by Guy Burt
‘Alex?’ comes a voice out of nowhere, sounding somehow bigger than the valley around me, and—
And the afternoon tumbles away from me and—
‘Alex?’ Jamie says.
I blink. ‘Hello,’ I say.
He is crouched next to me. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘You were like you were asleep,’ he says, ‘but your eyes were open. I could see them. I kept calling you but you didn’t move.’
‘I was thinking,’ I say. Saying this, I have found, usually works.
‘It was weird.’
I shrug. ‘I was just thinking,’ I say again.
After a moment’s hesitation, he sits down on the flat rock beside me. ‘What were you thinking about?’
Now it is my turn to hesitate. I have become used to what to say to my parents, but perhaps this is not the right thing to say to Jamie. I look at him, and his brown eyes are interested, not suspicious. I say, ‘I was thinking with Lena.’
‘Who’s Lena?’
‘She’s our cook. And she looks after me, sometimes.’ He nods, and I am encouraged by the way he accepts what I’ve told him. ‘We’re going for a walk up that way, and we see a bridge, and a chapel where a man used to live. A hermit,’ I add. ‘He went away, though, into the hills.’
Jamie is frowning. ‘When?’
‘When what?’
‘When do you go on the walk?’
I am thrown into confusion. I don’t want Jamie to know that I used to be a liar, but the conversation is becoming like the ones I used to have – back then, when I was a liar – with my parents. I don’t know what to say. But Jamie is still looking at me, his face open and waiting for me to say something, and in the end I just say it. ‘Just now.’
‘This morning?’
‘Just now. Before you came.’ Suddenly I want him very much to understand. ‘That was what I was doing. Staring into space.’
‘You mean you were imagining it?’
‘No …’
‘What, then?’
It is the tone of his voice that makes the difference: not impatient, just curious. I try to find the words. ‘You know when – you go somewhere—’
He nods.
‘And then you come back.’
Now he is looking puzzled. ‘What, like a walk?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Like that. That’s what I was doing.’
He is quiet for a time, then he says, ‘So you’d gone with Lena and then you came back and then you came here and I found you?’
‘No,’ I say, surprised he doesn’t understand. ‘I was with Lena and then you called me and I came back. I heard you say my name.’
‘But I saw you. You were right here.’ He isn’t laughing at me and he isn’t angry with me. His voice is steady and serious, as though he has found something that must be examined until it makes sense. He doesn’t sound like he cares if it takes him all day.
‘I was with Lena too,’ I say.
‘You mean like a dream?’
‘No.’ Dreams are all fuzzy, blurred, strange; they aren’t real. ‘When you go somewhere. Like up the valley with Lena.’
‘You make it up?’
‘No. Like now, like I’m here with you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he says.
I can’t think of anything else to say to make it clearer.
He sits there, still frowning slightly, thinking it all through. Then he says, ‘Can you go anywhere?’
‘Sure.’
‘Like the moon?’ He sounds suddenly excited.
‘Oh. No. Just – places in the valley. With Lena, or the town, or the garden.’
‘Oh.’ Another pause. ‘Anywhere in the valley, though?’
‘Just places I know,’ I say, and at that there is a sudden sense that something heavy has shifted – just a little – in my head, moving reluctantly, trying to accommodate what I’ve just said. The questions Jamie is asking aren’t ones anyone’s ever asked me before. I haven’t asked them to myself either. They feel like they’re prodding at me, searching, trying to find me out.
‘Just places you’ve been?’ he says, his eyes bright.
‘I – I suppose.’
‘So you’re remembering them,’ he says triumphantly. ‘You know – remembering, like when you remember what you did on Saturday. That’s all.’ He looks pleased at having pieced the puzzle back together, and I am pleased too. But then a look of vague disquiet crosses his face. ‘Only – you really looked strange. Your eyes were open, but you didn’t see me, and you didn’t hear me.’
‘Yes I did,’ I say, surprised. ‘That’s why I came back.’
We look at the rocks, and the side of the valley beyond them, together.
‘You’re weird,’ he says eventually. I blink. But then he says, ‘I like you, though.’ And my heart skips once, and feels as if it is grinning inside me.
‘I like you too,’ I say.
‘And wouldn’t it be great if you could go anywhere, just in your head – the moon or Mars, or different planets?’
I have never thought about this either. ‘I suppose,’ I say.
‘I’d love that.’ He looks entranced with the possibility. ‘Do you like comics?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ve got some great ones. They’re in English, though,’ he adds, doubtfully.
‘But I speak English,’ I say, surprised. It takes me a moment to remember that Jamie is a foreigner, like me. Astonished, I switch from the way we have been talking – the way I talk with Lena – to the other way I talk, when I’m with my parents. ‘Can you speak like this?’
Jamie looks just as astonished, but he answers the same way. ‘Yes. My father’s English.’
‘Mine too,’ I say. ‘And Mummy,’ I add, remembering.
Suddenly he begins to laugh – a little at first that quickly grows into a great uncontrollable peal that rings against the side of the valley. He points at me, helplessly, and then at himself, and I understand immediately what he means – We’re such idiots! – and the funny side of it strikes me, too. I can’t help it; I join him, laughing harder and harder until my sides hurt and there are tears in my eyes. I can’t think of a time when I’ve laughed harder.
At last we quieten down. Occasionally we look sideways at each other and giggles overwhelm us again; but in the end we are too tired to laugh any more. We sit side by side with big, idiot grins on our faces.
Jamie rubs his eyes with his sleeve and says, ‘You’re mad, you know? You’re mad. Mad Alex.’ In the laughter, the realization of English has left us as suddenly as it arrived, and Jamie’s words are in comfortable Italian once more.
‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘You’re mad.’
‘I’m not as mad as you, though,’ he says.
‘You are.’
‘Mad Alex.’ He grins at me. ‘If you show me your lizards I’ll show you my comics. They’re brilliant. Is it a deal?’
‘Yes,’ I say at once. He sticks his hand out, and I shake it. His hand around mine is strong and warm, like a stone in the sun.
When we go to look for the lizards, though, there are none to be found. Our laughing has scared them all away.
Jamie is my first friend; I have never had a real friend before.
For Jamie, everything is a question waiting to be asked. He wants to know why the lizards we watch blink in the sun, but snakes never do. We try not to blink until our eyes are hot and dry and gritty with the effort, but we can’t manage it forever, like the snakes. He wants to know why, when we have lemonade, the outside of the cold glasses becomes wet – how does the water get from inside the glass to the outside without our seeing? If water can get through the glass, why doesn’t the glass empty? We stare at our glasses until they are warm in the sun, and not so nice to drink, but we can’t find out the answer; in the end, the little beads of liquid vanish as mysteriously as they arrive. He wants to know why the rock in the sides of the valley is ar
ranged in layers like a stack of sandwiches, even where the farmers haven’t cut terraces. Lena has told me about terraces – that they are to hold the rain for the olive trees – and shows me how water runs down the sloping street next to the church but gathers in puddles on the church steps, an idea I grasp quickly. But she has never told me about the hidden sandwiching of the rocks, and when I ask her, she only shrugs and says that is just the way they’re made.
Jamie wants to know everything about Altesa. He quizzes me on everything he notices or can think of: about things, and places and people. I tell him all about me, and what I like and don’t like. I tell him about my family – things which I don’t really know myself but have in turn been told – like when we used to live in a different place. London. My parents still talk about it sometimes. He makes me tell him about the people – the figures he’s seen around town, the other children, our neighbours. I pour out all of Lena’s patchwork history of the town while he sits, attentive, soaking it up again. And I tell him the things Lena doesn’t know, or doesn’t like to mention: like Lucia being a witch. Like Signor Ferucci.
‘Up there on the side of the valley,’ I say, pointing out the window. ‘Well, you can’t really see it from here. But there’s a big white house, and it’s got a wall all round, high up, and gates. For miles. And he lives in there and he never comes out. Well, hardly ever.’
‘Have you ever seen him?’ Jamie asks.
‘Well, sometimes. In town. He’s got a beard and he looks a bit scary. He’s really tall.’
‘Is it a mad beard – like, all wild?’
‘No,’ I say, slightly surprised. ‘No, it’s neat.’
‘Oh.’
‘Nobody knows what he does in there,’ I add. ‘Lena says—’
There’s a pause. I concentrate very hard on not going away from Jamie. He doesn’t always mind it when I do, but sometimes I sense that he is a little worried. Lena’s word comes drifting back to me.
‘Lena says he’s – recluse,’ I say.
‘What’s that?’
‘Someone – someone who doesn’t like to come out.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe he’s a vampire,’ Jamie says.
‘Yeah.’ I think for a moment, and something else comes back to me. ‘I think he used to be that other thing,’ I say vaguely. The word hits. ‘Politician.’
Jamie says, ‘I’ve got a whole story about vampires from a haunted tomb in one of these.’ He indicates the several stacks of comics that are lined up against the wall of his room.
Jamie’s bedroom isn’t anything like mine. My room is quite small, with a ceiling that slopes down from the door to the window. Under my window is the gentle pitch of the kitchen roof; if I crane my head far out to the left, I can see the end of my mother’s verandah roof at the back of the house, where the iron stove-pipe of the little fat stove comes up through it. My bed is against one wall, and a wardrobe stands by the door that leads through to the back bedroom that is sometimes Lena’s. I have a little cupboard of toys, too, and some big picture-books which I still love and look at, though I know my father doesn’t like them. Apart from these things, my room is quite bare: the walls are pale, the ceiling white, the surround of the window dark wood. The best thing is the view: right along the row of our neighbours’ houses and up the valley.
Jamie’s room is much larger. Although there is more space, it all seems to be filled: with books and magazines and comics, with bedclothes, with packing cases and boxes both empty and half-full and unopened, with posters – rolled up and piled untidily in a corner. Near the window is a little red telescope on a tripod, pointing out, and by it on the wall is pinned, carefully, a large piece of card which looks as if it might be a map of something, though the scattered mass of little dots and larger dots and numbers and words makes no sense to me at all. On one of the bookshelves is a small black case, lined with worn red velvet, in which Jamie keeps his clarinet. He’s played it to me several times. Once school starts, his parents are going to find him a new teacher here, and he’ll learn new pieces, and play those to me as well.
‘Here. This is the Silver Surfer. You’ll like him. And here’s Spiderman. You know him, of course.’
I nod, unable to confess that I don’t – that I have never before seen the red and blue masked figure that leaps towards me from the page Jamie is holding open. He tells me how Spiderman was normal until he was bitten by a radioactive spider; he points things out, tells me who each of the characters is, passes me other comics to compare. I sit, entranced, while the bright colours and vivid panels of the cartoons accumulate around me, until I am like an island in a pool of brilliantly hued pages.
‘You can borrow them, if you like,’ he says. ‘Take them home to read.’
‘Thanks!’ I say, but then I realize something.
‘What is it?’ he asks.
‘I – nothing.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I can’t read the words,’ I say.
‘I can help you with the long ones,’ he says.
‘No – I mean, I—’
‘Can’t you read at all?’ he asks. He sounds shocked, but I know he won’t laugh at me or be unkind; he is just amazed that I can live without this essential ability. In a flash of understanding, I look around me at the room and see why he might think this.
‘My dad’s teaching me,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ he says. For a moment he seems at a loss. Then he says, ‘I suppose what you do – you know, the going places in your head – that’s like reading stories, isn’t it?’
I know what he means. This is the second time he’s called it something like that: going places in your head. Again, I can feel heavy structures grating and moving laboriously in me, as I try to fit the words into place. Very, very tentatively, I begin to see that the difference between going somewhere and going somewhere in your head might be what Jamie has been struggling with. In your head is the key. And I know in that moment that Jamie has already understood me better than my parents and everyone else ever have. I meet his eyes with a surge of gratitude pushing up inside me. I want to say something, but I can’t imagine what.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I know.’ His eyes are suddenly bright with inspiration. ‘Ask if I can come over to your house this weekend. To stay, I mean. There’s an annual in one of the boxes with whole stories in it – fourteen episodes, one after the other, so you don’t have to wait a week or find the next issue. I could read it to you, if you want.’ He says this last almost shyly, as if he’s afraid I might say no.
‘That would be great!’ I say. ‘I really like them.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Me too.’
Downstairs I hear the sounds of people moving about – his parents, I suppose. He glances towards the door and sighs.
‘It’s time for lunch,’ he says. ‘I’d better go.’
‘Oh. And me,’ I say.
‘But I’ll see you later.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t forget to ask about the weekend,’ he says. ‘Ask if I can stay the night.’
‘I will,’ I promise.
In the darkness, there is the shape of a figure: pale, outlined against the shadows.
For a moment it is all confusion, and then the room clears and I know where I am.
Night has come down around me and outside it is dark. The darkness in front of me is a wall, deep in shadow. Somehow my hand, holding the broad, thick-bristled brush I have bought in town, has made marks on the shadow. They are fragmented, hesitant; little uncertain sweeps and arcs of paint which have run and dripped, pale against the darker wall.
I blink. The marks coalesce, and for a second I see it: the pale shape of a figure there.
Christ, I think, what’s happening to me?
The distant echo of laughter rings through the house: childish laughter, but too bright, forced; laughter at a joke that isn’t funny, but which has to be funny.
I was too young, I
think to myself, rather wildly; I was too young to understand. He should have known that.
The image on the wall is back again now: a pale body, taut, tensed somehow, as if caught in the instant of time between intention and act. The slender curve of it is white, like moonlight.
I press my hands to my eyes to blot it out; but it still floats behind closed eyelids, the pale, stretched body now alone in an infinity of darkness. I press harder, trying to drive it away from me into the black, until the figure shifts and blurs and separates, until it looks as if it might be three figures and not one, and until phosphenes shimmer and burst across the range of my vision like fireworks, or seedheads.
Chapter Four
In bare feet I light some of the candles I have placed around the room, and the cheerful light they cast drives away some of the shadows that have been tugging at me. I don’t feel ready to sleep yet. I want to think of something to push the uneasy memory of these fragments away, to give me something else to concentrate on as I lie in bed. Some part of me is aware that the old childhood fear could so easily come back to life now; the fear that I will wake, in a moment, to find myself old and dying, my life already spent. I can’t face that again. So I take one of the candles and wander the house with it, eventually finding my way upstairs. Once I am in my old bedroom, it seems the most obvious thing in the world to open the window there, and to sit on the sill, looking up the valley at night.
I know this view to the last detail. The darkness obscures many of the small changes that are doubtless there, and would be clamouring their presence to me were it daylight. Now, though, I am only conscious that the branches of the tree that cut off the left-hand part of the horizon are longer by some small amount, and that the sound of the World Service radio is missing from downstairs. Above, the stars are unchanged; I look for Orion, and find him almost at once, a small smile of acknowledgement twitching the corner of my mouth. There are a few clouds low on the line of hills, but leaning out of the window I can see that the sky overhead is clear.