A Darker Domain

Tuesday 19th June 2007; Edinburgh

It had never occurred to Misha Gibson to count the number of times she’d emerged from the Sick Kids’ with a sense of outrage that the world continued on its way in spite of what was happening inside the hospital behind her. She’d never thought to count because she’d never allowed herself to believe it might be for the last time. Ever since the doctors had explained the reason for Luke’s misshapen thumbs and the scatter of café-au-lait spots across his narrow back, she had nailed herself to the conviction that somehow she would help her son dodge the bullet his genes had aimed at his life expectancy. Now it looked as if that conviction had finally been tested to destruction.

Misha stood uncertain for a moment, resenting the sunshine, wanting weather as bleak as her mood. She wasn’t ready to go home yet. She wanted to scream and throw things and an empty flat would tempt her to lose control and do just that. John wouldn’t be home to hold her or to hold her back; he’d known about her meeting with the consultant so of course work would have thrown up something insurmountable that only he could deal with.

Instead of heading up through Marchmont to their sandstone tenement, Misha cut across the busy road to the Meadows, the green lung of the southern city centre where she loved to walk with Luke. Once, when she’d looked at their street on Google Earth, she’d checked out the Meadows too. From space, it looked like a rugby ball fringed with trees, the criss-cross paths like laces holding the ball together. She’d smiled at the thought of her and Luke scrambling over the surface like ants. Today, there were no smiles to console Misha. Today, she had to face the fact that she might never walk here with Luke again.

She shook her head, trying to dislodge the maudlin thoughts. Coffee, that’s what she needed to gather her thoughts and get things into proportion. A brisk walk across the Meadows, then down to George IV Bridge, where every shop front was a bar, a café or a restaurant these days.

Ten minutes later, Misha was tucked into a corner booth, a comforting mug of latte in front of her. It wasn’t the end of the line. It couldn’t be the end of the line. She wouldn’t let it be the end of the line. There had to be some way to give Luke another chance.

She’d known something was wrong from the first moment she’d held him. Even dazed by drugs and drained by labour, she’d known. John had been in denial, refusing to set any store by their son’s low birth weight and those stumpy little thumbs. But fear had clamped its cold certainty on Misha’s heart. Luke was different. The only question in her mind had been how different.

The sole aspect of the situation that felt remotely like luck was that they were living in Edinburgh, a ten-minute walk from the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, an institution that regularly appeared in the ‘miracle’ stories beloved of the tabloids. It didn’t take long for the specialists at the Sick Kids’ to identify the problem. Nor to explain that there would be no miracles here.

Fanconi Anaemia. If you said it fast, it sounded like an Italian tenor or a Tuscan hill town. But the charming musicality of the words disguised their lethal message. Lurking in the DNA of both Luke’s parents were recessive genes that had combined to create a rare condition that would condemn their son to a short and painful life. At some point between the ages of three and twelve, he was almost certain to develop aplastic anaemia, a breakdown of the bone marrow that would ultimately kill him unless a suitable donor could be found. The stark verdict was that without a successful bone marrow transplant, Luke would be lucky to make it into his twenties.

That information had given her a mission. She soon learned that, without siblings, Luke’s best chance of a viable bone marrow transplant would come from a family member - what the doctors called a mismatched related transplant. At first, this had confused Misha. She’d read about bone marrow transplant registers and assumed their best hope was to find a perfect match there. But according to the consultant, a donation from a mismatched family member who shared some of Luke’s genes had a lower risk of complications than a perfect match from a donor who wasn’t part of their extended kith and kin.

Since then, Misha had been wading through the gene pool on both sides of the family, using persuasion, emotional blackmail and even the offer of reward on distant cousins and elderly aunts. It had taken time, since it had been a solo mission. John had walled himself up behind a barrier of unrealistic optimism. There would be a medical breakthrough in stem cell research. Some doctor somewhere would discover a treatment whose success didn’t rely on shared genes. A perfectly matched donor would turn up on a register somewhere. John collected good stories and happy endings. He trawled the internet for cases that had proved the doctors wrong. He came up with medical miracles and apparently inexplicable cures on a weekly basis. And he drew his hope from this. He couldn’t see the point of Misha’s constant pursuit. He knew somehow it would be all right. His capacity for denial was Olympic.

It made her want to kill him.

Instead, she’d continued to clamber through the branches of their family trees in search of the perfect candidate. She’d come to her final dead end only a week or so before today’s terrible judgement. There was only one possibility left. And it was the one possibility she had prayed she wouldn’t have to consider.

Before her thoughts could go any further down that particular path, a shadow fell over her. She looked up, ready to be sharp with whoever wanted to intrude on her. ‘John,’ she said wearily.

‘I thought I’d find you hereabouts. This is the third place I tried,’ he said, sliding into the booth, awkwardly shunting himself round till he was at right angles to her, close enough to touch if either of them had a mind to.

‘I wasn’t ready to face an empty flat.’

‘No, I can see that. What did they have to say?’ His craggy face screwed up in anxiety. Not, she thought, over the consultant’s verdict. He still believed his precious son was somehow invincible. What made John anxious was her reaction.

She reached for his hand, wanting contact as much as consolation. ‘It’s time. Six months tops without the transplant.’ Her voice sounded cold even to her. But she couldn’t afford warmth. Warmth would melt her frozen state and this wasn’t the place for an outpouring of grief or love.

John clasped her fingers tight inside his. ‘It’s maybe not too late,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll -’

‘Please, John. Not now.’

His shoulders squared inside his suit jacket, his body tensing as he held his dissent close. ‘So,’ he said, an outbreath that was more sigh than anything else. ‘I suppose that means you’re going looking for the bastard?’

Wednesday 27th June 2007; Glenrothes

Karen scratched her head with her pen. Why do I get all the good ones? ‘Why did you leave it so long to try to trace your father?’

She caught a fleeting expression of irritation round Misha’s mouth and eyes. ‘Because I’d been brought up thinking my father was a selfish blackleg bastard. What he did cast my mother adrift from her own community. It got me bullied in the play park and at school. I didn’t think a man who dumped his family in the shit like that would be bothered about his grandson.’

‘He sent money,’ Karen said.

‘A few quid here, a few quid there. Blood money,’ Misha said. ‘Like I said, my mum wouldn’t touch it. She gave it away. I never saw the benefit of it.’

‘Maybe he tried to make it up to your mum. Parents don’t always tell us the uncomfortable truths.’

Misha shook her head. ‘You don’t know my mum. Even with Luke’s life at stake, she wasn’t comfortable with me trying to track down my dad.’

To Karen, it seemed a thin reason for avoiding a man who might provide the key to a boy’s future. But she knew how deep feelings ran in the old mining communities, so she let it lie. ‘You say he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. What happened when you went looking for him?’

Thursday 21st June 2007; Newton of Wemyss

Jenny Prentice pulled a bag of potatoes out of the vegetable rack and set about peeling them, her body bowed over the sink, her back turned to her daughter. Misha’s question hung unanswered between them, reminding them both of the barrier her father’s absence had put between them from the beginning. Misha tried again. ‘I said -’

‘I heard you fine. There’s nothing the matter with my hearing,’ Jenny said. ‘And the answer is, I’ve no bloody idea. How would I know where to start looking for that selfish scabbing sack of shite? We’ve managed fine without him the last twenty-two years. There’s been no cause to go looking for him.’

‘Well, there’s cause now.’ Misha stared at her mother’s rounded shoulders. The weak light that spilled in through the small kitchen window accentuated the silver in her undyed hair. She was barely fifty, but she seemed to have bypassed middle age, heading straight for the vulnerable stoop of the little old lady. It was as if she’d known this attack would arrive one day and had chosen to defend herself by becoming piteous.

‘He’ll not help,’ Jenny scoffed. ‘He showed what he thought of us when he left us to face the music. He was always out for number one.’

‘Maybe so. But I’ve still got to try for Luke’s sake,’ Misha said. ‘Was there never a return address on the envelopes the money came in?’

Jenny cut a peeled potato in half and dropped it in a pan of salted water. ‘No. He couldn’t even be bothered to put a wee letter in the envelope. Just a bundle of dirty notes, that’s all.’

‘What about the guys he went with?’

Jenny cast a quick contemptuous glance at Misha. ‘What about them? They don’t show their faces round here.’

‘But some of them have still got family here or in East Wemyss. Brothers, cousins. They might know something about my dad.’

Jenny shook her head firmly. ‘I’ve never heard tell of him since the day he walked out. Not a whisper, good or bad. The other men he went with, they were no friends of his. The only reason he took a lift with them was he had no money to make his own way south. He’ll have used them like he used us and then he’ll have gone his own sweet way once he got where he wanted to be.’ She dropped another potato in the pan and said without enthusiasm, ‘Are you staying for your dinner?’

‘No, I’ve got things to see to,’ Misha said, impatient at her mother’s refusal to take her quest seriously. ‘There must be somebody he’s kept in touch with. Who would he have talked to? Who would he have told what he was planning?’

Jenny straightened up and put the pan on the old-fashioned gas cooker. Misha and John offered to replace the chipped and battered stove every time they sat down to the production number that was Sunday dinner, but Jenny always refused with the air of frustrating martyrdom she brought to every offer of kindness. ‘You’re out of luck there too.’ She eased herself on to one of the two chairs that flanked the tiny table in the cramped kitchen. ‘He only had one real pal. Andy Kerr. He was a red-hot Commie, was Andy. I tell you, by 1984, there weren’t many still keeping the red flag flying, but Andy was one of them. He’d been a union official well before the strike. Him and your father, they’d been best pals since school.’ Her face softened for a moment and Misha could almost make out the young woman she’d been. ‘They were always up to something, those two.’

‘So where do I find this Andy Kerr?’ Misha sat down opposite her mother, her desire to be gone temporarily abandoned.

Her mother’s face twisted into a wry grimace. ‘Poor soul. If you can find Andy, you’ll be quite the detective.’ She leaned across and patted Misha’s hand. ‘He’s another one of your father’s victims.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Andy adored your father. He thought the sun shone out of his backside. Poor Andy. The strike put him under terrible pressure. He believed in the strike, he believed in the struggle. But it broke his heart to see the hardship his men were going through. He was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and the local executive forced him to go on the sick not long before your father shot the craw. Nobody saw him after that. He lived out in the middle of nowhere, so nobody noticed he was away.’ She gave a long, weary sigh. ‘He sent a postcard to your dad from some place up north. But of course, he was blacklegging by then, so he never got it. Later, when Andy came back, he left a note for his sister, saying he couldn’t take any more. Killed himself, the poor soul.’

‘What’s that got to do with my dad?’ Misha demanded.

‘I always thought your dad going scabbing was the straw that broke the camel’s back.’ Jenny’s expression was pious shading into smug. ‘That was what drove Andy over the edge.’

‘You can’t know that.’ Misha pulled away in disgust.

‘I’m not the only one around here that thinks the same thing. If your father had confided in anybody, it would have been Andy. And that would have been one burden too many for that fragile wee soul. He took his own life, knowing that his one real friend had betrayed everything he stood for.’ On that melodramatic note, Jenny got to her feet and lifted a bag of carrots from the vegetable rack. It was clear she had shot her bolt on the subject of Mick Prentice.

Wednesday 27th June 2007; Glenrothes

Karen sneaked a look at her watch. Whatever fine qualities Misha Gibson might possess, brevity was not one of them. ‘So Andy Kerr turned out to be literally a dead end?’

‘My mother thinks so. But apparently they never found his body. Maybe he didn’t kill himself after all.’ Misha said.

‘They don’t always turn up,’ Karen said. ‘Sometimes the sea claims them. Or else the wilderness. There’s still a lot of empty space in this country.’ Resignation took possession of Misha’s face. She was, Karen thought, a woman inclined to believe what she was told. If anyone knew that, it would be her mother. Perhaps things weren’t quite as clear cut as Jenny Prentice wanted her daughter to think.

‘That’s true,’ Misha said. ‘And my mother did say that he left a note. Will the police still have the note?’

Karen shook her head. ‘I doubt it. If we ever had it, it will have been given back to his family.’

‘Would there not have been an inquest? Would they not have needed it for that?’

‘You mean a Fatal Accident Inquiry,’ Karen said. ‘Not without a body, no. If there’s a file at all, it’ll be a missing-person case.’

‘But he’s not missing. His sister had him declared dead. Their parents both died in the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, but apparently their dad had always refused to believe Andy was dead so he hadn’t changed his will to leave the house to the sister. She had to go to court to get Andy pronounced dead so she would inherit. That’s what my mother said, anyway.’ Not a flicker of doubt disturbed Misha’s expression.

Karen made a note, Andy Kerr’s sister, and added a little asterisk to it. ‘So if Andy killed himself, we’re back with scabbing as the only reasonable explanation of your dad’s disappearance. Have you made any attempts to contact the guys he’s supposed to have gone away with?’

Monday 25th June 2007; Edinburgh

Ten past nine on a Monday morning, and already Misha felt exhausted. She should be at the Sick Kids by now, focusing on Luke. Playing with him, reading to him, cajoling therapists into expanding their regimes, discussing treatment plans with medical staff, using all her energy to fill them with her conviction that her son could be saved. And if he could be saved, they all owed it to him to shovel every scrap of therapeutic intervention his way.

But instead, she was sitting on the floor, back to the wall, knees bent, phone cradled in her lap, notepad at her side. She told herself she was summoning the courage to make a phone call, but she knew in a corner of her mind exhaustion was the real reason for her inactivity.

Other families used the weekends to relax, to recharge their batteries. But not the Gibsons. For a start, fewer staff were on duty at the hospital, so Misha and John felt obliged to pile even more energy than usual into Luke. There was no respite when they came home either. Misha’s acceptance that the last best hope for their son lay in finding her father had simply escalated the conflict between her missionary ardour and John’s passive optimism.

This weekend had been harder going than usual. Having a time limit put on Luke’s life imbued each moment they shared with more value and more poignancy. It was hard to avoid a kind of melodramatic sentimentality. As soon as they’d left the hospital on Saturday Misha had picked up the refrain she’d been delivering since she’d seen her mother. ‘I need to go to Nottingham, John. You know I do.’

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his rain jacket, thrusting his head forward as if he was butting against a high wind. ‘Just phone the guy,’ he said. ‘If he’s got anything to tell you, he’ll tell you on the phone.’

‘Maybe not.’ She took a couple of steps at a trot to keep pace with him. ‘People always tell you more face to face. He could maybe put me on to the other guys that went down with him. They might know something.’

John snorted. ‘And how come your mother can only remember one guy’s name? How come she can’t put you on to the other guys?’

‘I told you. She’s put everything out of her mind about that time. I really had to push her before she came up with Logan Laidlaw’s name.’

‘And you don’t think it’s amazing that the only guy whose name she can remember has no family in the area? No obvious way to track him down?’

Misha pushed her arm through his, partly to make him slow down. ‘But I did track him down, didn’t I? You’re too suspicious.’

‘No, I’m not. Your mother doesn’t understand the power of the internet. She doesn’t know about things like online electoral rolls or 192.com. She thinks if there’s no human being to ask, you’re screwed. She didn’t think she was giving you anything you could use. She doesn’t want you poking about in this, she’s not going to help you.’

‘That makes two of you then.’ Misha pulled her arm free and strode out ahead of him.

John caught up with her on the corner of their street. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said. ‘I just don’t want you getting hurt unnecessarily.’

‘You think watching my boy die and not doing anything that might save him isn’t hurting me?’ Misha felt the heat of anger in her cheeks, knew the hot tears of rage were lurking close to the surface. She turned her face away from him, blinking desperately at the tall sandstone tenements.

‘We’ll find a donor. Or they’ll find a treatment. All this stem cell research, it’s moving really fast.’

‘Not fast enough for Luke,’ Misha said, the familiar sensation of weight in her stomach slowing her steps. ‘John, please. I need to go to Nottingham. I need you to take a couple of days off work, cover for me with Luke.’

‘You don’t need to go. You can talk to the guy on the phone.’

‘It’s not the same. You know that. When you’re dealing with clients, you don’t do it over the phone. Not for anything important. You go out and see them. You want to see the whites of their eyes. All I’m asking is for you to take a couple of days off, to spend time with your son.’

His eyes flashed dangerously and she knew she’d gone too far. John shook his head stubbornly. ‘Just make the phone call, Misha.’

And that was that. Long experience with her husband had taught her that when John took a position he believed was right, going over the same ground only gave him the opportunity to build stronger fortifications. She had no fresh arguments that could challenge his decision. So here she was, sitting on the floor, trying to shape sentences in her head that would persuade Logan Laidlaw to tell her what had happened to her father since he’d walked out on her more than twenty-two years earlier.

Her mother hadn’t given her much to base a strategy on. Laidlaw was a waster, a womanizer, a man who, at thirty, had still acted like a teenager. He’d been married and divorced by twenty-five, building the sour reputation of a man who was too handy with his fists around women. Misha’s picture of her father was patchy and partial, but even with the bias imposed by her mother, Mick Prentice didn’t sound like the sort of man who would have had much time for Logan Laidlaw. Still, hard times made for strange company.

At last, Misha picked up the phone and keyed in the number she’d tracked down via internet searches and directory enquiries. He’d probably be out at work, she thought on the fourth ring. Or asleep.

The sixth ring cut off abruptly. A deep voice grunted an approximate hello.

‘Is that Logan Laidlaw?’ Misha said, working to keep her voice level.

‘I’ve got a kitchen and I don’t want any insurance.’ The Fife accent was still strong, the words bumping into each other with the familiar rise and fall.

‘I’m not trying to sell you anything, Mr Laidlaw. I just want to talk to you.’

‘Aye, right. And I’m the Prime Minister.’

She could sense he was on the point of ending the call. ‘I’m Mick Prentice’s daughter,’ she blurted out, strategy hopelessly holed beneath the waterline. Across the distance, she could hear the liquid wheeze of his breathing. ‘Mick Prentice from Newton of Wemyss,’ she tried.

‘I know where Mick Prentice is from. What I don’t know is what Mick Prentice has to do with me.’

‘Look, I realize the two of you might not see much of each other these days, but I’d really appreciate anything you could tell me. I really need to find him.’ Misha’s own accent slipped a few gears till she was matching his own broad tongue.

A pause. Then, with a baffled note, ‘Why are you talking to me? I haven’t seen Mick Prentice since I left Newton of Wemyss way back in 1984.’

‘OK, but even if you split up as soon as you got to Nottingham, you must have some idea of where he ended up, where he was heading for?’

‘Listen, hen, I don’t have a clue what you’re on about. What do you mean, split up as soon as we got to Nottingham?’ He sounded irritated, what little patience he had evaporating in the heat of her demands.

Misha gulped a deep breath then spoke slowly. ‘I just want to know what happened to my dad after you got to Nottingham. I need to find him.’

‘Are you wrong in the head or something, lassie? I’ve no idea what happened to your dad after I came to Nottingham, and here’s for why. I was in Nottingham and he was in Newton of Wemyss. And even when we were both in the same place, we weren’t what you would call pals.’

The words hit like a splash of cold water. Was there something wrong with Logan Laidlaw’s memory? Was he losing his grip on the past. ‘No, that’s not right,’ she said. ‘He came to Nottingham with you.’

A bark of laughter, then a gravel cough. ‘Somebody’s been winding you up, lassie,’ he wheezed. ‘Trotsky would have crossed a picket line before the Mick Prentice I knew. What makes you think he came to Nottingham?’

‘It’s not just me. Everybody thinks he went to Nottingham with you and the other men.’

‘That’s mental. Why would anybody think that? Do you not know your own family history?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Christ, lassie, your great-grandfather. Your father’s granddad. Do you not know about him?’

Misha had no idea where this was going but at least he hadn’t hung up on her as she’d earlier feared he would. ‘He was dead before I was even born. I don’t know anything about him, except that he was a miner too.’

‘Jackie Prentice,’ Laidlaw said with something approaching relish. ‘He was a strike breaker back in 1926. After it was settled, he had to be moved to a job on the surface. When your life depends on the men in your team, you don’t want to be a scab underground. Not unless everybody else is in the same boat, like with us. Christ knows why Jackie stayed in the village. He had to take the bus to Dysart to get a drink. There wasn’t a bar in any of the Wemyss villages that would serve him. So your dad and your granddad had to work twice as hard as anybody else to be accepted down the pit. No way would Mick Prentice throw that respect away. He’d sooner starve. Aye, and see you starve with him. Wherever you got your info, they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.’

‘My mother told me. It’s what everybody says in the Newton.’ The impact of his words left her feeling as if all the air had been sucked from her.

‘Well, they’re wrong. Why would anybody think that?’

‘Because the night you went to Nottingham was the last night anyone in the Newton saw him or heard from him. And because my mother occasionally gets money in the post with a Nottingham postmark.’

Laidlaw breathed heavily, a concertina wheeze in her ear. ‘By Christ, that’s wild. Well, sweetheart, I’m sorry to disappoint you. There was five of us left Newton of Wemyss that December night. But your dad wasn’t among us.’