The Bellwether Revivals

by Benjamin Wood

  Oscar was still half-asleep, but he couldn’t help noticing the change in Eden’s eyes: they weren’t so pearly any more; the pupils were dilated. ‘What are you doing in here, Eden? You’re soaking.’

  ‘Raining out there,’ he replied. And he went over to sit down on the floor again, on the same little patch of wet tiles. ‘I came here looking for something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ He smiled dreamily. ‘But I found my sister’s tablets.’ He laid himself down flat. ‘If you take two at once, you get a nice giddy feeling.’

  Oscar took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water. ‘Drink this,’ he said.

  Eden pushed it away. ‘I don’t need a nursemaid.’

  ‘Drink it or you’re going to get sick.’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Eden took the glass, but didn’t even sip at it. ‘He’ll have to make an appointment like the rest of us.’

  ‘Who will?’

  ‘Dr Crest. If he wants to meet my parents.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Why is it so hot in here?’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘Then I must be getting a fever, because it feels like I’m on fire.’ Eden gulped down the water in one long mouthful. He exhaled and dropped the glass. It broke against the tiles in a few clean pieces. ‘Oops.’

  ‘You better go to bed, Eden. Sleep it off.’

  ‘Don’t tell me how to behave.’

  ‘You’re going to wake everyone.’

  ‘Tssh. They don’t care what I do. Nobody bats an eyelid.’ He lifted himself to his feet again, clutching onto the washbasin. ‘But that’s okay. I’m going to build my own organ. And then I can do anything, and everyone will listen.’ He staggered towards the door. ‘Get out my way,’ he said, pushing at Oscar’s chest weakly. ‘Everyone’s always in my way.’ And out he went along the dark hall, down the stairs, through the atrium.

  Oscar hurried to the window in the guest room. The rain was still driving across the garden. He saw Eden come out through the kitchen door below, stumbling over the patio, along the path. He stayed there at the window, watching, until the light went off in the organ house and the night began to settle.

  SIXTEEN

  Waiting

  Dr Paulsen didn’t miss a single movement of the weather all week. He studied every last twitch of the sky through his window, as if he was trying to lure the sun out by sheer will. When Oscar came into his room each day, the old man was rooted to the same spot as the morning before, eyes pointed up towards the clouds, and the only thing that seemed to change was the shade of the sky beyond his shoulders. Tuesday: heavy rain. Wednesday: brighter. Thursday: grey again. Friday: greyer. On Saturday, the sun was finally beaming through the glass and the room was heady with the smell of damp wisteria, but Dr Paulsen still kept staring, and by Monday morning, Oscar realised it wasn’t the sunshine that the old man was interested in—he was waiting for God to finally show his face and take him away.

  Oscar had tried to prepare for another long week in Grantchester the same way as last time—by not preparing at all, by booking the whole week off to enjoy his afternoons at the Bellwether house with Iris and his friends. But when he’d gone to Jean’s office to ask for the time off last weekend, she’d refused him outright. So he spent the better part of Monday at Cedarbrook, performing his usual duties and counting down the minutes until five o’clock, when he was due to meet Herbert Crest at the Crowne Plaza. It had been arranged for Andrea to drive them to the Bellwether house and drive them back later that night.

  After making a final sweep of the rooms, swapping pillowcases and fitting calipers and emptying one last colostomy bag, Oscar went to the staff room and changed out of his uniform. He dabbed his neck and face with aftershave and wet his hair and combed it. He brushed his teeth, packed his stuff back into his locker, and went up to check on Dr Paulsen.

  The old man was reading a book on his bed. It was written in a foreign alphabet—Russian or Greek or maybe Farsi. For the first time all week, Dr Paulsen noticed he was there, and it took Oscar slightly aback.

  ‘What are you reading?’ the old man asked.

  ‘Funny,’ he replied, ‘I was about to ask you the same question.’

  ‘What are you reading?’ Paulsen repeated.

  ‘Just making sure you’re okay.’

  ‘I’m okay.’ He moved his eyes back to the book. ‘What are you reading?’

  Oscar put a blanket over the old man’s feet. He felt elated to be having a conversation with him again, even if it was strained and looping. ‘I haven’t been reading much lately, Dr Paulsen, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘It’s good to read.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, it is.’

  ‘Rain today,’ Paulsen said. ‘Take my umbrella.’

  There wasn’t a drop of rain outside—not that he could see or hear from the old man’s window—but Oscar took the umbrella from the coat-stand anyway. It was an expensive leather-handled thing, with a Paisley awning. ‘Thanks,’ he called out from the doorway, but the old man was no longer aware of their conversation. He was turning pages over, wetting the tip of his finger.

  Oscar walked into the centre of town, swinging Paulsen’s umbrella, along Queen’s Road, past the playing fields of St John’s College where a few rangy students were tossing a frisbee around. He took the short cut over Clare Bridge, winding through the back of King’s, around the tall imposing chapel where a line of tourists were already queuing with their Nikon cameras and their pop-out guidebooks. He felt the weight of the building against his back as he made his way through the Front Court, like he was dragging it behind him on a rope, but once he made it past St Catharine’s and onto Pembroke Street, the heaviness began to ease away. The Crowne Plaza was not far ahead. Three silver Audis were parked under the carport, and nine or ten businessmen were standing in a huddle as the porters unloaded their luggage onto trolleys. They were checking in at the front desk when he got off the escalator and arrived into the lobby.

  He was five minutes early and there was no sign of Crest or Andrea yet, so he took a seat near the window and waited. The businessmen piled into the lifts and went off to their rooms, and the next thing he knew, they were coming back down again in their pinstripe suits and heading for the bar. It was quarter to six. He began to watch the lifts, keeping his eyes alert to the movements of the lights as they ascended and descended, studying the people who stepped out: old women in flowery two-piece outfits; a father and son in football shirts. With every slide of the doors, he held his breath, expecting Crest or Andrea to come out waving to him, apologising, but it was always just a porter bringing back an empty trolley, or a cleaner with a cartful of dirty linen.

  The phone rang steadily at the front desk; as soon as one call was answered, another came through. Oscar picked out a few pamphlets from a display stand and read all about the must-see local attractions and organised tours. Sometime after six o’clock, the phone rang again at the front desk—another booking, he thought, another room service order—but soon he heard a voice behind him saying, ‘Excuse me. Excuse me, sir.’ He turned around and saw the brassy-haired receptionist bending towards him with her hands on her thighs like she was addressing a stray dog. ‘Excuse me, sir, is your name Oscar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s a call for you at reception.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s a woman. I think her name was Denny? Miss Denny?’

  ‘Okay. Thank you.’

  He’d never heard the name before, but something inside him knew exactly who was calling. He got up and followed the girl to the front desk, and before he picked up the receiver that was waiting on the counter, he took a deep breath in through his nose and out through his mouth. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oscar, is that you?’ A soothing Caribbean voice came flowing through the earpiece, and he didn’t need to hear anything more. ‘Oh, I couldn’t remember your last name, but I
knew you’d be there. I knew you’d still be waiting.’

  ‘What is it, Andrea?’

  She took a long moment to respond. Across the gleaming floor of the lobby, the businessmen were in the bar, drinking pints and guzzling peanuts. Their laughter felt excessive, bruising. He plugged his ear with his finger.

  ‘It’s Herbert,’ Andrea said, and he knew right away what she was going to tell him. ‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘The Good Lord took him in his sleep. We never even made it out of the apartment.’

  There was nothing he could say, nothing he could do but exhale.

  ‘I guess you better tell whoever needs to know,’ Andrea went on.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m glad I reached you.’

  ‘Yeah. God, I’m just so—’

  ‘I know, me too,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a funeral soon. If you give me your number, I’ll keep you posted, okay?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Try not to feel bad. It was going to happen sometime.’

  ‘I know, but with his last scan and everything, I—’

  ‘He was hopeful,’ she said. ‘We all were.’

  ‘He told me he’d been feeling so much better lately.’

  ‘Well, it makes no difference now. But look, I’m really glad I reached you. He would’ve wanted you to be one of the first to know.’ She hung up and Oscar stood there for a while, holding the bleating receiver as the hotel walls closed around him like a clamshell, and then the girl at the front desk said: ‘Sir, are you alright?’ He gave the phone back to her without a word, and headed off down the escalator.

  The dusk was gathering outside. He staggered out of the hotel, feeling punchdrunk and hazy. His feet seemed to take him where he needed to go all by themselves, towing him through town, until he found the floodlights of Cedarbrook shining warmly before him. He went through the gates, up to the entrance. The parlour door was open and all the floorlamps were on but there was nobody inside; a John Wayne movie was playing quietly on the television. The young auxiliary at the nurses’ station smiled at him, and he tried to smile back but could hardly move the muscles in his cheeks. He passed right by her, trudging up the stairs and along the quiet corridor.

  Dr Paulsen’s door was ajar. The old man was back in his usual chair again, gawping at the blank pane of his window. Oscar went in, crouched at his side, and held his hand. The skin felt dry and brittle. ‘Dr Paulsen,’ he said, ‘I need to tell you something. It’s important that you listen to me, okay?’ The old man moved his face towards him first, then his eyes followed. ‘Herbert Crest is dead. He died today. I thought you should know. I’m so sorry.’ But Paulsen didn’t say a word. He simply rolled his head away and began to make a tutting noise—tt-tt-tt-tt-tt-tt—as if his tongue was trying to hack through the prison of his teeth.

  As he waited on the front step with the doorbell echoing, Oscar felt a coldness against the back of his neck. He looked down towards the Bellwethers’ driveway, where grey dust was settling in the aftermath of cab wheels, shining like moonrock. There was no easy way of telling them, he realised. There were no right words to say. It was past eleven, and here he was, standing outside the door the way policemen stand to deliver bad news to unsuspecting families, wringing his hands and shifting his weight around on his feet. He was tired—tired of Cambridge and its changeless scenery, tired of Cedarbrook and Dr Paulsen, tired of his small dim flat and his answering machine, tired of cab rides to Grantchester, tired of Eden and Marcus and Yin and Jane, tired of his parents. He hoped that it would be Iris who answered the door, because she was the only person he wasn’t tired of, and he knew that he’d start to feel better the moment he saw her.

  But it was Yin who came peering through the glass. He was holding a bottle of cider, and struggled to unlatch the door. ‘Hey. I was expecting Marcus. You didn’t see him pass by or anything, did you?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Listen, buddy, I’m—’ Yin was slurring. ‘I’m really fucking sorry about your friend.’ And before he could ask him how he knew about it, Yin placed a hand on his shoulder and said: ‘We got your message, man. It was pretty garbled, but we got it.’

  Oscar didn’t think it had recorded properly; the signal had been so intermittent. His calls kept going straight through to Iris’s voicemail, and he’d hung up the first few times because he didn’t want to leave the bad news waiting in her mailbox like some letter that began Dear Miss Bellwether, It is with profound regret that I must inform you … But after an hour of trying to get through, he’d finally left a message after the beep. As he’d said, ‘You better let your brother know,’ he’d thought of Eden’s apple-sheen eyes growing wide and wet, of slamming doors and falling chairs and that light going on and off in the organ house. The connection cut out before he could say he was coming over.

  ‘I don’t know why everyone’s so surprised,’ Yin said. ‘I mean, the guy was pretty sick, right? You kinda had to see it coming.’

  ‘Doesn’t make it any easier to accept.’

  ‘Yeah, but still—a brain tumour. Nobody comes out the other side of that.’

  He could tell Yin was drunk because he was talking too much, swigging his cider with big, slack movements of his arms. A sober Yin would’ve known when to shut up and keep his opinions to himself, but the drink always brought out the conversationalist in him. ‘Where is everybody?’ Oscar asked.

  Yin shrugged and sniffed. ‘There’s only the three of us here. Eden took off and Marcus went after him. That was—shit—’ He looked at his watch. ‘That was a couple hours ago. You sure you didn’t pass by Marcus on your way over?’

  ‘No. What do you mean, he took off?’

  ‘He took off, man. Drove away. I don’t know how else to say it.’ Yin pointed towards the light at the end of the hallway. ‘Rest of us have been sitting around, wondering what to do. I figured, hey, we got free time on our hands, right? Might as well get wasted.’ He took another swig of cider.

  They were in the drawing room with the lights dimmed and the television flickering in the walnut cabinet. Jane was watching some wildlife documentary showing animals in slow motion. She’d been crying; her eyes were puffy and she was blowing her nose into a damp, frayed tissue. Iris was fidgeting with her leg-brace, scratching the underside of her thigh with a chopstick. It was not the most graceful vision of her that Oscar had witnessed, but it brought him some comfort. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she said, holding out her arms.

  ‘You’ve really got to do something about your phone reception out here.’

  She held him for a while, whispering how sorry she was. ‘I know how fond of him you were,’ she said, her warm breath upon his ear. ‘I really liked him too. We should never have got him involved in all this.’

  ‘It was what he wanted.’

  ‘I know, but I can’t help feeling guilty.’

  ‘He went peacefully. I suppose that’s something.’

  He looked at Jane. She was hunched forwards with her hands in her lap, clenching her tissue, and the television screen was reflecting in her pupils, two little squares of blue. He lowered his voice to ask Iris what had happened with Eden.

  ‘I tried to let him down gently,’ she said. ‘We all went out to the O. H. and knocked for him. By then he was all wound up about Herbert’s no-show.’ She said that Eden had demanded to listen to the message himself. ‘I gave him my phone and he stood there and listened to it a few times but didn’t say much.’ Eden had gone back into the organ house, and the next thing she knew he was locking the door behind him. Jane had tried for an hour to coax him back out, talking to him through the door, but he wouldn’t respond. ‘I thought, okay, he’s just doing what he usually does, hiding himself away when reality bites,’ Iris went on, ‘so I told everyone to leave him alone. We went back into the house.’ Some time later, they’d heard the sound of wheels spinning in the gravel outside, and they’d looked through the window to see Jane’s Land Rover missing from the driveway, and two rear li
ghts speeding through the trees. ‘He must have been going about a hundred and twenty,’ Iris said, then nodded at Jane: ‘She’s been like that ever since. Hardly said a word.’

  Yin took a seat on the sofa next to Jane and put his arm around her. On the TV, two large green creatures were slinking across a patch of grass. ‘Are they Komodo dragons?’ Yin asked her.

  She shrugged. Then, ever so softly, she said: ‘They’re trying to mate.’

  ‘They seem angry.’

  ‘That’s just how they do it.’ She pulled Yin’s arm tighter around her like a blanket. They all watched the screen for a while, as the Komodo dragons engaged each other, writhing violently in the dirt. And somehow, just this—just watching the television quietly in the middle of the night, four of them together—took away that awful tiredness that had come over Oscar in the Crowne Plaza.

  But Jane still seemed dejected. By the time the credits of the wildlife programme were rolling, she was staring out towards the dim hallway expectantly, as if Eden might come bounding in from the atrium to apologise to everybody. The longer she waited for movement out there, the more defeated she looked. She began raking the hair away from her face, and, finally, her eyebrows furrowed and tears started to skim along her freckly cheeks. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling,’ she said, rubbing at her forehead. ‘After everything that’s happened lately … I’ve just got a horrible feeling.’ There was a sudden scrape of footsteps in the garden, and she sprang to her feet. The world behind the drawn curtains brightened.

  Marcus came in through the back entrance, lingering in the kitchen doorway. He set his car keys down on the cabinet.

  ‘Well?’ Jane asked. ‘Did you find him? Where is he?’

  Marcus shook his head. He began rolling up his sleeves like he was preparing to deliver a baby. ‘I lost him at a level-crossing,’ he said. ‘He shot right through before the barrier came down. Tried to get him to pull over, was flashing my lights at him, honking the horn, but—argh. Will somebody pour me a drink? I don’t understand any of this. My heart’s going like a rabbit.’