The Waking That Kills (13 page)

got a feeling, a kind of calm feeling. know what I’m going to do. don’t need to think. suddenly it’s nice again. art club, a dark rainy cosy october afternoon.

erroll garner. quince. batik. and the wax is boiling.

someone’s banging on the door, someone’s shouting outside...

I get the wax off the gas ring, carry it across to the kids.

white faces. big eyes. big eyes better than mine.

not fair. so I pour the wax.

Chapter Thirteen

I
SPENT A
long time in the shower. I ran the water as cold as I could get it and stood there in my shirt and shorts. And then I peeled them off and soaped myself from head to toe and examined my body.

The bruises on my ribs were changing colour: yellows and browns and darkening blotches of purple at the different points of impact with the branches of the Scots pine. I soaped and rinsed and massaged gingerly with my fingertips, and I wondered what the boy might make of the varying shades.

Colours and shapes... whatever he might see in the bruises which were altering as my body adjusted to the pain, that afternoon in the school artroom had been life-changing for him. A few thoughtless words had blighted his prospects of emulating the father he hero-worshipped, his boyish dreams had been shattered, he’d been grounded. A trivial thing, for a teenage boy to be colour-blind, not uncommon or noteworthy, unless it simply, unalterably, thwarted everything.

Life-changing for one of the other boys too. So Juliet had told me, when Lawrence had finished his horribly casual drawling of what he’d done and he’d loafed into the garden. She’d closed the story with a pithy footnote: one of the boys had been permanently blinded by the wax.

‘So now you know,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t take him out of school because he’s colour-blind. He was kept in a kind of detention-centre and they ran all sorts of psychiatric tests on him. I was here on my own and it was awful. Whenever I went to the village or into town I had people staring at me and even calling me in the street. And someone did that paint-job on my car, I don’t know who, maybe the boy’s mother or father or someone...’

She’d crossed the room towards me. I thought she was going to touch me or hold me, or she wanted to be touched or held by me, but she went past and looked out of the door to see where Lawrence had gone.

We’d both looked out. He was outside with the cat. He’d confiscated the newspaper from it. It had torn the ball open, and bits of the newsprint were scattered on the grass, like the feathers of a bird it had killed. Now, belying its prowess as a hunter, it was rolling on its back and letting the boy tickle its furry white belly. The boy, having lulled the cat into an almost hypnotic state, straightened up and wandered down the garden, where he tossed the ball high into the air and watched it splash into the middle of the pond.

‘You smell of us.’ Juliet had turned to me at last. Her hands went to my waist and I winced in anticipation of her touching my ribs. Hiding her face close to my chest, she’d said, ‘You smell of us. Go and get showered and then do what you want. You could pack up your stuff and get out of here. It’s a thirty-minute walk to the top of the lane and there’s a bus every hour.’ She lifted her face and looked up at me. ‘But I want you to stay. And I think, in his odd, perverse sort of way, Lawrence wants you to stay as well.’

I wasn’t so sure about that. And I wasn’t sure what was happening with me and Juliet. My body, a foolish man’s body, seemed to know. Despite the coldness of the shower, it reacted unequivocally when I thought of our love-making in the hearse.

So what did I do? Get the bus back to Grimsby? I put on my favourite t-shirt, the one I used for my late-afternoon runs into the jungle, worn and washed seven days a week for years. It had faded to grey, but the print on it was still clear:
Sarawak, Borneo,
with a representation of a hornbill surrounded by the scroll-work typical of the ethnic Iban. And I went upstairs to the tower.

The boy had showered too. Indeed his room was more fragrant, or less pungent than usual. He’d sprayed something around, an air-freshener or a cologne. He’d opened the windows on all four sides, and the very sky, with all the scents of the woodland and the summer itself, was breezing in. The model planes were whirling and clacking overhead, engaged in an endless dog-fight, and the boy and his cat were sprawled on the bed. He didn’t seem at all surprised that I’d come in. He had some books open in front of him, and, as though I’d been there all the time and we’d been engaged in a conversation, he was saying, ‘Yes, the footless birds, the Latin name for swifts and swiftlets is
apodidae,
meaning footless... because their feet are so small and feeble and almost nothing at all...’

He turned and looked at me as I stood in the doorway. ‘And what was it you were saying about devil-birds and some kind of spooky folklore? I like the idea that they’re so specialised for flying that their feet have shrivelled. I mean, like the planes my Dad flies, they’re so awesome in flight that any other kind of unnecessary stuff’s been designed out of them.’

I hesitated in the doorway. He waved me closer to look at the books he’d spread onto the bed. ‘They’re my Dad’s,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d dig them out. I think there are more somewhere, under Mum and Dad’s bed or something.’

I hesitated for another second, and then I sat on the bed. I could’ve turned and walked out. A bus every hour. But I sat on the bed, and I heard myself windily speaking, as though it was someone else’s voice in the blustering room... ‘devil-birds, yes, because they’re so dark and mysterious and screaming like crazy, hurtling and swerving and never stopping... and legends about the swifts, mating in mid-air and sleeping in mid-air... and when it gets dark and the swifts go quiet and disappear, they vanish into ponds and lakes and they stay there all night, deep in the mud at the bottom...’

The boy had almost stopped breathing. He was sipping the air and holding it in his chest and letting it seep out again. My voice took up again, windswept, weaving in the clack and clatter of the planes on the ceiling. ‘...or they go to the moon, look hard and you’ll see the moon is shaded and blotched with patches of grey... enormous flocks of swifts, clinging with their tiny feet and roosting all night...’

Thoughtful, he reached under his pillow and pulled something out. It was the piece in batik he’d brought to show me the other day. The Scots pine, the bright moon, the dark pond.

He stared at it and pursed his lips. ‘Funny, I did this,’ he said very softly, almost wistfully, ‘I did this in the art club with Mr Bray last year, before... before it all happened. And now you’re here and we’re talking about it and I never thought... I mean I’d never really noticed the swifts before, I’d never really seen them. But look, look what I did... I’ve even done the little grey shadows, the swifts roosting on the moon...’

Indeed he had. It was beautifully executed. We examined it closely. ‘And now you’ll always see them,’ I said, ‘you’ll see them and marvel at them until it’s time for them to go away at the end of the summer.’

‘Maybe they won’t go away,’ he said. ‘Do the things you like always have to go away?’

He folded the batik and pushed it under his pillow again. He did it with a childish gesture which was odd in such a rangy, manly boy: he had a downy face, hairy legs with great muscular calves like a cyclist’s, an Adam’s apple like a golf-ball in his throat, but he kept the picture he’d done in art club under his pillow, like a comforter.

He noticed me watching him. ‘I made it for my Dad,’ he said, with a shrug and a mocking smile. ‘I keep it here for when he comes back. The big tree, because he built the tree-house so I could go up there and watch for him coming back from his missions... the pond, because he told me stuff about it since I was little, about the monster pike and stuff... and the moon, well, it just looks good, and now it’s good because I got the swifts on it and it...’

He shrugged again. The self-deprecating smile. He was almost charming.

No. Monstrously, he was wooing me. I couldn’t help staring at him, with a kind of dreadful fascination. Fascination for a boy who, less than an hour ago, had described in a weary nonchalant voice an atrocity he’d committed. And a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. A dread of whatever ugliness he might still be capable of.

No, Lawrence Lundy was not charming. Enthralling? I didn’t want to be in thrall to his fake little smile, to the complicated trap I was slithering into. Captivating, like the pitcher plants in my Borneo garden – slippery, inescapable, carnivorous.

I met his eyes. His eyes met mine. And a strange thing happened. In a breezy, sunlit room, on a morning in June, an ice-cold shiver ran down my spine. I was afraid.

S
ARAWAK,
B
ORNEO
...
MAGICAL
words. When I’d made the decision to stay a bit longer at Chalke House and go upstairs to the boy in his tower, I’d deliberately put on the t-shirt as a kind of visual aid, a conversation piece, the sort of thing educationalists had started calling ‘realia’ – anything a teacher might take into a lesson, other than books, to interest his students. Sure enough, when the smile slipped off Lawrence’s face and he noticed the shirt, he read the words aloud. They hung in the cool English air of his bedroom, as mysterious as the human skulls I’d seen hanging in the smoke-blackened rafters of the longhouses on the Baram river.

I told him more about my life out there, that many of my students were Iban from the
kampongs
in the rainforest, whose tradition of head-hunting had persisted until fairly recent times. There were stories that, when north Borneo had been occupied by the Japanese in World War II, the Iban had been encouraged to take the heads of enemy soldiers who strayed too deep into the jungle. I’d been invited to my students’ homes for the annual festival of
gawai
, to stay the night and drink their brain-damaging
tuak
, and, eventually collapsing onto the bamboo floors of the longhouse, I’d drifted into a nightmarish sleep with the cobwebby skulls dangling over my head...

It wasn’t difficult to regale the boy. Man-eating crocodiles, the scorpion in my bathroom, the cobra in my backyard. The folklore of the indigenous people, their tales of witchcraft and superstition. The veneer of Islam – the cry of the mosque in the darkness before dawn, in the glare of the day, in the golden light of the evening and again at night, as though the drone of repetition might smother all pre-existing thought.

‘And what’s this, the bird?’ he asked.

‘Hornbill. It’s a symbol of Borneo, so typically a part of the island, like the orang-utan or the proboscis monkeys, that it’s always used on tourist brochures and souvenirs and things. For me, they’re a real part of my life out there. Every afternoon, at about five o’clock, I get a flock of them coming up river, I’ve counted more than fifty sometimes. They pause in my compound, they crash into one of my trees and rest for a while and then they carry on upstream, on their way to roosting somewhere in the forest.’

‘And the pattern? What’s all this?’

He took me by surprise. Not the question, about the Iban scrollwork on my shirt, but the way he jabbed at it with a bony finger and caught me hard in the ribs.

‘Hey, watch out...’ I gasped and jumped away from him.

He mouthed a word which could have been
sorry
, hard to tell because his lips were curled into a smirky sneer. And then he managed to say, ‘Sorry, I forgot,’ as I stood away from his bed and tried to ease the pain by pressing the flat of my hand onto the bruises. ‘Sorry, let me see ..’

I warily allowed him to examine the discolouring skin, as I’d imagined him doing when I was in the shower. This time there were no cryptic signs to be discovered, it wasn’t a challenge which might undo all the dreams he’d held so precious. He said to me, ‘I can see all the colours, you know. A lot of people, even the so-called experts who examined me, they think that if you’re colour-blind you see everything in black and white. It’s not like that at all. Look...’ And with the tip of the finger he’d jabbed me with, he touched the bruises with exquisite gentleness and whispered, ‘Orange... a kind of yellowy... this is red going to purple...’ and seemed to relish the words in his mouth like charms or spells.

He got most of the colours right. Yes, he could see them and identify them and even roll the words on his tongue with a thrill of pleasure. He could enjoy them as much as I could, as much as the boys in the art club could until he’d splashed boiling wax into their eyes. But he got some of the colours wrong. Enough to spoil everything.

The wind dropped. The model planes stopped knocking together and there was a stillness in the trees in the woodland. It was so sudden that a new sound crept into the room. It was coming from under the bed, yes, like a creeping or a creaking, or a scratching. I cocked my head at it. The boy saw me listening, and his voice was unnecessarily loud when he butted into the quietness, ‘you were saying about the swiftlets in Sarawak...’ and he was poking his finger at my shirt again, dangerously close to my bruises, ‘you said you’ve got a flock of them under your house, and...’