The Bellwether Revivals

by Benjamin Wood

  Oscar was sprinting after him now, and Yin was coming up behind, shouting: ‘Stop him, Oscar, stop him!’

  ‘Left,’ Marcus said, pointing, ‘he went left.’

  Eden was running for the river. Oscar went after him, spearing through the warm air, running so hard his muscles pounded and his lungs burned. As Eden dived into the water, he was only ten or twenty yards behind him. Flinging off his jacket, he got to the riverbank and dived in, too. He didn’t care that Eden was a better swimmer. He didn’t care that the water was deep and briny and green with algae and that it flooded his ears as he broke the surface. All he cared about was catching up with Eden. He could see his shining back a few yards downstream.

  Eden battled to haul himself onto the high bank—the marram grass was tall there, and he clawed at it, trying to find something to grip so he could escape to the meadow on the other side—and while he struggled, Oscar got closer and closer. With every passing second, Eden grew larger in his sights. He was nothing but a target to him now. He would bring him down like an animal.

  Eden heaved his body onto the bank, mauling the bulrushes. He’d only just made it out of the water when Oscar reached out and grabbed his ankle, pulling him back. With his other hand, Oscar gripped the marram grass to keep his head above the waterline. Eden kicked and jostled, but he didn’t have the strength or the will to shake himself free, and he slipped and fell to his knees, sliding back into the river with a great splash.

  Oscar watched the water settling. For a few moments, the river was strangely peaceful. The swallows gossiped in the reeds. Then there was a rush of pressure beside his waist, and Eden popped up, gasping, his hair drenched and slick as seal hide. Before he could even blink the river from his eyes, Oscar threw his arm around Eden’s neck and tightened it. He held him in the crook of his elbow and squeezed. Eden began to choke. He squeezed harder. Eden’s face turned beet red and his arms flailed and clawed. But Oscar didn’t release him. He pushed Eden’s head below the water, until it bubbled with his desperate breaths, until he could see his eyes bulging white and swollen. He wasn’t going to let him go until he drowned. He was sure of it. Thoughts entered his mind—sirens, policemen, hospitals—but they weren’t enough to stop him. In that moment, he thought revenge was all he had left. Drowning Eden right there in the placid green water was the only way he could help Iris now, the only way he could stay close to her.

  As Eden writhed under his arm, he tried to picture her face. He wanted to see it the way it had looked on the day they met—bright and hopeful, looking back at him with that guarded curiosity she had for everything—but he could only see it now the way it was: still and pale on the organ house floor. He could only see blue lips, and dead eyes, and tight white skin. And the cruellest memories came visiting him before the sweetest ones: he remembered the things he’d said wrong, the times he’d annoyed her, the moments he’d let her down, occasions she’d shaken her head at him or sighed. He heard her voice saying, ‘You should do whatever makes you happy,’ and he knew, looking down at Eden’s harried, popping eyeballs, that happiness was a long, long way from here and he would never get to reach it.

  He tightened the clench of his elbow around Eden’s throat and pushed him down lower, waiting for him to give up. Clinging to the riverbank, he steeled himself. Eden went on thrashing beneath him, his flailing arms getting slower, losing their energy. He was going to kill him. He was resigned to it. He understood now that he was capable of it, the way Eden was capable of it, the way his cousin Terry was capable of it, the way his father was probably capable of it, too. He remembered how his cousin would hold his head below the water when they were kids at the local pool—just like he was holding Eden’s head now—to train him to hold his breath, Terry would say, to teach him how to survive. He could almost hear his father’s voice now from the poolside, husky and thrilled, goading him the way the voices of The Fates had once spurred on Jennifer Doe. And that’s when he found himself thinking of the helpless little boy she had killed. Her own brother. Pink and wheezing. Desperate and confused.

  He stopped.

  He loosened his hold.

  Eden gulped in a stream of air and the colour came flooding back into his face. But Oscar didn’t let go of him. He swam cross-river, with Eden passed out under his arm, to where the others were standing solemnly at the foot of the Bellwethers’ garden, ready to bring them both in. They’d been watching the whole thing. They must have been shouting, but he hadn’t heard them.

  Yin reached down to heave Eden onto the bank first. He laid him flat on his back in the reeds and Jane crouched down to tend to him. ‘He’s alive,’ she said, feeling his heart.

  They all helped to pull Oscar out of the water. He sat on the bank, getting his breath back, saying nothing. Eden lay unconscious in the bulrushes and canary grass; there were bruises on his chest and scratches on his shoulders.

  Oscar felt a warm hand on his neck. ‘You alright, man?’ Yin was standing over him, tears in his eyes. ‘You okay?’ And from somewhere, he found the strength to nod.

  His drenched clothes were heavy and tight, and he peeled off his shirt and twisted the river out of it, then just let it fall onto the grass. He sat silently, the world hazy and foreign. They let him settle there for a while. The sun shimmered in the water and the crickets called out for each other. A steady breeze had gathered, shaking the willows. It was cooler now, and everything seemed almost like it used to be—like one of the nice spring evenings they’d spent together back in March, when they’d piled out of the punt and walked wearily to the house for dinner before Herbert Crest came. But it wasn’t one of those evenings, and no matter how hard he tried to convince himself that everything was going to be alright from here, he could only manage to feel a raft of nothing. He was beyond sadness, beyond rage, beyond despair. There was only blankness and vagueness and torpor.

  ‘Come on, let’s get you inside and get you dry,’ Jane said softly, touching his shoulder. ‘They can stay out here with him until the ambulance arrives. The police are on their way.’ Oscar got up. His legs were shaking, buckling.

  Jane took him to the back of the rectory, not up to the main house. He sat in one of the deck chairs while she went inside to fetch a towel, and he studied the garden in a kind of stupor. It was the exact same garden he’d stared at many times before. They were the same trees, the same flowers; it was the same grass, the same soil, the same decking under his feet. But it was not the same sky above him. The clouds were different; they were sharper, angrier. And the grey bricks of the organ house were different now too, because he could no longer look at them. He felt sick to be so close to that building. The breeze was gathering strength and every time it swept across the garden he could hear it blowing through the broken organ pipes—a weak and tuneless drone that sounded on and off, on and off, with the steadiest of rhythms, like some machine that had found a way to breathe.

  He couldn’t bear it any longer. He tried to stand but his legs wouldn’t hold his weight, and he slumped back down into his chair. Jane came out onto the deck, holding a blue dressing gown. ‘I couldn’t find a towel,’ she said, ‘but this will do. Here.’ She wrapped it around his shoulders and he felt the warmth rising through his body. She rubbed the tops of his arms the way his mother used to do when she’d take him out of the bath.

  They sat quietly together for a while. When he turned to look at her, he saw that she’d started to cry. She was padding her eyes with the sides of her fingers. ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe he could do something like this. He just isn’t the kind of person who—’ She stopped, knowing he didn’t want to hear it, and dipped her eyes to the deck. ‘Ruth is dead, too. Marcus found her.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In her bedroom.’ Jane broke down again, sniffing back tears.

  He stood up. ‘Show me.’

  ‘No, please, let’s just wait here.’ She reached out for him. ‘I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want to s
ee it.’

  ‘You have to see it, Jane,’ he told her.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. Her voice was like a child’s.

  ‘Because if you don’t believe he could do something like this now, you’ll never believe it.’

  And so they walked into the Bellwether house for the last time, through the sitting room and the hallway and the atrium, up the stairs into the master bedroom, following the trail of rubber from Iris’s leg-brace, with river water running off his trousers and his shoes.

  The master bedroom was dim and warm. On the four-poster bed, Ruth lay on her back with her eyes closed and her mouth partly ajar. Oscar didn’t need to touch her cheek to know that she was dead. There was a pillow on the floor beside her, and the linen slip was wrinkled and streaked. She’d been suffocated in her sleep.

  Jane backed up against the doorframe, biting on her thumbnail, trembling.

  A wave of nausea built up in Oscar’s stomach then, and he had to hold it in until he could make it down the stairs and out of the front door. He threw up on the steps, and the sight of Marcus’s car, still parked in the driveway, made his body weaken again. He thought of the little speech he’d given to the others. He thought about a party happening far away, people dancing to old-fashioned music, punts filled with champagne bottles, purple flowers, eveningwear, carnations, new aftershave. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of the dressing gown and sat down. There was a bulk of something in one of the pockets and he lifted it out: a half-empty packet of clove cigarettes. In the other pocket: a book of matches.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Jane said, coming up behind him.

  He just sat staring across the forecourt. The fountain was glinting in the dying sun. The pine trees stretched out before him in a perfect line. He opened the pack of cloves, put one in his mouth, struck a match and lit it. That sweet, cloying smoke unfurled around him. He felt it like a warm coal inside his lungs. Jane lowered her thin body down to the step beside him. She held his arm and leaned her head upon his shoulder. And they waited there together at the front of the Bellwether house, listening for the caterwaul of sirens.

  DAYS TO COME

  Truth is the torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it.

  —Claude Adrien Helvétius

  TWENTY-ONE

  Testimony

  Oscar waited on the courthouse balcony, looking through the streaked glass at the reporters and news crews huddling on the street below. There were some faces he remembered from the funeral: the fat-mouthed men who’d swarmed around the cortège and pushed their lenses against the windows, trying to capture his misery on film, who’d pawed so rabidly at the sides of the car that they dislodged and flattened one of the wreaths; and the orange-skinned women who’d pushed microphones up to his chin and asked him vile, insulting questions like ‘Is it true she was pregnant?’ and ‘Can you confirm she was sleeping with her brother?’ Now they were gathered like wolves in the grey afternoon light, prowling outside the courthouse. Cameramen and photographers were perched on high ladders with dark equipment, and press reporters were jostling for position behind a metal barrier, clutching onto dictaphones. As the lawyers ushered Theo through the doors to face them, there was a surging din of voices. The reporters called out their questions—one great shrieking disharmony—and the tick tick tick of flashbulbs brightened the street like fireworks.

  Theo’s barrister was calm and upright. With a simple gesture of his arms, he managed to quiet the crowd. ‘I have a statement to make on behalf of Mr Bellwether,’ he said, ‘and then—listen to me, please, because I’m only going to say this once—we will not be taking any questions.’ Another shimmer of flashbulbs. A headache of light. Theo averted his eyes.

  Lowering his glasses, the barrister read from a piece of paper: ‘I am satisfied that the judge, the Honourable Mr Justice Phillips, has seen fit to hand my son the maximum sentence of life imprisonment, despite the jury’s finding of diminished responsibility. From this point forward, I would appreciate it if you would all stop calling me in the middle of the night and refrain from parking your news vans across my driveway. Thank you.’ Voices clamoured as the barrister turned away. The cameras went on flashing and rolling. Policemen held the press corps behind the barrier while Theo was escorted across the street to a waiting car.

  Oscar looked on from the balcony, watching the wolves disperse. They packed up their equipment, smoked their cigarettes, laughed and joked, leaving their sandwich wrappers and drinks cans on the pavement. The traffic was flowing by the courthouse steadily, taking people somewhere he could not imagine, a place he wanted so badly to be. If he thought he had known tiredness before, he was wrong. The waning he felt now in his bones was the most unbearable kind of exhaustion, a persistent lag that rose with him each morning and spread throughout the day. He went down the dim stairway, hoping to see nobody on the way home. It was only when he was away from the courthouse and the jousting of the lawyers that he could remember Iris for the person she was, not just a victim or a name in a file. The more everyone talked about the facts of the case, the less she was alive.

  For the last few days, he’d sat in the courtroom, willing it to be over. He’d watched an artist making pastel sketches of Eden entering his plea on the first morning, and seen the drawings appear later on the news: badly proportioned, strangely coloured, like something from an old cartoon. He’d listened to Theo’s lawyers outline their case, describing the events with cold, considered voices: how the plaintiff suffocated his sister, then his mother, as they lay sleeping in their beds in the early hours of the morning of 7th June; how the plaintiff then proceeded to drag his sister through the house later that afternoon, into a detached building outside, whereupon, according to the plaintiff’s own statement, he tried to revive her. ‘The plaintiff believed he could resuscitate the victim by playing organ music, Your Honour,’ the prosecuting barrister had said, and Oscar had watched the reaction of the judge and the jury, their clenched, disbelieving faces.

  When it came time for the defence to present their case, Oscar had listened with rising desperation. ‘We do not wish to refute the facts put forth by the prosecution regarding the events of the seventh of June,’ the defence counsel said, ‘but we wish to argue diminished responsibility in this matter, Your Honour, and press for a ruling of voluntary manslaughter.’ Oscar knew that he was going to be called to testify to Eden’s state of mind. Theo’s lawyers had prepared him for it. But as he answered their questions in the crowded court, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his honesty was somehow a betrayal, that he was hurting Iris with every word. He tried so hard not to look at Eden in the dock, knowing the sight of his face in the daylight would send his blood raging. Instead, he kept his eyes on the prosecution table, where Theo sat, slouched with grief, his bald head blotched with eczema, looking thin, and lost, and beaten.

  When the defence counsel played the videos, Oscar saw the jurors fidgeting and ruffling their brows at the screen. He answered questions about Iris’s leg, how it had come to be broken the second time, and the sniggers from the gallery turned his stomach. Mr Lowe? Mr Lowe, can you please answer the question? His mind kept leaving the room as the defence counsel grilled him about Eden’s ‘behaviour’ and ‘character’ and ‘lifestyle’. They asked if he’d ever suggested to Herbert Crest that Eden suffered from a condition known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and he answered truthfully. But stepping down from the witness box, he felt a sinking in his gut. What use was the truth to anyone now?

  On the third day, the defence had called a leading neurosurgeon to show the jury the scale of Eden’s delusions and, later, the prosecution had been allowed to cross-examine her. It was unsettling to hear Theo’s lawyers lending credibility to Eden’s claims of healing, but Oscar had been told what they were trying to do: it was important to show that Eden had been in full control of his faculties so that the jury would not reduce his crime to voluntary manslaughter.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong here, Dr Reiner,’ the p
rosecuting barrister had said, ‘but aren’t the uses of hypnosis and music therapy considered to be perfectly acceptable forms of treatment for brain injuries, as well as cancer?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, they are, but—’

  ‘In fact, as a neurosurgeon, you provide information to your patients about both hypnotherapy and music therapy, don’t you?’

  The expert didn’t take kindly to being interrupted. She was a thin-lipped woman with her hair pulled tightly in a bun, and every time the barrister interjected she gave an angry little cough and looked at the judge. ‘Yes, I do. But only as part of a full, post-operative treatment plan. I like to give my patients a range of options. I admit, some patients find those kinds of treatments helpful, but I would not consider them to be anything but placebic.’

  ‘I’m sure those patients would disagree with you.’

  ‘They might. But they aren’t here.’

  The barrister waited. ‘Music has also been proven to benefit sufferers of Parkinson’s disease—hasn’t it?—helping to calm their symptoms? It’s also achieved some positive results with stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes. That’s true. It can have certain temporary effects—temporary.’

  ‘But the defence counsel would have us believe that the plaintiff was acting with diminished capacity in regard to the treatment of Dr Crest and his sister, the victim. Your testimony infers that the plaintiff was perfectly aware of his intentions. He was providing hypnosis and musical therapy, was he not? Perfectly normal forms of post-operative care—not delusions at all.’