by Guy Burt
Anna’s voice calls from somewhere below us. ‘I’ve got down! Come on!’
‘We’re coming!’ I call. I am about to run after her – I can’t wait to find out how the dust river feels under my feet – when Jamie catches me by the arm.
‘Alex.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t tell Anna about – you know. What you do.’
‘OK. Why not?’
‘Well – she might not understand. Maybe later, when we know her better, OK?’
I shrug. ‘OK.’ And with that, we round the far end of the bridge and scramble down a slope thick with dry grass and loose earth to the flat, smooth dust of the dry watercourse. Anna is standing in the centre, looking straight up the valley.
‘Isn’t it strange?’ she says. ‘The sand still looks like water. It’s like you’re walking on something – I don’t know.’
‘Yeah,’ I say quietly. I can feel again how I feel the first time I see it, from Lena’s bridge.
‘How far away is this church of yours?’ she says, echoing Jamie’s question. ‘I can’t see it.’
‘Of course you can’t see it from here,’ Jamie says. He glances at me, and we both struggle not to giggle at the audacity of his bluff. ‘It’s a long walk.’
‘We’d better get going, then,’ she says. ‘Come on.’
Anna leads the way, and kicks up dust with her feet so that it billows around us. Jamie and I are forced to run after her and catch her up, just so we can breathe properly. She grins at us. ‘This is great. I never get to do anything like this at home.’
A question surfaces. ‘Where do you live, then?’ I say.
‘Vicenza, now,’ she says. ‘But we keep moving. We’re always moving.’
I think to myself that my family has never moved; but on the heels of the thought comes the quick, surprising recollection that we must have; that before here, there was London, even if that hardly seems real at all. I say, ‘What’s it like?’
‘Moving?’
‘No. Vicenza.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ she says vaguely. Then, ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’
‘Sort of,’ I say.
‘Uncle Robert says both your parents are, so you must be.’
‘I suppose I am, then.’
‘Say something in English.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Something. Say – good morning.’
I do so. She grins.
‘Say – a cup of tea and some toast, please.’
I do. She laughs – a delighted peal of laughter that rings in the still air. ‘That sounded very English,’ she grins.
‘Can’t you speak English, then?’
‘No.’ She glances up at the far side of the valley. ‘What’s that?’
‘The big house?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s Signor Ferucci’s house,’ Jamie says.
‘Who’s he?’
‘He’s strange,’ Jamie says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Sometimes he comes down into town, but hardly ever. You see the wall?’
Anna squints, following the twisting line of the white wall across the slopes of the hills. ‘Yeah.’
‘All that’s his. All that land. Lena says it was all a big estate once, with vines and stuff, and that now it’s all gone wild. He lives in the big white house, and hardly ever comes out. Lena says he’s …’ I hesitate, remembering the word. ‘Recluse,’ I say.
‘Hey. Weird.’
‘Yeah. He’s a bit scary, I think. Cos you don’t know what he does in there. Jamie says maybe he’s a vampire or something.’
‘Does he look like a vampire?’
‘No,’ I admit.
‘You’ve seen him, then?’
‘Once. With Lena, in town.’
Jamie says, ‘My dad says he just keeps himself to himself. He’s quite rich, I think.’
‘Oh.’ Anna’s quiet for a bit, digesting all this. Then she says, ‘Are you two best friends?’
I look at Jamie. He says, ‘Yeah, I suppose.’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
Jamie says, ‘Do you have a best friend?’
Anna glances at a bird that darts across the empty river. ‘Oh, lots,’ she says.
Around us, the air hums with insects, and behind us the dust we kick up drifts slowly, turning the leaves of the myrtle bushes terracotta and ochre. Jamie fishes in his pocket and brings out toffees for us. I find before long that I am chewing in the same rhythm as I’m walking. I look surreptitiously at the others, and am delighted to see that they are doing the same. It looks peculiarly funny, and I snort with laughter.
‘What is it?’ Anna says, so I have to tell them. She says, ‘You notice the strangest things, you know.’
‘Alex is like that,’ Jamie says, shifting his toffee to inside one cheek to talk. ‘He’s strange. You have to watch out for him.’
‘I’m not,’ I say, feeling a little rush of self-consciousness.
‘He is, though,’ Jamie says with mock-seriousness. ‘Really weird.’
Anna says, ‘You said that before. What’s so weird about him?’
‘Oh, everything,’ Jamie says casually. ‘Everything.’
Anna looks at me, and I shake my head.
‘I think you’re both weird,’ she says. ‘Strange little kids.’
‘I’m not a little kid,’ Jamie says, nettled.
‘You’re younger than me.’
‘Not much. You’re only ten,’ he says.
‘That’s still older than both of you.’
‘You’re a kid too, though.’
She shrugs. ‘Maybe.’
We round a bend in the riverbed and I catch a glimpse of something white, far ahead. ‘There!’ I say, pointing. ‘That’s the chapel.’
They squint at it, shading their eyes from the sun.
‘It’s still a long way off,’ Jamie says uncertainly.
‘We can make it,’ Anna says. ‘I’m sure we can.’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t want my parents to be cross. This is your first day.’
‘Oh come on,’ she says. ‘It’s not far. Half an hour, maybe.’
I try to judge the distance to the building; it looks longer than that to me.
‘We shouldn’t be late,’ Jamie says, frowning. ‘We could come back tomorrow.’
‘Please, Jamie,’ she says. ‘I really think we can do it.’ She hesitates, watching him. ‘If we’re late, I’ll say it was my fault – that I ran on ahead for a joke. Promise.’
I wait. At last Jamie says, ‘All right. But let’s be quick.’
‘Thanks,’ she says. She smiles quickly at him. ‘We’ll be OK, you’ll see.’
A few minutes pass, and then she says, ‘I’m sorry I called you a kid. You’re not really.’
‘It’s OK.’
I say, ‘I’m not a kid either.’
Anna shakes her head as if exasperated, though I can tell she’s not really. ‘OK, OK. Nobody’s a kid. And nobody’s weird, either.’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘So. Tell me about this chapel of yours.’
I have sawdust in my hair and clothes from work that has been done. Small parts of the house are starting to be fixed around me, but I have hardly noticed it happening. My hands must have been working; tools are scattered about the place. But I have not been here. I have been all the time somewhere I thought I couldn’t go any more.
The valley and the chapel have invaded the house, until the smell of the hot air and the dust of the dry watercourse are everywhere. Somewhere in that caked, crusted heat and tinder-dryness the house itself has faded away. It has been the strangest thing. I have not felt anything like this for – for most of my life. Since I was twelve. I am like a ghost pulled between different bodies, bodies lodged in different times.
Jamie’s old riddle is going round in my head. What do you call a clock without hands?
I can’t make it stop.
&n
bsp; I pack the tools up slowly, feeling the weariness in my arms and back that says I have been working all day. There is the tiredness of the muscles, and the memory of exertion in the low throb of the scar in my shoulder, and there are the finished tasks – a straightened newel post, a fixed bannister – but there is so little left of how this happened. Some fractions of remembering do come to me: running my thumb along a straight-edge; marking a length on wood; sawing. But these are faint, like underpainting coming through something half-finished.
I have kept clear of the living room all day. In there is something not even half-finished; not even properly begun. A brief, haphazard swirl of paint on a discoloured wall, suggesting form and movement and a pale figure poised at the edge of something. I know I can’t ignore it for ever.
‘We don’t call it a clock because we tell the time by it. We tell the time by it because we call it a clock. Do you see?’
‘It’s still a crap joke, Jamie.’
‘All the best ones are.’
Altesa has changed. I have changed. I gave this place up – moved on. But here, in the house, what has been changed can be put back, made right again. Even though it can only work for wood and glass and paint and metal, it’s perhaps enough of a start. I can make things right again. I can wind back the changes and everything will be as it should have been – before it all shifts, and we grow up, and grow apart. Before it’s too late, and the chance to say things, to tell the truth, is gone. Before they sit me down in that dark, musty study and tell me how Jamie is dead: how he’s drowned; that they’re sorry.
In the sitting room the pictures lie half forgotten, an autumnal drift of coloured rectangles. They’re part of something that now seems irrevocably distant. London is a faint blur of memory. Jamie and Anna are right here – with me right now – and I can’t leave things like this.
I stand in the scatter of photographs and stare at what I have begun on the wall, and I can start to see what has to be added to make sense of this: a mesh of moonlight across low wave-crests, and a dark shadow of land, and a hollow place under the curve of the foreground where the moonlight can’t get and the waves are black.
A shiver runs through me like rain.
The air smells like there may be thunder on the way. I go round and make sure all the windows are closed and fastened in the upstairs rooms. I don’t want any storm damage to add to what already needs to be done.
Chapter Seven
We clamber out of the dry riverbed and through a tangle of scrub bushes and dusty grass. A little way in front of us is a ragged fence of iron railings, woven through with dark blue convolvulus and rusted almost apart in some places. It isn’t too high. We help each other over it. The chapel itself stands beyond, in the middle of a bare patch of ground which is broken up only by a big pile of timber and some scattered collections of masonry. Weeds have grown up through the piles of wood and stone.
On the side where we are, the chapel’s whitewashed walls are shaded by two big stone pines, and the hard-packed earth under them is padded with a layer of old needles and twigs. With the sun cutting through onto them, we can smell the faint tang of resin in the still afternoon heat. We stand looking about us for a few seconds, as if fixing this first proper look at the place in our heads. The chapel is rectangular, its roof overhanging the walls enough to make a deep block of shadow up there. At the near end, there is a stubby white tower, neatly capped off with its own little roof. Through the four narrow arches at its top I can catch a glimpse of a bell in silhouette. Then Jamie says, ‘Come on. Let’s see if there’s a way in.’
We skirt the building. There is a big double-door at the end, but when we go up to it, it is locked shut. Round on the far side, though, is a small door set in close to the other end of the building. Bushes have grown up here, screening off the view down the valley to the sea. There is a grimy padlock on this door, but when Jamie pulls at it, the hasp through which it is linked comes right out of the old wood of the door jamb, cascading little flakes and splinters of dusty wood debris from its screwholes. We glance at each other – a kind of shared excitement makes us tense for a moment – and then Jamie pushes the door open and leads the way inside.
The interior of the chapel is surprisingly cool after our long trek up the valley in sunlight and heat. The air here is dry and smells old – of stone and fabric and, very faintly, of wood polish, and of the faintest ghost of old incense. All the smells are faded, rubbed back by time, and there is none of the heavy pungency of the chapel in town. The sounds of the crickets and cicadas from outside are muted to the barest whisper.
Gradually our eyes get used to the gloomy half-light inside. The room is a muddle of dimly lit shapes. At one end – the altar end – there is a big stained-glass window of a Madonna and Child. The bottom part of the window has been covered up with sheets of dark board, but a panel has fallen away from the top part and the Madonna’s face, and her arms holding the baby, are alight and glowing. The orange and gold and blue from this window is all the light there is; all the other windows are blacked out.
Below the window is a wooden table, and down at the other end of the room – just visible – are wooden pews, shorter than the ones I’ve seen in town, and all pushed together as if to clear the floor for something. There are some sacks leaning against the wall by the door. When I look inside, they are full of brick dust and rubble.
‘How long do you think it’s been since anyone’s been here?’ Jamie says quietly.
‘I don’t know. Ages, probably.’
Anna says, ‘I thought you came here all the time.’ Jamie doesn’t reply; he’s too busy looking around at the murky limits of the chamber.
Anna walks away from us through the gloom, towards the darker end of the building, where most of the rubbish has been stacked.
‘It’s good, don’t you think?’ Jamie says.
‘Yeah.’
Anna’s voice suddenly rings out. ‘Hey! What’s that?’ We both jump a little; something about the place has had us keeping our voices low. We hurry after her.
‘What is it?’ Jamie says; then, ‘Wow.’
I peer past his shoulder and shiver with surprise. For a moment, it looks as though there is a man lying against the wall of the chapel, somehow propped there on his side: I can see his face, pale in the shadows, and a hand reaching up towards the ceiling as if trying to clutch something. His body is hidden from view by the jumble of pews. My breath catches for a second, and then I see what it really is: a huge wooden crucifix, the Christ on it carved in wood and then painted to look real. It must be three times as high as me – the figure life size or even bigger. I can see from Jamie’s face that he has been as startled as I. The cross has been leant against the chapel wall. Getting closer, I see the bottom part of it is covered with a sheet.
‘It’s huge,’ I say.
‘Yeah. I wonder where it comes from?’ We all look around the chapel trying to spot where such a huge cross might hang.
‘Usually they go over the altar,’ Jamie says, a little uncertainly.
‘But there’s a window there.’
‘I know.’
I say, ‘He’s almost bigger than a real man.’
Anna reaches out across some of the pews that are pushed up against the crucifix and, stretching, touches lightly the figure’s hand, tracing the shape of the fingers. It is the hand I had thought was reaching up for something, except now I can see the darker bar of the crosspiece behind it.
‘Wow,’ Jamie says again.
Anna’s hand lingers a moment longer, and then she shivers as if pinched. She turns away from the crucifix. ‘Let’s see what else there is. This is fun.’
She heads further into the shadow at the end of the building. Jamie follows, and after a moment so do I; the depth of the gloom there frightens me a little, but I don’t want them to know this. Although the air is cool – almost chilly – it also feels thick in my lungs, like water. The further back into the chapel we go, the thicker it feels.
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There are three stone arches here, and, through them, we can make out the bulk of the big double-doors we have seen but found to be locked.
‘This was where people came in,’ Jamie says.
‘Look here,’ Anna says. Off to one side is a little door set back into the stone, slightly ajar. ‘What do you think it is?’
‘I wish I’d brought my torch,’ Jamie says.
‘You should, next time,’ I say.
Anna pushes the door wider. Our eyes are getting used to the heavy orange and blue half-light now, and I can just see the regular shapes of steps, curving round and up into black.
‘I’m going up,’ she says.
‘Really?’
‘Of course.’
She doesn’t sound at all apprehensive. Jamie and I glance at each other. Now we have to go as well.
The stairs spiral round to the right, and we grope our way tentatively upwards. I keep one hand on the wall and one hand clutching the back of Jamie’s shirt; I have become suddenly scared that, once we are halfway up and the darkness is absolute, Jamie and Anna will somehow vanish and leave me stranded here, unable to escape. But he doesn’t vanish; and after a time, the darkness actually starts to lighten again. Little by little we progress, until I hear Anna, ahead of Jamie, say, ‘Hey! It’s like a little balcony!’
The top of the stairway brings us through another little arch, and we emerge in a kind of gallery, spanning the width of the chapel. We haven’t noticed it from the ground; it has been lost in the dark. We are high up now, with only a little stone balustrade between us and the big, empty volume of the chapel’s main chamber. The late afternoon sunlight is coming straight up the valley from over the sea, and cuts through the stained-glass Mary and Jesus; from our new vantage point the window blazes with colour. I blink and have to look away; it hurts my eyes now that they’re used to the twilight.
‘What d’you suppose this was?’ Anna says.
Jamie looks round the little area carefully. ‘There’s something been taken out there,’ he says, pointing. He’s right; there’s a place in the boards where the wood is lighter in colour, and there are some ragged holes also, as if things have been ripped out. A paler patch on the stone of the wall marks where something large, like a wardrobe, has stood for a long time, but is now gone.