Fourth Horseman (10 page)

‘Where’ve you been?’ said Dad.

‘Looking for holograms,’ I said. ‘We didn’t find anything, though.’

Dad glanced at me in alarm, and then at Alex and Javed. ‘Looking for what?’ he said.

‘The riders,’ I said. ‘At the lab.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Dad, as though he hadn’t lain awake all night thinking about it but had recalled it with difficulty from some far-distant recess of his memory. ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about that.’

‘And?’ I said.

‘I think it was an optical illusion,’ he said. ‘A trick of the sunlight in the woods.’

‘A what?!’ I said, completely aghast.

‘These things happen all the time,’ he said. ‘Do you know how many Americans believe they’ve been abducted by aliens? I mean, really believe that they have?’

‘Dad, this was nothing like that and you know it. We saw those riders yesterday as clearly as I’m seeing you now.’

‘I know I thought I saw something,’ he said. ‘But now I’m not so sure.’

I sat down at the table, too stunned to argue with him any more. What he was doing was terrible. Not only was he making me doubt myself but he was making the boys doubt me as well. Javed was looking over at me, and I detected that he knew what I was feeling and sympathized. But Alex was watching Dad dishing out the bacon.

‘Only three plates,’ he said. ‘Javed doesn’t eat bacon.’

‘Really?’ said Dad.

‘Or sausages,’ said Alex. ‘You know that very well.’

‘Sorry about that,’ said Dad to Javed. ‘I forgot you were a vegetarian.’

Actually I’m not a vegetarian,’ said Javed.

And you can’t fry his eggs in the bacon fat,’ said Alex.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Javed, embarrassed. ‘Honestly.’

‘I’ll scramble them then,’ said Dad, reaching for a saucepan. ‘I really am sorry, Javed. I ought to have remembered you were a Muslim.’

Alex and Javed exchanged significant looks and Alex shook his head in bewilderment.

‘Actually it’s not a religious thing,’ said Javed. ‘I just never acquired the habit.’

He had been through this before and Dad knew the story as well as the rest of us. Javed’s dad was a consultant psychiatrist and his mother was an architect turned artist. Like us, they didn’t follow any particular religious guidelines. Javed didn’t like fry-ups because he found them greasy and unpalatable. Dad was clearly rattled or he would have remembered.

I watched him closely. It seemed to me to be clearer than ever that he was putting on an act, going through the motions of being Dad. I looked at Alex and Javed. Neither of them could see it, I was sure of that. It made my stomach contract with fear. I’d had a fantastic appetite when I came in but Dad’s attitude had ruined it. I picked at my eggs and left the rashers and sausages, which gradually became welded to the plate by their own waxy fat. If Dad noticed my subdued mood he did nothing to try and lift it. He chatted, mostly to Alex, about the drive to Wales and the sick squirrel and the virus he hoped was thriving in its culture back at the lab. He tried to include Javed by talking about yesterday’s match, but if there were sides at the table that morning, Javed was on mine. I don’t know why. I’m not sure that he had any more conviction than Alex did about the existence of the riders in the wood, but he certainly had more empathy with me.

I dropped my leftovers down Randall’s hungry throat, and I was heading towards my room when the phone rang in the hall. I answered it.

‘Hi, Laurs,’ said Mum. ‘Just the person I wanted to talk to.’

The sound of her voice cheered me up immediately. ‘How are things, Mum?’

‘Great. We’re all ready to go on Thursday.’

With all that was going on I’d almost forgotten that the one-day international series was due to start that week. ‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘We can’t wait.’

‘Are you all OK?’

‘Fine. And you?’

‘Good, but I haven’t got long,’ she said. ‘I just got a terrible shock. I’ve forgotten all about the Family Row.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Mum,’ I said. ‘We can leave it out for this year.’

‘No way!’ she said. ‘It’s a sacred rite! The trouble is that there’s only one weekend I can be sure to get away. It’s between the third and fourth tests, the weekend of the twentieth of August.’

‘That’s ages away,’ I said. ‘What’s the panic?’ I wanted to tell her about everything: the riders, Dad’s behaviour, my hurt feelings. But there was no way to broach the subject. This wasn’t that kind of phone call.

‘There’s no panic,’ she said, ‘but there’s no way in the world that I’m going to be able to organize my team while I’m on the road. Can you do that?’

‘Sure. No bother.’

‘That means it’ll be your team this year. You’ll be the captain.’

‘No way, Mum!’

But she didn’t even stay around to argue. ‘Have to run. Love to everyone and I’ll talk to you all soon.’

My mood had lifted and I suddenly felt hungry. I wished I hadn’t given all my sausages to Randall. I went back into the kitchen and searched around for leftovers.

‘That was Mum. She wants to have the Family Row on the twentieth of August.’

‘Yess!’ said Alex. ‘I thought we wouldn’t be having one this year.’

‘Well, we are,’ I said. ‘And she’s appointed me captain of her team.’

‘You’re joking,’ said Alex.

‘I’m not. And I bags Javed.’

‘Oh, no!’ Alex screamed, but he was laughing as well. He and I never played on the same side, that was one of the rules. We usually tossed a coin to see who would play on which team. So it meant that if I had Javed, Alex would be playing against him.

‘All right with you, Javed?’ I said.

‘Why not?’ he said.

‘Right,’ said Alex, with the air of someone girding his loins. ‘Who else are we going to get, Dad?’

But Dad clearly wasn’t in loin-girding mood. ‘I could have done without this,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be up to my eyes in the lab.’

‘Let Alex do it,’ said Javed. ‘Let him be your captain.’

‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Dad. ‘I always knew you weren’t just a pretty face!’

D
AD GAVE ME A
day off work. He said he had to go in anyway and he would feed and water the squirrels. Alex and I made the first batch of phone calls, rounding up our teams. Then the boys decided to practise some aikido and began to rearrange the furniture in the sitting room. I helped them gather rugs from all over the house to lay on top of the carpet and cushion their falls.

From the kitchen I could hear their scuffles, their gasps, the light thuds of their rapid feet on the rugs and the heavier thud when one of them was brought to the floor. They were spending a lot of time at aikido lately. Javed blamed his poor batting performances on his state of mind, and both of them had taken to reading philosophy to help them with their attitudes. When they took their first aikido exam back around Easter time there had been great excitement and Dad had given them the money to go into town and buy their yellow belts. They had decided, though, after long discussions, not to wear them but to stick to their old white belts instead. Showing badges of rank, Alex told me, was against their philosophy. They pursued their art as a means towards improving themselves and not to impress anyone else. Alex had quotes from the
Tao Te Ching
on his wall; things like ‘In his every movement a man of great virtue follows the way and the way only’, and ‘In action it is timelessness that matters’, and, my favourite, ‘It is because he does not contend that no one in the empire is in a position to contend with him.’

I made myself a cup of tea and took it into the sitting room. The boys paid me no attention, so I curled up on the sofa and watched. They neither encouraged nor discouraged spectators. If their minds were properly oriented, they said, the presence or absence of other people would make no difference to them. If they were put off by people watching it meant that desires or anxieties were intruding, and these were the most difficult opponents; not the person they were sparring with. They did not practise aikido to impress anyone.

They did impress me, though. There was a beautiful discipline about their actions. They were both shooting up like nettles on a dung heap and coming into their adolescent strength, but they had none of the awkwardness of other boys their age. The aikido kept them both as supple and graceful as dancers. In their loose white suits they looked like monks, or strange, ghostly soldiers. They floated, circling around each other silently, watching each other with expressionless faces. Then, when one of them sensed an opening, they would strike with sudden speed and power. Nine times out of ten, the other would block or resist the move with equivalent skill.

Aikido is not about punching power. It’s about using the opponent’s weight and strength against him. It requires an understanding of how the human body works. If someone aims a blow at you, first you avoid it and then, following through, you catch him off balance and use it to your own advantage. If you can get hold of an arm or leg there are subtle ways to turn or twist the limb which can, if done right, bring your attacker to the ground and completely immobilize him. Someone with good aikido skills can subdue an opponent twice their size and weight.

I think if I’d been forced to choose between them I would have just about given Alex the edge. It wasn’t that he was faster, but he seemed able to wait that fraction longer before he reacted. He looked dozy sometimes, his eyelids drooping halfway down over his eyes. But there was a fierce glint beneath them, and when he did react to a move of Javed’s, it was with explosive speed. On the whole, though, they were well matched, and the most striking thing of all was their mutual respect. They bowed to each other before and after every round, and when they left the rugs at the end of the practice they resumed their everyday relationship exactly where they had left off. Their quiet, undemanding affection for each other was a model of human friendship.

And more and more that friendship had come to include me. By that time Javed was playing regular matches for the county, and Alex had managed to get himself picked for the second eleven. If either of them were playing a match they invited me, although I rarely went, because of my responsibilities at the lab. We did go mooching around town a couple of times though, shopping for clothes and having a coffee, but what I remember most clearly about those times was the conversations we had. We talked for hours, the three of us, about all kinds of things. Sometimes I think it was because I was lonely that year and had no friends of my own, and that I muscled in on the boys’ friendship. And sometimes I believe it was more than that. I believe that our extraordinary fate was already written on our palms or stamped across our brows. If we hadn’t had such trust in each other, things might have turned out very differently.

I never understood how they decided when an aikido practice was over. They never said ‘Shall we call it a day?’ or ‘I’m done in.’ They would just look each other in the eye, bow deeply to one another and vacate the practice space. On that day, when they had reached that moment, Alex trotted off upstairs to get changed but Javed flopped down on to the sofa beside me.

‘Do you ever analyse your dreams?’ he said.

‘Why would I want to do that?’ I asked.

‘Just wondered. My mother does it all the time. She tried to get me to do it a couple of times but I could never take it seriously enough. She gave up on me.’ He paused, and picked Randall hair off his white trousers. ‘I just thought it might be an idea to try and analyse what you saw.’

‘But the horsemen weren’t a dream,’ I said.

‘They might have been a vision, though. They must have been, when you think about it, since there’s no trace of them.’

I thought about what he was saying and I couldn’t deny it. The riders had been a vision. Dad and I had seen a vision. Like people saw moving statues and the Virgin Mary crying and stuff. Did that make it more significant or less?

‘I often get inspiration while I’m doing aikido,’ Javed went on. ‘My mind goes into a kind of meditation. And it came to me, just then. Why not analyse your vision as if it were a dream?’

‘How do you do that?’

‘Well, you kind of ask questions about things. The symbolism and stuff. You can even talk to the characters if you want to.’

‘Can you show me?’

‘I can try,’ he said. ‘It’s just a matter of talking about it and seeing what comes up.’

We went up to my room and I got out the notebook where I had written my lists the night before. Javed glanced over it. ‘You know, we should call Alex as well.’ He sensed my hesitation and went on: ‘Three heads are better than two.’

We went through my lists, one line at a time. We were lying on the grass at the back of the house. Alex had made sandwiches.

‘So the white horseman appeared alone first,’ said Javed. ‘You’ve put that at the top so does that mean it’s the most important thing?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I was just trying to be logical about writing things down.’

‘It’s important though,’ said Javed. ‘It means that he came first.’

‘Well, he did. He was the first one I saw. What’s the significance of that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Javed. ‘But this is how you do it. You go through everything and you ask questions about it, even if it doesn’t seem relevant. It might be, later.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘So the white horseman comes first.’

‘Who is he?’ said Alex.

‘I don’t know.’

‘He wears a crown, though. That must mean something. Is he a king?’

‘No,’ I said, without thinking about it. ‘Or at least, I suppose he might be.’

‘He must be if he’s wearing a crown.’

‘I suppose so. But he didn’t look like a king. The crown wasn’t exactly like that. It was more like … I don’t know. It was kind of silver leaves intertwined. He looked more like a Roman emperor or something.’

‘An emperor, then,’ said Javed. ‘Does that work better?’

‘Definitely,’ I said.

‘OK. So what about the other guy? What about him?’

‘He was much rougher,’ I said. ‘The white rider looked really wealthy but the red one was dirt poor.’

‘Would he have worked for him, maybe?’ said Alex.