‘Hess looking for a place to hide,’ Trent’s father responded from some depth of the house.
‘No, not old red-nosed Rudolph. Someone a bit younger and a bit more English.’
‘The Queen come to tea.’
‘He’ll never change, will he?’ Trent’s mother muttered and raised what was left of her voice. ‘It’s the boy. It’s Nigel.’
‘About time. Let’s see what he’s managed to make of himself.’
She made a gesture like a desultory grab at something in the air above her left shoulder, apparently to beckon Trent along the hall. ‘Be quick with the door, there’s a good boy. We don’t want the chill roosting in our old bones.’
As soon as the door shut behind him he couldn’t distinguish whether the stairs that narrowed the hall by half were carpeted only with dimness. He trudged after his mother past a door that seemed barely sketched on the crawling murk and, more immediately than he expected, another. His mother opened a third, beyond which was the kitchen, he recalled rather than saw. It smelled of damp he hoped was mostly tea. By straining his senses he was just able to discern his father seated in some of the dark. ‘Shall we have the light on?’ Trent suggested.
‘Can’t you see? Thought you were supposed to be the young one round here.’ After a pause his father said ‘Come back for bunny, have you?’
Trent couldn’t recall ever having owned a rabbit, toy or otherwise, yet the question seemed capable of reviving some aspect of his childhood. He was feeling surrounded by entirely too much darkness when his mother said ‘Now, Walter, don’t be teasing’ and clicked the switch.
The naked dusty bulb seemed to draw the contents of the room inwards - the blackened stove and stained metal sink, the venerable shelves and cabinets and cupboards Trent’s father had built, the glossy pallid walls. The old man was sunk in an armchair, the least appropriate of an assortment of seats surrounding the round table decorated with crumbs and unwashed plates. His pear-shaped variously reddish face appeared to have been given over to producing fat to merge with the rest of him. He used both shaky inflated hands to close the lapels of his faded dressing gown over his pendulous chest cobwebbed with grey hairs. ‘You’ve got your light,’ he said, ‘so take your place.’
Lowering himself onto a chair that had once been straight, Trent lost sight of the entrance to the alley - of the impression that it was the only aspect of the yard the window managed to illuminate. ‘Will I make you some tea?’ his mother said.
She wasn’t asking him to predict the future, he reassured himself. ‘So long as you’re both having some as well.’
‘Not much else to do these days.’
‘It won’t be that bad really, will it?’ Trent said, forcing a guilty laugh. ‘Aren’t you still seeing . . .’
‘What are we seeing?’ his father prompted with some force.
‘Your friends,’ Trent said, having discovered that he couldn’t recall a single name. ‘They can’t all have moved away.’
‘Nobody moves any longer.’
Trent didn’t know whether to take that as a veiled rebuke. ‘So what have you two been doing with yourselves lately?’
‘Late’s the word.’
‘Nigel’s here now,’ Trent’s mother said, perhaps relevantly, over the descending hollow drum-roll of the kettle she was filling from the tap.
More time than was reasonable seemed to have passed since he’d entered the house. He was restraining himself from glancing even surreptitiously at his watch when his father quivered an impatient hand at him. ‘So what are you up to now?’
‘He means your work.’
‘Same as always.’
Trent hoped that would suffice until he was able to reclaim his memory from the darkness that had gathered in his skull, but his parents’ stares were as blank as his mind. ‘And what’s that?’ his mother said.
He felt as though her forgetfulness had seized him. Desperate to be reminded what his briefcase contained, he nevertheless used reaching for it as a chance to glimpse his watch. The next train was due in less than half an hour. As Trent scrabbled at the catches of the briefcase, his father said ‘New buildings, isn’t it? That’s what you put up.’
‘Plan,’ Trent said, clutching the briefcase on his lap. ‘I draw them.’
‘Of course you do,’ said his mother. ‘That’s what you always wanted.’
It was partly so as not to feel minimised that Trent declared ‘I wouldn’t want to be responsible for some of the changes in town.’
‘Then don’t be.’
‘You won’t see much else changing round here,’ Trent’s mother said.
‘Didn’t anyone object?’
‘You have to let the world move on,’ she said. ‘Leave it to the young ones.’
Trent wasn’t sure if he was included in that or only wanted to be. ‘How long have we had a museum?’
His father’s eyes grew so blank Trent could have fancied they weren’t in use. ‘Since I remember.’
‘No, that’s not right,’ Trent objected as gently as his nerves permitted. ‘It was a cinema and before that a theatre. You took me to a show there once.’
‘Did we?’ A glint surfaced in his mother’s eyes. ‘We used to like shows, didn’t we, Walter? Shows and dancing. Didn’t we go on all night sometimes and they wondered where we’d got to?’
Her husband shook his head once slowly, whether to enliven memories or deny their existence Trent couldn’t tell. ‘The show you took me to,’ he insisted, ‘I remember someone dancing with a stick. And there was a lady comedian, or maybe not a lady but dressed up.’
Perhaps it was the strain of excavating the recollection that made it seem both lurid and encased in darkness - the outsize figure prancing sluggishly about the stage and turning towards him a sly greasy smile as crimson as a wound, the ponderous slap on the boards of feet that sounded unshod, the onslaughts of laughter that followed comments Trent found so incomprehensible he feared they were about him, the shadow that kept swelling on whatever backdrop the performer had, an effect suggesting that the figure was about to grow yet more gigantic. Surely some or preferably most of that was a childhood nightmare rather than a memory. ‘Was there some tea?’ Trent blurted.
At first it seemed his mother’s eyes were past seeing through their own blankness. ‘In the show, do you mean?’
‘Here.’ When that fell short of her he said more urgently ‘Now.’
‘Why, you should have reminded me,’ she protested and stood up. How long had she been seated opposite him? He was so anxious to remember that he didn’t immediately grasp what she was doing. ‘Mother, don’t,’ he nearly screamed, flinging himself off his chair.
‘No rush. It isn’t anything like ready.’ She took her hand out of the kettle on the stove - he wasn’t sure if he glimpsed steam trailing from her fingers as she replaced the lid. ‘We haven’t got much longer, have we?’ she said. ‘We mustn’t keep you from your duties.’
‘You won’t do that again, will you?’
‘What’s that, son?’
He was dismayed to think she might already have forgotten. ‘You won’t put yourself in danger.’
‘There’s nothing we’d call that round here,’ his father said.
‘You’ll look after each other, won’t you? I really ought to catch the next train. I’ll be back to see you again soon, I promise, and next time it’ll be longer.’
‘It will.’
His parents said that not quite in chorus, apparently competing at slowness. ‘Till next time, then,’ he said and shook his father’s hand before hugging his mother. Both felt disconcertingly cold and unyielding, as if the appearance of each had hardened into a carapace. He gripped the handle of his briefcase while he strove to twist the rusty key in the back door. ‘I’ll go my old way, shall I? It’s quicker.’