It wasn’t a good time to have a baby. The whole UK had been in an increasingly tight grip of a government pretty much recognised to be heading to autocracy. But it was a short while after he was born that they’d had visitors. Joe hadn’t want to tell people about this – it was so wild and dangerous. These strangers had turned up, one evening, a group of about ten, Chinese and Tibetan and an Arab man, a woman from Russia, at the flat, on the doorstep, in a minibus. Seekers after truth, he’d been terrified at first. But they brought with them an air of peace and he’d let them in to the front room where they’d squeezed together and had a cup of tea in all the mugs and cups in the house while Moira brought the baby down. And as she’d come down the stairs, they’d fallen to the floor, all at once.
And there’d been the pop star, the American singer, who’d turned up right then. Joe had opened the door to his knocking and he’d walked right in, kissed the baby on the head and placed a big envelope on the mantlepiece above the gas fire. “You’re going to need this,” he’d said.
It was like another dream.
The strangers had given them strange, oriental lotions for the child, to help him grow, for cleaning, and weirdly, an ointment that was labelled for corpses at the undertakers. He’d shivered reading it, thanked them, and eventually they left, leaving Moira and Joe and the baby sitting on the sofa by the gas fire breathing in the smell of all the strangers and the baby crying too.
And then someone had said that the Seekers were a cult – they were wanted. Joe had known it was a set-up – there’d been nothing wrong with them. They hadn’t been criminals, he thought, but he didn’t want to be mixed up in it, but the next night he’d woken up in a cold sweat with a ringing voice in his ears, “Get out, get out…”
He’d shaken Moira awake, wrapped up the baby, taken the baby bag and the pram and a few clothes, the big envelope, and they’d left the flat without telling anyone where they were going. Joe had learned to trust those dreams.
Something compelled him to get to the Netherlands on the ferry, and there, on the early morning news, he watched the footage of a anti-terrorist squad searching for the Seekers as they rammed down the door of a very familiar Long Eaton flat and felt sick.
It was all to do with their son. He didn’t know why, but Joe knew that the government weren’t after the Seekers at all. They were after his boy, the little red, bawling fist of life wrapped in a crocheted blanket and held tight against his chest.
Leaving was the right thing to do. There were arrests and people detained – including some of Moira’s family – some without charge. But Joe and Moira found a place to work and live near Gronigen, somewhere entirely overlooked, while they began to build their family and raise their boy.
After three or four years the party tumbled and the minister who’d been scaring the country into self-destruction with his xenophobia and hatred, well, he’d died nastily. And the next people in had published a general amnesty, and they’d come home. The Davidson family had come home, but settled nearer Sheffield, put a bit of distance between themselves and some very scary memories.
From one perspective, it all made sense to Joseph Davidson. It felt as though protecting his family was his life’s work, providing for them and for Moira the highest calling. But from another, it looked like a badly-plotted drama on tv, something unbelievable, something that should only have happened in a far less civilised country. But it hadn’t. It had been their story and it had been his life and it was real. That was undeniable. The boy was there, Moira was there, they were living in a too-small house and although the old van had gone for scrap long ago and the cash in that envelope had gone too, there was still that bottle of ointment on the mantlepiece, so long a part of the family that its quiet threat had become an inaudible harmony to their ongoing life. Every now and then Joe would pick it up, hold it to the light, tip the yellowish liquid and watch it move sluggishly against the faceted glass.
And then most days he’d head out to work.