Equivocator Read Free Page A

ways of tracing people. Altogether too many. Nobody can hide these days. There’s a sense of déjà vu . You have been peering out of the shadows, I think, and shiver: and somehow with Dad’s eyes. Melting eyes, variable between blue and grey. Why am I thinking that? Ludicrous. I ought to ask point blank. But, if I ask, he might tell me.
    The tide: it’s advancing too swiftly. It waits until we’re not looking and makes a dash forwards.
    And now Salvatore – as he was always going to do – speaks Dad’s name.
    Jack Messenger, he says. He knew Jack. As schoolboys. And later, of course. Your father, he says, was a genius. And I was so sad when. Of course it was the loss to you and your. Yes. Oh, I can’t speak about it, forgive me. We lost touch, Salvatore mourns in a curious piping wail. And then when they brought back his. His remains. From Turkey. Did they ever find out how he?
    â€˜No,’ I say, to cut him off, and start to rise. He doesn’t touch me but I feel detained, and sink back down.
    â€˜Jack was the only genius I ever knew.’
    Aside from yourself, I don’t say.
    And then Salvatore raises the topic of the shed. The shed, he is saying, when they dug it up. Your father’s writing shed in the garden? The shed. The den. Not the shed itself of course, but what they found underneath.
    Perhaps it was my nightmares that have always convinced me that I saw the cadaver they unearthed. Right down to the smell that over the years has assailed me from time to time, passing a restaurant ventilator shaft or lugging rubbish out to the bin. I couldn’t possibly have seen the corpse. My mother and I had been evicted for the police search and stayed away for weeks. The body was not Dad’s. I never thought it was.
    â€˜Everybody assumed …,’ he says.
    â€˜Yes, but it wasn’t.’
    â€˜No, of course not. And then. Last year. He was found and brought home. A kind of closure for you and your family.’
    Closure? What is this closure they all talk about?
    Salvatore wonders, by the way, whether Dad left a Persian manuscript or any letters from his last visit to Iran? He assumes not. Salvatore has been in touch with Jack’s publisher but the lady who used to edit him is either dead or has moved on (can’t people tell the difference?) and nobody appears to know anything.
    No, I say, there’s nothing. And if there were, wouldn’t it have been published? I think: the old guy’s just a nosy-parker with perfectly false teeth perched on a log pulling on his socks.
    â€˜We were at school together – he was the friend of my youth, Sebastian. And I have access to papers of his – I’ll be happy to share – I want you to meet my daughter – ’
    I consult my watch. The sea has sidled nearer. Waves are tonguing in, making progress with every surge. How they covered all that ground is a mystery, unless we’ve been here far longer than I’m aware. Without answering, I excuse myself and, turning away, retrace my steps across the sand.
    â€˜Don’t run off, Sebastian,’ he calls, as if I were a child escaping from leading reins, and he hurries behind me, panting, apologising for touching a nerve, if he has, he’s terribly sorry: what is my talk about this evening?
    â€˜The Abomination of Monthu!’ I call, without slackening pace, and even to me this sounds thoroughly inane and my behaviour appears infantile. And I think: I’ll go home to Jesse now, and offer him some clarity. I’ll ask him please to forgive my follies, which is all they are, and to stay, for he’s all the world to me. I’ll say: it’s not so much falsehoods we live with as the habit of silence. Let me bring truth out into the open between us. And I know I won’t, because I’m shot through with all these voluptuous arrows and tied to a tree.
    *
    Manchester, 1986. It was, I think, the following day when I