Black Chalk Read online

  He turned once more, this time the right way, and then he skied past me, bolder and faster. Thirty yards later, he was flying over a mogul, and his skis had come off, and his head was full of snow. He’d learned his lesson, I thought, and I went down to help. Juggling his skis in my arms, one of my poles slipped out of my hands before I reached him. It slid down until it hit him, face down in the snow.

  ‘That’ll teach you to be careful,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said, his head rising from the snow.

  ‘Can’t you be nice for once? I’m bringing you your skis. You could say thank you.’

  He stood up, yanked the skis from my hands, and glared at me.

  ‘Well, come on,’ I said, ‘put your skis on and give me my pole.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What! I just brought you your skis. The least you could do is give me back my pole.’

  He turned away, hiding his face, and I knew it from experience: despite the day I’d spent nannying him, despite me picking up his skis for him, he’d decided that he had a right to be angry with me. My thoughts swam, and I shuffled up to push him down:

  ‘Give me my pole!’

  He staggered up and pushed me.

  ‘I hate you.’

  Pushing me, the little weasel! I couldn’t believe it. I shoved and pushed until he was sprawled in the snow, lesson learned, and I had my pole back, and I left him alone with the moguls. When I reached the bottom of the black run, where it met the green slope ambling down to base, I pictured my mother, and I told myself I’d better wait for my brother. There, I plotted my revenge, looked at my watch, thought he’d hiked back up and chaired it down, that he’d broken something, until half an hour had passed, and he emerged over a crest, getting closer one slow mogul at a time.

  When he came to the bottom of the run, he looked different. Up to that day, we’d fought often, twice a day it felt like sometimes, but we’d always made peace half an hour after he wanted to kill me. This time though, he kept his lips in a hard line for a whole day, and he looked distant for days afterwards. My mother sided with him as she always did – because he was younger, I was meant to be responsible, she said. But more than her reaction, it was his distance that stayed with me for years afterwards, that resurfaced and cooled me down whenever we were on the verge of a fight.

  And it was this distance that I thought about when he stood by my hospital bed. He looked changed; it was in the way he held himself. But a week was too little time for change. The mere idea of it was ludicrous. If anyone had undergone change, it was meant to be me. I could hear experts say it: what I’d gone through, it was only natural. And yet, after days spent within myself, I could tell them that I was the same person I’d been a week before.

  I decided to trust my first impression: he looked different. I was finding him awkward, almost shifty. I asked him about cricket training.

  ‘We’ve got a new coach. He’s making me change my grip.’

  ‘Your grip was fine,’ I said. ‘What’s he showing you? The Vs?’ I parted my thumbs and index fingers into a V and held out both hands with the Vs aligned.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They always want people to do that, but Atherton holds his bat the way you do, and didn’t that serve him well? And you scored runs last season. He should just accept your way works.’

  ‘He reckons it’s better against the swinging ball.’

  ‘Pff, don’t worry about that. If the ball’s swinging, you need to be able to play late and straight. And that’s the key for all batting, swing, spin, all of it. If you can do that already, don’t go changing your grip.’

  He nodded and looked down.

  ‘How’s your bowling coming along?’ I asked him.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Is he changing anything there?’

  ‘He’s making me work on my left arm. Use it more.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’s a good coach.’ I paused. ‘And how’s school?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Just fine?’

  ‘Well… Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘Okay. What are the other kids saying?’

  ‘They… Nothing. Everyone’s just, you know?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, because yeah was what I had to say. ‘And home?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, and he looked up, searching my face. ‘Mum’s being annoying.’ He gazed at me for a second before he started to speak very quickly: ‘Dad says it’s because she’s stressed, but she annoys him too. I know, I heard them fight.’ He stopped and studied me again.

  ‘What about?’ I asked.

  ‘You. Dad says Mum is spending too much time talking to everyone, and Mum says she has to, for you she says, but Dad thinks she should let the police do their job, and Mum says she doesn’t want them to get it wrong.’ He paused. ‘And Dad’s not happy,’ he finished, looking satisfied.

  I nodded for a few moments while I pictured the scene. Then, as I started to grimace, I changed the topic:

  ‘Mum says Dad’s taking care of you. What’s he cooking? Eggs and beans on toast?’

  James smiled.

  ***

  My relationship with Anna ended strangely. I broke it off because it had come to that. Even though I still wanted to be with her, I had to bow to the inevitable.

  It was a summer romance, strung through parties and gatherings, at first when we were drunk and high, strings weaving away from the public eye, with stolen moments in smaller outings, and then with just us two, alone and together. I approached her full of confidence. A month earlier, I’d had sex for the first time, at a friend of a friend’s party in Oxford, and ever since, I’d eyed every woman with a newfound understanding: years of Playboy, pictures downloaded over dial-up, it suddenly made so much sense. When Anna started talking to me, my thoughts went beyond the mirage of my cock in her pussy. I wanted to put my nose in her navel, to count how many fingers I could put around her thigh.

  She was coming out of an eight-month relationship with a nineteen-year-old boy – an aspiring plumber who was at a technical college on the outskirts of Oxford. After each of our first two booze-fuelled make-out sessions, I tried calling her, emailing her, all in vain. By the time of the party on Old Road, when thirty of us invaded the park that straddled the top of the hill, I’d had enough. Jeffrey agreed – she was acting like a spoiled brat. To avoid her, I shifted from one group to another until long after the sun had set, and we were all drifting into drunkenness.

  ‘So,’ she said, standing above me, ‘how are you today?’ She pushed my bag aside and sat next to me. Her arm accidentally touched my thigh, and I asked myself why I hadn’t sought her out earlier. It brushed my thigh again, and it stayed there, and I felt happy.

  Late one night, we looked back on our beginnings, and decided we’d started being a couple after our second drunken full night. Unlike the night up Old Road, we’d spent the morning together, as couples ought to do. It was as sensible a guess of a starting date as we could come up with.

  Part of me, the romantic part, wanted her to say the relationship had started earlier, in our GCSE history class, when I’d spent all my spare time turning back and talking to her. But when I mentioned those months, she told me she’d been in love with Jeffrey then, much like half the girls of my class. She said it like she was sharing an old joke: all the girls had been in love with him then, and now they all wondered why.

  Over a year later, we were safely out of Jeffrey’s shadow and together. And we went on bike rides, and we watched movies, and she came to mine, and I went to hers. I liked to think of her, to call her, to talk about her – in all, love made me rather content. And yet, it was never an intense relationship. It never felt like it had to be. When school resumed, we spent most of our time with each other in and around class, perhaps meeting out of school once a week. I didn’t own a mobile phone at the time; there were no late night calls, no texting flurries.

  It was emails that brought it down. I’d gone to Cornwa
ll with my family for the first week of the holidays, to visit my father’s parents, as we’d done for many years. There was no internet there, and my grandfather had no intention to install it, even a dial-up modem. For six days then, I read novels into the afternoons, went for short walks in the countryside, and came back to Grandma’s mulled wine.

  Back in Hornsbury, I didn’t feel the need to check my emails until the second morning after my return. When I opened my inbox, I found five emails from Anna. I started with the most recent one, in which she asked me to ignore her earlier emails, hoped I’d had a great time with my grandparents, and told me not to break up with her. Puzzled, I went back through the earlier messages. I don’t think I ever read the third and fourth in their entirety. It was too much, the outpour. She was asking me to stay with her, and she was repeating it, and I was reading it again and again, and I was no longer paying attention, and I was thinking of us broken up. I closed the browser, left my desk and went for a walk. And I went to bed with my sword and sorcerer book, finishing it the next morning. Then I watched a movie, called Jeffrey and talked about nothing in particular. It was the next day I called her: our conversation didn’t flow. We met in a park – I had no plan in mind, but when I saw her, it was there, in her already wide eyes, in the head she didn’t dare raise, in the way she flinched when I asked her how she was. With a misplaced sort of sympathy, I understood that, to her, the relationship was already dead. Much like I’d accepted her hand on my thigh, I accepted her expression then.

  ‘It’s a pity,’ I told her, and she seemed relieved. Everything we said after that took the break-up as a given, and I felt like we’d done the right thing.

  It didn’t have to make sense.

  My days split between video games and a series of novels, the holidays dragged on. When school resumed, I was expecting a return to normal, if not in our intimacy, at least in our preceding friendship. Instead, she ignored me in the halls. She organised gatherings with my friends without inviting me. She went as far as to install her friend Laura in my old physics seat. When I challenged her over it, she looked away, pointing me towards Laura. Telling me I could take her seat, Laura’s mannerisms mimicked Anna’s in their disdain.

  I don’t want to judge her for it. I don’t want to judge myself. We were both young. But whereas I can now separate the break-up from her subsequent behaviour, I then saw the one as vindicating the other: her coldness was ridding me of any lingering doubt.

  It took bullets to break the barrier we’d erected. Bullets flying over me, past me, around me, while she hyperventilated and bled.

  ***

  My mother put down her papers, got up from her chair and stood tall next to me, her shape darkened by the light coming from the window. I shut my notebook, keeping my writings and drawings to myself.

  ‘I went to see Eric’s mother this morning.’

  The weight she put into those words made me want to stop her then and there, but I took a closer look at the stillness of her eyes and the line of her lips, and realised it was already too late.

  ‘I know you like her, the poor woman. So I wanted to see her, and tell you what’s happening outside this place. Hospitals, they can…’

  ‘I know,’ I said to fill in her pause. I didn’t need to look around me to understand her: I knew my hospital corner all too well. Feeling she hadn’t finished, I ignored my misgivings and prompted her on: ‘How was Eric’s mother?’

  My mother’s smooth face hardened for an instant. She held her hand up as if to tell me to be patient.

  ‘I went to see her after our morning meetings. That’s a support group we started right away, but we can’t invite her along. Some parents are blaming her, and that’s easy to understand. Still, I thought she’d appreciate a friendly face. Do you understand?’

  She looked at me expectantly, as Eric’s mother and her pained smile came into my mind. I turned away.

  ‘It’s not her fault,’ I said. I could see my mother raising her hand again from the corner of my eyes, but the words out of my mouth triggered more. ‘It could have been any of the other mothers. The ones who are crying now, they could be the ones feeling guilty.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘It’s true!’ My voice rose, and the old man turned to look at us. He didn’t matter; what I was talking about was more important. ‘Why blame her? It could have been anyone, imagine if it was you—’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ she hissed. A deep line spread down her forehead, her cheeks creased, and wrinkles quivered around her mouth. ‘I don’t want to hear anything like that.’

  Her sudden intensity cut my thoughts short. When I got over the shock, I looked at her and chose to keep quiet: I could see the anger draining from her face with every word she uttered.

  ‘But you’re right,’ she continued, ‘we should forgive her. Not all families are as strong as ours. And she’s lost a son too…’ On that thought, her voice found the softness I craved. ‘I knocked on her door this morning. No one came to open it, so I went around the back and found her sitting on the terrace, out in the cold. She wasn’t even wearing a coat. She didn’t recognise me at first; she shouted at me to go away. I think she gets a lot of media people, more than we do. She eventually let me in, but that’s after I told her who I was three times.’ My mother shook her head and stopped for a second. ‘She remembered you; she said, “Nate, the cricket player”, and that’s all she had to say about you.’

  She looked calmed: her lips had dropped open, and her brow was now smooth.

  ‘Maybe she needs to be alone,’ I whispered.

  ‘Sometimes we feel like that even though that’s not what we need. We’re lucky, Nate, because, whatever we do, we have each other. I know you don’t want to think about it, but I have to tell you that there are a lot of people out there,’ she waved her arm at the window, ‘who won’t leave us alone, and who don’t care at all how we feel.’ She dropped her arms by her side. ‘You’re getting better slowly, and those people want answers. Don’t you think we should be ready for them?’

  She stopped on that question, waiting for me to take her up on her challenge, before she went back to her chair. But if I looked deep in thought, it was because I was starting to realise that there were topics my mother considered out of bounds, and I needed to grasp where those boundaries lay.

  After my mother left and the caterers gathered our dinner trays, I thought of Eric’s mother. I couldn’t remember her name, and yet she was always kind to me. She was away working for the most part. When at home, she left Eric to himself. But she always did all she could to make me at ease when I saw her. A week before the 10th of February, I’d brought my bat to Eric, to see whether he could help me repair it. It was an old bat, a bat I’d used in the middle many times, over many seasons. Its weight and its pickup were too familiar to give up. With it, I could dig out yorkers, read shooters, attack googlies.

  Eric had carved a chunk out of the toe, replaced it with part of another bat, sanded down the result, and was applying glue when I heard his mother calling us. I knew she’d never walk down to the shed. As I expected, Eric didn’t react, his whole attention turned to applying glue. I took it upon myself to walk out of the shed, up the hill, and ask her what I could do for her.

  ‘I made you boys orange juice,’ she said, pouring me a glass.

  The fresh pressed juice tasted sweeter than the bottled juice I usually drank. I told her it reminded me of half-time orange slices during the football season.

  ‘I like it when you come over,’ she said, holding on to the jug.

  Feeling she wanted to talk, I sat down.

  ‘It’s nice here,’ I said.

  ‘You like it?’ she asked, doubts in her voice. She always had doubts in her voice. Of all the mothers I knew, she struck me as the most resigned. Everything that happened to her seemed to be another piece of evidence against fate. It was the way things were, she would say, with a sigh and a shake of her head. Like the three times she couldn’t ta
ke me home, all in the same month, and she told me, each time in the same voice, that that sort of thing only happened to her. Just when she needed a car, her husband was late, and the other car wasn’t working.

  ‘I can make you something to eat if you want,’ she said on all three occasions, putting her keys down and looking through her cupboard. ‘Pasta?’

  But Eric was never hungry, so I waited until my mother came to pick me up. For Eric’s mother – I know her name wasn’t Mrs Knight – the only thing she could do was suffer gracefully until her husband came home.

  ‘I like the field,’ I said the time she made us orange juice.

  ‘It’s a field because Eric won’t mow it. I keep on telling him to do it, it’s his job, but he doesn’t listen, no. He just stays in his shed and ignores me…’ She trailed off and I felt uncomfortable. ‘But I’m glad that you’re his friend. It’s good for him.’

  I wanted to grab the jug and bring it down, but she held on to its handle.

  ‘How do you think he is?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Is he doing well at school? Is he happy? I know he’s not happy here, but a few more months and he’ll have his own place. So, what do you think?’

  I waited for a second, hoping she’d add something and I wouldn’t have to answer her, but she looked at me expectantly.

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said. ‘Maybe a bit stressed, but he’s fine. Why do you ask?’

  ‘He doesn’t tell me these things anymore. It’s always the same. He used to when he was little but then he grew up and now he doesn’t tell me anything anymore,’ she sighed, letting go of the juice.

  I brought it back down and drank most of it, Eric being too busy with the bat.

  ***

  My ward waited for the doctors. Patients drifted through the days and into the nights together. Teams of nurses watched over our beds and left at the end of their shifts. On the stroke of mealtime, caterers wheeled meals in and wheeled trays out. Janitors pushed their buckets around the halls, and slopped their solutions on our floors. At the appointed hour, rule-abiding visitors stormed in and snuck out. And my mother outlasted them all.