Extract from Mind's Eye

Norfolk, 28 November 1981

The day after Alfie Flowers's birthday, his tenth, his father picked him up from his boarding school and took him to the seaside. It was the last Saturday in November, frosty cold but bright and clear, and they drove with the Morgan's top down. The little red sports car was Alfie's favourite car ever, a hundred light years better than his Grammie's poky Austin Metro or the heavy old Rover that smelled of damp and always made him feel slightly seasick. Riding inside the Morgan's cramped, low-slung cockpit, sturdy dials gleaming in the varnished wooden dashboard and icy air ripping past the narrow windscreen, was almost exactly like flying in a fighter plane, and as his father hurled it around the curves of the B-road Alfie pretended that he was a war ace, strafing enemies from the hedgerows.

Mick Flowers drove with casual expertise, his leather jacket zipped to the neck, his white silk scarf and blond hair raked back by the wind, telling his son that he had another assignment in Beirut, but it wasn't anything, an errand that would take no more than a couple of weeks. Alfie wasn't much bothered by the announcement. His father was a freelance photojournalist who spent most of his time in the world's hot spots, covering the endgame in Vietnam, conflicts in Rhodesia, Lebanon, Biafra and Cambodia (he'd been wounded in Cambodia), and the troubles in Northern Ireland. Because his father was away on assignments and his mother was no longer alive (a wild-at-heart Texas model Mick Flowers had met and married when he was working for London's high-end fashion magazines, shortly after giving birth to their only child she'd died in scandalous circumstances involving a drunken congressman and an illegal road race somewhere outside Amarillo), Alfie divided his time between boarding school and his grandparents' house outside Cambridge -- his grandmother's house now, his grandfather having died of a stroke a year ago. Alfie sometimes wished that his father was more like the fathers of his school friends, a banker or company director or Army officer, someone with an ordinary job and an ordinary life, someone with a wife instead of a string of girlfriends, someone who didn't gamble away most of his earnings, who wasn't given to turning up without any warning, exhausted and dishevelled, filling the house with cigarette smoke and the tingling thump of rock music. But he was inordinately proud of him just the same, and clipped his photographs from newspapers and magazines and pasted them in a scrapbook alongside postcards and airmail letters from all around the world. When he grew up, Alfie was going to be a photojournalist too. There was no question about it.

"I'll be home well before Christmas," Mick Flowers said. "Cross my heart, et cetera. I'll help you with that kit your grandmother gave you. If you need any help, that is."

It was the Airfix 1/600 scale model of the SS Canberra, the biggest Alfie had ever tackled. But two years after his first, badly botched attempt at assembling a Mark IX Spitfire he considered himself something of an expert at kit-bashing, and told his father that, except for the bow, which looked like it might be difficult to get exactly right, the assembly should be straightforward.

"We'll figure it out together, Chief," Mick Flowers said. "Deal?"

"Deal."

They reached the junction with the main road; Mick Flowers aimed the Morgan at the flat horizon. When machine-gun stutters of sunlight exploded behind a row of poplars that someone had planted to make a windbreak, he glanced over at his son, saw that Alfie's eyes were tightly closed, and said, "Flashing lights still giving you a hard time?"

They'd left the poplars behind. Alfie opened his eyes, shrugged inside his quilted anorak.

"If anything has happened since I last saw you, Alfie, fits or bad dreams, anything like that, I think you should tell me."

Alfie shrugged again, stubborn, embarrassed and, most of all, ashamed. He didn't like to talk about his fits because it reminded him of the accident that had set them off, knotted up his heart with shame and guilt. He said, "I'm getting better, Dad. Really I am."

His father accepted the lie. Or at least he didn't ask any more questions. The Morgan ate up the road with a steady roar. Trains of small white clouds appeared at the edge of the chill blue sky as they neared the coast.

A freezing wind blew off the sea, winnowing the marram grass on top of the dunes, skirling sand across the deserted car park, cutting straight through Alfie's anorak, school jumper, and grey flannel shirt. But he forgot all about the cold when his father opened the boot of the Morgan and presented him with a wide flat package wrapped in brown paper. Mick Flowers leaned against the car, blond hair whipping about his face, watching with a fond smile as Alfie tore open the package to reveal a diamond of bright red cloth, saying, "I thought this would be as good a place as any to try it out."

Ten minutes later, father and son were chasing each other along the beach, laughing and whooping as the kite caught the wind and swung high above them. Its taut red diamond thrummed as it dipped and soared; its long tail was studded with a dozen short lengths of plastic tubing that made an eerie keening sound as air played through them. With his favourite camera, a battered Nikon with a 21mm lens, Mick Flowers took photographs from several angles of Alfie leaning against the strong pull of the kite like a fisherman trying to haul in a prize catch; then he climbed on top of the crest of dunes and took a series of shots of the boy and his kite caught between the long, parallel planes of beach and sea. Later, in the darkroom of his rented London flat, he printed up one of these shots on high-contrast monochrome paper that accentuated the glare of the winter sun on the wet beach, and sent it to his son with a brief note memorializing the day. It was the last letter that Alfie ever received from him.

Alfie let the kite climb the ladder of wind until it was no more than a bright red dot pinned against the blue sky. He quickly learned how to make it slip sideways in heart-stopping swoops, like a nimble Spitfire or Mosquito avoiding German ack-ack, learned how to turn it into the wind and let it rise again, how to draw huge loops through the jolting air. But at last he grew careless and let it dip too low, and it stalled and dropped like a stone and crashed into the slate-grey sea. Mick Flowers kicked off his shoes and splashed into the water as Alfie tried to reel in the kite's dead weight, one moment scared that the string would break and his birthday present would be swept away, the next cheering wildly when his father snatched it from the top of a wave.

Breathless with excitement, father and son carried the kite back to the car, tied it to the rear bumper so that it could dry in the wind, and wolfed down the birthday tea that Alfie's grandmother had packed into a small wicker hamper. Fish-paste and watercress sandwiches cut in crustless triangles; sausage rolls with flaky, golden pastry; an iced sponge-cake stuck with ten sparklers which fizzed smartly but all too briefly.

The short winter day was nearly over. It was beginning to grow dark. Mick Flowers pulled a tartan blanket from the boot and told Alfie that they were going to build a fire -- it would be a lot of fun.

"It's still officially your birthday, Chief. We have permission to stay out late and howl at the moon."

Alfie, knowing what the fire was really for, felt a sudden dip in his stomach. He'd known all along that the day would probably end like this, but until now had managed to put it out of his mind.

The sun was setting behind a line of pine trees that hunched beyond the dunes. The empty beach stretched away for a mile on either side under a huge sky the colour of cut plums. Alfie helped his father build a small wigwam from driftwood and stuff it with marram grass and dry seaweed. Once lit, the fire burned briskly, tossing scraps of flame into the cold breeze, crackling blue and yellow as salty seaweed crisped. Mick Flowers produced a packet of marshmallows from the inside pocket of his leather jacket. He and Alfie skewered them on sticks and toasted them in the flames. The fire seemed to grow brighter as the air darkened around them. It was as if they were in a cave of light, an intimate space that invited confidences.

"I suppose we'd better get it over with," Mick Flowers said at last, and took out a tobacco tin.

Alfie felt the knot in his chest, hot and hopelessly complicated. "Dad, how long do we have to do this?"

I don't know, Alfie. That's the honest truth."

"Grammie says -- "

"If we did what your grandmother wants and went to the doctors, they'd give you medicine you'd have to take every day of your life. This way is better, isn't it?"

"I suppose."

They'd had this argument several times. It always ran along the same lines, and in the end Alfie always submitted. It was either Mr Prentiss's treatment or the hospital, and hospital would definitely be worse. Hospital meant obscure medical procedures. Hospital meant that strangers would find out what he had done -- what he'd done to himself.

It hadn't seemed like anything at the time. A minor bit of trespassing, curiosity about what was hidden in the secret compartment in his grandfather's desk. It hadn't been his fault that he'd been hurt by what he'd found, not really. It had been a mistake, a horrible accident.

Last year, early in the morning of Christmas Eve, Alfie's grandfather had suffered a major stroke in his sleep. He had never woken up, had died later the same day. A week after the funeral, two men had come to clear out his shed.

This was no ordinary garden shed, but a kind of chalet set on tall, cross-braced wooden posts like the observation tower of a prisoner-of-war camp, its walls painted bright yellow, its roof pillar-box red. It stood in a copse of Scots pines, silver birches, young oak trees and rhododendrons at the end of the long, rambling garden of the Victorian villa where Alfie lived with his grandparents. A wooden stair ran up one side to the balcony where Alfie's grandfather had liked to sit and smoke his pipe while gazing at the view across fields and patches of woodland towards the level Cambridgeshire horizon.

Alfie watched from his hiding place beneath a big rhododendron bush, lying as quiet and still as a spy monitoring the activity of enemy agents, while his father and the two men moved to and fro inside the shed, their shadows appearing and disappearing behind its dusty window. He watched them come back down the stairs, each carrying two or three cardboard boxes, took careful aim with the cap pistol that his father had brought back from Singapore, one of the presents he'd opened with little enthusiasm the day after his grandfather had died, and carefully shot them over and over again. He was a sniper; he was the last valiant defender of a fortress overrun by its enemies; he was a detective thwarting desperate criminals. He watched as the two men, both of them much older than his father, stacked the boxes in the boot of their grey Jaguar, watched as his father shook hands with them, watched as they climbed into their car and drove off, and his father disappeared inside the house. He watched and waited until he was as certain as he could be that the coast was clear, then snuck through the scanty cover of the little copse to the shed and scampered up the stairs, his blood thrilling.

At first glance, nothing seemed to have changed. The two overlapping, threadbare oriental carpets still covered the floor. The leather armchair where Alfie, as long as he promised to be extra quiet, had been allowed to sit and read while his grandfather worked, still slumped next to the black-leaded cast-iron stove that, stoked full of glowing coke, had grown so hot that when Alfie spat on it the spit danced around before vanishing with a satisfying hiss. The stove was unlit now, of course, and the shed felt cold and damp, and smelled faintly but definitely of his grandfather's funny tobacco, a smell that touched something deep inside Alfie and made him feel sad and alone. The floor-to-ceiling shelves were still stuffed to bursting with piles of books and papers, and the photographs from his grandfather's time in Iraq still hung here and there, but the collection of ancient artefacts -- fragments of unglazed pottery, clay tablets marked with neat rows of cuneiform writing, a clay lamp shaped like a slipper, stone and flint axes and hand tools and arrowheads, bone needles and pieces of bone incised with pictures of reindeer or horses, some bought at auction or from other collectors, some from archaeological excavations in Iraq where Alfie's grandfather had worked in the 1930s -- had been cleared away, and the roll-top desk had been stripped of its familiar clutter of papers and stood bare and forlorn.

Alfie's grandfather, kindly, patient, sweet-natured and utterly remote from ordinary life, had worked there every day, perched on the edge of a swivel chair, writing in neat copperplate with a green, gold-nibbed fountain pen pages of notes for his monumental, never-to-be-completed thesis, letters to other experts, and articles for publication in learned journals -- Alfie's grandmother would later type copies of these, using an ancient black typewriter -- or closely examining patterns on pieces of pottery or notches on fragments of bone with a huge magnifying glass whose cracked ivory handle had been thriftily mended with parcel tape, or making careful, minutely cross-hatched drawings with a set of Rotring pens on creamy sheets of heavy art paper. Now, the stacks of notes and drawings, the neatly filed letters and every other scrap of paper had been cleared from the desk and its rack of pigeon-holes. Alfie tiptoed to the window and looked at the house through the bare winter trees, then tiptoed back to the desk like a burglar. There was something he simply had to know.

Last summer, barefoot, practising being as silent as an Indian brave, he had stolen into the shed just as his grandfather had been taking out a rolled-up sheet of paper from a compartment hidden inside the desk. The old man had calmly put the roll of paper away and had made Alfie swear, hand on heart, that he would not tell anyone about it, that it would be their own private secret, and that he would never, ever try to open the drawer and look at what was inside. Now Alfie reasoned to himself that it was his duty to see if the two men had taken this mysterious piece of paper. With his pulse beating in his throat, he pulled out the shallow central drawer, full of pencil stubs and half-used rolls of Sellotape, odd lengths of string and the metal rulers and the device like a compass with two points with which his grandfather had made measurements of his shards and stones and bones, carefully set it on the floor beside the desk, and reached inside the space into which it fitted and pressed the panel at the back. It yielded with a solid click and sprang loose; Alfie pulled it open and withdrew the rolled-up sheet of paper. It was yellow with age, and tied with a piece of black ribbon. There was also a soft leather pouch fastened with a drawstring -- the pouch in which Alfie's grandfather had kept the powder that he'd added to his pipe tobacco.

Alfie remembered the clean thrill he'd felt when the secret drawer had yielded its treasure, remembered how he'd made a commando-style dash across the lawn and safely reached his bedroom, out of breath, his heart pounding. But he couldn't remember what had happened after that. There was a gap, a blank, and then he was lying in bed, feeble and confused, with his father sitting beside him.

Mick Flowers, angry and upset and, worst of all, trying to hide the fact that he was more than a little frightened, told Alfie that he'd had a fit after he'd tasted his grandfather's secret powder and looked at something he shouldn't have looked at. Alfie supposed that he must have untied the ribbon and unrolled the sheet of paper, but couldn't remember doing it, and couldn't remember what he'd seen, either, couldn't remember if it had been a drawing or a diagram or a magic spell. Whatever it was, it had done more to him than give him a fit. It had put a twist in his brain. It had left its mark. That night, Alfie was possessed by vivid nightmares in which monstrous faces took shape from clouds of swirling dots and lines; the next day, he suffered another fit and, against the wishes of his grandmother, was taken to see an old friend of the family, Mr Prentiss, who devised the treatment that had more or less cured him.

A year later, Alfie still had the occasional minor episode. He'd get a funny taste in his mouth, sharp and sour as burning metal, and the world would jump like a bad splice in a film, but it was no big deal, not much worse than a stutter or a nervous twitch. He hadn't once been struck by a full-blown epileptic seizure like those suffered by the pale, nervous boy in the year below his at the boarding school. He didn't fall down and jerk about and make animal noises, and he no longer woke sweating and mute with terror from dreams of monsters that swam out of garish patterns, but although Mr Prentiss's treatment kept the bad fits and nightmares at bay, it didn't mean that Alfie liked it. It wasn't only that it reminded him of what he had done, but it was creepy and weird, too. He knew that it was necessary, but he also knew that he would never get used to it.

Mick Flowers glued together four cigarette papers to make a square, creased it down the middle, and dropped strands of tobacco in the bottom of the crease. He unwrapped a little cube of aluminium foil and crumbled a little of the rich black Moroccan hash into the tobacco, then reached inside his jacket and lifted out a small bag of soft leather that hung on his chest from a loop of soft black twine. With his back to the wind, he tugged at the drawstring that held the neck of the bag closed, took out a pinch of grey dust and sprinkled it on the mix of tobacco and hash, rolled up the joint and sealed it at either end with a neat twist.

Alfie watched this ritual with a hollow feeling. The little bag was his grandfather's, the very same bag that he had found in the secret compartment, along with the piece of paper. His grandfather had used the dust it contained to salt his own special tobacco mix, made up for him in a little shop on Charing Cross Road. Once upon a time, in a rare expansive mood, he'd told Alfie that the dust was the dried extract from a plant called haka, which had sprung up in the footsteps of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, somewhere to the north of Baghdad.

Mick Flowers lit the joint with a snap of his Zippo, breathed in a deep, crackling toke and passed it to Alfie, who dutifully sucked on its wet teat. He'd been sick the first time he'd smoked one of these special cigarettes, but he was used to the rich sweet taste now. Without being told, he took the smoke deep into his lungs and held it there before exhaling. Mick Flowers watched sidelong, idly drawing dots and wavy lines in the sand with a stick. When Alfie had smoked the joint down to a nubbin, he passed it to his father, who pinched it in a little piece of rolled cardboard and took a final drag before tossing the roach into the glowing embers. Looking sidelong at his son, saying, "Do you see them?"

Alfie nodded. He was staring into the heart of the fire, where sparks snapped and jumped among glowing embers. His father leaned in and stroked his neck, murmuring the incantation that put him under. Alfie knew that he was being hypnotized and slyly thought to himself that this time he would resist, or he would suddenly jump up and chase around the fire or run off into the dark. But it was easier to do nothing, to sit with the fire parching his face and the wind chilling his back while the familiar patterns crawled through the shivering heart of the fire and his father's voice rose and fell with the sound of the waves collapsing on the beach, a meaningless but soothing murmur . . .

Presently, Alfie passed from a light hypnotic trance into sleep. Mick Flowers stood, worked the stiff knee where a fragment of shrapnel was still lodged, and gathered his son's slack body into his arms. He kicked sand over the embers of the fire and carried Alfie through the dunes to where the little red sports car crouched. Behind him, the tide crept up the beach, touching and retouching with fingers of lacy foam the patterns he'd idly drawn in the sand. Then, with a sudden bold surge, it erased them, with another put out the fire.

The next day, Mick Flowers flew to Beirut. A week later, the flat he rented in London was destroyed by a fire. Three days after that, the British embassy in Beirut received an envelope containing his bloodstained passport.

His body was never found.

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