Джон Бойн - A Ladder to the Sky

I nodded and tried not to look too bored. I’d spent so much of my life talking about Two Germans that I was justifiably tired of it. It didn’t even seem like something that had come from my pen any more. After publication, it had taken on its own life so quickly. I remained proud of the book, of course, but it seemed to exist at a certain distance from me these days. I barely recognized myself in it any more, even though it had given me the life I’d always wanted.

‘Although there must be a part of you that wonders whether he deserved what you did to him,’ he said. It took a few moments for the line to hit me as I had been barely listening while he yapped on and on. Instead I had just been staring at him, taking that familiar but not quite recognizable face in. True, he didn’t have the cheekbones that Daniel had, his face was a little too full for that kind of definition, but other than that the resemblance between my son and this boy was uncanny.

‘What was that?’ I asked, snapping back to the moment, unsure whether I’d heard him right. He couldn’t possibly have said something so impertinent, could he?

‘I asked whether you’d like another drink? It’s just such a pleasure to sit here and talk with you.’

‘It’s my round,’ I said, standing up and telling myself not to invent things. After all, I had never been able to before, so this was hardly the time to start. I made my way to the bar, where I ordered two more pints and focussed my gaze on the girl behind the counter as she poured them. ‘You missed a bit,’ I told her when she placed the drinks on the counter before me.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘In the corner there,’ I said, pointing to a space behind her where a thick and sharp chunk of glass lay on its side, broken side up. ‘From when you let the glass fall earlier.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ she said, turning to look at it as I paid for the beers and returned to the table. Theo had disappeared while I’d been away and I looked around, catching his shadow through the window to where he stood outside, smoking a cigarette. I watched him for a few moments, then reached forward and ran my finger around the rim of his empty pint several times before lifting that same finger to my lips and sucking on it slowly. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I had a sense that I was being watched. I was right, for the girl behind the bar was staring at me with an expression of disgust on her face. She turned away when I caught her eye and busied herself with sweeping up the broken glass. I didn’t care. I knew what she thought, that I was either trying to seduce the boy or already had, but it didn’t matter to me. Not in the slightest. I had a job to do and I would do it.

He came back a few moments later and we clinked glasses once again.

‘I’m enjoying our conversation,’ I told him.

‘I am too,’ he said.

‘I hope it won’t be our last.’

He smiled. He seemed so happy, so innocent. So like my dead son that it was all I could do not to take him in my arms and hold him tight, to beg for his forgiveness.

‘I hope so too,’ he said.

It was just over a week before I saw Theo again. After leaving the Queen’s Head that afternoon, we exchanged numbers and I planned on texting him by the weekend at the latest, but, due to an unfortunate accident that took place as I was leaving my Thursday pub, I had to wait a little longer to get in touch.

Brooding over the events of earlier in the week, I felt as if Daniel’s ghost were standing behind me at every minute of the day, whispering in my ear in that accusatory way of his. He was on my mind more than he had been in recent times and I was uncertain whether this had something to do with Theo’s appearance in my life or my plans for rebuilding my career. And so, as I stepped out on to the street a few days later, perhaps I wasn’t paying as close attention to my surroundings as I should have been and I stumbled, losing my footing, and fell heavily to the ground, where my face crashed into the pavement with such force that I was momentarily stunned. When I managed to gather myself together, I sat upright and could feel something wet running down my face. When I put my hand to my forehead, it came away bloody and, when I spat, a tooth fell from my mouth. I looked up at the people who were walking quickly past me, rushing to the Tube at the end of a day’s work, and each one was doing their best to ignore me. It was only when a policewoman approached me that my real humiliation began.

‘Now, what’s happened here, sir?’ she asked, crouching down to my level as if I were a lost child. She looked almost like a child herself; she couldn’t have been more than twenty-three years old and wore a gentle expression on her face that probably belied her seriousness.

‘I fell,’ I told her, my words slurring a little from a mixture of inebriation and shock. It embarrassed me to sound so pathetic.

‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘Had a little too much to drink today, have we?’

I narrowed my eyes at her. If there is one thing I’ve always despised, it’s when people – figures of authority, generally – speak in the first-person plural, as if whatever mishap has occurred has somehow been a shared concern.

‘ We haven’t been doing anything together,’ I said. ‘ We have only just met. And no, I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘I think we have, sir,’ she replied, smiling at me. ‘We smell like a brewery, don’t we? We smell as if we’ve been dunked into a keg of beer, head first!’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ I muttered, but I suppose she was accustomed to such abuse for she didn’t so much as flutter an eyelid. Instead she stood up, then took my arm in hers as she attempted to pull me to my feet.

‘That’s a nasty cut we’ve got there, isn’t it?’ she said, reaching for the walkie-talkie by her hip and muttering some strange, indecipherable commands into it, a series of numbers followed by our location. ‘We’ll need to get that looked at, won’t we?’

I could see the pedestrians watching us now, each one silently judging me. They thought I was nothing more than a tragic old alcoholic, drunk in the middle of the day. A hopeless middle-aged man who needed the assistance of a policewoman young enough to be his daughter to get himself home.

‘I was shortlisted for The Prize once, you know!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Which is more than any of you fuckers have ever done.’

‘Of course you were, sir,’ said the policewoman, obviously having no clue what I was talking about. ‘I won a prize too when I was a girl. Came first in the hundred-metres dash at school. But we don’t need to broadcast it to all and sundry, now, do we? Let’s keep our manners about us and not cause any fuss.’

Before I could speak again, I heard the siren of an approaching ambulance and looked down the street to where the traffic was parting to let it through, at which point I glanced back at my benefactress in annoyance.

‘That better not be for me,’ I said.

‘It is, sir,’ she said. ‘We can’t let ourselves walk around London with blood pouring down our faces, can we? It might scare the horses! We gave ourselves a nasty bang.’

‘Oh, you stupid bitch,’ I replied quietly, with a sigh.

‘Now now, sir,’ she said, squeezing my arm a little now. ‘There’s no need for any unpleasantness, is there? We’re just doing our jobs.’

‘Can you stop talking like that, please?’ I said. ‘You’re making my brain hurt.’

‘We’ll tell the ambulance men that, shall we?’ she replied. ‘Best to be honest with them about everything. We’ve cut our forehead and our brain is hurting. What’s our name, sir? Can we remember?’