The Kind Folk (4 page)

"There," Terence gasps—at least, that's what it sounds like. He has raised his hand as though he means to point, but clamps it to the dashboard and cranes forward as his voice gives out. He's gazing at the house so fiercely that he shudders with the effort; certainly he's shivering. Luke drives towards it as fast as he dares, and then he sees what Terence must have seen. Somebody appears to be standing at the upstairs window.

It has to be a reflection from one of the houses opposite. The figure seems not just to be resting its forehead against the pane; the white face looks pressed as flat as the glass, squashed virtually featureless. The rest of the shape is too blurred to be distinguishable. Before Luke can focus on it or tell Terence what it must be, his passenger topples across him and snatches the keys.

The van judders to a halt in front of the house as Luke tramps on the brake. Terence has been thrown against the dashboard, clutching the keys. Luke reaches for them, but they clank along the dashboard as Terence drags them out of reach. Perhaps another spasm is making him do so, because his head lolls sideways, thumping the windscreen. His eyes are still on Luke, but in a moment they're as empty as the windows of the house.

THE LAST ROOM

When Luke's car draws up outside the house a woman turns to watch him from beside the spiritualist church. She looks shy, perhaps about her generous proportions, which she has tried to camouflage with a long white dress that only succeeds in suggesting she's more pregnant than women generally are at her age. She hesitates while he locks the car, but as he makes to unlock the front door of the house she plods along the narrow pavement to him. "Are you one of Mr Arnold's people?" she says and then blinks at his face. "I'm sorry, you're a relative, aren't you?"

By now Luke has concluded that his looking like the Arnolds is one reason why he was misidentified after he was born. "You can tell."

"Do you mind if I ask what took him?"

"A heart attack. Two of them."

"Didn't he know to be careful of himself? I suppose that's men. He'd been drinking a lot, you know."

"I didn't," Luke says and feels inadequate.

"He'd let the whole street know when he came back from the pub. He was carrying on to nobody at all."

Luke feels compelled to ask "What was he saying?"

"From what we could make out he wanted somebody to stay away from someone else. You'd have thought they were there, he was being so fierce with them."

Luke imagines Terence's voice resounding in the darkness of the arch that's taller than his house. "We'll pray for him," the woman says and indicates the church.

As Luke thanks her she glances at the upstairs window. She retreats towards the church while Luke unlocks the mortise lock, and she's gone by the time he turns the Yale. He's remembering a moment from his early childhood, when Terence flung the door open with a cry of "Here's our magic boy" that embarrassed both Luke and Maurice. The door gives a few inches before it's blocked by an obstruction. It has crumpled a bunch of dun official envelopes—bills, which he lays at the foot of the stairs that bisect the hall. A stale smell meets him as he shuts the door: old food and musty paper, a smell he would expect from a house that has been abandoned longer than this one. It makes him feel guilty for not having spent more time with Terence. If he had, mightn't Terence still be alive?

He's heading for the front room when thunder masses overhead. It's closer than the sky and too prolonged for a thunderclap, and he seems to feel the house shudder. A train is rumbling along the line above the roof. Perhaps you can become unaware of anything if you've lived with it long enough, or at any rate take it for granted. It looks as if Terence was growing too used to solitariness, given the state of the front room.

It feels steeped in dusk, no longer lit by Terence's stories or his enthusiasm for them. An inch of stagnant beer is turning murky in a bottle next to an armchair that slumps in front of the television. A worn pair of slippers is splayed on the carpet as if to represent a step in a grotesque dance. A coat Terence sported for many years is draped untidily over half of the back of the chair. The latest issue of the local newspaper is strewn across the floor, and on the television listings page the Brittan show has been marked so fiercely that the inky blotch resembles a black hole. Could all this untidiness have been why Terence didn't want anybody in the house?

Luke advances down the hall, which is decorated with framed images. A painting of a windswept river shows figures in midstream huddled in a boat—the ferry that was rowed across the Mersey centuries before a bridge was built at Runcorn. There's a tattered brownish photograph of the Liverpool waterfront under construction, with one lonely sculptured bird perching on a domed tower to await its avian twin. A fragment of mosaic preserved under glass depicts another winged creature, though it's impossible to guess its species, since it has a jagged gap for a head. All these are souvenirs Terence collected from properties he demolished. They're just some of his attempts to keep the past alive.

His brother never understood why Terence chose to stay here when he could have afforded so much better, and Luke is beginning to wonder; it resembles a hiding-place more than a home. The next room was meant for dining, with a hatchway in the wall giving access to the kitchen, but the unpolished table is bare except for several magazines. Luke wonders if they're Terence's guilty secret until he sees they're devoted to angling, not a pastime Luke associates with him. Was it a bid for distraction? While a rod and tackle occupy a corner of the room, they look not merely new but unused. The house begins to reverberate with the passing of another train, and Luke imagines the vibration is troubling the flimsy doors in the wall; he could almost fancy they're about to be flung wide to reveal a face. Maurice always seemed to think that Terence indulged his own imagination, and at the moment Luke could think he's right that you can have too much.

He finds several days' worth of utensils and plates trying to lie low under the opaque water in the dingy metal sink. He hauls at the unpleasantly slimy chain to clear the plughole, which gurgles as if it's trying to imitate a chuckle without much of a throat while he sluices the unwashed items and consigns them to the draining-board. The window above the sink overlooks the yard, such as it is—a cracked concrete rectangle under the arch, occupied by bins and a few scrawny unsunned plants in boxes of soil. A wall about ten feet high, fanged with broken glass, bricks up the far side of the arch, where a door scaly with old paint is secured with a massive padlock. There's nothing in the kitchen to detain Luke, least of all the sight of an empty tin poking its round mouth out of the pedal bin and drooping the outsize lip of its lid.

Another train goes over as he climbs the stairs, and he thinks the chipped banister trembles under his hand. He hurries upstairs into the insubstantial mass of sound, which feels as if it's accumulating in his brain. As he shoves the bathroom door open, an object with not much of a shape slithers to the floor. It's a ragged towel that he has dislodged from the rail on the wall.

There's another movement, as soundless as it's violent—the struggles of a large black fly in a half-drunk mug of coffee beside the sink. Luke wouldn't bother venturing into the room except to identify the pillbox in the cabinet, which is ajar. When he slides the mirrored door aside, losing his reflection that's infected with a rash of spatters of toothpaste, he's dismayed to see how many medicines Terence was prescribed for high blood pressure and a heart condition. Both shower curtains have been tugged loose from several of their hooks, but Luke needn't imagine Terence wrenching them apart, having fancied that he heard an intruder in the house.

His bedroom does suggest that kind of mental state. The quilt has flopped on the carpet, and the sheet has pulled free of the mattress; it's so crumpled that it could be describing the chaos of a nightmare. Clothes crouch on a chair at the foot of the bed. One door of the wardrobe is open, revealing suits and shirts lined up like images of Terence squashed lifeless—incomplete cut-out representations of him. They remind Luke of a story Terence used to tell, about an orphaned shadow that made its lair among clothes in wardrobes. Only one room is left—the front bedroom—and Luke pushes the door wide.

The curtains are shut tight, which has to mean the figure he saw at the window was indeed a reflection, if he needed any proof. Although whatever colour they once possessed has faded pale as fear, they still darken the room, and he has to take care not to tread on the objects that clutter the floor. When he takes hold of the curtains the heavy fabric seems to stir in his hands; he could fancy that he has roused handfuls of parasites—encouraged them to hatch, perhaps. In a moment the sensation evaporates like the memory of a dream, and he drags the curtains as far as they will stagger on
the
rusty rail.

He isn't prepared for the view from the window. Beyond the terrace opposite he can see the road bridge. Cars are racing past and, worse, over the spot where Terence's heart attack halted the van. Luke imagines the tyres rubbing out traces of the man he knew as his uncle, and he feels as though the loss has caught up with him at last, gouging a hollow at the core of him. He can't help hoping to find a keepsake as he turns to the room.

A small desk stands in the nearest corner, hidden from the houses opposite. Perhaps Terence has been keeping secrets in a battered ledger, which is as thick as Luke's forearm and occupies most of the top of the desk. Suppose it means that he was falsifying the accounts for his firm and wanted Luke to hide this from the authorities? Luke would rather not deal with anything like that just yet, and he surveys the rest of the room.

It's full of souvenirs. A broken plaque depicts a rearing horse with its rider missing from the waist up. Beside it on the dusty carpet a jagged section of a stone frieze represents a parade or a dance. Some of the participants are not just leggy but hirsute, and erosion has robbed them all of faces. A fragment of ironwork, perhaps from a gate, contains a rusty smiling moonlike face that's flanked by open hands Luke initially mistakes for wings. An irregular piece of stained glass represents a dark blue sky in which stars form a constellation he doesn't recognise, while below them is either a halo or a ring filched from a planet such as Saturn. A marble hand too incomplete for its gesture to be clear lies next to a portion of a marble face—most of the smooth white brow, which is overlaid by a pallid wisp of hair, and enough beneath the forehead to include a single eye that, despite the absence of a pupil, looks unwaveringly watchful. None of these items means much to
Luke
,
but he draws a sharp breath that tastes of dust and aged paper as he notices an object in a corner where the sunlight doesn't reach. It's a skull.

Or rather it must be a carving of one. The irregular remains of the features suggest that the face looked none too human, and it's crowned with an intricate tangle of branches of its own substance, as if the brain has grown uncontrollably luxuriant and sprouted forth, unless the cranium is burgeoning like coral. The sight revives a memory that feels like starting awake. "Flowers grow up to the sun," Terence told him once, "but some bones grow up to the moon."

If that was part of a story, Luke can't recall the rest. No doubt the sculpture suggested Terence's fantasy. As Luke stoops to examine the item the contents of the hollow sockets swell to meet him—nothing like eyes, just his own shadow. He cradles the skull and is carrying it to the window when he seems to feel movement between his hands, as if he has wakened something inside his burden. Surely it's just a loose fragment, and he takes a firmer grip. He mustn't know his own strength, or the carving is more fragile than it looks. He hasn't reached the window when the skull implodes in his hands without a sound and crumbles into bony shards. As they strike the floor they disintegrate further, and in a moment nothing but pale dust is left—not even the memory of how the object felt for Luke to hold.

He feels like a child who has caused damage somewhere he was trusted to be careful. How could he have been so clumsy with such a delicate item? Rather than risk doing any more harm he turns to the ledger. Above the river beyond the road bridge a bloated moon has crept into view, and as he opens the massive volume he could fancy that a hint of daytime moonlight has settled on the page. The ledger is a journal written entirely in capitals, and it doesn't appear to relate to Terence's firm. The first word Luke sees is his own name.

GRACES FIELD. LUKE SHOWED ANIMALS.
The large sprawling letters look no less childish than the grammar, as if they've betrayed the writer's secret self. The entry is dated almost a quarter of a century ago, but Luke thinks he recalls the day when Terence took him walking outside Ormskirk. They'd stood in the middle of a field for so long that Luke had lost all sense of his own body, and at last wild animals had begun to emerge from a wood—squirrels, rabbits, a hare, a fox. Didn't Terence tell him they were putting on a show for him? Presumably they'd acted as wild creatures do when they're unaware of being watched. Luke must have moved eventually and scared them off, because he remembers Terence saying "See what you did."

He leafs through the journal and keeps seeing his name. Other entries record places Terence visited and mention how kind the local people were. Some pages contain stories or notes for them, many of which apparently came to Terence in the night. Quite a few seem unfamiliar; perhaps Terence never told them to Luke. The moon is peering down like a head cocked to spy in the window without much of a face. If Luke reads the entire journal he wouldn't be surprised to find himself still in the house after dark.

He shuts the ledger on a desiccated sprig of vegetation, another souvenir of Terence's travels, which resembles an insect more than a foot long with an irregular arrangement of legs. As he carries the ledger downstairs the treads shudder underfoot; the extra weight must be shaking them, however much it feels like being followed. He lowers the book into the boot of his car and locks the house before glancing up. A pallid object that appears to be doing its best to watch him is pressed against the glass—the reflection of the moon. No matter how fast he drives on the way home, the embryonic mask in the sky stays with him.