Griefwork by James Hamilton-Paterson Read Free Book Online

tar. Is he drinking?’
    ‘When I wake him.’
    ‘Plenty of hot milk. Sweet, with a lump of butter. Look at him. How can he fight like that? Poor little scrap. Bowels?’
    ‘Not so far, Doctor.’
    ‘Hickery-pickery, then. Nothing stronger. We can always increase the dose. Carry on, Sister. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.’ He looked again at his patient, picked up his silk hat from where it lay over the boy’s feet and shook his head.
    But that time Leon had pulled through, and the next, and the next. By his early teens he was left with permanently weakened lungs. He coughed a lot, became easily short of breath. Down in Flinn he excited pity. In his delicacy and unparented isolation he stood out, even on that harsh coast where conditions differed little for most people. Indeed, many were fond of him. He was gentle and polite; and if he seemed remote and always to be talking to himself it was construed as proof that ‘part of himwas already on the other side’. In this view people were touched by sickness as by sainthood. He was really only waiting for a fatal complication to set in – pneumonia, consumption – and he would finally go all the way to the churchyard where sickly children ended, his coffin leaned on by a sexton with a pole to stop it floating up as the soaking clods were shovelled hastily back.
    None of this happened. He survived and he left. One day in 1929 when he was about sixteen he walked to the town, hitched a lift on a cart full of Wim’s father’s tomatoes and vanished citywards. He forsook the cold, salt-laden yawn of sea, sky and polder and with him took a private landscape and an unseen friend. Not physically strong but entirely self-possessed he wandered for some weeks before finding a job as a gardener’s boy in the distant capital. A month after he had left, his uncle and two companions were drowned while fishing, caught in a squall which became a great storm. Had he survived, the uncle would have returned to find his dwelling roofless and sagging, the smoke house blown flat. In this manner he was saved from ruin by disaster.
    So carefully had he watched sails, waves, grasses, skies, that maybe Leon allowed himself to be guided by the wind. A quartering breeze on his thin shoulder-blades veered him diagonally to the railway instead of the bus station. An icy clout to the side of his neck knocked him into the first train rather than the second. At any rate, some explanation should be advanced for the uncanny accuracy with which he fetched up at the Botanical Gardens of all places on the very day there was a vacancy for a low-ranking employee, and this at a time when half the streets of Europe were restless with low-ranking employees looking for work. His companion about him, he moved among these listless folk in a purposeful way, one eye on the clouds. He had already been down to the docks crowdedwith shipping and admired the forest of masts and rigging, the funnels’ stained livery. But the wind was steadily onshore and he was blown back towards City Hall.
    Not far from the centre was a park. With one of his remaining coins he bought a bun, unconsciously divided it into two and ate as slowly as he could, sitting on the grass. Children kicked a football, the pages of an abandoned newspaper lolloped before the breeze. A hundred yards off was a row of plane trees beyond which he could see the flicker of traffic on the boulevard. He watched a brace of sheldrake cross the sky, quite high, then lose height rapidly to slant steeply behind the tree tops, wings downcurved. ‘Hutt,’ he said. ‘ Hutt. ’This was the air passing through a duck’s tight wings as it braked for landing. He got up, brushing off crumbs and leaves, and made for the trees.
    On the far side of the boulevard was a fine high wall bending with the road so as to suggest a large enclosure. He crossed, wincing at traffic din, and came to a pair of iron gates, one of which was open. He wandered in past a little lodge, the