Why I Went Back Read online

  ‘Leave your coat on,’ he said. ‘We’re going straight out.’

  ‘Out? Where?’

  ‘I’m taking you over to Tredegar House for an hour or so.’

  ‘But I thought you said …’

  ‘Forget what I said and take these.’

  We sat silent in the car, caught in a line of traffic. The blue tin of chocolates that he’d handed me rested cold on my knees. Dad, pale and serious, watched the road. I watched the red brake lights going off and on in front of us. The people in the streets were wrapped in their winter gear, everyone carrying bags of Christmas shopping.

  ‘They want to make things as normal as possible for her,’ Dad said at last. ‘Surround her with things she knows. That’s why they think it’d be good for her to see you.’

  I didn’t say anything. He’d never taken me before, even though I’d asked him to loads of times. Now the reality of actually going made me feel sort of numb.

  ‘There’s a chance she might not recognise you,’ said Dad. ‘When I went in yesterday it took a couple of minutes before she remembered who I was. And she’s put on some weight. A lot of it’s down to the medication they’re giving her.’

  ‘You told me you didn’t go in yesterday! Day before yesterday, you said!’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter now.’ Dad took his eyes off the car in front and looked across at me, not making proper eye contact though. ‘I’m doing my best.’

  Your best isn’t good enough, I wanted to shout but didn’t.

  ‘There’s a pattern,’ he said. ‘You’re not old enough to know it but there’s a pattern. We’ll get through this just like we did last time.’

  Last time. I don’t remember too much about that. It was three years ago, maybe more. One minute Mum was there and then suddenly she wasn’t and no-one would tell me where she’d gone. When she came back it was like something was missing, but I could never work out if it was just me or whether she’d always been like that and I’d been too young to notice.

  ‘Is she still hearing voices?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘I heard the doctor talking about it, when the ambulance came.’

  ‘You should have been asleep,’ Dad said sadly. ‘It was the middle of the night, then. A boy your age needs all the shuteye he can get.’

  I went back to gazing at the red brake lights. Are you having a laugh, I thought – or what? Don’t you know I’m getting up in the small hours and going out in the fog and the freezing rain every morning to do your job?

  No. He didn’t know. He really didn’t.

  The car park at Tredegar House was gravelled so you couldn’t approach it silently. Every footstep felt like a tiny sinking or sucking that you needed to make an extra effort to escape from. The lobby was bright, hygienic, empty. Even the little office behind the enquiries desk stood quiet, its computer screen dissolving into endless multicoloured patterns.

  We took the lift to the fourth floor and walked along a yellow-painted corridor until we reached a wooden door with a big metal handle and an oblong of reinforced glass. Dad pressed the buzzer and said, ‘Visitor for Mary Hale,’ and after a couple of minutes a nurse wearing a plastic apron opened the door and beckoned us in. Then there was a second door like an airlock where the nurse swiped a card through an entry point and inched inside. She had to do that because somebody was blocking the door, trying to slip out even though she was right there.

  ‘Mr Allum,’ the nurse said, like she was talking to a child, ‘please move out of the way. Can’t you see there’s people trying to come in?’

  An old man with thin white hair and a red scalp stared at us. I think the T-shirt he wore said Harley-Davidson but it was difficult to tell because he had most of it stuffed into his wet chewing mouth. The whole front of the T-shirt was soaked. As the nurse manoeuvred him away a string of loose saliva spattered on her plastic apron.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, glancing up at a whiteboard where Mum’s name was written along with lots of others. ‘Down here, please.’ She led us along another yellow-painted corridor, past leather sofas smelling of public toilets. Through an open door I could see people sitting in a circle, heads nodding but nobody talking. I looked backwards. Harley-Davidson man was following us, shuffling fast to keep up like he was one of the family. As soon as we got inside Mum’s room, Dad slammed the door in his face.

  ‘Mrs Hale,’ the nurse said brightly, ‘some visitors for you. Would you like me to stay?’

  Mum made some kind of noise that the nurse took to be no. ‘I’ll be back shortly then. I think they’ve brought you some chocolates, you lucky thing.’

  Alone with Mum, in Mum’s room. A bed, a chair, a bedside cabinet. Nothing else. No curtains to draw back or close. Beige blinds and bars on the outside instead.

  ‘Hello, love,’ Dad said. ‘How are you feeling today?’

  Mum said nothing.

  ‘She’s right about those chocolates. Look, biggest tin I could find. Here –’ he prised open the tin and rummaged around inside and I saw that his hands were shaking slightly – ‘an orange one. Your favourite. And Aidan’s come this time, to see you. Here, Aidan, give this to your mum.’

  I took the chocolate and went over to the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed. I pressed the shiny crackling orange wrapper into Mum’s hands.

  Mum.

  She looked like a fat folded-up snowman. Tiny tiny black eyes that never blinked, great thick cold arms, legs lost in the white bedsheets.

  ‘Mum …’ I couldn’t say any more because something hard was caught in my throat.

  ‘Come on, Aidan,’ Dad said. ‘Don’t snivel. She doesn’t need to see that from you right now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I gulped.

  We sat there in silence. One minute. Two minutes. Three. Dad went over to the oblong of glass in the door and looked through. Harley-Davidson man had gone.

  ‘Back in a bit,’ he said. ‘I’m going to find one of the nurses to talk to. You OK, being in here on your own?’

  I nodded Yes.

  He closed the door softly behind him and I sat there alone, looking at Mum.

  It’s weird. I’d imagined that situation a lot – what I’d say to her if nobody else was around. There were so many things. There was even a little part of me that thought by saying all those things, by sharing them, they’d somehow have the power to make her better. But now that moment was here, nothing would come out. I stared at her, trying to find a way to start, and then I realised she was trying to speak to me.

  ‘Mum?’

  I leaned in closer.

  ‘Mum?’

  Something was coming out from between her lips, that was certain. Some sort of whispering. But hard as I tried I couldn’t find any sense in it. It was more like a song you hear being hummed in the distance, all the sounds running together. And it only lasted a moment or two. Then the silence returned.

  ‘Mum, it’s me, it’s Aidan …’

  She moved her head, gazed out of the window. One of her legs started shaking under the blankets and bedclothes. She rolled over onto her side, stayed there where I couldn’t see her face.

  Quietness grew around us. It expanded and expanded. The shaking in the leg slowed and then stopped. It was like we were two objects in outer space, two objects whose orbits’d never synchronise again.

  The door opened. Dad returning. ‘Has she said anything?’ he asked, coming over to the bed.

  ‘I – I don’t—’

  ‘She’s only just had her medication. It can knock them right out, that’s what they say. But the nurses think she’s improving, overall.’

  ‘Improving?’ I managed to get the word out, just.

  Dad shrugged. ‘Things going in the right direction.’

  I looked at him wanting to know more, but he didn’t say anything else. Perhaps he didn’t have anything else to say. I didn’t know if he was kidding himself, or tr
ying to protect me, or what he was doing. All I knew was how could there be any improvement, any talk of improvement, if Mum couldn’t even recognise or talk to us?

  ‘She’s probably exhausted. We should let her rest. Maybe this wasn’t the best time to come after all.’

  I got up, and it was about the hardest getting-up-from-a-bed that I’d ever done. I thought of the wedding-day picture, the one on the mantelpiece at home. This wasn’t the same person. It couldn’t be. Slim and blonde and beautiful, Dad not believing his luck. Both of them still teenagers. But it was. The confusion in Mum’s eyes on that long-ago day led straight to this hospital room. Straight to the bars on the window and the medication that was making her obese.

  The doctors say she’s got schizophrenia.

  Haxforth says people like this are hearing messages from other places.

  I didn’t know who or what to believe just then. Sometimes, maybe all the time when you come right down to it, no amount of book-reading or cleverness helps. You can only ever know how you feel. Right then, it was like somebody was booting me in the stomach every hour of every day.

  Chapter 17

  8.38, the lopsided clock in Miss Tuckett’s classroom window said. I sat on the low wall by the gates and watched the schoolyard filling up. There, coming along the path, was Daniel Cushway. He’d have to walk right past where I was sitting if he wanted to get inside. I saw him glance at me and then away. How stupid all of that had been – having to stamp and shout around him just so I could eat. Like some conspiracy to keep me being a tiny kid forever. Well, I didn’t need his money any more, not with so much left over from those three envelopes I’d sliced open in secret.

  I turned Haxforth’s clasp over in my pocket. That was where it lived now, safe and secure. I thought of the beating he’d taken, the kick kick kick. Haxforth, who I’d let down, who I should’ve got out of that terrible place by now. The truth was, after seeing Mum in Tredegar House it was about all I could do to close the door of my bedroom and climb under the quilt until it was time to get up and start the early-morning mail round. And even then I’d done almost nothing because of sleeping somehow through the alarm I kept under my pillow. So I knew I’d have to go at it doubly hard from now on, go at it relentless like a machine if all that stuff inside the shed wasn’t to get completely out of control.

  The nearer he got, the faster Daniel Cushway was walking. His head had gone down, avoiding eye contact. I didn’t say anything as he went past. The pus-filled spot on the side of his nose looked worse today, like it was going to splat out any second. I thought of Christy and his pals, of the sort of people they were and what made them think they could treat Haxforth, or anyone, like that. And I thought too, at the same time, about all those things I’d been doing to Daniel Cushway.

  I slipped off the wall and started walking after him.

  ‘Daniel,’ I called.

  He stopped dead. Turned. I knew he was afraid. ‘I haven’t got any money for you,’ he said. ‘I can’t give you any more.’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ I said. ‘I wanted to show you something.’

  ‘What?’ he said warily, knowing it might mean a fist in the face.

  ‘Come here. Look.’

  I gave him the clasp. He examined it, poked it about on the palm of his hand. I could see right away he was interested.

  ‘What do you think? You know about history, don’t you?’

  I knew that because his house was one of my regular stops with the Big Bag, so I saw the type of post he got – things from the British Museum, magazines with names like History Today. Stuff like that, all addressed to D. CUSHWAY.

  ‘My dad knows more about it than I do,’ he said. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Found it,’ I said.

  He poked it about a bit more. ‘It’s really old. But then it also sort of looks like it might have been made last week.’ He looked at me closely, a look he’d never given me before. ‘Where’d you find it?’

  For the first time in his life Daniel Cushway wanted to talk to me rather than run away.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you, yet. I might do later, if you promise not to tell anyone else.’

  ‘I promise,’ he said straightaway.

  ‘And if you help me find out a bit more about it. Exactly how old it is.’

  ‘You want me,’ he said, ‘to help you?’ His eyes were blinking fast and I knew he wanted to say, What’s in it for me? only he couldn’t bring himself to.

  ‘You can forget about bringing that money in every day,’ I said. ‘If you do.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Great. Give it here then.’

  Daniel handed back the clasp. ‘I’d take it to the museum,’ he said. ‘If I were you. Someone there might be able to tell us more about it.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘You. Us. You asked me to help, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. I did. All right. Where is it then exactly, this museum?’

  ‘You mean you’ve never been there?’

  ‘If I knew where it was I wouldn’t be asking, would I?’

  ‘It’s down on Knowle Square. I could show you sometime.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When?’

  Daniel looked around. The whistle had gone and the schoolyard was emptying. Miss Tuckett’s clock said 8.49. Big black rainclouds were coming over and all the lights in the school were on, the windows misting up already.

  ‘Now?’ Daniel looked scared again but also a tiny bit excited.

  ‘Brilliant,’ I said, smiling.

  Chapter 18

  The rain was coming down properly by the time we reached the centre of town. We would’ve taken the bus but Daniel said he didn’t have enough money. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. The museum steps were wide and empty and slick with wetness until you got to a sheltered bit at the top with stone columns where we stood and shook the water off our coats and Daniel smoothed down his hair.

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ he told me. ‘Bunking off school.’

  ‘Nothing to it,’ I said. ‘Easy. ‘Specially for you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You can make up any excuse when you get back and they’ll buy it. Me – it’ll be trouble again. Not that I care.’ I put my fists up like an idiot and acted like a boxer sparring with the nearest column.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve never been here before,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Well, I haven’t, so shut up about it. Come on, let’s go inside. Which way?’

  ‘Through here.’

  Inside the museum. Marble floors and high ceilings, the smell of cleaning fluid and dust. A few old people gliding around on legs that hardly worked any more, speaking in low murmurs or not speaking at all. A guard in a black-and-green uniform sat dozing at the end of a long corridor. The reception area was empty so we walked around for a bit through rooms full of porcelain, rooms full of pictures, rooms full of clocks and old musical instruments. Daniel had a long look at those. That was something he was famous for in our school, being good at music, playing the piano, stuff like that. Finally he caught sight of a man in brown jacket and trousers disappearing through a door.

  ‘We’ll ask him. He looks like he might know.’

  The man was in a hurry, annoyed we were delaying him. He barely glanced at the clasp when I held it out. ‘Looks like a bit of old tat to me,’ he said. ‘But then it’s hardly my field. I’ll get McKendrick to look at it, he’s usually at a loose end this time of the day.’

  We waited five, ten minutes by the door. We waited fifteen minutes. Daniel wandered away and looked into some more glass cases. What was I doing here? This wasn’t my kind of place, never would be. I should be at home, smuggling more mail into my room from the shed, sorting it, making up for the time I’d lost last night.

  Or I could be travelling the miles over to Tredegar House, trying perhaps to visi
t Mum on my own – see if she really had improved. I wondered if they’d let me in without an adult, without Dad. Something told me No. Would she even know who I was this time? This time, or next week, or next year?

  Maybe she’s gone for good.

  Don’t think it. Don’t even think it.

  ‘I’ve been told you have an Ancient Artefact for me to examine …’ a sarcastic voice said close to my ear.

  I jumped. They’d snuck up on me, whoever it was. ‘What?’ I said.

  Daniel came running over. ‘Are you Mr McKendrick?’

  ‘I am,’ replied the man, all whiskers and shirt collar and green checked jumper. I could see he was looking straight at Daniel’s pus-filled spot but Daniel didn’t seem to notice. ‘And which of you boys has this Ancient Artefact?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘It belongs to me.’

  ‘Of course it does. Well, let’s see it then.’ He let out a weird snuffly chortle. ‘Don’t worry, I promise not to keep it for the collection.’

  I fumbled in my pocket, not liking the look of this man, not liking the way he talked or his disgusting green jumper and wondering whether I should even give the clasp to him or not but still watching myself hand it over anyhow.

  Mr McKendrick held the clasp up and moved nearer to a window to get a better look. His eyes widened ever so slightly.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said briskly. ‘Both of you.’ He marched down a side corridor, opened a door and led us up a grey staircase. At the top another door opened onto an office. A secretary was doing something on a computer, steam floating up from a cup of tea beside her keyboard. Other doors led off to other places.

  Mr McKendrick crossed to a desk drawer and rummaged around. ‘Sandra,’ he said, ‘have you seen my magnifying glass? Some damn fool’s moved it.’

  The secretary stared at her computer screen and ignored him.

  ‘Ah – here we are. Good. Now then …’ He placed the clasp on the desk, on a large clean sheet of white blotting paper, and hung his head over the magnifying glass. Every now and then he pushed the arrowhead end or turned it over with a sharp-pointed pencil. When he was satisfied, he sat down in a chair and gazed at us very seriously.