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The Conrad Press - Michael Waterhouse

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149 pages

English

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Can Stephen Padgett save himself and make peace with his past? Taken hostage while out on army patrol in Afghanistan, he finds himself imprisoned in a cell with his translator, Rashid.The news of Stephen's disappearance shatters the comfortable lives of his parents in England and stirs memories of their son's dark past.

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Publié par	The Conrad Press
Date de parution	06 décembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781913227685
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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PRODIGAL
MICHAEL WATERHOUSE

Prodigal
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2019
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-913227-68-5
Copyright © Michael Waterhouse, 2019
The moral right of Michael Waterhouse to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

For Tessa

1
2013
I think I heard scuffling during the night. It was difficult to tell. The row the guards make tends to mask every other sound. Even the tick and twitch of insects is drowned out by them. They shout and laugh and let off long screeching yells. You’d think they were drunk at a parade, the Notting Hill Carnival or New Year’s in Trafalgar Square. But they’re not drunk. They’re not allowed to drink. And they’ve probably never heard of Trafalgar Square, and I’m damn sure not Notting Hill. If anything, they’re bored. I’ve often wondered how they can be bored and appear so jolly at the same time.
A few feet from me, Rashid shrinks away when he hears them. He is always afraid that their exuberance will be the prelude to violence.

From: spadge@tyzl.com
To: me@padgett.com
Sent: 8 June 2013 18:16:33
Subject: Hello parents
Despite the latest deaths, which you’ll have heard about on the news, things have generally quietened down here. I don’t feel I’m in as much danger as I was. I think more about the heat than the possibility of being blown up or shot. During the day the temperature never sinks much below 35º (or ninety-five Fahrenheit, as you insist on saying, Dad). You step out of the compound and it’s like someone has shoved a hair-dryer in your face. The heat is always that close. You feel it on the surface of your skin. All the time.
They’ve been running old movies for the last few nights, keeping the lads entertained. I saw ‘Death in Venice’ recently. V good.
I remember you mentioning it, but I’d no idea how brilliant Dirk Bogarde was. He’s dead now, isn’t he? All that Mahler too. I’m guessing it’s one you both love. You should get it out on DVD. I’m sure it’s worth a second viewing. Or have you already seen it dozens of times?
I’m well. Cold cleared up. Will contact when I can. Love to you both, Steve.
‘Cara!’
She was upstairs, in their converted attic, trying to rehearse. Bach.
‘Cara!’
‘Alright!’
She had intended to give the whole morning to rehearsal, followed by lunch with Edward, then Sainsbury’s. It was now scarcely 11.30. He was going to wreck her plan. He’d want coffee, a chat. None of this would matter if she could return to her work and slip right back in exactly where she’d left off, but voice drill wasn’t like square bashing. She would need to warm up a second time, exercise, and in any case coffee often clagged the chords so that further rehearsal became pointless.
‘We’ve had an email from Stephen.’
She was half way down the stairs, pausing at the turn.
‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘When did it arrive?’
‘I thought you’d want to read it.’
‘I do, Edward. But it could have waited, couldn’t it? Until lunchtime, I mean. I was working, darling.’
Edward made his way to the kitchen. He called back ‘Coffee?’ as he ran water into the kettle and plugged the cable into a wall socket next to an enamel bin labelled BREAD. He took down a fresh bag of coffee from the cupboard above.
‘I can’t work.’
‘You’ve made that abundantly clear.’
‘Have I?’ Edward seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Is Tim coming down this weekend?’
‘I thought I was going to read the email.’
‘I printed it out. It’s in my study.’
Cara was annoyed.
‘No coffee for me,’ she said, and she went to fetch the email.
‘They’re forecasting rain.’
15 th June 2013
Dear Stephen
We have sunshine here, too, though it’s scarcely ever very warm. Since the barometer bust last July, I’ve not had a clue exactly how warm, but I have just discovered how to change the temperature reading on my car dashboard from bloody centigrade to friendly fahrenheit. I can now confirm that it has been around sixty or sixty-two for the best part of a month, which is good for the fruit. They’ve had a largely dry time of it on the farms.
Some new people called Carlisle, Jon and Lavinia (she calls herself Vinny), came for drinks on Sunday. They seemed pleasant enough. He’s an osteopath and she teaches somewhere. She said her subject was Resistant Materials. Do you know what they are? Presumably what we used to call Woodwork and Metalwork. Resistant Materials makes it sound as though they’re stubborn, not quite behaving themselves.
Your mother is preparing for the B Minor Mass. I wait to hear about a Wigmore gig at Christmas. I suppose it’s too much to hope that this government will bring you home for that. Take care. Affectionately, Dad.
Her stage name was Cara Loire. From the moment she’d thought of it, back in the Seventies, when she’d first met Edward, she’d loved it. They’d both loved it. She had been born Cara Laher and had never imagined that she’d have to change it to perform. But Equity claimed they already had a Cara Laher on the books. Cara had never heard of her. She was tempted to demand proof; it seemed so unlikely. Edward suggested she think of something French. At the time, they were eating French food, drinking French wine, reading French novels. Posters of Impressionist paintings from Athena hung on the walls of their flat. They listened to French records, as old as Rameau, but probably only as new as Poulenc, with Berlioz, Satie and Ravel sandwiched in between. A French name made sense. Loire was close enough to Laher. For months and months she could summon up the taste of a bloody good Vouvray every time she said it.
Of late Cara Loire had done rather better professionally than Edward Padgett. It was not a subject they discussed, but she knew he found it painful. At one time, he’d been in continuous demand. He’d never boasted about his success. He simply enjoyed it and for as long as Cara’s chorus work kept coming in, the disparity between them was not a problem.
Then two things happened: his heart attack and her chance meeting with Karl Rouse. Word got around that Edward was not so well and some of the people who’d regularly cast him began to think it would be kind to let him rest for a while. When the phone did ring, it was more often than not for Cara, because Karl Rouse, the conductor, had taken it upon himself to tell everyone he knew that the great, unacknowledged soprano of the new century was Cara Loire. No one could have been more surprised than Cara.
Solo roles followed, concerts of her own. Rouse asked her to make a record with him, which Classic FM picked up and promoted. The CD sold thousands of copies. She couldn’t recall how many.
She discovered audiences. As a member of a sixty-strong chorus, she’d not thought about the audience. They were appreciative, of course, and clapped and whooped enthusiastically, but they were an undifferentiated mass, and not there for her. Now, as a soloist, bathed in isolating light, she saw faces, smiling individuals, who belonged to her, if only for a moment. There was nothing quite like the completion of a performance. The hiatus before the applause was vivid in a way that nothing else in her life resembled or had resembled since she’d first fallen in love with a young Edward Padgett.
There were days when she felt bad about Edward. Her concerts meant evenings, sometimes nights, away from home. At first he’d gone with her, attended every one, put up with the hotel food she knew he was hating. Then he stopped, not altogether, but he began to come only to the occasional evening, judged by where she was singing rather than what it was.
She was aware that he would like her to be at home more often, to be together. She would have liked it too, but not at the expense of this late afternoon sunshine, this mellow unlooked-for renown. Why shouldn’t she enjoy it? The boys were grown up. ‘This is your time now,’ her yoga teacher used to say at the start of the class. That was how she saw it.
17 th July 2013
Hi Tim
It’s unusual for me to write you, I know, but I’ve had a few thoughts I wanted to put down, and we’re discouraged from spending time on our phones. I’m writing to you because I need to. I’ve got to tell you, bro, my leave in two months can’t come fast enough. The situation here changes from day to day, week to week, and it’s not generally as grim as I think it’s painted in the papers back home. We do get things done, most of the people like us and they approve of the early signs of reconstruction which you can see happening all over this part of the country.
But – you probably heard it coming – the past few days have been difficult, to say the least. I was out with my company on a clear-out op and there were moments when I was shit scared and I thought we’d had it the last night. We were sleeping out in some smashed up compound, under the stars - not as great as it sounds, the ground was either concrete or broken stones. Anyway, it was okay overnight, and then, just before it got light, we were attacked on three sides. There was open ground around our compound, but beyond that scrubland. All the fire was coming from invisible positions in some trees.
The lads were half asleep, but I got them mustered and we returned fire. We were pinned down, no two ways about it. I called up air support and got a couple of rocket-fired grenades poked into the trees where we thought they were. There was thick black smoke blowing across, which led to a strange silence, but it didn’t last long and as soon as the smoke cleared, the pop-pop start