Майкл Смит - The Lonely Dead

Monroe stood and started talking to Olbrich in a way that firmly suggested Nina's further input was not required. She waited until they wandered over to the cops in the back of the room. Then she turned to the self-proclaimed wunderkind and spoke in her quietest, most friendly and appealing voice.

'Vince,' she said. 'This is where I ask you a favour.'

Twenty minutes later she left the building with something in her bag. She stepped out onto the street and into an evening that was still very warm, and wondered if she was deliberately trying to screw up her career.

She needed to talk to someone, but John wasn't answering the phone and the truth was he was more screwed up than her. There was one other option. She thought about it. Then she drove home sedately. By the time she pulled into her drive she'd made her decision. In the kitchen she picked up the phone and dialled. It rang and rang, but he didn't answer.

She left a message, feeling like just another voice on just another machine.

7

The back of Mrs Campbell's house looked out over a small patch of yard that said everything the front of her house tried not to. I stood in her kitchen, waiting as patiently as I could while she clattered about. I remembered my mother once telling me that the day you refused a hot beverage from an old person was the day they learned their company was not worth the wait. I know shit about plants, however, and the view was not interesting me in the slightest. It took everything I had not to go through and grab the old lady by the throat.

'Muriel was adopted herself,' she said, when she eventually led me through into the sitting room. 'Did she tell you that?'

'No,' I said, stepping quickly forward to take the tray from her. I don't know what the protocol on that is, but the way I saw it, I had about ten seconds before it wound up on the floor and I just wasn't waiting for her to make a new batch. 'She told me she couldn't help me, and that was pretty much that.'

'She can be that way. I knew her when she first started working there. She had some bad years at the start. First husband left her, cleaned out the house when he went. Beat up on her some, too. But come what may, she turned up on time and she did what she was supposed to do and she helped a lot of people out. Lot of the public go into a place like that big old department on Adams and forget the staff are human too, folk who got their own lives.'

'I understand it can be a difficult job,' I said. 'People can be hard to deal with.'

'Damn straight. Course, some of the folks work there are assholes, too.'

I laughed. She nodded approvingly. 'You should smile more,' she said. 'People look better that way. You especially. You don't smile, your face looks like you mean people harm.'

'I don't,' I said.

'So you say.'

'Mrs Campbell, I got the sense that…'

'Okay, I'm coming to it. You're looking for a brother, that's right? Muriel said you thought it would have been 1967. That would be correct. In fact, as I remember it was October. Though truth be told my memory really isn't what it was. I'm okay on things. Just not so good on pure facts.'

I nodded. My chest felt tight.

'A Chinese storekeeper found him on the street. A toddler. Don't know how long he'd been there, but he'd been crying a good while.'

'My parents had their reasons,' I said, feeling an absurd need to defend a decision which had not been my own, and which I barely understood. 'The background was complicated.'

'I'm sure. And they didn't dump him in the Tenderloin or the Mission District, which is something. Anyway, we knew he was called Paul because he had his name stitched right there on his sweater. Course a lot of times back then families would choose a new name anyhow, but Paul's name stuck. We did the usual checks but we had no way of tracing where he might have come from, and so he went into care here in the city. Stayed a few years, too. Usually finding a home for one that's little and cute isn't so hard. But with this one, it seemed like they wouldn't take.'

I wanted to know what she meant, but didn't want to interrupt her flow.

'I lost track of him for a while. There are a lot of kids. Next time I heard about him was when he was becoming a problem.'

'What kind of problem?'

'He'd be with a foster family for a few months, and then he'd be back, well ahead of schedule. At first I didn't pay much attention. It happens. But it started to become a thing. Hey, Paul's back. The temporary family couldn't… well, I was going to say 'couldn't cope', but it never seemed to be that. Not exactly. It was just, here he is, back again. And you need to bear in mind these were families who'd looked after a lot of kids, who were good at taking children in and making them feel all right. We'd have him placed and mentally wave him goodbye, then five weeks later I'd go into the home and there he'd be, sitting on a windowsill, looking out. I'd ask him what had happened and Paul would say the same thing the families did: it just didn't work out.'

She paused and took a sip of her coffee, as if considering long-ago mistakes. 'Anyway, finally it's decided that we need to step up the search for an adoptive family, some longer-term solution. So I talked to Paul, and told him that's what we were going to try to do. He nodded — he's about six, seven years old at this stage, bear in mind — and something tells me he's not agreeing with the idea, just recognizing it was what was going to happen and his role is just to let it roll on. So I asked him, didn't he want to find a permanent family? And he looked me right in the eyes and said, 'I had one. It's gone. When everything is in place, I'll get it back.''

I felt cold across the back of my neck. 'He remembered us?'

'Not necessarily. But he knew that once there'd been something else. You don't have to be the brightest firework in the box to realize his position wasn't natural, and he was a very smart kid. You could tell. That's all it was. Kids often get this feeling they've been abandoned, taken away from where they ought to be. Even the ones who haven't been adopted get it. The 'I should be a fairy princess' syndrome, or 'I am rightfully a king and when I cry the earth cries with me'. That's what I thought it was.'

I'd watched the abandonment part of the video many times without really confronting what it must have been like for the child who was left behind. In the last three months I hadn't really cared what he'd felt. I tried hard to do so now.

'Look,' I said, 'do you mind if I have a cigarette?'

'Go ahead,' she smiled. 'My husband used to smoke. I like the smell. You do know it will kill you, though?'

'Not going to happen,' I reassured her. 'Just a rumour put around by the gym addicts and health nuts.'

She nodded, no longer smiling. 'Yes, that's what he thought too.'

Something about the way she said it meant that though I smoked the cigarette down, I didn't enjoy it very much. 'So what happened when you looked for a permanent family?'

'I'll tell you.' She was quiet for a moment, before continuing. 'You know, I did that kind of thing for a long time, and I thought about it a lot. Most of me believes that where we're born seeps up into us like water from the soil, that we have leaves like trees do; and where the seed that becomes us first lands, that's who we are and that will determine the colour of our leaves — even if some bird picks us up that same afternoon and moves us fifty, a hundred miles away. Another bit of me thinks well, we're all God's children, aren't we? We're all just human. Isn't that what the Bible says? Two hundred years ago there was barely anything on this spot but birds and some animals and every now and then one of the native people, out hunting in a land so big they called it the world. Now we've taken it and call it our home and go fight wars over it in places half of us can't even spell. So what does it matter if a child is brought up by someone who isn't its kin, or in some other part of the country? Give them a good home and it could be nothing ever happened. I've seen it work hundreds of times. It isn't always easy, but it works, and it's one of the things makes me think we humans aren't such a bad lot after all.'