Midnight Sun (4 page)

"Better tell me how much first," Ben said as the teacher blew her whistle for everyone to line up, and covered his mouth in case she'd heard him talking after the whistle and would send him to Mr O'Toole the headmaster.

As his class filed into the building, Ben's shoes his aunt had bought him for his new school making rodent sounds on the linoleum, he saw the headmaster waiting in the corridor, cocking his head which always made Ben think of a horse's grinning skull. He felt as if the heat and the smells of mopped floors and of the sickly green paint on the walls were writhing inside him as the class marched him to his doom. His ears were throbbing so hard that he barely heard what Mr O'Toole said to him. "I should get those oiled if I were you or you may be more than squeaking."

"Yes, sir," Ben stammered, feeling isolated and vulnerable and horribly ashamed of himself.

He was only a few paces past the headmaster when Dominic's murmur behind him almost caused him to trip himself up. "Funny, /un-ny," Dominic said.

Ben felt breathlessly exhilarated, and terrified for him. He didn't dare turn round, but he flashed Dominic a grin as they filed along the row of folding seats in the assembly hall. When Mr O'Toole thundered prayers at the hallful of children while the teachers glared prayerfully at them, Ben no longer felt alone. In the classroom he even raised his hand when Mr Bolger asked questions, and found that his palms no longer started sweating.

He was glad that his aunt didn't ask why he was pleased with himself; she seemed content that he was. That night he could hardly sleep for waiting; it felt like Christmas Eve. Soon he might know who Edward Sterling had met on his last exploration and what they had revealed to him. But when he hurried into the schoolyard, not even waiting until his aunt was out of sight, Dominic showed him his empty hands. "My dad laughed."

"How do you mean?"

"He said to tell you he wished you had a copy of that book, because he'd have given you a year's pocket money for it. He rang up a friend of his who sells old books who said he's never seen a copy in his life. You're as likely to see one as snow in summer, my dad said."

FIVE

At least Ben had made a real friend at school, which was more than he ever had in Stargrave. His aunt let him stay at Dominic's house until she came home from her tax office job to collect him. She must be pleased that she no longer needed to work in her lunch hours and that he had someone else to keep him in Norwich. Dominic's parents welcomed Ben, but it took him a while to get used to them. Mrs Milligan kept offering him food in no apparent order, perhaps because Mr Milligan was constantly on the move even during mealtimes, picking up books from the sideboard, from chairs, from a dozen other perches in the small house crammed with dingy rooms, and strolling about like an actor at a rehearsal, reading aloud. "Just listen to this," he would say, raising his squat face and half closing his eyes under their fierce reddish eyebrows as if he was smelling the pages rather than reading them, until Dominic's mother would lose patience with him and fly at him like a terrier, her short-legged body crouching to shove him towards the table, her square head lowered so that her chin appeared to engulf her stubby neck. "Their brains need feeding as well as their breadbaskets," he would protest mildly as his wife confiscated the book, growling "Don't be teaching them your manners."

The first time Ben visited Milligans Bookshop he saw a portly man with a briefcase waddling away like an endangered penguin, almost tripping over cobblestones as Mr Milligan harangued him. "Stop that man, he's living off immoral earnings. Where's a policeman? I'd like you to show him that page you didn't want me to read out loud," he shouted, and the salesman broke into a stumbling run. "Just a fellow with no respect for books or people," Mr Milligan told Ben as he ushered him into the shop. "Read whatever you think you might like so long as your hands are clean."

That was how Ben spent much of the summer. He read all the fantasies and myths and legends he could find, partly because he knew his aunt wouldn't quite approve, and some of the science fiction Dominic liked, which led Ben to the astronomy books. The measurements of space and time, the photographs of far stars and of points of light which proved to be composed of thousands of stars, filled him with an awe which felt like the edge of a delicious panic. Sometimes he was glad when Mrs Milligan rescued him from these thoughts by bringing him a bowl of cereal or a fried-egg sandwich from the house. Otherwise Mr Milligan could be relied upon to provide some diversion, reading aloud to prospective customers or trying to dissuade people from ordering books he disapproved of or disentangling authors' names and titles from their memories, whenever Ben's thoughts threatened to grow too large and dark.

When he lay in bed at night, however, there was nothing to distract him, especially once he was back at school and it was growing dark by the time he went to bed. Soon there was an autumn chill in the air, and he felt as if the summer had failed to keep it away, just as the daylight couldn't hold back the nights. As the nights lengthened, it seemed to him that the dark grew larger. He didn't know why the increasing cold and darkness should make him apprehensive; he wasn't even sure if praying every night in front of the photograph of himself and his family helped. Each night the reflection of the sky in the dressing-table mirror beyond the photograph seemed darker. Once he thought he saw the sky go out, having failed to hold back the starry emptiness, and he prayed as hard as he could.

Each night he crept out of bed to pray after his aunt had tucked him up, and he didn't realise she'd heard him until she took him to Father Flynn. That Sunday was the day the clocks were put back in order to bring the night forward an hour. Perhaps that was why the church service seemed so remote from him, the priest and his assistants performing their slow ritual motions while their prayers and the responses of the congregation fluttered under the arched ceiling like trapped birds. After the service he tried to sidle unnoticed out of the porch, but his aunt steered him in front of the priest. "Thank you for a lovely mass," she said.

"One tries to do one's best, Miss Tate." The priest bared his small even teeth in a smile which concealed his gums, and gave

Ben's head a token pat. "I don't need to tell our young Ben that, do I?"

Ben had been afraid that the priest would see from his face that his attention had been wandering during the service, and now his panic started his thoughts chattering: a lovely mass of coconuts, a mass of pottage, a mess of a mass ... "I want you to know I admire the way you've borne your cross," the priest was telling him.

"Actually, Father, that was what we wanted to talk to you about," Ben's aunt said. "The tragedy, that is."

Ben hadn't wanted to talk to him about anything. "My door is always open," the priest said.

His house must get cold in the winter, Ben thought, and struggled not to smirk — but nobody was looking at him. "I always have a pot of tea after mass, and like everything else in this life, it's better shared," the priest said.

The presbytery was at the end of a street in which twinned houses placed gardens between themselves and a row of discreet shops. An elderly housekeeper with beads as big as acorns rattling around her stringy neck opened the door. "One more for the pot," the priest said breezily, "and I think there might be an order for a glass of milk."

One chair faced several in the front room, before a tiled fireplace in which a coal fire was crackling. Records were stacked beneath an old gramophone in one corner. "You sit there," Ben's aunt said and nudged him into the chair directly opposite the priest's before sitting on the edge of the chair next to him. "I hoped you might be able to make things clearer to him, Father."

"I believe that's why I'm here. What about, now?"

"About, as we were saying, the tragedy. He isn't over it yet, not that you'd expect him to be. Only I've heard him praying for them as if his heart was about to break. God can't mean a child to feel like that, can he?"

"We mustn't presume to know what God means, Miss Tate. I was taught it may take us the whole of eternity even to begin to glimpse his meaning." The priest ducked his head towards Ben. "Perhaps our little soldier would like to tell us in his own words what he feels."

He was trying to make it sound like an adventure, but it didn't seem at all like one to Ben. "What about?" Ben said awkwardly.

"Why, how you've felt since God took your family to Him."

Ben managed to think of something he could put into words. "I keep wondering where they've gone."

"Well, Ben, I would have thought a good boy who goes to such a fine Catholic school would know."

"He means purgatory, Ben."

"You knew that, didn't you? And I'm sure you can tell us from your catechism what it means."

Ben parroted the answer. Perhaps his aunt sensed his mounting dismay, because she said "It's a hard thing for a little boy to grasp."

"Hard means durable, Miss Tate. Shall I tell you something that may surprise you, Ben? I expect you're feeling very much as I felt when I was just about your age. See my grandmother up there? I lost her when I was nine years old."

He was referring to a yellowed oval photograph on the mantelpiece, Ben saw as his thoughts began to chatter. "I couldn't understand why an old lady who'd never done anyone any harm had to wait to be let into Heaven," the priest said.

Whatever Ben had avoided thinking since the car crash, it wasn't this. "Do you think she's there yet?" he said.

His aunt made a shocked sound, but the priest smiled indulgently at him. "That isn't for us to know, is it? If we thought we did we might stop praying for them, and that's one of the jobs God gives us on earth, to pay Him our prayers so our loved ones can get to Heaven sooner."

Ben was beginning to panic because this meant so little to him. "But some dead people don't have anyone on earth to pray for them."

The priest flashed his teeth at Ben's aunt. "He's a bright boy. It's a good job you're bringing him up in the faith," he said, and to Ben: "That's why we pray for all the souls in purgatory, not just those who belong to us."

"That's better now, isn't it, Ben?" his aunt said as if he'd scraped his knee. "You know where your mother and everyone is now, and you know you're helping them."

Ben knew nothing of the kind. Mustn't there be more souls in purgatory than there were stars in the sky, since Mr O'Toole had once told the assembled school that a single unconfessed sin could keep you in purgatory until the end of the world? If praying for all the dead people you'd never even met could help them, what was the point of singling out your own? If praying for them by name reduced their time in purgatory, how could that be anything but unfair to people who had nobody to pray for them by name? The whole set-up struck him as so unreasonable as to be meaningless, and that terrified him.

The priest leaned towards him almost confidentially. "I think you're wondering what all this suffering is for, aren't you? Such a bright boy would. Now, Ben, whatever happens to us in this life and after it, however hard it may seem, don't you think it must be worth it if it leads us to see God?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, if we have to suffer so as to be worthy of it, mustn't being able to see God for all eternity be a reward beyond anything we can imagine?"

"I suppose so."

The priest sat back. "I think that may do for now, Miss Tate. There's a little chap with a few big new ideas to turn over in his mind. If they're too much for you, Ben, don't be afraid to ask questions. Now what's this I see coming for a good boy? I do believe it's a glass of milk."

Ben thanked the housekeeper politely and concentrated on drinking the milk. He had plenty of questions, but he was sure that the answers weren't here. The priest must be mistaken in his thinking; he'd said himself that he didn't know what God meant. But then was the church mistaken about death and what was waiting beyond it? Ben thought so, and he felt as if Father Hynn had separated him further from his family, had sent them further into the unknown dark.

That night Ben prayed for them more intensely than ever, under his breath so that his aunt wouldn't hear. He prayed in front of the photograph and then in bed until he fell asleep. He kept imagining them in purgatory, naked and writhing like insects thrown on red-hot coals, unable even to die. He gripped his praying hands together as if their aching would drive out the pain which clenched his whole body, and prayed so hard that he no longer knew what he was saying. When the vision faded, there was only the cold dark that felt like a promise of peace.

SIX

On Halloween night the streets smelled of mist and charred leaves. All day Ben had felt surrounded by signs too secret to interpret: the dance of decaying leaves in the air, the long shadows where the autumn chill lurked like winter biding its time, a sun which looked swollen with blood as the mist dragged it down beyond the unconvincing cut-out shapes the houses had become. He was almost able to believe that the anticipation with which the growing nights affected him was only the excitement he could see on the faces of the children around him, but then why was it making him nervous?

The Milligans invited him and his aunt to spend the evening with them. After dinner Ben's aunt led him through the streets, gripping his arm harder whenever they met figures wearing masks or pointed hats. "They're just children dressed up," she kept muttering, unaware that he was nervous of them only in case they might jeer at his costume, a sheet which she had reluctantly lent him and which he had to bunch in his fist to prevent the skirt of it from tripping him up. At long last they reached their destination, where a grinning pumpkin flickered in the front-room window, and Mr Milligan opened the door. "Why, here's a Roman senator," he shouted. "Hitch up your toga, Bennius, and come in."

Mrs Milligan bustled out of the kitchen, carrying two aprons and an apple from which she took a loud bite. "He looks more like a little old pagan priest," she said and then, so forcefully that she spat bits of apple, "You don't really, Ben. You're the best ghost I've seen tonight. It makes me shiver just to look at you."