3 Dear Diary
Sunday morning. Mum and Josh in the kitchen eating toast, one in a high chair, the other eating as she stood and stared out of the window. As usual, the kitchen was spotless apart from this morning’s crumbs. Oma had been up late despite yesterday’s long journeys, cleaning and organising as always. No wonder she had slept in.
“Danny. Sleep well? You still look tired. Will you be okay with Josh this morning?”
“Morning, Val.” That was a Hope Springs thing: everyone on first name terms. It never seemed natural to Danny and his mother, but it had become something of a family joke. About the only one they had. “No problem. You with me today, Josh?”
The three year-old spat out a piece of toast and rubbed jam in his ginger hair. “I want Mummy!”
Danny glanced at Val and shrugged.
“He’ll be okay,” she said. She swept the dyed-red hair back from her face and spread her arms. “How do I look?” she asked.
She was a short woman, slim, with pale blue eyes. She was wearing yellow leggings and a cropped, tie-dyed top that revealed her newly-pierced belly-button – a sapphire to match the stud in her nose.
“You look like a middle-aged mother who’s trying to be a hippy,” Danny told her.
“You’re so sweet.”
“But true.”
“Wish me luck with the hostas.”
“Luck with the hostas.” That was what they called the people who came to study at HoST, the Hope Springs Trust. Stockbrokers and teachers and bankers spending a weekend learning how to do yoga, how to grow vegetables by the cycles of the moon, how to employ the healing powers of crystals. New Age drop-outs for the weekend, with their BMWs and Volvos clogging up the car park, and their mobile phones in their pockets just in case anyone from the real world needed to contact them.
She had gone. Off to teach the bankers yoga in one easy morning.
Danny brushed the hair back from his eyes and turned to his young brother.
“Daddy?” said Josh, as he was lifted from his high chair. Or it might have been “Danny”, of course.
“Good of you to ask,” said Danny. “As nobody else seems interested. I thought no-one was going to mention it. Yes, I saw Dad yesterday, Josh. He’s locked up in prison where he belongs, so that the rest of us are safe from him. He seems okay. He seems ... adjusted, which is probably all you could ask for.”
He didn’t ask about you, though, young Joshua. I think he might even have forgotten that you exist. He must have tried hard enough.
~
They spent the morning in the greenhouses behind the Hall. Danny did his best to help David, the Trust’s founder, with the potting up of seedlings, and at the same time to keep Josh out of too much trouble in the compost.
Over lunch, Oma reminded Danny of his father’s journal.
“So,” she said to him, over a cup of milky tea. “Have you wrapped it up for Mr Peters yet?”
Danny knew immediately what she meant by the word “it”. “I’ve been looking after Josh all morning,” he said uncomfortably.
Oma glanced at the toddler and made a clicking sound with her tongue. She had never been close to Josh. She was always telling Val to be stricter with him.
“She should be doing that,” she said now. “Is her responsibility.” She returned to the subject. “So. You are wrapping it this afternoon, then. No?”
Danny didn’t answer.
He hated the thing and the feelings it stirred in him. He didn’t want to go anywhere near it. But on the other hand, it would be a relief to be rid of it.
They had come across it in one of the boxes in Josh’s room the previous weekend. They had been in this flat at Hope Springs for around six months now, but for some reason these four boxes had remained untouched. It wasn’t until Oma had suggested that they finish the unpacking that it had struck Danny quite how odd this should be. Oma was normally so efficient about organising the household, and yet these boxes had been left sealed.
It was only when he opened the first box that he realised why.
They were his father’s things. The few possessions of his that they had brought with them. Some of his books: the two big volumes of the Concise Birds of the Western Palearctic, a Moths of the British Isles, some volumes of poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. There were his binoculars, and a couple of hardback notebooks small enough to fit in a pocket – the kind he used to take with him when he went birdwatching, to note down his observations.
And a larger notebook, so much like the little pocketbooks that Danny almost overlooked it.
But no, it was as if he was meant to find it. His eyes had been drawn back to it and he saw that it was different. As soon as he opened it, he realised that it was a diary, each date double-underlined, followed by a colon and a dash, and then several lines of tiny handwriting. Apart from the handwriting, it looked just like Danny’s entries in his own diary, which he kept in the envelope under his bed. Like father, like son. From the very first entry, Danny knew what these pages would contain.
He had slammed it shut immediately. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want those old wounds to be opened up again. He didn’t want to be that close to what had happened. But at the same time ... he was drawn to it, he couldn’t resist.
Opening it would do no harm. Reading it.
24th December 2000:- Tis the season to be jolly. Ho ho ho. Wrapping presents with Val tonight. My head! It’s hurting. Bursting. I’m writing this down. Is it any use? I don’t know. I’ve got to let it all out somehow or I’ll burst.
He had read more of it, but then had shut it again, dropped it back in the box and fled the room. He couldn’t face it. And yet, ever since, he had been drawn back to it. Perhaps if he read more if it he would begin to understand his father’s madness.
It was as if there was a small voice, urging him to read it...
Now, Danny looked at Oma and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll get it ready. I’ll go to the Post Office with it at lunchtime tomorrow.”
“Good good good. I give you the money for posting,” said Oma. “I get it from her.”
~
All the boxes were still there in Josh’s room, packing tape stuck back roughly in place. Last weekend they had got no further in unpacking them once they found the journal.
Danny took the large notebook and went back to his own room. He sat in the wooden window seat with the view over the crowded car park, and stared at the journal’s cover. There was nothing to identify it, no label or title, just the words Guildhall and A4 ruled in the bottom righthand corner.
18th January 2001:- They think I don’t know but I do. I see things. I watch them. I know all about what’s going on. Sometimes it’s in my dreams. I see what’s happening. I watched them today. Tonight, I mean. Saw what they were up to. I followed them. It was meant to be like this. Pre-ordained. He told me all about them. Hodeken tells me all kinds of things. He told me where they’d be tonight.
He remembered that bit from last Sunday – the entries he had managed to read before the memories it stirred became too painful. They were the writings of a madman. A man with imaginary voices in his head. And that madman was his own father, his own flesh and blood. Half of his genes had come from that man. So was he, Danny, half a madman?
16th February 2001:- Voices in my head. It’s driving me mad. It’s like my skull’s splitting open from the inside. They’re talking to me. Laughing at me. Telling me what to do. I’ll have their tongues. That’ll shut them up.
They had never claimed that he was mad, though. If they’d said he was mad he would have been sent to a secure hospital instead of prison and there might be a chance he could be cured and then they’d have to set him free. So no: the prosecution had said he was bad, not mad, and Danny’s father had not argued with that.
He was mad, of course. Anyone who had done what he had done must be mad.
Maybe if they had read this journal they would have treated him differently.
20th March 2001:- SHUT UP!!!!!
Danny closed the book. His vision was blurred. He couldn’t read the thing.
He wished he’d never found the diary.
As he had read those words, he could hear his father’s voice, as if he were reading them aloud. He put his hands to his face, and squeezed it between them as hard as he could. As if that would shut out his father’s voice, the madness in his words.
He remembered his relaxation lessons. The tightening and relaxing of every tiny muscle in his body, one after the other. The breathing. Breathe in, hold, breathe out and hold. Emptying his mind of thoughts. Squashing each new thought as it sparked.
He was in control.
Danny was in control.
Danny was always in control.
He had to be.
The alternative was too terrifying to consider.
He opened his eyes and saw that the journal had slid off his lap and fallen to the floor. He went over to his desk and gathered up the roll of parcel tape and the brown paper he had brought up earlier.
He kneeled. He spread the wrapping paper and placed the journal at the top of the sheet in the middle. Even now, he felt compelled to open it again, to read it and learn where his father had gone wrong.
Instead, he folded it over within the paper, and then folded it over again, and one final time, before folding in one end. Trapping the flap with his knee, he cut off a strip of tape and stuck the paper down. He then repeated this for the other end.
It was a well-wrapped parcel. It made him feel better that the book was so well-contained.
He copied the address of the chambers from his mother’s personal organiser using a black felt-pen. He realised that he had not enclosed a letter to explain the parcel’s contents, but he was sure that his father’s barrister would see immediately what this was.
He slipped the parcel into his school bag, placed the tape and organiser on his desk, and then rushed into the bathroom to be sick.
~
He dreamed that night.
He lay awake in his bed for what seemed like hours. His head was spinning, and whenever he closed his eyes he saw rows of tiny handwriting, twisting and swirling before him.
When he woke, he realised that he was squeezing his eyes tightly shut, but then he seemed to have forgotten how to relax those tiny muscles that controlled his eyelids and they remained sealed. No matter how hard he tried, he could not open his eyes.
There was a weight on his chest, too. Not a great weight. He could still breathe with ease. But a pressure, a presence. Something pressing softly down.
If he could open his eyes he would be able to see what it was.
He felt the panic rising. Like a balloon inflating. Soon, surely, it must burst.
If only he could open his eyes.
A voice: I can help you, Danny. You just need to open up.
He opened his eyes and it was still dark. There was nothing on his chest, no soft, insistent voice. All of that had still been the end of a dream.
All that remained was the sense of panic.
Out on the landing, or maybe in the kitchen, Oma was still moving about. She was humming softly, just loud enough for the tune to drift into Danny’s room.
He rolled onto his side, and closed his eyes.
If he dreamed again that night, he did not recall it in the morning.