This Census-Taker(17)

I imagined that glint descending like a star falling slowly toward my mother.

“It’s what you say against what he says,” the man continued. “And we do have the letter.”

“She ain’t write that,” Drobe said. “Come on.”

“His father says she did,” the teacher said.

“What if he said something about you?” the hunter asked me. “What if he said you stole something or you killed a person, and we just said, ‘Oh, well then, if you say so, we’ll do law on him, then.’ You wouldn’t like that, would you? That wouldn’t be fair.” He looked over his shoulder into the black.

“She did write it.”

That was my father’s voice.

He was stood at the cave mouth next to the window-cleaner in his sash. I saw my father and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t feel my hands. He looked straight at me and I made a noise in my throat.

Drobe stepped between us. Later I remembered that and I loved him for it.

“What did you bring him for?” the hunter shouted. “I said we’d come when we were ready, didn’t I?”

“He wanted to come see,” the window-cleaner said. “What should I stop him for?”

“For f*ck’s sake.” The hunter shook his head.

“What?” said the other man. “You got something to say to me? Say it to me.”

“I did, didn’t I?” the hunter said. “I said, ‘For f*ck’s sake.’?”

“She wrote that letter,” my father said. He was speaking to me. “We were fighting,” he said. He blinked repeatedly and I could feel his tremendous worry. He took a step toward me and I lurched back and Drobe moved to meet him.

“She was good for me,” my father said, “and I was good for her too, but not in the end.” He looked beseeching. “I’m sorry you saw it. You shouldn’t have. I was asking her not to leave, is what you saw. For you and me. For you more than me even because you needed her. I know that, I know. I wanted to stop her, I’m sorry I couldn’t. But you mustn’t go. You mustn’t go.”

He seemed to see Drobe at last, standing in his way. My father whispered to him, “Move.”

His voice was sudden and different and cold and Drobe instantly obeyed.

“I’m sorry your mother went away,” my father said to me. “I’ll make sure we’re all right, you and me.”

—

When he understood that they wouldn’t take my father to jail and they wouldn’t take me from him, Drobe screamed at the officers. Samma would probably just have got hold of me and walked away in any direction until they’d reached her, maybe hit her and taken me back. Drobe did shout at them that they were wrong, bastards, and so on.

I ran outside. The window-cleaner caught me easily. The hunter and the teacher with the law books huddled with my father in the tunnel and spoke to him too low for me to hear.

“We can’t just take you,” the hunter came and said to me eventually. “He didn’t do what you said.” He said that quickly.

“Lock him up,” Drobe said. “When the police next come they can go down there and look.”

“No one can go down there,” the teacher said.

“There’s no one there,” my father said. He sounded almost too exhausted to speak.

I said something about the customer who’d come and argued.

“Smail?” my father said. “Is that who you mean? Oh, son.

“I don’t know his second name,” he said to the others. “Smail. He came for keys. He was already on his way. He’d left, and he made sure he’d pass my house. He wanted one key to get money, one so he could travel quickly, and one for a disgusting thing, so I wouldn’t make it for him and he shouted. But I did make him the travel key. Only that one. And he went on. Ask anyone. Ask his friends. They’ll tell you he always wanted to get away, and he did. There’s no one in the mountain.”

“You,” the hunter said slowly to him. He looked at me and said it loud, as I listened. “We’ll come back.”

“You should come back,” my father said.

“I f*cking mean it. We’ll send someone up and you’ll show us the boy so we know you’re treating him right.”

“Yes.” My father nodded with abrupt rage. “You should. Look at me. You should come back.”

The window-cleaner was looking into the sky, at the waning light. Drobe ran to me.

“I’ll come and get you,” he whispered. But the teacher was calling him and he had to turn.

The window-cleaner descended with the woman beside him. They still kept glancing up at the sun. Behind them went Drobe, watched by the hunter.

It was he, the last man, who looked back at me most, more often even than the boy.





There is a kind of thorned bush that thrives on the hill where I was born. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. It stands about a meter tall, with compact snarled branches that grow in dense near-cylinders so its copses are like low, snagging pillars. Its all-year berries are blue-gray but in the red light of sunset their luster makes them shine like black pupils.

I stood among the columnar bushes watched by their nasty vegetable eyes.

My father didn’t look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn’t look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.