The Perils and Dangers of this Night (5 page)

'No, Alan, lower the pistol, do not fire.' My father's
voice was in my ear, actually inside my head, not
shouting, but perfectly firm in the certainty that I would
obey him. The vole swam to the bank of the stream and
climbed out of the water. It was slick and sleek like a rat,
until it shook off a shower of droplets and fluffed up like
a cuddly toy. Its eyes were black. Its bead of a nose
twitched at me. As I lowered the pistol, the vole turned
away and disappeared into a dark tunnel.

My father took the pistol from me and we walked back
to the house. I was sickened in my stomach that I'd spoilt
the day and dreaded what he might say to my mother.
But I remember my heart had swelled and my eyes
prickled with tears of love and gratitude when, at the
Christmas dinner table, she'd asked if I'd done well with
the pistol and he'd smiled and said, 'Alan did very well –
he learned a lot this morning.'

Last Christmas: the pistol from my father, the radio from my
mother. Now the vision faded and disappeared and I stared into the empty darkness
of the dormitory. I pressed the hiss of the radio to my ear, and I wept, with
great gulping sobs. As I swallowed, the tears scalded my throat.

Sleep, and the burning in my throat, brought the dream
to me again – the faces and the room I didn't know. The
music that Kemp had snatched out of my ear suddenly
blared again, the lurch and swoop of a familiar, unrecognisable
sound, and a gloomy college room strewn with
paper whirled around me. This time the faces of the man
and woman blurred into view together, locked in a kiss
which dissolved in a muddling of pain and tears as
though the fusion of their lips had burned them. She was
weeping, he was clawing at his throat and choking, and
a voice said 'I disgust myself' in a weary monotone.
When the lid of a piano slowly opened – and as it did so
a pit of the deepest horror seemed to yawn inside my
stomach – the reflection of the boy, me at first and then
not me, beckoned me close and gestured for me to peer
down into the hole. I leaned in. Something like a wire
glimmered and snarled towards me and caught my throat
and I recoiled with it scalding into my skin . . .

I awoke with a jolt, as if I'd fled to the end of a leash
around my neck and been yanked to a bone-breaking
standstill.

I lay still, in a quiver of relief that it was over. The
radio was still hissing in my ear.

Outside on the lawn, a cock pheasant scratched at the
hard ground. It was a cold bright day, and the grass
was white with frost. It had been a freezing night. Now
the sky was silvery grey, the trees bare and black, and the
world was a softly creaking, tinkling metallic place. The
bird puffed out its feathers, red and gold and iridescent
in the thin sunlight. It scratched again, and its little
breath was a puff of vapour in the cold air.

Inside the house, I was singing. I'd been singing
throughout the morning, and now I was tired of it. It was
early afternoon, and we'd only stopped briefly for a lunch
of tinned tomato soup and slices of white bread that Mrs
Kemp had brought from the kitchen. I sang –
Three kings
from Persian lands afar
– while Dr Kemp, employing all
his guile as a musician to avoid the few minutely
out-of-tune notes which offended him so much, sketched
an accompaniment on the grand piano.

Mrs Kemp sat by the hearth. The hall was grey and
dismal. There was no fire, so the room was probably not
much warmer than it was outside. The lights on the
Christmas tree had not been turned on. As I sang, my
breath plumed around me. Dr Kemp, in his everyday
tweedy jacket, didn't seem to feel the cold, and Mrs
Kemp, a prisoner of her wheelchair, was swaddled in a
red tartan blanket. She sat by the dead fire, and she
brushed and brushed the big black dog, over and over,
keeping a kind of rhythm with the music. From time to
time she would stop brushing and pick all the hair from
the brush and toss it onto the ashes, until there was quite
a mat of it lying there.

We reached the end of the carol. Mrs Kemp said, 'That
was lovely, Alan,' and she leaned out of her chair to
throw another ball of fur into the hearth. I waited for a
moment, standing with my hands on the top of the piano,
for a word from Dr Kemp.

The word came. 'Again,' he said. 'Let's try to get it
right.'

Mrs Kemp was quick to say, 'Well, I thought it was
lovely,' and there was a terseness in her voice which I
hadn't heard before. 'That's my opinion, for what it's
worth. I know we're all ''striving to shine'' at Foxwood,
but sometimes a bit of praise where praise is due might
be nice.'

The headmaster looked at her as though she had used
a word he had never heard before, a word from a
language with which he was not familiar. '
Nice
? We
aren't striving to be
nice
.' He made a play of searching
the ceiling for inspiration, and then added, with what he
thought was withering sarcasm, 'Now there's a good idea
for a school motto: '
strive to be nice
'. Yes, let's change
the motto for next year and see what a difference it
makes to our exam results.'

'You know what I mean, my dear,' she countered, and
somehow the tiniest edge of exasperation on her sweet,
soft voice was more cutting than his clumsy attempt at
irony. 'I know it's a banal sentiment that only silly,
mediocre people like me allow themselves, but at Christmas-
time it is nice to be nice to one another, or at least
to try to. That's what I think.'

Dr Kemp weighed her words carefully. He instinctively
felt for the crooked, paralysed fingers on his left hand,
and massaged them as if he could bring them back to life
again. And he said, with a great effort, 'You're right, my
dear. The boy sings beautifully. With work and perseverance
he might one day achieve some of the things which
I did not. And so, for that reason, let's sing it again. Let's
get it right.'

So I sang it again, although my mouth was dry and my
lips were chapped after the hot soup. This time Dr Kemp
stood up from the piano, gesturing me to continue
singing, and he caressed my knuckles with the ivory
baton to keep me in time. I sang, and I could smell the
man's jacket and his breath and his hair because he
loomed so close, sometimes even placing a heavy hand on
my stomach to whisper, 'From here, you breathe from
here . . .' even as I sang without pause or hesitation. And
I reached the end of the carol, unaccompanied, only to
wait for the absolute verdict as Dr Kemp leaned to the
piano and touched the chord which would signify that
my voice was either perfectly in tune or minutely wrong.

The chord hummed in the cold, still room, hung with
the motes of dust from the dead fire and the dead tree. I
knew I was good, because my ear was true and had
always been true, long before Dr Kemp had singled me
out. He listened to the notes until they faded to nothing
and at last he said, 'Yes, that is good.'

High praise. Mrs Kemp's eyes glistened as she smiled
across at me, moved by the beauty of the carol and the
unqualified approval of her husband. Only Wagner
sounded an off-key note. He groaned long and loud, with
a horrible rasping in his throat like a death rattle, so that
Mrs Kemp laughed and even the headmaster chuckled at
the sound of it.

'Yes, Wagner, time to go out,' she said. 'At long last . .
.'

A minute later – the time it took for me to go swerving
and skidding through the corridors and into the changing-
room for my outdoor coat and shoes and back to the
great hall – I followed Wagner as he burst from the front
of the school and into the colder air of the outside world.
The dog lumbered ahead of me, gathering speed into a
lolloping gallop, charging across the lawn and towards
the woodland. Another minute, and the two of us were
crashing through the dry bracken of the forest, winding
through the stands of smooth white birches, in and out
of the tall columns of the beech trees.

A grey and steely place, so that, if anyone else had been
there to see it, my tuft of red hair would have been the
brightest thing in the forest, flickering like a spark
through the afternoon shadows. I yelled, my voice a little
hoarse from the hours of singing and this sudden exertion
– 'Go on, Wagner, go!' – as the heavy black bulk of the
dog forced through the undergrowth ahead of me. With
a glance over my shoulder I saw that the flinty façade of
the school, with its rows of empty black windows, had
fallen away and faded, that I'd escaped at last and was
dodging and burrowing deeper and deeper into the
woods. With another glance, I saw that the dog had
startled a pheasant from the bracken, and the bird ran at
first, keeping ahead of the dog, until it launched itself into
the air and rocketed up, smashing through twigs until it
broke clear, a brilliant-hot rocket of a bird which filled
the trees with guttural croaks as it made its escape.

'Go on, Wagner, get him, get him!' I shouted, as the
dog pressed a hopeful, joyful, futile pursuit. We ran, until
at last, as the woodland banked upwards where the lane
wound through it, the dog flopped into a nettle bed and
lay there heaving, his tongue flopping like an eel and
flecked with foam. I threw myself onto the ground and
lay by the dog, flat on my back, gathering my breath as
I gazed through the tops of the trees to the darkening sky.

A silence grew around us. At first the only sounds were
our breathing, slowing and slowing to a steady rhythm,
and the sounds of the forest on a late afternoon in
midwinter that I knew so well: the cluck of the blackbird,
the tick of the wren, the distant staccato of pheasant, and
always the sway and creak of the branches. Dusk already.
And never a silence, for the woodland was a whispering,
living thing, as alive in the depths of winter as it had been
in the sappy days of spring and bloom of summer.

I lay there and listened. Stillness, a sense of waiting –
waiting for the darkness to fall and the night to come.

But then there was another sound. The dog heard it
first. Wagner stopped panting, stopped breathing, and
listened. I heard it too. It was the sound of an engine.

It grew louder. A car was coming along the lane,
winding through the forest towards us.

I crawled on my belly to the top of the bank, so that I
was overlooking the lane from a height of fifteen or
twenty feet. The lane was a narrow cutting, barely wide
enough for one car, with passing places here and there to
allow a flow of traffic. On either side the banks were
sheer, ancient hedgerows, much older than Foxwood
Manor and the surrounding estate: probably this lane had
been a cart track through the forest for hundreds of years.
Now, as the dog bellied up beside me to have the same
view, I peered into the distance and heard the sound of
the engine grow louder. It was a snarling, intermittently
roaring sound, the testy, impatient note of a car that was
forced to slow and slow and nearly stop for the sharp
bends before accelerating briefly along a short straight
before slowing again. And I saw the lights: already, only
four o'clock in the afternoon, it was dark in the deep
tunnels of the lane, where the banks closed in and the
trees lowered their bare branches over and across it; so I
saw the headlamps cutting towards me, flashing their
beams into the forest, now bright, now dimmed, as the
car turned this way and that.

The dog growled a deep, throaty, rattling growl. I put
one arm around the animal's body and snuggled him
close. The car burst into the cutting below us.

An extraordinary sight, at such a time, in such an out
of the way, forsaken corner of the English countryside.
The car swerved round the bend too fast, headlamps
blazing, the engine snarling, and as the rear wheels
fishtailed out of control on a patch of frozen mud, it
slithered to a standstill with its long nose rammed into
the hedgerow, the front wheels mired in a ditch. Long
nose, red flanks streaked with mud, the headlamps now
blinkered in a tangle of hawthorn and blackthorn and
nettles.

I goggled from my vantage point. It was an E-type
Jaguar, quite new, something so beautiful and wonderful,
so unexpected, that I mouthed an involuntary
wow
and
stared, aghast and agog. The car was stuck. The filthiest,
loveliest car I'd ever seen, the wheels spun and the engine
howled as the driver crunched it into reverse and tried to
accelerate backwards. There were two people in the car,
a man and a woman, bundled in coats and scarves. I
could see them quite clearly – mouthing at each other,
their faces white with anger – because, despite the bitter
cold and the quickly smothering darkness, the hood was
folded down. And now, the deep, narrow lane, which had
been so quiet and still a few moments before, was
swirling with fumes, loud with the noise of the engine,
bright with white and orange light, as though a machine
from another planet had suddenly landed.

The driver got out. The engine settled to a rumbling
growl as he stood up and slammed the door as hard as
he could. He was tall and dark, young – hard to tell in
the dusk and with a big black coat pulled up to his ears,
a scarf wrapped around his mouth. Now he tugged the
scarf from his face, said, 'Fuck,' and marched across the
lane so that he was standing just below the spot where
the dog and I were lying. He fumbled with his coat and
trousers and started to urinate into the hedgerow. A
cloud of steam rose into the air. The dog wrinkled his
nose at the scent of it. Then the young man zipped
himself up and strode back to the car.

'You try,' he said. 'Come on, Sophie, you try, while I
push. Just slide across, jam the fucking thing into reverse
and let the clutch out.'

The passenger, a girl as dark as the man and just as
swaddled in coat and scarf, struggled to move across into
the driver's seat, muttering impatiently as she snagged her
coat on the gear-stick and hand-brake. 'What the hell are
we d-d-doing here?' she stammered. 'I didn't even know
you had a b-b-brother till last week.'

'You didn't waste much time then, did you?' the man
hissed back. 'Now, clutch down and find reverse – come
on . . .'

There was a horrible clang as the girl jerked the car
into gear. Once more the air was filled with smoke and a
terrible snarling, as she accelerated hard and the wheels
spun in the mud. At the same time, the man forced
himself into the hedge and heaved with all his weight
under the nose of the car. Suddenly, throwing a splatter
of mud and ice from its tyres and into the other side of
the lane, it lurched sideways and was clear again. The girl
just managed to stop before it rammed backwards into
the opposite hedgerow.

The man stood with his hands on his hips, his head
thrown back, regaining his breath after the effort of
pushing. When he crossed to the car, he paused and
kicked at the off-side front tyre. 'It's going down, but it'll
get us there. Move over.'

With another struggle of big coat and gear-stick, the
girl was back into the passenger seat and the man was
behind the wheel. A moment later the car throttled
forwards, the wheels spinning again as it tried to grip,
and it seemed to leap through the cutting and along the
lane like some kind of wild animal.

Then it was gone, around the first corner. There was
only one place it could have been going to: Foxwood
Manor, the only place at the end of the lane. I jumped to
my feet, tugging the dog with me. 'Come on, Wagner,
let's go!'

I was thrilled to have seen such a car appear in the
lane: an E-type, so sleek and slim and smooth, so dirty.
My head rang with the sound of it, and I could still smell
the fumes of its engine as I hurried to follow the dog
through the trees. I was strangely excited by the quick,
sudden vision I'd had of the driver and the girl, and the
language the man had used: words that I and the other
boys at school knew and had even tried ourselves in a
clumsy, experimental way, but which I'd never ever heard
in real life, from the mouth of a real person. I tried now, as
I ran. 'Fuck,' I said, and even in the emptiness and growing
darkness of the woodland where no one could see me or
hear me, the word felt awkward and ugly in my mouth.