by Mark Haddon
It happens fast. The door opens before Sean can put his key into the lock. Dylan is standing there in dirty blue dungarees, phone pressed to one ear. He says, calmly, Cancel that, Mike. I’ll talk to you later, and puts the phone down. He grabs a fistful of Sean’s hair and swings him into the hallway so that he skids along the lino and knocks over the little phone table. He puts his foot on Sean’s chest and yanks at the bag, ripping it open and breaking the strap. He takes out the gun, checks the chamber, shunts it back into place with the heel of his hand and tosses it through the open door of his room onto his bed. Sean sits up and tries to back away but Dylan grabs the collar of his T-shirt and hoists him up so that he is pressed against the wall. Daniel doesn’t move, hoping that if he stands absolutely still he will remain invisible. Dylan punches Sean in the face then lets him drop to the floor. Sean rolls over and curls up and begins to weep. Daniel can see a bloody tooth by the skirting board. Dylan turns and walks towards the front door. He runs his hand slowly across the deer’s flank five or six times, long, gentle strokes as if the animal is a sick child. Bring it in.
They wheel the pram across the living room and out onto the balcony. Dylan gives Daniel a set of keys and sends him downstairs to fetch two sheets from the back of his van. Daniel feels proud that he has been trusted to do this. He carries the sheets with their paint spatters and the crackly lumps of dried plaster back upstairs. Dylan unfolds them, spreads them out on the concrete floor and lays the deer in the centre. He takes a Stanley knife from his pocket, flips the animal onto its back and scores a deep cut from its neck to its groin. Gristle rips under the blade. He makes a second cut at ninety degrees, a crucifix across the chest, then yanks hard at one of the angles in the centre of the crucifix so that the corner of furred skin rips back a little. It looks like a wet doormat. Daniel is surprised by the lack of blood. Under the skin is a marbled membrane to which it is attached by a thick white pith. Dylan uses the knife to score the pith, pulling and scoring and pulling and scoring so that it comes gradually away.
Sean steps onto the balcony holding a bloody tea towel against his face like a mask. Daniel cannot read his expression. Turning, Daniel sees the sandy slab of the car plant rippling slightly in the heat coming off the road. A hawk hangs over the woods. His headache is coming back, or perhaps he has simply begun to notice it again. He wanders inside and makes his way to the kitchen. There is an upturned pint mug on the drying rack. He fills it with cold water from the tap and drinks it without taking the glass from his lips.
He hears the front door open and close and Mrs. Cobb shouting, What the bloody hell is going on?
He goes into the living room and sits on the brown leather sofa, listening to the slippery click of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, waiting for the pain to recede. There are framed school photographs of Sean and Dylan. There is a wall plate from Cornwall that shows a lighthouse wearing a bow tie of yellow light and three gulls, each made with a single black tick. The faintest smell of dog shit from the sole of his shoe. Sean walks down the corridor carrying a full bucket, the toilet flushes and he comes back the other way with the bucket empty.
He dozes. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. The sound of a saw brings him round. It takes a while to remember where he is, but his headache has gone. So strange to wake and find the day going on in your absence. He walks out onto the balcony. Dylan is cutting the deer up. The legs have been sawn off and halved, hoofs in one pile, thighs in another. Carl from next door has come round and is leaning against the balcony rail smoking a cigarette. I’ll have a word at the chippy. They’ve got a chest freezer out the back. Sean is no longer holding the tea towel against his face. His left eye is half closed by the swelling and his upper lip is torn.
Get rid of that, will you? Dylan points to a yellow plastic kids’ bathtub. Lungs, intestines, glossy bulbs of purple.
He and Sean take a handle each. As they are leaving Dylan holds up the severed head and says to Carl, What do you reckon? Over the fireplace? But it’s the bathtub that unsettles Daniel, the way it jiggles and slops with the movement of the lift. MURDER in capital letters. The inside of a human being would look like this. The dazzle of the sun blocked out. Thinking for a moment that it was Robert.
He says, How are you?
Sean says, Fine.
Some kind of connection has been broken, but it feels good, it feels like an adult way of being with another person.
They put the bathtub down and lift the lid of one of the big metal bins. Flies pour out. That wretched leathery stink. They hoist the tub to chest height as two teenage girls walk past. Holy shit. A brief countdown and they heave the bathtub onto the rim. The contents slither out and hit the bottom with a great slapping boom.
Upstairs the oven is on and Mrs. Cobb has put a bloody haunch into a baking tray. Carl is helping her peel potatoes with a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Dylan drinks from a can of Guinness. Come here, he says to Sean. Sean walks over and Dylan puts an arm around him. If you ever do anything like that again I’ll fucking kill you. Understand? Even Daniel can hear that he is really saying, I love you. Dylan gives Sean the half-finished can of Guinness and opens another one for himself.
Your mum rang, says Mrs. Cobb. Wondering where you were.
Right. He doesn’t move.
Because it has nothing to do with the gun, does it? Right now, this is the moment when time fractures and forks. If he speaks, if he asks to stay, everything will be different from this point on. But he doesn’t speak. Mrs. Cobb says, Go on. Hop it, or your mum will worry. And however many times he turns her words over in his mind he will never be able to work out whether she was being kind to his mother or cruel to him. He doesn’t say goodbye. He doesn’t want to risk hearing the lack of interest in their voices. He walks out of the front door, closes it quietly behind him and goes down via the stairs so that he doesn’t have to see the blood.
Forty years later he will go to his mother’s funeral. Afterwards, not wanting to seem callous by heading off to a hotel, he will sleep in his old bedroom. It will make him profoundly uncomfortable, and when his father says that he wants things back to normal as soon as possible, he takes the hint with considerable relief and leaves his father to the comfort of his routine. The morning walk, the Daily Mail, pork chops on Wednesdays.
There are roadworks on the way out of town and by chance he finds himself diverted along the stretch of ring road between the flats and the woods. It comes back so vividly that he nearly brakes for the two boys running across the carriageway pushing the pram. He slows and pulls into the lay-by, grit crunching under the tyres. A rusted oil drum half full of rainwater, a pink sofa with wedges of soiled yellow foam poking from slashes in the arms and the back. He gets out of the car and stands in the same thumping draught that comes off the lorries. Freakishly the gate is still held shut by a loop of green twine. It scares him a little. He steps through and shuts it behind him.
The scrapyard is still there, as is the Roberts’ house. The curtains are closed. He wonders if they have been closed all these years, Robert Hales and Robert Hales and Robert Hales, the same person, growing old and dying and being reborn in the stink and the half-light.
That cathedral silence before the first shot. The stag beetle. Planks of butter-yellow light stacked among the trees.
He stoops and picks up a jagged lump of broken tarmac. He imagines throwing it through the front window, the glass crazing and falling. The loose rattle of scattering birds. Light flooding in.
A stick cracks directly behind him. He doesn’t turn. It’s the deer. He knows it’s the deer, come again.
He can’t resist. He turns slowly and finds himself looking at an old man wearing Robert’s face. His father? Maybe it’s Robert himself. What year is it?
The man says, Who are you? and for three or four seconds Daniel has absolutely no idea.
THE WOODPECKER AND THE WOLF
Every time she wakes she is convinced for a couple of seconds that when she open
s her eyes she will be looking up at the mobile of wooden animals which hung over her bed in the house in Gloucester where she spent the first seven years of her life—hippo, lion, monkey, snake, eagle. Then she opens her eyes and she sees the air vent with its halo of beige stain and the four cables running across the ceiling which Mikal has duct-taped to the panels. The air smells faintly of sweat and hot plastic and human waste. In the wall space she can hear the water pumps ticking over.
Day 219. She sits up and rubs her eyes. Her back is sore. She lowers herself to the floor and sits against the bed with outstretched legs. She holds her right foot with her left hand for ten seconds then holds her left foot with her right hand for ten seconds. She sits back and feels the knotted muscles loosen. She listens until she is certain that it’s unoccupied then she steps into the corridor and goes to the toilet. She comes back to the room, takes off her pants and vest and rubs herself down with the damp orange cloth. She gets back into her pants and vest, massages Epaderm into her heels and elbows, takes her testosterone and brushes her teeth. Then she zips herself into her green worksuit and heads over to North 2 to get breakfast.
Suki and Arvind are sitting at the table eating granola, drinking coffee and staring at tablets. Arvind looks up. “Good morning, Clare.”
She has never found Arvind attractive but he has skin so smooth and flawless it looks like suede and sometimes she wants to reach out and stroke the back of his neck. She asks what the news is from home.
“Baby girl.” Arvind rotates the screen to show a picture of his sister holding a tiny, damp person in a crocheted yellow blanket. “Leyla.”
“Uncle Arvind. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, though it required very little effort on my part.” He looks at his niece. “Nine pounds six ounces.”
“Is that big?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“That’s pretty much a Thanksgiving turkey,” says Suki without looking up. They are all small but Suki is the smallest by some margin, and moves so lightly on her feet that Clare sometimes catches her out of the corner of her eye and thinks there is a teenage girl here with them, which spooks her every time. Suki has black belts in judo and karate. Clare guesses that she is still in the middle of Angels & Demons.
“Also, there’s been a coup in Guatemala,” says Arvind, “and Brad Pitt is dead.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m serious.”
“Overdose?”
“Cancer.”
“Were we expecting this?”
“The world was, I think, unprepared,” says Arvind. “Though I am not always on top of celebrity gossip.”
“We should have a memorial night,” says Suki, again without looking up. “Ocean’s Eleven, Fight Club, Twelve Monkeys.”
“Happy Feet Two,” says Arvind. “He voiced Will the Krill according to a very comprehensive obituary I have been reading.” He is looking at the little girl he will never be able to hold in his arms. He puts his hand across his mouth, riding out a lump in his throat perhaps. He turns the screen off and Leyla vanishes.
Suki finally looks up. “Have you seen Jon, by the way?”
“I’ve only just got up,” says Clare. “Is there a problem?”
“He must be having a lie-in.” Suki returns to her Dan Brown. “I’ll prod him later.”
Clare pours water onto some powdered apple and spreads cream cheese onto a rye cracker. She sits and stares through the scratched porthole at five thousand acres of pink rock under a washed-out, gull-grey sky. There are five or six dust devils in the distance, twenty, thirty metres tall. The Endurance impact crater, Margaritifer Sinus quadrangle. She thinks, every time, how ironic it is that they chose to name the place after Shackleton’s ship, abandoned and crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea.
In truth she misses being en route, sealed inside a tiny metal bead on the longest string in the world, slipping through the great tide of radiation at two hundred degrees below zero. It was her reason for coming, those childhood fantasies of being at sea with Magellan or Frobisher, hunting the Northwest Passage, anchored off the Celebes, hunkering below decks while the hull rolled, a hundred cold fathoms below and nothing from the crow’s nest, the way it made her feel, the belonging of not belonging, so that she was not afraid when Suki’s epilepsy started, or the port-forward adjuster blew and set them spinning for two weeks, because that was the cost of stepping over the edge of the known world, and if you didn’t embrace it then why were you here?
In truth, if she were writing the script they would have died during the landing, entering the atmosphere nose first, shredding the parachute, hitting the ground at a hundred, a hundred and fifty, no flames, no suffocation. Bang. Over and done with. Because what do you do when the most extraordinary thing has happened and you are still alive? You hunker down and don’t complain. After all, it was one of the reasons they’d been chosen, wasn’t it, their ability to accept, to be patient, to endure.
She remembers the garden in Painscastle the year before her mother went into care, those two hours of stillness and silence she needed between hoisting that tiny body into bed and returning to sleep in her own bed. Late spring, Orion setting, Cassiopeia almost gone, Jupiter with its pinprick moons, Mars rising on the great Ferris wheel of the ecliptic, the red of the iron oxide visible even at that distance. Information pouring like rain down through the dark. The desire to be somewhere else, which is never satisfied by being somewhere else, however far you go, though you have to go a very long way indeed to figure that one out.
She scoops up the morning’s data. She takes it all down twice then meets up with Per in South 2 for the handover.
“Greetings, co-worker.” He looks directly into her eyes for three or four seconds. “You’re still sleeping badly.”
“I need to ski for longer.”
“Then ski for longer.” Per has a birthmark on his neck precisely where the bolt would be if he were Frankenstein’s Monster. His blond buzz cut has grown into a blond ponytail. In one of the early training runs there was a fire. Everyone assumed it was real, that something had gone terribly wrong. Per sealed Shona and Kurt inside a module to stop it spreading. Shona wept openly assuming she was about to die. They were gone by the end of the week. If the shit really hits the fan Clare wants Per nearby, on her side of the airlock.
“Water throughput?” says Per.
“Two hundred and five litres.”
“Backups?”
“A good. B good.”
“UV sterilisation?”
“We’re up and running again.”
“Thank God for that,” Per says, “the chlorine is disgusting.”
“Oxygen 21.85 percent, nitrogen 77.87, CO2 0.045.”
“Internal radiation?”
“Top 10.5 milirads, bottom 9.5.”
“Humidity?”
“Twenty-three percent,” says Clare. “I dropped the night temperature a couple of degrees.”
“Don’t want people getting too comfortable. And how is the weather out there?”
“Minus 12.2°C and rising. Winds 4 to 8 kph. Visibility between 18 and 20 km.”
“So, people, it is shaping up to be a fine summer’s day.” Per leans back. “Enjoy your drive-time commute. Stay safe. And here is some classic Bruce Springsteen to kick off the programme, the appropriately titled ‘Radio Nowhere’ from 2007’s Magic album.”
The second crew are en route aboard the Halcyon, 408 days into their journey—Joe Deller, Annie Chen, Anne-Marie Harpen, Thanh Thuy, Kees Van Es. They don’t seem real yet. Perhaps it’s self-preservation, perhaps it’s the two-way light-time of thirty minutes, perhaps it’s those two weeks of radio silence when the earth was behind the sun. None of them use the word “home” anymore. It has become a fictional place, despite the daily ebb and flow of information. So here they come, these five new people, like characters walking out of a fairy-tale forest, no one knowing if they are good or evil.
She goes to West 1 and stri
ps down to pants and vest. She wipes the headphones clean, puts them in and scrolls through her playlist till she finds Kylie’s Impossible Princess. She presses play, steps onto the machine and turns the resistance up to 64.
Gravity here is 0.4 G. But after two weightless years on the Argo it felt like being poured onto the Wall of Death in a fairground. It seems normal now. She no longer notices the bounce in everyone’s step, the thin legs, the puffy faces. But on the increasingly rare occasions when she watches a DVD she is surprised by the speed at which everyone moves, like Charlie Chaplin or the Keystone Cops. A couple of months back Suki broke her ankle tripping over a chair. They still don’t know if the bone loss plateaus. They’re the guinea pigs on this one. Fifteen minutes, twenty. She cheats and drops the resistance a little. The trick is not to ask why you are doing anything, the trick is simply to persist. Twenty-five, thirty. I should be so lucky. She is sweating heavily.
Arvind says he misses baths, the sensation of lowering yourself into ridiculously hot water. It’s showers for her. One in particular keeps coming back. They were on holiday in Portugal. The name of the resort escapes her, as does the year, her poor memory being one of those disabilities which become skills in the right context. But the beach is clear in her mind, the wooden diving platform, the jellyfish like Victorian lampshades, Peter in his green Speedo. They’re in the hotel room afterwards, wind moving the balcony curtains, those cool terra-cotta tiles underfoot, the tightness on her salty, almost-burnt skin. Standing naked in the falling water. What is it about that moment which calls her?