Джон Бойн - A Ladder to the Sky

It would have been Daniel’s birthday that day and I spent most of the morning, and my journey to Covent Garden, thinking about him. His loss lay heavily on me but, just as I was discarding Theo, it was time to discard him too. I couldn’t write if I felt guilt. The truth was, I had been wrong all those years when I imagined that I would like to be a father. Perhaps it was the idea rather than the reality that appealed to me most for, in the end, much like my marriage to Edith, the experience hadn’t moved me as much as I had expected it to. Certainly, I had formed an attachment to the boy and would have preferred him still to be with me, but a life alone, where I was in control of my own movements and decisions, was my natural state.

Other People’s Stories had begun as a rough idea one evening when I was feeling a little dejected from having discovered nothing interesting in the recent pile of Storī submissions. It had been almost a year since I’d found anything that I could adapt as my own and so I had started to think about my own life and how I had turned an unpromising beginning into a triumphant career. There were the people who really mattered – my parents, Erich, Dash, Edith and Daniel – and it was true that each had contributed something to my success. I started to make a few rough notes. I thought back over my own actions since I’d first left Yorkshire for the Savoy Hotel in West Berlin and realized the story I was searching for had been there all along.

It wasn’t another person’s story at all.

It was my own.

Not that I intended to write a memoir. Certainly not. Fiction was my métier and fiction was my comforting home. Also, it wasn’t as if I could ever write a truthful autobiography. I would be vilified instantly and, one would assume, arrested. No, I couldn’t do anything as theatrical as that, but what I could do was write a novel. All I’d ever needed was a story and, once I had that, I still believed that I was one of the best in the game.

And so I did what I had been doing all my life: I started to write.

I began with a boy growing up in Yorkshire who wanted to make something of himself. I kept separate files, taking the truth and recreating it exactly as I remembered it. I began with my friendship with Henry Rowe, that early conquest of mine and the first person who had made me understand the powerful draw of my beauty. It hadn’t worked out, of course, and I’d never managed to finish the story I was writing, but I’d been young at the time and I wasn’t going to reproach myself for that. I’d still been learning, after all, and Henry had proved an excellent place to start.

Then there was Erich. And Dash. And Edith. All good stories to tell. To make it easier for myself, my first draft was written exactly as I remembered things, using their real names and using my own. The plan was to write about a person with absolutely no conscience, someone who would use anyone to get ahead, an operator on the very highest level. And then, when my first draft was written, I would get down to the real work. Change the names, of course, and draw much wider distinctions between myself and the characters’ real-life counterparts. Also, I had decided that my protagonist would not be an aspiring writer but an actor. Erich and Dash would be great men of the theatre, Edith an ingénue. I had a lovely idea for a section where I and my Dash recreations would spend a night at the home of Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, where Olivier, wily old fox that he was, would be the only person who had ever seen through me. I was certain that Gore would appreciate the comparison with perhaps the most handsome and talented actor ever to appear on screen. I had written several drafts of that section and it was my favourite by far because I’d always thought that, if Gore had simply taken the time to get to know me, then we might have got along. It was a shame, I thought, that he was no longer alive to read it.

That day had also been a Saturday, and Daniel had been in a grouchy mood all morning, which I put down to the fact that he was thirteen and was entering puberty. He’d been quite annoying of late and I was starting to dread the two or three years that lay ahead.

I’d gone out that afternoon to the Storī offices to catch up on some work and then, not relishing the idea of returning home to a moody teenager, had gone to the Angelika for a screening of Midnight in Paris . It had left me in a good mood, and when I got off the subway on my way home, I stopped at a local take-away and picked up some food. His favourite restaurant, I might add, not mine.

When I returned home, however, I was surprised to realize that the apartment was empty. It was designed in such a way that Daniel’s bedroom was at one end, near the front door, while mine, and my office, was at the other, the two wings separated by a communal living space and kitchen. I opened the door to his room, but he wasn’t there and, as he wasn’t lying on the sofa reading or watching television, I assumed that he’d gone out. Perhaps one of his friends had called around and they’d gone to the movies or to wherever boys his age went when there were no adults around to tell them no. I generally didn’t ask too many questions. Daniel, after all, was quite responsible and, because of that, I was content to allow him his freedom.

It was only after I put the food in the refrigerator for reheating later and returned to the living room that I heard noises coming from the other end of the apartment. Daniel rarely went down there so I was immediately surprised and a little anxious. I walked down the corridor, opened the door to my office and, to my surprise, discovered my son sitting at my computer. I don’t think I’d ever seen him there before, as he knew that he was expressly forbidden from using it.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

He didn’t reply, nor did he turn around. His attention was entirely fixed on the screen before him and only when I repeated my question did he slowly turn to look at me. His expression was one I had never seen on his face before, a mixture of disillusionment, fear and hatred.

‘I’ve told you before, Daniel,’ I said, slightly disconcerted by this, and I could hear in my voice that I did not sound as stern as I had hoped. ‘My office is out of bounds at all times and no exceptions. You have your own computer. Use it.’

‘It’s broken,’ he said, and his tone was rather flat, as if he could barely bring himself to respond to me. ‘I dropped it earlier and it’s not working.’

‘Then we’ll get it fixed,’ I said. ‘Or we can get you a new one on Monday. But don’t use mine, all right? That’s my work computer. I don’t like people messing with it.’

He stared at me for a long time and, despite the fact that he was only thirteen, I couldn’t help but feel that I was the child in this situation.

‘Was Edith my mother?’ he asked finally, and I hesitated, like a chess player calculating a few steps ahead, wondering how he would respond to any reply of mine, and what I would say to him then, and how he would react to that. I turned my attention to the screen before him. A Word document was open but I couldn’t make out which one.

‘Where did you hear that name?’ I asked, and it crossed my mind that I had never talked to him about my marriage. There seemed no reason to, after all, for Edith was already dead before I even met the Italian chambermaid. All Daniel had ever known was he and I, and there had seemed little point in dragging up the past.

‘I read your book,’ he said. ‘The first section, anyway. Everything you’ve written about your life.’

His voice came in quick gasps; he was obviously upset, and he reached for the Ventolin inhaler on the desk before him and took a quick puff to decongest his lungs.