‘Shut up!’

The child shut up.

4

‘I’ve got his diaries in the attic,’ Atlas said in the middle of a sentence about something else. ‘Would you like to see them?’

‘Diaries?’ I stuttered. ‘Your father wrote diaries? You have them? You’re not – I never heard about any such thing. Are you sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. I’ve had them for years. There was a whole load of junk – didn’t know what to do with it. So I just put it up in the—’

‘Are they complete? His whole life, or what? God, I’d love to – They’re really here? Right here in this house?’

Atlas shrugged. ‘Yeah. I didn’t know whether you’d be interested or not. See, that’s one of the funny things: they’re in code. I always figured I’d get down to cracking it one day – but somehow—’

‘Code? Really? Why’d he do that?’

Atlas shrugged again. He’d been a handsome man once, my uncle Atlas. ‘I was so good-looking,’ he said to me, ‘it gives me shivers to think about it.’ Even pushing eighty, with jowls and trifocals, he had the air of an old-time movie idol.

‘Atlas, go get them. I’ve got to see them. I can’t wait another minute.’

He pulled his bulk out of his chair and disappeared. His office was a mess, a heap of papers trailing over the edge of his desk, old files open and strewn over the examining table. It drove the efficient Claire mad. Atlas was a much-married man.

‘She’s nothing but a white-haired old lady,’ said my aunt Ruth in disgust when Atlas announced his decision to take on Claire. Ruth was Atlas’s only surviving sister at the time (dead now, too, like the rest). ‘What’d he possibly want to marry a white-haired old lady for?’

He returned with an armload of books. There were five volumes of diaries. Five! In Babylonian times five was the secret of the universe. Five was in fact the number of Atlas’s wives and the number of Claire’s wines, too, as exclusively prescribed by Reader’s Digest. Five is the number of the Pentagon in Washington: of war. Five is the pentagram, and out of the pentagram you conjure the devil, which was most assuredly what I hoped to do. Fairly thick volumes, in clean condition, not matching, no attempt even to try for a match. The first – each had a date on the spine – was a ledger, bound in horsehide. The middle three are various sizes of cloth-bound. The last, the greatest treasure of them all, was a paper-backed school exercise book from Woolworth’s.

My grandfather’s hand was not an easy one: angular, jerky, letters written at high speed, often not wholly formed, as though the thoughts had flown by him so fast that he’d never had time to reflect on them. But the code was simple. I could see that at a glance. I’ve always been interested in codes: I like secrets. Back in England in front of my computer – a week after this day of taping that had just begun – it took me under half an hour to crack it. The earliest entries, plainly written many years afterwards, have to do with that afternoon in Wikin’s Store and the first week with the Stokes. Even when Jonathan strained with all his might to remember, he says he could bring to mind nothing of his life before he became a slave, not a face or a voice or a room, not a single image. He’d gone willingly to the spring wagon, though. He’d even delighted in the prospect of a ride in it. When Alvah hit out at him for his babbling, he’d been more puzzled than anything else. It was nearly six o’clock when Alvah reined in the horse and jerked his head in the direction of the lean-to that served the homestead as a barn.