D - This Belongs to Jack

There used to be an insecticide on the market called Bugex. It was
an 'insect growth inhibitor', designed for getting rid of woodworm. You
sprayed it into the holes and it prevented the growth of the beetles'
hard outer shells. The young beetle would keep on growing, its
exoskeleton wouldn't. Eventually its insides got squashed. The Health
and Safety Executive withdrew it from the market last year, following
concerns about the active agent involved finding its way into the food
chain, and the effect it might have on humans. Of course, by that
stage, it had already been used in some fifty-thousand
woodworm-infested homes nationwide, particularly poorly-maintained
council flats. This story isn't about Bugex, or anyone affiliated with
the company that produced Bugex. We live in litigious times, and I just
wanted to make my position clear. Bugex is still under review, and
pending HSE test results may be given the all-clear as early as next
Spring.

* * *

When she found out she had breast cancer, the first thing Emily thought
was that at bloody last she had something worthy to write about. She
had been trying to write a novel for ages; colleagues at the Bristol
Evening Star assured her everybody had at least one inside them,
waiting to get out. She could write features on rambles in the Bristol
and Bath area, or on the new Holistic Therapy Centre opening in
Clifton, or on the history and cultural significance of the St Paul's
Carnival, but the leap between that and producing a piece of
publishable, novel-length literary fiction was immense. She couldn't
seem to come up with anything besides daffy chick-lit pap. Until the
illness.

Emily was thirty-two, single, and by her own admission not particularly
attractive, which put her into the ultimate novel-buying demographic.
She tried to read a lot, hoping against hope that inspiration would
come to her through some sort of intellectual osmosis. That hadn't been
working, and so when she was diagnosed with DCIS she immediately took
it to be the Damascus-like blinding flash that would plant a book,
fully formed, into her head. She told herself, resolutely, that it was
Meant To Be. That it was a Good Thing.

So it was bemusing rather than disappointing when she found, after
several weeks of abortive efforts, that she could no longer read or
write. She hadn't become completely illiterate, it wasn't that. She
just couldn't concentrate anymore. Anything more complex than the back
of a cereal packet was beyond her. If she tried to read a book, her
eyes would prowl over the same paragraph, march again and again across
the same, tired lines like a bantam strutting back and forth. Writing
was even worse. As soon as she sat in front of a computer screen, her
mind would start buzzing with minutiae, little ten-second loops of
advert jingles would begin playing in her head, pictures of friends or
album covers or stills from old films dancing and whirling. She
couldn't sit still. She couldn't stand to be alone with herself.

With a nod towards Wordsworth and his well-documented jaunts around the
Lake District, Emily, in pensive mood, took to walking as a means of
relaxing, contemplating her life, and unclogging the creative
bottleneck in which her muse was surely lodged. She lived in a small
town called Portishead, just outside Bristol, in a bungalow next door
to what had once been a Victorian bathhouse and spa. With no particular
destination in mind she would stroll up the hill and along the coast
road, past The Ship, then across an appropriately crooked stile into
dew-soaked fields.

There were woods farther up the hillside to her left, where a company
hosted games of paintball. It was mainly for corporate groups or
parties of older children; Emily knew a bit about it because she'd had
to write a feature on it a few months back. Before her cancer. She
chewed on that thought as she tramped through the long, wet grass. Her
placid, formerly purposeless life cleaved into 'before' and 'after'.
She considered that as a title: Before and After. Perhaps just Before,
or maybe Before the Cancer. Before My Cancer? Before the Illness? She
wanted something with a little emotional distance. It was no good
letting it descend into a bleeding-heart whyme-fest, but she didn't
want it to become some Oprahfied struggle-against-the-odds feelgood
story, either. It had to be real, unflinching, artistic.

That afternoon the weather was not at all suited to long, meandering
walks, and as she approached the Portishead Caravan Park a fine perfume
of rain was starting to fall. Since her Winnie the Pooh umbrella was
propped against the banister rail at home, she decided to duck inside
the site shop until the shower passed. It was part corner shop, part
post office, and part caf?, with three Formica tables placed next to
the window, so patrons could sit with their coffees or cheese toasties
and gaze out at the slurry-grey channel.

Emily walked up to the counter and ordered a large, milky coffee. The
woman serving had a shock of frizzy blonde hair, and thick, circular
glasses, the kind that cartoon moles often wear.

"It's hot mind," she warned as she handed Emily the polystyrene cup.
"It don't bother me cos I've got asbestos hands, but you might want to
use a napkin and hold it round the lid, look." She pulled a paper
napkin out of the dispenser and put it on the counter, smiling with a
set of teeth that weren't quite straight.

"Thank you," said Emily, a little shyly. She picked up the cup as
instructed and carried it over to one of the tables. Rain was dappling
the window pane, transforming the park outside into astigmatic smudges,
green, cream and slate. A three-bar electric heater was going in the
opposite corner. In the warm, with water streaming down the glass, she
felt strangely secure. Perhaps it wasn't all that strange, really. The
shop was surprisingly homely.

She was just beginning to pleasantly lose herself when the bell above
the door jangled and a young boy entered, his tousled sagebrush hair
glistening with droplets of water. He walked with a slight limp, his
left foot angled awkwardly. As he approached the counter Emily tried
not to stare. He sniffed, wiped a bead of rain from the end of his
nose.

"Can I have a Toffee Crisp, please?" he said. His voice was reedy, with
a slight quaver, like the soft ululation of an oboe. He pulled a little
leather purse out of his trouser pocket and emptied it onto the counter
in a clatter of coins.

"Thirty-six pence please, my love," said the till-lady. The boy leant
in close to his money and with a finger began to slide two-penny pieces
away from the flock. Emily sat, sipping her coffee and listening to the
scrape of copper against the counter surface.

"Thank you," said the boy. He held his purse just under the lip of the
counter and swept his remaining coins into it, then fastened the
tarnished metal popper and pushed the purse back into his pocket with
his thumb. He took his chocolate bar, and turned to go. "Thank you," he
repeated. The bell jangled as he left and faded into the rain.

Emily glanced at the trail of small, irregularly-shaped puddles that
led across the tiled floor. Where they caught the neon strip-light
above, they shimmered like quicksilver. There was one, just beneath the
till, that looked a bit odd. She squinted at it, trying to figure out
why, then she saw, floating on the water's raised skin, a little
triangle of plastic. She got up from her seat and walked across to it,
bent over and plucked it dripping from the puddle.

It was a British Racing Green plectrum, corrugated in the middle to
allow it to bend, with shallow crosshatching grooves cut into the
widest part. She dried it with the hem of her blouse, changed the
finish from gloss to matt. She had turned it over in her fingers a
couple of times before it occurred to her that the young boy might have
dropped it. Leaving her half-empty coffee belching steam, Emily
cantered out of the shop door and to the right, the direction the blue
daub of colour had floated.

The rain had turned from mist to fat, noisy, bullet-sized droplets that
kept making her flinch as they burst in and around her eyes. She
scanned the rows of static caravans, propped up on breeze blocks to
compensate for the gradient of the hill. One of them was sheltering a
greyhound, suede-brown, stretched out on the gravel with its head on
its front paws. The boy couldn't have got far, not over wet grass with
a limp. She was on the cusp of shaking her head and giving up when a
flicker of movement through a window caught her eye. Turning her head,
she saw him inside the nearest caravan, hanging up his blue anorak on
one of the doors.

It felt foreign, peculiar, knocking on a stranger's door, especially in
such an interesting neighbourhood, but she reassured herself she was
only doing the normal, sensible thing. Besides, he could only have been
about nine years old. It wasn't as if he was likely to assault - or
worse - deride her when he answered. He would probably feel more
intimidated than she did.

His outline appeared behind the frosted glass. There was a rattle as a
key was pushed into the lock, a click as it was turned. The door handle
lowered, the door retreated just far enough to allow a head to squeeze
through the crack. He stared up at her, his mouth making no sound save
for the steady, almost inaudible crunch-crunch-crunch of his Toffee
Crisp.

"Hello," said Emily, trying to appear friendly without assuming the
nervous, giddy smile that made her look drunk. "I was in the shop just
now and I think you dropped something." She opened her hand, brought it
down to his height. "Is this yours?" The boy stepped back and pulled
the door wider, so he could fit through. She blinked back rivulets of
water as he peered at the contents of her palm, frowned. He looked up
at her.

"Yes, I think so," he said. The tremor in his voice belied the
confidence in his hazel eyes. "Can I have it back?" For the first time
in a while, Emily laughed. It was a brief thing, barely a quiet
splutter against the falling rain, but a laugh nonetheless.

"Of course," she said, handing it to him. The boy took the plectrum and
quickly tucked it into his back pocket. The crunching had stopped. "Do
you play guitar?" The boy nodded. Emily pursed her lips in mildly
condescending admiration. "Ooh, aren't you clever? How old are you?" He
scrutinised her for a moment, with something that felt less like
suspicion and more like mild amusement.

"I'm ten," he announced. "How old are you?" Caught off-guard, she
blushed, considered then rejected hedging.

"I, uhh, I'm thirty-two," she told him finally. The boy nodded his
approval.

"What's your name?" She felt a lot more comfortable answering
this.

"I'm Emily, Emily Norton. How about you?" She bent her legs a little
and placed her hands on her knees. The boy appeared to contemplate her
question.

"I'm Jack," he said at last, and then, abruptly, "I'll play guitar for
you one day, but not today." She cocked her head to one side and raised
an inquisitive eyebrow, cold raindrops exploding against her
cheek.

"Why not?"

"Mummy will be home soon. She likes things tidy." Emily slowly returned
to her full height.

"Okay. Well, it was very nice meeting you Jack. Perhaps&;#8230;
well, if I'm ever round this way again, perhaps I'll see you." For the
third time, Jack nodded silently, then his head retracted through the
gap and the door swung closed. After it had clicked shut, she became
conscious of just how sodden her hair and clothes were. A few seconds
passed while she contemplated this, then she became conscious of just
why she had got wet - she had left her coat in the shop, along with her
handbag. As she half-slid, half-scampered past, the dry greyhound
yawned.

* * *

That night, whilst on the phone to her mother, Emily let slip that she
had cancer. She had meant to conceal it - to lie, basically. When the
truth came, it came incrementally, leaking out drop by drop.

"So, how have you been?" Mum had asked.

"Well, you know&;#8230;"

"What's wrong? Are you feeling under the weather?"

"No, no, I'm okay, just, you know&;#8230;"

"Darling, come on&;#8230; what's the matter? Something's wrong, I
can tell."

"It's nothing Mum."

"Emily&;#8230; there's no use in hiding it from me. Come on,
love."

Emily found her mouth had gone dry. "Honestly, it's nothing
important&;#8230; Seriously Mum, I don't want you worrying over
this."

"Over what?"

"I had a mammogram, and the doctor said I've got DCIS."

"What's that?"

"It's, uh&;#8230; I can't remember what it stands for. It means
they've found some, uh, abnormal cells, in the lining of the milk duct
of one of my breasts." The words dropped one by one from her mouth,
hard and irrevocable, like murder.

"You've got breast cancer?" She heard the end of Mum's sentence get
swallowed up by a gasp.

"No, no, no&;#8230; Mum, don't panic. It's just&;#8230; it's just
a very early warning sign, that's all. They've caught it at a very
early stage. I'm going to be okay."

"Oh, Emily&;#8230; oh, my poor baby girl&;#8230; Why didn't you
tell me earlier?"

"I didn't want you to panic. It's not an issue."

"Right. I'm coming straight down."

"Mum&;#8230;"

"No buts&;#8230; don't you dare argue with me. I'll be there
tomorrow morning."

"I'm all right. It's not a problem, honestly."

"Nope. I'm coming and that's final. Now, you get yourself to bed young
lady. You need plenty of rest."

And that had been that.

* * *

When Emily next went on a walk, about four days later, it was to escape
her mother, who had already cleaned the entire house twice, mowed a
lawn that didn't need mowing and practically ransacked the local
pharmacy for all manner of vitamin pills and restoratives. Though the
weather was much better, she stopped in at the caravan park site shop
just the same, lying to herself with limited success that it was
because she had enjoyed the view. The real reason, however, the one she
was embarrassed to admit, was that she hoped to bump into Jack again.
Her journalistic instinct (or the nosiness she liked to dress up as
such) told her he had a story to tell&;#8230; a story she could use,
perhaps?

She had barely sat down with her coffee when the bell over the door
rang, and Jack came hobbling in. He stopped in the doorway, stared at
her.

"Hello," he said. "I saw you from my window."

"Hello Jack," said Emily. "How are you today?" Jack let his tongue loll
out the side of his mouth. He glanced around the shop.

"I can play for you if you like," he said, apparently distracted by the
stacks of pies, pasties and sausage rolls, kept warm behind glass.
Emily was a little taken aback by his bluntness.

"Oh, yes&;#8230; I would like that." The shop was empty besides the
two of them. The lady who normally served behind the counter had ducked
into the storeroom. "Is your Mummy in?" Jack shook his head. "Where is
she?"

"She's at work," Jack said, rattling the door handle. He turned and
began walking towards his caravan.

"Hang on a second," Emily called, but the shop door had already shut.
She slung her bag over her shoulder, checked that she wasn't leaving a
coat behind this time (she wasn't), picked up her polystyrene cup and
started to follow him.

Outside, the greyhound was nowhere to be seen. The owner had taken it
for a walk, presumably; along the coastal path, through the Hole-in-One
pitch n' putt course and down onto the pebble beach. Jack paused in
front of his caravan, looked round to check Emily was on her way. He
had left the door open, his blue anorak dangling from a peg on the
back. As soon as she had stepped inside, he pulled it closed and turned
the key in the lock.

The caravan interior was beige and stank of stale cigarettes, rather as
Emily had imagined. Plates smeared with egg and ketchup were piled up
in the sink. There was a small television in one corner, with an
ashtray, almost full to overflowing, on top of it. She sat down on the
sofa that ran along one wall, feeling oversized and cumbersome. This
was a stupid idea, she decided. She had no business being here, no
business obeying the low, whimsical draw of her intuition.

"How long have you lived here?" she asked. Jack had disappeared into
one of the rooms.

"A few years," said Jack. "Me and Mum used to live in a real house on
the hill but we had to leave."

"Where does your Mummy work, Jack?" she said. She heard a muffled
clatter, then he emerged, carrying a three-quarter sized acoustic
guitar. The scratchplate was cracked, the tuning pegs dull and worn.
Its surface was covered in numerous chips and dents. In one corner,
there was a bright blue sticker that said This belongs to JACK.

"At the parcel factory," he said. "She wraps parcels for people and
works the machine."

"Is that your guitar?"

"Yes." He carried across it to the opposite side of the room, sat down
on an upturned plastic washbasket.

"Where did you get it?"

"Mum got it for me&;#8230; I don't know where she got it from." He
slid the guitar onto his lap, let his chin rest on top of the fat body,
gazed down at the strings. The instrument rose and fell as he sighed.
"She works a lot." Emily had put her handbag down behind her feet. She
glanced out through the net curtains, at washing struggling on a bright
yellow line.

"Don't you have school?" she asked. Jack shook his still-bowed head.
"Are you sure?"

"It's in-service," he said. "When it's school, Mary comes and picks me
up."

"Is Mary one of Mummy's friends?"

"She's a helper," said Jack sullenly. "She helps me at school."

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?" He shook his head again. An
uncomfortable silence billowed and expanded between them. Then,
gradually, Jack lifted himself from the guitar, looked to the
fretboard, moved his fingers into the shape of an opening chord. His
other hand, floating over the sound-hole, began coaxing light,
trickling arpeggios from the strings. At the neck, his fingers
glissaded, the mood of the chord subtly changing, deepening. The
arpeggios became faster, glided together. He began pinching out a jazz
waltz melody. He slowed it down in places, strumming rich, folksy
chords. There were no lyrics, just the silver textures of a little
boy's guitar, filling the hollow of the caravan, making it jangle and
glitter like a row of milk-bottle tops on a string.

Emily sat and listened, watching his fingers pluck the notes from
corroded bronze strings. His little finger pointed stiffly outward,
stark and rigid as a winter branch. She glanced at his face. His eyes
were closed. The tip of his tongue still protruded from the corner of
his mouth. Out in the Bristol channel, a white and terracotta car
transport nuzzled its way upriver, towards Avonmouth docks, silhouetted
gulls surrounding it. Quiet, sleepy, she allowed the music to seep into
her, chill formications sparkling the back of her neck. With neither
crescendo nor flourish, Jack's playing gradually began to wind down,
until it came to its gentle, lazy conclusion.

Emily watched him, unsure of how to put her feelings into words, unsure
of how her praise ought to be phrased, how much of it she should show.
Jack was slumped over the belly of the guitar once more, gazing at the
lino in some kind of clockwork slumber.

"Jack, I&;#8230; I don't know what to say. That was beautiful." Jack
continued to stare at the floor. Emily looked again at his twisted
finger, at his askance trainered foot. "Who taught you to play?" He
shrugged. "Was it someone at school?" He shrugged again.

"I just like to make things up," he said.

"You've got an amazing talent," said Emily. "You'll be famous one day,
I'm sure. Do you&;#8230;" She hesitated. "Is it hard, with
your&;#8230; I noticed you have a bit of a limp, and your
finger&;#8230;" Jack looked up.

"Mary takes me to the doctor."

"What does the doctor say?"

"He says it's going to get worse, when I get bigger&;#8230; I might
need a wheelchair and special help." Emily frowned.

"What about your hands?" Jack inhaled through his nostrils.

"I might need special help," he repeated. From outside came the sound
of frenzied barking. The greyhound was back, hurling itself at the
clothes on the washing line, gnashing at T-shirts, knickers and a
towel. Its owner, a thickset man in a baseball cap and sandals, ran
over and tried to restrain it, grasping and swearing. By the time he
had brought it under control, Emily found she was weeping.

* * *

The next day, a Saturday, she went back with her Dictaphone. Jack's
playing had haunted her all night. She had lain awake in a cold sweat,
unable to move to the living room and watch TV lest she wake her
mother. Thoughts had rushed in and around her head. The boy was a
phenomenon; a miracle. This was why she had got ill. She was meant to
meet him. He had to be destined for great things.

Although she went up to his door instead of waiting in the shop, she
still did so tentatively, with a little trepidation. She knocked once,
twice, looking around to see if any of the neighbours were staring at
her. A figure appeared through the frosted glass. An adult figure. The
door opened about a foot.

"Yes?" said a dark-haired, sallow-faced woman, eyeing Emily cautiously.
In her enthusiasm, Emily had not planned for this.

"Uhh&;#8230;" she began, inauspiciously. She faked up a smile, more
of a strychnine grin. "You must be Jack's mother."

"Yes, that's right." She didn't seem hostile, but she wasn't exactly
welcoming either. Emily's handbag was swaying ungracefully. Steadying
it with her hand, she remembered the Dictaphone inside, remembered what
she was here for. She was a journalist, after all, a journalist with a
potentially life-threatening illness - she had certain inalienable
prerogatives.

"Is he in?" She tried to look past his mother, into the living room,
then, noticing her consternation, "oh, sorry&;#8230; I'm Emily
Norton - from the Bristol Evening Star." As soon as the adjunct had
left her mouth she regretted it. It had seemed, in a flustered moment,
a way of legitimising her invasion of their privacy, but Jack's
mother's brow immediately knotted into a frown.

"What do you want him for?" she said.

"I&;#8230; well&;#8230;" Emily was foundering, desperately
groping for the one thing that wouldn't get the door slammed in her
face. It was eerily reminiscent of her brief stint in telesales. "I was
round here yesterday, actually&;#8230; He invited me in to hear him
play guitar." She could feel her cheeks becoming decidedly rosier than
the conversation's current outlook. "I was just so&;#8230;" She
clapped her hands together, tapped her fingertips against her lower lip
as if in prayer. "I was so bowled over that-"

"You've been talking to my boy when there's nobody home?" His mother
began to close the door. "Not interested. I don't like people poking
around in my house when I'm not here."

"Please, Mrs, uhh, Mrs&;#8230; please&;#8230; Jack is incredibly
talented. I mean, he's just amazing. I don't doubt he could get a
scholarship to a music college, and then-"

"Not interested!" his mother barked. "And don't go coming round here
again when my little boy's on his own." She shut and locked the door,
and that was it. Emily never came back.

* * *

It seems almost parenthetical to mention it, but a fortnight later
Emily had a lumpectomy to excise the portion of infected tissue,
followed by nearly two months of radiation therapy. A few months after
that, she was thirty-three. The cancer had gone (although she would
need regular check-ups) but the walks still remained. She took a
different route now, a less ambitious one, down through the
golf-course, around the Lake Grounds, up round the back of the open-air
pool.

It was a late, dark afternoon in February when she, lost in a twilit
reverie, stumbled across Jack in the Hole-in-One car-park, sat on the
bonnet of a black VW Polo, gazing out over the channel. She didn't
recognise him at first; he didn't have an anorak and his hair was
longer. The kink in his ankle was still there, however. If anything, it
seemed more pronounced.

"Hello Emily," he said warily.

"Hello Jack," she said. "How are you?" He turned back to the water, and
the amber-pinholed outline of Newport on the other side.

"Okay," he said. "Cold." She thrust her hands into the pockets of her
duffel coat and sidled up alongside him.

"What are you up to?" She tried to make the inquiry sound off-the-cuff,
nonchalant.

"Watching the flames," he said.

"Flames?"

"Over there." He raised an arm and pointed towards the opposite bank.
She could see nothing save a few distant streetlights.

"Is something on fire?"

"I think it's a furnace," said Jack. "Every now and then, it goes
whoosh!" He threw his hands up to illustrate. Sure enough, seconds
later, a porcupine of yellow-gold flame roared into view on the Newport
coastline before shrinking and vanishing. Emily shook her head in
astonishment.

"Do you know, I've never seen that before," she said. The two were
quiet for a while, then Jack turned and looked at her.

"I'm sorry about Mum," he said. "She's not nasty. She just doesn't know
you." Emily shivered.

"It's okay&;#8230; I just wanted to explain to her&;#8230;" She
pivoted to face him. Sat on the bonnet as he was, their eye-level was
the same. "Jack, I've never heard a boy of your age with
such&;#8230; such talent. I want to see you make the most of it
while you still, uhh, while you still&;#8230;" Her sentence came to
a grinding halt.

"There it is again!" he said, reaching and thrusting his arm out a
second time, that gnarled, useless little finger curling round,
pointing right at Emily. She squinted at it, in the darkness, and on
the far bank the night sky glowed with fire.