Chapter 2

That was why she had asked Charlie to take a seat in the kitchen, a mug of steaming sweet tea sitting on the folding table.  She looked at her sweet boy and genuinely did not know whether what she was about to tell him was a good thing to do.  Fourteen years ago she had thought that the decisions she had made were the right ones.  She thought she had protected the people she loved most in the world, but at a terrible cost to herself.  Now, looking back, she wasn’t so sure that she had made the right choice. 

“Charlie,” she said in a calm, measured voice.  “Before you were born I made a decision that I thought would protect you.  I think I made a mistake.”

“What do you mean?”  Charlie said, looking up at her from under his fringe.

She slid a photo across the table to him.  A good looking man with a floppy fringe of red hair dressed in black jeans and a brown leather jacket grinned back at him from the picture.

“That’s my dad, isn’t it?”  said Charlie. “What’s this all about?”

“A while ago I thought that the best way to protect you would be to ensure that you never had anything to do with your father,” his mum said, looking at her hands, unable to look him in the eye.  “I told you that he had gone away before you were born and it was just us two now.  You’ve wanted to know more about him but I’ve always really avoided telling you too much about him.”

“You’re always dodging my questions.  You show me the photos, you tell me nothing.  You’ve never even told me why he left us,”  Charlie said wearily, his hands wrapped around the mug of tea.  They’d ‘discussed’ his father many times before but his mother had always managed to find ways not to shed anything but the barest glimmer of light on his father.  It was frustrating and it was one of the few things that she and he would argue about.  He was always being told that she would tell him more when he was older.  He doubted that he would ever be old enough.

Angela reached out and covered Charlie’s hands with her own, “Oh Charlie, I am so sorry! Your father didn’t leave us.  I think I did a very stupid thing along time ago.  I think I did it to protect the people that I most loved in the world and I think I have hurt you terribly, when it was the last thing that I intended.  You deserve to know more.”  She paused and collected her thoughts before continuing, “Your father was in the same line of work as me but in a slightly more glamorous capacity.”
            “You mean he restored ancient artefacts?”  asked Charlie.

“No, I didn’t do that back when I knew your father.  I was a kind of troubleshooting archaeologist.  I would be sent to digs by the Museum to help teams identify particularly unusual items, or help retrieve them safely.”

“Retrieve them safely?”

            “Some of the things that I helped recover had been stored in special mausoleums, or temples, that had been specifically constructed to protect them.  Over time, these structures would become dangerously unstable and I specialised in making them safe.  A dig team would come across one of these places, contact the museum and I would travel out to advise the team on how to proceed safely.  I’d figure out where the traps were, and figure out how to get round them, so to speak.”

Charlie was intrigued.  His mum rarely talked about her life before he was born and he began to relax.  Whatever she had to say to him seemed to be about her doing something wrong and not him - for once.  “You mean you were Indiana Jones?  Cool, Mum!  Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”  Charlie was intrigued and felt his curiosity getting the better of him.

“Not exactly, Charlie.  Indiana Jones is just a movie.  My work was much more careful, more considered.  I can’t deny that there were exciting moments, but I am afraid that there were no ghosts, aliens or ancient, deathless guardians in my life.  However, I was pretty good at it and when you are good at something in such a specialised world as I lived in back then, word gets round about you, and that is how I met your father.  I was called in to help him on a project.”

“You mean my Dad’s an archaeologist too?”

“Not exactly…kind of…it’s not important, right now.  What is important is that I fell in love with him.”

“Mum, please!”  Charlie mimed a revolted face at her but he was actually lapping up the story.  His mother had never spoken at this much length about her life before Charlie and he found it fascinating.  He took a sip of tea, relaxed slightly and began to enjoy the history lesson.

“We worked on one particular site.  Your dad was working with a television company, recording the dig.  He was kind of dashing, certainly charming, and we hit it off right away.  The dig became secondary, even though it made us all celebrities for a little while.”

“Celebrities?  Like famous?  In the papers and everything?”  Charlie interrupted.

“Yes, kind of.  We got on the TV news and in the serious newspapers at least.  We were uncovering some barrows on the South Downs.  They had been ploughed under by farmers over the centuries but your Dad had uncovered evidence that they weren’t really barrows but more likely to be the entrances to some intact underground temple.  The TV Company wanted to record the moment when the entrance was unblocked.  For some reason, they were convinced that this was going to be the Tutankhamen of the North, despite what the archaeologists and your dad had told them.”  Angela paused; a memory of those days came back to her.  A man in his early thirties smiled at her, his red hair caught by the sun and blazing like burnished bronze, blue eyes piercing against his freckled skin, then he had turned away to continue into the dark of the barrow on that long ago July morning.  She smiled to herself.

“Well?”  Charlie leaned forward, eager to hear the rest.

“Well?  The dig was a disaster in the end.  The barrows really were just empty barrows, robbed out centuries ago.  It turned out that your dad’s source had got it wrong, leading us into a very expensive mess.  If it had been a regular dig then that would have been fairly normal.  You never really know what you are going to dig up until it’s in a sorting tray.  Archaeologists are used to disappointment.  They console themselves with studying the structures left behind when there are no artefacts to examine. However, the TV Company had really got into a twist – their producer had made promises to the network and they were expecting something amazing.  They even arranged for a live broadcast!  You would normally want to keep most archaeologists off the air because they’re all so weird!”  She laughed and poured more tea for herself and Charlie from the old brown teapot. 

Charlie stirred in two teaspoons of sugar and some milk, asking, “So what happened next?”

“Oh it all went to pieces.  With no magic treasure or amazing building for the cameras to shoot, the producer lost face, the network lost face and they were all pretty angry, despite the fact that everyone had warned them that finding nothing was a greater possibility than finding something.  Your dad was blamed for the failure and lost his contract with the TV Company.  In fact, they sued him and he lost a lot of money.  I carried on with the Museum and started going out with your dad since he was stuck in London between jobs.”

“So he did he stay for long or did he up and leave when I was born?”  Charlie said abruptly.  His mood had changed in an instant.  He suddenly found that he was intensely angry.   Angela’s slightly dreamy recall of a man he had never met had got under his skin.  “I mean, did he stop long enough to give me a name?”

Angela was shocked at his anger, “No, no, Charlie.  It wasn’t like that.  Your dad is a fantastic human being.  He would never have left without a pretty good reason.  It was me.  I made him go!”

Charlie was stunned.  “Why would you do that?”  he said weakly.

“I loved your dad.  I loved him with all my heart but I was scared.  I found out that I was pregnant with you and I just got scared.  As your dad got back on his feet after the disaster with the TV Company, he started travelling a lot on different jobs.  Sometimes he was gone for a couple of days, sometimes for a couple of months.  It became unpredictable and I couldn’t stand the separations.  My work with the Museum kept me in London, or on assignments of my own.  Then one day he came back and he was in a shocking state.   He’d been on a job and got into some kind of trouble with some locals.  They’d hurt him and his partner, one man on their team had been killed and your dad had been beaten up badly.”  Tears formed in the corners of Angela’s eyes and they began to trickle in their stop start way down her cheeks.   She sniffed, got up from her chair and went to the kitchen counter to tear off a strip of kitchen towel.  Leaning against the counter top, she wiped her eyes and crossed her arms across her stomach.

“I got scared.  I panicked, Charlie.  I asked myself constantly whether it would happen again.  The worrying got the better of me.  When he was away I would imagine all sorts of terrible things.  I couldn’t follow him around the world helping with that type of work, carrying a child on one hip.  I just felt that I couldn’t ask him to stay in London and settle down.”

“Why not?  Lots of dads do.  That’s their job!”  Charlie retorted.  He felt cheated, robbed of a father he had never known.  He was furious at what his mother had done.

“I fell in love with your dad for what he was.  I loved what he did.  He found things that had been lost for generations, things that needed to be brought to light.  It was important work, revealing our past and the work of people long dead; people who did not deserve to be forgotten.  He was really, really good at what he did and I wasn’t going to be the one to stop him doing it.”  Angela paused and sipped her tea. “He would have stopped too, for you and for me.” She added as an afterthought.

“So?”

“So I told him that it had all been a mistake and I wasn’t really in love with him.  I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to ever see each other again.  I didn’t think about the future, Charlie.  I didn’t think about the need to have him in your life as you grew up. I guess I just didn’t think.”

There was an uncomfortable silence between them.  It was early June and the window was open in the kitchen.  From outside could be heard the sounds of London settling down for the night; the brakes of taxis squealing, the window-rattling rumbling of the huge diesel engines in double-decker buses as they travelled down the Brockley High Road; doors slamming and voices raised in a loud argument, punctuated with considerable amounts of swearing somewhere else on the estate; a lone dog barking manically, unstoppably.  Cool air wafted in through the open window along with the persistent smell of fried food from the Coddammit! fish and chip shop.  Everything seemed perfectly normal but Charlie felt as if his mother had taken the flat and turned it upside down like a snow globe, his thoughts and feelings stirred up in turmoil like the flakes inside the little glass ball.  She had sent him away?  Was she mad? 

“Charlie, I think I was wrong.  I thought I was doing the right thing.  I know now that it was a mistake to end it with your dad.  But… it…is not too late for you.”  Angela picked up a manila folder that sat on the countertop next to the toaster and removed a piece of paper.  She slid it across the table to Charlie.

He picked it up.  In the harsh light of the fluorescent tube that illuminated the kitchen, he could see the photo clearly.  Or, to be precise, he could see the people in the photo clearly.  A red haired man, middle aged and brawny, with a thick waist and florid complexion, grinned back at him.  He was standing with his arms folded next to one of the biggest people that Charlie had ever seen, a huge dark man with long, black hair who seemed to fill the photo.  They were both standing in front of some ancient aeroplane, wearing white shirts, shorts, socks and shoes.

“That’s your dad, Charlie.  That’s your dad,”  Angela said then promptly burst into tears.

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