The Kind Folk (7 page)

He doesn't dream, in spite of remembering a story Terence told him about the children of the moon. People would see them when it was full, because then they were closest to taking form. They waxed with it and waned as well, and merged with the dark when it did. At the new moon you might mistake them for thorn bushes bleached by the light, unless you saw their faces that were thinner and spikier than bone. They would grow flesh as bushes grow leaves, and on nights of the harvest moon their round faces would be wider than their fat white bodies, and anyone they touched would see more by moonlight than they ever did at midday. Luke was never sure how appealing this was, and he doesn't find it attractive now. He's glad when the tale drifts away into the dark that leads to sleep.

A cry wakens him. It's his mother—no, it's Freda. As he strains his ears he hears Maurice grumbling "What's up, woman? It's only a dream." Luke hears an apologetic murmur, and the night settles down once more; at least, his hosts do. He peers about and eventually shuts his eyes, and tries not to feel like a child left alone with no light. When he dozes he's intermittently able to forget Freda's cry. "It's got in."

THE FACE FROM THE DARK

They've been stopped by traffic lights at the edge of Speke when they hear the song from the car that has pulled up beside Luke's car at traffic lights. "That's me," Sophie says. "Luke, it's me."

He switches on the radio and searches for the station. Her voice in both vehicles begins to duet with itself just as the refrain comes up—"A song we all can sing." The presenter fades the record out and sings the line. "Sophie Drew with the Liverpool sound for this century," he says, and so does his twin on the road. "Watch her climb the charts."

The show is on national radio, not local. The lights step down to green, and as the Lexus surges forward Sophie says "I still can't quite believe so many people like me."

"I can't believe anybody wouldn't, so just you believe in yourself."

"I will if you will."

"I'm still trying to decide who I am."

"You're who you made yourself, just like everybody else. The people you've known had something to do with it, but you're the one who had to make the choices." As Luke wonders if it can be so simple for anyone she says "You're Maurice and Freda and Terence and the bits of them you decided not to be."

"Is that how it worked with your parents?"

"I'm sure it was."

He's inclined to agree. He has grown to know them, classical musicians who lecture on the subject and who are even more delighted that their daughter writes songs than by her arranging and performing them. The speed limit on the open road lets the Lexus have its head, and he says "I wish you'd given me a chance to clear up at the house."

"I promise not to be appalled. I saw your place before I moved in, remember."

"That was a shadow. This is the real thing. I just don't want you trying to tidy up when you're what Freda's mother used to call delicate."

"We're sturdy even if we don't look it, the Drew women." When Luke doesn't answer she says "There's nothing I can't see, is there?"

"Terence asked me not to let people into the house, but he can't have meant you. He must have known he was leaving it to us both." Luke hesitates and doesn't know why before blurting "I found his diary last time I was there."

"Did it tell you anything?"

"Not that I noticed. Some of it might as well be in code."

There's a promise of green at the end of the concrete vista ahead—the bridge over the river. As he drives across it Luke can't identify exactly where he found the van, but he vows never to forget all that Terence did for him. A procession of glazed faces is slithering above the house. The train snakes away as Luke halts the car, and Sophie says "How long did he live here?"

"More than all my life."

"It's almost hidden, isn't it?" She clambers out of the car and blinks at the arch. "I think he was quite a private person," she says, "under everything we saw."

Luke finds he doesn't want to be reminded. He's anticipating resistance when he unlocks the front door, but there are no more bills. He tries the light and finds the electricity has indeed been switched off. The stale smell is waiting like a friend that's grown too old. Luke hurries to retrieve the bottle from the front room and empty it into the kitchen sink. "I should think so too," Sophie says and instantly relents. "No, I shouldn't think anything of the kind. I can imagine how you felt when you were here."

She's gazing at the relics in the front room: the gaping slippers, the coat the armchair has shrugged on. As she picks up the scattered pages of the newspaper she sees how Terence dug his pen into the listing for the Brittan show. "He must have been angry," she murmurs. "Maybe he thought Brittan was right."

Luke doesn't have time to examine his own anger. "Right how?"

"I'm not saying he was, just that Terence might have thought so. That's how he looked when Brittan tried to say it was his fault you had medical help."

"Well, it wasn't, and why should he have blamed himself all these years later?"

Suppose Terence was afraid that Luke might revert to the condition, perhaps from going on the Brittan show? As Luke tells himself there was no need for the fear Sophie says "Do you want to talk about it? You never have."

"We can bin that paper. Wait, there's no room." Luke unlocks and unbolts the back door to evict the smelly contents of the kitchen bin. As he dumps the bottle and the scragged bag in the dustbin against the weedy brick wall underneath the arch, a train rumbles overhead and the yard door jitters as though an intruder is fumbling with the latch. He secures the back door while Sophie finishes lining the kitchen bin. "Sorry for the wait," he says. "Hardly worth it. I kept waking Freda up, that was the problem."

Sophie folds the newspaper as small and thin as a book and lets the lid clap shut on it. "Do you remember what you were dreaming?"

"What, when I was six?" He's surprised to be able to say "It was the same thing for however long it lasted. Somebody was watching me and I don't think I wanted to see them."

"Did you, though?"

"They used to be at the window." He's disconcerted by how vivid the memory is growing. "Sometimes they were looking in upside down, more than one of them. And sometimes I thought their necks must be as long as a giraffe's if they were the right way up, or they could stretch that far."

"I'm not surprised you made a noise."

"That wasn't all," Luke says, though he's beginning to wish it had been. "If I didn't they would come in even though the window wasn't open and stand at the foot of the bed."

"They weren't as stretched as you thought, then."

"They could take all sorts of shapes," Luke says, and another memory lights up like a tableau in a ghost train: how the figures silhouetted in the moonlit dimness would lay their hands on the bedrail. They would grasp it as though they were establishing some form of ownership, and then all their hands would adopt another shape. It seems to him now that it resembled a symbol more than any hand ought to be able to do. "I've forgotten how they looked," he says, "before you ask."

"Did you tell anyone at the time?"

"I had to. Freda, Maurice, the doctor, the psychiatrist. Just that I kept dreaming somebody was at the window or in the room."

Sophie lowers herself onto one of the quartet of rickety chairs that loiter around the stained table. "What did they say?"

"Not a word I can remember. Sometimes I thought they hadn't got around to having mouths," Luke says and laughs, though not much. "You're asking me about the people I told, aren't you? The psychiatrist said it was nothing to worry about, so we didn't."

"There must have been more to it, Luke."

"She was the kind even the Arnolds liked. I'd say she thought psychiatry was her last resource after she'd tried everything else, certainly for somebody my age. She said I was highly imaginative and oughtn't to spend so much time on my own, and not to feed me close to bedtime, and keep an eye on what I read and watched. They'd have recommended her to their friends if they hadn't been so embarrassed about taking me to see her. But they did everything she said, and made sure I brought friends home from school, and I stopped waking Freda up."

"So the psychiatrist was all you needed."

"I'm not sure she cured me."

Sophie clasps her hands on her midriff as though she's protecting their child. "Why not, Luke?"

"I think I cured myself." He waits until she parts her hands. "I told you the Arnolds were embarrassed," he says. "I really think that made me feel worse than the dreams or disturbing Freda. I thought I wasn't the kind of son they'd hoped for, and so I did my best to be."

Sophie turns her hands up towards him, and he's put in mind of an opening flower. "What did you do?"

"Whenever the figures showed up I kept my eyes shut, even if they came into the room, and pretty soon they went away for good."

"You managed that when you were six years old, Luke?"

She's expressing admiration, not disbelief, but for an uneasy moment he feels she's implying that he couldn't have overcome his condition—that it's lying low inside him. "I hope they knew how brave you were," she says.

"Nobody needed to know."

"Well, I'm glad I do. They were proud of you, anyway, and they still are," Sophie says and stands up. "Shall we go on with the tour?"

The house stirs in response—at least, Luke imagines that the doors of the serving hatch fidget as the vibrations of a train reverberate through the bricks. He pulls the pair of lightweight doors wide to see Sophie come into the dining-room. With not much more than a glance at the fishing tackle and the magazines she says "Where are his books?"

"In the library," Luke says with some force on Terence's behalf. "He used to say that was how you helped people to read, keeping the libraries open. I expect that's where he found the tales he told me."

"See how many you can remember, then you'll be able to save them up."

Which of them might he tell their child? He remembers Terence saying there were places so remote they weren't on any map and so isolated that they hadn't caught up with the world. They were still in the process of becoming, so that time and space and the tyranny of matter had less of a hold over them, though surely Terence hadn't used those words. He'd talked about a jungle where explorers stumbled on a valley in the mist, where birds of an unknown species flew away at their approach and settled in the trees to wait for them. The explorers wondered if they'd caught some kind of jungle fever, because as the birds flapped into the distance they appeared to grow larger—far too large. This wasn't the reason the party made a wide detour around the valley and never recorded the location; it was the sight of a solitary figure watching from beside a bush as if he was guarding the path into the valley. He wore a mask like the head of a creature too prehistoric to be named, or was it a mask? The explorers retreated into the mist, praying they weren't followed, and one of them risked whispering what they'd all seen: though the shrub hadn't been as tall as the watcher, it was no shrub—it must have been at least fifty feet high. But you didn't have to go into the jungle, according to Terence; if you knew where and how to look you could still find traces of the shaping of the world.

Would Luke ever tell his child anything like that? He doesn't know what effect it might have, which feels like being unsure how it affected him. Before he can decide he sees Sophie making for the hall. "Sorry," he says and manages to reach it first. "Upstairs is worse."

She lingers in front of the pictures and the framed mosaic in the hall. By the time she follows him Luke has picked up the ragged towel and draped it over the chilly metal rail. The dead fly is marinating in the coffee, which he empties down the toilet. He's rinsing the mug when Sophie glances into the bathroom and moves on to Terence's bedroom.

He almost breaks the mug in his haste to put it down, but he's too late. She's tucking the dishevelled sheet under the mattress, and without too much more effort she stoops to drag the quilt onto the bed. "I'm just straightening up for now," she says. "We'll need to make a laundry trip if any of this is worth it." Letting go of the quilt, she takes hold of the solitary pillow.

The house shivers, or Luke's vision does, as a train passes close overhead. The muffled thunder seems to darken the room, unless Luke's apprehension is hindering his senses. Sophie lifts the pillow and begins to tremble—no, she's shaking it into some kind of shape. There was nothing under it, no face lurking like an insect beneath a stone, not even a sculpted face. She lays the pillow to rest and glances at the ceiling as the rumble of wheels mutters into silence. "I suppose you can ignore anything," she says, "if you live with it long enough."

"Maybe he couldn't any more," Luke says and leaves the thought behind as he follows Sophie into the front bedroom.

It smells older than it should, besides dusty and airless. He makes his way to the window, where he has to force the rusty catch out of its groove. He's shoving the sash as high as it will judder when Sophie says "Do you know what I think is in here?"

He swings around to find her gazing at the contents of the room. "What is?"

"A song," she says as if she isn't quite speaking to him. "Maybe a lot of them. Here's a horseman who was so eager to get where he was going he's left half of himself behind. Here's somebody offering us the moon to play with. Here's a ring for a giant to give his girl and stars for her hair. Here's a hand looking for its fingers and an eye to help it look ..." Stroking her belly, she murmurs "I think someone likes it here."

"Let's decide what to do when we've sorted the place out," Luke finds he's anxious to establish.

"We could make a start if I didn't have a gig tonight. We'll come back very soon."

She could almost be advising her little passenger if not the house itself. Luke shuts the window as she heads for the stairs. He's on the landing when he glimpses something pale in Terence's bedroom. A glance at the object sends him hurrying downstairs. As Sophie climbs into the car he loiters in the hall. "Won't be a moment," he calls, "don't know if I locked the window," and sprints back to the room.