‘You’ll get square eyes, you will,’ his mother would say, his father muttering behind his paper about the brain-rotting capacities of the idiot box. But then, his father didn’t like books much either.
Christopher never understood what square eyes were, though by the age of fourteen myopia had furred his world like the inside of an old kettle. His mother took him to the optician, and two weeks later, spectacles were pushed onto his face, adjusted around his ears. And there they would stay, in various sizes and subtle variations, for the rest of his life: his world clear now but gated off in dark tortoiseshell.
He worked hard, always. He made no apology for that. Caught the bus to school, stayed for dinner, played British Bulldog sometimes on the tarmac. ‘Rubbish’ at woodwork and art, ‘all right’ at English and history (he excelled, though he would never say it). Loved to read, loved music. The seventies brought decimalisation, all mod cons, though Morecambe still seemed a decade behind, judging by the clips on News from the North. The seventies were happening elsewhere, just as the sixties had, but news of them still came through the television. A tide of change: IRA bombs in London, Margaret Thatcher knocks Edward Heath off the Conservatives’ top spot, a prostitute murdered in Leeds.
Like any sixteen-year-old, Christopher was more concerned with youth club on Friday nights in the church hall, watching but not speaking to girls whose pastel dresses had been replaced by flared trousers and low-cut T-shirts stretched tight, girls who threw back their heads when they laughed, who smoked in dangerous blue clouds; boys with long hair who, unlike Christopher, knew what to say. Sundays at Mass, an altar boy, a chorister, his alto broke, turned baritone. Having no distractions at home above the distant whoop of his siblings downstairs, his schoolwork progressed apace. Three A grades at A level – a place at Leeds University to read history.
‘What do you want to go there for?’ his father asked, sipping tea from his mug in the kitchen. He meant university, not Leeds. He set aside his newspaper, peered down at the results sheet as if it were a secret code, up at Christopher, then back down at the sheet. ‘That a trade, is it, history?’
So, you see, his father might not have let him go to university at all, might have steered him into a steady job doing real work for real money, money he could chip in for rent. University of Life! Christopher might have ended up with an apprenticeship like most of his peers, were it not for the maintenance grant.
He might never have opened that suitcase.
* * *
Christopher picked up the fallen torch, pulled the case from the eaves and into his room. There he dusted it down with an old inside-out vest and into it placed the clean clothes his mother had left folded on his bed along with his books and the new brushed-silver fountain pen she had given him for university. After that, he unscrewed the handles of his skipping rope and tied it around the case to be sure it wouldn’t pop open again. He carried the case downstairs and left it in the hall.
In the kitchen, his mother and father and Jack and Louise sat together around the table. Christopher handed his father the piece of paper. His father took it from him, his expression no more than that of mild enquiry. He pushed his reading glasses onto his nose and studied the letter for no more than a second, his expression changing instantly – nothing anyone would have noticed if they were not watching closely; no more than a clench of his jaw, a flare of his nostrils. He placed his forefinger and thumb to his brow and, handing the letter in silence to his wife, dispatched Jack Junior and Louise upstairs to their rooms.
To Christopher he said, ‘Go and wait in the front parlour.’
Christopher sat on one of the armchairs, firm, almost hard, the raised pattern of the fabric running like Braille beneath his fingertips. His teeth chattered. The front room was cold. He had only ever seen one other person’s front room – his school friend Roger’s, when they’d laid out his grandfather’s body. And here, now, with no corpse to speak of, he felt death in the room just the same. In his chest, the rope tightened.
Long minutes later, his father came in, followed by his mother, who brought a tray with three cups and the teapot, a jug of milk, the sugar bowl, and set it down on the low table, as if the ritual of tea could protect them from the chaos Christopher felt coming.
‘Christopher.’ It was his mother who began, skinny knees pressed together, hands bunched on her fraught lap; his father, beside her on the settee, smoked his pipe in silence.
‘Me and your dad,’ his mother said. ‘That’s to say, we’re your parents, of course we are.’
‘Yes,’ Christopher said, falling towards what she had to say, helpless as a stone pitched down a well.
His mother looked towards his father, who sucked on his pipe and nodded for her to continue. Trusted her with so little usually but now appeared content for her to take charge. Seeing no shift from her husband, no move to help her out, Margaret returned to Christopher, her glance flashing like guilt itself.
Don’t say it, he willed silently. Don’t say what it is you are about to say. Let us drink our tea and say well here we are and shouldn’t we be going and don’t want to miss that train. But they did not drink their tea, and they did not say those things. Instead, his mother said the words that were already travelling up her windpipe, forming themselves on her tongue, which now pressed itself to the floor of her mouth to let in the gulp of air she took to ready herself and say:
‘Christopher, you had another mother and father.’
And like that the rope uncoiled, snaked wildly in the sudden vacuum.
A girl in trouble. This was all they knew. This, and more, he heard through the electric buzz in his ears, a white heat searing the cave of his chest. His parents – familiar strangers who sat in front of him now and looked anywhere but at him – these people had picked up his infant self from a convent on the outskirts of Liverpool. They had brought him home and called him Christopher. Here in their semi-detached house with its back patio and its converted roof space, that baby had grown, had learnt to skip, to read, to not spoil things, to not claim things for his own. And somewhere along the line, the natural child that had been denied them had come after all. He had come, and they had called him Jack.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked.
‘You had opportunities here,’ said his mother, pressing on, deaf to him. ‘Dread to think what would’ve happened if we hadn’t taken you. We left a note for her, told her we’d look after you. Yes, truth be told, you were much better off here with us.’