Haven

by Adam Roberts

  So he looked into her eyes and, somehow, instead of saying that, said, “I met him once, you know. He kidnapped me actually. Carried me off. I mean that man who killed your sister.”

  She stared at him. Then she started crying. Then she got up from the table, still crying, and, followed by one of the guards, left the room.

  Davy sat in front of his lunch blushing. What had he done? Embarrassment filled him, as acute as grief. His stomach chewed at itself. It occurred to him to get up, rush after her and apologise but he couldn’t move. He was as stuck to the bench as firmly as if he had been glued there. He was aware of a rushing, sparkling hum inside his skull. The other two guards were staring at him. They were staring. They were staring at him, and he was blushing so hard he could feel the heat of his own cheeks. He had to at least try to explain. He opened his mouth to speak, as electrical sleet swirled in the crosswinds of his sightline, and said:

  “I’m—”

  The dark angel was there, looking exactly as he had done on that icebound hill overlooking the Thames. The light faded and thickened. Shadows gurgled audibly. The dark angel rose, slender and terrifying, and when his metallic wings spread wide they clicked like beetle-jaws snapping together, and rustled like old paper and reached as far as a great tree. The ground was sand and the sky was white and there were no walls. The face of the dark angel opened—a vertical central seam that separated with thin rungs of spittle that broke and inside was black and the dark angel said—

  —

  —

  —

  The next thing he knew he was in a strange bed. He sat up and the action made pain swell at the back of his head. “There you are,” said Gabriela. “I was just about to radio the hospital and have you transferred. And you’re OK now?”

  The sheer ordinariness of the quality of reality, its solidity and groundedness, made Davy breathe more deeply. It had something to do with the abruptness of the transition. Maybe it did.

  “My head hurts,” he said.

  “You had some kind of fit.”

  “Epilepsy,” said Davy. “It comes on me sometimes.”

  “Epilepsy!” Gabriela’s voice was full of amazement.

  “I’ve always had it.”

  “They might have told us! Well you thrashed yourself off the bench like a fucking dervish, clonked your head on the floor. We had to put a bandage on the bleeding.”

  Davy reached up and felt with his fingers: it was true. “I’m OK,” he said. “I think.”

  “Can’t keep you in here,” said Gabriela. “This is the sick room and it’s not secure. Can you walk? You need to get back to your bedroom and get locked in. Or should I get a wheelchair?”

  Davy tried his feet on the floor, and found that he was able to stand. “I’ll walk,” he said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE FOLLOWING DAY Amber was back at the lunch table. She seemed less upset. Davy swore a solemn oath, silently in his head, to be more tactful, and then debated with himself whether apologising for his tactlessness the day before would violate that same oath. In the event she spoke to him:

  “You had some kind of fit yesterday, they say.”

  Davy smiled what he hoped was a rueful smile, but which probably came over as sheer goofiness. “Yeah. Epilepsy.”

  “Woh,” she said, in a disengaged voice. “Sounds serious.”

  Not wanting to miss the opportunity to appear heroic and dignified in front of her, he pulled a solemn face and said: “Pret-ty serious. I’ve had it all my life.”

  “You poor thing,” she said.

  Pity wasn’t the reaction Davy had been trying for. It occurred to him that he’d only managed to make himself look more pathetic in her eyes—not only a kid and a runt but some kind of brain-cripple.

  “It’s pretty painful,” he lied. “When the fits come. But I’ve learned how to endure that.”

  She didn’t seem very interested in his powers of endurance. Instead she said, “I’ve decided, I will teach you your letters.”

  “Oh. OK. Thank you!”

  “It’ll be good practice for when I get out of here, and if I get a teaching duty. It’s pretty likely I will get a teaching duty, you know, because I’m pretty good with kids.” She patted his hand.

  “Oh,” he said again, feeling the press of disappointment.

  “That’s how things work in Wycombe, most people have stints doing most jobs. There’s a rota.”

  Later, back in his cell, he lay on his bed and went over and over the exchange. It had been, in a strange way, more provoking and embarrassing than the episode the previous day. A kid? Was that really how she saw him? Was it because he couldn’t read? If so, he would learn to read in double-quick time—he would become the greatest reader in the history of reading. He would read so well she would have to take notice of him. She might have reservations about the viability of a relationship between them right now, but the time would come, one day soon, when she would look across and see him turning the pages of a prodigiously big and complex book. And then she would think to herself, “Wow but that guy can really read!”

  The following day he brought a book to the lunchroom, and in the courtyard afterwards she started with Birds of the British Coastline. He was soon recognising B and C, but then was rather thrown by the fact that letters—Amber said—came in large and small forms. “Why?” he asked, but she didn’t know, and indeed the question propelled her into a characteristically rambling disquisition on how illogical and stupid spelling was, and how she planned one day to write out a standard book of logical spellings that everybody could use and so save all that effort and make the world altogether a better place. But the lesson broke down when Amber picked out some examples of small-form Bs and Cs, and Davy asked why it was that the small-form c looked like a smaller version of a large-form C, but the small-form b did not look like the large-form B. She didn’t know, and began speculating on whether it would be possible to start from the ground up, with a whole new alphabet.

  The following day Davy got all the letters of the book’s title, and their order, fixed in his brain. Birds. Coastline. British. Then he was able to go through the main body of the text picking out examples of those letters. He was even able to read the word for, by piecing together the three components.

  By the end of the week he had his vowels, and most of his consonants. It wasn’t clear to him if all of these latter were actually needed. X, say, was just cs, J a sort of dge, and lots of words seemed to have gs and hs in them that didn’t really contribute anything to the overall effect. But he wanted to impress Amber, and so he worked hard.

  He dared to hope that teaching him this elementary stuff was distracting her from her sorrow. She made no mention of remembering him from before. Perhaps she’d blocked the memory, or perhaps she really hadn’t noticed that he was even there. But, he thought, I am speaking to her! We are having conversations! That’s the start of something, surely?

  One week turned into two. By the end of the month he could sit and read aloud to her, in a halting voice, often going wrong over pronunciation. The exercise appeared to be having a calming effect upon her too.

  The weather grew milder, although for several weeks winter persisted more or less stubbornly. Sometimes he would chat with the guards and ask them what was happening outside. He didn’t learn much this way, except that Father John had retreated into his own territory with ‘a bloody nose’, whatever that meant in practical terms. “So the war’s over?” Davy asked Gabriela one day. A small hope buzzed in the empty cavity of his breast that peace might lead to his release.

  “No,” said Gabriela. “Not by a long way.”

  So that was that. And the real facts of his existence had nothing to do with the routine, or the possibility of release, or the larger events. They didn’t even have to do with the slow progress he was making in terms of reading and comprehension. The real facts of his existence in that place had to with the enormousness of the crush he had developed on Amber.


  He lay in bed at night thinking about her. In his room, alone through the morning and afternoon-evening longeurs, he thought about her. He was desperately, hopelessly, heedlessly in love with her. At the same time he was—because he wasn’t a complete fool—perfectly aware that love was something else, something grander and more grown-up, and that what he was experiencing was an infatuation. But how powerful the infatuation he was in! How all-encompassing. How it flavoured every feature of his day!

  He had enough control over himself now not to blurt anything out. He couldn’t prevent a certain amount of cow-eyed staring at her in quiet moments. She must have been aware of his feelings, but she said nothing and engaged in no flirting, kept him courteously but unmistakeably at arm’s length. Still, she was pleasant, and helpful, and interested in his progress, and he was as completely under her spell as her faithful pet dog.

  One consequence of this was that her moods now governed his. When she was tetchy, or sad, or withdrawn, his self-esteem would collapse and his heart sink. When she was upbeat or cheerful or chatty his whole mood would lift, and the world would seem full of possibility again.

  Still, Amber was scrupulous about not encouraging his crush. One month turned into two, and blossoms began to appear on the trees. Davy’s reading abilities continued to improve.

  One lunchtime Gabriela let Davy out of his cell, and followed him as he padded through to the lunch-room.

  Amber wasn’t there.

  “I forgot to tell you,” Gabriela said, “she’s been released. It’s just you, me and Louise now, kiddo.”

  The other guard, Louise, smiled blankly at him. The boulder that had fallen from the height of the moon all the way down to this precise spot in the middle of the Chilterns had flattened Davy so completely and so rapidly that he didn’t even feel it for whole, long minutes.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE SIMPLEST WAY to describe the weeks that followed would be to say: Davy gave up. He stopped reading, although he had acquired enough fluency to make out whole stretches of any of the books on his shelves. He ate less. He spent all morning, afternoon and evening lying on his bed, doing nothing, thinking nothing.

  “Cheer up, lad,” said Gabriela, bringing his breakfast one morning. “She hasn’t been executed, at any rate.”

  That his hopeless passion for Amber had been so very obvious to his guards dampened his already sodden spirits even further. It’s not that it surprised him. If he thought about it, it must have been obvious to anybody who so much as glanced at him. But for his profound and deathless love to be the matter of amused gossip was almost worse than the bruise of his broken heart.

  He wanted to ask for more information, but something that was either pride or else the sheer inertia of his misery prevented him from doing so. After Gabriela had gone he told himself that he was going to hold out. He would claim that his refusal to play into their narrative was strength. He would ask nothing about her, and say nothing, and become granite, and endure. At lunch, though, he broke down straight away.

  “Where did they send her? Did they exile her?”

  Louise laughed, and Gabriela’s indulgent smile was rather too wide. “Don’t worry about her—she’s fine. You won’t be seeing her again, though.”

  “You mean she’s gone into Wycombe proper?”

  “Even if you did see her again,” Susan told him, “it wouldn’t make any difference. She’s never going to go with a geezer like you.”

  “Susan!” rebuked Gabriela.

  “Well it’s the truth.”

  Another week passed. He let it pass. He unclasped his fist and let the time dribble through his fingers. Was it a whole week? How long had he been in this prison? Months and months.

  How long was he going to remain in this prison? Years and years.

  Nothing to be done, and everything to be endured. He could, he told himself, fret himself into exhaustion and despair, or he could accept the situation. Go, as Mother Patel liked to say, with the flow. And remembering Mother Patel, and wondering how the old lady was doing now, took his thoughts back to Shillingford Hill, and home, and his depression melted with the winter outside. The weather alternated sunshine and April showers.

  He didn’t cry for very long, in the end. There didn’t seem a need to prolong the performance of grief. And as he washed his face in the sink, he did feel better. ‘Senses working overtime’ had been his Da’s phrase. But the work part didn’t need to be quite so strenuous, and the overtime could soar like a falcon rather than drive him to exhaustion and collapse. The only thing he needed to hang on to was his sense.

  Sense. Sensible.

  Him. Use your senses, Davy. Make them work for you.

  The rat-in-a-hole scratch of a key being turned in the lock of his door. And here was Gabriela to take him through to lunch.

  “Will they keep both of you on duty here,” he asked her, as they wandered down the corridor. “It seems like a lot of bother, just for one kid.”

  “It won’t be us,” said Gabriela, opening the door for him to go through. “But it will be somebody. Somebodies. And what I’m hearing is that you may not be alone for very long. Father John has thrown a great crush of people at our defences. A huge army. We’re knocking him back, of course, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few high-profile people from the north didn’t come inside to join you.”

  “Fellow hostages,” said Davy. “Company, at least.”

  “Not that I think Father John will care. The welfare of hostages doesn’t concern him.”

  Davy took a look at the way the lunchroom was laid out. It was as it generally was: a bench at the table, and one chair, with a couple of free chairs scattered around the room. Sometimes these were stacked in the corner, but today two of them had been put out. He saw that he wouldn’t be able to check, later in the meal, without looking suspicious, so he clocked the room as he came in.

  He took his seat on the bench by the table and ate. He wasn’t hungry, but he figured he should probably eat as much as possible.

  Sensible.

  “Is there any more?” he asked.

  “Hungry today? I think there’s some more. After all, it is just you.”

  Gabriela came back with a second plate. “Good to see your appetite’s picked up,” she said. “That you’re not so down in the dumps.”

  “We all get a little heart-bashed,” agreed Susan. “Especially when we’re young. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Davy’s put his fork beside his half-finished plate. He stared at the table. His expression very plainly said, This is an actually painful matter to me. It said, Please don’t make fun of me. Susan chuckled, and Gabriela said, “Oh, lad, don’t take on so. You were doing so well!”

  It was time. He had to do more than accept. He had to embrace. He had to commit to it completely. His only worry was that he might commit so wholeheartedly that he actually ended up injuring himself. But there was no other way.

  He made a low growling noise. He wasn’t sure why, but it seemed appropriate. Then he made as if he was getting up from the bench. Susan opened her mouth to say something, but before she could Davy shut his eyes and threw himself backwards.

  It was, in a way, a leap of faith; although the proximate focus of his faith was: I hope I don’t actually break anything. Like his skull. Like a fatal crack, killing him dead. Nonetheless he had to kick back as hard as he could, or it wouldn’t work. He tried to let himself go limp, but he couldn’t help tensing a little. And when the back of his head and his good shoulder connected with the chair it was a painful shock, and the willpower he had to employ in not crying out was considerable.

  Bang, clatter, and he hit the floor. This second impact was even worse, because he bounced off the chair onto his bad shoulder, and though the speed with which he hit the floor was not so great, it sent shock waves of pain through his whole left flank nonetheless. He writhed on the floor and made a sort of low groaning to try and vent his agony. Some of his half-chewed potato mash spilled over his l
ips and may have looked like foam. He counted to seven, and then lay still.

  This was, in a way, the hardest part of the whole process. The pain was difficult, of course—his shoulder burned and the back of his head was very sore—but worse was the need not to adjust his position to get more comfortable, not to scratch the itches that flittered over his skin, not to open his eyes to snatch so much as a glimpse.

  He just lay there.

  He could hear the two guards coming over to him, and felt their hands touch him. One felt for a pulse in his neck—that tickled, but he fought down the reaction—and the other lifted his head and held it at a strange angle. Whoever was holding his head lowered it to the floor.

  “He’s had another fit,” said Gabriela.

  “That was quite an acrobatic one,” said Susan, with what sounded like admiration. “Let’s get him back to his cell.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “What, leave him there? I don’t know.”

  “He’ll come round. Come on, we need to clear up the lunch stuff.”

  “I tell you I don’t know.”

  “Bung him in his room. He’ll be fine.”

  “We need to take him to the hospital,” said Gabriela. “I received very specific orders from Henry herself: his well-being is paramount. He’s no good as a hostage if he dies.”

  “He’s not going to die, though,” said Susan, confidently. And then, less confidently, “Is he?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. Are you?”

  “Christ on a bicycle must we, though? The hospital?”

  “Let’s not take any chances. Think how fucked we’ll be if he dies in our custody. Look, I’ll take him to the hospital,” said Gabriela. “OK? You help me carry him to the van.”

  There was silence and inaction for a few minutes, and then Davy felt hands gripping his ankles, and other hands under his armpits. He willed himself to go as limp as a bonefish, and suffered himself to be hauled along, round a corner, straight along for a distance, round a sort of dog-leg and then—the air cooler on his skin—he must have been outside. He was lowered, none too gently, onto the corrugated floor of a van, and was able to eavesdrop on some more rather anxious conversation.