The Waking That Kills (24 page)

Now she’d changed. How to describe her body? It was weathered, it was chapped. The raw wind from the north sea had somehow funnelled down from the wolds and pinched her. The season had changed her. Everything must change. The sallow greenness of summer, the sappiness and pith, was drying up. I could taste the change in her mouth. There was something metallic in her mouth; it tasted like blood. It was the taste of autumn.

I watched her and listened as she pleasured herself. And when she’d finished, with a sudden arching of her body and a dry croaking in the back of her throat, she’d asked me in a perfunctory, matter-of-fact way, ‘Was he here last night? Did he come in? I wasn’t sure if I heard him or I was just dreaming.’

I hesitated and answered. ‘Lawrence? Yes, I think he...’

She’d thrown me a queer, sideways look and rolled off the bed and tiptoed to the dressing-table.

Naked, scented of me and then her own self-satisfaction, she looked very small, like a girl. She sat at the mirror. She puffed a cloud of cologne into the air and watched as the droplets caught the first of the morning light and then disappeared. She picked at a few hairs on the brush on the table and studied them minutely in her fingertips.

‘Lawrence?’ she said to her own reflection. ‘No, I didn’t mean Lawrence...’

Chapter Twenty-Two

I
FOUND MYSELF
doing a strange thing, later the same day, in the afternoon. I climbed the Scots pine to the very top and stood on the tree-house.

Why did I do that? In the morning I was in the garden with the boy. We’d had a quiet breakfast together, the three of us and the cat, an almost eerily quiet breakfast with none of us speaking except to offer the tea and toast and pass the butter and the honey. I listened to the quietness of the woodland outside the kitchen window, almost like the whispering of a village church or a country churchyard, it reminded me of the long-ago autumn days I’d spent with my father as he chipped and chipped at the headstones and the names of the long-dead people lying beneath them. So we passed the butter and the honey, and I heard the robin again. This time I didn’t comment on it. I didn’t need to, it was so pure and cool and silvery-perfect. No, it was an absence of sound that caught my attention, if not the attention of the boy and the woman.

The air was somehow empty and still. A sound we’d heard almost incessantly for weeks and weeks was no longer there. The swifts. Their aerial screaming. No more. They’d gone.

I opened my mouth to remark on it. I saw the boy cocking his head to the window. I saw the gulp of his Adam’s apple, as he swallowed to clear the mucus in his throat and his sinuses, and listened hard. When our eyes met and he could see I was about to speak, he ducked away, hiding in the privacy of his own hair, to nibble noisily at a piece of toast as if the crunching of it would suffice to break the silence and prevent me from speaking.

And so, into the garden. I followed him down to the pond. He glanced up a few times, and if I’d been expecting a hint of wistfulness that the sky was suddenly so empty, I didn’t see it. Odd, after the things he’d said about the birds not leaving, as if it was in the power of the mad mythical swift-boy to hold them back. It was odd to see him appraising the emptiness of the autumn morning with a kind of satisfaction.

‘You can help me,’ he said, as we came closer to the pond. ‘I’ve nearly finished, but you can help me with the rest of it.’

The smell came to me. It was smell of my nightmares. A brackish slime. Outside, in the open air of the woodland garden, it wasn’t so nauseatingly strong as the reek of it which had caught in my nostrils, in my dreams. ‘We do it every year, around this time, me and my Dad. It lets the air into the water, otherwise the stuff all dies and goes rotten and sinks to the bottom and whatever...’

He’d been stripping the weed from the pond. When? Maybe at night, in the moonlight, or in the long evenings when his mother and I had been sousing ourselves into sex and sleepiness with gin. ‘Do you want to help me finish it off? You’ll get very dirty and stinky, but it’s kind of fun too. Me and Dad, it’s something we do together every year.’

He waded through the tall grasses and rushes at the edge of the water until he was knee-deep, reached through the green-brown surface and clawed at the weed below it. He leaned back with all his weight, and like a fisherman heaving ashore a net replete with his catch, he started dragging out a mat of the stuff. A mat of it, a rug of it, bigger and bigger and more and more until he splashed heavily backwards onto the dry land at the edge of the pond with a mighty carpet of weed, intact in one piece, and flopped it down onto the grass.

‘That’s what we do!’ Heaving with the effort, his face agleam with satisfaction, he said, ‘We get tons of it! Stinky! but I kind of love the smell and look! Look! It’s popping with insects!’

There was a formidable, almost overwhelming fume of mud and decomposing vegetation: beautiful really, a smell of dying-off and putrefaction, over-ripe with the stench of its own richness. It was the countryside, the autumn, the world. A natural world of life and death and the turning of the seasons. And yes, the mat of weed was fizzing with the myriad creatures which had been dragged into the daylight – countless unidentifiable bugs and beetles and worms, tiny prehistoric beasts which the boy had trawled unceremoniously from the pond.

I helped the boy to finish his job. He’d already cleared most of it, working secretly on his own, while Juliet and I had thought he was in the greenhouse or up in his tower, and I could see a trail of the slimy mats which he’d dragged away and into the woods somewhere. Together, we heaved more of it out of the water and dumped it under the trees. We were dripping wet and lathered in mud. Breathless, barely able to speak after we’d extracted an especially spectacular piece, a great congealed mass of tangled roots and fibres, he’d muttered something about composting it or recycling it in some way. Unlikely, because no one had done any real ‘gardening’ in the overgrown wilderness of Chalke House for years. But he could use it, he was using it, he mumbled to himself as we hauled it through the trees and towards the greenhouse.

I didn’t know what he meant. No matter. In any case, the pond looked better for its autumn ‘spring-clean’. The water was a deep, murky, mulligatawny mirror.

So it was done. I got the sense that I was dismissed. We’d spent an hour or two together and that was enough for him. There was such an air of abstraction in his manner, his face was so clouded with his own intense preoccupation, that he could no longer bother to glance at me. When I spoke to him, if only to express a platitude about ‘a job well done’ or ‘a good way to work up an appetite for lunch’, it was as though he couldn’t bear to have my voice pestering his ears. He didn’t want me around any more. He didn’t just drift in the direction of the greenhouse; he headed off, quite purposefully, and threw a wary look over his shoulder to make sure I wasn’t following him.

Fine with me. I watched him slink into the dense cover of the nettles and cow-parsley. In the ensuing silence, I waited until I felt myself truly and comfortably alone, and I walked further away from the house, deeper into the woodland.

To the car, at the foot of the Scots pine. I hadn’t been there for a while.

The Daimler was almost overgrown with grasses and thistles. And the tree had dropped its daily, nightly showering of needles and cones and brittle black twigs. The hearse, like a badger scenting a coolness in the air, was growing a shaggy overcoat to coincide with the end of summer.

I didn’t open it up this time. I didn’t slide inside and sit behind the wheel and inhale the fragrant memories. At first, I made as if to swish some debris from the bonnet or the roof, but then I hesitated and stepped away. What was the point? The old car, so sleepy and still, so long neglected, was slipping into a slumber of hibernation... or rather, a torpor from which it might never awake. Moribund. What was the point of disturbing it? Time to let go.

An eerie hush. I stared up and up, where we’d seen the swifts hurtling and screaming day in and day out since the very first week I’d arrived, and there was a clear blue silence. Up there, the devil-birds had relinquished their realm and gone away.

Good. The boy, who was clinging to the memory of his dead father with such an obsessive madness that I’d been touched by the strength of his imaginings, would surely see a reason in the birds’ inevitable departure. Time to let go.

I found myself climbing the tree. And in a few minutes, before I’d realised what I was doing, I was halfway up, my feet jammed uncomfortably into the notchy branches, and looking down through the sooty prickliness of a one-or-two-hundred-year-old pine tree at the ground below, and onto the roof of the hearse.

Why? I’d just felt like doing it. Like a boy, I’d reached for the lowest branches and swung myself up and up and easily up. No, not so easily; there was pain, every move was a wrenching in my ribs, the torn muscles were being stretched too much, too soon, too raw. But the pain was alright. I felt it moving me, onwards and upwards, I was swarming through the dark, dry branches and they were burning my hands, they smelled black and carboniferous, the venerable tree was a piece of an ancient planet, its roots deep in the rock of England, and it was thrusting skywards from the fossil remains of prehistoric times.

In short, the Scots pine was big and black and old. It hurt and it felt good. I was a man, unnecessarily climbing a tree.

But when I scrambled to the top and emerged onto the bare, tremulous spars of the tree-house, there was nothing unnecessary about it. I felt an exhilaration I hadn’t felt on the highest summit of Borneo, or on the pinnacles of the Sarawak caves.

I struggled onto the rickety planks that Lawrence’s father had brought up there. I saw the knots he’d tied in the raggedy ropes, and the nails he’d hammered in. In my giddy mind’s eye, as I lay stranded on this aerial shipwreck, I could imagine the man up here, I could see him and smell him and hear him, as he lugged the spars into place, as he knotted them tight with the bits of rope he’d brought in his pockets, as he banged in the nails. I lay there, my head swimming, my heart thumping, and I knew that a cooler, braver man than I had built this thing, this jutty bit of planking which was a foothold. More than a foothold, it was a springboard into the sky.

And so I stood up. I was covered in pond slime, but the smell of it drying on my skin was something I’d left far below. It had no connection up here. For the first time in weeks, I could see the faraway horizon, the demarcation in the eastern sky which was the sea; the simplicity of sky and sea and nothing else.

The tree sighed and swayed. I moved with it, unafraid. And I rejoiced in the emptiness of the sky, and for the swifts... the splinters of godliness that had been there and had now taken themselves off, so tiny and brave, on a journey of thousands of miles across mountains and seas and deserts... and which would come back, they would come back next spring to this very place, to the very crannies and crevices and blobs of gluey spittle they’d built in the broken-down greenhouse.

The tree creaked and groaned beneath me. I felt the mud drying on my skin. I listened to the silence of the sky.

But then there was a sudden sound below me, so incongruous that it made me wobble. I sat down hard and took hold of the ropes.

Breaking glass.

I
ROLLED OVER
and peered down and down, through the branches of the Scots pine. I could make out the bulk of the Daimler, directly below me. And I hadn’t realised, because I’d been so absorbed by my communion with the air around me, that I had an unobstructed view of the greenhouse from my vantage point.

The building leaned drunkenly against the slabby chalk cliff. It was almost swallowed by decades of tangling undergrowth, and overshadowed by the dense, late-summer foliage of oak and ash and beech. The panes of glass were remarkably intact, carpeted with moss and years of the rotted-down acorns and keys and mast that the trees had rained onto them; a few holes here and there, where the vine had burst its way out or maybe a resilient sapling was prising its roots into the framework.

I could see something moving inside the greenhouse.

The boy. I could see his body pressed against the glass. In defiance of gravity, he was pressed hard against the ceiling, against the panes in the ceiling. It was like watching a fish swimming lazily through the waters of a neglected pond. He moved slowly, with a strange balletic grace. His outline was blurred, but silvery white, like the upturned belly of a tench, doomed to a death of oxygen-starvation in a stagnant aquarium. He’d smashed a pane. I’d heard it, and I saw the splinters of glass newly-scattered on the mat of moss. And a strange thing... his hand came poking through, into the air of the outside world.

He was groping around, with his fist clenched on something. He must have caught his hand on the broken glass, because it withdrew as suddenly as it had appeared... and then it reappeared, his fist bunched on a wad of some kind of material, and when it withdrew a second time he’d left the wad in the hole.