All Sorts of Possible

by Rupert Wallis

  ‘There’s definitely no magic here,’ he announced, chopping the surface of the water with karate hands. ‘I don’t think you were saved. It was luck, that’s all.’

  Daniel was about to nod, the whisky woozy in his head, when a shadow moved over the entrance to the tunnel and the light dimmed for a moment, like a candle flame blown flat by a draught. Spooked, he looked up as Bennett scooped up water and drank, his chin dripping and shining.

  ‘HELLO?’ shouted Daniel, cupping his hands. ‘Is someone there?’ A blackbird landed at the mouth of the tunnel and looked down at them, before flapping away with a shriek. Daniel kept staring up at the entrance, his heart thumping. It was difficult to hear much of anything over the sound of the waterfall. By the time Bennett looked round, Daniel was already wading back to the shoreline.

  ‘I think there’s someone up there,’ shouted Daniel, pointing at the tunnel as he emerged dripping from the water.

  Bennett stood watching it like a hawk as Daniel picked up his socks and trainers and started back over the rocks, creeping as quickly as he could in his bare feet.

  30

  ‘Hello?’ shouted Daniel again as he picked his way quickly over the rocks in the tunnel, hopping to put on his shoes one at a time.

  But when he emerged, panting, into the daylight, with the fence all around him, there was no one there. He blinked in the bright sunshine, looking all about him. In the distance, a tractor the size of a toy suddenly breached the horizon and then turned and dipped below it again, into a green field half ploughed.

  Daniel studied the ground around the edge of the hole.

  ‘Well?’ asked Bennett when he emerged, stamping his left foot down to make sure his shoe was on properly.

  ‘I think there was someone here.’

  ‘You think or you know?’

  Daniel watched Bennett raise his eyebrows, wondering what he meant, until Bennett waggled the half-empty hip flask. His friend plucked the topmost wire between two wooden posts, making it thrum.

  ‘Well, if there was someone here, they’ve gone now,’ said Bennett. ‘Maybe it was just someone leaving another letter, worshipping at the shrine of Daniel.’

  Daniel scanned the notes and offerings lying on the ground, and the ones hooked on to the wire and tacked to the posts, but he couldn’t tell if there was anything new since the last time. He looked to his left and studied the dark fringe of the woods and then he heaved himself up over the fence and started walking towards the trees. He thought he heard Bennett muttering something, but he couldn’t be sure as the breeze blew over his ears and he didn’t turn to find out.

  He lingered on the edge of the pines, looking into the cool, muffled dark, and then he walked on, beyond the first row of trunks.

  The floor was a weave of soft brown needles, springy, like matting beneath his feet. He trod carefully as if it might give way any moment, listening for the sound of another person, his hearing seeming keener after spending so long near the waterfall.

  The cracks of sky shone bluer between the tapering tops the deeper he went. But when he heard Bennett coughing behind him, the needles hissing as he kicked at them, Daniel stopped and picked at a nub of hard sap on the trunk beside him. ‘Let’s just say it was nobody then,’ he said.

  ‘Or a passing cloud,’ said Bennett. He sighed. ‘It hasn’t been a waste of time though, has it?’

  Daniel thought about that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’

  And Bennett smiled.

  The boys pedalled back across the meadow, leaving two bright, winding trails in the grass. When they arrived at the wheat field, they started back through the lumpy tractor channel.

  Daniel looked back over the bobbing, bearded heads of wheat towards the woods, imagining that someone was watching him. But there was just a wall of trees. And then he thought he saw something moving on the edge of the woods. It could have been a figure flitting between the trunks. Or it could have just been the sunlight and shadows falling through the branches of the trees.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ said Bennett, ‘however much you want there to be.’

  Daniel kept watching for a few seconds more and then just turned round. ‘Let’s go or we’ll miss the train,’ he said.

  31

  Sitting on the warm platform, waiting for the train, they watched the shadows creeping across the concrete. Daniel moved his leg when one black finger touched his foot.

  When the boys heard the rails begin to twang, the two of them stood up and picked up their bikes as two carriages came round the bend.

  ‘We could just keep going, you know,’ shouted Bennett above the noisy brakes of the train. When the carriage doors opened, Daniel propped his bike alongside Bennett’s and imagined choosing a seat and riding the train until it terminated before catching another one going somewhere else, followed by another, and then another, never stopping anywhere and having to be someone. But, when the train lurched, the idea fell away inside him and he knew there was no point poking around in the jumble of daydreaming and pointless thoughts to find it, because he was never going to leave his dad.

  The rest of the carriage was deserted. Bennett inspected the crescent moon of a burger and bap left in its tray on the seat opposite, but decided it wasn’t for him. So he opened his hip flask and took a swig and offered it to Daniel who did the same.

  As he handed the flask back to Bennett, a previously unseen figure rose up from the seats further down and tottered towards them along the aisle, like an ancient spirit of the carriage. He was a grimy, wiry man, with a matted beard the colour of rust, and he wore a tatty blue shirt, shorn of buttons to below his ribcage, which flapped beneath a tattered white mackintosh mapped with stains. His white, freckled chest was daubed with two nipples the colour of terracotta and, through the fuzz of cropped orange hair on his head, Daniel could see a pale scalp pocked and marked with scrapes and cuts.

  The man stood swaying with the carriage, licking his blistered lips, then held out his hand for the flask.

  When Bennett shook his head, the man sat down beside Daniel and reached into a pocket of his mackintosh and drew out a large darning needle and aimed its tip a couple of centimetres from Daniel’s ribs.

  ‘I’ll burst his heart,’ said the man.

  Up close to him, Daniel could see muck in every pore. There was a hot, bitter tang around the man like a fox.

  Bennett grunted something before handing over the flask and the man took it and wedged it between his knees.

  ‘Pockets too,’ he said.

  The tip of the needle stayed close to Daniel as each of them handed over their loose change. When the carriage lurched, Daniel’s fingers brushed the man’s upturned palm as he dropped the coins into it, and when he drew back the man was staring at him, dropping the change into the pocket of his mackintosh. Suddenly, he moved across the seat to get closer, the needle flashing back the sunlight. Daniel shrank into the corner and felt the click clack of the wheels on the track up his spine.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ growled Bennett. But the man didn’t seem to hear as he peered closer. Daniel could smell the reek from his clothes, like hot, wet cardboard. Teeth stained the colour of cork. But in his eyes a flicker of something bright. He grabbed Daniel’s wrist, the fingers tightening like wire, the needle in his other hand drooping.

  ‘Oh, you got the fizz, boy,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’ve got the voltage.’ The man gasped. Whooped like a cowboy.

  Daniel felt a sudden fluttering in his chest, but it was faint and feeble, a series of warm golden spots flitting inside him like fireflies.

  ‘Can we make the fit?’ asked Daniel. ‘Do you know how to?’

  ‘There was a time once I might have done, but now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘But we need to try. See what we can do.’

  ‘It’ll cost you,’ said the man, holding out a grimy palm.

  ‘We already gave you everything,’ said Bennett.

  ‘No then. Cos a man’s got to make a living,
you know.’

  ‘But I need to find someone who can help me,’ said Daniel.

  The man raised the needle like a single finger to make a point. ‘It won’t be me unless you pay for it.’

  ‘I can get you money. I can.’

  ‘No one knows the future,’ laughed the man. ‘No one knows that. So it’s pay up now or never!’

  ‘But it’s important. I need to help someone.’

  ‘The one in the bed or the bald man?’

  Daniel’s mouth opened, but he didn’t know what to say.

  The man just grinned. ‘It’s only flickers and sparks in me now. Flickers and sparks on a good day. Not the raging fire it used to be. But I can still see some things. So who is it? Who do you want to help most?’

  ‘The one in the bed.’

  ‘So what about the bald man? What about what he wants? How are you going to handle him?’ The man smiled when Daniel said nothing. He shook his head as he picked out a blue loop of seat fabric with the needle. ‘Find someone else to help you,’ he said. ‘That bald one’s a problem that won’t go away. He’s like gum on your shoe.’

  He laughed and lifted the hip flask from his knees and took a sip, watching Bennett as he did so with bright blue eyes in case he tried to snatch it back. After swallowing a mouthful and wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he said to them, ‘There’s something you should know though, and I’ll tell you about it for free.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Daniel edging forward to hear.

  ‘That we all want lives we can understand. But the world doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t care what we want.’ He wove the needle up and down, as if stitching an invisible thread through the air. ‘So we sew in the bits that don’t make sense, making up stories about ourselves we can believe in or at least pretend to.’

  Suddenly, he stabbed the needle into the seat, making Daniel flinch and sending dust motes streaming into the sunlight. ‘It’s a curse being human.’ He pulled out the needle and pointed the tip at Daniel. ‘So make up whatever stories you need to explain it. Make sense of that talent inside you however you want, especially if you find them.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Someone else to make the fit with.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  The man laughed out loud. ‘How should I know? Just make sure they fit you better than last time.’ He pumped his hand open and shut and then balled it tight into a fist, making it shudder. ‘Went off like a bomb, I bet?’

  He smiled and stood up as the train started to slow.

  ‘Wait,’ said Daniel. ‘I need to know where to look.’

  ‘They’ll be wherever you are because they’ll need you as much as you need them. That’s what making a good fit’s all about, helping each other, but not in the way you’re expecting. Don’t ask me why. But that’s how it was for me.’

  He grinned and his smile was like a dirty crescent of moon. ‘I ended up telling myself all sorts of stories to try and make sense of it, and now here I am.’ He shook his head as the train pulled into the station and bade them good day with an elaborate bow, one arm twirling its hand and then sweeping aside the air.

  They watched him get off the train, draining the last of the whisky and Diet Coke from Bennett’s hip flask and beaming into the sun. Bennett picked up the burger in its tray and flung it at him before the carriage doors closed and the tramp waved them off as the train left the platform, a stripe of ketchup glistening on his mackintosh.

  Before they lost sight of him, they saw him dancing down the platform as if accompanied by some ballroom music piped out of the sky for him alone.

  32

  Daniel’s aunt was out and the windows seemed larger and more full of daylight, as though the house had taken a secret moment to relax without her. Daniel drifted from room to room, pausing to look in each one.

  In the sitting room, his father was reading the paper with his feet up and the television turned down low.

  In the kitchen, he was cooking pasta, a red sauce overheating in a pot, bubbles popping, freckling the worktop red. ‘Where’s the bloody colander?’ he turned round to ask and then stood waiting until he faded like a ghost with Daniel still leaning against the door frame, shaking his head.

  In the bathroom, his father was standing in front of the mirror, shoulders draped in a towel like a boxer, uprooting black hairs from his nostrils then suddenly tilting his head to one side and smoothing a hand through the thinning hair above his forehead. When he caught sight of Daniel watching in the mirror through the half-open door, he froze. ‘Don’t you dare say a word,’ he grunted with a smile.

  ‘I won’t,’ whispered Daniel to the empty bathroom and drummed his fingers on the wood in time to his heart. When he turned round, something swilled unexpectedly in his head and he paused, thinking he was still woozy from the whisky. But the sensation didn’t pass. It filled out into something more, an inkling of a memory at first, and then it began spooling through him like a snippet of film and suddenly he was . . .

  . . . running towards a door, along a landing laid with deep-pile white carpet, the fluffy threads bulging up over the rims of his brown lace-up shoes.

  When he gripped the door handle, it slipped through his fingers and pinged back up because his hands were oily with blood.

  After the moment vanished, Daniel stood trying to place it in his life. But he couldn’t. He opened his bedroom cupboard and inspected all the shoes lined up along the floor, singling out a pair of brown lace-ups that might . . . or might not . . . have been the same ones. Frustrated, he began toying with the idea that the universe had taken so much from him recently it might want to give him something tiny back, allowing him at least to place one moment in his life. But he recalled nothing else about the memory or when it had happened.

  The whisky and sunshine felt heavy on him so he took a shower, inhaling the steam to try and rinse out his lungs. When he stepped out and wrapped a towel about his waist, he wiped the mirror clear and studied his flat, bony chest, trying to look through the wet skin and the stringy blue veins to see what might be deeper down. He stared harder at his reflection, fingers tightening round the edge of the basin, trying to invent an explanation that made sense of everything. It was only when he remembered the tramp on the train, and what he had said, that Daniel rocked back on his heels and let go.

  Dressed and with his damp hair drying, Daniel stopped halfway down the stairs and watched through the balustrade as the front door opened then shut. His father stood in the hallway, hanging up his suit jacket on a peg, his work tie loosened and the top button of his white shirt undone. He plunged his hands in his trouser pockets and looked up. ‘How’s things, Dan?’

  ‘Not great,’ whispered Daniel and as he watched his father fade he spoke again. ‘I’ll help you, I will. I’ll find out what to do.’

  He flinched when the door suddenly opened for real, letting in the evening sunlight. But it was his aunt that looked up at him, her shadow stretching down the hallway, pointed as a blade.

  ‘How are things, Daniel?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine,’ he replied.

  33

  After supper, Daniel went to bed. He lay blinking at the ceiling, unable to sleep, as he thought about his father and Lawson and what Mason had told him he must do. Through some cranky, twisted thinking, Daniel began to wonder if he had actually died underground and never found a way back to the surface at all, his body left stiff on the rock with the water lapping beside it, while the rest of him had slipped into some other place without realizing it until now. A hell maybe? Or some inbetween world?

  But the bed felt real enough. And the long, uncomfortable silences during supper with his aunt had seemed authentic too.

  The only other solution Daniel could imagine to explain what was happening to him was that he had dropped through a hole in the fabric of one universe into another where everything was familiar, but where his life was not quite the same. He sat up and looked round his bedroom, checking car
efully for anything that might seem odd or out of place. But nothing was any different that he could see.

  As he slumped back down, he remembered the strange memory that had come to him before his aunt had returned home. It was difficult to recall it entirely, but there were just enough details for him to ponder:

  the deep pile of a white carpet on a landing . . .

  brown lace-up shoes . . .

  his hands covered in blood and a door handle slipping through them.

  Daniel wondered if it could be a clue that might prove he had indeed fallen from one universe into another. Closing his eyes, he tried to picture everything he could about that moment and gradually it started coming back to him, and he was

  . . . running towards a door, along a landing laid with deep-pile white carpet, the fluffy threads bulging up over the rims of his brown lace-up shoes.

  When he gripped the door handle, it slipped through his fingers and pinged back up because his hands were oily with blood.

  He got up and inspected the brown shoes in his cupboard again. They were definitely not the same. And then he looked at his hands. They weren’t the ones covered in blood that had reached for the door handle. His own fingers weren’t as slender or as white.

  Daniel tried to understand how he could have remembered something that hadn’t even happened to him. Unnerved by the strangeness of it, he lay back on his bed and closed his eyes, replaying the moment over and over, trying to see if he could find out anything else . . .

  . . . and then something clicked and he began remembering more . . .

  . . . his bloody hands grabbing hold of the door handle a second time and turning it to let himself through into a white tiled bathroom . . .

  . . . When he looked in the mirror above the white ceramic sink, he saw Lawson staring back, his bleeding nose cupped in his bloody hands . . .