Jack

I never understood my father.

It might sound clichéd, but it is true. My father had been in active service during the war, fighting against tyranny. I was still in the womb when he departed, off to some foreign place, danger waiting for him on muddy fields with gunfire acting as the song of a mockingbird. My mother worked in the munitions factory before I was conceived. She reminded me, every now and again, of the hours of labour. I didn’t pay much attention at the time.

When the war was over, I was six. According to my grandmother, my father returned from the war a different man. I was too young to notice. He did not return from the war, however, without a gift for his family. The surprise that came across my mother’s face when she discovered the money. It accumulated to around one and half million. My father told us that he had recovered it from the enemy during a raid. No one was going to miss it. That’s what he claimed. My mother accepted it. I knew he was lying.

My father bought us a house, in the country, far away from everybody. He invested a large chunk of the money here and there. All turned up a profit. I hardly saw my father except at the dinner table. He only spoke when it suited him. My mother and I had a much healthier relationship. She would always tell me stories. Fairy tales, mostly. Tales of derring-do and princesses in the tower. She would tell me these stories. All except one.

On my eighth birthday, I got sick. The food had not been properly cooked. My father fired the chef. My mother tucked me in bed and kissed me on the forehead before she began to tell me a story. It was a story that I had not heard before. She was halfway through it when my father, moving out of the shadows in the hallway, entered my room. His expression was one of anger.

“Do not tell him that story,” he said in a seething tone. “That is not what happened.”

“It’s a fairy tale,” my mother told him. “Children need fairy tales.”

“Maybe they do,” my father continued. “But I will not have my son be told that one.”

“But I need to know what happened,” I protested weakly.

“Maybe you will find out, when your older,” was all my father said.

That was the end of the matter. It was never brought up again. That night, I overheard my parents talking. My mother started to cry. Her tears became muffled, evidently due to her burying her face into a pillow. The next morning, my mother smiled at me like she always did, but the smile was different. It was a smile that concealed something. Some hidden truth. I did not mention what I had heard in the night.

When I was ten, my father packed me off to boarding school, the childhood equivalent of hell. I have never been to the real Hell, the place down below but compared to that school, fire and brimstone would be a breeze. I stayed in that school until I was eighteen. Most of the time, I was in some sort of trouble. I was caned nearly every day. My only escape from the hostility of those ancient walls was the school library. I would explore that library at my leisure, finding new stories. But I never found that story. The story that my mother told me. I asked if they had it and the librarian, a stuffy woman with bad breath, looked at me with disdain.

“We do not keep childhood nonsense in this establishment,” she told me.

I walked away, defeated.

I went off to university. My father, who had managed to gain some influence, made it so that my place at Oxford was guaranteed, even if he disagreed with my chosen subject. He wanted me to study history. I chose the classics. Literature was what I wanted to learn. I wanted to write, I wanted to tell my own stories.

University was, ironically, not a time of learning. By then, I had become interested in Jack Kerouac, rock ‘n’ roll and sex. I dressed like a rocker, leather jacket and all. My hair styled like Gene Vincent, although with my glasses, I looked more like Buddy Holly. My father disapproved. On my first trip home to see them during the Christmas break, he made me wash my greasy hair and locked away my leather jacket. I did it for my mother. I knew that she was ill, and she would not want me to look like some American street tough at the festive season. She died soon after that. Cancer.

I graduated with a 2:2. My father was not pleased. I did not care. I made sure not to return home for several years after that. My father didn’t even call to ask how I was, and I never called him. I still felt bitter. He never showed any emotion when my mother died, not even at her funeral. He never shed a tear.

I survived. When I was twenty-four, I was given a break by a producer. He asked me to write a script for a television show. I wrote it and it was greenlit. It was a great day, when I received that first payment. After years of submitting short stories to magazines and spec scripts to television studios, I finally had the proof that I was a writer. The first money that I had earned on my own.

I stayed in the field of television as the Swinging Sixties rolled on. Not that I had much to show for it, in the end. The episodes that I had written for various television shows had all been wiped, to save money on the film. I could hardly believe it. My stories had been revoked.  It was only by some act of fortune that Target Books was established in 1973 and I was able to write novelizations, adapt the lost episodes into prose form. To retell The Highwayman and The Dream King. It was these novelizations that made me rediscover my love of prose writing and in 1975, my first novel was published.

The novel was typical of first novels. I had written about my childhood. Semi-autobiographical. I did not tell my father. He would not have been pleased with his portrayal, his characterization. My father was still set in his ways. I was set in mine. Still, that story from my childhood lingered in my mind. A story that had been left without an ending.

It was during an interview with a journalist that I found out the name of the story my mother started to tell me, and my father forced her to leave unfinished. I had included parts of that story in my novel, the parts I could remember through the haze of childhood recollection.

It was called Jack and the Beanstalk.

I did not read the story immediately. I did not cave into my childhood curiosity. I was too busy. Book signings. Visits to America. New words to write. New stories to tell. My father and I never spoke. I was in France when I got the call. My father had died. I immediately cancelled the remainder of my visit, and all other commitments were put on hold so I could deal with the funeral and his estate. I booked the plane tickets and packed up my suitcase. It was then that I decided to take my walk. The French village that I had been staying in was beautiful. The air was clear. It was raining when I set out on foot. France seems more peaceful in the rain. I walked for ten minutes, and with each minute the rain pelted down harder and harder. I decided to seek refuge and entered an abandoned chateau.

Inside, a light shone from an old lantern. Candlelight flickered. I found a seat and removed my coat, which was soaked right through. I removed my cigarettes from the left pocket, making sure that they had been left unsoiled by the storm. They were intact. I took one out and lit it. As I did, he emerged, the tramp. He staggered towards me, a limp in his stride. Sitting on an old chair, he looked at me before asking for a cigarette. I gave him one out of charity. He struck a match and the cigarette burned. He inhaled. He coughed before blowing smoke into the air.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t mention it.”

“You are English,” he observed.

“Yes, and you can speak English very well,” I replied.

“I was taught by an Englishman,” he explained. “During the war.”

“My father was here during the war,” I said making conversation, the news of my father’s death still lingering in my thoughts.

“What was his name?” the tramp asked in curiosity. When I told him, he became startled. He looked at me with eyes that seemed to pass judgement before shrugging off his expression and shaking his head.

“No, it couldn’t be,” he said.

“Couldn’t be? Couldn’t be what?” I asked.

“I knew a man with your father’s name, a long time ago, during the war,” the tramp explained. “I thought he was my friend, but he was a thief. A thief and a murderer. But it cannot be the same man and you do not want to hear an old tramp’s tale.”

I listened and heard the rain outside, pounding down from the heavens, faster and faster. I looked at the tramp and realized that, if anything, his story would help me pass the time. I lit another cigarette and blew smoke into the air.

“Tell me your story,” I said to him. He looked and me and nodded. He cleared his throat and then, he began.

“I was eighteen years of age. France had been taken by Nazi forces but me and my family lived peacefully, as farmers, avoiding the fury of their guns and death machines. The farm was searched every few weeks in case enemies of war or illegal aliens had been hidden away by our family. They never found any of the people we gave sanctuary to. All of them escaped. My father felt it was the right thing to do, before he died, of natural causes. His heart.

“It was this same view that led me to offer sanctuary to an Englishman. He looked frazzled; the war had not been kind to him. He explained to me that his entire battalion had been wiped out. He was the only survivor. He had watched his friends die at the hands of the enemy. Those were images he could not remove from his mind. He screamed in the night, from the pain in his leg, that had been wounded, and the memories of death that haunted him.

“He stayed hidden in our farmhouse for a few weeks, hiding, when necessary, under the floorboards. He slowly regained strength in his leg as the wound began to heal. It was during this time, that another was forced to take sanctuary with us. He was a man who had lost the ability to speak. A mute. He had no religious affiliation; however, deformities and disabilities were not in keeping with the enemy’s ideology.

“He was forced to hide in the hay. The floorboards could not hold his stout frame. He and the Englishman got along well enough, the Englishman taught him how to read and write, all the while planning his escape back to England. Back to the war.”

The tramp paused. He looked at me. Sadness withered his old, shaggy face. He gestured at my cigarette. I sighed before handing him another one. After he had lit it, and the coughing had echoed across the chateau walls, he continued.

“The Englishman had planned his escape for a night in October; however, his escape attempt was halted by the discovery that emerged during the morning light. I had heard it in the night, a strange thud that shattered the ground. When I looked out into the darkness, I did not see any lights of a fallen plane and so, I went back to sleep, but in the morning, I saw it, as did the Englishman and the mute.

“In the middle of my land, growing upwards from the green grass, it towered up into the sky. It was a tree, the bark attested to that. We tried to cut it down with axes; however, still it remained. It was then that the Englishman decided to climb. The mute followed his lead. I was hesitant, but my curiosity got the better of me. Ascending the tree, we were amazed at how far it went, up into the sky. We had no knowledge of the time, only that when we finally reached the top, the sun had ceased to shine, and the moon began to glisten.

“The top of the tree housed a green land of soft grass and flowers that bloomed with a scent of blissful beauty, untarnished by the war. Exploring this land, we stumbled upon the castle.”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “But this reminds me of a story. A story that I heard as a child without knowing the ending. This is a fairy tale. It is not real.”

“Just because it is a fairy tale, it does not mean it isn’t real,” the tramp told me. I remained silent as he continued.

“We entered the castle with caution. We were surprised by the height difference. We were insects compared to the furniture which towered above us. The Englishman referred to Alice in Wonderland, but I had not read that book back then, so it was only later I understood. Walking through the castle we discovered the skeletons of men, left scattered on the floor. Their skulls were a cruel reminder of death.

“It was when we reached the dining room that we saw it, the giant skeleton sat at the table, unmoving. Lifeless. We knew nothing of such fantastical things and thought them fanciful memories of childhood, just as you have pointed out. However, it was real. All too real. It was the Englishman who suggested we head back, a decision that he stood by for only a few moments before he found it.

“The money was in English currency. The bag contained millions of pounds. He picked it up and tossed it on his shoulder, something which the mute protested too. He could not speak so we could not understand him. It was when we began to leave that the giant skeleton began to move.

“We watched as it stood up from its seated position. The rattling of inhuman bones came in unison with the pounding of giant feet. We stood there in terror for a moment as the skeleton kneeled and looked at us with it cold, dead eye-sockets. Turning, we ran, the skeleton of the giant chasing us down halls that had not been company for living souls for centuries.

“At the top of the tree, we sailed down. The Englishman turned back and looked at the skeleton of the giant as it came towards us, tumbling and shattering on the warm green grass. We sailed down the tree, using the leaves as parachutes and landed back in our own world. Back where it was safe. The Englishman hid the money and went to bed, the mute and I followed. The Englishman thought that he had a right to the money. He was wrong, very wrong, but his greed had created a monster.

“It was the following night that the Englishman committed the most sinister act. The mute had been acting strange all day. We paid no notice to him; I had a farm to look after while the Englishman prepared for his departure. It was that night that I was awoken by a commotion outside. When I investigated, I saw the Englishman, my father’s old rifle in hand, looking up at the tree. When I rushed over to him, he handed me a note by way of explanation. It was written in the mute’s jagged handwriting. The mute’s conscience had made him choose his current plan of action. He planned to return the money stolen from that castle in the sky.

“He was halfway up when the Englishman raised the rifle. I tried to stop him, to reason with him, but I reacted too late. He fired two shots. Bang! Bang!   And the mute came plummeting to earth, the money falling with him like petals from a withering rose. I did not speak to the Englishman as he gathered the money. I did not kill him in retaliation for his cruel and unjust murder. He left the following night. We did not say goodbye.

“After the Englishman had departed, the tree that had sprung up for no logical reason, began to die. It took three days before the final leaf disintegrated, dispersed into the ground, joining the worms. I buried the mute in the place the tree stood. I buried him so far down that no one would find him. Time passed. The war ended. Eventually, my land was bought for a profit. Houses stand there now, and the mute is still buried, underneath dirt and concrete.

“The money I got from the sale of the land I wasted on booze and women until I became this tramp, this destitute that sits before you. I believe it is my punishment, a just one at that, for my inaction. My failure to hold the Englishman to account for his crimes. I heard he had returned home a wealthy man. Had a famous son. But it cannot be you. You look too kind.”

And with that, the tramp finished his story. He rose from his seat and was about to walk away when I asked a question, a question that I wanted to know the answer to, more than anything, to finish the story, to make it more real. I asked my question. The tramp smiled and hobbled over to me, leant it, and whispered the answer in my ear. I froze momentarily as the tramp turned and walked away, back into the shadows.

When I returned to my hotel room, I thought about the tramp’s tale. I wondered if it could possibly be true. I then had a glass of whiskey and went to bed. I did not have a good night’s sleep. On the plane home, I thought about the story some more, concluding that it was a lie. A story. A tall tale. Maybe, it was delusion or denial. When I returned to England, I dealt with my father’s estates. I organized the funeral. I said some kind words, only a few of which I meant. As the mourners gathered around the grave, and my father was interred in the ground, with the dirt and the mud, the tramp’s story returned to my mind. The story, my question, and his answer.

“‘The mute? What was he called?’”

“‘They called him Jack.’”