A Darker Domain

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 thegood 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.