First Novel

The Sniper

NICHOLAS WON A place to read languages at university.

At Queen Mary College, University of London.

He had talked to his nana and grandad about his desire to apply to London and they had said it was his decision. They were proud that he was going to university at all. He wanted to tell them he didn’t want them to think he was rejecting them by going to college in the city where his father was living, but he didn’t. He wanted to tell them that he loved them very much and that he appreciated all the sacrifices they had made for him. He knew that his father sent small amounts of money whenever he could, but he also knew that those contributions had been paid into a separate account to be made available to him when he needed it, and that all the cost of bringing him up had been borne by his nana and grandad. He knew that neither his nana’s part-time position as a dinner lady at a nearby school nor his grandad’s job working for SELNEC, one of the local bus companies, would have paid all that well, but he had never worn a dirty school shirt or a pair of socks with holes in them.

He was offered a place in an inter-collegiate hall of residence, Hughes Parry Hall in King’s Cross, so that he found himself mixing with medics and dental students and civil engineers as well as arts students like himself. London was so big and so full of different sources of excitement and amazement and entertainment and enlightenment, he couldn’t take it all in. Whatever he sampled, he knew there would be more of it and a hundred different choices besides. College was only part of what was on offer. He went to hear live music, to repertory cinemas that ran double bills and all-night shows, to exhibitions in art galleries you could have fitted his grandparents’ whole estate in, never mind their house.

His attendance record at college was not the best, but he was still on site, hidden away in an office in the union building writing reviews for the arts pages of the college newspaper, having discovered that not only could he do this, but it was also a good way to get to see films for free — and before they came out. He sat looking at his first byline — Nicholas Cross — so hard and with such intense excitement that he was surprised the paper didn’t ignite in his hands.

He arranged to see his father, who was now living above a shop in Camden Town. They didn’t meet there, but on the South Bank in the coffee bar of the National Film Theatre. Ray looked at the newspaper his son handed over and he felt almost intoxicated with pride, but also humble as he knew he could take no credit for his son’s accomplishments. He was grateful beyond words, however, that it was important to Nicholas to show him what he had done.

‘And — Dad,’ Nicholas said, becoming increasingly — surprisingly — comfortable with the nomenclature as he got older, ‘I’ve met a girl. Liz, a medical student.’

‘That’s great, Nicholas. Tell me all about her,’ Ray said, beaming. ‘I mean, if you want.’

Nicholas’ failure to turn up at college — for German lectures in particular — started to become a problem. He knew he should have done single honours French, but he’d wanted to impress his grandparents, wanted to pay them back, and foolishly opted for combined honours. His German was poor but he had a plan, to read all the set texts in English translation. Kleist, Kafka, Schiller, Böll — this stuff was relatively easy to get hold of. But the Goethe, surprisingly, was not available, and to make matters very much fucking worse, it was not available in roman script in German either, only in Gothic type.

He sat in his room one evening — the night before an essay deadline — trying to ignore the competing sounds of music playing in neighbouring bedrooms. The book lay open on his desk under the lamp. He stared at the bold, angular, spiky letters. The page looked like it had been created by someone in a secure ward with an italic fountain pen that was leaking ink. It might as well have been Arabic or Mandarin.

Maybe a drink would help?

He went down to the bar and stared at the range of drinks on offer. He was not a big drinker; he’d never really had the opportunity. The girl before him, a dental student from Guy’s, ordered a vodka and orange. He asked for the same, but the orange failed to mask the taste of the vodka, which was like some kind of foul-tasting blunt horn trying to force its way down his throat. He tried a gin and tonic. How could something utterly colourless taste so sharp and unpleasant? A vodka and grapefruit worked a little better and a gin and lime — with lots of lime — seemed to be the answer. It was important to have enough lime to hide the taste of the gin completely. You needed enough lime that it — the lime cordial itself — caught the back of your throat and made you cough.

Nicholas went back up to his room and stared at the sticklebacks and spider crabs swimming across the pages of his book. The drink didn’t help him make any more sense of Gothic script, but it made a nonsense of the looming deadline, which no longer seemed so important (or not until the following morning, at least).

Ray and Nicholas started to meet up more regularly, often on the South Bank or at the Tate or the National Gallery. Sometimes Nicholas invited Ray to come along to film screenings and afterwards they would get a coffee at Bar Italia and discuss the movie. They talked about Ray’s work, which Nicholas had started to read. Ray wanted to hear what his son thought of it. Indeed, when he was getting together material for a second collection, Ray asked Nicholas if he would mind reading the manuscript and giving him feedback. Were there some poems that shouldn’t make the cut? Was there too much of one type of subject and not enough of another? Nicholas said he was honoured to be asked, but that he felt inadequate to provide the kind of feedback he sensed was required.

‘Bollocks,’ said Ray.

Nicholas read the manuscript and he talked to Liz about it and then he read it a couple more times and arranged to meet up with Ray at Patisserie Valerie in Soho. Ray didn’t show. Nicholas waited half an hour then phoned Ray’s flat from a call box. There was no answer and his father appeared not to have an answer machine. He went back to Patisserie Valerie and waited a further half-hour. He called again later that day, but there was still no answer.

He kept trying.

Ray called the phone on Nicholas’ floor at Hughes Parry a few days later. He apologised. Something had come up, he said.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Nicholas said, trying to keep the hurt out of his voice.

‘Look, Nicholas, I’m sorry,’ Ray said, sounding like he meant it. But still. ‘I lead something of an unpredictable life. Sometimes it’s hard to keep appointments.’

Nicholas wondered if that was what he was, an appointment. Like the dentist.

‘I’ve got to go, Dad,’ he lied. He had to get off the phone.

He went down to the bar, but it was shut, so he went to the pub on Marchmont Street opposite the Brunswick Centre and ordered a pint. He drank it swiftly, feeling nothing more than a slight unsteadiness, and so he switched to spirits. A vodka and grapefruit. A gin and lime. And another gin and lime, and another — asking the bartender to be generous with the lime. The bartender complied until he suggested Nicholas might have had enough.

All his life he had expected nothing of his father. He knew it was a mistake for that to change.

He went back to the hall and shut himself in his room and ignored people when they came knocking. He ignored Liz until she threatened to go and get the floor tutor to bring a master key.

‘What the fuck is this?’ she demanded. ‘How often does this happen?’

‘It doesn’t,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t happen. It happens very rarely. It happens very fucking rarely, OK? I’m very fucking surprisingly together, all things considered.’

He sat on the floor, pressed up against the wall, his hands clenched at either side of his head. He was trying to stop it from spinning.

The next message Nicholas got, to say that his father had called, he ignored. Liz managed to persuade him to call Ray a few days later, but there was no answer. He was aware that there would be some kind of deadline for getting his remarks about the manuscript back to his father. He wasn’t conceited enough to think that his input would have any great value, but Ray had asked him and so, for all Nicholas’ hurt pride, he was determined to finish the job. He didn’t have his father’s address in Camden Town, but the address of the publisher was easy to find. He parcelled up the manuscript with a handwritten note and dropped it off.

A few days later, Nicholas walked out of the hall. A familiar figure was leaning against the railings across the street.

‘I got your package,’ Ray said. ‘I wanted to thank you.’

‘No problem, but I’m late for college.’

‘I’ll walk with you — if that’s all right?’

‘Sure.’

Ray ended up taking the Tube with Nicholas over to the East End. He told him again that he was sorry he’d failed to turn up and he asked him to trust him — he said he knew there was no reason why he should — but he would have turned up if he’d been able to. From time to time, he said, there was a possibility he might fuck up with his timekeeping. It didn’t mean he didn’t want to see Nicholas, he said. It didn’t mean he didn’t—

At that moment the train hit a set of points and Nicholas didn’t hear what his father had said. It was a shame because he had a sense it had been something his father had been building up to, but, partly because of that, it didn’t seem appropriate to ask him to repeat it.

‘It meant a lot to me,’ Ray said, ‘not only that you read the manuscript and commented on it, but that you went to the trouble of delivering it. You had to go out of your way and you must have been pissed off at me for letting you down. So, thank you.’

Nicholas smiled and Ray put an arm around him and pulled him in for a hug, which Nicholas allowed him to do. It was the closest they’d been, physically, in years.

‘You know, if you’ve got problems,’ Nicholas said, looking at his shoes planted on the carriage floor, ‘you can talk to me about them. Whatever it is.’

‘Thanks, son. I will,’ Ray said.

During Nicholas’ second year, he continued to do well in French and badly at German. He worked hard on the college paper, attending press screenings — in the presence of broadsheet critics Derek Malcolm and Philip French and, on one memorable occasion, director Andrei Tarkovsky — when he should have been sitting in Professor Fowler’s lectures on Brentano, Goethe and Tieck. His relationship with Liz deepened and that with his father survived one or two more instances of apparent unreliability on Ray’s part. He waited on tables in the summer and got three weeks’ work experience at Time Out magazine, where he did a lot of filing and was asked to write a review that didn’t get used. But, more importantly, he got the bug and he knew what he wanted to do after graduating.

His third year was spent in Paris. Liz’s course wasn’t the kind you could dip in and out of, and Ray explained that certain circumstances prevented him from travelling, though he didn’t elaborate on what they were. As a result, Nicholas came back to London as frequently as funds allowed. He told Liz he was worried about his father, concerned that he might be on drugs. It would explain a lot of his behaviour — the unreliability, the restrictions on travel.

‘Maybe he’s on a methadone programme?’ Liz suggested.

‘For all I know,’ Nicholas said, ‘he could be supplying. I can’t see how else he makes a living, unless he has a private income. Which seems unlikely. There was an RAF pension, but I don’t know if he still gets that.’

Liz shrugged.

‘It could also explain the presence of that weird guy at the party,’ Nicholas said.

He’d timed one of his trips back to coincide with the launch party for Ray’s second collection, Flight Path, which was dedicated to the memory of Russell Flynn. At some point during the evening, Nicholas had seen a balding man in an unfashionable velvet jacket being firmly encouraged to leave by a couple of senior editors with a lot of literary lunches under their belts. He’d also spotted his father watching the ejection from a safe distance and visibly relaxing back into a conversation with a journalist and a publicist once the intruder had left the premises.

‘And why he’s so thin,’ Liz said.

‘Is he thin?’ Nicholas asked.

‘He seems thinner to me,’ she said.

‘So you think he’s using rather than supplying?’

‘He could be doing both. But he’s definitely lost weight.’

‘You see him less often than I do,’ Nicholas pointed out. ‘You’re more likely to notice change.’

In his final year, Nicholas threw himself into German. A warning from the dean that he would almost certainly fail if he didn’t buckle down seemed to be the catalyst. As for the language, a few days in West Berlin, taken at the last convenient moment before the exams, over Easter, when it happened to be snowing in that part of Germany, helped more than he would have imagined possible. Just being surrounded by the language, both spoken and written, made an appreciable difference to his understanding and ability to express himself. In the end, he got a decent result, an upper second, and like most of his fellow non-vocational students went straight on to the dole. He tried to get more work experience, but that wasn’t happening either. He kept his hand in by contributing to fanzines. He and Liz, who was still studying, found a flatshare in Archway with two other medics. He saw his father on a fairly regular basis and came to agree with Liz that he was looking gaunt. Ray seemed as cheerful and positive as ever, offering words of advice at the same time as warning Nicholas he was the last person in the world who should be handing it out, particularly on the subject of careers. However, he was able to fix his son up with a week at his publishers — unpaid. Nicholas enjoyed it, but not as much as he had Time Out. He retained vivid pictures in his head of the ramshackle office, with its countless in-trays and bulldog clips, wire pigeonholes, sheafs of paper sliding off desks, dodgy swivel chairs. He loved the teetering towers of CDs, videos and books, the overflowing baskets full of old Jiffy bags ready for reuse.

The publishers’ office, by contrast, was much quieter and more sedate. He didn’t see any authors until his last day when a small flurry of activity greeted the arrival — and departure soon afterwards — of a first-time novelist.

Nicholas came off the dole to work a short-term contract at the National Union of Students as Information Officer. On the staff there he met another writer, Judith Meadows, whose first novel, The Summerhouse, had just been published. He proudly told Judith who his father was and she gave him an enigmatic smile. Over the next few weeks he realised all her smiles were enigmatic. He found a copy of The Summerhouse years later in a second-hand bookshop. On the back was a large photo of the author wearing an enigmatic smile.

The NUS contract terminated, Nicholas was sitting in the flat in the middle of the day writing another round of job applications when the phone rang.

He left the applications unfinished on the kitchen table and took the Tube from Archway to Goodge Street, then walked the short distance to Middlesex Hospital. He found Broderip Ward without difficulty. It was not how he imagined a hospital ward to be, especially an NHS hospital ward. It looked more like a hotel. A posh one at that. The beds had duvets instead of sheets and blankets. There were telephones by the bed and potted plants dotted around and comfortable seating areas with magazines and coffee machines. He found his father sitting up in bed writing in a notebook, which he immediately closed and put to one side when he saw Nicholas.

‘Hello, son.’

‘Dad.’

‘Sit down, sit down.’

‘Dad, what are you doing here? What’s wrong?’

Nicholas had learnt nothing in the initial phone call, only that his father was in hospital. He’d made the Tube journey in a state of suspended emotion, but with anxiety building up inside him. The sight of his father — thinner-looking, haggard even — was a shock. He had never before seen his father in pyjamas. There was a rust-coloured sore on his neck.

‘Dad?’

‘Nicholas. There’s some stuff I haven’t told you.’

‘You’re dying!’

‘No, I’m not dying. I’m not very well, but I’m going to get better. Do you know where you are?’

‘In a hospital. What are you talking about?’ Nicholas felt himself getting angry. His father appeared to be playing games.

‘This ward,’ said Ray gently. ‘You might have seen it on the news or read about it. It was only recently opened, by Princess Diana. There’s been a bit of fuss in some quarters. It’s too nice, there’s too much money being thrown at it.’

There was a silence, which Nicholas broke.

‘It’s the AIDS ward.’

‘Yes, it’s the AIDS ward. But don’t worry, you are not at risk.’

‘I’m not worried about being at risk,’ Nicholas snapped. ‘You’ve been sick for a long time.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? All those times you didn’t show up, you were in here getting treatment.’

‘I was getting tested. Prodded and probed. And treated for infections, yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I couldn’t tell you.’

‘Why couldn’t you tell me?’

‘Because it would have meant telling you other stuff, too, that maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to know.’

‘You mean about you being gay?’

Now Ray was silent.

‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘You knew? How did you know?’

‘I don’t know. I just knew. You’re my dad.’

‘I wish I’d known,’ he said.

‘That I knew?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I wish you’d felt you could talk to me about it,’ said Nicholas.

‘I didn’t know what you would think. And I kind of thought it would be disloyal to your grandparents, in a funny way. Better to maintain the illusion.’

‘Better to tell a lie?’

‘A white lie.’

‘Is that how you got sick?’

‘Probably. Yes. Definitely. I mean, almost certainly.’ Ray sighed. ‘For a long time they didn’t have a clue what was going on. With me and with lots of others. They’ve got more of an idea now.’

Ray explained about HTLV3 and HIV and AIDS.

‘They’re calling it a Gay Plague,’ he said.

He explained about the haemophiliacs, about the worries over blood.

Nicholas said he’d seen the tombstone adverts and he’d read James Anderton’s double-page rant in the Daily Mail, which had done the rounds at the NUS when he’d been there.

He took hold of his father’s hand, which he was pleased to feel grip his tightly.

‘Do you have AIDS?’ he asked.

‘No, I have HIV.’

‘So why do you have to be in here? Will you get to leave?’

‘I had a bad turn. My T-cell count went down, but it’s already back up. I’ll be out of here in no time. I may have to come back in, but then I’ll get out again. That’s how it’s going to be.’

There was another silence.

‘I wish you’d told me.’

‘I wish I had, too.’

And that was how it was. Ray was in and out of Broderip Ward for years. Nicholas got to recognise many of the regulars on his visits. Sometimes Ray was sicker than at other times. He talked to Nicholas about his work, about poems he was struggling with. He would show him drafts and ask his advice and Nicholas would protest that his advice was worthless, but he liked being asked and he offered his opinions. Eventually, Ray started planning a third collection, working title The Sniper. The title poem, over several pages, was set in a holiday resort on the Mediterranean. People having fun sailing, canoeing, swimming in the sea, doing laps of the pool. Playing tennis, water polo, beach volleyball. Socialising at the bar, making new friends, eating together in the open-air buffet-restaurant where they would queue for eggs in the morning made by a spatula-wielding Greek chef called George with a hat as tall as he was. And all the while, a sniper moves from one rooftop to another, from hotel to beach bar, trattoria to taverna, picking off victims one at a time with a high-velocity rifle. Efforts are made to find and eliminate the killer, but he always seems to be one step ahead. The holidaymakers, meanwhile, instead of deserting the resort or cowering in their rooms, carry on as before, intent on having a good time, just hoping it won’t be them next. They take time out to attend the funerals of the dead, but life must go on.

Life for Nicholas and Liz turned a dark corner when Liz fell pregnant and while they were both happy about this, and started looking for a flat for just the two of them, the pregnancy did not proceed in a normal manner. After six weeks Liz developed an infection and had to be rushed into the Whittington Hospital. Not only did she lose the baby, but the infection left her sterile without hope of ever conceiving again. Before the pregnancy, babies had been a subject they had raised only rarely, but they had both known it was something they very much wanted for the future, once Liz was qualified and Nicholas was earning, too.

Dark times. Ray, feeling well and keen to do something to cheer up his son and his partner, threw a party in their honour at his flat in Camden. He invited his friends and theirs. Nicholas recognised one or two faces from Broderip Ward. His father introduced him to Oscar Moore, whose novel A Matter of Life and Sex, he had just read, in floods of tears for the most part, and to David — just ‘David’, no surname — an architect in his late sixties. Watching his father with David — the ease and familiarity with which they negotiated each other’s company and anticipated each other’s needs — Nicholas wondered if they were long-term partners.

Nicholas got a job at Time Out and he and Liz did move out of the flatshare into a rented flat of their own, so to speak, in Finsbury Park. Over bowls of black pepper soup at the Jai Krishna on Stroud Green Road, Nicholas asked Liz to marry him and she said nothing would make her happier. When they met up with Ray for dinner in Islington and told him the news, Nicholas asked Ray to be his best man and Ray burst into tears. He said it would be the proudest day of his life. He then joked that they’d better not hang about, though. Nicholas found those jokes, to which Ray had become partial, rather difficult to take, but he assured his father that they were not planning a lengthy engagement.

They married at Marylebone Town Hall on Euston Road and took over one of the cheap Indian restaurants on Drummond Street for the reception. Nicholas’ grandparents came down from Hyde, their first visit to the capital for longer than anyone could remember, including them. In a bid to keep costs down, Nicholas and Liz had not engaged a professional photographer, but had asked a friend of theirs, Simon, to do the honours. Nicholas asked Simon to make sure he got a shot of the family group on the Town Hall steps: Ray and his parents with the bride and groom. Liz’s parents had emigrated to Australia and separated. She had lost touch with her father and the wedding was arranged too quickly for Liz’s mother to be able to come. Nicholas remarked that he had never seen his father in a collar and tie before; wiping sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, Ray agreed that it was the first time since he’d appeared in court that he had worn such attire. Ray gave a short speech that contained a couple of jokes and a handful of personal remarks that had many guests in tears for different reasons. As the evening wore on, Ray unbuttoned his collar and removed his tie. As he leaned across the table towards Nicholas to say something, a rust-coloured sore or scab could be seen on the side of his neck. Nicholas tried to ignore it and Ray pretended he didn’t know that Nicholas had seen it.

Late in the evening, Simon the photographer entered the Gents to find Nicholas and his father in an embrace. Ray was clasping his son’s head against his chest while Nicholas’ shoulders rose and fell as sobs tore through his body.

Two weeks after the wedding, Ray was back on Broderip Ward. He told Nicholas he thought it could be a long stay this time. Nicholas gathered up an armful of unwanted review copies from the box under the books editor’s desk at Time Out and walked over to the Middlesex.

He waved to a couple of faces on entering the ward. His father was occupying the same bed as he had the first time Nicholas had visited him. He smiled as Nicholas started unloading the books. A bound proof from Faber, This Is the Life by Joseph O’Neill; a collection of stories by Mark Richard, The Ice at the Bottom of the World; Adam Lively’s The Snail. A handful of crime novels — a new blah blah mystery, an Inspector So-and-so novel — and one or two unknown quantities, first novels from new names put out by small presses, the sort of thing published more in hope than expectation and chucked straight in the charity boxes at books editors’ desks across London.

‘I’m sorry there’s no poetry,’ Nicholas said. ‘The poetry editor takes it all. There’s the odd thing left, but believe me, I’m doing you a favour by not bringing it.’

‘About that,’ Ray said, ‘I want you to do something for me. Look in that drawer. There’s a key.’

Nicholas took a set of keys from the drawer by his father’s bed.

‘Keys to the flat,’ Ray said. ‘I wanted to get that collection sorted and delivered before I came back in here and I ran out of time.’

‘You’ll be out again soon and can do it yourself.’

Ray tried to smile. ‘I don’t want to waste any more time,’ he said. ‘I want it tidied up and delivered. You’ll find it all on the machine in a folder marked “Sniper”. All you need to do is make sure I haven’t forgotten anything obvious, then print it out and post it. You’ll find the address there, too, somewhere. Same lot, anyway. They’ve not moved.’

‘I’ll take care of it for the time being,’ Nicholas said.

Ray was sweating a lot and tended to use the books Nicholas had given him to fan himself with rather than for reading. There was a rash of tiny pustules across his chest and more telltale Kaposi’s sarcomas had appeared on his neck and at the top of his back. His bones were sticking out of his pyjama jacket, creating hollows where perspiration collected. He kept telling Nicholas to go back to work, that there was nothing to see here, move on, show’s over. He managed to stretch a smile across his increasingly skull-like features. Nicholas did leave, but not to go to work. He hired a car and drove to the outskirts of Manchester and then around the M63 to Hyde and he knocked on the door of his grandparents’ house. One visit to London in twenty-five years and now they were expected to go again for the second time in two weeks? Nicholas knew it wasn’t the upheaval of leaving home or the effort required for travel that was putting them off. They had never accepted their son’s sexuality. To them he was still the young Post Office worker who had married the bingo caller, for good or bad; or the young airman on the other side of the equator but still the right side of the sexuality divide; if not the innocent young boy they had brought up to embody the right values and follow the rules of normal behaviour.

‘You may not have another chance to see him,’ Nicholas advised them.

He went out for a walk to give them a chance to talk and when he came back his nana took him into the morning room, which had lost the paraphernalia of childhood but kept the brighter colours.

‘I can’t see your grandad going,’ she said.

Nicholas decided to see this as encouraging and he called Liz to let her know he was stopping the night and would be back the following day. In the morning, he rose early, made a coffee and sat in the back garden listening to a blackbird singing. He wondered if his father had ever done the same. Tea instead of coffee, perhaps. When he went back into the house, his nana was putting her coat on and collecting her handbag from the telephone table in the hall.

‘What about Grandad?’ Nicholas said.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Nana.

Nicholas paused, thinking hard, wondering what more he could do. His grandparents were proud people.

He shouted upstairs, ‘We’ll be leaving in a couple of minutes, Grandad.’

There was no answer.

‘Come on, Nana.’

They left the house and Nicholas started the car. They sat in it for a few moments with the engine running and then Nicholas depressed the clutch and selected first gear.

‘Just a minute, love,’ Nana said.

Nicholas looked out of the side window, which allowed him to see the front of the house. Everything was still. Then he saw movement behind the frosted glass and the front door swung inwards and his grandad appeared. He closed the door, locked it and stumped down the path. He stood at the kerb by the passenger door, clearly expecting his wife to give up her space in the front seat for him. With a barely perceptible sigh, she opened her door and eased herself out of the car. Nicholas shook his head and stared out of the windscreen. His grandfather lowered himself into the front seat, leaving the door to be closed for him, and then Nana climbed into the back.

‘All set?’ Nicholas asked and didn’t wait for a response.

When Nicholas saw the look on his father’s face as the three of them walked on to the ward, he knew it had been worth it. Fearful, grateful, relieved, humble: all of these expressions guttered like dying candles in the recesses of his sockets. Nicholas watched his grandad progress slowly down the ward, every muscle contracted, making sure he came into physical contact with nothing that might infect him. Nana had cast her eyes on her son the moment she’d stepped through the door and she allowed his deep-set gaze to reel her in without any concern for her surroundings.

They sat around the bed. Nicholas had taken his father’s hand and given him a hug, as much to show his grandparents there was nothing to fear as for the contact itself, but so far they had kept their hands to themselves. Nicholas went to get some drinks and when he came back he observed that Nana had moved closer to the bed and was holding her son’s bony, cannulated hand.

Nicholas spoke to the consultant to ask if he should try to persuade his grandparents to stick around for a night or two. The doctor said Ray was not in immediate danger, but that he was unlikely to be leaving the ward any time soon.

‘If at all?’ Nicholas asked.

‘Your father is at the end stage.’

Nicholas drove his grandparents back to Hyde that evening. There had been a handshake between Ray and his father, and Nana had kissed her son and hugged him and cried. Nicholas saw them back into the house and turned down the offer of a bed. He embraced his nana and thanked her and shook his grandad’s meaty hand, the old man’s grip still fiercely strong, and thanked him too. Nana, in turn, thanked him for taking them and bringing them back; his grandfather remained silent on the issue, but Nicholas was confident he had done the right thing, at least by his father.

Ray died three weeks later, at 10.17 a.m. on 19 April 1992. Nicholas was with him, holding his hand, having gone to visit on his way into work. Ray had been conscious for the first hour of the visit and Nicholas had told him that just the night before he and Liz had taken the decision to do something they had been considering for some time: they were going to adopt a child. Nicholas said that while theirs might not have been the most conventional father — son relationship, it had ultimately inspired him to become a father himself.

‘I don’t know,’ he joked to Ray, ‘I get the sense you’ve enjoyed being a dad and I want some of that, too.’

In response, he felt the slightest increase in pressure from his father’s grip.

Nicholas also reassured him that the publishers were very happy with the new collection and were pressing ahead with publication in the autumn.

‘Thank you, by the way,’ Nicholas said, ‘for the dedication. It means a lot to me.’

This time there was no answering squeeze. His father had gone.

The funeral, at Highgate Cemetery, was well attended. Nicholas recognised a lot of people from the party his father had thrown for him and Liz at the flat in Camden Town. One or two patients from Broderip Ward came and the consultant was spotted at the service, too. Ray’s parents both made the trip; Liz looked after them for the day.

‘I’ll be next,’ said Nicholas’ nana. ‘You wait and see.’

‘You’re as fit and healthy as me,’ Nicholas said. ‘Healthier, I suspect.’

‘I’ve got a line of tablets to take every morning as long as your arm,’ she said.

‘It’s this new GP she’s seeing,’ said Nicholas’ grandad. ‘I think he’s trying to keep the pharmaceutical companies in business.’

‘I don’t think they need much help,’ Liz said with a laugh.

‘Isn’t there an argument that says they have to charge a lot for drugs to fund new research?’ said Nicholas.

‘There’s certainly a lot of money being spent on research for HIV and AIDS drugs,’ Liz agreed.

They fell silent.

As part of the service, Nicholas read an extract from the title poem of his father’s forthcoming collection.

The Sniper was published in the autumn, as planned. Nicholas and Liz hosted a small launch party at the flat in Camden, which Ray had left to them in his will, much to their surprise as they had not known he even owned it. Nicholas discovered it had been a present to Ray from David, the architect. David, it turned out, had been providing Ray with financial support for years. They had had a long-term open relationship.

At the party, Nicholas said a few words on his father’s behalf. He kept half an eye out for a balding intruder wearing a velvet jacket that might by then have become fashionable again, but there was nothing to worry about on that score. The party was well attended and some appreciative reviews followed in the poetry press, alongside respectable notices in the TLS, the Guardian and Time Out (by the poetry editor, who could be considered impartial).

Nicholas and Liz registered with the Adoption Agency and got the ball rolling there. They filled in a hundred forms and submitted to a thousand interviews, or so it began to seem to them. They took to observing certain parents when they were out and about — and Liz sometimes came across them in the NHS — and they wondered why such people were not subjected to the same rigorous testing they were having to go through. They read about cases in the news involving parents’ abuse of children. They became extremely sensitive to the subject. Nicholas’ own unusual upbringing was the subject of particular scrutiny.

‘Anyone would think we were convicted murderers or rapists,’ Liz said, aghast at the latest test of suitability.

‘Or drug addicts who are going to leave needles lying around for their adopted children to play with,’ Nicholas added, similarly disgruntled.

There were numerous false starts and delays and there were times when one or other of them started to lose the will for battle. But finally, in spring 1994 they had their first face-to-face meeting with Jonny, who was very nearly four years old. He was very quiet and withdrawn, uncomfortable meeting people and uncomfortable, it seemed and according to the reports, with himself — with his body, his intellect, his emotions. But he had been through some tough times, like a lot of children up for adoption. He had seen some trauma. Nicholas and Liz were put fully in the picture, but they didn’t hesitate for a moment. Liz said later that she felt as if her heart jolted or shifted position on meeting him. She knew it was silly, she added, because it’s not even in the heart that you really feel these things, but in the stomach or gut, but she insisted on the heart. She felt, she said, that when he reached out his little hand to shake hers, he didn’t stop there but carried on somehow and his hand passed into her chest where it grasped her heart and gave it a squeeze.

They had more face-to-face meetings, completed further interviews with assessors and psychiatrists and all manner of folk and finally the handover took place.

‘It’s like Checkpoint Charlie,’ Nicholas whispered. ‘Or North Korea.’

Finally, in May 1994, they were a family. They were living, the three of them, in the flat in Camden Town. They didn’t expect it to be straightforward.

And it wasn’t.

Birthdays were difficult. Jonny’s fifth birthday came around in May 1995. Nicholas and Liz felt caught. They wanted to listen to others and take advice, but at the same time they didn’t want to. They emphatically didn’t want to. They didn’t want to do things the way they had been done before, because clearly that hadn’t worked, so they wanted to do their own thing, but it had to be right. They couldn’t afford to make mistakes. By 1995, children’s birthday celebrations had already started to become much more elaborate affairs than during Nicholas’ childhood, which admittedly had been far from typical.

They organised a party at the flat inviting children from school. It soon got out of hand as Jonny refused to accept the result of any game in which he was not declared the outright winner. When the candles were lit on the cake he refused to blow them out, or to let anyone else do so. When one child did manage to blow them out, Jonny started screaming until Nicholas relit them and asked the other children to let Jonny blow them out himself. But again he refused. In the end, frustrated and embarrassed, Nicholas blew them out and Jonny focused on the dark coils of smoke rising from the blue and white candles, his face set like a mask.

The party went downhill rapidly. Jonny bit and scratched other kids and ended the afternoon wearing a dress he had somehow physically removed from one of the girls. Unusually for a little boy’s party, most of the guests had been girls. Jonny had not asked for any boys to be invited, but Nicholas and Liz had tried to do what they thought was the right thing by insisting on a more balanced guest list. Parents who stuck around, hovering uneasily at the edge of the party to wipe food off chins or to check that little Sammy or darling Annabel was not given too many fizzy drinks, were quietly outraged at Jonny’s behaviour, exchanging shocked expressions and openly glaring at the young offender while offering strained and patently false smiles to Nicholas and Liz.

Both parents thought it a good idea to try to involve grandparents as much as possible. There was a vague plan for Liz’s mother and her new partner to come over from Perth at some point, but it really was very vague. Nicholas encouraged his grandparents to increase the frequency of their visits to London, but his grandad disliked leaving the front room, never mind Manchester.

‘What about you, Nana?’ Nicholas asked. ‘We could meet you at Euston and then it’s just a couple of stops on the Tube.’

‘I don’t know, love. It’s a long way and the GP says with my heart I shouldn’t be going on long journeys.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to come up and visit you and Grandad.’

They went up on the train on a Friday. It was a tight squeeze in Nicholas’ grandparents’ house, Nicholas and Liz in the spare room and Jonny having a bed made up on the floor of the same room out of the cushions from the settee downstairs. They took these up at the end of the night, and transferred Jonny from their bed to the floor while he was asleep.

‘Your grandad’s getting quite frail, isn’t he?’ Liz whispered as they lay in the darkness listening to the night sounds — the pipes, the floorboards and general settlement.

‘Is he?’

It hadn’t occurred to Nicholas that this might be the case, but as he thought about it while listening to his son’s regular breathing he realised it was probably true. The unwillingness to move very far from the front room was not just inertia or laziness; he moved slowly and unsteadily and even the shortest walk seemed to leave him out of breath. He was nearly eighty, after all.

‘I wonder if, while we’re here, we should offer to do some shopping for them or something?’ Liz suggested.

‘You’re right. Good idea. I’ll offer in the morning.’

At the breakfast table Nicholas watched Jonny eating. He seemed to concentrate intently on his bowl of cereal. Nana had been out and bought a selection pack of miniature cereal boxes, by some distance the most expensive way to buy cereals, but what child can resist those miniatures? His features seemed to sharpen when he was engaged in a task, as if absolutely everything in the world at that point was focused on his successful consumption of breakfast. His cheekbones seem to angle forwards, his lips reach out and actively seek the spoonful of cereal. There had been a question mark at one point over whether he might be on the spectrum for autism, according to the Adoption Agency, but this had been ruled out. There was nothing wrong with him that hadn’t been directly caused by the trauma he had witnessed and experienced.

‘Is that nice, love?’ Nana asked.

She was sitting, arms folded on the table in front of her, across from Jonny.

‘Yes, Nana.’

‘Yes, thank you, Nana,’ Nicholas corrected him.

‘Yes, thank you, Nana,’ said Jonny through a mouthful of Coco Pops.

Nicholas had suggested that Jonny call his adoptive great-grandparents Nana and Grandad, just like he did.

‘What’s all this about not going on long journeys, Nana?’ Nicholas asked.

‘It’s my heart, love. I’ve got this heart-valve problem. You know about it.’

‘Mitral stenosis,’ Grandad’s voice announced as he appeared in the kitchen doorway.

‘Aye, well. It means I’m at high risk of blood clots.’

‘Arterial thrombosis,’ added Grandad.

‘I know,’ said Nicholas.

‘And I used to take warfarin for it, but the GP says that can interact with my arthritis tablets, so he took me off it. Off the warfarin, you know. So I’m at high risk of blood clots.’

‘To the brain, causing a stroke,’ elaborated Grandad.

‘Hmm.’ Nicholas studied Jonny’s empty cereal packet. ‘You should have a chat with Liz, you know, Nana. Get a second opinion.’

‘Can I have some orange juice?’ Jonny asked.

‘Can I have some orange juice, please?’ Nicholas reminded him. ‘I’ll get it,’ he added, addressing Nana.

He squeezed past Grandad in the doorway and took the orange juice from the fridge. When he had returned and poured Jonny a glass, he spoke again.

‘Fridge is looking a bit bare, Nana. Why don’t you let us do a bit of shopping for you while we’re here?’

‘All right, love. You can take the car. It needs a run out. I don’t know when it last had one, to be honest.’

‘Great. I’ll just get His Lordship dressed. Come on, sunshine. Let’s get cracking.’

Liz stirred while Nicholas was getting clothes for Jonny, who was in the bathroom.

‘You have a lie-in,’ Nicholas said, lying down next to her for a minute. ‘Give us a kiss.’

‘Mmm,’ Liz said, pulling up the blanket and sheet, and adding sleepily, ‘I wonder if we should buy your grandparents a duvet for Christmas.’

Nicholas got Jonny ready and they headed downstairs. Nana had produced the car key. It was sitting on the kitchen table.

‘It ought to start all right,’ said Grandad. ‘There should be petrol in it.’

‘Don’t worry, Grandad.’

Nicholas took Jonny outside.

He unlocked the car and it was only at that point that he realised he didn’t have any kind of child seat. He wondered if it would be OK to go ahead without one. But very soon it became clear that this was a side issue.

The moment he opened the back door of the car and encouraged Jonny to get in, the boy refused.

‘Come on, Jonny. We’re going to get some shopping for Nana and Grandad. You don’t want them to go hungry, do you? And anyway, we’re staying with them for the weekend, so if we don’t get any shopping there’ll be nothing for us to eat either.’

But Jonny turned his back on the car and crossed his arms.

‘Come on, Jonny,’ Nicholas said, trying to turn him around and push him lightly in the direction of the car.

His face wore that mask of concentration that Nicholas had seen at the breakfast table. He seemed quite determined not to get in the car. Nicholas released his pressure and knelt down in front of his son.

‘What’s up, mate? Why don’t you want to get in the car?’

‘No,’ Jonny said, stamping his foot. ‘No no no no no no no.’

‘What’s the matter?’

Jonny started screaming. ‘No! No! No!’

‘Look, this is ridiculous,’ Nicholas said, getting cross. ‘I think you’re a bit old for tantrums, sunshine. You are five, remember. Five-year-olds don’t generally behave like this. If they don’t want to do something, they give you a reason and they do it without screaming. Also, if Daddy wants you to get in the car, I really think you should just, you know, get in the car, don’t you?’

Jonny screamed.

Nicholas took hold of his shoulders and the boy squirmed and fought to get free. Nicholas tried to keep hold of him, but the boy bit his hand and managed to break away, running back to the front door and when he found it closed he tried to get around the side of the house.

‘Jonny,’ Nicholas shouted, ‘Jonny. Stop it. Forget the car. I’m not going to make you get in the car, OK, but you have to stop screaming and fighting and especially biting. Right? You have to stop all that right now.’

The front door opened and Nana appeared.

‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ Nicholas said to her. ‘I opened the car door and he went ballistic. I don’t think we’ll be going in the car.’

When Jonny saw that Nana had appeared, he ran to her and threw his arms around her legs. Nicholas caught his breath when he saw her rest her hand instinctively on top of Jonny’s head.

Jonny eventually calmed down, but he stayed in the house with Liz and Nana and Grandad, while Nicholas drove off on his own, puzzling over what had happened and feeling depressed by the incident.

Later, when they were in bed and Jonny was asleep, Nicholas talked to Liz about Nana and her various tablets, those she was taking and those she was not.

‘It’s true what she says, that warfarin can interact with what she’s taking for her arthritis,’ Liz said, ‘and it’s also true that taking her off it increases the risk she’ll get an arterial thrombosis. She could have a stroke. But she could have one whether she sits on a train to London or not. That seems a bit odd.’

‘Really?’

‘I suppose if she’s got bad arthritis, she can’t really be getting up for a walk around while on the train, so maybe it makes a kind of sense. But still…’

‘Is it worth her asking for a second opinion?’

‘It depends. I’m sure she doesn’t want to get the GP’s back up.’

‘Yes, but how often do people die because they don’t question the advice they are given? Because they don’t ask for a second opinion?’

‘Only once.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Sorry. I don’t know, but not often, I wouldn’t think,’ Liz said. ‘If you’re worried I can ask around about him.’

‘Thanks. Just to set my mind at rest.’

Liz did ask around — making a number of phone calls first thing in the morning while Nicholas was getting Jonny up and dressed — and most of the feedback was good. The doctor was well liked by patients, maybe less so by colleagues, one or two of whom thought him a little odd. But these were people who didn’t work with him closely, other Manchester GPs who did occasional locum work at the surgery.

They were due to return to London in the afternoon. Nicholas proposed that they drive out towards the Peaks and find a nice pub for lunch, but there was the question of whether his nana and grandad would want to, and, more to the point, whether Jonny could be persuaded to get in the car without another screaming fit. In the end, Nicholas’ nana suggested that Nicholas and Liz take Jonny for a walk in the park while she prepared a salad for lunch.

The boy ran off and seemed to enjoy having the freedom of the place — a windswept scrap of land on the side of a hill. A couple of swings and a rusting roundabout. No railings.

While Jonny played, Nicholas and Liz talked. They decided there was no particular justification for questioning the judgement of the GP.

The year turned: I was glad to see the back of 1992 but I had no cause to believe that 1993 would be an improvement. Veronica was no more than civil to me; the marriage was over, in all eyes but those of the law. She made no attempt to restrict my access to the children. She was too clever to present my legal team with useful ammunition. Legal team. A university friend specialising in conveyancing and operating out of store-front premises between a charity shop and a bookmaker’s in Basingstoke.

I took the children to nursery and picked them up most days. I wasn’t trying to rack up credit; I knew there was no point. I was just trying to maximise the amount of time I spent with them. I knew I would always have photographs, but I didn’t want to forget what they smelt like. I didn’t want to forget the touch of their skin. The sound of their breathing as they slept.

I kept up appearances, but when I was alone I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t read or write. If I put a CD on, I took it off again before the end of the first track. I would put the radio on, but it could have been broadcasting static for all I took in. I went for long walks. I walked on different routes out of London, each time in a straight line — Uxbridge Road, the A5, the A1. I just kept going until exhaustion forced me to stop and then I would catch a bus or the Tube to get back. I thought about nothing other than the upcoming case and the twins. Their faces went round and round in front of my eyes until they started to blur and I had to get their picture out of my wallet to fix their faces in my mind again.

There was a chance, or so I believed at that stage, before the case reached the courts, that I’d get visitation rights. A good chance. But I felt that chance receding once the case began and Veronica’s lawyer, predictably, went to town on the dogging angle. My own counsel just ended up sounding pathetic as he objected that we had not been dogging because we had not been deliberately performing for the entertainment of others.

‘They had sex — let’s not put too fine a point on it,’ said Veronica’s lawyer, ‘they had sex in Ms Ashton’s vehicle in full view of other car-park users and hundreds, if not thousands, of airline passengers coming in to land. Those with window seats, anyway.’

A titter ran through the courtroom.

The case did not reach a conclusion on the first day.

‘I think we still have a good chance of visitation rights,’ my lawyer friend said to me.

I looked at the defeated slope of his shoulders in his ill-fitting suit.

The following morning, Veronica left the house first. The idea that we should have travelled to court together was, of course, absurd. She was going to drop the twins off at nursery and I was to leave the house shortly afterwards. Instead I sat in the kitchen, staring out of the window at the brick wall that separated our house from our neighbours’. I made a cup of tea, but didn’t drink it. A greasy film formed on the surface of the tea.

I got a bag from the cellar and packed it with a small number of items. I walked out of the house and placed the bag in the boot of the car. I returned to the house and walked up the stairs to my study. I sat at the desk and looked at the mannequins — the woman and the two children. I got up close to each one and stared into their glass eyes. They looked real.

I looked at my books, my eye drawn by the repetition, numerous copies of the same book. The same title over and over again. The same author’s name. The same colophon.

I got up and left the room. I went downstairs. I stood in the kitchen staring out of the back window. After an indeterminate length of time I left the kitchen and walked through the hall. I closed the front door behind me and double-locked it. I got into the car and started the engine. I drove around the block. I parked again and switched off the engine. I started it again and drove to the nursery, where I said I had come to pick up the twins. We were going somewhere, I explained. The staff were surprised, but released the children. They were my children, after all. I led them out of the building and to the car, which was double-parked. It was a narrow road with cars parked on both sides and there was no way past my car. Three cars sat waiting. The driver of the first car was leaning on his horn. When he saw me he started to gesticulate. He wound his window down and shouted at me. It was just noise. I strapped Jonathan into his seat, then took Laura’s hand and led her around the back of the car to get to the other side. I told the driver of the car behind to shut the fuck up. He got out of his car. I took no notice of him, even when he came very close to me and continued to shout abuse at me. I just made sure that I kept my body between him and Laura. I lifted Laura into her seat and fixed the straps. I closed the car door, aware of the man’s breath in my face. He wouldn’t stop shouting. I told him again to shut the fuck up and I felt a sudden buzzing in my ear and I fell against the car. My ear started to throb. I realised I had been hit. I opened the driver’s door and collapsed into my seat. I managed to pull the door shut and lock it, despite the man’s efforts to stop me. He stood alongside the car, his arms tensile bows, fists clenched, white knuckles. His body seemed to vibrate with fury and barely controlled energy. I looked away from him and felt a powerful thud against the door where he had kicked the car. I twisted the key in the ignition and pressed the accelerator to the floor, vaguely aware of another insistent noise just below the screaming of the engine. Because the man had to run to get back in his car, I reached the junction before he was able to catch up with me and there was no way out into the traffic for him to be less than several cars behind me. I tried to change out of first gear, thinking that the noise I could hear was the sound of the engine racing, but I wasn’t in first gear and the noise I could hear was the children crying. I checked the rear-view mirror, but there was no sign of the man’s car. I overtook a bus and negotiated a roundabout and headed out of London.

The children eventually cried themselves to sleep and didn’t wake until I pulled into a service station on the M1, parked up and switched off the engine.

I turned to face them as they stretched and slowly came round.

‘Daddy, why have you got a bleed?’ asked Laura.

‘Where?’ My jaw ached as I spoke.

‘On your face. You’ve got a bleed on your face.’

I turned to look in the rear-view mirror and saw that I had a cut above my cheekbone where the man’s fist had struck me.

‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

I took the twins with me into the services and bought sandwiches and crisps and drinks.

‘Where are we going?’ Jonathan asked once I had strapped them both in again.

‘For a drive,’ I said.

I started the engine and looked for the way out of the car park.

Jonathan asked a couple more times where we were going, but I just kept driving. I checked my watch. It was a little after half past eleven. I pictured the courtroom. The looks of worry, my lawyer’s drooping shoulders. I pictured our empty house, a ringing phone. I took the exit for the M6. All the choices I was making seemed preprogrammed. They had nothing to do with me. I looked in the rear-view mirror. Jonathan had gone back to sleep and Laura had her head turned to one side and was gazing out of the window. I didn’t know where I was going. I was just driving. I knew what was in the boot, but I wasn’t thinking about it. I read the road signs, noticing how the distance to Manchester kept decreasing. Each time I read the name, I sensed a certain lightness on the horizon, which seemed incongruous. I left the motorway at the next junction. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to drive and drive and never stop.

I drove automatically. I turned the wheel when I had to. I obeyed the rules of the road. In terms of where I was going, I simply headed away from everything. The light changed, became softer, yellower. The children made occasional noises, but slept most of the time, lulled by the motion of the car. I pulled off the road, into a field, parked in the lee of a high hedge, switched off the engine. I sat for a moment, hearing a gentle shifting behind me. I checked the mirror. Laura was moving about in her seat; Jonathan was rubbing his face with his fist.

I opened my door and got out. I stretched. I opened the rear door and leaned in. I kissed Laura on the forehead and squeezed into the space between the front and back seats so that I could reach Jonathan also. I kissed him on the cheek and noticed the little round scar at the corner of his eye. I caught a whiff of washing powder or fabric conditioner. I pulled back and exited the car.

I went to the boot and opened it. I took out the black bag and removed from it a coiled length of hosepipe. I put the bag back in the boot and closed it. There was a noise coming from somewhere, but I didn’t know what it was. I got down on my hands and knees to affix one end of the hosepipe to the exhaust. This was difficult to achieve but after two attempts I got it in place. I wiped my hands on the grass and dried them on my jeans. I uncoiled the hosepipe and walked around the side of the car. I placed the pipe on the ground and it immediately started to recoil itself. I opened the rear door on Laura’s side and wound down the window a short distance. I picked up the hosepipe and threaded it through the gap, then wound up the window enough to trap the hosepipe without squeezing it too hard. I was still aware of a noise coming from somewhere. I didn’t know what it was. I ignored it. I closed the door and got back into the car. I reached round the back of the driver’s seat and picked up Laura’s coat from the floor. I got out of the car again and stuffed the coat into the gap at the top of the window. I used one of the arms to plug the last bit of the gap, noticing a stain where Laura had spilt something on it. I got back into the car and closed the door. Jonathan was crying and trying to get out of his seat. Laura was watching him. I turned the key in the ignition. Laura was asking questions. I couldn’t tell what she was saying. I climbed into the back of the car and squeezed into the space between their two seats. I told the children it was going to be all right. Jonathan’s crying got so bad he coughed and kept coughing and I thought he was going to choke. But he was OK. Laura was still asking questions and I was still unable to process the sound of her voice. I could no longer hear the other noise that I had heard outside. I could now hear the chugging of the car’s engine. I looked through the gap at the dashboard and saw that there was plenty of petrol in the tank. Now that Jonathan was calmer I undid his seat belt and he moved free of the straps. I leaned forward and around the driver’s seat to engage the central locking. I undid Laura’s seat belt and encouraged both children to sit in my lap. Laura kept talking and Jonathan was saying something as well. I hugged them both, pulling them into my body. It’s going to be all right, I told them. It’s going to be all right.