Chapter 3: The Tattoo That Wasn't Mine
The quiet room at Station 14 was the crew room, with a kettle, a scarred table and a noticeboard thick with rotas, and through the wall came the muffled music of the fair. But the door shut, and that was enough.
Leo would not sit. He stood by the table with his small hands flat on it, as if to hold himself upright, bracing for adults to arrange the truth into something smaller.
"Sit down, love," Emma said.
"No."
"Leo."
"If I sit down you'll do the voices." His eyes stayed on Nathan. "Grown-ups do quiet voices and then the thing is gone. I'm not sitting down."
Nathan sat down himself, slowly, and put his own hands flat where Leo could see them. It was a thing you learned, with frightened people: show your hands, lower yourself, take the threat out of your size. He was not sure who, in this room, was the frightened one.
"All right," he said. "Nobody sits. But I'm going to show you something, Leo, and I need you to really look. Can you do that? Really look, even if you don't like it."
Leo nodded once.
"Show me the photograph again. Please."
Emma hesitated, then laid the photograph on the table between them and smoothed it flat with the side of her hand, gently, as you would smooth a crease out of something precious and damaged. The couple laughed up at the ceiling. Late light. The boat. Sarah's hand on her belly.
There was a knock at the crew room door, soft, two raps, a firefighter's knock, information rather than inquiry. Nathan did not move. After a moment Derek's voice came through the wood, pitched low. "Band's packing up, Cap. I've told the chief you've got a family matter. Nobody's coming through this door." Then the footsteps went away again, unhurried, and Nathan understood that his friend had stationed himself at the end of the corridor like a piece of furniture that could fight. The fair went on thinning outside the walls. Someone laughed, a long way off, at something that had nothing to do with any of them. Leo's eyes flicked to the door and back, checking his exits even now, and Nathan thought: this child has been the only adult in his own life for four months, and he is deciding whether I am a door or a wall. He made himself sit still and be examined.
"Look at his arm," Nathan said. "The one around your mum. Look at the inside of the wrist." He touched the print lightly with one fingertip, not on the faces. Never on the faces. "What do you see?"
Leo bent over it, his hair falling forward, with the fierce concentration of a child reading a text in a language he had only just learned was not his own.
"A picture," Leo said at last, uncertainly. "Drawn on him. A little — " He traced it in the air above the photograph. "A little boat thing."
"An anchor," Nathan said. "A small anchor, tattooed here." He turned his own left hand over and held it out across the table, wrist up. Then his right, for good measure. Both wrists were bare: pale skin, a scar across one knuckle. No ink. There had never been any ink.
"Now mine."
Leo stared.
He stared for a long time. Nathan watched the knowledge move across his face the way you watch a tide go out. The boy reached out, very slowly, and put two fingers on Nathan's wrist, as if ink might be hiding under the skin. His fingers were cold.
"You could have taken it off," he said, but the conviction had gone out of him, and his voice was small. "People can. On the television a lady — "
"Leo," Emma said, very softly, from behind him.
"You could have!"
"I couldn't, Leo." Nathan kept his hand exactly where it was, wrist up, offered. "A tattoo like that doesn't come off clean. There'd be a mark. And I never had one. My — " He had to stop. He had said the word in eulogies and toasts, and now it stuck like a bone. "The man in the photograph had a name I haven't said out loud in a long time. His name was Daniel. He was my brother. My twin brother. We were identical. That is why he has my face."
"Your brother," Leo repeated, in a flat, testing voice.
"My twin. Two of us, born together. Same face." Nathan chose his words the way he chose footholds on a bad roof. "He worked on boats, down at the coast — a carpenter, and he taught people to sail. He got that anchor done at nineteen, in Astoria, and our mother cried, and he laughed and said now nobody would ever mix us up again." A sound came out of him that was not quite a laugh. "It was his joke. His whole life, if someone mixed us up, he'd turn his wrist over and show them. Like this."
He turned his bare wrist over and back, helplessly.
Emma put her hand over her mouth, her eyes bright with tears. "I never saw it," she whispered. "In all the times I looked at that photograph after she died, I only saw your face. I saw you on the news in February, the rescue on the bridge, and I thought: there he is. There's the man who never came."
"You thought I was him too," Nathan said.
"I thought you were a man who'd walked away from my sister. I have thought it for four months, every time Leo asked where his daddy was." She wiped her face, hard. "It never occurred to me that you might be his brother. Sarah said his name was Daniel in the first year. After the crash, she never said it again. She said 'Leo's father', or she said nothing."
Leo had not moved. His two fingers were still resting on Nathan's wrist, as if he had forgotten them there.
Leo asked, in a voice he was clearly keeping on a short lead, what Daniel had sounded like. Nathan had to think, which shamed him; it should have been instant, a thing carried in the ear like a heartbeat. Lower than mine, he said. Faster. Daniel had laughed first and then said the thing, so you were already laughing before you knew why; all through school Nathan had been told off for a laugh in a corridor that was never his, and had said, every time, that's how you can tell it wasn't me, I never laughed first. And then Leo asked whether Daniel had known about him, in the picture, and Nathan made him look again at the arm around his mother: not a man passing through, that. A man who had been told the best news of his life and was holding on to it with his whole arm. He knew, Leo. He knew before you had a name. Leo nodded once, with enormous care, like a person carrying a full cup across a room and determined not to spill a drop of it.
"So the man in the picture is dead," he said.
Nathan could lie kindly then — gone, away, any of the soft words adults keep in a drawer for this. Emma's warning stood in the room with them: He has had enough of people being kind instead of true.
"Yes," Nathan said. "Daniel died, Leo. Seven years ago, in October, before you were born. A car crash, on the highway. He died very quickly. He didn't suffer. And I am so, so sorry, but I am not him. I wish — " His voice failed then, honestly and completely. "You have no idea how much I wish I could tell you different."
Leo took his fingers back. He folded them, precisely, into fists at his sides.
"Then it's a trick," he announced, and there was a terrible dignity in it. "It's a trick picture. Mum wouldn't lie. She said I'd know him. She said — " The dignity cracked down the middle. "SHE SAID I'D KNOW HIS FACE!"
His voice rose into a wail on the last word and Emma caught him as he hurled himself at Nathan, all seven years of grief arriving at once in a crew room with a kettle in it — and Nathan, who could have stepped back, did not. He let the small fists land where they landed, and put one hand, very lightly, on the back of the heaving small head, and said nothing at all, because there was nothing.
"I know his face," Leo sobbed, into the front of a fire captain's uniform. "I know it. I know it. I know it."
"I know you do, mate," Nathan said at last, quietly, to the top of his head. "That's the worst of it. So do I."