Wake (43 page)

William closed the drawer, turned out the light, and went to the kitchen.

The range had browned ripples of burned egg on its elements, and the counter top was clouded. As William stood there he realised he'd come as if to consult Holly's ghost. Holly had chosen oleander because for some reason she happened to know that, now and then, people accidentally poisoned themselves with that ordinary garden plant. William wondered was there anything that regularly, accidentally, poisoned cats? Since he lived in California, he knew oleanders were poisonous, but here he was, surrounded by unfamiliar plants.

William filled the electric kettle and switched it on. He listened to the clatter as water turned to steam right by the element. Then it settled to boil. He spooned camomile tea leaves into a small glass teapot. He thought about his own kitchen—the one he never cooked in. He saw himself cutting up melon for breakfast. He'd arrange it on a plate, rinse the knife and the chopping board, and that was all the use he'd make of his kitchen. He saw his espresso machine. He saw a bottle of red wine standing on his glass counter top. His house was empty, the city was humming around him. Then he was in the street hurrying to the intersection to catch the F train. He was going out to eat home cooking. He got off midtown and walked towards the bay. He pressed the buzzer to his friend's apartment. She released the lock and sent the elevator down to him. She opened her door. He kissed her and gave her the flowers he'd bought on Stockton Street. He watched her use her kitchen scissors to snip the stamen and sepals from the lilies. Saffron pollen spread softly and transparently on the film of water at the bottom of her sink. She would put the lilies up high to keep them from her cats, but even then the stamens would eventually fall and then the pollen would be everywhere. ‘So it's better just to cut them off,' she said.

‘What does lily pollen do to cats?' he asked.

‘Liver failure, I think.'

Liver failure was gradual and insidious. The cats would sicken and stay put. They'd crawl under houses, hide, die.

William had never plotted to kill anything. He'd only been fatally forgetful, leaving his cousins out in the freezing weather. How many times, in his head, had he gone back into the house to pull a rug off the couch, a quilt off the bed, to cover them? He'd do it over and over whenever he was tired or unhappy—he'd take a minute, go back, and find something to keep them warm.

The accident had happened three weeks before his ninth birthday. When that birthday came he was in a foster home. He didn't tell anyone. Several years later the attentive foster parents took note of the birthday and there was a party and presents and a cake, and William—who loved to be the centre of attention—felt ashamed to be noticed. It was wrong to measure his progress away from that day. And yet here he was, still alive. Alive, and doing it again, pulling the quilt from his cousin's bed. Or—he'd go back in the middle of the night and see that his drunken uncle had carried the barbecue indoors to keep the room cosy while they all went on drinking. He'd see it, and
do
something
, and it would make a difference that he was outdoors when everyone else was indoors.

He was standing outside his uncle's house. His breath was fuming in the frozen air. Someone was calling him back in, as if they needed his heat. The mountains were on fire. The state trooper and the national guardsmen were waiting at the plastic-draped gate. ‘Step in here, sir,' said the national guardsman. ‘It's nice and cold in here.'

*

A slightly clammy hand dropped onto William's. He opened his eyes—they had been screwed shut—to see Sam's bony, blunt-tipped fingers. She was pressing down hard because she was using the kitchen counter to hold herself up. ‘Don't,' she said.

The tea in the pot in front of William was deep yellow, stewed, and no longer steaming. William stayed still, his blood blowing in his ears. He knew that there was something else there in the kitchen with him and Sam. He couldn't feel it, but he knew she could, and that she'd got out of bed to investigate.

She was wearing only a man's T-shirt. Her feet were bare, and she was shivering. William pulled off his sweater and put it over her head, then left her to do the rest herself. He poured the tea into a cup and put it in the microwave to reheat. He said, ‘Is it gone yet? The Wake?'

‘It's back upstairs,' she said. ‘It's leaning on someone, I'm not sure who. And I'm too tired to chase it from place to place.' Sam sat on one of the tall stools and put her feet up on another, between herself and William.

William took the cup from the microwave, warmed his hands for a moment, passed it to her, then gathered her toes between his warmed palms.

She said, ‘Whatever you were feeling, you have to not feel it any more. The Wake had a real taste for it.'

The next morning Bub and Sam went out in different directions to look for Warren. It was Bub who found him.

Warren was lying where Bub had left him. He had crawled to the far side of the sullied tree and was slumped face down, his shoulder against the trunk, his knees tucked under him, and one ear pressed to the pine needles, as if he was listening for footfalls. His face was piebald with patches of dark blood. His eyes were open, and dull, their surfaces dry.

Bub stood with both hands clamped over his mouth, stifling sounds that wanted to escape him and be heard—noises of anguish. For a few minutes all he felt was a scalding shock. This was followed by a feeling that Bub knew he'd have from now on, would have all his life, in the foreground of every other feeling. It was shame. He had done this. He'd lost control of himself, and his malice had made his hands and feet so insensitive that he couldn't feel and see what he was doing, the violence he was doing. He wanted to say to Warren, ‘But I didn't hit you that hard.' But he must have—because there was the blood, crusted thick on the back of Warren's head. The last time Bub knocked him down Warren must have cracked his skull. The bunched tree-roots near Warren's head were blood-smeared.

Bub was frozen with horror. He had killed Warren. Had killed his friend's friend. He had made a corpse. He had made
another corpse
. For a long period he paced, and pulled at his hair, and made futile wishes. He wanted to absent himself, but he kept being where he was, circling that poor body.

Bub was guilty, so he was wary too, and when he heard someone coming it took all his strength not to flee. He knew he couldn't do that. He wanted what he had, so he was going back, to the others, to Belle, to confess and be judged. There wasn't any way around it.

Myr came into the clearing. He stopped at a respectful distance.

Bub found himself pointing inarticulately at the hunched body. He pointed, and looked at Myr with swimming eyes. He scrubbed his face with his palms.

Myr's silence must be sympathy. It was a captivating and resilient silence, and it seemed to work on Bub, to slow his agitated stamping, to make him stop and listen.

Myr said, ‘Will you want to bury him in your small graveyard?'

This remark struck Bub to his knees. He wrapped his arms around his head and wept. He sobbed and wheezed.

‘I've seen this before,' Myr said, gentle. ‘You begin by needing your own dead near you—then feel outnumbered by graves.'

Bub ground his knuckles into his hot eye sockets and tried to stop weeping.

‘You don't want to be the one to break the bad news,' Myr said.

It was then that Bub realised that Myr had no idea he was crying because he was culpable. Myr thought Bub was simply grief-stricken, and unready to tell the others that they'd lost yet another of their number.

‘Did you quarrel with him?' Myr asked. ‘He was off on his own.'

Bub nodded, then lied, ‘We quarrelled with him.'

There was a period of stillness disturbed only by Bub's shuddering breathing. Then Myr said, ‘Perhaps it would be kinder if your friends could think that this man has only shunned them and hidden himself.'

Bub stopped sniffing and blearily regarded Myr.

‘It will only work if you can dissemble,' Myr said.

Bub opened his hands to gesture at Warren's body.

‘Yes. We'll have to bury him,' Myr said. Then, ‘Would that help, do you think? Would that make their lives more tolerable?'

Bub bit his lip. He tried to keep his face still. Myr really seemed not to suspect him. He was offering to help Bub quietly dispose of the body, so that the others could go on imagining that Warren was still alive.

Would
that be better? If Bub postponed his confession he could go on, for a time, being what the remaining survivors needed him to be—steady, reliable, strong.

‘What do you say?'

Bub managed to nod.

Myr told Bub that he'd fetch what they needed. He told him to wait, and strode away through the trees.

Bub sat down and tried to collect himself. This was his first test, and it was an easy one, he told himself. He would simply do what he was told. It didn't seem to have crossed Myr's mind that he'd killed Warren. But, of course, Myr would expect Bub to be upset. Later, Bub knew, he'd have to pass harder tests. He'd be under closer scrutiny. He'd have to keep up a pretence that Warren was alive. He'd have to continue searching for Warren, and act anxious, but not too anxious, since everyone knew he was angry at Warren. And he'd have to continue to bad-mouth Warren, because to stop altogether would be suspicious.

Bub's thoughts went around in little self-consuming circles. Several times he was roused, startled by a sound—two branches knocking together, the thud of a falling pine cone. He found himself talking, telling Warren off. ‘Why did you have to say you expected me to hit you?' he whispered. ‘Why did you have to do that? And why didn't you have any sympathy for Belle?' His accusations got away on him, till he felt like a mountain climber trying to sprint down a slope of shale ahead of a landslide. The words would merge soon into some hoarse, senseless noise. He found himself glaring resentfully at Warren and asking why he'd had to
die
? Why did he have to go and do a thing like that?

Oscar was cycling to his house to feed Lucy. On the way he spotted William in an overgrown garden, scissors in hand. Oscar squeezed his brakes and dropped his feet onto the road. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Gathering a remedy. What about you?'

‘I'm going to feed Lucy.'

William pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket and positioned its opening under an orange lily. ‘Do you have a cat cage, Oscar?'

‘Yes.'

‘Bring your cat to the spa. You can keep her in your room.'

Oscar was puzzled and alarmed. To him any change in routine signalled calamity. Every day the adults were more secretive and peremptory. He said, ‘Lucy's happy where she is.'

‘Because the predator-proof fence is broken we have to get rid of all the cats. And Lucy is going to have to stay indoors.'

‘Oh,' said Oscar.

When he was sick and Myr was seeing to him, Myr had said something about how his people wondered whether these monsters weren't—what was it he'd said?—‘a provision for the end of the universe'. Oscar had been thinking about that word ‘provision'. If something was a provision then someone had provided it. Like God. Oscar thought that this made Myr's people's ideas seem religious rather than scientific—and less likely to be true. He hadn't been at the meeting where the adults had talked about the monster and the man in black, but they'd been yelling, and it was impossible not to pick stuff up. But since then, Oscar had been so busy thinking about the end of the universe that he hadn't thought too hard about what he'd actually overhead—that the Wake wouldn't leave till there was nothing left for it to eat, that it would only go once they were all dead.

Now he found himself thinking about it. The kakapo had always been Belle's business. But William had said ‘
we
have to', which meant that all of them were now the birds' custodians, and that it was their responsibility to make sure the kakapo survived the breach in the predator-proof fence until the other barrier—the No-Go—was gone.

Right up until this moment Oscar had felt safe—sort of. He'd felt he was behind a last line of defence, and all the adults had ranged themselves along it, in front of him. He'd gone on feeling that despite what Holly had tried to do, because he knew she'd meant, in her crazy way, to save him. But watching William snip pollen-furred stamens and sepals from the centre of the tiger lilies, Oscar realised the line had moved, and that there were now no people in the preserve—only endangered birds.

William fastened a twist tie around the bag and slipped it into his pocket. ‘Go on, Oscar, get your cat. Or—do you need help carrying her?'

‘No. She's little.'

William made shooing motions.

Oscar pushed off and rode away.

Bub discovered that the arboretum had a fairytale forest on one of its borders. He was there, in the twilight, following a line on the forest floor, the mark of something dragged, something insubstantial, for the disturbed leaf litter wasn't gouged down to rot, only scuffed, its top layer parted. The line meandered through the trees.

Was the forest thickening, or was night on its way?

Up ahead there came a sound, a light, metallic rattle. Bub caught up with the shadowy figure ploughing the shadow. It was Myr, dragging a long-handled shovel. They had been together—but Bub had forgotten it. They were looking for a place to bury the body. Bub took the shovel from Myr. Its concave side was dry and unused, the green anti-rust coating unmarked. Bub turned it over. Its convex side was wet and dark, and when Bub gave Myr a wounded look, Myr said, ‘That's not going to get us anywhere.'

Bub woke up. He was lying beside Belle. The lights were low, the windows black. Belle had hold of him; his shirt front was bunched in her hand, as if she knew he'd get up before she woke. How did she know that? He hadn't yet begun to avoid speaking to her. But that was what it was going to be like. Bub knew that if he talked to Belle eventually he'd be moved to tell her that it was her fault too, and that Warren had been right, her value system was skewed. People
were
more important than kakapo. Bub hadn't cared about the kakapo, had only cared that Warren had injured her. But Warren hurt her by accident, while acting more in grief than malice, and
if only
Belle hadn't made such a meal of her responsibility.