by Max Porter
LANNY’S MUM
We went to the maze at Carlton Hall for a walk and a picnic and to get some use out of our expensive membership card.
Robert was banging on and on about having met Lanny and Pete for lunch in London, about how good Pete looked in a suit.
Properly good, like a trendy old dude.
Darling, he is a trendy old dude.
Yeah but he dresses like a scarecrow most of the time. I’m serious, he looked like he ran an ad agency, brown suede boots, lovely linen suit, beard trimmed, tortoise-shell glasses.
Jesus, Robert, you got the hots for Pete or what?
I’m just saying, I think we forget that Pete is quite a big deal. There’s books on him. I think he’s probably rich.
You are a ridiculous person, Robert Lloyd.
We gaze at the sign, which warns of the maze’s difficulty and suggests it takes forty minutes to reach the centre, where there is a walkway and a statue of the Carlton Green Giant.
Where’s Lanny?
He was right here.
Lanny?
There’s a distant whistle from the maze. We step back outside the first hedge and there is Lanny, on the raised platform in the middle, waving from next to the statue.
What the fuck? says Robert.
We look at each other.
Lanny! Come back. Come back and get us.
We wait. Robert’s mouth hangs open as he stares at the maze entrance.
Has he cheated? Did he find a map? Or follow someone? We’ve been here once before, last spring. He can’t have remembered. Nobody could have.
I don’t get it.
A few minutes later Lanny bolts out of the maze pink and grinning.
Darling, how did you get there so quickly?
What do you mean?
The middle. It takes forty minutes. How did you get there so quickly?
I ran.
Robert kneels down.
Lanny, how did you know which way to go, I mean, is there a route marked on the floor? How did you get to the centre?
I just ran.
Lanny! Robert holds his shoulders.
Hey, Robert, calm down. Lanny? Tell us the truth, because it’s just really amazing and a bit strange, that’s all. How did you know which way to go?
Lanny is completely perplexed, as true and easy as he always is.
I just jogged along. I got to a corner and every time it seemed obvious. Left! Right! I could feel which way to go. I just knew. And guess what! That statue in the middle is Dead Papa Toothwort.
We go and eat our picnic on the hill and Lanny is chatty and Robert and I don’t say much.
In bed that night Robert turns to me and asks if I’m still thinking about it.
Of course I am. I don’t know what to think.
Love, it’s properly strange. It’s a freak event. Or he’s some kind of number genius who can see things we can’t. Weird shit like this, I just, I wonder if we should …
Do you remember that time at my parents’?
Please don’t, I can’t handle it.
I’m referring to a time when Lanny was a baby. He could crawl but not walk. We were in my parents’ garden and he suddenly wasn’t there. We searched and shouted and started to panic and then we heard him gurgling and giggling and he was in my old tree house at the bottom of their garden. Nine feet up a ladder. Every one of us insisted we hadn’t put him there, and we knew we hadn’t because we’d all been sat at the table drinking and eating. But we told ourselves afterwards that my dad had done it, he’s a joker, he must’ve crept off and lifted Lanny up there. It was easier to accept that Dad was lying than it was to have no rational explanation.
We lie there in silence.
I am thinking of my baby lying next door asleep. Or possibly he’s not asleep. Possibly he’s dancing in the garden with the elves or the goblins. We assume he’s asleep like a normal child, but he’s not a normal child, he is Lanny Greentree, our little mystery.
PETE
Lanny and I are trooping up to his place after I’ve let him cut some lino and shown him Bellini’s Doge which rightly knocked his socks off. Said I’d walk him home because I’ve not been out, and I think I might stop in at the pub for a pint or three and a bag of dry roasted.
We haven’t seen so much of each other recently. I’ve been getting on with new work. He probably doesn’t want to hang out with an old man all the time. I was chuffed when he dropped in this evening.
Bellini’s Doge or Mantegna’s Dead Christ?
Doge.
Bellini’s Doge or the upside-down toilet?
Doge Doge Doge. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.
Well I’m glad. I agree it’s a bit special. I’ve got a postcard of him somewhere, I’ll dig it out. Oh hello, magnetic pensioner at twelve o’clock, Peggy straight ahead, there’s no avoiding her, oh boy we’re done for, eye contact has been established, she’s got us, none can resist her powerful drag, we will have to stop and talk.
No problem, he says, the sociable little bastard.
We find Peggy in mournful mode, which is increasingly the case. Gone are the titbits of village gossip, the exhaustive updates on the state of every marriage. Peggy is these days fairly sad. She’s frail, and her bones hurt. She’s convinced of a great and unstoppable badness at work in the world. She’s not wrong.
What I will say, she says, holding Lanny’s hands in the wrinkled cup of her own, what I will say is that it brings me great joy to see you, young man. Everyone marching about on their telephones, speeding about in these huge shiny cars, and you seem to me a child of the old times, a proper human child.
Oh don’t be fooled, Peggy, this one knows his way about a computer, he’ll be running the show one of these days.
Lanny grins, escapes from Peggy’s wrinkly grasp, and ducks from my swipe.
What I will say is that very soon, little man, I will die. I’m the last. I waved my brothers off to war from this gate. They didn’t come back, but the village has filled again and again like a rock pool. All sorts. That Mrs Larton likes to pretend she’s been here forever, but it seems to me just yesterday that she arrived with her brass-buttoned husband, rosy of cheek, plugged into a bottle of claret all day every day, and she started bossing us all about. They come and go. I see it all. But you’re a delight, little man, and you’ve had a pleasing effect on the place.
Do you know, she says, that I will die and this Victorian cottage will be knocked down, and on this site they will build three pretend Victorian cottages. This gate will be replaced by a new gate, faked to replicate this gate’s charms.
How do you know? asks Lanny.
I just know.
I won’t let them.
Do you know, she says, what the Domesday Book has to say about this place?
No, we both reply in dutiful unison.
It says the bishop holds this place. It says it answers for ten hides, land for sixteen ploughs, twenty-nine villagers and five slaves.
Slaves? I ask, because that doesn’t sound right.
Peggy tuts, Slaves just meant folk with no land, Peter.
Oh, OK.
Five slaves, meadows for sixteen ploughs, two hundred pigs, the land valued at eleven pounds.
Eleven pounds, says Lanny, hopping on the spot, I’ve got twenty-nine pounds in my savings. I could buy it!
Buy it, lad, I say.
Buy it and take good care of it, young man, says Peggy.
Do you know what else it says there in the book?
Peggy leans on the gate with her elbows and takes up Lanny’s hands again and stares into his eyes.
It says, in small letters at the end of the entry, hardly legible but I’ve seen a photograph copy of it, Puer Toothwort.
Oh Peggy, I tut, you rotter, what a load of old bollocks.
It says it, Peter. It was written. He’s been here as long as there has been a here. He was young once, when this island was freshly formed. Nobody was truly born here, apart from him.
Night night, Peggy, sweet dreams, sings Lanny.
Sleep well good child, she says. Sleep well, Mad Pete, and she winks.
LANNY’S MUM
He’s been very distant. Or I’ve been very distracted. He comes and goes and seems worried. I can never find him. Tonight I looked for him everywhere and found him eventually floating in a deep bath with only his perfect face emerging from the bubbles.
He is all clean hair and freckles.
You delicious boy. I could eat you.
That would be ‘Not OK’, Mum.
Mums have special permission to eat their sons, it’s a rule as old as time.
Mum? He sits up, dripping.
Yes, love?
Last night I dreamt I went running with the deer again.
Ooh lovely, your favourite dream.
But this time I wasn’t a boy, running with deer. I was a deer, inside a deer looking at me, wondering if I was an animal. My bones felt lower and stronger, springy, my eyes were deer’s eyes, but I could see me inside the deer and I thought ‘a human boy!’ and I was excited and really, really worried at the same time. There was a bang and I was pulled backwards, caught in barbed wire or metal teeth or something, and my leg was ripped up and the bone was showing through. The deer were all watching me and couldn’t help because they were deer, and I was dying, and they felt terrible because they had tripped me. I knew they’d tripped me and they showed me with their eyes that they had done it because I was human, because they couldn’t have a human running as a deer, it wasn’t possible. I’d broken the rules. It went on for ages. I needed hospitals and medicine and words and they didn’t have any of it so I lay there and waited. I just waited and waited and the deer watched.
Shit, Lanny, darling. What a horrible dream.
Wasn’t horrible. Just sad. I felt so sad. What happens when we die?
Why?
Just wondering.
Well, I think our bodies rot and our souls go to heaven.
If we’ve been good.
Do you believe in heaven?
I do, sort of. Yes.
I agree with Pete.
Oh yeah, what does Pete think happens?
He thinks our souls split off and wander around for a bit, seeing things properly. He thinks we see for the first time how things really work, how close we are to plants, how everything is connected, and we get it, finally, but only for a second. We see shapes and patterns and it’s incredibly beautiful like the best art ever, with maths and science and music and feelings all at once, the whole of everything. And then we just dissolve and become air.
That’s very nice. I’m pleased with that as a thing to look forward to.
Me too.
I love you Lanny.
I know you do.
DEAD PAPA TOOTHWORT
He sits gorged in his favourite stile, wearing a worried knot for a face,
Dead Papa Toothwort knows himself, and he has felt the tightening-itch, and now is the time,
he crawls towards the living, climbs under Spring Lane and washes along so he can come right up under the village street, so he can float belly-up under them and sip the bath water and shit, fat-clumps and grit, a dark attentive voyeur,
up into the sinks, shower-heads and toilet bowls, he allows himself some intruding, some peeping, some tasting,
every hundred years or so it gets like this, he can’t resist, he feels it coming, he needs to act,
every now and then he does it, puts on a show, intervenes, changes the nature of the place,
he can’t resist and never could, he can’t resist and never should,
he is up to something.
LANNY’S DAD
I wake up fists clenched and buzzing, certain of someone downstairs. Someone in the house. I used to get this a lot, but I’m more accustomed to the sound of the village now. I know a hedgehog making his way along the planted borders, I know the postman’s early footsteps on the gravel. I know the alien hum of Mrs Larton’s late-night tumble-drying. This isn’t that.
This is a human body moving.
There is someone in my house.
I don’t wake her. I get the cricket bat from the wardrobe and the little bones in my feet crack as I tiptoe out of the bedroom.
My pulse is loud in my ears as I creep across the landing and pause, listening, at the top of the stairs. Nothing but my thump thump thump.
Gingerly down the stairs. Nothing. The words in my brain from the script of terrified male homeowner, ‘come on then, you fucking fuck’ and the bladder-squirm because I have no actual defensive power, I am not brave, I do not fight, have never fought, I work in asset management and only fight in subtle ways on Microsoft Outlook. I’m terrified.
There’s nobody in the kitchen but it shits me up being in there, imagining someone looking in, loads of them, lines and lines of men with hessian faces, with razor wire and acid, farmers by day killers by night, invisible just beyond the window pane watching one of their number stalk me through this house, Jesus, it scares and humiliates me so I start to swagger a bit, performing the ‘just looking’ in case I am being watched, how daft, to be worried about what people think even as I genuinely think there’s an intruder in my home. Nobody in the hallway, nobody in the lounge, no axe between my shoulder-blades, no shotgun pointed to the back of my head, behind me just the corners of my house, in front of me just a dark interior designed by my stylish wife, my own reflection, and I fling open the under-stairs cupboard and feel a proper chest pain, an angina-spasm of dread and then there is a tight squawk from upstairs –
Robert!
I run up, three steps at a time, imagining – with absolute conviction and clarity – that there is a big man in a dark cloak in my bedroom and he has a knife against my wife’s throat, and I stride in, bat raised, and she is sitting up in bed.
I heard something.
Me too. I can’t find anything.
My ballsy woman, she looks fucking terrified. She whispers.
In here. There’s someone in here. There’s something in the room.
I run over, bat in hand, and I jump into bed beside her, suddenly childlike and not brave at all. I think of newspapers printing photos of our bloodstained walls. My heart is whumping in my chest. Is he in the wardrobe, is he made of the sheets, is he in the ceiling, is he in my wife’s skin, is she hiding him, can I kill a person, will it hurt, will he torture us –
I’m frightened,
I’m fr—
A rustle and movement, right here, right with us, under the bed. There’s a man under our bed, in our bedroom. We’re going to be killed in our beds.
She is gripping my hand as hard as she gripped it when our son came ripping his way into the world.
I need to do this. Maybe it’s a lost cat or a frightened refugee or a dying fox or a robed poltergeist. I need to do this quickly and surprise myself with bravery, so without too much pause, curiously calmed by the recognition that she needs me, that I’m caring for her, I swing out of the bed. I roll out and land on the floor with a thump and raise my arm ready to swipe the bat hard across the carpet, ready to smash my bat again and again into the face of the man.
Under the bed, eyes wide open, possibly asleep, possibly awake, is Lanny. Lying stiff and long like a rolled-up rug with his arms by his side, under our bed, gazing beyond me. Our child. No expression whatsoever on his face.
Later, both of us awake and talking it over, she says I was too angry.
You called him a fucking freak.
I know.
You need to apologise tomorrow.
He’s grown-up enough to know that he gave us a fright, and I was angry. And he needs to stop doing things like this. It’s worrying.
You need to apologise to him.
I know. I’m sorry. I was … appalled.
I’m sorry.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more fri
ghtened in my whole life.
Shall we spoon?
Please.