by Guy Burt
“Have you seen a doctor about it?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I have the inhaler.”
“I meant recently,” she replied. “Have you seen a doctor in the last six months?”
“Uh, no,” I said.
“Where do you get your inhalers, then?”
“Mummy gets them for me,” I said.
Her lips compressed slightly. “I’ll call your mother and suggest you have a checkup,” she said.
“All right,” I agreed miserably. There was no point whatsoever arguing with Miss Finch.
“Now, do you feel you can go to your next lesson? If you’re at all worried, I’ll take you up to Mr. Fergus and you can go home.”
I thought about the idea of going home. “I’m OK,” I said. “I think it’s stopped now.”
Miss Finch looked dubious. “Well, if you’re sure,” she said. Then, with more of her usual decisiveness, she swept together the scattered papers and put them on my desk along with the book. “You’d better get along,” she said. “I’ll put this away for you. Don’t forget to say sorry you’re late.”
“I won’t,” I said, standing a little queasily. Then, fighting down a brief pounding of my heart, I said, “Miss Finch?”
“Yes?”
I opened the book to the right page. “Why can’t I read this?”
She glanced at the page. “You really are feeling better, aren’t you? That’s good news. I think you had us all a bit worried back there.” She smiled. “Let’s see. Oh, right. Well, for a start, Leonardo was Italian, so you can’t read it because it’s in a different language.”
“Is that all?”
She looked at me, and there was something strange in her expression. “No, actually. It’s written back to front and inside out—like mirror-writing, you see. Leonardo didn’t want anyone to read his notes, so he invented this as a sort of code.”
“So no one would understand it?”
“That’s right. It’s all in the book, if you read it.”
“I will,” I promised.
When school that day was over, Sophie met me at the gate and we started to walk home together. Under my arm I clutched a ring-binder file and the book Miss Finch had given me. I was subdued, for any number of reasons, with thoughts streaming through my mind too quickly to analyse properly.
“You’re quiet,” Sophie observed.
“Mm.”
“Anything wrong?”
“I had an asthma attack in History,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Miss Finch said she was going to phone Mummy and say I should go to the doctor.”
Sophie nodded thoughtfully. “I see. And?”
“I don’t know.” I sighed. “I don’t want Mummy to be cross.”
“Hey,” she said, concerned. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be all right.” Her tone wasn’t as light as it could have been, though, and I didn’t feel any better. “Anything else happen?”
“I’m going to do a project on Leonardo da Vinci,” I said.
“Oh, right. The painter.”
“He was really clever,” I said, looking sideways to catch any reaction. “He—designed lots of things, like tanks and stuff.”
“That’s right. How’s the plane going?”
“It’s going OK,” I said. “I don’t know if it’ll be ready by half-term. How long is there to go?”
“Not this weekend, but next weekend.”
“We’ve done the wings,” I added, “But they weren’t too difficult.”
“I’m really looking forward to seeing this grand project once it’s done,” Sophie said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
When we got home, Sophie went upstairs. I found some squash in the kitchen and made myself a drink.
“Matthew,” my mother said from the doorway. “Would you come with me, please. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
She seemed quite calm. I set the glass down and followed her to the drawing room, shrugging my shoes off at the door as usual. Mummy had walked at first as if to take her normal place in the high-backed armchair, but at the last moment she stopped, and turned, and went instead over to the window. Outside, there was a limited view of the lawn and back garden, to only about a quarter of the way down. My mother stood with her back to me for a long time, haloed with light from the single window of the otherwise dark room.
Finally, still staring outside, she said, “I had a call from a Miss Fitch this afternoon, Matthew. Do you know her?”
“Uh, Miss Finch,” I said. “She’s my form teacher.” I could feel a tightening in my chest already, and fought it down as best I could.
“This—” Mummy paused. “This Miss Fitch says you had some sort of attack in her lesson. Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said miserably. “I—”
“Thank you. Be quiet.” She exhaled harshly. “Matthew, I realize that sometimes a subject can be boring. I haven’t forgotten what it was to be at school myself.”
“I don’t—”
“Be quiet, please.” She turned to face me at last. “But I will not have you—disgracing yourself like this, just to get attention. Do you understand?”
I looked at her blankly.
“Answer me,” she said, softly.
“Yes.”
“So. You understand what you have been doing, and yet you did it anyway. Is that it?” The smell of dust grew stronger, and I felt my chest tighten, almost imperceptibly.
“I—”
“Don’t think I don’t know about you, Matthew. Everything about you.” She took a shuddering breath. “You’re like your father. All you care about is you, you, you. And never think of me, perhaps? Isn’t that the way of it?”
Her voice had got louder. I shook my head dumbly, but she hardly seemed to notice. Her gaze was fixed somewhere past me, her eyes failing to take me in. I was frightened.
“I know everything,” she said again. “Stains on the bedclothes. Do you think I never noticed?”
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
“My fucking bedclothes!” she shouted, and the force of the shout rocked me back on my heels for a moment. “You bastard, I even know who she was, did you realize that? I know where she lived. The whore’s apartment. Did you soil her sheets as well, mark out your territory like an animal?”
“Hello, Mummy,” Sophie said. My mother’s head jerked back as if she’d been slapped, and she closed her mouth. The abrupt silence in the room lengthened horribly. Sophie, standing just inside the doorway, was watching my mother with a level, almost sad expression. At last, my mother’s breath seemed to find the force to escape her body.
“Take off your shoes,” she said, and the words were almost a whisper. “This is the drawing room. Take them off.”
“I think that’s enough, don’t you?” Sophie replied. “Matthew and I are going out to play. We’ll get our own supper.”
My mother crumpled into her armchair as if Sophie’s gaze had eroded her insides. “Take off your fucking shoes,” she muttered, but she no longer seemed to be talking to us.
“C'mon, Mattie,” Sophie said, and took me gently by the hand. Over her shoulder, she said, “You know nothing, Mummy. Remember that.” We closed the drawing room door carefully behind us.
Once we were upstairs, she said, “You OK?”
“Yeah,” I said, a little unsteadily. “What was she talking about?”
“Things that happened a long time ago. Nothing to do with you.” Sophie stroked my hair back from my eyes and smiled sadly. “Ignore her. You’re quite safe. She makes a lot of noise, I know, but there’s nothing she can do anymore.”
“Really?”
“Really. I promise. That’s all over now.”
“I was scared,” I said. “I don’t understand what she was saying. All Miss Finch did was phone up—”
“Ssh,” Sophie said. “I know. It’s not your fault.” We sat on the edge of my bed together, an
d when I looked at her, Sophie’s eyes were fixed on some distant inner landscape that I would never see.
nine
I had thought that I knew Matthew, but now I am getting to know him a second time. His quirks, his habitual movements, his turns of phrase—I watch them all with the intent fascination that comes as a part of fear. At the moment, there’s no one else that matters.
I keep returning to ideas of escape. They’re all impractical. There is nowhere nearby that I could get to, even if I somehow managed to leave this room. The farm down the road is a mile or more away, and as deserted as this place. I’m fully aware that there’s no point in thinking the same things again and again, but I can’t help myself. The moment I stop concentrating on what is actually in front of me, my mind turns immediately to dreams of running away from here, leaving him alone in the house with his candles and memories. I am constantly trying not to do this. There is a conviction building in me that the way to escape is buried in what he is saying, if I can only trace it through the knots and tangles of his story. I feel it. If I can piece together the past, the present will take care of itself.
I hope I am right. It sounds easy enough, but sometimes I worry that I am just comforting myself, that somewhere along the line my brain has realized there’s nothing I can do, and is just attempting to keep me calm. I don’t know. I feel that I’m playing tricks on myself.
Strangely, though, Matthew’s story is itself helping me. Not just in the way I’ve described—giving me more details of him and his past—but also in another way. It lets me see the Sophie of Matthew’s childhood through his eyes. And, whether he likes it or not, no matter what he tells me and himself about his being in control now, I know that when he looks at me, some portion of that little girl is still evident in what he sees. I thought at first that this was dangerous to me, but I have started to think that I was wrong, that in fact it may be a weapon to use against him. I am sure he doesn’t see it like this. He may not even be aware of it. It doesn’t matter; when I see a way that it might be used, I have it ready.
It occurs to me suddenly, in the middle of thinking all this, that he may be justified; after all, what else am I doing but keeping secrets, trying to hide the truth, plotting against him? It’s almost as if he were right about everything.
In another place, that thought would be amusing, but not here. I draw my legs up further, knees pushing against my chest, and hug my arms around my shins. The tape has twisted a little, cutting into my wrists, but I put up with it. It is another device with which to remind myself that I have to keep trying.
He says, “What are you thinking?”
I blink. “What?”
“You look like you’re thinking.”
“I was thinking about the barn,” I say.
He nods. “Yeah. Me too.” He scratches the side of his neck, looking up at the ceiling.
On Sunday morning, we set off late. The sun was large and pale above the hills beyond the wood, hanging in the sky behind a misty wash of thin cloud. The air was still, and the colours of the wood were even more splendid than they had been the evening before when we had walked home. We took the path up from the end of the garden until we were about halfway to the top of the quarry hill, and then cut through the broken wall and across the empty fields. Crows scattered away from us lethargically, and the grey and rust-coloured buildings of the deserted farm grew slowly larger. It was cold, the invigorating tang of the coming winter tempered with the rich smells and flavours of autumn earth and leaf mold, bonfire smoke and fallen apples. We scrambled into the lane near the chestnut and conker trees.
The section of corrugated iron turned smoothly on its remaining rivet now, where Sophie had dripped oil on to it. We held it for one another as we scuffed our way inside. The inside of the old barn was shadowy and cool, catching both light and heat more readily at midday and in the afternoon. I ran down its length to the far end, enjoying the emptiness of the space, while Sophie climbed up into the castle.
“Mattie?”
“Yeah?” I called back.
“Come here a minute, would you?”
I ran back, pleased that I was barely breathing hard, and followed her until I could poke my head over the battlements and look into the upper room. “What?”
She nodded at the scattered crayons and paper and stuff. “You didn’t touch anything, did you?”
“No,” I said.
“You’re really sure? You didn’t kick something by accident?”
“No. I don’t play near there in any case. I play over here.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Why? Is something changed?”
She looked at the childish debris steadily. I followed her gaze, and couldn’t see that anything was any different to the last time we were here. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it’s changed. Someone’s been here.”
Abruptly, the sense of fun was gone from the atmosphere. I realized that we had no way of knowing who the stranger might be. “What—I mean, do you think they’ll come back?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “Come on. We’d better get things ready.”
The thrill of excitement and fear at finding that someone else knew about the barn, and had been there, made me eager to help Sophie prepare everything the way she wanted it. First of all, she checked the secret room, made sure that nothing in there was disturbed.
Presently she reported, “No, nothing’s moved. So they only know about the upstairs room, which is fine. Even so, it’s going to be difficult.” She paused, thoughtfully. “We can assume they’re kids, because adults wouldn’t bother climbing the bales or messing around with the stuff. Which means they’ll probably be back.”
“When?” I asked.
“I should think today,” Sophie said. “After all, it’s the weekend, and they’ll have school or whatever in the week. First things first, though. We need to be somewhere else.”
So saying, she led the way out of the barn. The sunlight made me blink after the gloom; Sophie scanned the farm quickly. “I don’t see anyone. You?”
“No,” I said.
“Right. We need somewhere that we can see the barn from easily, and not be seen ourselves. Let’s get back into the lane.” We climbed the dry-stone wall but this time, instead of going down towards the chestnut trees, we walked up the hill a little way until the scraggy hedge that augmented the wall was thicker. Here, we stopped, commanding a fair view of the farm courtyard and the side of the barn with our doorway in it.
“We’ll take turns at guard duty,” Sophie said. “Just watch through the hedge and see if anyone turns up. Do you want a sandwich?”
“All right. What sort is it?”
“Ham and cheese.”
We watched the barn in quarter of an hour shifts, talking about school and people in the meantime. The sun was a little warmer now that it was nearly midday; from the other side of the village, in the middle distance, I could see the plume of smoke from a bonfire drifting lazily up before being dispersed by invisible currents of air.
Sophie sat on the wall and swung her feet thoughtfully.
“Still no one?”
“No,” I confirmed. “When do you think they’ll come?”
“Well, they might not come today at all,” she admitted. “It seems more likely, though. And I don’t want to be inside the barn when they arrive; I want us to see them first.”
“Then what do we do?” I asked.
“That depends on who it is,” Sophie said. “We may have to abandon the barn.”
“We could make a club, and let them join,” I said, thinking of the model aeroplane group.
“Yeah, something like that,” she said vaguely. “We’ll see.”
We waited until one o’clock, and still there was no sign of anyone.
“I’m bored,” I said. “How much longer do we have to wait?”
“What do you want to do instead?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Go up to the woods?”
Sophie shrugged. “OK. Leave the sandwich box on the wall there, we’ll pick it up later.”
The woods towards which we headed were beyond the field at the top of the lane; over to our left, a few fields’ distance away, was the clearing with the fallen tree. We carried on straight up, though, until we found ourselves pushing through the unruly growth of saplings and bushes that formed the outskirts of the wood. Further in, the ground cover thinned out a bit, until we were walking on a deep cushion of fallen leaves, the top layer still crisp and brown as if they had been deep fried. I kicked leaves up and scuffed my feet to leave trails behind me, and Sophie laughed and did likewise. There were alarmed calls from birds deeper in the wood, and high above us, the nests of rooks were scattered through the high branches.
Toadstools glistened at the roots of some of the trees. In the pocket of my anorak were a couple of toy aircraft, but I didn’t bother playing with them; there was no need. A horse-chestnut tree yielded up some rather soggy conkers, which I hurled at toadstools, making them spatter into startlingly white pieces. The air felt thin and clean.
We spent a good hour or so in the woods, walking in a wide circle that brought us out nearly where we had started. As we set off back down the lane once more, I rolled the roundest stones down in front of us, to see how far they would go. The white square of the lunch box was just visible on the wall when Sophie put her hand out to stop me.
“Hang on,” she said. “Look.”
I followed her pointing finger. Down in front of us, in the courtyard of the empty farm, were two figures in brightly coloured anoraks. As we watched, they moved about aimlessly for a while, going up to the boarded windows and examining them, poking around in the shed where the oil drums were, and finally coming round to the near side of the barn. There was a pause then, as they tried to identify the loose sheet of metal; after a couple of unsuccessful tries, they found it, and slipped inside.
“Well,” Sophie said. “There we go. Come on, let’s get closer.”
We ran down the slope as far as the thicker section of hedge and stopped there, peering intently at the blank side of the barn. We could hear nothing, and there was nothing visible to indicate that anything was amiss.