Tangents

By J SPRACK

The novel centres on two characters who met and fell in love who then part because–life happened. It opens with them both in their 50s. Michael is interrupted on his PC by an invitation from a program to take a memory holiday. He is drawn into the opportunities that this offers to re-live memories. His selections are haunted by his perceived failings and his sense of guilt over decisions he has made. Alongside Michael’s story, there is Niamh’s. Hers is a love story of mothers and daughters rediscovering through shared maturity how to love those we love and how to smile. They select photographs from an old box that have stories to tell. Ultimately, Niamh knows that the one story she has to tell is what happened in Amsterdam. The revelation offers a resolution for both strands of the novel, but it is left for Michael’s son to be his witness. Aideen learns of her father, the man who tried to kill Niamh, for the first time. Tangents investigates love and disillusionment attempting a balance between the two.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244415259

Book preview

Tangents

TANGENTS

By

JD Sprack

The flame crept up the portrait line by line

As it lay on the coals in the silence of the night’s profound,

And over the arm’s incline,

And along the mark of the silkwork superfine,

And gnawed at the delicate bosom’s defenceless round.

Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes;

The spectacle was one that I could not bear,

To my deep and sad surprise;

But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtivewise

Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth and hair.

‘Thank God, she is out of it now!’ I said at last,

In a great relief of heart when the thing was done

That had set my soul aghast,

And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the past

But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on.

She was a woman long hid among a pack of years,

She might have been living or dead; she was lost to my sight,

And the deed that had nigh drawn tears

Was done in a casual clearing of life’s arrears;

But I felt as if I had put her to death that night!

...

-Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive,

And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead;

Yet – yet – if on earth alive

Did she feel a smart, and with vague anguish strive?

If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?

Thomas Hardy *

CHAPTER ONE

Even before Niamh had become a memory, Michael had bookmarked Hardy’s poem. Not by tapping an icon in the corner of a monitor, but an actual bookmark; the torn off corner of a newspaper, yellowing over time in the red volume. The inscription on the ex libris sticker gives just a date: March 1981. He had stumbled across ‘The Photograph’. Then it fixed him. Some irony there; a Hardyesque example of fate. A tale about a man peering back through the years, putting his affairs in order as a simple case of housekeeping, or to avoid leaving behind evidence of the past, a live before that had only been half-formed before being pruned. The action of preserving a version of the present by eliminating an alternative past, was the moment of a brief flaming. Instead of disappearing to grey ash, she consumed him. A life unlived; a path not taken. That was what the poem said to Michael. Hardy? Or just a fictive persona through which to envisage a drama?

He had left many things behind when the separation happened, and he moved out of the family home and into the flat, the book wasn’t one of them. On the narrow black metal shelves, with most of the relics of his past life, it had a place within easy reach. Against the long beige wall, beside the cream sofa that helped to divide the room into a space to listen to music and the radio, and the area with a dining table. The table had chairs for six, but he had never used more than two. One at each end. One where he sometimes sat to eat; the other, opposite, where he sat in front of the other principal survivor of two decades of marriage, a PC. He replaced the book on the shelf and moved to table. It was a place to fill time, between the hours of work, the place he lived, and the hours of work. His finger hovered over the start button. Hesitant.

He had been sitting in a Costa concession stuck in the carpark of an Outlet shopping centre when he first saw what he now hesitated to engage. He was supposed to on his way back to the office having concluded a meeting earlier than he expected. Instead he was here. About to delay work. Then it happened.

The design of the advert was different from the usual mess of pop ups: it was strikingly plain. It avoided bright colours; muted the black typeface to a charcoal; made the white an off shade of white. There were no adverts bouncing along the top; no invitations to free bets with spinning poker dice on a green baize. Nothing of note, but the simplicity of the command: ‘Take a Memory Holiday.’

Not, take a memorable holiday. That was the intended hook. A discrete, gentle invasion. Its simplicity was unsettling.

Michael had checked his screen to see if search conduit had resurfaced at some level to irritate with redirection, carrying piggy back invitations at a penny a click. He had launched a quick malware scan that morning, it was part of his daily routine without anything being flagged, but still he scanned his homepage. It looked okay.  The unobtrusive charcoal font and off-white box had drawn his gaze for a moment more then faded. He’d glanced at his watch, as well as at the time in the bottom corner of his laptop icon bar, trying to determine the duration of the advertisement, if that was what it was. These things are never easy to be sure about as time dissolves so effortlessly with the mind slipped into the neutral of web search drift. Thirty seconds? Possibly, but he wasn’t sure when he first noticed the statement had appeared, or whether it had been there on start up. What had opened a window? Or was it just a random ad sneaking round blocks that were supposed to be in place? He quickly checked his settings and wondered again how secure these free Wi-Fi spots were as he sipped at the coffee in the Outlet Costa concession he had driven to. A perfect place to play truant.

An itch that at this time of the day he thought he could leave alone. Closing the search program he had dallied, he had opened the document that he was supposed to look at, and his day shifted through the gears until it was time to shut down, exit and drive the short journey to his flat.

A chilly February evening. At four in the afternoon, the light remained though weak and cool. His mind in neutral as he passed the familiar landmarks of tarmac roads, roundabouts, grey black hedgerows and industrial units. The last stretch was always the most calming and the one most able to draw his attention: the winding circuit round the man-made lake, pale grey and rippling in the light wind. Approaching the security gate he remembered to reach for the fob in the key well of the centre console and aimed, slowing enough to glide through as the gate traced an arc then closed behind him. He manoeuvred his car into the space assigned to him. It was quiet. The residents’ car park was no more than a quarter full. Having retrieved the hold all from the boot of the car, he punched in the code at the entrance to his block. It was dark enough inside to trip the overhead light and yellow light illuminated slightly scuffed pale blue emulsioned walls as he stood waiting at the lift door for the mechanism to bring the lift to him. The matte steel doors opened. On the third floor the light was already on signalling at least another person had emerged or arrived. The routines of daily journeys and activities were seldom accomplished without some soundtrack to make it bearable, even if the soundtrack itself was a routine of counting the seconds the lift took to move from floor to floor, or the number of steps from the lift exit to the plain light wood door of the apartment that faced him each working day. Today, though, he could not rid his brain of the message on the screen.

The approach to Michael’s door was a narrow corridor of a couple of metres. Just long enough to cast shadows, and time enough to glance over the shoulder as the key was inserted into the lock. Just another day almost over. Except it no longer felt like just another day. Perhaps that was part of the attraction: making the ordinary pregnant with possibility.

Once inside, the door swung to a near close, completed by a final push to secure it. Then the light was turned on. The cheap paper globe cast a pale light down the narrow corridor either side of which were the various living areas. He walked forward down the hall to the lounge dining area, took off his coat and hung it behind the chair. Facing a monitor again.

His finger hovering over the start button. Memory what? He paused, thinking of what it had offered or if it was selling him anything at all. He had the slight flush as if caught in the act of something untoward. Holiday? No chance of that!

The Start screen came to life at last. The cursor hovered over the Steam icon as if to invite another escape from routine. Maybe later. He well knew that, however much he told himself that he would only play for 30 minutes, time would race and two hours would have passed, and getting tea would become a race that it didn’t need to be. Football Manager had been a bone of contention in his previous life and it still had all the hallmarks of a guilty pleasure, but now without the need to have an excuse ready for not having done x or y. Truth be told, there wasn’t an urgency to his accessing his pc now. Unless he had to, he wouldn’t resume a work task. The cursor opened Edge and the Sky home page. He opted instead for a round of personal email checks, knowing he was deliberately postponing a half-formed intention.

Sky email had the usual four or five that included Secret Escapes, and a mail shot from Rise Records. Nothing to stop him from moving through his other accounts: BT, Hotmail, and, finally, Gmail. As the final digit completed the unlocking process, a barrage of adverts hit the side bar. So many that just disappeared into visual white noise. An Ipsos panel request; an invitation to apply for a credit card for those with bad credit ratings. It was a feature of his new life that putting private rental instead of homeowner into personal profile pages had affected the kind of rubbish he was bombarded with. A life of Spam in the main folder of existence.

He leant back and glanced around the room of magnolia walls, cream furniture and beige carpets. February. The mid-point of the school year. The central pivot around which his life had revolved for so many years as a teacher. Four floors up, the view from the window as dusk settled held his gaze. The half way point between the pot of gold at the end of the July’s rainbow and the September base camp of Everest. From below, the faint sounds of voices. Another family. The accents Asian. Too muffled to be identified as English or Urdu. September. A lifetime of Septembers. Of beginnings. Leaving for new schools both as student and then as teacher, for Amsterdam, university. Amsterdam. And all that it had come to mean over the years. Memories.

He cradled the mouse ready to close the Gmail window when he saw the same phrase from earlier fashion itself on to the screen: ‘Take A Memory Holiday’. A rectangle of textbox in the same understated style against the background of insistent noise.

Yeah, right.

He still clicked.

"If you want to go to Rome and see, well, all that Rome has to offer, check out the Lonely Planet guide and either click on the Thomas Cook site, or if adventurous, Expedia (!), and then – then what?

Just another holiday.

The text then fractured into tiny pale pink petals and drifted towards the bottom of the screen and disappeared. 

Very Zen, thought Michael.

The anatomical drawing of a head faded into view, complete with scroll script labels in Latin of features of the head. After a moment, the skull hinged open.

Or Monty Python.

From the cortex bubbles began to emerge, first as a gentle flow then rapidly to crowd the screen around the head. Each one, a thin grey outline around white nothing, and then each popped into a picture, some still and some moving.

Harry Potter!

Curious, Michael moved the cursor over the sound icon, clicked and moved the slider from silent to a cacophony of competing noise, a chaos of: me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! … Each seemingly inviting the viewer to choose one over the rest. He moved the cursor towards the images, and as he did so one expanded and filled half the size of the screen as the centre was accessed, before shrinking as the arrow moved towards another, with a new image moving out of the chorus line to fill its place. Michael swished the mouse backwards and forwards across the screen creating a kaleidoscope of expanding and deflating coloured bubbles. Before coming to stop at one of them.

He happened to be looking at a picture of himself.

What the? ... How did that get there?

A pause to look closely at the photograph that he held at the largest of the sizes. How old was it? A trickle of memories, and stabs at the names of some on the fringes of the shot. Then a commentary, that familiar feature of living by yourself where conversation is in more short supply than monologue.

Crickey. I never knew anyone had taken that picture. What the fuck is it doing here?

The photograph showed Michael from years before. He, like the others in the frame wore a black tea shirt in the design of a dinner jacket and black tie with the words on the chest smudged by pixels, but remembered by him at that second: York Stag, 20** picked out in red.

The gentle collision of moments in time made him smile. It was only a couple of days since he had noted the photograph on the BBC Sport site with the unusual new strip of an obscure Spanish football team with that same dinner jacket design. Over the years this synchronicity of such moments had amazed him. It still did. Every now and then he pondered: design or coincidence?

A time lock kicked in and the image disappeared to become just another tiny thumbnail.

Left to gaze into the distance beyond the window out over the lake, to remember. Just fragments. A touch overweight, perhaps, but not an issue for his height – just a whisker under six feet. Arms crossed over the chest in one of those self-protective gestures. Not like the expansive wide-open arms of the groom to be, Jack? Jack who? Who stretched around those around him in a collective hug? Delight clear on his photogenic face. Seddon. Jack Seddon. The name, the face and the memory coalesced. Michael noted his own characteristic pose: at best a half smile, the inclination to the left to show what he felt was his less worse side. The half-smile that attempted to hide teeth that were a touch crooked. The hair still black. He wasn’t a bad looking bloke, not as bad as the photograph made him appear, but he had learned to accept that the camera didn’t really like him. Which is one of the reasons that he tended avoiding being in photographs at all. That made this one something of a rarity.

And when we were walking round past a newsagent the next morning this old bloke sniffed the air saying, ‘My God! It smells like a sewer!’ in this posh Colonel Blimp voice after Dodge had just dropped one. That was a curry and a half. Christ.

From the photograph a mind map tremored into a gentle convulsion of thoughts and memories each lighting up the next like sparks from fireworks. People, places, a phrase. Their apparent randomness existing within the context of the main event, until, stretched to the edge, the mind pauses, the brows narrow into a frown and the self-questioning as to whether that memory belonged to that memory or not.

The thumb and fore finger of his left hand stretched and massaged his tired eyes. Glancing up, the room, he noticed, was illuminated now by just the light of the screen. He did not use Facebook. At least actively. He had a homepage, but he avoided all personal details he could. His profile picture was a landscape. It had been a way to see what was happening to his son. There was nothing inflammatory or dodgy about the York picture that could cause embarrassment, even if he wasn’t already beyond the point when such an embarrassment would cause a problem with work.  When he used to be a teacher. He knew he hadn’t posted any pictures of himself on line. But here it was; here they were, apparently. Then the thumbnails exploded into a Roman candle of silent sparkling lights.

Take a Memory Holiday. In the same understated font and colour scheme, the now familiar message faded in, this time to be followed by the added phrase: Bring the Past to Life. Then a white screen.

Michael waited to see if anything else would arrive. This unexpected distraction from dozens of evenings filling in time between getting home, going to bed and going to work that had become his life.   Instead, the screen simply filled with items from his Gmail account. He checked his history and tried to click on the link. Just an error message for an unknown page and an invitation to check the web address for accuracy. Sighing, he moved the mouse purposely to the close position and he began the shutdown process. Moving back to the kitchen, his thoughts shifted between the memory of York that the thumbnail had ignited and the mysterious message that provided it. In time, he would wonder if he had triggered the intervention by seeking, or whether he had been sought. Was he looking or found?

"Fucking search conduit! I’ll need to do another malware scan."

The clock’s alarm was set for ten minutes before the iPhone’s. The tiny analogue face suggested it was 7.30am, but it was set a few minutes fast. It had been a decent night, just the three trips to the toilet punctuating his sleep. He put it down to age and a lack of exercise that each took longer than they used to. Not so much of these days when he could have a less good night and not have to face a full-on work day. The phone alarm would remind him at 7.40am, and every eight minutes until he opened the device rather than tapped snooze. He would then reach for the light switch, lean towards his book that lay on the floor then reach for the house glasses perched on the cheap IKEA beech effect bedside table. Propped comfortably on the down pillows that rustled slightly as he had manoeuvred them into position against the cold bars of the metal bed head, he opened the book. The book was slender enough to balance on his left hand. He had to re-read the first paragraph until the lines and words stabilised, and the meaning of the words began to register. Then the insistent chirrup of the first reminder: 7.48am.

It was a murky, cool morning. The light from the bottom few centimetres between the roman blind and the window sill hinted at a cloudy start to the day. Putting the book to one side on the duvet beside him, he reached for the tablet, waited for it to boot up, and then opened his emails. New ones pinged and the two other email programmes waited in the digital in-tray at the top left-hand corner of the 7" screen. Nothing new from work yet. They would start to come through more quickly once schools started to grind to a start and the requests for support with the latest validated or official performance data releases that held little hope of a major change from the unconfirmed data sets released in November. A year ago, it would have been him keen to check the two versions of the school performance data as he tried to finalise the narrative that endless rows of graphs and numbers presented to him, instead of deconstructing the stories of the authors and poets that had been his stock in trade at the start of his career thirty years before as a naïve English teacher.

Michael glanced at his iPhone, deactivating the alarm with just a few seconds to go. There was movement from the flat below as the youngster battled with his parents about getting ready for the day: the orchestra of groans reminded him of what it used to be like when Eoin was that age. The getting up, getting a shower before or after breakfast, checking the contents of the brightly coloured bag holding brightly coloured pencil case and assorted bright gadgets; all whilst still half asleep. Another day.

Right, that’ll do it. Time to shake a leg.

And the first of the day’s monologues was done.

After breakfast, Michael moved towards the mirror and checked that his tie was straight. He had never got used to the notion that being retired meant not having to don the uniform of suit and tie. Being dressed for work meant having a particular mindset. Jeans, Vans, an open necked shirt or t shirt was for lounging, or own time activities. It was just difficult to focus the mind on work and far easier to dally with distractions. A suit helped do that.

The final check: Right. Keys?

Car keys in one trouser pocket and house keys in the other.

Phone.

Checked to see how charged it was, though it would get a boost when plugged into the car later. A quick look at the BBC weather app confirmed what his eyes could see through dusty windows that at nine o’clock it was not raining but was cloudy.

He picked up his brief case, in its usual place in the hallway and checked for the contents needed for that day. Ready to go, he opened the door and walked through into the hall. In the second before the door closed with final click behind him, he leaned into the door with his backside until the door rested on the latch. One more routine: patting each trouser pocket until he was sure the house keys were still there. Then pulled the door to.

A couple of minutes later, swearing under his breath, he let himself back into the flat and picked up his reading glasses.  Remembering to watch himself, Michael locked the door and replaced the keys in his pocket. In the steel lift, his phone gave off the hello sound effect three times in quick succession. New mail in the work account. Amongst them would be the first salvo from schools. Sitting in the driving seat, phone ready to be connected to the media centre of his car, he unlocked the phone, noticed 7 emails ready to be opened, and there it was.

When would you like to be today?

At first, the meaning didn’t quite register. A frown as he started the car. The engine pulsed gently in the background.

When?

The gear stick synchronised with hand and clutch foot to place the car into gear. Bite achieved, the car moved gently off, on automatic pilot. The iPhone display faded into black. It was an itch he was forced to ignore, for now. Except that it was like a switch had been turned on. Past lives seen in the blur of commuter traffic. Standing on the companionway of the Tor Anglia ferry that had taken him from the Humber to Amsterdam. The heat of the enclosed space was almost smothering. The sharply lit corridor. The young him looking out at the Dutch police officer looking at his backpacked self with its comical medley of assorted sleeping bag, metal cups and change of boots. A remembered smirk that invited the official to challenge him. After all, he had long hair, wore the dark blue denim uniform of youth, and was entering hashish heaven. Michael watched the thoughts tumble from the ship to a flat. The hippy flat he’d visited as a 17-year-old. A year back in time in a second. Sitting on the floor reading the Diamond Sutra in the soft yellow of candles, listening to Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra on the stereo, seeing the joint passing from hand to hand, not daring to take it himself, but wanting to and wanting the girl in the long print maroon tie-died skirt to nestle into him with her smell of patchouli oil and incense as she did into the bearded cool guy she was with. What was her name? Forward again. The back pack was red nylon on an even brighter red tubular frame. The frame at the bottom curled up like a lip and attached to it was an ordinary blue patterned sleeping bag wrapped in thick polythene instead of a purpose-built hiker’s or serious back packer’s compact earth coloured roll. Such was the youth’s awareness of being prepared for his adventure to the East. A brash, hesitant confidence that sat heavy upon him as the mist that he had seen in the dawn as the ship approached the canals of old Holland. Amsterdam, like a tattoo on his brain, faint, but indelible. And earlier, in the car that he rode in to the ferry port in late September as the light failed.  Sitting in the back of the cramped Mini Clubman, wishing for a way to save face and to give up on the coming journey. Six months of saving, working weekends in the Cold Store to earn the extra cash that would amount to little more than £350 to fund the trip to India. Afraid to go forward; afraid at the thought of staying behind. So much like now?

His brain operated like the thumbnails on the computer screen of the day before. Except, instead of the random trajectory of the mouse across the screen page, one memory triggered related flashbacks, although the relationships were tenuous. His brain now was the connected mesh of circuitry, ganglions, with a thought at one junction connecting with other points in the network. The pathways were linked, but the more thoughts that competed for attention the further one travelled through the network. Left to itself, the moment would come, like in a drunken pub debate: how did we get here from there? These thoughts, as yet, were contained within a similar time frame and that had been the trigger.

The ‘When?’

But why then? What was the link between the innocent enough question and the time the memory resuscitated? Eighteen and seventeen versus late fifties. A beginning, an opening, against an overwhelming stasis? Was it as simple as that? A yearning for a lost self, and missed opportunities?

While thoughts ricocheted inside his brain, another part manoeuvred the car along the awakened February streets, through sets of lights and intersections, balancing hands and eyes and feet with unconscious intent towards another day of data analysis.

The offices of Education Solutions, all three of them, occupied the first floor of a white plastered late nineteenth century building. Once a grand house on the wide avenue that led from the Racecourse to the centre of town, it had passed through several incarnations, each one adding interior walls to create more but smaller rooms until today it was home to a small solicitor practice, top floor; an IT solutions self-starter enterprise, ground floor; and ES in the middle.

Michael indicated and turned right into the narrow strip of road and right again to the back of the building with spaces for eight cars with a bit of a squeeze. At five past nine, he was forced into parking between other cars in the too small bays. The back of the building looked out on to the flat expanse of municipal playing fields, intersected with paths between football and rugby pitches. The field also included the Town’s hockey pitch, enclosed within a six-foot concrete perimeter fence, used by the local school from a time when, as the Grammar school, it had eschewed football in favour of rugby and hockey. It now played football like all the rest. Placing the Yale key in the dulled brass lock of the heavy black door, Michael caught the sounds of a dog barking and the insistent holler of seagulls circling and swooping the playground of the school, hunting out the crap of crisps and other scattered litter.

As the door closed to behind him, the narrowed corridor flickered into sharp shadows as the fire escape light fluttered into life to light his way to the staircase. The varnish on the mahogany banister had worn thin, giving another reminder of faded splendour. There was the faint whiff of disinfectant and the remnants of a mopped floor from the mid-week maintenance and cleaning service.

A series of mechanical insect beeps increased in volume as Greg opened the door to the left of the banister where Michael had started to climb to the first floor.

Hi, Mick.

Morning, Greg. Already at it I see / hear.

It was a familiar exchange conducted at what seemed a predetermined time in their office routines: Michael’s arrival and Greg’s need for his ‘first dump of the day.’ Greg’s bowel movements were at least as reliable as the atomic clock. Each floor, fortunately, had its own conveniences. A simple affair of urinal, double cubicle and original basin. Uni-sex. At least that was the arrangement for Education Solutions. Michael had never ventured south to ‘Aces I’.

Yep. Booted up and ready to roll.

Greg didn’t look like your usual IT geek. He looked anything but. His head was bald, shaven that way to avoid what years before would have been described as a Bobby Charlton sweep over. The back and side sweep of a pale blue bruise like sweep indicated where the hair follicles had long since given up the ghost. He was one of that type where Nature played that cruel trick: a mid-thirty something prematurely balding, but a jaw that could have supported a rich dark growth of beard.

Greg wore the company uniform. Black jeans secured by a black belt that strained against a swelling belly. Black trainers, the flash advertising them as Nike. Fading black tee shirt with a fan of Aces of Spades beneath which was a light bulb radiating white lines of light, or signals like the ripples from a pond, and the word, Intelligence in a gothic font stretched across the belly. Arms, thick and muscular, expensively decorated with Maori designs completed the ensemble. He could have been a drummer in a Thrash Metal band, or a hooker for the All Blacks. Except he came from Rotherham.

Half way up the stairs, Michael thought about the unusual email, and whether Greg might know something; but Greg had already closed the door and slid the bolt home.  He made a mental note to mention it the next morning. Then glanced at his watch. Opening the door, the shiny brass plate engraved in black with Education Solutions, reflected an expression he could barely conceal: that he that wasn’t entirely thrilled at thought of the day ahead. February was a no-man’s land of a month now that he was retired from teaching full time. It no longer marked the mid-point of the school year in quite the same way as once it had, nor the promise of a paid half term holiday. Michael was almost six months into his post retirement employment, education consultancy, as he sought to add to his pension and find direction, or at least something to do after more than thirty years of teaching. It didn’t seem very much like a new direction; just the old re packaged without the need actually to confront youngsters.

A sigh, a turn of the handle, a push against the weight of the cream hardwood door, and then the effervescence of Alan, the former Headteacher, and driving force of the firm of consultants that had sprung up in the wake of several early retirees who had decided the time was right to swap Ofsted and constant stress for a good night’s sleep, whilst cashing in on the only real skills sets they possessed: an understanding of the game, and the ability to produce a half decent PowerPoint presentation. Michael fixed a smile to his face and walked