The Tin Heart Gold Mine Read online

  As she thinks of Tim, and Adam’s differences and similarities that small but greedy gape of doubt and guilt grows once more under Lara’s ribs. She wonders what Tim will say to Adam once they have caught the underground train. She wonders what she wants him to say about her, and then about the three of them. She wonders what dire secrets Tim might give away to Adam. Lara knows Tim is not malicious. She also understands just how easily hurts can produce spiteful words from people.

  One day one of them, or both of them, Tim or Lara; or Tim and Lara, if they are still together, must confess to Adam that there was once a man called Oscar, who though dead, changed all their lives years ago and who – though dead – is changing their lives again today.

  Lara imagines that on the tube train Tim and Adam will again wipe each other’s specs with the clean tumble-dried hanky provided by Lara. One hanky will certainly be lost, one, with luck, may arrive back at home. Tim will grab Adam’s wrist firmly as the tube train clatters in and the commuters push forward to its doors. If father and son are lucky enough to find a seat they will arrange themselves so that Tim sits and Adam stands with their heads almost level, so they can talk. Adam will want to talk about his 9th birthday next year. His 8th birthday, celebrated six months before, is still one of his favourite topics of conversation.

  “Will you be back for my birthday, Dad?”

  “I’ll come home if it’s possible.” Tim will repeat the promise Adam keeps asking him to make. “What do you want for a present, Adam?”

  Lara has guessed what Adam’s answer will be but Tim has been delegated to find out for certain.

  “Nothing that you’ll be able to get there, Dad, I shouldn’t think. I’d like to see a Kalashnikov though. At school Brett said his Dad has got a proper gun he brought back from Iraq.”

  “I doubt that’s true.”

  Tim would grin. He might belatedly try to flatten Adam’s hair into a semblance of tidiness. Tim never had a comb with him. He didn’t need one with his short-cut, tightly-curled dark hair but he is never without pens and a notebook which fill the sagging pockets of his jacket even when he isn’t on a journalistic assignment.

  “Why do you want a gun, Adam?”

  “To shoot Brett of course – he’s such a dork!”

  Adam will look at Tim slyly to see if he acknowledges the joke.

  “Don’t think I will manage to get you a gun, but we can do the Imperial War Museum on your birthday if you like.”

  It was Lara who had suggested to Tim that they would both enjoy a trip to the War Museum. War and reporting on war are part of Tim’s job as a foreign correspondent on a London newspaper. Adam, with the insatiable curiosity about violence common to boys of his age, always wants to know why and how wars happen and what guns and weapons are in use by the opposing enemy sides. Tim is just the best Dad for a boy the age of Adam.

  “Ooh – that’d be fantastic, Dad!”

  Adam makes ‘fan-tas-tic’ into three long syllables with the emphasis on the middle ‘tas’.

  Tim smiles whenever Adam does that. He had been a rather geeky kid himself but he had not had to endure the indoor life that London forces on Adam. Even the rock-climbing that Adam perseveres with, in spite of his lack of skill, and the basketball that he plays with reluctance are done inside a sports hall. It is true the buildings are large but there is no blue infinity of space overhead. Tim worries that Adam may not survive the physical bullying that is part of growing up but Adam seems unphased by his experiences so far. He is, however, not yet at middle school.

  One day at home, as Adam fiddled with a model Dalek toy that no longer said “Exterminate!”, he explained to Tim that he made jokes about the school bullies so that, rather than be laughed at, they left him alone.

  “The power of the word,” Tim had said with parental pride to Lara afterwards. “Hope it continues to work for him!”

  Adam wants to know where Tim’s new assignment is going to take him and Tim has promised to get him maps to cover the whole North-Eastern area of Africa as his work will probably include parts of Sudan, Kenya, Somalia, and Uganda.

  “I’ll let you know where I am going but sometimes I’ll be off your map completely, Adam.”

  “Too bad – Mum will want to know where you are too, Dad.”

  Adam, standing against Tim’s knee in the train, will push his spectacles up the bridge of his nose while tilting his head backwards. Adam has copied the gesture from Tim, who is quite unaware that he makes it in the first place.

  Their plan is to leave the Underground at the frenetic Holborn interchange and wander through Covent Garden, pausing to see the performers and jugglers outside St Paul’s Church. At Stanford’s map shop they will look for maps and guides of the places where Tim is to work.

  Once their Covent Garden expedition is over, they will cross over the Thames to the lunchtime jazz concert in the South Bank Centre that Tim wants to hear and that Adam has been persuaded he will enjoy. After that they will have seafood pasta by the restaurant window with the giant bust of Nelson Mandela on guard outside. Lara thinks the statue’s likeness to Mandela is poor. Perhaps that is why she never can remember the name of the sculptor.

  Her thoughts skitter back from making representational art to what Tim might say to Adam or Adam to Tim. Might Adam raise the question that his parents expect and dread? How will that go? Again Lara can only guess.

  “Dad – are you and Mum fighting? Is that why you are going away?”

  Will Tim take off his spectacles and rub them briskly with his scratchy paper napkin instead of his soft hanky? What would or could he say that was honest and the right thing for Adam to hear? Lara tries to breathe in and out steadily for him. She guesses how he might word it. She knows what she wants him to say.

  “Look Adam, things go up and down in every family. Right now Lara and I are making adjustments to – well – our jobs are changing – we were wondering about moving house – you’ll be going to a high school one day and we have to find one that suits you – yes – well – we’ve had a disagreement, but we are sorting it out – I promise you – ”

  Adam will listen attentively while spearing a prawn and twirling his pasta around it. His eyes will flick up at his father and afterwards he may ask the question that Lara wants to ask.

  “Dad – do you still love Mummy?”

  Tim hasn’t been able to use the word ‘love’ to Lara for a while. Adam, however, needs reassurance. Lara feels the weight of Tim’s resentment and anger with her as if she is sitting at the table with them. She knows Tim wants what is best for his family but she knows he’ll never accept anything tainted by that bastard, Oscar even if it was to make them richer. Maybe Tim has come to feel that she’s tainted too.

  He might say simply to Adam, “I do love Lara. I love you and I love your Mummy too. I think we both need a little time to think about how we do things. None of that will ever change how much we love you, Adam.”

  He might not.

  Lara is terrified of losing Tim’s love but what is she able to do about Oscar? Everything to do with Oscar is complicated. She loathes Oscar so much that when she thinks about him she discovers that she is not breathing. When she dreams about him, as happens too often, he presses against her, a troubling but warm and intimate presence.

  When Tim first told Adam he was setting off on a working trip to East Africa, Lara had seen Adam look at Tim for a moment. Then he had stood up, walked up to Tim and hugged him, ducking his head under Tim’s chin so that he couldn’t be kissed on his face. Tim had squeezed him and kissed the top of his head, distracted again by the hair that poked up and tickled his face.

  “That’s okay, then,” Adam had said using Lara’s end-of-conversation expression and copying her most matter-of-fact voice.

  Perhaps at the South Bank Centre, Adam will get up to hug Tim again and then ha
ve to say, “Oh, I got some pasta sauce on your shirt Dad – sorry!”

  Chapter Three

  The School Gate

  It is the divided Lara, the sad and bad Lara, the Lara who has hollowed out the artist Lara, who is waiting at the school gate on Monday afternoon for Adam. Tim has gone. He left for East Africa on Friday night and reached Nairobi the following day. They last spoke to each other by phone on Saturday. Now, today, he is on the road to somewhere else.

  “Handsome boy.” comments the woman standing next to Lara.

  Lara knows her slightly. It is Hilda Brewer, a thick-bodied rusty-haired woman probably in her late-forties, who lives in the same block of council flats as Lara and has grandchildren at the same school as Adam.

  “Looks just like his dad. Saw them together last week.”

  Lara turns her head rather too quickly to see what Hilda means and jerks her neck painfully. Holding her hand under her ear she tries to nod. Why does a cricked neck hurt so much? Last week it had been Tim who had collected Adam from school. This week it is Oscar who has possession of the inside of Lara’s skull. She tries to mentally dislodge Oscar without physically shaking her head.

  “Yes, he does, doesn’t he? – I suppose.”

  Lara curses herself inwardly for her confusion and her guilt. She’s falling apart, she’s stupid, she’s collapsing, she’s pathetic. If only the sky wasn’t so grey. If only the sun could dissolve the mist. If only she could think straight. If only thinking could provide her with an answer. If only she could answer spontaneously and say with a confident laugh, “Yes, Adam is the spit of his father.”

  “He can come for tea with my grandson if he likes.” Hilda said, “‘He’s the same year as Lester – 8 years? It’s Adam, innit? You ask him – then just knock at No 15. What’s your name, dear?”

  Lara thinks with some horror of what Adam might be fed in front of the telly at No. 15. It would probably be a bag of chips from the takeaway opposite as they watch a noisy and violent Japanese cartoon for kids and listen to racist opinions regurgitated from a florid tabloid newspaper. People keep to themselves or to their cliques in the council flats where Lara lives. There’s a degree of suspicion between the older council tenants and the younger owner-buyers. If Lara ever thinks about the older working class tenants, she imagines they resent the invasive changes that herald their inevitable displacement. She personally doesn’t feel a citizen of England or Britain. London, however, both contains the whole world and is claimed by it, so Lara feels safe in its boundaries even while she yearns for Africa.

  Without Tim Lara is in need of an occasional child-minder. One who is a neighbour with regular habits would be convenient. Lara gives herself a mental shake and smiles at Hilda. Lara’s emotions swing crazily between anger and misery every day. If Hilda can look after Adam she will be able to make an appointment to see Brendan, the therapist that her old friend, Liseli, recommends.

  “Thank you. I’m Lara – Lara Weston.” she says.

  Weston is Tim’s name and Lara’s married name. It is not the name she uses currently as a professional artist. Perhaps she is truly paranoid but Lara has nightmares that somebody might connect her to the ‘Lara Kingston’ who had painted ‘those’ paintings. If someone made the connection, if it all came out, could she be arrested and jailed?

  Lara gives Hilda a continuing smile.

  “I’ll see what Adam wants to do – I expect he would like to.”

  Adam and another boy are approaching. They are obviously friends and their heads are together as they laugh and tug at each other’s coats in some game of unthinking natural physicality. Adam drops behind and drags at the other boy’s rucksack, unbalancing him for a moment. Before they reach the gate each boy produces a length of stick harvested without permission from a school-yard tree. They begin a battle to the death with their light-sabre substitutes.

  “Lester, where’s Tracey? Where’s your sister, Lester?” Hilda calls.

  “Coming,” he answers without turning to look round for her.

  Lara sees a pretty child with thick hair and a brown skin wandering across the yard towards them. Both Lester and his sister, Tracey, are mixed-race. Lara sighs as she realises that she had chosen to stereotype Hilda as an East End racist. She doesn’t need another proof of her own increasing misanthropy.

  Hilda explains as they start to walk back to the flats together.

  “My daughter and her husband work away in Essex. They’ve got a cleaning business. Sometimes if they are working all night the kids stay over. Lucky I’m not working. You’re not working either?”

  Lara gives a slight shrug. She is never sure of the reaction she may get when she admits to being an artist. It’s usually blank incomprehension followed by a fatuous statement about how lovely that must be.

  “I’m a painter – artist if you like – I have been using the front room in our flat as a studio – that way I can work when it suits me – and it fits in with Adam’s needs. I will be moving into a new studio very soon – over by Victoria Park.”

  “I see you’ve got big pictures going in and out of your flat.” Hilda grins. “Where my daughter Shelley cleans, at the office, there’s pictures on the walls. Shelley says they’re like patterns and not of anything – she don’t understand them. What kind of pictures do you do?”

  “Oh, animals – wild animals from Africa – or anywhere.” Lara answers, dismissing herself, the vague, the modest artist, with a hand wave.

  In her studio at the moment the paint is dry on the palettes and her brushes untouched. She has a commission to complete and if it isn’t done she will be short of cash again.

  “Sounds nice.” Hilda approved, “Any time you want, dear – come in for a cup of tea. Don’t be lonely!”

  She pats Lara’s arm. Lara shrinks inside. Is she being patronised? What has Hilda noticed about Lara?

  They arrive on the second floor corridor outside Hilda’s door at the other end of the building from Lara and Tim’s flat.

  “Do you want to play with Lester now, Adam?”

  Hilda looks at Adam then at Lara. Lara nods and drops a kiss on the top of Adam’s untidy hair.

  “Till supper-time, Adam.” she says.

  The boys whoop and clatter their way indoors at No. 15. They dump rucksacks in the corridor under Tracey’s feet with the deliberate intention of tripping her up and making her squeal. Hilda shakes her head at them and waves Lara away with a smile.

  “Boys!” she says.

  Lara walks back to the front door of her own flat and goes indoors to solitude. She takes off her coat, turns her back on her makeshift studio in the sitting-room and enters the kitchen to put on the kettle. The breakfast dishes are still waiting to be done. Hilda and her daughter would not have left their washing up chores till the evening. Lara imagines their expressions if they could see her loaded sink. Hilda’s daughter can’t be more than thirty if Hilda is, as she looks, not yet fifty. Lara feels old at almost forty to have a son of Adam’s age. Her life is sliding away. She is only a jobbing artist painting in order to sell. Her art will never amount to much. All those years of wasted career opportunities while she worked for Oscar at the Tin Heart Gold Mine. When Tim talked of returning to Africa, those years that she had blocked from her memory came storming back into her dreams at night and woke her up in strangled, screaming fear.

  Lara can’t recall Oscar’s face. Her brain has bleached him out. The flashbulbs of her memory shatter and strobe the images of him. She dares not remember how he looked, but when she shuts her eyes he is present in her flesh. She feels his heat, his weight and his size. She feels his voice vibrate against her body. It is as if she was still lying with her face resting on his chest, her lips pressing his skin. The raucous shrill of insects around them and the fierce blaze of an African sun overhead. Now she is fading into a sullen fog. Back then she had b
een alive. Every nerve of her body sharp and taut as the whine of mosquitoes, as the harsh screech of mine machinery or the zing of high-velocity bullets.

  When a gun is fired the thud of the bullet into a body is heard before the shivered sound of its flight from the barrel of the gun. That was Oscar. Death-dealing. Impact before emotion. Fatal.

  Chapter Four

  Art and Family

  Has Lara fitted her family around her art? Or has she fitted her art around her family? Lara doesn’t really know. She knows how much stubbornness it takes to simply keep on trying to make art. She has kept on painting and drawing in the living room from 10 till 3 each weekday for years, observing strict hours like someone with a normal job. Tim often works late into the evening, sometimes at the office, sometimes at home. When Tim is busy Adam arranges his Transformers figures into an audience for his stories while Lara prepares their supper. Then she rushes around doing the most necessary or obvious of the household chores.

  One evening Tim and Lara are listening politely while Adam relays to Tim the plans that Lara is making for the months that Tim will be in Africa. Lara has, of course, already told Tim about them.

  “Mum’s going to ask Gillian if she can also have a studio with the other artists at Victoria Park. She says it is time that we had a proper sitting room for our family instead of a stinky artist’s studio.”

  Adam makes puppy-dog sniffing noises at the mere notion of turpentine.

  Tim agrees.

  “It will be nice won’t it, Adam?”

  “Mum says that is dangerous to be a journalist nowadays.”

  Adam switches wildly from subject to subject.