Boy on the Wire (13 page)

You may ask why I have written this letter. You may ask why I did not stay to give it to you in person. It is a good question. It is a last selfish and cowardly act, you might think. Perhaps it is. Perhaps also it is one final attempt to have that story you told erased. To have it erased, I must open you up, reach inside you, wrench the heart of it out.

There is a chance it might not work. There is a chance, in ripping it out, I take you with me. The cancer, creeping around your guts, has merged with them and now you can no longer tell them apart.

I hope that is not the case. In spite of everything, you are my brother. I do not blame you for what happened. Perhaps, assuming you did push us off the ledge, your guilt was too great to allow you to face up to it. You were eight. You should not have had to bear so much at eight.

I let you down. I was, am, the older brother, I should have done this sooner. I should have unpicked our story earlier, should have told my own story.

I do not blame you. Resent, perhaps, but not blame. I have never stopped wanting to be together again, wanting my little brother back. And perhaps this letter is the only way I can break the ice that holds us, holds you, forever in that mountain valley.

Peter.

She has read the letter so many times she has lost count. She regrets she did not open it when it was handed to her, though she does not know what she would have done had she read it while John was still in London.

When her flight is called, she gets up and goes to the gate. She is the last to board a nearly empty plane.

14

Rachel parks outside the gate of the red-brick house that belongs to her husband. To her, too, in a way, a thought she finds strange. The house is dark and she cannot see a car outside. She turns off the headlamps. As her eyes adjust, she realises it is lighter than she thought. The moon is full. She watches the shadows of leaves on the car and on the drive. She can hear crickets and the wind in the leaves. She has a sudden thought and looks to the right and left and in the rearview mirror, remembering tales of car-jackings. She looks at the trees. There could be someone there, waiting for her to get out.

The road is empty. She waits, then reaches up and switches off the interior light so that it doesn’t come on when she opens the door. Eventually she gets out and presses the buzzer at the gate. There is no answer. She stands for a minute and looks out onto the road in both directions. She feels something tightening in her stomach. Not fear – something else. She can’t name it. She walks up to the gates and pushes and they swing open. The noise is loud and she looks behind her, then back at the house.

She drives up to the building, keeping an eye on her rearview mirror. The gate is still open, but no one follows her.

The noise of the car door closing is loud. She is certain it will wake him if he is in the house. He was always a light sleeper. She looks at her watch. Only eight o’clock. Too early for him to be asleep.

There are no lights on and she thinks no one is home, but she rings the front-door bell anyway, hearing it echo inside the house. There is no other sound and the door does not open. She presses the bell again and steps back to look at the windows on the second storey. They are all black. No curtains.

She steps forward again and tries the handle. Locked.

She walks around the house, the grass crunching beneath her feet. At the side of the house, she goes up to a window, holds her hands around her face and peers inside. It is an empty room, small, a study perhaps. The next window she comes to is the lounge. There is nothing in there either. The moon reflects off the white walls and the concrete floors.

There is furniture in the next room, the sitting room. A chair, a table. There is something on the chair. She leans in closer to the window. It steams up with her breath which she wipes quickly away. Photographs.

There is a patio door here. She tries the handle and almost laughs when the door opens. The smell hits her: old carpet, concrete, dust. She sits on the chair, does not look around the rest of the room, and picks up the first photograph: two boys and a dog. She struggles to make it out in the light. She thinks it is a dog. It might be a mound of earth.

She does not look at the others. Instead, Rachel leans back in the chair and pulls her feet under her, rests her head against the back of the chair. She can smell him in the furniture. He has seeped into it. She closes her eyes and it is like he is there next to her, watching over her, watching her sleep.

Before she opens her eyes, she realises it is light and feels the sunlight on her face. It is warm and she feels at rest. A shadow moves across her eyes and she jumps up. There is nothing in the room or outside. She goes to the door and looks out and to the sides of the house. Nothing. She tries the handle. The door is open, but she knows she left it open. There is a key in the lock on the inside. She locks the door now, leaving the key in the lock.

She does not know why she did not explore the house last night, why she simply sat in the chair and went to sleep. He could have been upstairs. Anyone could have been upstairs. Or he could have come home. Perhaps he was out at a restaurant. It is as if she was drugged, not thinking clearly.

She listens for movement but can hear nothing.

The warmth she felt on waking has gone. As she walks through the house, she finds each room stripped bare. Unlike the first, none of the others has any furniture or carpets or curtains. The house has been swept clean, though in places there are still bits of wood, pieces of torn carpet. Somehow she knows he has done this.

Upstairs the smell is stronger. A closed-up house. Perhaps an animal, trapped inside, decomposing.

She goes into the room with the attic. She pushes the door into the attic, but it does not move. The bolt on the door is drawn but there is a keyhole too. She will look for a key later.

In the kitchen she opens the door to the garage and takes a step back when she sees the car.

Rachel feels the bonnet, though she knows the car hasn’t been used for some time. It is unlocked and the keys are in the ignition. She sits in the driver’s seat. On the key ring, in red letters, ‘Avis’. In the cubby hole she finds documents. They have his name on them, his signature. She sits in the car with her eyes closed.

She remembers seeing the neighbouring house on the way here, though it, too, was dark. It is the only house with a view of the property. She walks round to the bungalow.

When she turns into the drive, she notices boards across the windows, the walls brown with dust. She rings the bell nonetheless and knocks too. She feels silly doing this. There is no sound and she puts her ear to the door. Nothing. She steps back. The grounds the house stands in are dry, the grass withered. She can hear crickets. There is a pot next to the front door, the plant in it long since dead. She lifts up the pot, thinking there might be a key. Nothing there, apart from a cockroach. She drops the pot and wipes her hand on her jeans. She thinks about going round to the back of the house, but something stops her, something she cannot name.

She watches the bungalow from the house next door. She doesn’t know why she does it. It is unoccupied, so there will be no one who can tell her where her husband is. But she watches in spite of this.

She stands at the window with a view of the bungalow and it is then that she sees it. The shutter swaying in the breeze. She looks at this, knowing it may be a way in, but still holds back.

She watches the house in the afternoon and into the night. She does not remain at the window. She sits on the chair downstairs, reads a book, looks at the photographs, but comes back to the window often. There is no sign of anyone.

It gets dark. She locks the doors and scans the neighbouring house for lights. There are none. The house disappears into the night and she strains to make it out.

At night, the house she is in, the one she thinks of as her husband’s, grows cold. Though it is summer here, the house rattles in the wind and she feels the cold of it, the emptiness of it. She is in the corridor. Ahead of her the open doors to the bedrooms. The darkness of the corridor is broken by the light from the doors. She expects to see the shadows disturbed at any second, to see a figure emerge. A boy, she doesn’t know why she expects a boy, but she can imagine him, even see him. He is shivering, most likely from the cold, though she thinks too it could be fear. The painful thing, the thing that wrenches at her, is that the boy looks like her husband. She can see him standing there in the corridor staring at her – she can see him, though she knows the corridor is empty, the rooms are empty and the house is empty too. She knows, but it makes no difference. And then she loses sight of him.

All she wants to do is find him. Find him, hold him to her. She can save him. The boy: her husband.

Rachel goes quickly through each room in the house, but he is not there. She does it again: each room. She finds herself turning around every now and then, half expecting him to be behind her. She wonders what it is in this house that makes her feel like this. She feels the weight of it, the weight of every brick pressing down on her.

Something makes her forget the room under the eaves, as if she has blocked it from her thoughts.

As she goes through the house, she opens windows and doors. She thinks about where she is, and knows she should not do this. She wouldn’t do it in England, so why here? But there is something about the air in the house. If she lets the breeze blow through, perhaps she can breathe more easily.

For the first time, she notices the cameras in the corner of every room. She goes up to one, peers into it. It seems to her they are not working, though she has little experience of these things. All the same she feels watched. When she has her back to the cameras, there are prickles down her spine.

She goes downstairs and sits in the armchair. She hasn’t eaten for the whole day and sleeps lightly and fitfully. Soon after dawn, she goes and stands at the fence and watches the bungalow, watches the shutter. It begins to move, shifting in slightly towards the house. She pictures a hand on the other side pulling it closed. Then it moves out again. The wind: she feels the breeze on her face. Still, though, the shutter seemed to hang longer than it should have.

She takes a couple of steps back and to the side and waits behind a tree.

Later she goes back inside, sits in the chair and reaches for the photographs. The three boys. She puts her finger on the child in the background.

There are other photographs: the back of a boy in the woods, a sleeping child, two people she thinks are her husband’s parents, and a photo taken on her and John’s wedding day. She looks at this for a long time.

In the early afternoon she closes her eyes and sleeps.

When she wakes, it is dark. She had not meant to sleep that long. She clutches at her face as she wakes as if it was covered in spiders’ webs. The moon is bright outside the window. It lights up a patch of the floor and reaches in towards her feet. Over her shoulder, the rest of the house is dark. She listens. It creaks, settles. There is no other noise.

She walks up the stairs and goes to the room with the window overlooking the neighbour’s. That house, too, is dark. She watches for a few moments, then leaves the house and begins to walk up the drive. This is probably not what a local would have done, she thinks.

She does not expect to find anyone there. In fact, she does not know what to expect and does not know why she is doing this: going to an abandoned house in a foreign country on her own. She laughs. The noise frightens her.

There is a pull that the house exerts – both houses, in fact. She sees herself in a stream, floating on her back. Something happened here, she thinks. She drifts, hair spread out around her, down a brown river, insects buzzing in the heat.

She walks towards the window with the broken shutter. The wood is grey. The window behind it has gone. She steps closer and peers in. She can make out shapes of furniture inside, nothing else. She takes a small torch which she has found in the car and shines it into the room. The light barely reaches the door. There is a table, upturned chairs, a cabinet. On the cabinet a sole piece of china: a gravy boat. She shines the torch towards the door, but the passage beyond is dark. Nothing appears. She walks around to the back of the house.

Standing on the porch, she shines her beam towards the bungalow. There are old flowerpots, some of them overturned, and she steps around these. Then she sees the open door. She turns off the torch and listens but hears nothing. No sound at all. No insects, no night birds. Even the wind has died down. She takes a step forward and slides the door open further.

Inside, in front of the door, an old chair. To her right, a television and a laptop. There are discs on the carpet. She walks into the room, shines the torch around it. The rest of it is empty. She turns the light off and listens again.

‘Hello?’ Her voice sounds hollow. She stands in the doorway to the rest of the house before walking slowly down the passage. She shines the light around each room.

Back in the lounge, she flips through the discs. The ones next to the computer have dates written on them. The earliest date she finds is from soon before or after her husband must have arrived. She does not count the discs but thinks there are about forty.

She recognises the handwriting and wishes it was not his.

Rachel hesitates before tapping the keyboard. She sits on the floor, her face close to the screen. A grey light washes over her.

She jumps when she sees the face staring at her. Her husband’s, but in form only. She pauses the video. She can see bones in his face she has never seen before. She tries to make out his eyes but the picture is grey and blurred. They look like pools of black. She holds her hand up to the screen and puts it on his face.

She remembers a time. Him on top of her, her hand feeling for his mouth, his breath on her palm. He kissed the hand across his mouth. She feels again the touch of his lips.

The camera points towards the door into the attic. She sees him come and go, to and from that room.

She skips over part of the disc. In the next shot, the door to the attic is open. The room inside is dark. She leans in closer to the screen. There is something there. Something hidden by the dots of the screen. Her face is against the screen. She leans back. It begins to form, forms out of the black. A man. She can see only an outline, but it is a man, of that she is sure. It is him.

He comes closer, stands in the doorframe. She watches his face disappear as he shuts the door.

The disc ends. She ejects it and examines the date. The start date is four days ago but there is no end date. She shuffles through them to find a later date. But she cannot.

Rachel backs up until she hits the chair and swivels round, still on the floor. She gets to her knees, then her feet, and runs. She stumbles as she does and trips through the open door and onto the patio and is up again and running, running away from there.

But then she stops. Where can she go? She is running from what she has seen, but running towards where it comes from. There is nowhere to go. She stops in the middle of the road.

She has to go there. He is in there. She cannot call the police, cannot wait for help. It is for her now, for her to find him, to bring him back, if that is possible.

She starts to run again, along the road and down the drive. She stumbles again and the tar cuts her. She runs through the front door and up the stairs and into the room. She runs at the door and bangs against it with the flats of her hands. It is locked and does not budge.