Free Mr Toppit by Charles Elton Page B

Arthur Hayman ones were relatively normal. There were a lot of calculations, which I guessed were conversions from pounds into dollars, and bits of travel information like “Nearest subway: Lancaster Gate,” the name of an hotel with a phone number, and various things ticked or crossed out, like “Call Alma.” Turning to the Arthur Hayman pages and those after them was like going through a door and entering a different world. There were doodles and little sketches, some just scrawls and others quite carefully done, all variations on a theme: a man and a child. Oddly he seemed to be a kind of Red Indian chief with a big headdress made of feathers. The child was a little girl, and while his face was quite carefully drawn, both head on and in profile, the child was a sort of silhouette with no features. The most finished of the drawings took up nearly a whole page of the notebook and showed the man and the child standing: he was tall and thin and she was tiny, hardly taller than his knees; they were holding hands. Running alongside all the sketches were the lines of a poem. They had been crossed out and rewritten all over the place, but a little portion of it was finished and written out neatly:
    Oh my Anaglypta calling
,
Princess Anaglypta calling
,
Calling through the forest darkness

Calling over prairie mountain
.
’Cross the waves of Gitche Gumee
,
Soaring waves that brush the seabirds
,
Haymanito hears her calling
,
Hears his Anaglypta calling
.
    It was like
Hiawatha
, only it wasn’t. “Haymanito hears her calling …” I repeated the line aloud several times, then put the notebook, along with everything else that had spilled out onto the chair, back into the black bag as quickly as I could. I felt a strange sense of revulsion and couldn’t wait to get it all off my hands. Just reading that poem had made me feel embarrassed, as if I’d been caught breaking into someone’s house. But it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. The frightening thing—the inexplicable thing—was that it was like breaking into a house you’d never laid eyes on, in a country you’d never been to, and finding it filled with your belongings.
    So, there I was, sitting on a stackable black plastic chair in the foyer of a hospital into which my father, who might or might not be in a dangerously unstable condition, and my mother appeared to have vanished, and I was surreptitiously going through the bag of an obviously unhinged woman, who might or might not be American and whom a security guard believed might be my mother. The opportunities for confusion were endless and I wanted something to be simple. Then amazingly—for a second—it was. There was an echoey
ping
and a light went on above the lift. The doors parted and there was Martha.
    For a few seconds she didn’t see me. She seemed rather small and old, and was apparently having difficulty with the lift: she was peering around her in a confused way, as if going through the open doors in front of her might not be the best way ofgetting out, as if, in fact, there might be several other exits that she couldn’t find. Then she stepped out tentatively, looked up and saw me. I could tell that whatever the news was going to be, it was not going to be good.
    I got up from the chair. It seemed to take a long time. I began to walk across the foyer to where Martha was standing and, at that moment, a number of things happened: a clanging ambulance squealed to a halt outside the entrance and the man in the glass office swiveled round to look; a troupe of chattering nurses holding clipboards banged through the double doors that led from the wards, their heels clicking on the lino like tap shoes, and crossed the foyer in front of Martha. It had been silent for such a long time that the noise was deafening, as if someone had turned up the volume too loud.
    As I was moving past the glass office, the man’s eyes met mine and I saw something in them that made me snap. Before I knew what was happening, I