The Waking That Kills (23 page)

‘Brains,’ she said, ‘not brawn. It takes a woman to know these things.’

Small talk. A small triumph. Nice, yes. Nice and banal. We were three normal human beings, like a family, eating eggs and bacon, rummaging for a jar of honey and struggling to open it. The sun, a cooler, paler sun fell into the room, and it was alright for me to say, ‘What a lovely morning!’ It was alright to state the blindingly obvious, it felt so good to be back in a normal world.

The other thing? ‘Listen,’ I said, to engage the boy and his mother, ‘do you hear it? You won’t have, not since the springtime, and it’s a sure sign that it’s nearly the end of the summer. Listen... the robin.’

The most delicate, silvery song. A trickle of quicksilver. ‘You’ll hear him singing in the spring, when he’s disputing territory and looking for a mate and nest-building, but then he’ll stop. Not a peep, through June, July and into August. Listen, that’s the robin singing, that’s the sound of soon-September.’

We all listened. The cat listened. It had been lying asleep on the floor, away from the table and the movement of the humans’ feet. But now, as if required to stir itself and pay attention, it opened its eyes and blinked around the kitchen. Like Juliet and Lawrence, it was still and quiet, and listening.

At the same moment, both Juliet and Lawrence cocked their heads slightly in the direction, not of the garden, but of the kitchen door and the hallway and the foot of the stairs. As if they’d heard something out there and they were waiting.

Not the robin. Something else. Somebody else.

The cat started purring. It got up and stretched, arching its back and shimmying all its fur into a huge orange halo. It moved to the door and stood there, purring loudly, and staring up the stairs. There was a creak of the floorboards, a flexing of the old house in the warmth of a summer’s morning. Another creak. And the boy and his mother, perfectly synchronised, their eyes fixed on the doorway, turned their heads and followed something, or somebody who came in. No, actually a nothing, an utter invisibility, which didn’t come into the kitchen and sit on the empty chair at the breakfast table.

The cat too. Purring like a sewing-machine, in a state of bliss, it folded its body as voluptuously as only a feline can, in and out of the legs of that chair, the empty chair, on which no one was sitting, an empty chair at which two people were staring with beatific smiles on their faces.

Nothing. I stared at the chair as well. Was it Banquo’s fucking ghost or what? The cat sprang onto the chair and sprawled on its back with its legs wide apart, as though someone was stroking its tummy, nubbing its nipples...

Juliet and Lawrence turned their heads and smiled at each other. She, her eyes gleaming with incipient tears, reached for her son’s hand and squeezed it. I was completely effaced. For them, I wasn’t in the room. They were engrossed in one another and the phenomenon they, and the cat, had conjured.

‘Excuse me...’ I tried sarcasm, to hide my exasperation, to quell a qualm of fear I felt in my stomach. ‘Excuse me, did we hear the robin singing? In the garden? The first one I’ve heard in six years?’

They blinked at the sound of my voice. I heard myself clawing at the reality I thought we’d had in the room, clutching for it, desperate for it, feeling it slipping away from me. They both looked at me, a flicker of puzzlement on their faces, as though they’d discovered a stranger sitting at their table and helping himself to their toast and honey, and I said, a bit louder, groping for the moments of sanity I thought we’d been sharing, ‘The robin? The end of the summer? The days will get shorter and cooler and...’ I sighted on the boy and aimed an idea at him, to try and wake him, to try and bring him back to the real world. ‘And Lawrence, soon the swifts will be thinking of leaving, we’ll go out one morning and find they’ve all gone.’

He stared at me. My voice, my words, seemed to jar on him. I saw, in his eyes and in the tensing of the muscles in his forearms, a warning glimmer of the anger he’d manifested before.

He controlled it. He looked at me through the fall of his hair. He simply said, ‘No.’

I tried to smile at him. I wanted small talk. I wanted little, everyday conversation. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean no. The swifts won’t go. They don’t have to.’

I felt the smile falter on my face. I fixed it there, but I knew it was only a mask and he could see through it.

‘Lawrence, I know, and you know, they’ll fly away soon. They always do. And they’ll come back next year, the very same birds will return to the very same nests. Their migration, it’s one of the marvels of nature. Those tiny creatures, weighing no more than a couple of ounces, will set off and...’

‘No, they don’t have to,’ he said. ‘You don’t know. You’re a teacher, but there are things you don’t know.’

Oh god. No, not oh god. Oh fuck. I felt myself encloaked in a dream. Was that a word: encloaked? The weight of it, the very darkness of it, was like a smothering cloak. All of the delicious, chilly end-of-summer, and the miraculous robin... smothered in his truculent teenage words.

In a maudlin millisecond I had a dream come back to me, in a nightmare or a blur of reality.

In my first month in Borneo, wet behind the ears and not a clue about how to live and eat and work and sleep there, I’d tacked up a mosquito-net over and around my bed, and clambered in, unwashed and sweaty with gin, and woke in the night with the net collapsed on top of me, enmeshing me, smothering me, suffocating me, so that I cried out loud and fought and fought to get out, while the sweat of the gin was on me and the mosquitoes whined in my ears and jabbed their bloodthirsty needles into my skin. A horrible trap I’d set for myself, and the more I struggled to get out and the louder I shouted the more I was enmeshed and ensnared and suffocating and...

Juliet intervened.

‘Alright, Lawrence,’ with a toss of her head and a furious blinking, like a child annoyed at being woken from a daydream. ‘Lawrence, it’s alright. Chris is a teacher, and he’s travelled to a lot of places we’ve never been to and he knows a lot of things we don’t know. That’s why we asked him to come here.’

Her voice was bright, but as tinny-empty as the bell on a bicycle. It chimed in the air, and the boy swatted it away with his hands. ‘More toast, more coffee?’ She persisted, as he ducked his head and sniggered behind his hair. ‘Or maybe you two men can help me tidy up a bit? Lawrence, can you put all this stuff back in the cupboard for me? Not the long-lost honey, of course.’

She twittered on. Like the song of the robin, wistful for the passing of summer, brave in the face of an imminent winter. She seemed determined, after her relapse into a dream-world, to emerge into an everyday day and live in it, at least for the moment. And so she delegated the chore to her troubled, troubling son, as deliberately humdrum as the soap and batteries and shoe-polish and candles he rearranged into the cupboard.

P
OSSESSION
? W
HY DID
you, Dayangku Siti Hafizah Qurr’atul binti Hj. Mohammad Alimin, why did you fall onto the floor and start crying?

You were always such a quiet and studious and serious girl. You sat at the front and blinked up at me from beneath your perfectly ironed
tudong
. You smiled at my
orang putih
jokes and you always did your homework. So why, when a bulldozer outside my classroom was chewing and gnawing at the forest, did the spirits of the fallen trees come whispering through the window and... and, well, why did the spirits of the forest possess you? Why did you tear off your
tudong
and start screaming so loudly, so madly, that a thousand other girls and boys and even teachers with degrees from Worcester and Gloucester and Brighton and York start screaming?

Possession? Like this boy? Lawrence Lundy, the mad? Sniggering mad... sniggering mad, with insects in his mouth.

I saw him. I saw him on the battlements of his tower. With his badminton racquet. Never mind fucking blue tits. I saw him, outside the windows of his tower, at night, swatting at the insects with his racquet, at the night bugs and cockchafers and moths until the racquet was encrusted with their gauzy and chitinous bodies, and then scraping them off and stuffing them into his mouth. I saw him. And I saw him, in the rafters of the old greenhouse, a mythical swift-boy, naked and dusty and drooling, a mythical boy from the pond, or from the moon, sicking up... sicking up a drool, a spittle... a mad boy.

Possessed? He possessed his father. The ghost of him. The invisibility of him. The presence of him. The nubbing the nipples of a cat of him.

And me? Afraid. Afraid for the boy, afraid of the boy? Afraid for Juliet, so fragile, so fey. She also, I saw it with my own eyes, she also saw... I saw her and the boy as they followed with their eyes, I saw with my own eyes, they saw someone come into the kitchen and sit at the table with the toast and the honey, and the cat came purring like a panther and jumped onto his lap...

His? How could I say his? Or think his? Unless, me too, I saw something? No. I didn’t see anything, anyone.

But at night, I heard voices. I heard a voice in the tower. Someone was talking.

I
AWOKE.
I thought I awoke... and the woman was nude in the moonlight, beside me.

She was lovely. The moon cast her body in silver and grey and an indescribable blue – nothing like the sea or the sky, but an ineffable blue from the shadows of the moon and its light through the clouds and the trees and our open window. She was asleep, and she smelled of sleep and our love-making and herself, so it couldn’t have been her voice I had heard. She was whispering; a tiny, faraway whisper, as she breathed, as she dreamed, which blew the fall of her hair across her lips. So it wasn’t her voice I’d heard.

I slipped out of bed and onto the landing and listened. And I heard voices up in the tower.

I tiptoed up and up the stairs.

Pitch darkness. A narrowing space, as though I was burrowing my head and shoulders into a shrinking, suffocating nothingness, a kind of vacuum which might swallow and smother me. I controlled a panic of claustrophobia and trod to the top, where I took a huge breath and pushed open the door.

The boy’s room was full of moonlight. Impossible, of course, but it seemed to fall into the tower from all four sides, filling the room with a powdery, chalk-dusty talcum of moonlight.

He was sitting on his bed. Lawrence, it was his voice I’d heard. He turned and smiled at me. He beckoned me in. He was naked, like a god. His hair was dense and purple-black, and his nakedness was slick with an iridescent slime.

A man was sitting on the bed with him. He was handsome and young and he was wearing his RAF suit. They had the pieces of a model aeroplane laid out on the bed between them, and a tube of glue, and they were making the model together.

They both looked up at me. They smiled.

When the boy smiled, a spittle oozed through his teeth. It was flecked with grey and black, the indigestible remains of the insects he’d swatted with his racquet and stuffed into his mouth.

When his father smiled, his teeth were brown and broken. Sea-water dribbled out, and then a gush of it, the contents of his bloated, submarine belly.

Oh god, oh fuck, I could smell it. You can smell things in dreams, the reeking rank viscosity of a drowned man. And I could feel it was hot, it splashed onto my bare bedroom feet.

Bedroom? I awoke. I think I awoke. And I was in bed with Juliet.

She was silvery nude and fast asleep beside me. I was naked too. The sheet had slipped off us, or maybe we had pushed it off because the night was so warm. I was suddenly wide awake, and the exposure of my own body in the moonlight was frightening.

I awoke and I was afraid. Because someone else had come into the room and was staring at me.

Yes you can smell in a dream you can smell the sweat of your fear from your own body, and you can smell the slimy sweat of a huge naked boy standing so close to you and looming so close that you can hear and smell his breathing...

He stared down at me for a long moment, and then he moved around the foot of the bed, past the dressing-table and to the wardrobe. As he had done before, he opened the wardrobe, felt among the hanging clothes and nuzzled his shaggy head into them.

But this time, something was different. The boy stepped back from the wardrobe and he smiled. He made a curious, beckoning gesture with both hands, as though inviting something or someone to come out. And then he waited.

The clothes on their hangers, they moved. They moved aside. And a man stepped out.

In his smart RAF uniform, dapper and self-assured, the boy’s father came out and he looked around the moonlit room. I was lying naked on his bed, beside the naked body of his wife, but he didn’t see me. He moved to the bed and looked down on the sleeping woman. He appraised her face and her body, and tears of joy seemed to shine in his eyes. But when he bent to kiss her, a bubble of rusty-brown water broke from his shattered teeth.

He straightened up and adjusted his uniform – on parade. He went to the dressing-table and sat in front of the mirror. He smiled at himself, oblivious of the dead and decomposing ugliness of his mouth, and he took the brush from the table and brushed his hair with it. He set it down, satisfied with his dashing, jet-fighter-pilot good looks, and he sprayed himself with cologne.

He went back into the wardrobe. He pushed the clothes aside and slipped between them. The boy closed the door on him. The boy went out of the room and I heard him go up to his tower.

P
REPOSITIONS ARE TRICKY.
My students would say so. Small, inconspicuous little words, which look so unimportant, but which change the meaning of a sentence, change the meaning of everything.

In the morning Juliet made love to me. She made love on me. And then, she made love without me. She rolled off me and lay still, staring up at the ceiling and at the dressing-table and at the wardrobe door. And she made love to herself.

She’d woken me with a swift, slithering movement of her body, and she was straddling me, astride me, and making the most of my male, waking-up readiness. And there was something different in her, something akin to the change of the season. She’d been russet, she’d been tawny, she’d been the red squirrel or the marten, a marvellous forest creature, ever since she’d dropped from the pine like an elf on a gossamer thread. For me, exiled for years to the torrid tropical jungles and dreariness of the faraway mosque, she’d been the electric-blue shock of the jay and the flash of the yaffle in an old English woodland. I’d rubbed her and smelled her, the sweet fibrous earth and the fragrant mulch of the ancient trees.