Wolves

by Simon Ings

  ‘I’ll eat when I’ve dropped you off. Come on, Connie, hurry up with that. We have to get going.’

  I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t have the courage. After I had gone to school, unprepared and all alone, he would find Mum in the boot of his car.

  The boot.

  The boot was open.

  I had left the boot open, and the key in the lid still, and my kit bag on the ground in front of it. Anyone could walk by. Anyone could see.

  The world fogged over. I wrestled out of my chair, took the plate to the bin, emptied it there. Dad didn’t see. He was clearing up. ‘All done?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I staggered out the room, along the hall, through the side door, and round the side of the hotel to the forecourt.

  The violence of what Mum had done to herself, the hurt she had meant to inflict, made it impossible for me to picture her properly. It wasn’t Mum in there. I kept telling myself this. No telling what it was, what filthy horror, but it wasn’t Mum. Who had it been who’d taken me for walks through the water meadows? Not her. In its madness and monomania, this thing had stolen Mum from me. I would have to get rid of it. I would have to get rid of the body.

  There was the car. The boot was still open. The key was still in the boot lock. My green canvas bag was still on the ground where I had dropped it.

  I closed my eyes and shuffled forward. I reached out, paddling my hands blindly in front of my face, because if I could find the lid without having to open my eyes I could shut the boot and I wouldn’t have to look at her again. I was afraid to breathe because worse than seeing her, far worse, was that smell, that bleach and whisky smell that I couldn’t be sure was even her, but which surrounded her, defining her.

  My hands made contact with the lid. I grabbed hold for balance. I had to breathe. I had to. And it came – the smell was stronger now, scraping the back of my throat, forcing tears from my eyes.

  ‘There you are.’ Dad was standing on the porch, shrugging on his jacket. ‘Have you got everything?’

  I picked up my sports bag. Pads and bat and gloves. Jumper. I hefted the sports bag in both hands and dropped it between Mum’s legs. I swung the boot down.

  It didn’t latch. The lid didn’t close properly. I stared at the lid of the boot, at the angle of it, a mouth slightly parted. I heard Dad’s footsteps approaching.

  I couldn’t bear to open the boot again. I got all my weight on top of the lid, and the latch clicked shut.

  It was as I was climbing into the passenger seat that it occurred to me what a calamitously stupid thing I had done.

  I had to tell Dad what had happened. I had to tell him what he could expect to find when he opened the boot. But when I did – when at last I mustered the courage to tell him, then he was going to ask, Why did you shut the boot? Why did you drop your sports bag on top of her? What on earth did you think you were doing?

  And it was all going to be worse, ten times worse than before – even more grotesque than it had been at the beginning.

  Still, I had to tell him.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts?’

  ‘Oh, Christ, Dad. Nothing.’

  ‘Well, strap in, don’t just sit there like a lemon.’

  When was he most likely to find her? When was he going to need to look in the boot? When we got to school he would park up and I would get out and open the boot and there she would be. Of course Dad wouldn’t see her then, because he’d still be at the wheel, waiting for me to slam the boot shut. He would drive off with no idea of what he was carrying with him, no idea at all that he was driving it around, and when he did find out, the very fact that he’d been driving it around would be enough to destroy us.

  ‘You knew.’

  ‘Dad, I—’

  ‘You saw. You knew.’

  I had to get her out of the boot. There was no way I could do it before the end of the day. If Dad opened the boot before I got back home from cricket practice – well, there was nothing I could do about that. But if the boot stayed closed till I came back, then there was still a chance.

  I was going to have to take the car. There was no other way. Now and again Dad had taken me to a nearby disused airfield, an old wartime place, just a strip of concrete that was too expensive and too much trouble for the farmer to grub up. He’d put me behind the wheel of the car a few times and taught me the basics. He reckoned that the sooner I started to learn to drive, the safer I’d be. That was what he told me. I think the real reason was that he enjoyed it – just him and me in the car, doing stuff, away from home and all its pain and fret.

  I figured that in the middle of the night, with no traffic to get in my way, I should be able to wrestle the car away from the hotel. Once I was out in the country I could just – what? Leave her somewhere.

  Leave her anywhere. It wasn’t as though I was trying to hide her. What would be the point of that? I wanted her to be found. I just didn’t want Dad to find her, not like this.

  The hotel driveway was steep, but if Dad parked where he usually did, I’d be able to get the car out and onto the road without having to start the engine. The trouble would come on the return journey. Suppose I managed to drive all the way back home – how was I going to manage the drive? How was I going to get the car up the steep drive and back where Dad had parked it?

  This couldn’t possibly work. This had the logic of a nightmare. Something was going to go wrong.

  ‘Conrad?’

  We had stopped. The engine was idling. We were outside the school gates already.

  I climbed out. ‘Well, have a good one,’ Dad said, putting the car into gear.

  ‘Wait!’

  He looked at me.

  ‘The boot.’

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know anything.

  ‘In the boot—’

  Dad put the handbrake on.

  My courage failed me. ‘My kit,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Go on, then.’

  I got out of the car. I rarely came into school by the main entrance and the place – the clock tower and the low, slate roofs of the quad – seemed utterly strange to me, grandiloquent and Gothic, not any part of my real life.

  Dad wound down his window and called to me, ‘I’ll pick you up tonight.’

  I went round to the back of the car. I pushed the catch, the black rubber diamond. The catch was stiff, the mechanism was under tension, because the boot was overstuffed. I tried again, pushing harder, hard enough to hurt my thumb, and the lid popped up. The smell was a stench now. Dad was bound to smell it the moment he got back to the hotel and got out of the car. He was going to be driving and the heat from the engine was going to warm up the whole car, never mind the heat from the sun as the day went by, and he was going to smell it, how could he not? Him, or a guest at the hotel, passing by. Smelling it, he was bound to investigate it. He was going to open the boot. He was going to see her there. And he would know that I had seen her, too, and said nothing. Twice.

  I was going to have to tell him now, after all. It was too late for me not to. I had to explain. I pulled out the sports bag from between my mother’s legs and I slammed the boot shut. ‘Dad.’ First, I would tell him what had happened. I would get him out of the car and I would tell him what happened, what she’d done, and while I explained, I would keep myself between him and the boot, until he was ready. I would at least manage the moment as best I could.

  Dad tapped the horn and drove away.

  ‘Dad.’

  I watched him go, out through the gate, onto the road.

  Dad.

  I picked up the bag. The bag smelled. I carried the bag into school.

  Because the term was nearly over, the teachers were operating on autopilot. There were no tests, no questions, no discussions. In their place came interminable periods of private study. We were left to read whatever we wanted. During morning break I went and checked something out of the library, a big thing, something to hide behind, and that’s what I did – I hid. At
lunch I walked round the sports fields, avoiding everyone. Especially Michel. I didn’t want him caught up in this.

  The smell had spread to my clothes now. It was everywhere. On my fingers, from the handles of the bag. Around the lockers, where I’d left it. The corridor. Everywhere. Was there anywhere now that did not smell of what I had done?

  What I had done. What had I done? Why was I taking on the burden of what she’d done to herself, that mad and vicious bitch who stole my mum from me? Dimly, in as much as I could feel anything in this buzzing confusion, I was beginning to understand that anger was my friend. I needed it. It was the glue that was holding me together. Without it, what was to keep me from spinning apart?

  The day was a ragged, half-glimpsed thing, unconvincing in every way. In the final period before the end of school, marooned together in ‘private study’, Michel tried to get me into conversation about some book he’d been reading. Yet another apocalyptic science fiction ‘masterwork’.

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’m not interested in any of that shit.’

  And that was that.

  I took the usual track home, on the look-out for servicemen. Their blindsight, useless as it was in many ways, unnerved me. Blind to so much, they would sniff my secret out, their remaining senses tuned to an exquisite pitch, lapping horror from the air. I met no-one. A flash of white between the trees turned out to be the rusted corner of an abandoned refrigerator, one of that sarsen circle that marked Michel’s redoubt. So much for his hideaway – even summer undergrowth could not conceal it.

  The wire fence. The ditch. The lawn. Coming home this way, I could not see who was parked out front. Ambulances? Police cars? How easy it would have been for me if Dad had already opened the boot. How easy, and how terrible.

  But Dad, none the wiser, was in the conservatory with one of his clients, a serviceman stripped to the waist, the visual vest bound round him like a piece of antique underwear. A truss. I tapped the glass.

  Dad started and turned. I had surprised him. The light must have been at my back because for the longest moment, Dad did not recognise me at all. He stared at me through the glass as if I had been a ghost. At last he assembled a smile. He waved me in.

  The serviceman was wearing the vest back to front. Some found they saw better that way – through the skin of their backs, rather than across their chests. Just as a blind person reading Braille truly reads (their visual cortex lighting up like a Christmas tree under the fMRI scanner), the serviceman, hooked up to Dad’s vest, truly saw. When Dad swung his torch from side to side, the serviceman moved his head, tracking the light with the camera mounted to his heavy black eyeglasses. Though he was seeing through sensations on his back, he didn’t attempt to turn his back to the light. A nubbin on dad’s remote control operated the camera’s zoom ring. Dad pressed it and the soldier, convinced that things were hurtling towards him, staggered, throwing out his arms to protect his face. Dad nudged the nubbin again – again the soldier stumbled.

  ‘Thank you, sergeant.’

  The soldier’s face was a zipped bag. What emotion was he not showing? He put his clothes back on – clothes issued to all service personnel on their discharge from hospital. Baby clothing remade to an adult physique, with pockets and belt-loops to cushion their infantilisation.

  Dad turned to me. ‘You’re home early.’

  ‘So are you. I thought you had a conference.’

  ‘I had a conference.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘It was very nearby.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Just the morning session.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Where’s your cricket kit?’

  ‘My—?’

  ‘Your bag?’

  ‘Oh.’ The pads, the bat, the gloves. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at cricket practice?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. God.’ I felt my face burning. Burning and blushing, all because of a missed sports practice. Tears. I felt them welling. All the stored grief of the day, released at last, by such a trivial thing. ‘Well, don’t worry,’ Dad said, taken aback by my reaction. ‘It’s all right. Just run back.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Conrad?’

  ‘Please.’

  The serviceman rocked from foot to booted foot, waiting to be dismissed. He’d forgotten he was not under orders any more.

  ‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Dad said, taking and shaking the man’s hand.

  ‘Yes.’ Still no expression on that tanned but too-smooth face. No embarrassment, and no relief. ‘Tomorrow.’ His vest click-clacked as he navigated his way to the three concrete stairs, climbed them, found the door-handle, and opened the door.

  When he was gone inside the hotel, Dad turned to me, questions in his eyes, but the few seconds’ grace the interruption had made had been enough for me. I was sealed again. Bottled. In control. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘I’ll be off.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’ll see you around six.’

  ‘I’ll come pick you up,’ he agreed.

  It was nearly four in the afternoon. Now I had somehow to get through two more hours – two hours in which, left to his own devices, Dad might, for reasons obscure to me, find a reason to look in the boot of the car.

  And then what? Why should it ever come to a stop? What was there to prevent things going on like this, hour after hour, day after day?

  We lived so near the school, I wasn’t even particularly late for practice. Hill said something routinely sarcastic. ‘Nice of you to turn up.’ Soon enough I was brought in to bowl.

  At that time I was about the fastest bowler the school had, which isn’t saying much, but at least we kept a steady length. I found myself facing a boy called Martin. Nothing I came up with fazed him. I threw him a leg cutter and instead of blocking it as he was supposed to, he leant his bat a foot wide of his wicket and clipped the ball as it passed for an easy four. And I was done.

  ‘Next up.’

  I glanced at my watch as I took up position on the field. It was only twenty past four. Time was crawling by. The next bowler, Merriman, managed to knock Martin out of his complacency; he scooped the ball like a beginner and suddenly everyone was yelling at me. I flubbed the catch: the ball slipped through my fingers and, falling almost vertically, hammered the toes of my left foot. I staggered around like a wounded deer while everyone groaned at me.

  ‘Thank you all. If you can, get some catching in before Saturday.’

  Puzzled, I looked at my watch again – it was ten to six. First, time had practically stopped. Now. it was racing out of my grip. Nothing added up. Nothing made sense.

  In the shower room, people left me alone. The shame of my missed catch steered them away from me. This far into the tournament they feared a jinx.

  Dad was waiting for me out the front of the school. He was standing, leaning against the car. When he saw me, he said, ‘Where’s your kit?’

  I had left it behind. I couldn’t bear the idea of opening the boot again. I couldn’t bear it. ‘It’s in my locker. There’s another practice at lunchtime tomorrow.’

  Dad shrugged and went round to the driver’s side and started the engine.

  I climbed in beside him.

  ‘Come on,’ he sighed. ‘Let’s go for a drink.’

  And so it went on, and on, and on – it was never going to stop – there was never going to be an end to it, never. Now we were off to the Margrave, with its lead-roofed veranda smothered in lilac. Beer straight out of the barrel, because the barrels were kept directly behind the bar. I was old enough to drink if Dad bought. This had become our summer treat – a half, maybe a pint, in the pub around the corner, away from the smell of Mum’s patchouli, clary sage, dyes, inks and paints.

  The Margrave had no car park as such – just this verge, badly churned, along the lane that turned from tarmac outside the p
ub, to gravel and dirt where it became no more than the driveway to the mill house at the bottom of the hill.

  Dad, an old hand at this, reversed us down the lane about as far as you could park without blocking the drive. From here the lane descended, unlit, through a tunnel of trees to the mill house, the millrace, the river. It was part of our cross-country course.

  He ran the nearside tyres up on the bank a little, so that we both had to climb out the passenger’s side. I stood by the car, fearing to breathe. The odd thing was, I couldn’t smell a thing. Nothing bad, anyway. The earth churned by our tyres, and a cut-grass smell, and something dusty and ticklish from the field behind the hedge.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Dad said, pocketing his car keys.

  There was a slatted bench in front of the house, under the soft leaden roof. It wasn’t a whole lot more comfortable than the window seat in my room at home, but Dad wanted us to sit outside. He took off his jacket – in summer he wore this ice-cream linen jacket – and dumped it on the bench beside me. ‘Mild?’

  The local mild was frothy and liquorice-sweet. ‘A meal in itself.’

  We drank. We talked cricket. At least, I set Dad talking about cricket, knowing how reliably he would spin off if I gave him his cue. The daylight was going. A lamp blinked on above our heads and within a minute the air was a blizzard of moths.

  ‘I might walk home,’ I said at last.

  ‘Okay.’ The hotel was only round the corner – closer, if you cut the corner and followed the river. ‘Can you manage in the dark?’ If he’d known how treacherous the ground was along the river bank, how precarious the brick edging of the millrace, he would have tried to stop me. Instead, he accepted what I told him: my shortcut home was simply a stretch of our cross-country run – not difficult at all. ‘I’ll be back after this,’ he said, lifting the remains of his pint. I was fairly sure he would stay for another. There were men here he knew, and he would stay to talk with them tonight, making the most of his little moment of freedom.

  ‘Sure, Dad. Thanks.’

  I headed down the lane, down the hill, into the dark.

  Half-way down I stopped and turned. I watched the top of Dad’s head as he entered the pub. Even if he came out again he wouldn’t see me. The glare from the porch lights would blind him to movement this far down the lane. The stars were out. No street lamps. No house glow.