Robert Dinsdale - Gingerbread

‘You’ll look after him, and your papa will look after you.’

The boy accepts the Russian horse, feeling its chips beneath his fingers. ‘But who will look after you, mama?’

Mama crouches to plant a single dry kiss on his cheek. Once, her lips were full and wet. ‘Get dressed for bed. I have to speak to your papa.’

After she is gone, the boy sits with the little Russian horse. By turning him in the light from the streetlamps below, he can cast different shadows on the wall: one minute, a friendly forest mare; the next, a monstrous warhorse rising from its forelegs with jaws flashing wild.

He does not get into his nightclothes and he does not climb under the blanket. To do either would mean he would not see mama again until morning, and he knows he must see as much of mama as he can. When he hears voices, he steals back to the bedroom door and out, back past the banks of photographs, back through memories and generations, to the cusp of the kitchen.

His mama’s voice, with its familiar tone of trembling resolve: ‘Promise me, papa.’

‘I promise to care for the boy. Isn’t that enough?’

‘I want to be with my mother.’

‘Vika …’

‘After it’s done, papa, you take me to that place and scatter what’s left of me with her. You listen to me now …’

‘You shouldn’t speak of such things.’

‘Well, what else am I to do, papa?’

His mother has barked the words. Shocked, the boy looks down. His shadow is betraying him, creeping into the kitchen even as he hides himself around the corner.

‘I miss her, papa. On her grave, I haven’t asked you for a single thing, not one, not since the boy was born …’

‘Vika, please …’

‘You do this thing for me, and we’re done. I won’t ask you for anything else.’

‘It has to be there?’

When mama speaks next, the fight is gone from her words. They wither on her tongue. ‘Yes, papa.’

‘Vika,’ Grandfather begins, ‘I promise. I’ll look after the boy. I’ll take you to your mother. And, Vika, I’ll look after you. I’ll hold you when it happens.’

Then comes the most mournful sound in all of the tenement, the city, the world itself: in a little kitchenette, piled high with pans, his mama is sobbing. Her words fray apart, the sounds disintegrate, and into the void comes a wet and sticky cacophony, of syllables, letters and phlegm.

When he peeps around the corner, Grandfather is holding her in an ugly embrace, like a man in a patchwork suit at once too big and too small.

‘And you don’t let him see,’ mama’s words rise out of the wetness. ‘When it happens, you make sure he doesn’t see.’

Strange, to wake in a new home, with new sounds and new smells in the night. The tenement has a hundred different halls, and the footsteps that fall in them echo through all of the building – so that, when he closes his eyes, he can hear a constant scratch and tap, as of a kidnapper at his window.

Mama has her own room, across the hall in the place where Grandfather used to sleep. Grandfather has a place by the gas fire, in a rocking chair heaped high with blankets and the jackboots at his side. It is here that the boy finds him every morning, and here that they sit, each with a hot milk and oats. New houses have new rules, and the boy must not leave the alcove while Grandfather takes mama her medicines and helps with her morning ablutions. The boy is not allowed to see his mama in the mornings, but he is allowed to spend every second with her after his schooling is finished.

This morning, he is lying in the covers with the old bunk beams above, when the door opens with an unfamiliar creak. There is an unfamiliar tread, unfamiliar breath – and, though he wants it to be mama, it is Grandfather who tramps into the room.

‘Come on, boy. Time for school.’

The boy scrabbles up. ‘Is mama …’

‘She’s only resting.’

That is enough to quell the fluttering in the boy’s gut, so he rolls out of the covers and follows Grandfather. The old man is retreating already down the hall, past the photographs of the long ago, when everything was black and white. The boy hesitates, eyes drawn inexorably to the doorway across the hall. Then Grandfather calls and he follows.

In the kitchen, he studies Grandfather as they eat. Once upon a time, Grandfather was only a story. The boy lived with his mama and only his mama in a house near the school, and in the days he learnt lessons and played with the boy named Yuri, and in the nights he came home and sat with mama with dinner on their laps. Now, Grandfather is real. He has a face like a mountain in the shape of his mother, and ears that hang low.

‘What was mama like when she was little?’

Grandfather pitches forward, breaking into a smile that takes over all of his face. What big teeth he has, thinks the boy.

‘She was,’ he beams, ‘a … nuisance!’

Then Grandfather’s hands are all over him, in the pits of his arms and the dimples on his side, and he squirms and he shrills, until Grandfather has to tell him, ‘You’ll wake your mama. Go on, boy, up and get dressed.’

It used to be that mama walked him to the school gates, but the tenement is far from the school, almost on the edge of the city, where hills and the stark line of pines can be seen through the towers and factory yards, so today they must take a bus. The boy asks, ‘Why can’t we drive the car?’ But Grandfather isn’t allowed to drive, so instead they wait in the slush at the side of the road until a bus trundles into view.

As he puts his foot on the step to go in, he thinks of mama, alone in the tenement like a princess locked in her tower. He halts, so that the people clustered behind him bark and mutter oaths.

From the bus, Grandfather says, ‘What is it, boy?’

‘It’s mama.’

‘She’ll be okay. She’s resting.’

‘I don’t want her to be on her own. Not when …’

Grandfather’s face softens, as if the muscles bunching him tight have all gone to sleep. ‘That isn’t for a long time yet.’

The boy nods, pretending that he believes – because even pretending and knowing you’re pretending is better than not pretending at all.

He settles into a seat beside Grandfather and, as the bus gutters off, cranes back to see the tenement retreating through the condensation.

Sitting next to Grandfather is not the same thing as sitting next to a stranger, because in his head he knows that Grandfather was once mama’s papa, and that, once upon a while, Grandfather took mama to school and maybe even sat on a bus just the same as this. Yet, knowing a man from photographs is not the same as sitting next to him and hearing his chest move up and down, or seeing the ridges on the backs of his hands. Every time Grandfather catches him watching, the old man grins. Then the boy is shamefaced and must bury his head again. Once the shame has evaporated, the boy can look back; then Grandfather catches him again, grins again, and once even puts a hand on the boy’s hair and rubs it in the way mama sometimes does.

‘I bet you’re wondering about your old papa, aren’t you?’

The boy shakes his head fiercely. It is a terrible thing not to know which is wrong and which is right.

‘I’m sure you’ve heard stories.’

That word tolls as strongly as any other, and he looks up. ‘Stories?’

‘Things your mama’s told you, about her old papa.’

‘Oh …’

‘No?’

‘I thought you meant other sorts of stories.’

They sit in silence, as the bus chokes through the lights of a mangled intersection.

‘You like stories?’

The boy nods.

‘Then maybe we’ll have a story tonight. How does that sound?’

The boy nods his head, vigorously. It is a good thing to know which is wrong and which is right. ‘Do you know lots of stories?’