Extinctions, p.26
Extinctions, page 26
Jan beeped and waved and the girl waved back.
At that moment anything was possible.
MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2006
It was around 6:00 AM when the phone woke her up.
“Dad?” she said groggily.
“Caroline Lothian?”
“Speaking. Who is this?”
“It’s Corinne Palmer, the manager of the Sir Charles Court Care Facility.”
“What is it, Corinne? Is something wrong with Callum?”
“That’s why I’m calling, Caroline. I’m sorry to trouble you so early in the morning, but we’ve left a number of messages on your phone.”
“I’m sorry?” she said. “Is it Callum? Is he—”
“The point is, Caroline, Ms. Lothian, Callum is missing. He’s not here.”
“What do you mean, he’s not there? Where is he?”
“We believe he’s with your father, but we can’t locate Mr. Lothian. Have you heard from him in the last twelve hours? Do you have any idea where he might have taken Callum? Callum has been gone since yesterday afternoon.”
“He always unplugs his phone. They must be at home. Have you called him at home?”
“We called St. Sylvan’s Village and the management have been to his villa and checked. He’s not there. However, they think he might have been burgled, which is a further concern.”
“Burgled?”
“Apparently there were things strewn everywhere.”
“That’s nothing,” she said. “But where’s Callum?”
“Your father’s car has gone and he and Callum are missing. Apparently they did not stay at the house last night.”
“Missing,” she repeated. “Why is Callum with him? How did he get Callum? Why did you let him go? Is this some kind of joke?”
“Caroline, please, calm down and listen. Your father came in on Friday, after he got out of the hospital.”
“What hospital? Why was he in the hospital?”
“I believe it was a minor issue related to a fall he had at a restaurant. He came in on Friday to see Callum and sign the next-of-kin papers, so we don’t have a repeat of that business with the antibiotics last week—which you’ll have to authorize, of course.”
“I have no idea what’s going on,” said Caroline flatly.
“On Friday Mr. Lothian said he wanted to take Callum out for the day—that would have been yesterday, Sunday. I told him our policy: until he has proper authorization and training and has installed safety measures in the home, he cannot take Callum. We believe that at around 1:30 in the afternoon your father entered the care facility with another man—an Asian man—and removed your brother from his room with the aid of some kind of homemade wheelchair and took him outside to a waiting car.”
“This is ludicrous. How do you know this? There’s a security door. Didn’t you see this man come in? It must be someone else. How could my father manage Callum? He’s an old man. You have to find out who took Callum. He could die.”
“I’m losing you. Please speak slowly. Mr. Lothian was given a folder with the security code for the door when he came in on Friday. We have video of the parking lot and both your father and his car have been identified by the village. Mr. Lothian was in the company of an older woman. She’s also from St. Sylvan’s, and I believe she’s now been located. She and an Asian gentlemen helped transfer Callum to the back seat of the car, next to the booster seat. Hello? Are you there, Ms. Lothian? Caroline?”
“Who are all these people?” Caroline had stopped listening. The situation was beyond her imagining—this had to be some mistake—this woman on the phone was clearly mad. “What’s a booster seat got to do with any of this?”
“There’s a child involved—a boy of about five or six who is related to the woman. We’ve asked Jan Venturi—that’s the name of the woman—to come in. Normally we’d call the police, but we do understand that Mr. Lothian is Callum’s father. It’s now Monday lunchtime. Do you have any reason to believe your father could hurt Callum, or place him in danger?”
“No, of course not, other than that he’s not at all qualified to look after him, and Callum needs twenty-four-hour care.”
“Is there somewhere they’d go? Where do you think your father might be?”
“It’s Monday. He walks by the river.”
“We’d like to call the police, Caroline, but as next of kin you must decide.”
Caroline held the phone in her hand.
“Caroline? Are you there?”
“Don’t call the police,” she said quickly. “Not yet. I have to think. I have a flight to Aberdeen in a few hours. I’ll make a few calls and get back to you before I board, and if you hear anything, please contact me. And thank you, Corinne. I’m sure this is all some mistake. I’m sure Callum is fine.”
But she was not sure at all. The sun was coming up. She looked out to the street and saw running shoes, court shoes, flat loafers, and lace-ups. It was a day like any other. It was Monday morning.
She listened to the missed calls from the care facility.
The last message was from her father. She sat on the bed while it played, and then she called the airline.
Caroline took a sleeping pill at Dubai, but after three hours she was wide awake. She lay in the darkness with the mask over her eyes, trying not to think about what her father might be doing out in the Wheatbelt, in Wandering, of all places. When she heard his message she canceled her flight to Aberdeen, and then called Nicola Masterson. “Callum is safe,” she told the woman. She knew where her father had gone. “I’ll be back in thirty-six hours. Don’t call the police.”
Was that the right thing to do? Was Callum really safe?
In the lounge at the airport she entered Richard’s name into her search engine. He was real. She read reviews of his albums and a short account of the accident. She listened to something he had written for the double bass and cello that was fierce and serious and unsettling, and then she wrote him an email.
Richard, this is Caroline Lothian, the woman from Australia. I am flying back to Australia today. Something has happened with my father and my brother. I am listening to your music. Please write to me as soon as you can.
Under her name she typed her number, with the international dialing codes. She wanted someone serious to talk to, someone else who understood the threat of extinction.
And she wanted to have a baby.
The woman in the seat next to her was snoring. Caroline put on her headphones and turned on the console. When Rabbit-Proof Fence came out she announced she would not watch it. She knew the history, and films like that ruin the truth, she told her friends; they overstate things, or fall short. But even then she had felt unsteady in her convictions. After all, what else can any story be, but too much or not enough?
It was the 1930s; it wasn’t her story at all, but from the opening credits she was lost. She was lost when the three children were taken, lost when their mother fell to the ground, lost again when only two came home.
When the film ended she turned off the screen and closed her eyes.
At eleven she told her mother, “I look like a person that no one would know.” Martha had put this in a notebook, and Caroline kept returning to it. “To look like” is to resemble; it is to follow the pattern of another. She knew at eleven that she resembled no one. But resemblance was only part of it; without another to recognize her she had felt as if she had no weight in the world. She was an egg in a wooden cabinet, labeled by an unknown hand, emptied of content.
But it wasn’t true; she was on her way home right now, and there would be some kind of ending, which was all she might ever have. Which might even be enough.
Last time Fred was in Wandering, the whole family nearly froze to death, but tonight there was just enough cool air to lift the spirits. The moon was rising over the crest of the stubble, and it was so quiet that if you listened carefully you could hear the snap of a fox’s jaw on the neck of a rabbit.
Once more Callum was watching the universe, safely strapped into the B3. Roger Wu had done a stellar job welding the axle and harness to the tubed frame, not to mention the improvised footplate. The handles had come off a racing bike. Marcel Breuer would have been proud of Roger. He had picked the wheels up of an old bicycle trailer, and they were perfect. It wasn’t all plain sailing at the workshop—there were some sticky questions from his former student. “Why do you want to ruin a vintage chair, Fred? Can’t you just rent a wheelchair? What’s the rush?”
How to explain that he had to do something irrevocable, that he had to leave something behind, relinquish something? Relinquish, from the Latin, relinquere, to surrender. It was not a sacrifice to modify his chair, but a gesture in the true spirit of engineering and modernity. Why cling to the past? But at the care facility, Roger dug in his heels and he’d had to work hard to placate him. “Can’t the staff bring Callum out, Fred? Isn’t that their job? Why are we rushing through the corridors like criminals? Shouldn’t we be signing him out? Doesn’t he need a special van?”
In the end, Fred had to agree to everything Roger wanted, just to keep him quiet. Yes, he would give a series of guest lectures. Yes, he would mentor one or two postgraduate students. And yes, Professor Lothian would even lead a group of structural engineers on a tour of China, South America, and Turkey, where they would visit areas in earthquake-prone regions and talk to governments and local councils about pre-stressed concrete solutions. A former student of his had developed a system of embedding wire into concrete and it was proving to be remarkably strong under stress—and cheap. The professor’s task was to garner support from the private sector for the university’s not-for-profit venture. Yes, yes, yes.
It would not be so easy to appease Jan. He would beg her forgiveness. He would take her back to Le Marin.
At Wandering he was exhausted but happy. It had been tricky getting Callum out of the car and through the fence by himself. Thank goodness for the wire cutters—he would slip them back into Roger’s workshop next time he was there. When he clipped back the barbed wire, he found a compacted channel left by a combine harvester, which made it a little easier to push the chair through the wheat stubble, with Callum piled high with sleeping bags and a thermos and him with a pack of essentials listed in the folder from the care facility.
It was a magnificent evening under the stars. Callum was staring right up at what could be Alpha Centauri. Fred checked the chair. The back wheels were angled so Callum could see right across the field and out into the southern sky. If only he knew what Callum was feeling. When he first got him up here onto the rise he was sure his son was ready to jump out of his chair, climb into a rocket, and leave right then and there. “You’re not going anywhere, young man,” he said sternly, as if Callum were nine or ten. Fred smiled. Callum was not young anymore, but it was hard not to think of him that way.
The last time Callum was young he was in his final moments of architecture, and he was perfect. He had been invited into the honors program, and he wanted to go to America to do his PhD. Callum was so much smarter than Fred had ever been. He had his eye on a scholarship at MIT and a bruise on his cheekbone from where a hockey ball had struck him at training. In the last moments of the Grand Final, with the team one-down, he trapped the ball, dribbled around one, and then two, and, with nothing left to do, shot wide.
Like all perfect children, Callum was unaware of his perfection. Martha liked to say he was born outside of the realms of the ordinary, like a minor god—“Which doesn’t excuse him from the responsibilities of mere mortals, like cleaning his room and doing his chores!” She loved to say those sorts of things—infantilize things. She was never comfortable with either of the children growing up, and if she were here today she would say something like, “I can’t believe you’re nearly thirty-four.”
The other Callum had been thin and muscular. The Callum sitting by his side was soft and putty-colored, and his skin fell away from him as if it were a distant relation to his bones. But never mind; they were coming together again, these two Callums.
For now, just being here together was enough.
It had never been easy with the first Callum.
It was the tenth of June, not the day to be left alone with a four-year-old. He was nursing a fierce hangover from a party at the house of their new friends Ralph and Veronica Orr. Callum whined, slouched, grumbled, and did everything an overtired four-year-old did when he didn’t know what to do with himself. Then Alexander called from Lincoln. Drunk, Frederick presumed, although he could never really be sure. He listened to his father sobbing on the other end of the line, then put the phone down, but not before he caught the strangled vowels of his brother’s name. “Virgil . . .”
His father was calling on Virgil’s birthday.
While Fred was on the phone, Callum had managed to get into the cupboard and tip Rice Krispies all over the floor. Nothing really, but Frederick took Callum’s thin arm, squeezed it as hard as he could without breaking it, and dragged him into his bedroom, then lifted him up and tossed him onto his bed as if he were yesterday’s newspaper. The boy floated down onto the quilt, where he lay perfectly still, looking at his father.
Frederick felt it rising up inside him, like lava, like vomit, generations of loathing for his own powerlessness. He swept the spit from his son’s mouth and then he hit him. He hit his four-year-old son on the face with the back of his hand, as his father had hit him and his father’s father had hit him, begetting and begetting.
He had hit Callum once and the small head snapped back and forward like a piece of white elastic, returning to him with a red welt clearly visible on his cheek and a trickle of blood bubbling out of the split lip. At that moment he saw his son not as a person, not as a child, but as a space, as the same dark, motherless space in which he himself had been interred as a child, when his own father was master of the void.
He managed to close the bedroom door before his knees gave way. He slid slowly down the corridor wall and dropped his head to his knees. It was a very long time before the door behind him creaked open and one brown eye looked out. Step by step, as if approaching a wild beast, Callum edged forward until he was so close that Frederick could feel his shallow, warm breath. He tried to say something to his son but his mouth had clamped up. Frederick forced himself to look Callum in the face, to let his son see his tears. His shame. When he could, he reached out for the arm that hung limply by his boy’s side. He led Callum to the bathroom where he bathed his face and lip in the sink, and then held him in his arms while the bathtub filled. He carried him to the kitchen and found a candle, a match, and a chipped Beatrix Potter saucer. He lit the candle and saw Peter Rabbit chasing an eternal orange carrot in Mr. McGregor’s garden. He undressed his son, then himself, and lowered Callum into the deep, warm bath. He turned off the light in the bathroom, and on that cold, wet winter afternoon Frederick lay in the water holding his four-year-old boy with the yellow light of the old candle catching the white enamel tiles, and tried to wash away the sins of the father.
“Are you thirsty, Callum?” Fred helped him drink some water, then held on to his hand. Callum had long, thin fingers, like his mother.
Frederick was holding on as tight as he could to his mother’s thin fingers, as in the distance a man came toward them, pulling his little speck of a brother along with him. He could hear Virgil crying—sniveling, his father called it, from an Old English word, snyflun, meaning “mucus of the nose.” His mother’s hand tightened on Freddy’s, not to reassure him, no; she was terrified of the man approaching like a turbine and she was hoping that if she tossed the boy in front of the man, then the teeth of the machine might catch on him and grind to a temporary halt, giving her just enough time to get out of the way. But the machine was inexorable and it simply picked up Frederick and incorporated him right into its pounding core and continued out of the garden, down the steps, and toward the lake.
The small town of Saint-Clair, in a comfortable house by the lake. It was his mother’s idea. “The war is over, Alex, so why not a holiday in France, like other families do?” Grand people, like the owners of the foundry who held his father’s fate in their hands. They boarded the train at Victoria Station and took the night ferry from Dover, as if they were a normal family in normal times, as if there were not long sections of the train ride where Mam tried to turn their little heads away from the view, so they would not have to see for themselves the bleeding landscape of France.
Their father laughed. “Your mother wanted a holiday after the war? Well, here it is, lads.”
But the town was empty, the shops were shuttered, and no one was on holiday. After three days spent inside reading The Hotspur and hiding from hailstones and their father’s palm, the boys were dragged outside, their dad dismissing the high winds and the storm water pouring down from the mountains, insisting that he, Frederick, get some bloody exercise, and that he, Frederick, row his little brother out to the center of the turbulent lake.
“But Alex, Virgil can’t swim,” protested Mam, and then turned away, giving in for the last time.
No matter. Alexander rolled up his trousers and went to work on the boat, dragging it to the edge, while his Mam stood on the bank, worrying her heavy gray wool skirt. His father’s strong, pale calves were marbled with cold, half submerged in the lake’s muddy rim, like broken columns.
