The Waking That Kills (16 page)

I stood back and admired my handiwork. A new heart, transplanted from a young athlete into a wheezing pensioner.

Juliet was there. I’d been aware of her presence for a while, I heard her come closer and I knew she was watching me. Like me, she’d smudged the blood on her face, rubbed it smooth into her complexion. But there were clotted streaks of it in her hair.

She said, ‘I’ve sent Lawrence indoors. He’s alright, just a cut on his head, I told him to jump into the shower and get it clean.’ She frowned and added, ‘Is this going to work?’ just as I was settling into the hearse again. ‘I mean, I haven’t started my car for weeks. The last time I tried it was as dead as a dodo.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Now you tell me.’

I turned the key in the ignition. The petrol pump ticked. I pressed the starter. Nothing. I pressed again. Not a groan or a murmur.

‘I just thought... I don’t know what I was thinking.’ She flapped at her hair with both hands, at some imaginary wasp. ‘I wasn’t thinking anything. When I found you with my car and the bonnet up and I was upset and...’

I pressed the starter again. Not a thing. ‘Juliet,’ I said, ‘we walked down the garden together, with me lugging the battery, and so you knew what I was going to try and do, and you didn’t say anything. I don’t get it.’

She shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to get,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I can understand you wanting to start the car, it doesn’t make sense not to, whether you’re trying to get out of here or not. But I was upset, I’ve told you that’s why I keep my own car covered up and hidden away, so that Lawrence can’t see it... and I was anxious because I didn’t know where he was.’ She shrugged again. ‘I’m sorry, that’s it. There’s nothing to get.’

‘Alright,’ I said, ‘never mind. There’s always tomorrow. We can phone, and someone will come.’ I saw her glum face, and something else too, a look in her eyes. She was hurt, but behind the fear in her demeanour I could sense the stubborn resilience of a wounded creature. Yes, she was bloodied and cornered, but she would defend her corner with a furious strength.

I tried to make her smile. ‘Hey, don’t worry, I’ll phone and someone will come. This is England, not Borneo. There are no crocodiles in the pond, no head-hunters lurking in the jungle. In any case, look at you and me, all smeared with blood... if a party of head-hunters bumped into us now, they’d run a mile.’

But she didn’t smile. ‘No one will come,’ she said, in such a cold, flat voice that I shivered at the chill in it. She turned and walked back to the house.

Chapter Sixteen

A
ND SO IT
seemed that the two of them, Juliet and Lawrence Lundy, had, in their different ways, recovered the spirit of the missing airman. Her husband, his father – they’d found him again.

Easier, first of all, to talk about Juliet. She fucked me inexhaustibly. She came to me in the night, she came to me in the daytime, in the first light of dawn and in the long afternoons, at dusk when the night was swaddling the valley and suffocating the house and us... yes, suffocating us, in a summery darkness. Was it the hottest summer in living memory? Memory, what was it, but a jumble of sensations: blurry snapshots, snatches of songs, dusty smells and fading perfume? Dreams and flashbacks. Who remembered anything? Who cared? Days and nights and maybe weeks went by, and Juliet Lundy was all the scent in my nostrils, all the taste on my tongue, all the sweetness and sweat on my fingertips. Memory, what was it? She was emptying my brain and re-filling it with herself.

She called his name. She would rock and rock on top of me, and her eyes were elsewhere. She was on me, I was in her, but she would swivel her head and stare around the room as though he had just come in, as though he was standing there and watching us, as though he had tiptoed close and his breath was hot on the back of her neck, hot in her hair, hot in the small of her back as she rocked on top of me.

In me, on me, she had repossessed her husband. Ironic, that the release she achieved when she collapsed on my chest and I could feel her very bones dissolve and all her fears and nightmares and memories of ugliness fall away from her... ironic that her release was won by her having me.

And the boy? It was a wonder – no credit to me, but sheer chance or serendipity – that the swifts had re-connected him so sweetly with his lost father. The first encounter was a miraculous accident, when the bird had swerved into his room and fought among the dangling model planes and fallen onto his bed: a gift from the gods, a fragment of god, flung into his tormented world. It had fired his imagination, although I’d exerted myself over him and set it free. The second encounter, when, trespassing on their airy space, he’d batted at the swifts so precariously on his sky-platform, and for a moment he’d clutched at one of them and held it and it had wriggled free... after a tumbling descent through the sooty branches of the pine, after a nightmare in the jaws of a cat, it was festering in a box under the boy’s bed, buried alive in a coffin of pitch-blackness and its own oily mutes.

And now the greenhouse. Throughout the summer, indeed for all the summers of Lawrence’s life and long before he was born, it had been the roosting place of the swifts of Chalke House. For decades they’d squeezed through crannies and cracks in the collapsing timbers, they’d found holes where the panes of glass had broken, and they’d enjoyed a warm, safe, fusty darkness: a perfect sanctuary for them, to build their nests and feed their chicks and rest their sickle wings after hours and hours of non-stop flight.

‘What on earth is he doing down there? Will you go down and look, please, Christopher?’

Gin was not salving her. It was a balmy night in July. The French windows were wide open, it was ten or eleven o’clock or maybe later, and we were nestled in the cushions of her sofa. A hummingbird hawk-moth was whirring around the lamp-lit living-room, the most delicious and perfect piece of a midsummer’s midnight. It nuzzled into the curtains, clung for a second and shed a whisper of dust from its velvety wings, and then nuzzled its way out again. A tawny owl was calling, somewhere in the woodland. I heard the yelp of a fox.

Gin was salving me. The moth and the owl and the fox and the gin. For a magical moment, the moth came bumbling into my face. I swept it away as gently as I could, because it snagged in my hair. It dropped into my empty glass. It fizzled in the pool of ice, and the sound of its humming-bird energy was loud until I tipped it onto the carpet ... where it shivered itself dry, achieved a clumsy lift-off, butted its way around the dim, dozy room and out of the open window.

‘Go and see, will you, Christopher? I hope he’s alright...’

‘We know what he’s doing, Juliet, the same as last night and the night before and so on. And we know he’s alright.’ Nevertheless, I extracted myself from the sofa, put down my empty glass and made for the window. ‘Are you coming?’ I turned and asked her. She said no, she wasn’t, she might go upstairs and watch from the boy’s tower.

He was in the greenhouse. I found my way into it, even through the deep shadows of the trees and the dense undergrowth, because I could see the light of his torch. I pushed a way through the darkness. In the overhead branches of a horse chestnut, the owl fluttered away from my passing. No sound of the fox, although the scent of it was strong in my nostrils.

‘Hey, Lawrence...’ I didn’t want to blunder in and startle him, in his communion with the swifts. For the past week he’d gone down to the greenhouse at dusk, with his torch, with the sandwiches and flask of soup his mother had insisted on plying him with, to watch the swifts coming in to roost.

‘Hey Lawrence, are you there?’ I knew he was somewhere, I could see his torch propped into a clump of nettles and beaming into the rafters.

A spectacle... not on the scale of the swiftlets’ caves at Mulu or Niah in Sarawak, where, every twilight, every day of the year, for thousands of years and long before any human had ever seen them, a million birds funnelled into the caverns in a vast black spiralling cloud. And at the same time, defying the probability of myriad aerial collisions, a million bats came out. Swifts and bats, in their hundreds of thousands, the birds going in and the bats coming out... and dashing among them, a hawk, snatching randomly here and there with its talons.

A spectacle, not on the scale of prehistoric Borneo, but lovely in Lincolnshire.

As the light faded on the wooded valley of Chalke House, the swifts came into the greenhouse. Hundreds of them. And the boy would crouch inside, waiting, listening, and when the birds came in through the broken panes with a rush and a rustle of their wonderful wings, he was ready with his torch.

‘Lawrence?’ No reply. ‘Are you there, Lawrence?’

I felt my way gingerly over the uneven brickwork underfoot, felt the bristle of nettles on my hands and arms as I pushed my way in. There was his torch. I saw, in the yellowy light which spilled from it, his packet of sandwiches untouched and the unopened flask. No boy, although the place in the cow-parsley where he would crouch and hide was flattened to the shape of his body.

I’d watched the spectacle with him. Crepuscular, gloaming, twilight... the words were lovely, and in England on a midsummer’s night the reality was lovely too. Just as the light was fading, to be lying in a bower of elder and bramble, with the shrew and the toad and a shiver of moths... to lie back and watch the darkness of dusk through the mossy windows of a derelict greenhouse... no sound until the swifts came furtling, hustling and snuggling in. And then to catch them, to hold them, to play them in the beam of the torch.

This time, no boy. ‘Lawrence? Where are you?’

The birds were in. I could hear them in the spaces above me. Their black velvet-furry bodies. Their mole-furriness. The rafters above me were rustling and whispering, alive with the roosting of the swifts. They were clinging to their gobbets of nests. They were snuggling together, folding their wings after all the hours of flying, steadying their breath after lungfuls of screaming, fidgeting away the last of their frenetic energy until they might sleep. To achieve a release, a torpor. I could hear them. I could smell their dust, and the breath of their whiskery mouths.

But no boy. ‘Oh shit, what are you doing, Lawrence, are you there?’ Not sure why, I felt sick in my stomach.

His torch was pointing where the rafters were crawling with birds. I moved to the torch and picked it up and waved its beam around me. ‘Lawrence? Are you there? Oh shit Lawrence where are you?’

He was up there, hanging. I shook the torch, its feeble yellow beam.

Juliet would be watching from the tower. We’d watched from there together, and it was lovely to stand on the boy’s battlements and see the greenhouse down in the woods, to see the torchlight sweeping this way and that and know what the boy was doing, that he was safe and cosseted in his faery-world of the birds and the moles and the voles and the moths... safe, albeit in his own otherworld, his abstract unreality. We’d watched together, myself uncomfortably disinterested, Juliet sick with worry for the boy, but feeling that, at least for the time being, he was safe from harm or from self-harm.

It was our secret, private
son-et-lumiere.
The light was the rhythmic movement of the torch inside the derelict building, soft on the mossy panes and sparkling where the panes were broken. And the sound – the fox and the owl, and sometimes, unnecessarily beautiful, the song of a blackbird in the dead of night.

I looked up. He was hanging. ‘Oh shit no Lawrence what...?’

For a terrible second, my stomach lurched. Worse than nausea. Fear in my bowels, loosening them.

He was at the top of the vine, where it had snaked the length of the building and was prising open the very timbers of the roof. His face was turned up, away from me, and his body was dangling.

‘Lawrence... what the fuck...?’

The torchlight faded from yellow to a wash of pale-silver. For another second, as I craned my head so hard my neck was aching, all I could make out was his bare legs swinging in mid-air, the bare skin of his belly where his t-shirt rode up, and the whiteness of his throat, stretched.

Fuck!
I banged the torch into the palm of my hand
fuck
it was bright again. His face swivelled down to me.

‘Hey Chris, this is amazing... can you get up here? And bring the torch?’

So I scrambled, somehow, up the vine. It would have been easy, but my ribs seemed to grind together with every tug of my arms on the sinuous branches. I couldn’t speak when I made it close to the rafters. Lawrence’s face hung close to mine. With the sinewy athleticism of youth, he swung from beam to beam like a lemur. Yes, he’d been hanging, from his fingertips, as he communed with the rustling, roosting swifts.

I clung to the vine. He steadied himself next to me, took the torch from me and stroked its beam fondly among the birds. They were crawling around his head, he nuzzled his face among them. He was lit with a strange glow of joy. His eyes were wild, he gleamed with sweat, his smile was wet. His lips and his chin gleamed with saliva, and wisps of feathers and dust had stuck there.