David Llewellyn - Trace Memory

'Maria…' he said. No other words came. His eyes burned, and he felt himself smile, properly smile, for the first time since as far back as he could remember. It was as if his heart couldn't be contained, as if he wanted to breathe in until he burst, as if every prayer he'd ever made had been answered in one.

Maybe now it could end, maybe now this thing would stop, and he could be safe, and home.

'Robert, go to your room,' said his sister to her son, to the boy Michael had last seen as a baby, only days before.

The boy shrugged and walked back into the house, and Michael realised that Maria wasn't smiling back at him.

'You're not my brother,' she said, shaking her head. 'My brother's dead. Years ago. Look at you. How old are you? He'd be almost forty now. You aren't Michael. How dare you come here and say a thing like that. Who are you? How do you know his name? How do you know where I live?'

'No…' said Michael, stepping closer to the door.

'You keep away from me, or I swear to God I will phone the police. Who are you?'

'I've told you,' said Michael. 'It's me. It's Michael. I'm back. I'm here, and I'm back, and I just wanted to-'

'Is this some kind of sick joke?' said his sister. 'My brother was missing for years. Probably drowned himself, they said. Probably jumped off a boat and drowned himself. How dare you come here and say these things. How dare you.'

She covered her mouth, and then wiped away the tears from her eyes.

'You're lucky my husband's at work,' she said. 'If he wasn't…'

'Please, Maria…' said Michael. 'I just-'

'I don't want to see you round here again,' said his sister. 'Do you hear me? I never want to see you again.'

The door closed, not with a slam but with a dull thud, and Michael was sure he could hear her sobbing on the other side. He leaned against the door, and tried to say something, anything, but he couldn't. It was pointless.

They sat in silence for the rest of the journey back to the hotel. Jack had pinned everything on the boy's sister welcoming him back with open arms, but then fourteen years was a long time. There was no textbook on how to react to a surprise like that, especially one which defied all logic. There was nothing Jack could say to console Michael; at least there was nothing he could think of, nothing that would mean anything to him. The only thing he could do was keep him safe.

Jack often liked to think that years spent waiting fruitlessly — years exposed to every grubby facet of life — had hardened him to the world, leaving him cynical enough to cope with whatever came next, and emotionally tough enough to walk away from any situation, but he knew this wasn't true. The last embers of his empathy and altruism had not yet died out completely. But what to do with Michael?

'What are we going to do?' Michael asked him, when they were back in the hotel room. The fading light of a setting sun filtered through the closed curtains, turning the whole room a fiery orange.

'In the long term, I don't know,' said Jack. 'I've got questions of my own I need answering, and you… Well, you are just one great big bundle of questions. There's a thing, tomorrow… I might have to meet up with some people. It might be nothing. Until then, I don't know. I'm fresh out of plans. But tonight… Tonight I say we go out and we drink. I mean, there's no real point in me drinking, cos I can't seem to get drunk these days, but we can sit in some noisy crowded pub somewhere and pretend that we're having a good time. Sound good to you, kiddo?'

Michael smiled. It wasn't a plan, as such, but it was better, he figured, than staying in this lifeless room and thinking about the events of the day so far. Besides which, just being with Jack made him feel safe.

The pub was called the Rose and Crown, and it was only a few minutes from the hotel, in a narrow passage off the thoroughfare of St Mary Street. It was exactly the kind of place Jack had described; both noisy and crowded. They sat in a corner that gave Jack a clear view of the rest of the bar, at his insistence, and for a while neither of them spoke. It was Michael who broke the silence, or whatever silence they had amidst the cacophony of the other patrons.

'So do you have any friends?' he asked.

Jack laughed. 'Friends? Well, there are people I know,' he replied. 'Associates, I suppose you'd call them. Acquaintances. I've had friends, but I've not seen any of them in a long time. You see, this thing I have, whatever it is I have… It doesn't lend itself to keeping friends.' He paused, and looked down at his pint of cold tap water with a wistful smile. 'It's like you're running on a different clock to everyone else. What feels like months to you is years to them, and then they're gone. They get older, they die. At first I'd go to the funerals, but then there were so many funerals to go to. The war didn't make that any easier.'

'You were in the war?'

'Oh yeah,' said Jack, nodding and still smiling. 'Both, actually, and a few more besides. And it's being in a situation like that that makes you… I don't know… think differently about it all. I mean, if life is so cheap that lives can be shovelled into war like… like lumps of coal into a furnace, what does that mean?' He shook his head, and took another sip of his water.

'You don't drink at all?' Michael asked.

Jack shook his head.

'Does nothing for me,' he said, grinning. 'I wish it did sometimes. You know, to take the edge off?'

Michael nodded. 'You do have friends,' he said. 'Not now, I mean, but in the future.'

'Whoa,' said Jack. 'No more. Like I said, you can't go telling me things that haven't happened yet. I could go into a whole lecture about paradoxes and upsetting the space time continuum, and-'

'I know, you said,' Michael cut in. 'But just so you know. You do have friends. They seem like nice people.'

Jack looked back at his drink and smiled again. 'That's good,' he said.

Michael smiled at Jack and drank the last drops of beer from his glass. Unlike Jack he had been drinking, and the alcohol was beginning to affect him. He wasn't drunk, but his first two pints had definitely helped relax him, if only a little.

Even so, he'd not forgotten about his sister. He wasn't sure how he'd expected her to react but then, in hindsight, he'd never even known for sure that she would still be at the same address. He just wished things could have turned out differently.

To take his mind away from such thoughts, Michael looked around at the other men in the bar. It occurred to him that almost without exception there were no women in there, only men, and that the atmosphere was somehow different. It reminded him of one of the pubs back in Tiger Bay, a place he'd been to only once or twice. The men spoke differently to one another there, as if talking in some kind of code.

At the bar, he noticed an older man in a lilac shirt smoking a cigarette through a cigarette holder, talking to a surly-looking youth in a leather jacket. The older man giggled nervously at something the youth had said, and then placed one hand on his shoulder. There was something in the gesture that Michael recognised and understood. The older man was what Michael's father would have called a 'pansy' or a 'powder puff. He knew that much.

'There's pubs like this,' said Michael, 'back where I'm from. In Tiger Bay. Some of the sailors go there.'

'What?' said Jack. 'You mean pubs where they sell beer?'

'No,' said Michael, bashfully. 'You know what I mean.'

Jack looked around the room, inspecting it, and frowned. 'No. I don't,' he replied.

Michael scowled. Was Jack mocking him?

'You do, ' he said. 'Pubs for… you know… men who…'

Jack laughed. 'Oh… I see.