The Waking That Kills (8 page)

‘Don’t go away just yet. We both need you. We all need you.’

I
WAS DREAMING
of fireflies.

Sometimes, faraway in the place I called home, I might fall asleep on my balcony. Only nine o’clock, I might have had a drink or two or three and watched the darkness fall until the river was black and the forest was black and even the sky was a whirl of blackness... and I might fall asleep on my balcony, in my easy chair, and slop the drink into my lap.

And then wake up. And see the trees alight with fireflies. Hundreds of them, or thousands. The forest of Borneo a spangle of silvery lights, and their reflection in the river... a marvel... and for me, who would set my alarm for five in the morning, time to climb out of my armchair and stumble indoors to bed.

Now I was dreaming of fireflies, in my bed in my room in Chalke House in Lincolnshire, England. But when I woke with a start I saw nothing. The space around me was utterly black. Not a single glow in a slumbering forest, not a gleam in a mighty, mysterious river.

Nothing. Wide awake, I got out of the bed. I had to, I had an urge to look and look and find a vestige of my dream...

And when I peered out of the window I saw it. A light in the darkness, as if a tiny piece of my dream had escaped and found its way into the real, waking world...

There was a light in the trees.

I opened my window wide. The night was cool and fresh after my stupor of sleep. The trees moved in a lovely breeze. The foliage stirred. And a light flickered, beyond the pond, in the darkness of the woodland.

Was it real, or a part of my dream? Was it real, or one of the fireflies I’d been dreaming, burned onto my eyeballs and still there, although I was awake?

I closed my eyes and rubbed their lids. I opened them again and saw the trees stirring. I felt the cool breath of a spring night on my face and on my neck.

But the light was gone. Nothing. No starlight above me, not a glimmer of moonlight on the surface of the pond.

I slipped back into bed and dreamed of nothing.

Chapter Nine

W
E WERE ALL
a bit quiet at breakfast the following morning. Juliet looked wanly at me over a mug of coffee, blew on it and sipped and then smiled with a frothy moustache.

‘How do you do it?’ she said, with a husky, hung-over voice. ‘I mean, how do you drink gin like that and then get up at five o’clock in the morning?’

‘I have an alarm call,’ I answered. My voice was a bit throaty too. ‘The mosque. At five o’clock... it feels like the dead of night and I feel like death, and this guy is wailing from a bloody great loudspeaker a couple of hundred yards from my house...’

I grimaced at her, deliberately dunking my mouth deep into my coffee to imitate her moustache. ‘But no, really, I don’t drink like that in the week. I guess I was showing off last night, trying to look like an old Borneo hand...’

Unusually early, Lawrence was there too. He pulled a face, a snarly sneer with his upper lip, listening to me and his mother exchanging our morning-after banter. We were in cahoots, me and Juliet... he must’ve thought we’d been drinking and talking and spilling all sorts of beans while he was upstairs alone in his tower. He narrowed his eyes at his mother, as if, by doing so, he might burrow his brain into hers and find out what precious secrets she’d divulged to this latest incomer. That was why he’d got up and come down so early, in his t-shirt and shorts, because he knew we’d been up late together and he wanted to intercept any more indiscretions. But she just fluttered her eyelashes at him and then mock-rubbed at her temples, signifying that she was an adult with an alcohol-induced headache and he was excluded from the aftermath, because he was a boy and he should mind his own business.

He was miffed. Good. I winked at Juliet and she winked back.

He noticed. I think she meant him to notice and tease him, because he was in a funk of jealousy over her cosiness with me. He made a big play of nonchalance, busying himself with the toaster, and, to try and jolly him out of it, she leaned over and touched his downy arm. ‘Hey, isn’t it about time you changed into another shirt?’ she said. ‘How long are you going to live in this thing, day and night? What’ve you got stuck on the back?’

He wriggled away from her touch, but not before she’d picked off two or three tiny green burrs. ‘Where’ve you been? You’ve got lots of these stuck on you...’

He shrugged. His face darkened, and he pretended to be preoccupied with poking a knife deep inside the toaster to dig out a smouldering crust. With his other hand he started scratching at the bare skin of his neck. He had a new rash of nettle blebs there.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘I woke up in the middle of the night and went outside. I’d had that dream again. I thought Dad was back. I went outside and down the garden ’cos I thought he was back.’

‘Silly boy,’ she said very softly. A shadow had crossed her face too, the same one which had darkened his. She stood up and behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. ‘You and your dreams, you big bony silly boy...’ She pressed her mouth between his shoulder blades. ‘Phew, you’re a bit whiffy, aren’t you? Throw this old thing into the wash and run upstairs and get a shower. You’ll feel a lot better and you and Christopher can spend some time together.’

‘What about the birds, Lawrence? The swifts?’ I said. ‘We can get a good look at them from your tower, with your binoculars. You must have a bird book or something in the house, we can read up about them and...’

‘I got a better idea,’ he interrupted. ‘But we might get a bit dirty. So I’ll keep this shirt on a bit longer. For this morning, at least. Hey, Mr Chris, are you any good at climbing?’

Juliet tried to dissuade him, but she couldn’t. She wheedled at him to go upstairs and get changed and spend some cool, calm, quality time with me... He ignored her.

She carried on trying to dissuade him, as we followed him meekly out of the French windows and into the woodland. But he hardly seemed to hear her, as he strode ahead. He was wresting the initiative back from her. She had had her time with me and told me who-knows-what family secrets and rumours and tittle-tattle, lubricated by wine and gin and snuggled into the sofa all night, and now, on a brightening summer’s morning at the beginning of June, he was in charge and we were going to do what he wanted to do, never mind the so-called grown-ups who were fuzzy and fuddled and hung-over.

We came to the foot of the Scots pine.

First of all we appraised the car. It was impossible not to. Shabby and neglected, a hulking ton-weight of rust and blistered wood and wormy leather, it was still amazing: a Daimler hearse, in a Lincolnshire woodland. It wouldn’t matter how often you strolled down there, on a frosty winter’s afternoon or a moonlit midsummer’s night, it would always be something to happen on, an extraordinary thing to behold.

So we paused and cocked our heads at the car. We couldn’t help it. With its showering of twigs and moss, and the smash in the glass as though it had had a wonderful adventure with gangsters and shotguns, the mighty machine was a picture. For a moment I thought – and I was sure Juliet was thinking and hoping too – it might be such a distraction, such an anomaly in the scheme of things which might or might not happen that morning, that Lawrence’s idea might be forgotten.

To prolong the moment, and to postpone what the boy was wanting to do, I skirted the car and had a closer look. I kicked at the tyres. I rubbed at the rust on the radiator grille. And, my hand going instinctively to the handle of the driver’s door, I saw that it was ajar.

‘Funny,’ I said, opening the door wide. ‘I’m sure I closed it properly. Leave it open and the courtesy light stays on and the battery goes flat...’

Sure enough, no light. No soft green light from the little bulb in the headlining of the car. I felt under the front seat, where I’d left the ignition key, slotted it in and turned it and heard the reassuring tick of the fuel pump priming. But then, when I pressed the starter button there was nothing but a click.

‘It’s dead. Not going anywhere.’

Juliet and Lawrence stood and watched, as I tried again. Futile, the second and third attempts. I was puzzled and annoyed. Puzzled, because I was certain I’d shut the door the other day, when I’d started the car and warmed it up and then switched off. Annoyed, because the presence of my father was so strong that I could hear him chuntering... I’d had the car a couple of weeks and already neglected its maintenance. Juliet folded her arms across her chest and frowned. The boy met my eyes without blinking, for one second. Then he looked away, and his hand went to his neck and he rubbed at the place where the nettles had swiped him in the night.

I let the door swing shut on its own weight. I went round to the back, muttering, ‘Jump leads, my father’s got everything in here, I’m sure there’ll be jump leads...’ I opened the door to the yawning space which had been his workshop and living-room and bedroom, clambered in and reached across the box of newspapers for the toolbox. When I lifted the lid, the leads uncoiled and sprang out, a black snake and a red one, as if they’d been waiting for me in the darkness. I was saying over my shoulder, ‘Is it possible to get your car down here, Juliet, and try to get this poor old thing started?’ and at the same time the snakes reminded me of how Lawrence had recoiled from the newspapers when he’d first peered into the car.

I climbed out of the hearse. My eyes fell on the headlines at the top of the pile: a football match, a hat-trick in a cup final or something. I did a double-take and read the headline again.

Before I could turn my thoughts into words, Lawrence butted in. ‘So are we up for this?’ My jumble of suspicions – the light I’d seen in the night, the boy’s off-hand remark about his sleeplessness, the car door ajar, and now the papers rearranged – my suspicions stayed jumbled. They were real, as real as the sting of a nettle... but they needed an itch to create a visible rash, needed a scratch to form the clear white blebs. Before I could ask Lawrence why he’d been in the car in the night, he’d said with an exaggerated boldness, ‘So, are we up for this? Can’t you hear them? Let’s get up there!’

It was no good Juliet trying again to dissuade her son. High in the sky, above and around the very top of the Scots pine, the swifts were screaming. The boy wanted to climb to the tree-house, and he wanted me to go with him. He wanted the upper-hand, he wanted to exert some kind of authority over me, to give me the option of feebly declining the challenge or letting him take me where his dare-devil father had been, to the summit of the tallest tree in the woodland. The other day, in his room, I’d somehow diminished him, by overruling him on his own territory. So now he said, with a crowing self-confidence, ‘Mum, listen. He’s a teacher, he wants to teach me about the swifts. So what’s best? Sitting in my bedroom with a bird-book, reading and looking at the pictures and peeping out of the window with our binoculars? Or climbing into the sky, to be with the swifts, to be where the swifts live? What’s best?’ And turning to me, claiming the moment by tugging the jump-leads out of my hand, he said, ‘What’s best, Mr Teacher? What do you think?’

He handed the jump-leads to his mother. ‘Of course I’m up for it,’ I said.

I
T WAS EASY
at first. Despite my muzzy head, I was still fit from all my running and cycling on hot tropical afternoons. Lawrence swarmed up and up the tree and I followed, more slowly and deliberately. He was lighter, sinewy-strong, and he moved so easily through the dry black branches that he seemed to be dancing. I paused for breath and looked down. Juliet seemed a long way away, her face turned up, her mouth open and her eyes anxious. Beside her, the bulk of the car was a huge rounded boulder, dropped by a prehistoric glacier. I blew on my hands, which were burning from the coarseness of the bark, and I continued to climb.

And my legs were shaking. I wasn’t afraid, exposed like a rock-climber on a slabby cliff; I was comfortable with the height because the darkness around me was like a cage, through which I couldn’t fall even if I lost my grip and slipped. But the pressure of notching my feet into smaller and smaller spaces as the branches thinned out had started my legs quivering. I pulled myself up with my arms and saw Lawrence up there, already adjusting his frame onto the spars of the tree-house.

At last I clambered on board beside him... on board, because the tree-house was nothing more than the pieces of an old wooden pallet which had somehow been manhandled up and lashed onto the flimsy topmost branches... it felt like the debris of a shipwreck, a makeshift raft adrift on an ocean. I lugged myself onto it. I closed my eyes and hung on, to calm the thudding in my chest, and was alarmed when I opened my eyes again to see the vastness of the sky and feel the tree swaying.

‘You did alright.’ Lawrence was grinning at me. He was sitting cross-legged, quite at ease in his eyrie. I crouched beside him, and he must have seen my knuckles whiten as I gripped the knotted ropes which barely held the structure together. A little bit begrudgingly, he admitted, ‘You did alright, I didn’t think you’d make it...’ and, his idea of fun, he shook the thing with all his strength so that it creaked and groaned.