Alice’s Dérives in Devonshire

Chapter One ~ Dad

Chapter One ~ Dad

Time: Midnight

Place: The hospital

Action: Stand holding your breath for as long as possible. Then exhale loudly, catch your breath and run away.

(Open City, Andrew Brown, Katie Doubleday & Emmac Cocker)

Dad was a fireman. But one day, during the pretend riots, he breathed in a cloud. He wasn’t allowed to be a fireman after that.

Dad had been trapped in a big fire at a factory where they made things they weren’t supposed to, with things they shouldn’t have. When the gangs burned it down Dad breathed in their mischief. He wasn’t the same Dad after that.

“What am I going to do?” he asked Mum one day after the fires. Mum said: “You always wanted to save the world – now you’ve got time.”

“I couldn’t save a cat,” he said.

After the fires they always spoke like they were joking, but they didn’t laugh much.

Every week or so after that, our front room would fill up with huge men. I told Mum that they were too loud, but she said that firemen had to have big lungs. And, anyway, Dad was always the loudest.

After they’d gone Dad would cough for a while.

Dad had to be still a lot when he first came back from the hospital. Then it became a habit. Even my little brother wasn’t allowed to bother him. Dad might have started to laugh again, but he would never go back to the fire station, Mum said. The people there wouldn’t let him go back on the engines and Dad said he wasn’t going to fly a desk. How could he have? At the time he said about the desk he was taking down his certificates and making weird gulping noises. Dad didn’t ever cry, but he did a mixture of laughing and coughing bits of cloud. After that, when the big men came they still arrived loud, but went out quiet. Then they stopped coming altogether. It didn’t matter. Because Mum’s friends started coming instead and Dad would make them laugh. Mum put up some pictures she’d bought in town.

For a whole school term, from summer to nearly Christmas, Dad sat in the corner by the bookcase. He never seemed to move from there. Never took us on walks like he used to, no more setting off with no idea where we would end up. Now, when his visitors laughed it was as if Dad had crept up on them from out of a lair.

My little brother says that our Mum is a ‘cynical cyclist’. She does go to work on a bike, but actually she looks after people who are ill in their minds.

My Dad’s mind is fine, but he has the remains of a riot in his lungs. “Why don’t you help me?” he sometimes says to her. “You won’t let me,” she says; then they go quiet when they see me. The one time I asked “won’t let you what?” Mum went and made frankfurters (to teach me I suppose).

When Dad wasn’t laughing he would read. He said he didn’t mean to, but he couldn’t see the telly properly from his chair. At first he just looked at the words, then he started to write notes on the edges of the pages. Soon our bookcase was full of new books that Mum fetched for him from town or got from her computer, so he started to build little piles around his chair. Mum told him off about writing in the books so he kept notebooks for when she was there. On one side of his chair was a shrinking pile of empty notebooks, and on the other was a growing pile of full ones.

“What are you making notes about, Dad?”

“Connections.”

When Dad was in his chair he was like a giant king in a city of paper towers.

Dad never wanted to come out with us any more. He wanted to sit in his chair, all his body concentrated on breathing. He’d say to Mum: “I think I’d better give it a miss this time.” One teatime Mum had called me into the kitchen, but I stayed hidden so I could read another page of ‘The Coral Island’. (I’m hoping that if I read all ‘the classics’ one day a letter will come, with a key and membership.) Dad must have forgotten I was there. Mum came in to speak to him. In front of my eyes I saw him do his change. He’d been tapping on his chair arm, reading the latest weird present from his ‘theory godmother’ (Mum). Now he bent over and coughed. Mum said: “Naya’s free to babysit if you want to come tonight.”

“I think I’d better give it a miss this time,” he said and coughed again.

Mum shrugged and went off shouting for me. Dad punched the air and rubbed his hands together like a clown. I stood up. He saw me. I wanted to shout: “Dad’s a…” but he silently and furiously cut the air with his flattened hand. Backwards and forwards. His eyes were a difficult kind of funny. A k id doesn’t know what to say when grown ups act like this. So I cut the air with my flattened hand and made his face back to him. He laughed. Or else I would have told Mum.

“I won’t tell.”

He made a thumbs up.

“But you have to tell me why you don’t want to go out.”

“I need to get on with things inside.”

After that, if I ever thought Dad was putting on his poorliness to get to watch his old videos on his own I would make the sawing with my flattened hand. Mum caught me once. It was a good secret sign. She didn’t have any idea.

Then Mum made Dad take all his books and notes and videos up to the loft. She said: “you’ll have more room. Isn’t that what we converted it for?” But she didn’t use a question mark. So Dad disappeared up the ladder. Now he has to come down specially to see us. Mum says: “I wish I’d never said you could go up there, we never see you.” But Dad won’t move back down now. And when he does come down he always has a book.

“What’s that one about, Dad?”

“Space.”

“Rockets!”

“No, different kinds of space in the world, Ben, how people feel about those different spaces, how they see them.”

That was the biggest sentence Dad had said to us since he swallowed the cloud. I knew it was important.

“I didn’t know you were a geographer,” Mum said.

I could tell Dad didn’t like that because he started to do the washing up. So he could turn his back on us.

Because of my little brother the ladder to the loft always had to be pulled up. When he was tiny Mum had left it down and he had climbed all the way up to the top and terrified her, a little naked baby so high above the landing. Sometimes, before Dad lowered the trapdoor or Mum pushed it shut, I could see the bright blue ceiling of the loft.

Dad has a different sky to ours.

“They’re here!” Mum would shout, pulling down the ladder and Dad would climb down backwards, already laughing. Dad would sit in his chair again, as if the buildings of paper were all around him, a king in his city of words. And he would tell stories and listen with a big smile on his face, and when he laughed I could see his teeth, jumbled like an animal’s. But I never heard him talk to Mum’s friends about the things he read in his loft, under his painted sky, never about connections and space.

And then, one day, when Mum brought us home from school in the car, Dad wasn’t in his sky. Nor in his chair. He wasn’t in the house anywhere. Mum was excited. The ladder had been down and she put it back up. She checked the coat cupboard under the stairs.

“Your father’s gone for a walk, for the first time since the fire. You’ve got to tell him how well he’s done when he gets back.”

But he didn’t get back.