“I’m sorry if I upset you, Davy.”
“You didn’t,” David said, not least because his grandmother’s eyes looked dangerously moist. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”
Her face was already quivering as if there was too much of it to hold still. When she shook her head her cheeks wobbled like a whitish rubber mask that was about to fall loose. He didn’t know whether she meant to answer him or had strayed onto another subject as she peered towards the window. “There’s nothing to him at all then, is there? He’s just an empty old shell. Can’t we get him down now?”
“Better wait till the new year,” David’s grandfather said, and with sudden bitterness “We don’t want any more bad luck.”
Her faded sunken armchair creaked with relief as she levered herself to her feet. “Where are you going?” her husband protested and limped after her, out of the front door. He murmured at her while she stared up at the roof. At least she didn’t shout, but she began to talk not much less quietly as she returned to the house. “I don’t like him moving about with nothing inside him,” she said before she appeared to recollect David’s presence. “Maybe he’s like one of those beans with a worm inside, Davy, that used to jig about all the time.”
While David didn’t understand and was unsure he wanted to, his mother’s hasty intervention wasn’t reassuring either. “Shall we play some games? What would you like to play, mummy?”
“What do you call it, Lollopy. The one with all the little houses. Too little for any big fat things to climb on. Lollopy.”
“Monopoly.”
“Lollopy,” David’s grandmother maintained, only to continue “I don’t want to play that. Too many sums. What’s your favourite, Davy?”
Monopoly was, but he didn’t want to add to all the tensions that he sensed rather than comprehended. “Whatever yours is.”
“Ludo,” she cried and clapped her hands. “I’d play it every Sunday with your granny and grandpa when I was Davy’s age, Jane.”
He wondered if she wasn’t just remembering but behaving as she used to. She pleaded to be allowed to move her counters whenever she failed to throw a six, and kept trying to move more than she threw. David would have let her win, but his grandfather persisted in reminding her that she had to cast the precise amount to guide her counters home. After several games in which his grandmother squinted with increasingly less comical suspicion at her opponents’ moves, David’s mother said “Who’d like to go out for a walk?”
Apparently everyone did, which meant they couldn’t go fast or far. David felt out of place compared with the boys he saw riding their Christmas bicycles or brandishing their Christmas weapons. Beneath a sky frosty with cloud, all the decorations in the duplicated streets looked deadened by the pale sunlight, though they were still among the very few elements that distinguished one squat boxy house from another. “They’re not as good as ours, are they?” his grandmother kept remarking when she wasn’t frowning at the roofs. “He’s not there either,” he heard her mutter more than once, and as her house came in sight “See, he didn’t follow us. We’d have heard him.”
She was saying that nothing had moved or could move, David tried to think, but he was nervous of returning to the house. The preparation of Christmas dinner proved to be reason enough. “Too many women in this kitchen,” his mother was told when she offered to help, but his grandmother had to be reminded to turn the oven on, and she made to take the turkey out too soon more than once. Between these incidents she disagreed with her husband and her daughter about various memories of theirs while David tried to stay low in a book of mazes he had to trace with a pencil. At dinner he could tell that his mother was willing him to clean his plate so as not to distress his grandmother. He did his best, and struggled to ignore pangs of indigestion as he washed up, and then as his grandmother kept talking about if not to every television programme her husband put on. “Not very Christmassy,” she commented on all of them, and followed the remark with at least a glance towards the curtained window. Waiting for her to say worse, and his impression that his mother and grandfather were too, kept clenching David’s stomach well before his mother declared “I think it’s time someone was in bed.”
As his grandmother’s lips searched for an expression he wondered if she assumed that her daughter meant her. “I’m going,” he said and had to be called back to be hugged and kissed and wished happy Christmas thrice.
He used the toilet, having pulled the chain to cover up his noises, and huddled in bed. He had a sense of hiding behind the scenes, the way he’d waited offstage at school to perform a line about Jesus last year, when his parents had held hands at the sight of him. The flickers and the buzzing that the bedroom curtains failed to exclude could have been stage effects, while over the mumbling of the television downstairs he heard sounds of imminent drama. At least there was no creaking on the roof. He did his best to remember last Christmas as a sharp stale taste of this one continued its antics inside him, until the memories blurred into the beginnings of a dream and let him sleep.
Movements above his head wakened him. Something soft but determined was groping at the window—a wind so vigorous that its onslaughts made the light from the sign flare like a fire someone was breathing on. The wind must be swinging the bulbs closer to his window. He hadn’t time to wonder how dangerous that might be, because the creaking overhead was different: more prolonged, more purposeful. He was mostly nervous that his grandmother would hear, but there was no sign of awareness in the next room, and silence downstairs. He pressed the quilt around his ears, and then he heard sounds too loud for it to fend off—a hollow slithering followed by a thump at the window, and another. Whatever was outside seemed eager to break the glass.
David scrambled onto all fours and backed away until the quilt slipped off his body, but then he had to reach out to part the curtains at arms’ length. He might have screamed if a taste hadn’t choked him. Two eyes as dead as pebbles were level with his. They didn’t blink, but sputtered as if they were trying to come to a kind of life, as did the rest of the swollen face. Worse still, the nose and mouth surrounded by a dirty whitish fungus of beard were above the eyes. The inversion lent the unnecessarily crimson lips a clown’s ambiguous grimace.
The mask dealt the window another blundering thump before a savage gust of wind seized the puffed-up figure. As the face sailed away from the glass, it was extinguished as though the wind had blown it out. David heard wires rip loose and saw the shape fly like a greyish vaguely human balloon over the garden wall to land on its back in the road.
It sounded as if someone had thrown away a used plastic bottle or an empty hamburger carton. Was the noise enough to bring his grandmother to her window? He wasn’t sure if he would prefer not to be alone to see the grinning object flounder and begin to edge towards the house. As it twitched several inches he regretted ever having tipped an insect over to watch it struggle on its back. Then another squall of wind took possession of the dim figure, sweeping it leftwards out of sight along the middle of the road. David heard a car speed across an intersection, its progress hardly interrupted by a hollow thump and a crunch that made him think of a beetle crushed underfoot.
Once the engine dwindled into silence, nothing moved on the roads except the wind. David let the curtains fall together and slipped under the quilt. The drama had ended, even if some of its lighting effects were still operating outside the window. He didn’t dream, and wakened late, remembering at once that there was nothing on the roof to worry his grandmother. Only how would she react to the absence?
He stole to the bathroom and then retreated to his bedroom. The muffled conversations downstairs felt like a pretence that all was well until his grandmother called “What are you doing up there?”
She meant David. He knew that when she warned him that his breakfast would go cold. She sounded untroubled, but for how long? “Eat up all the lovely food your mother’s made,” she cried, and he complied for fear of letting her suspect he was
nervous, even when his stomach threatened to throw his efforts back at him. As he downed the last mouthful she said “I do believe that’s the biggest breakfast I’ve ever had in my life. I think we all need a walk.”
David swallowed too soon in order to blurt “I’ve got to wash up.”
“What a good boy he is to his poor old granny. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you. We won’t run away and leave you,” she said and stared at her husband for sighing.
David took all the time he could over each plate and utensil. He was considering feigning illness if that would keep his grandmother inside the house when he saw the door at the end of the back garden start to shake as if someone was fumbling at it. The grass shivered too, and he would have except for seeing why it did. “It’ll be too windy to go for a walk,” he told his grandmother. “It’s like grandad said, you’ll catch cold.”
His mouth stayed open as he realised his mistake, but that wasn’t the connection she made. “How windy is it?” she said, standing up with a groan to tramp along the hall. “What’s it going to do to that empty old thing?”
David couldn’t look away from the quivering expanse of grass while he heard her open the front door and step onto the path. His shoulders rose as if he fancied they could block his ears, but even sticking his fingers in mightn’t have deafened him to her cry. “He’s got down. Where’s he hidden himself?”
David turned to find his mother rubbing her forehead as though to erase her thoughts. His grandfather had lifted his hands towards his wife, but they drooped beneath an invisible weight. David’s grandmother was pivoting around and around on the path, and David was reminded of ballet classes until he saw her dismayed face. He felt that all the adults were performing, as adults so often seemed compelled to do, and that he ought to stop them if he could. “It fell down,” he called. “It blew away.”
His grandmother pirouetted to a clumsy halt and peered along the hall at him. “Why didn’t you say? What are you trying to do?”
“Don’t stand out there, Dora,” his grandfather protested. “You can see he only wants—”
“Never mind what Davy wants. It can be what I want for a change. It’s meant to be my Christmas too. Where is he, Davy? Show me if you think you know so much.”
Her voice was growing louder and more petulant. David felt as if he’d been given the job of rescuing his mother and his grandfather from further embarrassment or argument. He dodged past them and the stranded sleigh to run to the end of the path. “It went along there,” he said, pointing. “A car ran it over.”
“You didn’t say that before. Are you just saying so I won’t be frightened?”
Until that moment he hadn’t grasped how much she was. He strained his gaze at the intersection, but it looked as deserted as the rest of the street. “Show me where,” she urged.
Might there be some trace? David was beginning to wish he hadn’t spoken. He couldn’t use her pace as an excuse for delay; she was waddling so fast to the intersection that her entire body wobbled. He ran into the middle of the crossroads, but there was no sign of last night’s accident. He was even more disconcerted to realise that she was so frightened she hadn’t even warned him to be careful on the road. He straightened up and swung around to look for fragments, and saw the remains heaped at the foot of a garden wall.
Someone must have tidied them into the side road. Most of the body was a shattered pile of red and white, but the head and half the left shoulder formed a single item propped on top. David was about to point around the corner when the object shifted. Still grinning, it toppled sideways as if the vanished neck had snapped. The wind was moving it, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure that his grandmother ought to see. Before he could think how to prevent her, she followed his gaze. “It is him,” she cried. “Someone else mustn’t have liked him.”
David was reaching to grab her hand and lead her away when the head shifted again. It tilted awry with a slowness that made its grin appear increasingly mocking, and slithered off the rest of the debris to inch along the pavement, scraping like a skull. “He’s coming for me,” David’s grandmother babbled. “There’s something inside him. It’s the worm.”
David’s mother was hurrying along the street ahead of his grandfather. Before they could join his grandmother, the grinning object skittered at her. She recoiled a step, and then she lurched to trample her tormentor to bits. “That’ll stop you laughing,” she cried as the eyes shattered. “It’s all right now, Davy. He’s gone.”
Was the pretence of acting on his behalf aimed at him or at the others? They seemed to accept it when at last she finished stamping and let them usher her back to the house, unless they were pretending as well. Though the adults had reverted to behaving as they were supposed to, it was too sudden. It felt like a performance they were staging to reassure him.
He must be expected to take part. He had to, or he wouldn’t be a man. He pretended not to want to go home, and did his best to simulate enjoyment of the television programmes and the games that the others were anxious his grandmother should like. He feigned an appetite when the remnants of Christmas dinner were revived, accompanied by vegetables that his mother succeeded in rescuing from his grandmother’s ambitions for them.
While the day had felt far too protracted, he would have preferred it to take more time over growing dark. The wind had dropped, but not so much that he didn’t have to struggle to ignore how his grandmother’s eyes fluttered whenever a window shook. He made for bed as soon as he thought he wouldn’t be drawing attention to his earliness. “That’s right, Davy, we all need our sleep,” his grandmother said as if he might be denying them theirs. He suffered another round of happy Christmases and hugs that felt more strenuous than last night’s, and then he fled to his room.
The night was still except for the occasional car that slowed outside the house—not, David had to remember, because there was anything on the roof. When he switched off the light the room took on a surreptitious flicker, as if his surroundings were nervous. Surely he had no reason to be, although he could have imagined that the irritable buzz was adding an edge to the voices downstairs. He hid under the quilt and pretended he was about to sleep until the sham overtook him.
A change in the lighting roused him. He was pushing the quilt away from his face so as to greet the day that would take him home when he noticed that the illumination was too fitful to be sunlight. As it glared under the curtains again he heard uncoordinated movement through the window. The wind must have returned to play with the lit sign. He was hoping that it wouldn’t awaken his grandmother, or that she would at least know what was really there, when he realised with a shock that paralysed his breath how wrong he was. He hadn’t heard the wind. The clumsy noises outside were more solid and more localised. Light stained the wall above his bed, and an object blundered as if it was limbless against the front door.
If this hadn’t robbed David of the ability to move, the thought of his grandmother’s reaction would have. It was even worse than the prospect of looking himself. He hadn’t succeeded in breathing when he heard her say “Who’s that? Has he come back?”
David would have blocked his ears if he had been capable of lifting his fists from beside him. He must have breathed, but he was otherwise helpless. The pause in the next room was almost as ominous as the sounds that brought it to an end: the rumble of the window, another series of light but impatient thumps at the front door, his grandmother’s loose unsteady voice. “He’s here for me. He’s all lit up, his eyes are. The worm’s put him back together. I should have squashed the worm.”
“Stop wandering for God’s sake,” said David’s grandfather. “I can’t take much more of this, I’m telling you.”
“Look how he’s been put back together,” she said with such a mixture of dismay and pleading that David was terrified it would compel him to obey. Instead his panic wakened him.
He was lying inert, his thoughts as tangled as the quilt, when he heard his grandmother insist �
��He was there.”
“Just get back in bed,” his grandfather told her.
David didn’t know how long he lay waiting for her to shut the window. After that there seemed to be nothing to hear once her bed acknowledged her with an outburst of creaking. He stayed uneasily alert until he managed to think of a way to make sense of events: he’d overheard her in his sleep and had dreamed the rest. Having resolved this let him feel manly enough to regain his slumber.
This time daylight found him. It seemed to render the night irrelevant, at least to him. He wasn’t sure about his grandmother, who looked uncertain of something. She insisted on cooking breakfast, rather more than aided by her husband. Once David and his mother had done their duty by their portions it was time to call a taxi. David manhandled the suitcase downstairs by himself and wheeled it to the car, past the decorations that appeared dusty with sunlight. His grandparents hugged him at the gate, and his grandmother repeated the gesture as if she’d already forgotten it. “Come and see us again soon,” she said without too much conviction, perhaps because she was distracted by glancing along the street and at the roof.
David thought he saw his chance to demonstrate how much of a man he was. “It wasn’t there, granny. It was just a dream.”
Her face quivered, and her eyes. “What was, Davy? What are you talking about?”
He had a sudden awful sense of having miscalculated, but all he could do was answer. “There wasn’t anything out here last night.”
Her mouth was too nervous to hold onto a smile that might have been triumphant. “You heard him as well.”
“No,” David protested, but his mother grabbed his arm. “That’s enough,” she said in a tone he’d never heard her use before. “We’ll miss the train. Look after each other,” she blurted at her parents, and shoved David into the taxi. All the way through the streets full of lifeless decorations, and for some time on the train, she had no more to say to him than “Just leave me alone for a while.”
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