A Stone's Throw

by Fiona Shaw

  ‘Mother said I should bring something to play with in case you were asleep.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a doll,’ Will said. ‘I thought you didn’t like them very much.’

  ‘I’m practising to do it better.’

  ‘To do what better?’ Will asked.

  ‘Play with dolls better. It’s done a lot at school.’

  ‘Ah,’ Will said. He was, he realised, very glad to see his sister.

  ‘And Mother will be back in an hour and I’m to be quiet if you’re tired, and practise, and just-wait-patiently.’

  ‘There’s a special chair for visitors,’ Will said, ‘or you can come and sit on the bed, beside me.’

  He watched her consider this, and then she took the chair, scrambling a little to gain the seat. She wriggled to get comfortable and put a hand on each knee. Then she turned to Will.

  ‘Why did it get Benjamin and not you?’ she said.

  ‘Mother said you’d been very upset.’

  ‘Benjamin is funny,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him to be dead.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ Will said. ‘I don’t know why it left me here.’

  ‘But there wasn’t any lightning,’ Emma said.

  ‘No,’ Will said. ‘No thunder, no lightning.’

  ‘Father says he’s going to sell the land, and we’re not allowed to go there any more.’

  She looked at his feet. Sitting on the chair, she wasn’t much taller than the high hospital bed.

  ‘Did it burn all your toes?’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘Each one?’

  ‘Each one,’ he said.

  ‘Like the Pobble,’ she said, and then: ‘And are you very sad about Benjamin? Very very sad?’

  Will turned away a little. He hadn’t cried till now.

  ‘Mary’s my best friend,’ Emma said. ‘Mary Angela Dawkins.’

  She shuffled forward in the seat so she could swing her legs, watching them to and fro.

  ‘And I know it wasn’t lightning, but if she got struck by lightning, then I’d be very, very sad, and she said I could have her china tea service; and if I was, then she could have my doll, but that’s not as special because she has a doll already.’

  She looked up at Will.

  ‘But she doesn’t like boats or adventures,’ she said, ‘so I don’t either.’

  He felt each upswing of her foot, its gentle brush against the bed. He understood her and he wanted to tell her that they’d been safe home, that Benjamin didn’t die because of him, but he said only: ‘As long as she’s a nice friend.’

  ‘Don’t cry, Will,’ she said and she took out a handkerchief. ‘I brought it specially.’

  Will took it in his bandaged hands and patted at his cheeks.

  ‘Anyway, Mary said girls had friends and boys had chums, so Benjamin was your best chum,’ and Will smiled despite himself because she said it as though this might change something.

  ‘Mary has very definite opinions,’ he said.

  She took the handkerchief back, folded it and put it in her pocket.

  ‘She is nearly seven and a half,’ she said with the air of someone who knows that the six months makes all the difference.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Benjamin was your best chum, wasn’t he?’ Emma said, needed, Will realised, formal clarification of their status.

  ‘Yes, he was my best chum,’ he said, and they were both silent for a while, she swinging her legs, he hit with the memory of Benjamin’s sleeping face.

  ‘I’m going to get down for a bit and practise with my doll,’ she said.

  He watched her pick the doll out of the basket and cradle it in her arms. She rocked it to and fro several times, then appeared to adjust its frock, rub at some mark on its cheek before depositing it back in the basket and tucking it in again.

  ‘There,’ she said, and returned to her seat.

  Pain came in waves. It was worst in his chest, but he didn’t want to give it too much room. He had cleaned the mackerel that day, then flipped the blade inside and hung the penknife on its string around his neck. Safe, careful. But when the electricity bolt struck, the knife had scored its own mark against his ribs, an oval of charred skin that the nurses dressed each day, although the burn pain – searing, aching – was not so much there as all around it, up to his heart and down to his navel.

  The doctor had explained to his mother why this was and she’d told him.

  ‘There are no nerves left where the worst burns are; so where you feel the pain, that’s around the edges, where the burn is less bad.’

  He didn’t want to cry out, or groan, because it would frighten Emma and she might not want to visit again.

  ‘What shall I do, Emma?’ he said, because if he could listen to what she said, then he could ignore the pain, or pretend to. And besides, she might know the answer as well as anyone.

  Emma leaned forward, put her elbows on the bed and rested her head, thinking.

  ‘Father said when he was sad, he did more work, but he didn’t say why. And when Muftie died, I cried. But Father said I oughtn’t too much, because rabbits can’t be your best friend or your best chum because they’re only animals.’

  ‘No,’ Will said.

  They were each silent for a minute, each caught by a different kind of loss. Will rested his bandaged hand gently on her head.

  ‘Your hair is so cool,’ he said, and she giggled.

  ‘Hair isn’t cool or hot, silly,’ she said. ‘Besides, you can’t feel it with all the bandages.’

  ‘Why don’t you be my best chum now?’ Will said.

  She lifted her head and looked at him. His face was serious.

  ‘No, sisters can’t be,’ she said and then: ‘Did you know that Barbara Lavery has been to our house twice? She was very sorry that you couldn’t go to her birthday party.’

  ‘I don’t know Barbara Lavery,’ Will said. ‘I’ve barely seen her since I was little.’

  ‘She’s very nice and very pretty,’ Emma said, ‘and she was very sorry. Mother made her tea both times and the second time there was cake.’

  Pain burned in his chest and he closed his eyes to meet it. His anger rose and he spat the words out like grit: ‘Well, if Mother gave her cake, then she can be my best chum now.’ But when he opened his eyes again, Emma had got down and she was tugging at the chair.

  ‘I’m going to look out of the window,’ she said and he heard the shake in her voice.

  He waited while she positioned the chair and fetched her doll, then kneeled up to look out, only her legs and her shoe soles visible to him now, hidden as she was behind the curtain. Then he spoke gently. ‘Emma, I wasn’t angry; not with you.’

  She didn’t reply, and he tried again.

  ‘It hurts,’ he said. ‘Everything is painful and sometimes I can’t keep it in.’

  The legs shuffled. He heard her point things out to the doll – the flowerbed, a nurse, a tree. Then, in a small voice: ‘When you’re not so sad, maybe you could have a new chum.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s right.’

  His father visited at the weekend. The last time, a week earlier, Will had been asleep when he came and it was only from the sharp smell of his cologne that Will knew he had been there. This time George nodded and patted Will on the shoulder and muttered something, Will wasn’t sure what. Something like ‘Glad … jolly good … fine recovery.’ Then his father sat down in the chair and opened a notebook.

  ‘Meeting with Messrs Gladstone and Gladstone regarding land adjoining hotel,’ he said. ‘Thought you might like to know the outcome.’

  This offering of information, man to man, was as close as his father would come to expressing affection and Will said: ‘Yes, I’d like to know,’ which wasn’t strictly true. He didn’t want to think about that strip of land; it ran alongside his dreams too much already. But he did want to know that his father had got him in mind somewhere.

  George read out what he’d written down, s
peaking in notes, as if whole sentences were an indulgence:

  ‘Discussions with the hotel. I’ll sell land if they’ll make sure never used for storing boats again. Make sure it’s safe.’

  Will thought: Somewhere in there he is sorry for me and angry and doing whatever he can do. But there is nothing he can do, because what can anybody do now?

  ‘Freak thing,’ his father went on. ‘Sea fret. Mast. Ten feet between. Spoken to several people. Authorities. Freak thing.’

  Then he read from the notebook again.

  ‘If hotel was cottage, you’d have been fine. Only 11,000 volts. Just some burns, if anything. But line to hotel carries 33,000 volts. Electricity found the mast, carried in the fret. Corona effect.’

  ‘And crowned Ben,’ Will said.

  ‘Found your friend,’ George said.

  ‘Know thine enemies,’ Will said. ‘You always told me to do that. Always seemed like good advice. But not this time.’

  George checked his watch and stood up.

  ‘Must talk about your future. Once you’re home. Glad you’re feeling better.’

  The nurses came and went and his body began to heal. Soon he could go home, they said, as long as his wounds were dressed each day. He couldn’t see his chest or his feet, but he had watched as they dealt with his hands. The new skin would be puckered, they said; there would be scars, and he nodded: of course.

  Emma came again, with Henry this time, and they brought Monopoly to play, unfolding the board precariously on Will’s legs. Will didn’t like the game, but he was pleased to see them and so they played for a while. Emma was too young to understand its ruthless economics and insisted on buying properties by card colour – she liked the orange and the red ones, but not the blue, or green, and certainly not the stations; Henry had his father’s shrewd eye, playing the percentage game, and Will didn’t care. So after a time the game descended into anarchy, and Will declared Henry the winner and sent himself to gaol forever, which made Emma laugh. Will played and joked and didn’t mention Benjamin, and his grief was hidden inside him like a stone.

  They sent him home two days later and he walked from the hospital like an old man, hobbling, exhausted. The day was sunny and the bright light startled him. They’d had to prise his arms away from Benjamin when they found him, but now he hadn’t the strength of a child.

  ‘Mother,’ he said, his voice urgent, but when she answered him, he couldn’t name his fear, and he just shrugged. ‘Thought I’d left something behind,’ he said.

  Meg drove the car gently, easing round the deep Devonian corners, taking the longer route home around the cliff to avoid any well-wishers greeting them in the village. Will saw this, was relieved, and though he knew she didn’t intend it, he felt the obligation: to behave right in return, to dance the dance.

  He was so angry and he wanted to hurt her. Smash her with his fist, wound her with his grief. He wanted her there, and he wished she would leave him alone.

  ‘I’ve made a nice tea,’ Meg said. ‘The little ones are excited. They’re making a list of games already, I should warn you.’

  Will looked out of the window. The hedgerows looked the same, only darker. The Lady’s Bedstraw still flowered and he could still pluck it if he chose.

  ‘I’d like to sleep in the spare room for a bit,’ he said.

  ‘I had wondered,’ Meg said. ‘The bed is made up.’

  Because, he thought, if he lived as a stranger to himself, then perhaps he would manage. An idea came to him, returned rather. He would say it out loud now, see how it sounded; how she took it, and how he did, before they were home, before they were anywhere.

  He looked round at his mother.

  ‘I’ve come to a decision,’ he said.

  He tried to make his tone light, but it was hard and flat and he saw the anxiety on his mother’s face.

  ‘I’m going to take Emma’s advice,’ he said.

  ‘Emma’s advice?’ Meg expression softened. ‘What did she advise you to do?’

  ‘Now Benjamin is dead, I’m going to invite Barbara Lavery to be my chum.’

  Meg slowed into a bend.

  ‘Do you mean,’ she said, ‘that Emma advised you to marry Barbara?’

  ‘She advised me to be her chum.’

  ‘You might say that amounts to the same thing, coming from your seven-year-old sister.’ His mother’s voice was amused, but curt.

  ‘Emma’s a good judge of character,’ Will said. ‘Much better than Henry.’

  ‘You are joking, Will?’ There was a note of concern now in his mother’s voice, as if she couldn’t tell now what to take seriously and what not. ‘You don’t even know the girl, not since you grew up anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know what a joke is,’ he said. ‘But Emma said Barbara had been round twice and that you’d given her cake.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl, and she was concerned,’ Meg said. ‘You – Benjamin – it cast something of a pall over her birthday.’

  So his mother was sorry for her. That was it.

  ‘Christ, Mother!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for the pall we’ve cast. Very, very sorry!’

  Meg stopped the car, dead, in the middle of the lane and turned round to face him.

  ‘Could have gone through the windscreen then,’ he said, and he heard the sarcasm in his voice, but he couldn’t help it.

  ‘Look at me,’ she said once and before he’d had time to do so, again: ‘Look at me!’

  He twisted in his seat, nursing his bandaged hands to him in what he knew, as he did it, was a deliberate gesture; a gesture that said: these wounds, these are my weapons and my defence. But she looked only at his face and refused to see them.

  ‘Benjamin was a close friend,’ Meg said, ‘and grieving takes its own time. I know you’re in shock. The doctor said they think that it can stay in the body – in the actual tissue, in the bloodstream – for months. But even so, I don’t want to hear language like that from my son.’

  The lane reared up on either side of them, the green so high it blotted out the sun. Love or no love, Will thought.

  ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘It must be the shock speaking,’ but he said the words gently, so she would believe him.

  ‘And still, that’s no reason to be uncivil and I’m glad the little ones aren’t in the car to hear you, your tone as much as your words. Perhaps Emma is right and Barbara would be good for you. But if you do invite her, then do so because you’d like to see her. Don’t invite her otherwise.’

  It was quite a speech from his mother. He thought she might put her hand to his head after this, stroke his hair. He hoped she would, despite himself. But she put the car back into gear and drove on. Will didn’t look at her, but he could see, out of the corner of his eye, that she was thinking about something.

  ‘The day you sailed to Shining Sands,’ she said finally, ‘I was cross with you about something. Do you remember?’

  Will nodded. Of course he remembered. That morning, that day, every last detail, was carved into him. His beloved Ben, curled around his sleep, so ready to be woken. His mother telling him to live a life of his own making.

  ‘That hasn’t changed,’ she said. ‘Benjamin’s death hasn’t changed it.’

  The mornings came, each of them, like a terrible reprise. The summer stayed warm and bright and the sun shone through the curtains like a punishment. Will slept sparely in the spare bed, often woken by dream fits of jagged colour or fearful journeys that swung relentlessly into catastrophe, and from which he lurched awake, sweating, heart racing. He came to dread sleep and would stay awake as long as he could, or take a sleeping bag into his sister’s room. It was better there where he could hear Emma’s easy breathing, though his parents disapproved.

  But gradually his body mended, his strength returned and even his sleep settled. In the following weeks the dressings came off one by one, first from each toe, then his chest and finally his hands. He made a game of it with Emma, counting his body back into life, like one o
f the number rhymes she pooh-poohed now she was so grandly six. Before he would have sailed, or swum, every day in a summer like this; now he didn’t once go near the sea.

  He saw Benjamin everywhere: at the turn of the stair, or snugged into the heap of sleeping bag. He glimpsed him at the twist of the lane, the cap on his head, and shouted out and ran down; and once he heard Benjamin, he knew he had, talking to his mother in the greenhouse. So he crept up and listened. He was right, his mother was speaking and not to herself, but no one answered her. And when he came round the corner silently and stood in the doorway, she didn’t see him for a minute, so he listened to her talk, quite plainly, to a boy, or a man, who wasn’t there. She jumped when she saw him, and shouted his name: ‘Will!’ But she didn’t explain, and he thought only: I’m not alone, seeing ghosts.

  He wasn’t sure why he asked Barbara to tea finally. It wasn’t because he thought they’d be friends, and he certainly didn’t feel his mother’s sense of duty. Perhaps, like sleeping in the spare room, it was in the effort to live as a stranger; or perhaps he simply wanted to confound himself.

  She came and she was very real. A girl his own age with thick, dark hair wound up on her head, and a handbag, and a cardigan the colour of an orange sunset. She ate cake, was charming with his mother, playful with Emma and serious with Henry, discussing quite readily the finer points of cricket, so that Henry declared her afterwards to be the best sort of a girl. And with Will she was reserved, respectful, funny, so that despite himself, he found that he liked her.

  The second time Will invited her to the house, he did so when he knew they would be alone. They sat in the garden, backs up against a tree, and talked.

  ‘You know, I was planning an escape from your birthday party,’ Will said. ‘I don’t like dances and Mother was insisting.’

  ‘I wish you could have come, and made your escape,’ she said. ‘You and your friend, both.’

  ‘You’d have liked Benjamin,’ Will said. ‘He was nicer than me.’

  She smoked a cigarette, leaning in towards him to light it from his lighter. She was a good listener and she didn’t try to gainsay, or commiserate, or reassure. She leaned against the tree, her skirts pulled down between her knees, her fingers weaving and unweaving the edges of her scarf.