‘Summer in the Mountains’ by Andrew Meehan

His nickname, which he gave himself, was Utopia Frank. And Pascaline the innocent bystander had become the instigator. She was the one who was forced to take all their expectations and put them in a gym bag in the back of an old Datsun Bluebird.

She had looked on for so long as lovable Frank created a shining city beside the ocean in San Diego, followed by an absolute golden age in the wrong part of New York, and an Elysium, very close to one, on Mount Pelion. Now they were in Dublin and adorable Frank was about to create a fucking brave new world of everything that crossed their path. Pascaline had not and would not ever agree to them living in Paris. She did not want him creating anything there.

They dealt with their child problem in different ways. As for Frank, absolutely he was upbeat, and cheerful as an ice cream cone. They kept trying, or then again they didn’t, and every now and then he would suggest adopting a fat Chinese genius or the son of a Somali pirate, at which point she would sidestep the subject as casually as ducking under an awning to avoid a rain shower.

*

Pascaline could turn herself inside out. Her skin was thicker than you might have imagined, so it was slow to peel back. Always there for all to see was her shining viscera.

I am perfect. Darling, the perpetrator is you.

Oh she was a one.

They were always saying things. But in 1989 you couldn’t buy babies any more than you could buy the sea, so Frank could not remember the first time he suggested just taking one. And see the blackcurrant blush on his cheeks when she replied that nothing had changed and nothing would change, but life could no longer be compared with their dreams. Yes, she did want a baby and if after prolonged exploration he couldn’t give her one they were going to take matters into her own hands.

*

Imagine a house that sits on a street proud with other houses just like it. Add, for the sake of drama, some moonshadow and the faithful call of a pair of foxes, crying. If you wait until morning you will notice the sprinkler on the lawn and the hesitant way it goes about its work. Then you must look carefully for the owners of the house. See how they occupy their lives, their attitude towards the place they bought in a hurry from under the noses of another couple just like them. Notice their fear of the child they have just brought into the world. The couple are going through bad times, but it’s possible you will never discover their secret or how well it is guarded. N.b. – a secret can’t be something you have forgotten. It isn’t a proper secret unless there is no relief and it calls on you daily.

A voice, his wife’s, his mother’s, his sister’s, called Patrick away from the window.

What are you doing over there? Come over here and have a look at this child

of yours.

Not now.

Have you ever been alone with a child? You haven’t, have you? Have you looked in one’s eyes? They are what they are. And you are who you are – his father.

He was named on the birth cert as Patrick Aloysius Mary Heaney. His son, the boy who was about to be kidnapped, was called Leonard after his grandad. The boy’s mother was Triona. Just Triona.

The little pink boy, who resembled Anthony Hopkins, had slept through most of his life so far. Patrick was holding him, and doing it badly. He knew how you were supposed to behave, with the requisite solemnity, and he couldn’t manage it. He was trying to catch his son’s eye, even though the child’s vision can’t have been more than a smudge. But Patrick Aloysius Mary Heaney was trying in his own way to communicate.

You’re his father but you could be the wall.

Someone take him from me, Patrick said. I’ll do all kinds of damage. I’ve no idea what I’ll do. Here, take him.

*

In the days prior, Pascaline was in a suspiciously good mood. This was what Frank was coming to understand. Burnt toast, running off with your neighbour’s child, it all elicited the same ballerina’s reaction, systematically demure. And then it was back to the battle plan. December had its useful darkness, but summer’s arms were open.

May. But there was never a good month to be on the run.

Tickets were got for Madrid – Pascaline made sure everyone knew about that – when in fact they were driving to Cork harbour in a Bluebird she had bought with new twenties off a traveller who came to her work. All that mattered was the car had plenty of space in the back.

They’ll know we didn’t get on the plane, he said.

All we need to do is be on that ferry, somehow. Get the child to France. Then we can drive all the way to Iran.

I am going to leave all that to you, Frank said.

Leave all that to me, said Pascaline, who had chosen his birthday as the day to disappear. And Frank the stickler for occasions could say nothing.

*

Pascaline, who Frank had assumed was capable of anything, barely managed to remove the child from its cot without botching the entire job. It was something she had rehearsed. Patrick was supposed to be always half out of it and Triona was truly devoted to the NyQuil. But their patterns weren’t what they used to be, all things considered.

Away we go, Frank said.

Pascaline was silent until they were well past Wexford Town. At least there was little traffic to speak of, nor, Frank was quick to notice, any birthday cake. Not even a gingerbread from the garage.

It wouldn’t have killed us to pack one for the journey, Frank said. A slice of cake even. I see you didn’t forget a flask. The fruit cakes are very filling – it would have done us for lunch and breakfast.

Didn’t think of it.

Well, this is one birthday I’ll never get back.

It wasn’t the cake he liked so much as the candles and puffing his cheeks. It was all very moving. And Frank was known to cry at a strident Happy Birthday, he made no secret of that.

Leaving everything to Pascaline had involved no child seat for the car. It would draw attention, she said. She had to lie in the back seat with the child. After a while she swaddled him in an empty gym bag.

We have to think of a name.

He’s called Leo, Frank said.

He’ll be born in France so he will have a French name.

*

Shock was holding Triona together as a steel beam supports a bridge but Patrick had snapped free of himself altogether, fulminating into the kitchen cabinets. An awful crack of his head hollowed out the wall in the hall.

I don’t know what you think all that will achieve.

I’ll tell you what it’ll achieve, he said. I’m going to go and I’m going to bring that little boy back with me.

And where will you go exactly, Patrick?

Everywhere, said Patrick Aloysius Mary Heaney.

What if he’s lying dead in a ditch over the back wall? Have you looked there? 

Not yet, he said.

A great sense of pity possessed her. Grow up man, she said.

*

Pascaline was waiting below deck with the child in the gym-bag manger. Meanwhile, Frank queued for food that he didn’t want, if only because it would waste – not that much – time. He tore absently into the congealing eggs the way you’re supposed to do when you have killed a deer or some other astonishing feat. He was fighting his way through a blur of sponge and custard when she appeared, alone.

It’s the nearest thing they have to birthday cake, he said. Shouldn’t one of us be with the boy?

*

Below deck was an appropriate venue for something significant. And a minute later he was wishing for them both to be engulfed in polluted sea. She sat in the front seat away from the child and Frank knew it before she opened her mouth.

It’s inside you or it is outside you, she said. He is without his maman. This is unthinkable. He has to breathe her air and – can you feel it?

I can feel the boat okay, Frank said.

Oh Frank. Don’t be silly. It’s time for us to go home.

I think you’ll find that’s no longer possible.

The boy needs his mother. The woman who bore him, his progenitor.

Leo awoke and like goons they attempted milk straight from a carton which went everywhere but into his mouth and this was not at all how Frank had planned on spending his birthday.

*

Pascaline was gone but a pervading sense of precariousness remained. What had Frank been to her other than, intermittently, a night watchman or janitor or a driver or a labourer? Little more than a bystander. An accessory. A sidekick. A straight man. A pusher of trollies. Of carts. Someone to read the manual and hammer in the pegs. Frank would come home exhausted from one scheme or another, sometimes at three in the morning and sometimes at three in the afternoon, an incompatibility that carried them headlong to this, the end.

He was going to ignore Paris altogether. Pascaline’s mother lived halfway to Switzerland. That’s where they had been going. She had promised the child there’d be moo-cows, so that’s where Frank was going to go. After stocking up on formula, he kept on for Rennes where he slept for an hour in a lay-by with the gearbox sticking into his balls. Then he made for Orléans and there he fed the child successfully and spoke to him.

He introduced Leo to himself.

Yes, they are your hands, he said. One day you will use them to squeeze grapes or conduct an orchestra or punch your father. And don’t you forget that it was me that told you.

Frank had never seen such little paws. Leo’s fist in his mouth was as tasty as cake.

*

They sun was a fearsome presence. They were in the very middle of the country. He was driving somewhere where they grew oil, or seeds for oil, or whatever the fuck. He was tired and he saw a woman walking through a crayon-yellow field with a young boy bobbing along beside her.

The boy was unfurling something. A long ribbon, no. A flag?

Frank loosened his seat-belt and watched them recede in the rear window. Leo was watching him from the gym bag. Frank took another look out of the window. It wasn’t a flag but a kite, although it looked like the boy was dragging behind him a chain of ragged petals. There can’t have been much of a breeze and he was leaning back as his mother readied the kite for flight. Frank imagined the boy’s hopeful face as the kite slithered a foot or two above the quilt of flowers before dropping out of sight. The boy and his mother danced towards where it had fallen.

We’re going to have to get some sleep, Frank said. Then we can drive all the way to Iran.

He felt so tired that he wanted to open the door before rolling deftly across the tarmac, to make his way back to the yellow field for such an almighty nap. Even though he had his foot to the floor, and they must have been travelling at 120 kph, Frank was certain he would survive the impact of the fall. There was no point in being in the countryside if they were going to travel so fast and miss everything.

*

The old brown village was always busier in the morning than at night. Frank drove behind two men in waders who were strolling steadfastly with black buckets. When he nudged his way past them they offered him a pike and dropped their shoulders when he said he wasn’t one for freshwater fish.

Pascaline’s mother, Corinne, thought he was someone to deal with the sick Montbéliardes. She was anxious about her cattle and not very pleased to see Frank. Yes, the local police had been in touch and would soon return with colleagues who weren’t local.

There was a great deal to catch up on. The kidnap was Pascaline and Patrick’s idea. They had been in cahoots, Corinne could only guess at how. It is very hard to explain, she said, the ambient affect her daughter had on people. She was like a sexy sheepdog.

No mystery why Frank fell for it.

Even as a little girl, Pascaline would attempt to marshal the flies that swarmed on the manure. Of course, they would obey. The family dog attempted suicide on account of her haranguing. Have you ever seen a mesmerised German Shepherd? Have you? Then you’ll know.

The house was sour with wood-smoke and the flagstones in the kitchen were silver from wear. Corinne’s hands were the size of those foam fingers you saw at American football matches and she took Leo in one of them and bathed him while keeping half an ear on the road. To eat, she gave Frank tripe that smelled of the pot in which it had boiled. Leo went to sleep under a blanket which was already balled up in Pascaline’s old cot.

It is my fault, Corinne said. I brought her up to be shellfish.

Selfish.

I brought her up to be shellfish, so of course she is going to do the things of a shellfish person. And very soon we are here in this place.

Frank went as far as to say he felt foolish. He inspected the sombre dale where his wife played as a child. All this talk of cows and there were none to be seen.

*

Corinne was awake when he left and in the green dawn she packed the Bluebird with the Comté she had made with the end of the milk from the last of her cows.

Cheese for a month, Frank said. Don’t mind if I do.

*

The Bluebird nosed upwards and upwards and day one in the mountains passed quietly. The next day Frank found a secret hideaway and in the morning paradise seemed quiet. Not so much as a bird in the valley.

We’ll need a snow-plough later in the year, Frank said, spreading his arms as though he was a scarecrow. He took the fact that he stood on and killed a lizard as a sign of good luck.

The next day Frank took to collecting nettles and kneading them into dough while listening to Leo talking to himself. Listen! He was off, showering Frank in the language of the seasons, the pair of them singing the same slow, beautiful song, as if the music was up to them. The next day, Frank swung an axe at the stream so as to discover new rocks, whose names he’d formed from a secret language invented for the boy’s pleasure. The remaining words said this – those summer flowers will be something to see, won’t they? It did not matter that Leo was asleep and could not hear the question. Living anywhere else was already as improbable as the child weight-lifting the entire hillside.

*

In his little baby dreams, his tailing swings at flies, Leo started to express his amusement at the world.

*

Up there was quieter than the arse-end of Mercury. Frank made a point to be up for sunrise, when the mountain was all his. He walked unusual routes through the forest, usually ending up at the purple lakes, conscious of what is said about lonely men beside water. In theory it was a time to think of what might happen when they found him, since they had to be tracking him. The butterflies he saw on his walks were more than likely fitted with microchips.

There were always interesting things to do with juniper berries. Frank was riddled with ideas for things to do with them. For the first week, he kept  track of the ugly crows that showed up on the window-sill of the old dormitory. The times and dates went into an old notebook that he lost on one of his walks, after which he preferred to concentrate on jobs on the old hostel. Some mornings, he liked to carry Leo to the lake and demonstrate his natty way of line fishing. He would manoeuvre his line, so that it hugged the rocks and he could manage to snake the hook into the murky, busy spot. After barely a wait, and a sudden tautening, Frank would fiddle the trout the impressive distance between himself and the water.

Again, he said. Let’s try that again.

And sweet Jesus, as he looked at him crawling along the shore, Leo grew lovelier by the second. His was a well-designed face, but Frank could take no credit for that.

*

Autumn came one morning. The police, too. Two young lunks appearing out of a thin streak of sunlight.

Frank had been sitting on an upturned bucket by the hostel’s door, studying Leo’s lips, plump and luscious as a dog’s nose is wet, and pursed in concentration on his own dancing feet. One of the officers raised his arm as they approached – was he supposed to invite them in? – and it seemed to Frank that they were waving. All of this he would recall as if they were kindly wizards appearing to him in a dream.

*

All the way up to date –

He works hard at revealing very little. Ostentatiously sombre, not only around strangers but with Triona, who has all this time been banking that it will change even if there is no reason to believe that it will. But Leo would sooner lose his legs than discuss Utopia Frank. Any oohing and aahing from his mother and he’s off, fingers in his ears and la la la.

Yes, it is a fact that Leo will not submit to negative thoughts or extravagantly positive ones. He is undoubtedly the kind of young man who will sit apart in a happy room. But he is in no sense reticent about his studies, and the momentousness of flowers. It’s not within his capabilities to say why, but he can admit that it’s quite something to be such an authority on alpine plants at his age.

Some plants behave the same as animals, he likes to say.

*

Leo hasn’t much of an idea what Patrick and Pascaline do with themselves. They don’t live all that far from his mother and he has a sense that life is not easy for them, even though it was Utopia Frank who brought all this upon everyone.

No one knew where witless Frank had gone until Leo got a message. A postcard written in Romania but posted sometime later in Greece –

It’s true. Only the guilty are relieved by justice. Each night when I go to sleep and each morning when I wake up you become more precious to me. Don’t rule out Bucharest for your next holiday.

Leo gave it some thought. He wanted to reply, to Romania, to the mountain, and tell Frank all about his most recent field trip. It’s not that he had expected to see anyone he knew up there, but one morning on the Wicklow Way he doubled over laughing when a Swiss hiker called Florian presented some juniper berries he had just picked in the valley.

You must notice this, he said.

I know someone who used to do that, Leo said.

Then they’re yours, the hiker said, opening his cracked palm to display the berries. Every invisible thing is yours.

From issue 2: spring/summer 2016

About the Author
Andrew Meehan has been a winner of the Cúirt Literary Festival’s New Writing Award. His fiction can be found in the Faber anthology Town & Country, and an essay called ‘Difficult People’ features in Winter Papers. His novel One Star Awake was published in 2017 by New Island.