Джон Бойн - A Ladder to the Sky

‘Of course I can fucking remember,’ I said. ‘I’m not a complete imbecile. It’s Maurice Swift.’

‘And do we have a home to go to tonight?’

I stared at her in bewilderment. She surely didn’t think that I was homeless? I looked down at my clothes and, true, I might have looked a little ragged that day, and the blood pouring down my face probably didn’t help, but still. This was a degradation that was almost intolerable.

‘Of course I have a home,’ I said. ‘I live near Hyde Park. I’m not some sort of vagrant, you know.’

‘Oh, very nice, I’m sure. Can I call someone for you there? Is your wife at home?’

‘My wife is dead.’

‘A son or daughter perhaps?’

‘Only a son. But he’s dead too.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said, looking a little uncomfortable at last. Still, I thought about it. If I did need someone, if I needed help at some point in the future, who would I call? My parents were long dead and I hadn’t spoken to my siblings in decades. My son was gone. I had no friends. My publisher and I were no longer on speaking terms. For a moment, I thought of handing her my phone, where one of the only numbers listed was Theo’s, but I had enough sense not to do that.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I don’t need anyone. I just want to go home.’

‘Well then, we shouldn’t be drinking in the middle of the day, sir, should we?’ she said as the ambulance pulled up alongside us. ‘It’s not a good idea at all.’

‘It’s an excellent idea, actually,’ I told her. ‘You should try it sometime. Believe me, it will cure almost every ailment you have.’

‘But it leaves us with a bloody face and a missing tooth,’ she said, releasing my arm at last as a burly man of about sixty emerged from the ambulance, before giving him a quick rundown of my condition.

‘We’ve been drinking,’ was her first comment. She lowered her voice as if she didn’t want anyone to hear and, before I knew it, I had been thrown into the back of the ambulance and was being whisked off to St Peter’s, where my forehead was stitched and my mouth was cleaned. I think I fell asleep on a trolley and when I woke I felt utterly disoriented and my head ached. No one seemed to be taking any responsibility for my well-being so I dragged myself to my feet and made for the exit, hailed a taxi and went home.

My point being that I didn’t want Theo to see me like that so put off contacting him, waiting instead until early the following week, when the wound was less discoloured, to get in touch again.

Across the eight days until we met again, I felt an unexpected longing for Theo’s company, one that I hadn’t anticipated when I began this project. Finally, after hours of deliberating over the wording, I texted some nonsense about having meetings in town on Wednesday morning, that I would probably be in the Coach and Horses around three o’clock and, if he was interested in joining me, I’d be happy to buy him a drink and answer more of his questions then. To my delight, the message had barely left my phone when he replied with a quick ‘See you there!’ and a smiley face, followed by an image of two beer glasses clinking against each other. It was all that I could do not to sit down and weep in gratitude.

I had said three o’clock because I wanted an hour to myself first to settle my nerves. I sat at the small table in the corner, watching as Londoners walked by the window and, as I had done so often in my professional life, tried to invent stories for them, wondering if they had some quality that could help to populate a novel for me, but failing every time. Finally, a sense of relief. The door opened. He was here. My boy.

‘You made it,’ I said, standing up and awkwardly embracing him. He extended his hand just as I opened my arms and when he put it down, the whole thing became too complicated and embarrassing to pursue. I ordered two pints and brought them over as he took his coat off. I could already tell that he was distracted. He looked tired and had that strange habit Daniel had suffered from when he was anxious of tapping the tip of his index finger against his thumb rapidly, like a woodpecker attacking an oak tree. It was an unusual gesture, one that my son had never seemed conscious of, and here was this boy doing the same thing.

‘Of course,’ he replied, smiling now, his expression lightening a little as we began to drink. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’ He leaned forward, peering at my forehead. ‘What happened to your head?’

‘A slight accident,’ I told him, waving his concerns away. ‘I woke in the night to use the bathroom and walked straight into my bedroom door.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Indeed. It needed seven stitches. But I was a brave little soldier. And how was your week?’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘And you? Did you get much work done? On your book, I mean.’

‘Which book?’

‘The book you’re writing.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Of course, he assumed that I was working on a new novel. Why wouldn’t I be, after all? I always had been, since I was not very much older than him, and it had been some years now since my last publication. It would seem strange if there weren’t something in progress.

‘How’s it coming along, anyway?’ he asked. ‘Are you close to the end?’

I smiled and tried to think how best to answer this. Before Daniel died, I had been engaged on a new book, but I had all but abandoned it since then. My working title was Other People’s Stories , but I hadn’t been able to look at it since my son’s death. It was still there, of course, sitting on my computer desktop like an unexploded bomb, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. The truth was, I was nervous of returning to a manuscript that had effectively cost my son his life.

‘I hope so,’ I told him finally. ‘It’s hard to know. These things can go either way.’

‘Can you tell me anything about it?’

‘I’d rather not,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Fair enough. I suppose it’s difficult to talk about a work in progress. You never know who might steal your ideas.’

‘It’s not that,’ I said, anxious for him to believe that I trusted him. ‘It’s just—’

‘I’m kidding,’ he said, looking a little abashed. ‘It’s not as if anyone could just take someone else’s story and write it themselves, is it? These things need to form in a writer’s mind over time. After all, a novel is about a lot more than just plot, right?’

‘Right,’ I said, wondering how many of my peers would argue with that notion. ‘So, what you’re saying is that if someone did do that, they’d have to be… what? Actually, what are you saying?’

‘Well, they’d have to be really talented,’ he said. ‘But also a complete psychopath.’

I laughed. ‘Well, yes. But, of course, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.’

‘Can you at least tell me when you think it might be published?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, wishing he would change the subject, for I didn’t want to talk about any of this. ‘Late next year, perhaps. Or early the following one.’

‘Well, I’ll look forward to reading it whenever it’s ready,’ he said, before making his way up to the bar and ordering some more drinks. When he came back, he reached into his bag and removed a Ventolin, put it to his mouth and took a quick breath. I stared at him in horror. My head began to grow slightly dizzy, as if the earth had shifted a heartbeat quicker on its usual rotation but I had been left a few paces behind.

‘You have asthma,’ I said quietly, more a statement than a question, but he looked across at me and nodded.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s not too bad, though. The inhaler gets me through.’