by Peter Wells
‘Can’t you thank me?’
‘What for?’ I whine, but in a tone of voice which is stern also, with non-recognition. To my Quiz Kid brother, who wears glasses, and reads books.
‘Why?’ I say to him. ‘Why do I have to say thank you?. You gave it to me. I didn’t ask for it.’
Which is true.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘You didn’t ask for it. But I did it for you. I did it for you,’ he says then in a heated way. He has come closer to me. I think he wants to snatch it back. I can see his eyes, which are almost crying, but I know he wouldn’t cry in front of me. Not any longer. No more.
I pull the paper away from him, so he can’t snatch it back.
‘So what,’ I say insolently. ‘So what. I didn’t ask.’
He just looks at me.
‘You heard from MumandDad?’ he asks then.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Course not.’
‘Why of course not?’ he says, suddenly interested. Now it’s like he has forgotten about the drawing.
‘Well, they don’t want to think about us. Why should they?’
The logic of this is pretty unassailable.
‘Why shouldn’t they?’ he says to me. ‘After all they are our parents.’
I shrug. I don’t know what to answer to that. ‘Maybe they won’t come back,’ I say. ‘Maybe they like it over there. I don’t know,’ I say, angry at having to think of all this. ‘They better buy us some good presents,’ I say warningly.
‘Do you like staying with Ponky?’ he says to me, sharp and close.
‘It’s OK,’ I say carefully. ‘How are the Balles? You like staying with them?’
‘It’s OK,’ he says, as if it doesn’t matter. ‘It’s only three weeks now,’ he says to me.
‘It is not,’ I say, angry. ‘It is three weeks and five days. And, I glance down at my watch. ‘Four hours. I know. I’m counting. Not like you.’
He sighs then. He says, ‘You will use the poster? It took me hours, and I had to buy the card myself.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say coldly. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’
We look at each other. Matthew turns his bike around and starts walking away.
‘Well you tell me if you don’t,’ he says to me. ‘Because I can use the paper again.’
I wait until he has gone, then I unroll the card and look down at the paper very carefully, admiring his subtle colours, the way the yellow on the feathers fades into brown, with soft and curly little strokes of purple pencil. I look at these fine flicks of lacework, of inspiration in action. This is what I could never do.
I let out a long breath, knowing I have done something hopelessly wrong in, first, accepting the drawing from Matthew, then not thanking him. I should have just returned it. But, I think, as I turn about and start walking, he shouldn’t have given it to me.
He shouldn’t have spent five hours writing me a love letter which he then put in my hands and asked would I accept it. I didn’t want it. I didn’t ask for it. He did it. He gave it to me.
And faintly in my mind’s ear I can hear CarrotnKeely saying, ‘Wow, Jamie, you won the competition, you’re really neat, can I sit beside you in art class? You want to walk home with me, Jamie? Can I come to your place?’
Can I stay the weekend with you? Sleep in my bunk, Keely? Put your hand down there? Please, Keely. Yes please.
Listening to all this, not listening to the words inside my heart, I walk away with my brother’s love letter in my hand, being careful not to smudge it.
Sleep
I DON’T KNOW who heard it first. Sometimes I think it was both of us, simultaneously. And the instant we heard it, we both knew it had happened.
He had arrived.
He had come.
And the look of shock on our features — this was what Ponky and I now exchanged as we lay there, turned to each other.
It was as if we had both glimpsed a dead man’s face and recognised the face for the very first time: it was our own.
At the same time, and in the same simultaneous impulse of fear, our eyes moved towards the safety of Uncle Ambrose and Aunty Gilda’s bedroom.
We both gauged the distance: could we make it?
He would have to get through the window.
Surely this would take a moment?
But in another sense, we knew it did not matter.
Horton had super-human strength. The mere occupation of space by something as insubstantial as wood, as glass, as plaster would fall away, explode into its essential nothingness so that he could, pincer-like, lean through and claim us.
Take us back.
THE BLINDS RATTLED again, impatiently.
We were running.
We were running and screaming, at the same time.
We were screaming and running and running and screaming.
It was so long, that run.
When we got into the hall, sound came out of our mouths. Up till that time the scream had been growing inside us, resounding in our throats, echoing to every part of the suddenly abandoned torture chambers of our bodies. Now it gouged up our throats, pulling our gullets apart painfully as the sheer volume of our terror blasted out.
Aunty Gilda sitting bolt upright.
‘Horton, it’s Horton!’ we screamed. He’s come to collect us.
Aunty Gilda awakened into her nightmare.
We were beside ourselves, hysterical, still running on the spot, even though there was no further for us to go.
‘Horton!’ we kept screaming, though I realised, with a shock, our voices were only whispers, they were his whispers: his voice was in our throats, his breath had taken possession of our bodies.
We turned to Aunty Gilda.
Aunty Gilda had aged in one second. She had become a hag so ancient she had sat on rocks watching fleets of ships going out to sea, and sinking, within her sight. She had witnessed troops marching off to war and returning in casket after casket. She had witnessed mushroom clouds, and with a painted toe traced a human silhouette on a blackened pavement.
So when she spoke, the voice which came out of her mouth was one other than her own, recognisable only in that I could hear inside it the song of her hysteria, as if the faint tintinnabulation of her laugh had reversed itself and turned into an almost haggard anxiety, joining disaster to catastrophe, bad luck to ill fortune.
Yet this voice compelled. And her eyes, I felt her eyes looking at me, beseeching even as she commanded me.
Her wiry grasp closed round my wrist, and pushed me slightly forward.
‘Jamie,’ she said. ‘The baseball bat. Get it for me.’
The baseball bat? Back into that room?
I can’t I can’t I can’t, I sang to myself, under my breath, gazing away across the prairie of carpet to the door.
Ponky, come with me, come and die with me. Ponky.
‘I can’t,’ Aunty Gilda, I whispered out loud. ‘I just can’t.’
We all stared at each other, in the whiteout of our powerlessness.
‘Well, kids,’ she said then rising up, blooming in that second into a nemesis. ‘We’ll have to do it together. Come on.’
The bravery which lay behind her conviction was beyond anything I knew.
‘On the count,’ she whispered now, converting it into a game which Ponky and I could understand.
She was our general. In that second she had obliterated Davy Crockett.
‘One, two,’ she whispered, then on the count of three, she opened her lips wide and out of it came a cry so terrible Ponky and I simultaneously felt the hairs on our heads rise up. Our eyes came together and met as this tribal cry — of defence, of anger, of outrage — merged and then blew Horton out of our blood systems in one seismic wind so immensely powerful we found it forced open our own mouths and we too were screaming out loud in our fury at being awoken into such panic. It was blowing us across the carpet, we were being blown before this tribal wind and before we even knew it, or could resist it (we sensed resistance was h
opeless), we had breached the bedroom and moved out into the open territory of the hall carpet.
As if magnetised, the baseball bat leapt into Aunty Gilda’s grasp.
She swung it once, twice through the air.
Her cry was more magnificently chilling.
Then.
‘Open the door, open the door,’ she murmured softly, seductively, as if she — she who had seen South Pacific more times than anyone I knew, sitting in the very best seats — understood the nature of theatre was to deliver the greatest effect, yet to undercut it at the last moment by something spare, low-key and personal. So she, the general, ordered me, the private, almost in a whisper, to snatch back the door so: brave now, individually heroic, inspired by the sheer lunacy of her leadership, I yanked the door back and, flicking on the outside light so it flooded the grass outside with a cruel white shade which we knew would kill all the spirits of darkness in which Horton dwelt, we found ourselves running out onto the dark lawn, all three of us screaming at the tops of our voices, emitting our terror so that what was inside us bled out and fleed out and joined the real world of appearances so that the horror of what was not real and only imagined would be forced, in this instant, to leap into the real — or cease to exist forever.
THERE WAS A boy there.
He was standing in terror. Raised up high on the pedals of his bike.
He had his hand up at the window.
He was wearing a school uniform.
It was Matthew.
‘Horton!’ we screamed as if the word itself made every horror manifest.
‘Horton! Horton! H orton!’
‘Is Horton about?’ my brother asked naïvely, gazing about him, oblivious to this fundamental fact. Because everyone knew in Hungry Creek, when Horton got out, all you could do was retreat inside, and close the doors, lock the windows, lie low and wait.
‘I didn’t know that.’
Instantly, our horror converted itself into relief, tinged with hilarity. Because now Matthew became terrified.
‘Where is h-h-h-h-he?’ Maddy stammered, looking about him into the dark.
‘What’re you doing here anyway?’ Aunty Gilda thought to ask, and I knew by the return of her voice to the known routes of sound we were safe.
‘Yeah, Maddy, what you up to?’ asked Ponky almost fiercely, resenting the fact she had had to show herself in slightly less than a heroic light.
‘I I I …’ my brother stuttered.
His head turned slightly on its side as, in his urgency, the words failed to come out. I looked at his mouth turning into a spout, formed and pursed.
His shoulders were hunched and his whole narrow frame seemed to be contorting as he tried to get out whatever it was he wanted to say.
In the end he could not speak.
His hand rose up, trembling.
I looked down.
It was a letter.
From Australia.
Soundlessly he offered it to me.
‘O! MADDY, YOU dunce,’ Aunty Gilda laughed, so returned to her old self that she ruffled Maddy’s hair, and he beamed back at her, at that second, like this was the sweetest sound, or word, he, a Quiz Kid, a brainbox, had ever heard.
Aunty Gilda had her arm over Maddy’s narrow back as we wandered back up the steps we had, so recently, spilt down in terror.
‘I think we all need a strong cuppa, Mutt.’ She used Ponky’s nickname for me. I always assumed PK’s nickname was somehow inaudible to her, an invisible calligraphy parsed between Ponky and me, a form of morse code. But now, I did not mind. We were comrades. I even felt the odd prickling of pride. ‘Get out the sugar for us, will you, Mutt pet? And plenty of it.’
‘You were trying to give us a scare, weren’t you?’ I asked Matthew all cross, letter tightly held in my hand. ‘Weren’t you!’
But somehow I didn’t mean it.
WE BEGAN TO troop back inside. Laughing amongst ourselves to still be alive, have limbs, breath, eyes to glance at each other. We now noticed that we were outside in our pyjamas. This caused even more laughter. Ponky threw the baseball bat up into the sky, turned round once, and caught it.
But as we came up the stairs into the light, Ponk, Aunty Gilda and I suddenly realised that we had to confront an undeniable fact, something we had blotted out at the time.
We had seen Uncle Ambrose bolt out of bed.
As if at that moment we heard, afresh, the turn of handle as he shut himself in.
He had hidden inside Aunty Gilda’s wardrobe.
He had abandoned us.
Just at this moment, Uncle Ambrose chose to make his entrance.
Our laughter cut off.
Ponky, Aunty Gilda and I did not dare glance at each other.
Robed in an ornate blue silk dressing gown, cord laced round his pudgy midriff, he stood there, glowering at each one of us in turn.
‘Who was it?’ he demanded.
We all, as if in one movement, looked downward.
Even Aunty Gilda judged it better to remain silent.
‘Time you was all in bed,’ he said to us tartly.
Maddy stood up uncertainly, pushing his chair back and sheepishly making ready to go.
‘I’m v-v-very sorry,’ Uncle Ambrose, he stammered. ‘I was only delivering a letter. Express delivery,’ he said. ‘I knew Mutt was waiting for it.’
In the strange circumstances, he too had taken to using my nickname.
I glanced at him warningly, then swiftly lowered my eyes. There was something more important — if somehow indefinable — at issue here.
‘Why don’t the lot of you go back to bed,’ he chivvied us. ‘And you, Matthew, don’t you ever let me catch you coming up here so late at night again. I don’t care what you got to deliver. Understood? Boy? Understood?’
With a stooped head Maddy nodded, taking his glasses off, polishing them then placing them back on. This had the effect of him taking a good and scrutinising look at Uncle Ambrose in his state of fallen majesty. For he had looked dethroned, no longer in his suit and smart hat, emerald winking on his little finger, but in the strange, even feminising garb of a silk dressing gown.
Aunty Gilda even tittered.
In a flash, I saw Uncle Ambrose on his annual trip down to the tide. Though Uncle Ambrose and Aunty Gilda lived only one hundred yards from the beach, they never swam, no matter how hot the weather. The only exception was a king tide. Under a full moon, Uncle Ambrose ambled down the road, in this same silk dressing gown. This was strange enough, though it seemed to have its own logic — darkness, night, a dressing gown, the queer lunar intensity of the moon. But it was when he undressed and revealed his body, white as a pupa, I grasped something else. Because, on these nights, Ponk swam as far away as possible from Uncle Ambrose. She abandoned him. And he was left there, standing on his own, glaring at anyone nearby, as if their one aim in life was to splash him.
The terrible truth was Uncle Ambrose could not swim.
There was nothing or no one more pitiable on earth to Ponky and me than someone who did not feel at home in the water.
And it was him.
I seemed to hear the splash of water across the warm surface of a moonlit sea as Ponk put stroke after concentrated stroke between her and her father.
I glanced at Ponk now. Her face was blank.
‘Hear me, boy, or were you born deaf?’
‘Yes, Uncle Ambrose. I mean no, Uncle Ambrose.’ Maddy let out a small, almost clerical cough. ‘That is, Uncle Ambrose, I wasn’t born deaf …’
‘Get out!’
Maddy disappeared into the night.
BOOK TWO
LIES AND THEIR NECESSITY
Dad
EACH WEDNESDAY, WHILE my parents are away, to keep the beads laced on the necklace, I go to running. This is to make me into my parents who carry within them as they age and forget, and frowns bury the young looks on their faces, twin memories, slim and silvery. One is of the young man fleeting along, his leg raised up as he bursts th
rough the tape. The other of a young maiden, her body following through the master-stroke of her golf-club so that, as her hips cantilever round, she seems to be caught in a perpetual slow-revolve: revolving towards the camera flash as she goes up to the front to collect the cup which is and always has been forever engraved with her name, simply awaiting her hour, and her arrival.
This is what my running is. I must run, again and again, over the same length so that I may arrive at the correct hour, and there will be presented to me a small silver cup — the first of many — on which will be engraved my name. This will be the true beginning of who I am. It is only at this moment James Caughey, as my parents meant him to be, will exist.
I know all this from the silver treasury which lies on the very top shelf of the kitchen dresser, behind glass: the cup after cup after cup engraved with my mother’s name, my father’s name; small bowls, large chalices, tiny eggcups, each one as if to bespeak of a vast long table lined with people who that moment, in a sudden gush of hush, have risen to their feet, glasses charged and the solemn words are for us spoken.
IN MY MIND, within a little sealed bubble, an image exists of these cups always on the top shelf. I see my mother and myself taking them down every so often, smearing the dense pink paste of polish over them carefully, covering all the yellowed and tarnished mirror surfaces with the dimness. Each concave surface, every minute inset and recess must be covered. The tiny black podiums, some already blistering with age, must be treated with care. We do not want to reveal they are made of wood. We wish to keep the stark contrast between the whiteness of silver and the blackness of ebony. My fingers, behind the polishing cloth, feel out and follow the braille of their names. This is what made them, my parents, who they are. Mentally and forever they are bursting through tapes and delivering the master-stroke … except now, it is over. Now. It is over.
It is not forgotten. No. It is now buried deep within me, waiting for its ordained moment to surface.