White

‘Do you want to watch this?’ he asked pointedly. The yammering faces of some talk show filled the screen with stories of outrage, attended by resentment and rancour. Although it was appropriate enough, he thought. There was always disappointment here, in this house. A rich deposit of it, seamed with the ore of anger. So why not on the box as well? Maybe it was why Mike liked all these programmes. He felt at home with them.

‘I thought maybe we could talk,’ Sam added.

He moved his father’s stick from beside his chair so that he could pull his own seat closer, partly blocking out the TV screen. The result was that they sat almost knee to knee. Sam could have reached and taken Mike’s hand between his own, but he didn’t. They had never gone in for touching, not since Sam was a little boy.

Mike’s response was to aim the remote and lower the volume by a couple of decibels. Then he turned to look his son in the face.

‘I didn’t qualify,’ Sam said.

There were two, three beats of silence.

Mike rubbed the corner of his mouth with a horny thumb. ‘Huh?’

‘I ran in Pittsburgh last week. It was the 2000 Trials.’

Sam had been training for the City of Pittsburgh Marathon ever since the USA Track & Field international competition committee had announced that the Olympic men’s marathon team would once again be decided, as it had been for more than thirty years, by a single race. And for Sam it had been one of those days when the running machine had kept stalling and finally quit. He didn’t suffer many of them, but when the machinery did let him down it was usually to do with the weight of expectation binding and snagging. His father’s expectations, specifically. Sam was fully aware of the dynamic between them, but awareness didn’t change it or diminish the effects. Even now.

‘I didn’t know.’

The old man’s face didn’t give much away. He just went on looking at Sam, waiting for him to explain himself.

It was so characteristic, Sam thought, that he wouldn’t have known or found out about the run in advance even though his son was a contender for the US Olympic team. Mike lived a life that was defined by his own ever-narrowing interests. He watched TV, he read a little, mostly outdoors magazines, he saw a neighbour once in a while and drank a beer.

But it was equally characteristic, Sam acknowledged, that he hadn’t told his father about Pittsburgh. He had qualified for the Trials by running a time better than two hours twenty in a national championship race and he had called Mike immediately afterwards to tell him so.

‘That’s pretty good,’ had been the entire response.

In adulthood, Sam had trained himself not to resent or rise to his father’s lack of enthusiasm. It’s the way he is, he reasoned. He wanted me to do one thing and I did another.

But even so, this time Mike had seemed particularly grudging. And so he had not told him anything more about the big race beforehand, or called him with the bad news once it was over. Instead, he had waited a week and then come down to visit the old man. He had played various versions of this scene in his head, giving Mike lines to express commiseration, or encouragement for next time, or plain sympathy – but the most cheerless scenario had been closest to reality. Mike was neither surprised nor sympathetic, he was just disappointed. As he had been plenty of times before. The pattern was set now.

‘So what happened?’ Mike asked at last.

Sam caught himself shrugging and tried to stop it. ‘I was fit enough and I felt good on the start. I don’t know. I just couldn’t make it work.’

‘What time did you do?’

‘Not good. Two twenty-eight. I’ve done plenty better than that, beat all the other guys who came in ahead of me – Petersen, Okwezi, Lund. But not on the day it counted.’

Mike went on looking at him, saying nothing.

‘There’s always 2004.’ Sam smiled, thinking within himself: It should be the other way round. You should be saying that to me.

‘You’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, aren’t you?’

You know how old I am. ‘Long-distance running isn’t a kids’ game, luckily. You can stay in the front rank over long-distance well into your thirties.’

‘I was looking forward to you bringing home that gold.’ Mike nodded to the mantel, as if there were a space there, among the pictures of mountains and bearded men, that was bereaved of his son’s Olympic medal.

‘I’d have been happy enough just to go to Sydney and represent my country. It never was just about winning, Dad,’ Sam said patiently.

‘No.’

The monosyllable was a taunt, expertly flicked, that dug into Sam like the barb of a fish-hook.

It’s the way he is, Sam reminded himself. It’s because he’s bitter about his own life. And he’s entitled to a grouse this time. He would have been proud of me if I’d made it, so it’s understandable that he should feel the opposite way now.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it this time. It was tough for me as well. But I won’t stop running. It means a lot to me.’

‘Keep at it while you still can,’ Mike agreed. ‘You’re lucky.’

Do you want me to say I’m sorry for that, as well? Sam wondered.

Mike had already turned his gaze over his son’s shoulder, back towards the jeering audience on the television. The volume went up again.

Sitting in this house, with its fading wallpaper and the same old sofa and chairs, and the blandishing blue-sky covers of his father’s magazines – he still subscribed to Climber and Outside and the rest – it was hard for Sam to head off the memories. They lined up in the kitchen space and in the closets, and behind the curtains, waiting to ambush him. Where he lived now, up in Seattle with work to do, and Frannie and friends for company and distraction, he could keep out of their way. But not here, not even most of the time. He supposed it was the same for everyone going home. Whether or not you enjoyed your visit depended on the quality of the memories.

They had moved to this house when Sam was six. Before that, Mike and Mary McGrath had lived on the Oregon coast near Newport, but then Mike had started up a rental cabin and backwoods vacation tour business, with a partner, and had brought his family to the little town of Wilding. The business had only survived a year or two, and the partner had made off with most of the liquid assets and none of the burden of debt, but the McGraths had stayed on. They had put money into this house, a couple of miles out of town, and Mary had dug a garden out front and started to make some friends. Sam was in school and seemed happy enough, and in any case Mike was as willing to stay where he was as to move on. He took a job as a transport manager with a logging company. Mike didn’t reckon much on where he lived or what he did for a living, just so long as he could feed and house his wife and child, and get to Yosemite and the Tetons whenever possible, and to plenty of big boulders for climbing when his budget didn’t stretch to proper expeditions.

Other kids had plenty worse things to deal with, Sam knew, but he found the climbing hard.

He went on the camping trips, and while his father solo-climbed he played softball with the other boys and swam in icy streams, and hiked and rode his bike, always in fear of the moment when his father would call him.

‘Come on, Sammy. It’s your turn.’

‘No.’ Trying to climb with his father watching, with the hammering of blood in his ears and the shivering of his joints, and the sipping for breath with the top inch of his lungs because to breathe more deeply might be to dislodge himself from his precarious hold – all of these were too familiar to Sam.

‘Watch me, then.’ Mike sighed.

His movements were so smooth as he climbed, his body seemed like water flowing over the rock. But Sam’s arms wound tight around his knees as he sat watching and his breath came unevenly.

Don’t fall, he prayed. Don’t fall, Dad.

A moment or two later the man reached the crest of the boulder and disappeared, then his broad grinning face looked down over the edge. ‘See? Easy as pie.’

Sam felt his cheeks turning hotter, not from the sun’s brightness. His father was already down-climbing, smooth and steady. And then midway he suddenly stopped.

‘Now what can I do?’ he demanded, flinging the words back over his shoulder into the still air. ‘I’m stuck. Tell me what to do.’

The boy raked the reddish cliff with his eyes, searching the sandstone for a crack or a bulge. There were no ropes, nothing held his father safe except his own fingers or toes and now he was stuck and he would surely fall … he would fall and fall, and he would die.

‘See anything?’ Mike McGrath called more loudly. ‘Any foothold?’

Sam gazed until his eyes burned.

The red rock was flat and hard, and there wasn’t a dimple in it, even to save his father’s life. Terror froze the sunny afternoon and silenced the birdsong, and stretched the moment into an hour.

‘Wait. Maybe if you go that way …’ He rocked up on to his knees, so that he knelt at the rock face, and took tufts of long grass in his clenched fists to hold himself tethered to the earth. There was a little nubbin below where his father’s feet rested.