap, unable to tolerate his wife's anguish, until one day he snatched up a ball-peen hammer and marched out into the mud and rain still wearing his chequered slippers.

Caffery had crept up to this very room and stood wobbling on the bed so he could reach the window and watch the wood cracking, slats dropping to the ground, the mud splatters on his mother's tights as she stood sobbing on the churned-up lawn.

And then, through the bare branches of the trees, on the other side of the railway cutting, he saw someone else.

Ivan Penderecki. Pale, meaty arms propped on his decomposing back fence, grey rain and a distant smile on his face.

Penderecki stood for twenty minutes or so, the house behind him silhouetted against the rain clouds. Then, as if he'd been filled to the brim with satisfaction, he turned and silently walked away.

To Caffery, nine years old, small nose pressed against the steamy glass, that was the proof he'd needed of the inconceivable and the unvoiceable. The thing the police said was an impossibility because 'We've searched every house in the area, Mrs Caffery; we're going to extend the search of the railway cutting; past the New Cross bridge…'

Caffery knew, in the organic, instinctive way a child knows things it has never been told, he knew that Penderecki could show the police exactly where to find Ewan.

The Cafferys gave up the battle in Jack's twenty-first year. They moved back to Liverpool, selling him the house knock-down in return, he understood, for never having to see his face again. Jack the antagonist, the difficult one, the one who wouldn't obey, be quiet, sit still. The one they would rather have lost. They never said the words, but he saw them in his mother's face, when he caught her staring at his thumbnail. The ruby-black bruise had refused to grow out — proof in his mother's eyes of her second son's intent to remind her of that day for ever. Ewan's disappearance had done more than simply diminish Jack in his mother's eyes. He knew that even now she was waiting, somewhere in the sprawling Liverpool suburbs, for what? For him to find Ewan? For him to die too? Caffery didn't know how much she needed from him — what compensation she wanted from him for being the one who was left behind. Now and then, in spite of Veronica and the women who'd come before her, he found himself almost crippled by loss and loneliness.

So he took his energy into a high-velocity sprint up the Met's ranks. Penderecki's name was the first thing he plugged into the PNC computer. And there he found the truth.

John (Ivan) Penderecki, convicted paedophile, two sentences served in the Sixties before coming to live in the same inner-London streets as Jack and Ewan Caffery.

On the shelves in the study — still 'Ewan's room' — lined up and colour coded, stood twelve box files, each crammed with scraps of paper, clingfilm-wrapped John Player cartons, faded Swan Vesta boxes containing paper clips, a rusted nail, a scrap of a burned gas bill, the trivial facts of Penderecki's life collected over twenty-six years, by Caffery, boy detective and obsessive. Now he was committing the contents of the files to digital memory.

He put on his glasses and opened the database.

'At it again?'

He started. Veronica was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, head on one side. She smiled. 'I've been watching you.'

'I see.' He took his glasses off. 'You let yourself in.'

'I wanted to surprise you.'

'Have you had the tests?'

'No.'

'It's Monday. Why not?'

'I was at the office all day.'

'Your father wouldn't let you leave?'

She frowned and massaged her throat. The crocus-yellow jacket was cut low enough to reveal the tattooed point on her sternum. A memento of the radiotherapy in her teens. 'There's no need to get angry.'

'I'm not angry. Just concerned. Why not go to casualty? Now.'

'Calm down. I'll call Dr Cavendish tomorrow. OK?'

He turned back to the screen, biting his lip, trying to be intent on his work, wishing for the hundredth time he had never given Veronica the front door key. She watched him from the doorway, half sighing, pushing her hair behind her ears, running her nails along the door frame, the discreetly expensive rings and bracelets — the best way a father knew to show love for his daughter — jingling softly. Caffery knew she wanted him to watch her. He pretended not to notice.

'Jack,' she sighed eventually, coming over to the chair, lifting a swatch of his dark hair, running her thumb across the exposed skin. 'I wanted to talk about the party. It's only a few days away.' She crawled onto the chair and folded herself against him like oil, mouth to cheek, hands tangling in his hair, her left leg cocked over the chair arm. Her hair tickled his neck. 'Jackie? Yoo hoo. Can you hear me?' She pressed her fingers into his face, her fingers that always smelled of menthol and expensive perfume and wiggled herself against his groin.

'Veronica—' He was starting a reluctant erection.

'What?'

He disentangled himself. 'I want an hour here.'

'Oh God,' she groaned, climbing off. 'You're sick, you know that?'

'Probably.'

'Obsessive compulsive. You'll die in this place if you're not careful.'

'We've discussed this.'

'This is the twenty-first century, Jack. You know, new starts, onwards and upwards.' She stood in the window and stared out at the garden. 'In our family we were brought up to move away from our roots, better ourselves.'

'Your family's more ambitious than me.'

'Ambitious than I am,' she corrected.

'Yes. And give a shit more than me.'

'More than I do.'

'God.'

'What?'

He put his glasses down and rubbed his eyes. Candy-bright tropical fish cruised across the screen. Thirty-four years old and he still couldn't bring himself to tell this woman he didn't love her. After the tests, and after the party — coward, Jack, you coward — if the tests were OK, that would be easy. Then he'd tell her. Tell her it was over. Tell her to give him back the keys.

'What is it?' she said. 'What've I said now?'

'Nothing,' he said and went back to his work.