by Adam Thorpe
‘There are definitely no monsters here, Alicia,’ said Nick, suddenly sounding very tired, a wave of tiredness taking him beyond desire.
‘I’ll come up in one minute exactly,’ Sarah promised, shifting her rump minutely against Nick’s groin, reviving him a little. Too much, in fact: he had to concentrate hard on other things: reinforced concrete; the last department meeting; the question of wheelchair access to FitzHerbert’s library.
‘But first you have to get into bed.’
Alicia stood after a moment and asked them when they were going to get dressed.
‘Go – to – bed,’ her father intoned. Around his data-driven, precision-debated professional realm, where every error was magnified a thousand times (he had once muddled, during an academic conference on Suez, General Chehab and President Chamoun of Lebanon in a passing comment – and suffered an imaginary ignominy for years), his children’s mental world swirled like the confusion of a frivolous, waking dream.
‘Very quietly,’ Sarah added, with a kind of stuck-on weariness.
The latch socked its clasp like a gunshot as the door was manhandled shut by Alicia.
Inevitably, after a few seconds of thought, Beans began to wail in short bursts. It was intensely annoying, because there was studied reflection behind each burst. Then she started to drone softly like a distant air-raid siren, without much conviction, but with all the time in the world.
* * *
The next evening, the monsters made noises again.
The girls watched from their bedroom, shielding the subdued light behind in the tunnel of their hands. Their bedroom looked out onto the pool. At first they saw nothing, brows cold on the glass. The water was lighter than the ground; there were stars, but not yet any moon.
Then Alicia gasped, fisting her mouth. A shadow, a shadow detaching itself from the darkness and becoming something alive and big. They yelled for their mother. Their mother arrived, breathless, from reading downstairs. She was astonished to see something dark and monstrous down below, as terrifyingly indistinct as the Loch Ness version. The mercurial water in the swimming-pool rocked and rippled as the shadow, bulky and ogre-like, dipped towards it. Something glinted on its face, like a toothy grin. It craned round and stared up at them, still grinning, its head eyeless and twisted. A terror and tribulation.
Tammy opened the window, nevertheless, and the cool wind brought with it the faint, sweet smell of night, tinged with dung. The shadow was making noises – human snuffles, old-man grunts. The toothy grin turned into a giant curved horn.
‘They’re very cute really, boars,’ said Sarah. ‘Even sharks are pretty harmless. We’re the ones to worry about. We human beings.’
She closed the window as her girls stared up at her. Alicia was kneeling on a chair. She waggled her bottom. ‘I know the names of three sharks,’ she stage-whispered. ‘Great white, basket, and blue.’
‘We’ll just keep one as a pet,’ Tammy said, quietly, bypassing any higher authority with that assurance Sarah sometimes, at weak moments, found disturbingly unassailable.
Nick wasn’t certain whether boars were generally dangerous, or only so if cornered. Royal boar-hunts were not, as far as he remembered from the records, without their danger. A composite image came into his mind, drawn from old paintings filled with saliva-whipping, canine snarls and a vast hairy bulk in the middle, impressively tusked: it wasn’t reassuring. Boars had long disappeared from Britain, he told them, hunted to extinction and becoming somewhat mythic, even primeval. The fact that they were using the swimming pool as their watering hole seemed almost surreal.
‘It’ll be lions next,’ he joked.
‘God, don’t.’
He and Sarah were lying in bed. While the Sandlers’ bed was a modern double with a state-of-the-art chiropractic mattress, the guests’ bed was an antique: aesthetically satisfying but nothing else. Too narrow, too high and too creakily bouncy, it had a bedhead of dark wood, with a primitive carving of grapes in the middle, that rocked slightly and knocked the wall at the slightest movement. The horsehair mattress sloped inwards and, if a couple were not to end up kneeing each other in the middle, necessitated a counter-balancing force in the body. The Sandlers’ bed next door spread like an inviting island. Could the Mallinsons sneakily move to the hallowed master bedroom, until the Sandlers came for their possible visit? Would the Sandlers know if their bed had been used, as the Three Bears had known?
Probably not, but there was another factor. Small kids are not only unreliable confidantes, they have Pavlovian tendencies. When the Sandlers visited – they were planning to do so at some point towards the end of the sabbatical, after some major sailing trip or other – Beans or even Alicia was likely to toddle sleepily into the familiar nest and find Alan snoring there and scream. Worse, they might run out of their bedroom into the shuttered morning gloom and leap onto the cuckoos, heartily pummelling their bodies. This happened from time to time, usually much too early, back in Cambridge. Reading the clock correctly was neither girl’s forte.
Their parents kissed each other ‘nightie-night’ in the usual ritualistic way and Nick had walked through the sleek bubble-wall of sleep before he knew it. He dreamt he was placing an old tile over his own thigh. Perfect fit. The mould of a dead man’s thigh over a living thigh. The weight of it, of the hump of the tile. Always heavier than you expected. It made you think. For instance, how this tile would probably outlive us all, not just its maker a hundred years back. His shoulders were nice and large, he could feel his hard dorsal muscles like the shell of a tortoise, his thick neck. He hadn’t been aware of this until now, but really he was very strong, he’d spent his entire life underestimating himself and overdoing his age. He was, in fact, forty-four.
He grunted and told himself to shut up and lay the tile, slipping it under with that high, scraping sound he liked. Then he cracked it. Hammering in the nail, he cracked the tile. The bastard tile cracked, for no good reason. Like biscuit. That didn’t outlive me, he thought.
He chucked the two halves over the side, without checking, and woke up to a dreadful scream from far below that might have been one of his girls, visiting her daddy and getting brained by a tile.
The scream hung in the blackness that he couldn’t quite shape into their bedroom in Cambridge: it was too dark. Then he remembered. The scream was repeated, but very distantly: some sort of bird or animal, some raptor or raptor’s victim. The secret life of the night. All those protoplasms shaping up for the next million years. His mouth was dry.
His neck was stiff enough to hound him through the rest of his troubled sleep, as if some linkage was out, though his swivel joint was now fine.
Woken again later by his neck, he knew straightaway where he was, from the lumpy horsehair mattress: the dorm at school. Second time round. The first time he’d won a scholarship, propelled from the grammar to Hilmorton Academy for Boys, long closed down. Now he was back, and the bed still fitted, squeaking in the same way. He’d written an article about his old school, once, which they wouldn’t have liked. Set up after the war by a rich eccentric who had discovered to her amazement, via a batch of urchin evacuees, not only how the other half lived but that there was actually another half, leaving her Lincolnshire manor house to the Ministry of Education and retiring to Cassis, Hilmorton College was a public public school, an anomaly, a melting-pot of the classes.
Nick was bang in the middle of the scale, and therefore nowhere: not like his best friend Duncan, Duncan Haighley, the son of a leftish judge. For some reason, despite the idealism, bullying was a problem. It went on secretly under the benign, Ministry-approved surface. It was peculiarly vicious, and classless. The posh boys were no better nor worse than the pale, gifted cockneys, the runtish scousers who could do long arithmetic in their heads. Renton-Parr was the worst, with his cricket-thickened wrists, his malevolent gaze: he was no doubt out there right now in the darkness, plotting to leap on him and twist his nipple. A vicar’s son. With bony, painful knees.
No, Nick realised, surfacing further: he was in Cambridge, he was an admired Reader in History, he was thirty – no, fifty-four years old! Hilmorton Academy was now a residential centre for business courses. His legs were sweaty with fear. It was never usually as black as this. A thin, small voice reminded him that nuclear conflict had taken out all the street lights. Correction: the collapse of the climate. Desert winds blew beyond the broken glass, swirling about the shattered carcass of King’s Chapel where wild boars nested among the elaborate fallen fans of the vaults. His hand strayed towards the bedside lamp and knocked a wall instead. There was no bedside lamp.
Sarah was stirring as he surfaced entirely and remembered with a playful skip of his heart that everything was fine, that he had six months of his sabbatical in front of him, that the sheets were softer for a good reason. Their faint scent of lavender was happiness. Lavender was good. Shepherds kept it in their pockets to rub between their fingers, he’d read: it was the thin line of happiness running through the obdurate human story, as crude oil was the line of evil. Define evil. A philosophical, not a historical, question.
He kept very still until he reckoned Sarah was fully asleep again. He could hear the night wind whistling softly in the rafters, merging with her breath.
By which time the darker clouds had moved in. He was on the downhill half of his life. He’d wanted, at nineteen, to become an archaeologist, to study the mute mysteries of Bronze and Iron Age Britain, in love with tussocky, windswept hillforts and ancient nettled ditches. But this was politically otiose in the 1970s; he followed the banners, embraced the clamour of names and dates, the harsher materials of great men, of social forces and ideals instead of pottery and tombs. He concealed his real self under the guise of the rebel. He fell for absolutes, gigantic dreams, the overarching system, dialectics and determinism. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: simple, really. He transferred his sensibility to the post-colonial, to power rather than settlement patterns. It was all a huge mistake. He would have liked to have knelt in grass in the rain, scraping and brushing. His entire career had been a mistake. He could have been an antiquarian.
He thought of the boars returning to the trees, to the inscrutable blackness of the forest. He thought, inevitably, of poor Duncan: Duncan, who went up to Cambridge with him but did English, not History. Who one day in their second year had shyly shown him some poems. Oh, how he blushed to think of it now, picturing his own mouth with the sound turned off, moving around the syllables of those few, terrible words in the revolutionary lexicon, trampling Duncan’s frail verse under the heel of righteous polemic.
Privileged. Middle-class. Precious. Detached.
Individualist.
And Duncan left the room all but in tears. How easy it was to destroy a friendship! To cut down a great and spreading tree!
To massacre in the name of love and progress. Except that Marx rejected brotherly love, so there could be no illusions there.
In the panned-out curve of her professional life, there would be a book on the history of isonomy, with particular reference to its survival, or otherwise, in the emergent African states after independence. The isonomic basis of otherwise oppressive systems, with an analysis of the abuse and distortion of their constitutions. Even Stalinism was essentially isonomic, her introduction would suggest. The word was one of the keys to her and Nick’s domain. Even some of their Cambridge colleagues did not know what ‘isonomic’ meant.
Equality of the citizenry before the law. The most cherished, and the most abused, of all ideals.
Not even a tattered mask, now. The winds were whipped up. She dreamed of the waving reeds of Lake Chad, glimmering to the boundless horizon; of the Teda nomads fishing in their hollowed pirogues. Nick had given her this. She was grateful. But she sometimes wondered what might have happened had she not walked into his room that first tutorial, unbearably naive.
She woke up almost every night, these days, and worried about the future. Nick said that when he was a student no one really believed they would escape a nuclear holocaust, that humanity tends towards apocalypse when confused. But she didn’t find this at all reassuring. She tried to picture the worst-case scenarios, but it was always like a bad epic film: squalid, tormented extras clawing at each other, parched and hungry, over-acting, amateurish. No, she thought: we’ll still make light of it all, when we can. The English will stick together, though no notion of a nation will remain, and we’ll queue at the river or the lake and be laughed at, tormented by a kind of exaggerated species of gnat. We’ll make jokes and gossip, veer between embarrassment and sudden bursts of what used to be quaintly termed ‘yobbery’. We’ll keep our chins up and pass the time in hope. My children will be there among the hordes: they’ll be rumpled and prematurely old, wondering what happened to their childhood. The halcyon days.
Then she’d want to cry, each time, and would feel the beginnings of a real terror threshing in her stomach, as right now, while Nick snored gently beside her in this strange bed in this strange house in this strange country. And even in Cambridge, in her own home, she had felt this.
Nick had gone back to sleep, having woken her up. A kind of see-saw, she thought. One up, one down.
* * *
‘What?’ she asked, tapping and scraping Beans’s toast free of carcinogenic cinders. She felt as though her eyes had been twisted in their sockets. The toast ended up too thin, almost membraneous.
‘Want them ones.’ Beans pointed at the biscottes bought on the way down.
‘Temperatures today are expected to break all records for February,’ Nick repeated.
‘I’ve got three records,’ Alicia informed them, a moustache of hot chocolate giving her a raffish look. ‘No, four. And you can’t break them cos they’re special and anyway they are still CDs.’
Tammy snorted into her cereal. ‘Who was responsible for your birth, Ali Baba?’
‘Mummy,’ Alicia complained, ‘Tammy called me Ali Baba.’
Tammy’s nickname for Alicia was forbidden, on grounds of compassion: the victim hated it, which was the whole point.
‘Tammy,’ said her mother, wearily, surveying Beans’s attempts to spread her biscotte with the wrong side of the plastic knife, ‘you know you’re not supposed to.’
‘Supposed to what?’
The biscotte exploded like a letter-bomb in Beans’s hand.
‘Lots and lots of honey,’ her mother reassured her, spreading another one. This biscotte, too, splintered under the mild pressure of the knife. ‘Oh for God’s sake, how daft!’
‘Stupid bikset,’ said Beans. ‘Want toatsie now.’
‘Please, Mummy,’ instructed Sarah.
Beans smiled wickedly at her, not saying it. The toaster was operated again, nevertheless, on a lower number.
‘Beans is really rude,’ said Alicia.
‘Not like you,’ said Tammy.
‘I know,’ said Alicia, too young for the dose of irony.
Tammy covered her face in her hands, stricken with mirth.
‘You make us say please,’ said Alicia. ‘Or else.’
‘She’ll say it next time,’ her mother reassured her, like a pathetic negotiator at some intractable peace conference.
‘Wanna toatsie now,’ Beans shouted, through a goblin smirk.
‘Shush,’ said Nick.
He was leaning to the old, bulbous radio on the kitchen windowsill, trying to catch the weather over the family noise. The newscaster seemed delighted by the record temperatures. Nick wanted some comforting signal, some boffin to come on air and say it was all fine, his kids were going to have a good life, not some Old Testament visitation craved for by crazed Americans.
‘Want toatso!’ Beans repeated, banging the table.
‘Can’t you help a bit, Nick?’ said Sarah, fishing Beans’s toast out of the toaster with a knife.
‘What?’
‘Ali Baba,’ Tammy murmured, catching her sister’s eye.
‘That’s asking to be electrocuted,
sweetie,’ Nick pointed out, unplugging the toaster.
‘She said it again, Mummy,’ Alicia moaned.
‘Is it so interesting?’ asked Sarah. ‘The radio?’
‘About gay marriage,’ he said, in a low, depressed voice.
Beans’s toast shot, apparently of its own volition, out from under Sarah’s probing knife and onto the tiles. Beans leaned over the side of her chair to examine the damage as someone might look down from a biplane.
‘Stilboesterol,’ she remarked.
‘I hope you like authentic French dust on your toast,’ said Sarah. What she had wanted to say was ‘Oh, fuck.’
‘You look tired,’ Nick observed.
‘You woke me up,’ she replied, flatly.
He was hurt. ‘I dreamt I was back at school.’
‘I dreamed of Pooh,’ said Alicia.
‘Ugh,’ Tammy said. ‘In your nappy.’
‘Pooh and Piglet, stupid.’
‘And before that,’ said Nick, turning the radio down as it entered into a jingle, ‘I dreamt I was tiling a roof.’
He repeated the information, as no one had reacted.
‘That must have been exciting,’ said Sarah, scooping the fragments off the kitchen’s ancient floor.
* * *
Nick did wonder sometimes whether he had somehow missed it. That’s to say, he had the feeling he was living just next to the real Nick Mallinson, who was experiencing the excitement of being alive. That he was this entity’s shadow or blurred double. Everything he might have been if he’d been a little more courageous. Was it Aristotle who believed that courage was the supreme virtue, as all other virtues followed from it?
Cambridge, where he had spent his entire adult life, save the odd semester in Africa. FitzHerbert College, in particular. He felt sometimes that he had gelled over to one of the college’s time-moulded stones, one of its lintels scooped by countless bottoms. Fitzherbert’s was small, discreet and ignored by tourists unless they were lost. Three fifteenth-century courts leading to the modest, shrub-lined garden at the end, which was enclosed by a huddle of old flint walls and shaded by a vast yew on one side; the Gothic chapel ‘uninteresting only to the jaded’, as the last President famously put it; the dining hall boasting three full-figure paintings by Van Dyck and a mysterious, unnamed portrait of a woman from the sixteenth century which, though darkened by age, moved its eyes at night. The girls saw it move its eyes whenever they visited, but (despite the intensity of their squeals) they were evidentially unreliable. They’d made similar noises on their recent visit to Loch Ness, which Tammy had pictured as a large pond.