The Fetch

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘I can’t relate to him. Don’t you understand that? We’re like chalk and cheese. There’s nothing there. Nothing in there. Do you understand me? It’s a void. His head’s a void. Our relationship is a void!’

  ‘Keep your voice down. The poor little devil is only upstairs. He’ll hear.’

  ‘We were so hasty. If we’d just waited, Carol would have come anyway … I’m sure of it …’

  ‘Sometimes I hate you.’

  ‘I know you do. Sometimes I hate myself. But for Christ’s sake, what pleasure is there in him? One child, we said. That’s all we wanted. One child. A natural child—’

  ‘And it didn’t happen. And Michael is part of us now.’

  ‘But he’s not. Maybe he is to you. But to me he’s a stranger! He’s cold. I can’t get close to him. It’s the ghost in him, Sue. I’m sure it is. It disturbs me.’

  ‘Nothing’s happened for ages. The haunting’s gone.’

  ‘He haunts me. He frightens me.’

  ‘He just wants affection! You don’t bloody well try.’

  ‘I do try. But he’s empty. He’s always watching. It was a mistake.’

  ‘We can’t give him back, Richard.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me. I know we can’t. But what am I to do? He’s a stranger in my house. Carol is warm. I can feel her warmth even though she’s only little. She giggles, Sue. She sees me and laughs.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise.’

  ‘You know what I mean. We feel for each other …’

  ‘What a bastard you are …’

  ‘I can’t help it. It’s like living with a ghost. I never felt right about adopting—’

  ‘You were such a bloody coward. Such a lying coward. If you’d just once expressed your doubts we could have thought about it, perhaps thought it through more clearly …’

  ‘You wanted it too much. I didn’t know how to say what I felt without causing you pain.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Me too. But you have to live with our decision, Richard. You can’t just cut the boy out. You have to try. Hard. Harder. Endlessly. He’s not a computer game! You can’t save the score and turn off the machine in the evening, then come back to it as if nothing had changed.’

  Pretty. Pretty …

  He stared at the ceiling. There was a glimmer in his mind’s eye, something gleaming, something pretty. But it slipped away again, and shadows flexed and shifted in the room, the past still urgent to be remembered – shadows: his father’s shape looming past him as he sat and drew, years ago …

  A fine summer’s day. The air was still and heavy with the scent of grass. There had been visitors, and from the kitchen came the sound of washing up, glasses clinking, laughter from his parents.

  Michael sat at his table below the apple tree, drawing Castle Limbo and the wide beach. Carol was toddling down the lawn towards her tricycle. Michael raised his face and watched her, then glanced down as his father left the kitchen, ran towards the toddling child and swung her high, pretending to toss her, but not quite letting go.

  Carol giggled. The two of them walked down to the hedge maze and vanished for a while.

  Michael drew.

  He was startled by the sudden shadow over his shoulder. He had been so absorbed in the drawing of the castle that he hadn’t heard his father come up behind him. He and Carol stood there, dark against the bright sky. Michael felt nervous. He was aware that his drawing was being scrutinized critically.

  Carol watched him, one hand tangled in her father’s long hair. She wanted to be put down and her father let her go. The man walked away, a broad shape, clad in jeans and a dark shirt. Michael heard him say, ‘More bloody spirals. Doesn’t he ever draw anything else?’

  ‘It’s my castle,’ he whispered.

  He drew himself into the picture, a small, yellow-haired figure, and placed his shadow perfectly considering the position of the bright sun at the top corner of the drawing. He drew his mother, standing at the edge of the garden, just outside the zones of his castle. He drew Carol and gave her a big smile, because he always wanted Carol to smile when she felt sad. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he drew his father. He drew a huge open mouth with teeth around the figure of the man.

  After a while, after staring at the page for a few minutes, he found a darker crayon.

  And with a quick, angry smile, he closed the monster’s mouth.

  Pretty?

  He reached for it, but it slipped away. This was the wrong place. He needed Chalk Boy, he needed the sea. He needed to be able to reach through the tunnel, to fetch the pretty glimmering things that sometimes sparkled in the castle, by the sea shore, by the great chalk sea.

  Michael stood by his bedroom window and stared out through the summer night, at the dark woods that huddled round the quarry.

  Beyond them, a strange light, an eerie tinge of blue in the darkness, was the ocean, the Channel. It was not the same sea, not the sea that bordered Castle Limbo, but it was a place he could visit, and he hungered for that cold water now, for the pebbles that jarred and jabbed at naked feet, for the rush and swirl, the suck and flow of the ice-cold sea, dragging down into the lost depths of the old land bridge between England and the Continent.

  He had read about it all, how below the sea were great mountains of chalk, some of them nearly reaching the surface of the ocean. Millions of years had eroded the chalk hills into these spires and fingers of chalk, part of the downlands. And when land had filled between them, people had walked there, and lived there.

  Their bones, their weapons, their spirits still swam in the shallow depths, in the chalk depths.

  But it was not the same sea. Not the sea of monsters. Not the sea of screams and cries. Not the sea of shadows that he could touch and smell whenever Chalk Boy came near to him …

  It was still too dark to leave the house, but he felt such longing to be in the pit, to smell that ancient ocean.

  He wrapped up in his top blanket, curled up on the window sill, staring out through the darkness and over the trees, to the blue glow of the near-dawn.

  He sighed.

  He listened to the silence in the house.

  TWELVE

  While Susan took Michael to school, Richard went out to the chalk quarry, spade and fork carried over his shoulder. He found the boy’s camp, did a superficial survey of the area where he claimed to have found the statuette, then cleared the shrubs and the thin layer of soil. He paid particular attention to the area among and below the tangled, shallow roots of trees.

  After an hour he had found nothing. No hoard, no stash, no evidence at all that the gold statuette was part of a concealed haul of stolen goods.

  So who was Chalk Boy? An imaginary playmate? Then he certainly hadn’t given Michael anything as tangible as fifteen ounces of very high-quality gold, shaped so exquisitely.

  A brief visit to their neighbours, the Goulds, had established that Bobby was at a Cub’s meeting during the time that Michael claimed to have been playing with Chalk Boy. And a phone call to Jenny Hanson confirmed the obvious: that her two sons had not been over at Ruckinghurst that afternoon either.

  It was pretty. So I fetched it for you …

  Richard kicked around the camp once more, then walked back to the earthfall, staring down at the low mound. No, it was impossible that he had missed such an object during his sift through. He just wouldn’t have missed anything so bright, so starkly different to the primitive contents of the shrine.

  Later, he called Jack Goodman at the British Museum, arranged a meeting then drove up to London.

  Over coffee in his small office, Goodman examined the statuette, making appreciative sounds. ‘It’s a lovely thing. A lovely copy of an Egyptian statuette. Although – I’m almost inclined to think that it’s not a copy. It’s just that it has such a new feel …’ Goodman turned the figure again. Light glanced off the solemn wolf-face of the ecstatic dancer.

  ‘But a copy of what, I wond
er?’ Richard said. ‘It’s familiar, but I can’t place it.’

  On impulse Goodman rose from his desk and took down four catalogue volumes from his shelves. It took him half an hour of turning the pages, thinking, scratching his head, swearing, flipping forward and back through the huge books, but eventually he found what he was after.

  ‘Let’s go and see …’

  Behind the scenes in the museum the rooms were lined with cupboards, drawers and shelves of artefacts, objects and implements not on display. A curator led them to a drawer of gold from the tomb of a minor Egyptian king of the Fourth Dynasty. The goldwork was inferior for the most part, and had been damaged when stones from the tomb’s ceiling had fallen at some time soon after the tomb had been sealed. As such the pieces were not displayed.

  Among them, though, was a bronze and gold inlaid dancing figure, a human male wearing the mask of a wolf. It was only half the size of the statuette from the chalk pit, and the dancing position was different. But there was something so similar about the two pieces that it caught Richard’s breath.

  ‘You say the girl dancer is a copy,’ he said to Goodman, while the curator listened, ‘but could it be real? Could it have been stolen from a collection? Even from the museum?’

  The curator examined the wolf-girl carefully, shaking his head. ‘Not from this museum. It’s familiar, of course, but I have no knowledge of something this beautiful having been stolen. Besides, it’s too new. I agree with Dr Goodman, it’s a superb copy. Where did you say you obtained it?’

  ‘My son says he found it. But if that’s true, he certainly found it on the surface of the ground. There’s no sign of his digging down to a hoard. I don’t know if it’s treasure-trove or not. So before I go through the normal procedures I want to try and find out exactly what it is.’

  ‘I tell you one thing,’ Goodman said with a smile. ‘It’s worth a few bob. The gold alone, if it’s as high quality as it looks, must be worth several thousand.’

  ‘It would be a shame to melt such a lovely thing,’ the curator murmured.

  Richard took back the statuette. ‘I don’t intend to. I just need to know where it came from and how it got into my son’s possession. You’re sure you don’t recognize it as stolen goods?’

  ‘Positive. I’d ask at Sotheby’s though. They have a department that specializes in detecting the movement of stolen art.’

  ‘I’m going there next.’

  Sotheby’s didn’t recognize the dancer. The young woman who examined the piece was intrigued and entranced by the statuette, however, and offered to sell it on Whitlock’s behalf, just as soon as he could establish his credentials of ownership.

  ‘What would you say it was worth?’

  She stared at the wolf-girl for a long time, then looked up abruptly and smiled broadly. ‘More than the value of its weight in gold,’ she said. ‘Beyond that, I have no idea. It’s curiously …’ She turned the piece over, shaking her head. ‘It’s curiously old, yet it’s new … if it’s a copy, it’s so intricate, even to the signature of the craftsman who made it …’

  ‘What signature?’ Richard was surprised. She indicated with the nail of her index finger the tiny head of a bird, marked on the back of the wolf-head. Richard had thought that to be a part of the design.

  The woman said, ‘I have such a strange feeling about this piece. I can’t shake it off. It must be recent, I suppose. But it has an odd age about it. Where did you say your family acquired it?’

  ‘It was a gift. Out of the blue. Until I’m certain about its origins I’d rather not go into more detail at the moment.’

  She looked slightly irked. ‘I can’t sell it unless you have established your ownership, and its pedigree, however poor.’

  ‘I’m not going to sell it. Not yet. But I do appreciate your time and help.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  He was held up by traffic on his return to Kent: a Dutch juggernaut had jack-knifed on the narrow section of the A20 close to Charing. A five-mile crawl, taking two and a half hours, meant that he arrived back at Eastwell House after seven.

  Susan had made supper, fresh fish and new potatoes. Michael sat at the end of the table, his face a sparkling mask of pleasure and excitement. Weary from the car, frustrated, Richard poured himself a large scotch and listened to his daughter for a few minutes as she conversed about things that didn’t quite make sense to his adult hearing, but which were presumably important to her. He agreed, supported, questioned, laughed, and cuddled.

  Michael watched him, and he smiled at the boy, talking to him through Carol’s oddly disorientating conversation.

  He talked about traffic. About the museum.

  Michael watched him through eyes that blazed, those green eyes, the sparkling eyes of a boy who had a secret to tell.

  ‘Supper’s up,’ Susan announced, and plates of fish were placed upon the table.

  Richard sat down and reached for the water jug.

  ‘I have a few things to tell everybody here,’ he said, and placed the wolf-girl statuette upon the table.

  Carol giggled. Michael looked coy. Susan passed the bowl of greens down to her husband.

  ‘Before you tell us what you’ve found out, Michael has a little present for you,’ she announced in a quiet, steady voice.

  Carol said, ‘Mikey’s found something else …’

  There was silence at the table. Then Michael reached into his pocket and stretched out his hand to his father. ‘Pretty…’

  Green eyes watched fervently, hopefully.

  Fingers opened.

  Richard took the fragment of silver brooch with its massive, embedded emerald and raised it to the light.

  ‘It’s for you, Daddy,’ the boy said. ‘I fetched it for you.’

  Susan watched him solemnly. Carol had succeeded in spreading most of her mashed white fish over her face and napkin. She ate and chattered to herself, unaware of the tension behind the silence in the room.

  Good God! This must be worth a fortune!

  ‘Thank you,’ Richard said, trying to control his voice. ‘It’s beautiful. Did Chalk Boy give this to you?’

  ‘He showed me where it was,’ Michael said, edgily.

  ‘Will you say thank you to him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He placed the fragment of jewellery on the table, took a deep breath and looked up to meet Susan’s gaze. He smiled and shook his head. She allowed her face to register a restrained delight, then began to eat.

  Michael said, ‘Will you tell me a story?’

  Coming back to his senses, Richard said. ‘A story? Yes. Yes, of course. Which story would you like me to tell you?’

  ‘The Fisher King. Will you tell me about the Fisher King?’

  Richard stared at the boy, then glanced in panic at Susan, who was watching him with an expression of controlled hilarity. His eyes said it all: I don’t know a damn thing about the Fisher King. But he said brazenly, ‘The Fisher King. Old King Fish himself. OK. You’re on. The Fisher King. In all his glory. But let’s eat supper first, shall we?’

  Michael bent down to his plate, delight on his face; he began to fork the fish and potatoes into his mouth with one hand. The other, his left, was clenched into a fist, and Richard noticed that as the boy ate, so the fist beat out a quiet but regular rhythm on the table top.

  The camp had been disturbed. Even by the fading light, Richard could see how the screen of blackthorn and elder had been struck by a violent force; branches were broken, cut or cracked. There was a great quantity of crude plaster and shards of stone on the white chalk, and bits and pieces of mahogany (he guessed), a dark wood, a heavy wood, stained, varnished and polished, cracked and crushed now, as if someone had deliberately smashed a piece of furniture.

  His impression, as he collected together these artefacts at the base of the chalk wall, was that he was looking at the remains of a dressing-table.

  Perhaps the jewelled brooch had been in a drawer in that table?

  Chal
k Boy’s ‘fetching’ was obviously very violent.

  Michael bounded up the stairs, tripping on the feet of his pyjamas, which were slightly too long. He thundered across the landing, burst into his room and leapt on to the bed, instantly doing a headstand with his feet up against the wall.

  In this unlikely posture he greeted his father, who came calmly into the room, switched on the bedside lamp, and sat down on the mattress.

  Richard watched the boy, trying not to think of the thousands of questions he longed to ask his son. The boy watched Richard from his bat-like position, then suddenly collapsed down into a heap, sitting up and grinning.

  ‘Headstand,’ Michael announced.

  ‘I noticed. Are you ready for a story?’

  ‘Fisher King! Fisher King!’ Michael chanted.

  ‘I’ve got a special story for you. One I’ve made up myself …’

  Michael subsided, leaning back against the pillow, his freckled face lowering in looks until it registered positive gloom. But he didn’t speak. He watched his father through eyes that were suddenly anguished and sad.

  Richard said, ‘Don’t you want to hear the special story I’ve made up for you?’

  The ‘yes’ in the boy’s voice was so quiet as to be almost inaudible. Michael’s gaze shifted to the window. Disappointment clouded him.

  ‘On the other hand,’ Richard said quietly, glancing at Susan who had appeared in the doorway, ‘I could always tell you my special story tomorrow, when I get back from work. And tonight …’

  ‘Fisher King! Fisher King!’ Michael said brightly, and sat upright again.

  ‘Fisher King it is. Shall we get Carol to come and sing in the—’

  ‘NO!’

  He had been about to say: to come and sing in the chorus. In the story of the Fisher King – he had just researched it in half an hour flat, finding a children’s version that explained a lot – there was a song that could be sung, with a chorus that celebrated the land coming back to life after the Holy Grail had been discovered.

  Shocked by the screaming negation from his son, Richard took a moment to recover the initiative. Carol was already in bed, but still awake, the evening having been one of excitement and general good humour. Richard had not expected this violent rejection of the girl, although it was clear to him, instantly in retrospect, that he should have expected such a denial.