Black Chalk (9 page)

I kept silent.

‘What was the extent of your relationship with Eric Knight?' he asked.

‘Nate is friends with everyone!' my mother said, loud enough that the whole ward looked at us. ‘Nate's tired! Look at him, look at what you've done!'

But I was still absorbed by the inspector. He held his notebook at the ready, his pen resting on the paper. The thick rims of his glasses seemed to soar up, precariously resting on his brow, as if they were waiting for my answer to drop back down to the bridge of his nose.

‘It's me. I shot him—'

My mother barked over the rest of my words. Mr Hill took off his glasses, and played with them as he stared at the bed's headboard. He tweaked them between his fingers as I'd seen him do on television.

‘Yes, I thought so,' he said.

‘Inspector!' She moved around to the other side of the bed. ‘That's quite enough. You told me you'd be careful!' She grabbed him by the arm and snarled: ‘Out, out!'

***

She lingered in the ward's corridor before coming back. ‘Get some sleep,' she said. Her lips drifted open and the fingers of her right hand were slipping down her face. Suddenly, she pulled out her mobile phone, told me she'd be back later, and walked out.

The tears had retreated without ever bursting through. But they'd left me with a great sense of unresolved sadness. I wished I could have cried the sadness away or talked it out with her. Instead I was alone. The doctors had ordered nothing but rest for me that day, and I couldn't think up a ploy to attract the nurses' attention. One of the old ladies had a quiet visitor. Mother and son, I thought. It was the first time I'd seen him. He'd barely arrived that he'd opened his book. I looked at them for a few seconds, but their mutual silence seemed to hide even more sadness. I toyed with that sadness for a moment, hoping it would bring the tears up, but they were too far gone.

The other old lady was asleep, a wisp of white hair covering part of her forehead, the translucent skin glowing in the afternoon light. I looked towards the old man. He was in bed, sitting up, the sheets pulled down so they covered his legs from his thighs down. He was turned towards the old lady and her son – it had to be her son. The old man's face seemed like it had been creased by years of laughter. I stared at him resolutely, my chest facing him, my head pointing towards his bed, my eyes fixed on the contours of his face. I wanted him to notice me, turn my way and respond to my smile. He would come over and we would speak. I knew he could walk, I'd seen him.

I waited for a minute, but he didn't move. I focused all my thoughts on him, broadcasting them silently across the room. I waited for five minutes, but he was a patient man. I grew calmer, the emotions in my chest weaker. I waited for half an hour. At one stage, he shifted his stare from the old lady's son to a janitor coming through the ward. Then the son left, and his eyes moved to the window, turning from one side of the room to the other. He passed over me without acknowledging my efforts.

‘Nate?' I looked up. Two nurses, both men, were by my bedside. The sight of two young men in nurses' clothes puzzled me. Perhaps Hill had ordered me transferred to a prison hospital. Or perhaps they'd decided I was crazy, and they were going to take me to a psychiatric ward. Either way, they'd sent two men because they were afraid I was going to fight.

‘Nate, we're going to move you to another ward. You're going to get a single room, lucky you.'

I looked around me trying to think of a way to prevent this. The old man was now looking at me, but it was too late. The nurse in charge of my bed was nowhere to be seen. I looked at the ward's entrance, but my mother wasn't showing up.

‘Why? I didn't hear anything about this.'

The bulkier of the two answered me: ‘Don't know. We just got told to move you.' Seeing my worried expression, he smiled gently. ‘One floor down. Your own private room and the same view, lucky you.'

The thin nurse gathered my things and they started wheeling me out.

‘Don't you have some idea?'

They shrugged.

They took me to a large empty corner room and set up my bed so that I wasn't quite in line with the door. I didn't have the same view: there were windows on two walls, but from my position I could only see out of one, towards Headington. And I was too far from the window to look down at the town. I could see a few trees and houses, but they were hazy.

As they were leaving me, I asked the nurses to keep the door open. They left it so that I could only see a thin strip of the outside world; from my angle, it was a yard-long stretch of the corridor going around the corner of the building. It was a busy stretch: legs flashed through, clad in green, slacks, or town clothes. I never had time to see who was walking by. No one seemed to stop and talk as they had done in my old ward.

My mother found me an hour later. She bustled through the door and strode to my bed. She stopped to take in her surroundings, and with a satisfied look reached for a chair. Her hair was tied back, folded into a neat ponytail. I looked at her face, searching for a sign. When she faced me, it was with a decisive expression.

‘Hill wants you isolated,' she said, launching into his reasons: he didn't want me watching television, he didn't want just anyone to speak to me. I lost interest in the subject as soon as I understood his reasons. I held silent, waiting for an opening, wanting to tell her more about Eric. But once she exhausted this first topic, she started on another without marking a pause.

***

Eric could spend days working away in his shed. All he needed was a good project.

The first time I visited his place, he showed me a tree-house he'd spent a year building when he was fourteen. When he'd first mentioned it, I'd imagined a couple of planks nailed to a tree. Instead, I saw something that would have fitted in Neverland.

We went down to a copse that separated his garden from the field it backed onto. He stopped in front of two ancient oaks, and with a broad sweep of his arms, he invited me to look up. It took me a few seconds to make out the tree-house through the green spring leaves. When I did, it all came into focus: the porches, the terraces, the ropes, the steps, the walls, the ladders, the bridge. They webbed across the branches gently, using and adding to what the trees offered, as if they were embracing the canopy.

I followed him around a smooth trunk, where he unfurled a short ladder tucked in between two branches. We climbed to a platform covered with a PVC sheet, which he'd built first, he told me, and on which he'd stored his tools as he worked. Steps, some carved into existing branches, others nailed into the trunk, weaved past a lookout and a space he'd styled as his desk, and led to the sturdiest part of his refuge: a walled-up room five yards above the ground, large enough to hold a camping bed and a coffee table. Waving his hands around, he showed me the room's features: it had an impermeable roof, straw to insulate the floor, and windows he could seal with clear plastic when it rained. Another door opened on to a long and sturdy branch. Fastened to the room's outside wall, two ropes followed the branch at hand-height, before meeting a third rope, tying up into a frail bridge, and plunging across the void to the other tree. He'd spent two weeks making the bridge, he explained.

The taller tree was his sanctuary. My feet dangling from a platform, his long limbs stretched across a hammock, we looked out across the neighbour's field and smoked a cigarette in silence. It was the only place I ever saw him smoke.

It was in his shed that he'd conceived the tree-house. And it was in the shed that he'd worked on all his other projects. Some of his more ornamental ideas ended up on the shelves of his room. Lying on his bed, I could see a sample of his ingenuity: toy cars made out of aluminium cans, a bow and a quiver full of arrows, stones carved into paperweights, even a nativity set – he wasn't religious, but he found the concept challenging.

It was his determination that I admired. He'd decide something and he'd carry it through, like the shelves he'd fitted into his tree-house. They were going to be made from wood he'd recycled himself. Buying freshly cut planks was too easy. He wanted to work with existing forms, to make something new from what people had discarded. For two whole months, he scoured through pits, scrutinised rubbish piles outside houses, until he had a heap of material spilling out of his shed. He studied each item: the headboard, the splintered table, the Ikea bedside table. He played with them all, unscrewing, sawing, gluing, until he had enough sketches to fill a whole notebook, until he had a design. For months, I'd seen planks like limbs shifting puffs of sawdust in his shed. And then, one day, he took me straight to the little cabin up his tree. Against an outside wall, covered with a small awning, his bookshelf was finished: from the bottom to the top, it narrowed in width, in breadth, and its wood lightened until a short and thin plywood piece, coated in white paint, capped the whole assembly.

He'd said he'd do it and he'd done it. Unlike me. I could hold a hammer, I could tie a knot, but I'd never set up a pulley system thirty feet up a tree. It was his determination that drew me into his world.

And how sullied it had been on the news! While the grainy images were bouncing off the shed's tin roof, the newsmen dissected Eric's relationship with his stepfather, his behavioural record, his broken mother. In malignant detail, they talked of the replicas Eric had turned into live guns. And not once did they ask how a seventeen-year-old could have achieved so much.

***

My body was recovering. The pain had gone, its departure unnoticed. It was taking me longer to fall asleep. Hoping the house would slump into the soot, I was spending hours caught outside a dream. My thoughts roamed unhindered by carnal impulses. They swirled into my past, rushing across vast plains, amassing at my defences. They started with the day just gone, scratching around one moment until it bled. Satisfied, they jumped further and landed on an image. Sometimes, the image yielded a rush of impressions. Sometimes, I fended it off, and my thoughts, undeterred, flowed on to another vision. But they were soon darting back, their question rephrased.

Was someone trying to get into my room? My mind jolted back to the sound of shuffling steps outside my door. I held my breath and listened, waiting for a hand on the door handle, for a muffled footstep across the lino floor. Nothing came. Two people moved down the corridor past my door, whispering to each other. I let air swell into my lungs, tension washing away as I breathed out.

No one was trying to get in. I smiled as my thoughts leaned into a safe topic. I was waiting for the soot to settle.

***

When my aunt came to visit, I found myself more engrossed with her toddler of a daughter than in what she had to say. For once, I wasn't the youngest person in the room. Nicole was the second of my father's sisters, and also the one who lived closest to us. For years, when I was little, our fridge had been adorned with her postcards: temples in Laos, the Sydney Opera House, Polynesian dancers, the Golden Gate Bridge – there seemed to be one coming every six months. On their back, a two-line description of what she was doing littered with exclamation marks. ‘Just climbed Kilimanjaro! Next stop: K2!' came with a cloudy peak. ‘I love Aussie men and I love surfing lessons!' she wrote on the back of a surfing kangaroo.

When she'd met an Englishman in Boston four years ago now, she plunged into a relationship with the same enthusiasm: within months, she was married, pregnant, and ecstatic to be back home.

Green-eyed Tori was her second, and she was making sure that her mother didn't look at anyone but her:

‘What's that?' she said.

‘That's a window, dear. Now let Mummy speak.'

Tori gathered her teddy bear close, and pointed a plump finger in my direction.

‘What's that?'

‘Not what's that, but who's that. That's your cousin, dear. Where's your teddy bear? What was I saying, Nate?' She looked at me, but I shrugged the question towards my mother.

‘Tori, Tori,' my mother was saying, her voice an octave higher than usual. ‘Where's your teddy bear? Come and show Aunty Liz your teddy bear!'

Tori pouted, holding her teddy bear behind her back, as if to protect it from my mother's outstretched hands.

‘Yes, that's what I was saying.' My aunt jabbed her index finger at the ceiling. ‘It's so typical of your father to take on more work just when you need him the most. Don't give me that look, Liz. I've known him for a lot longer than you.' Tori was sitting in my mother's arms, fiddling with my mother's collar. ‘When he was young, he was just the same. When our mother got her first tumour, the benign one, Henry went and spent his days in the library—'

Spending time with my aunt was both frightening and refreshing. She could hammer her truth in just as easily as she could delight us all with a story. On this visit, she opted for her genial self. After telling me about her brother's faults – I always liked the perspective she gave me on my father – she started recounting her own hospital adventures, the gash on her head when she was seven, the burst appendix when she was eleven, and I laughed along to the beat of her stories.

‘Who's ever dislocated a shoulder on Christmas Day? And going surfing too! Now that's my luck, isn't it? A hot surfer, washboard abs to go with the stubble, picks me up and I'm thinking that it's not so bad after all, but that's as good a Christmas present as I got that day. Fifteen minutes later, two seventy-year-olds, each with a moustache, and I'll tell you what: one of them wasn't a man – so there they are, slicing through my brand new swimsuit, and then wheeling me off to hospital – hold on, Tori, let Mummy speak – and I look around the emergency room: from this wall to that wall, people lying around waiting, holding a bit of ice on their head, knee, you name it; they like to play sports in Australia and they like to drink, not an easy mix. And for all these people, three poor doctors asking themselves why they didn't take Christmas off!'