The Waking That Kills (4 page)

I frowned, about to demur, genuinely puzzled by her insistence that I’d performed some unexpected feat of bravery by turning up at her house. She glanced across the room and caught the eye of her son. Lawrence had been poring over an old aviation magazine, he hadn’t seemed to be listening at all. But all of a sudden he prickled himself upright in his chair and was staring hard at his mother... as if he was assessing the implications of everything she was saying and was ready to stop her if she said something wrong. So now she pulled a face at him, turned back to me and tried a joke. ‘I mean, you hadn’t even got out of your car and I’d thrown a hammer at you. Not very welcoming, but not entirely my fault. It isn’t every day a hearse comes rolling into the garden...’

The boy bent over his magazine again. Earlier, I’d had some success with him. Through mouthfuls of cold lamb and mint jelly, in answer to my gentle questioning and encouraged to answer by his mother, he’d told me he’d been at school in Alford, not so far away from Chalke House; he hadn’t liked the teachers or his fellow pupils, he’d asked and then persuaded his mother to take him out of school. ‘Just before last Christmas,’ he was mumbling, ‘I made a mess of my exams, I failed them all, and then there was a bit of trouble with some other boys and I...’

She’d stopped him in mid-sentence, with a gentle hand on his arm. ‘Don’t try to eat and talk at the same time, dear. There’ll be plenty of opportunity for Christopher to get to know you properly.’

It was a mutual, reciprocal thing. They watched each other and they listened, almost breathless with waiting, waiting for a slip-up or a giveaway. That was what it sounded like, on that long, slow, first evening at Chalke House with Juliet and Lawrence Lundy. Now, leaving the lamp burning outside, the boy came in. I talked about Borneo, the weeks and months of an ex-patriate teacher in a small town in Sarawak, the kind of boys and girls I was teaching, their hopes and expectations, their lifestyle, their lives... Another bottle of wine, the windows wide open on a cool, black night, the wind in the high trees and the bubbling call of a tawny owl... and as I talked a little more, the woman and her son sat side by side on their sofa and sank deeper into the soft, shabby cushions.

They wanted me to talk. And I started to understand why. Not because they were fascinated or even mildly intrigued by my descriptions of another world so many thousands of miles away, but because it saved them from talking. They could relax. They didn’t have to guard what each other was saying. Whatever secrets they were keeping from me – and I kept seeing, from time to time on the blank screen of my mind, an image of my father’s tormented face, the gleam of fear in his eyes as he scoured his memory for the meaning of the name I’d given him – while I was talking they were safe in their own silence.

I was suddenly very tired. A cockchafer whirred through the window and butted noisily against the lampshade in the corner of the room. For a moment, my mouth was ready to begin a sensational account of the bugs and beetles, snakes and crocodiles I’d encountered along the banks of the Baram river, but my head was too weary. The boy was watching the cockchafer, his mouth curiously agape. The lamplight accentuated the unusual swarthiness of his face. He looked somehow nocturnal. He was scenting the air, tasting it, as though the beetle had brought the spirit of the night into the house. Indeed, he opened his mouth and his tongue shone with saliva, as if he might snap at the insect and swallow it down. His eyes gleamed as he followed its erratic, bumbling flight, as it bashed and buzzed around the room and back to the inescapable lure of the lamp.

And then he stood up. In a couple of loping strides he’d crossed to the lamp and caught the cockchafer in his hands. He cupped it there, held his hands to one ear and then the other, and he listened as it roared and raged in its prison. He didn’t offer it to his mother or to me, as an adult might do by way of a conversation piece. It was nothing to do with us, nothing to do with anybody except himself. He was curiously alone, alone with the beetle, as though they were the only living things in all of that soft spring night.

He crossed to the French windows. He stepped outside. As if to release the creature into the darkness.

No. He opened his hands and dropped the beetle into the glass bowl of the paraffin lamp.

For a mad second, it fizzled furiously around the flame. Then it ignited. An explosion of green and gold, it plopped into the paraffin and fizzed into a whiff of blue smoke.

T
HE TORPOR OF
the house was on me, and the weight of all the hours of travelling. I could hardly remember going up to my room, escorted to the door by the solicitous woman. I slept so deeply that a kind of vacuum sucked all my thoughts and dreams away and left me lying in a state of death-like nothingness...

And yet, when I awoke in the middle of the night and stared around the room, unable to remember where on earth I was, I was suddenly and utterly conscious. Not a shred, not the tiniest cobweb of sleep clung to me, as I swung my feet out of bed and stood up. Something had woken me, aroused me from the deathliness of my sleep.

There was a movement at my window and I cossed the room to look out.

It was a movement I’d seen the previous afternoon, when I’d first arrived at the house. Not the flash of a falling, metallic object... not the dazzle of sunlight through the branches of a tall tree... but a crawling shadow, the shadow which had crawled like a live thing across the building and over the hills. Now, the same movement led my eyes from the sill of my window into the garden below me.

Bright moonlight. A moon-shadow. Cast by a rag of cloud, it slid across the sky and dissolved into nothing.

The moon quivered in the dark waters of the pond. The cloud-shadow had gone. It had become a figure, which moved across the lawn in stealthy silence.

The boy. He stopped, and his own shadow was a pool of blackness, lapping around his feet. I froze at the window when he turned his face upwards. But he didn’t look at the house, he didn’t look at me, he stared at the moon until the whiteness of it blanched his skin. Then he trod swiftly across the lawn, the shadow flickering around and beneath him, until he came to the deep cover of a nettle-bed.

It was the very spot where the pigeon had fallen. As lithe as the cat which had pursued its stricken prey, as smoothly as though his own shadow were a coating of oil, he simply folded himself into the undergrowth and disappeared completely. He was gone. I waited for him to emerge, looked for any swaying or stirring of the tall nettles, but there was no movement and he did not reappear. He was gone, as if he and his shadow were drowned forever.

But, just as I was turning from the window to collapse onto the bed, the boy reappeared from the nettles. He was carrying something, a loose grey bundle which overflowed his hands as he walked with it towards the edge of the pond.

He paused there, the moonlight on his face, and a big silvery moon floating in the black water. When he coiled himself like a spring, wound himself up and then uncoiled and hurled his bundle high into the night air, I could see for a second that it was the remains of the pigeon... a rag of grey feathers and a hollow carcase.

It splashed onto the water, and the moon was shattered into a million shimmering fragments. Only for a moment... exerting its mighty magnetic pull upon its own pieces, the moon drew itself splendidly together and was whole again. It folded and rippled for another minute, until the surface of the water was still.

From my upstairs window, I watched it happen. The boy stood and watched it from the edge of the pond. The bird floated, sinking slowly as the mat of feathers and gristle became waterlogged...

But then, before it sank completely from sight, there was a sudden, sinewy swirling in the pond.

A whirlpool... no, a kind of black hole appeared and gaped and sucked and... and the pigeon was gone. The pond, or something greedy and muscular from deep inside it, swallowed the remains of the bird.

The boy had gone too. When I drew my heavy eyes from the moon in the water to the place where he’d been standing, there was nothing. No boy, no shadow, only a few grey feathers which had fallen from his hands.

I blinked and stared. I must have been dreaming. As sudden and as sweet as morphine, once more the deathliness of sleep was on me. The weight of my limbs and my head was almost too much to support.

I crossed back to the bed and fell onto it.

Chapter Five

T
HE BOY WAS
still scratching at the blebs on his hands and wrists a few days later. He had a swipe of white blisters across his face too. I knew where and when he’d got the nettle stings, but he’d fended off his mother’s questions by telling her he’d been looking for birds’ nests in the garden; he said he thought there was a flycatcher starting to build on the brick wall of the derelict greenhouse, and he’d been pushing through the undergrowth to get a closer look. The boy and I were in his room in the tower. We’d started, rather shyly and hesitantly at first, to do some of the ‘home tutoring’ that ostensibly I’d been hired to do. He fidgeted and itched, and he read aloud to me from
Lord of the Flies,
a text he’d been studying at school before he’d persuaded his mother to take him away.

He read beautifully. Odd, because he was still very curt, off-hand, when I tried to engage him in conversation about himself and his home, his family, school and so on. When I asked him to suggest some of the themes of the book, he looked at me as though I was the most predictable and boring of all the teachers he’d ever had, stifled a yawn and started to drawl contemptuously, ‘War, survival, isolation, the loss of innocence, death...’ a list he’d had to learn at school and trot out for homework or exams. I managed to stop him with my own loud theatrical yawn. And then, when I asked him to choose a passage in the book, a crisis which illustrated one of these themes, he turned straightaway to a well-thumbed page and read slowly, relishing the brilliant clarity of the words... the death of Piggy, the fat little boy hit by an enormous boulder, his body falling and falling through space and smashing onto the rocks below...

He itched at his wrists. The blebs were tiny white blisters on the purpling of his veins. Beside him, on the rumpled bed where he was sprawling, the orange cat sprawled too. It lay flat on its back, ridiculously asleep: legs splayed, eyes tightly closed, head thrown back, its breath whistling through bared fangs. I watched the boy and listened to his reading: he and the killer-cat side by side, accomplices in the capture, defenestration and death of the gentle pigeon.

He finished reading. In my mind’s eye, Piggy lay broken on the rocks, until a wave rolled over him and the sea sucked his body away.

Now, a cool breeze blew through the open windows of the tower. The squadrons of aircraft clattered together, and for the first time in the few days I’d been at Chalke House, Lawrence volunteered to speak to me. If only to divert me from the book – a book he’d done to death in a classroom he’d hated, with boys he’d hated, with a teacher he’d hated – he glanced up to the ceiling and said, ‘That’s a Phantom, the green one, the fighter with the RAF roundel... it’s what my Dad flies, out of Coningsby.’

Of all the hundred planes hanging from the rafters, I could only have identified a handful. Never an enthusiast as a boy, never interested in planes or cars or steam engines, I glanced up too and said, ‘I haven’t got a clue, Lawrence. Let me see...’ I pointed with my thumb. ‘That’s a Lancaster bomber, and there’s a Spitfire, and is that a Mosquito? Oh, and the airliner, the white one with the blue stripe, is that a Comet?’ I scanned around the rafters of the high room. ‘Green one? I don’t see it... which one do you mean?’

He reacted explosively. One moment he was a drawling teenager lying limp and exhausted on his bed... and then he bounced onto his feet, reaching up, reaching up, his face suddenly clouded with a rushing of blood into his cheeks. The cat was out of the room in one long orange streak. The boy grabbed one of the planes, wrenched it off its thread and flung it onto the floor. It smashed into pieces.

‘Green!’ he was hissing at me. ‘Didn’t I say the green one? The Phantom he flies out of Coningsby!’

He was calm again. The blood drained out of his face. His skin was as white as before, with only a residual blotchiness where the nettles had blistered him. He stepped off the bed and busied himself picking up the pieces of the shattered aircraft. ‘I can fix it, I can fix it,’ he was saying to himself, and then he turned to look at me over his shoulder, as though he’d suddenly remembered I was there, and he said more loudly, ‘I can fix it, I’m good at fixing things, it’s only a model.’

He sat on the bed with the fragments in his hands. He spread them across the blanket and rearranged them, the bits of a puzzle, like an archaeologist about to reassemble the fossilised bones of a dinosaur he’d unearthed. His calmness was rather unnerving. I watched his hands, the long, white, bony fingers, as if I would detect a tremor or a twitch, some aftershock of anger. There was none. There was no quaver in his voice, when he said to me, ‘My mum will tell you. She’ll explain it all, I guess. I get angry. That’s why I’m here right now, that’s why I’m at home and not at school. That’s why you’re here.’