Advent

  He shuffled miserably into the back room. Mum was in the high-backed chair she always took because she thought it was the uncomfortable one. Owen Jeffrey – one of the four people in the world who had the power to give away Horace’s secret – had been forced into the horrible puffy fraying armchair that cut your circulation off at your knees and made your back feel like it was being bent in two, otherwise known as the ‘good’ chair.

  It faced the door. As Mum craned round to inspect him, Horace met the priest’s eye.

  Owen winked.

  ‘Say hello, Horace. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Here, you can cut another slice of cake, and get yourself a plate. What happened to your hands? They’re disgusting!’

  The bloke couldn’t have told her. No way she’d be fussing the same as usual if he’d told her. She’d have been in shock. And what else was that wink all about? Braced for the worst, Horace didn’t know what to do with himself.

  ‘Go to the kitchen, please. I don’t know how you get yourself so dirty.’

  ‘Hello, Horace,’ the priest said.

  So what was he doing here? Had he just been waiting for Horace to get home, so he could make him admit everything in person? But he didn’t look like he was about to tell anyone off.

  ‘I only stopped in with a quick question,’ Owen said, stretching his back uncomfortably. ‘I’ll be on my way soon.’

  ‘Are you sure you won’t have some dumplings? I have the water boiling. They only take a few—’

  ‘No, thank you, Mrs Jia.’

  From the kitchen, Horace listened to the familiar argument. He ran the water ice-cold before washing his hands. They felt clammy.

  ‘I have to get back for evensong,’ Owen was explaining as Horace returned to the sitting room.

  ‘But that is not for another hour! That’s better, Horace. Cut a slice for Reverend Jeffrey, please.’

  ‘Honestly, no. I’m quite all right.’ He leaned forward a little to catch Horace’s eye and repeated, ‘Everything’s quite all right.’

  ‘What is this? When did you become such a rude boy?’ Now Mum was doing her thing where she made a joke of him – another reason he hated it when there were guests around – but he was so relieved to discover that the priest obviously hadn’t told Mum anything about his visits to Pendurra, he almost laughed along himself.

  ‘You’re standing there like a sheep. Doesn’t he look just like a sheep?’

  ‘Sorry, Mum. Slice of cake?’

  ‘Really, no.’

  ‘Go on, Horace.’

  Owen roused himself from the chair’s swampy upholstery as best he could. ‘Please. You’ve been very kind, but I’m fine. You’ll try Professor Lightfoot again later and ask her to call me as soon as possible if you find her in?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. She ought to be home. I know I saw the lights on opposite earlier. I can’t guess where she has gone. But I’m going tomorrow to help her. And I will try again tonight. Maybe Horace saw something?’

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘Next door. As you came by just now.’

  ‘Mrs Pascoe?’

  ‘No. Didn’t you hear? The professor. Mrs Lightfoot.’

  ‘That’s not next door, it’s across.’

  ‘Horace!’

  ‘Sorry. What about her?’

  ‘Did you see if she was at home?’

  ‘Thought she’s never here. It’s her holiday place, isn’t it?’

  ‘I stopped by,’ Owen put in, explaining, ‘to ask if your mother happened to have bumped into Professor Lightfoot. I’m trying to get hold of her.’

  ‘Nah.’ Horace definitely didn’t want to say anything that might delay Owen’s departure. ‘Didn’t see anything.’

  ‘She arrived yesterday!’ Mum threw her hands in the air, as if Horace’s ignorance of the pointless comings and goings of mad old ladies was personally embarrassing to her. ‘I told you! I don’t think you listen. I think too much computer games. It rots your brain.’

  ‘We don’t have any computer games, Mum,’ Horace said darkly.

  ‘But you always go and play with your friends.’ She turned to Owen, catching him easing himself out into the hall. ‘All day long they play these games. It isn’t good, is it?’

  ‘I’m sure God doesn’t mind. And besides’ – he directed a peculiar smile at Horace – ‘I have a feeling Horace is good at finding more interesting things to do with his time.’

  Horace went red. His secret throbbed at the back of his skull like a bruise, but Mum didn’t notice anything. She was too busy chasing the priest down the hall.

  ‘At least take a slice of cake with you.’

  ‘Well, all right, then.’

  ‘Oh good! Horace!’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he called, and ducked into the kitchen.

  ‘Wash your hands again first!’

  They felt like they were on fire. The bloke wanted Horace to know it was OK, he wasn’t going to tell her. That was obvious. But how come? Grown-ups ganged up on kids; that was the whole point of their existence. He heard them talking by the front door while he got out a napkin and folded it round a slice of the ginger cake. No matter how big he made the slice, he knew Mum would send him back for a bigger one. He knew the whole routine; he’d done it a million times. But just this one time he was spectacularly relieved that everything was the same as usual.

  ‘What is this? Don’t be so mean to a guest. That is half a slice. Go.’

  ‘It’s perfect.’ Owen took it from Horace, then shook hands. ‘Thank you. Nice to meet you again.’ He opened the door and squinted across the street towards Hester Lightfoot’s house. ‘Doesn’t seem like anyone’s home, but I might as well knock one more time just in case. Do please—’

  ‘Yes, of course. I will keep trying.’

  ‘Great. Thanks so much.’ Though Owen was already in the lane, Mum didn’t want to shut the door. When something was going on, she couldn’t bear the idea of not being involved.

  ‘Don’t stand there in the door. You let all the cold air in.’

  She was actually the one holding it open, but Horace stopped himself pointing that out. He always had to bite back his retorts. He hoarded them for later, for his own room, where they’d all come out at last, his long bedtime monologue of fractured, whispered resentment.

  ‘So you didn’t see anything in her house just now?’ his mother asked, stepping back inside with evident reluctance.

  Guess what, Mum. Some of us don’t spend our lives wondering what the neighbours are doing. Some of us really don’t give a shit. ‘No. I just came home.’

  ‘Her car still isn’t there.’ Mum lifted the net curtain over the square window beside the front door. He thought of it as her spyhole. ‘It’s a strange time to be driving. It’s so dark.’

  ‘That’s ’cos it’s night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t mumble like that.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She turned back to the view across the lane. ‘Did you know Professor Lightfoot was a friend of Miss Clifton?’

  Fortunately Horace had turned back towards the stairs, so his mother couldn’t have seen the surprise on his face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think we have to go to the doctor to look at your ears. I said, did you know Professor Lightfoot knew Miss Clifton? Miss Clifton is that strange woman who comes to church sometimes. The one—’

  ‘Yeah, I know. What’s she got to do with— Why would I know anything about that?’ He tried to sound as bored as Mum’s conversation usually made him, as bored as he dared.

  But she was still watching the house opposite hopefully, and for once didn’t reprove him. ‘Reverend Jeffrey was looking for Miss Clifton. He went to the train station in Truro. She was going to pick someone up there, he said. Something like that. But he said there was a message for her there from Professor Lightfoot.’

  ‘Why’s he looking for Miss Cli
fton?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not my business. You don’t ask why someone does something. What would you think if I was always asking you why you do this, why you do that?’

  Under normal circumstances Horace would have been thinking a lot of things, all of which would only have been whispered aloud upstairs in the solitude of his room, after lights out, but this time he was busy answering his own question in his head. Because something weird happened to her. Because I saw her acting really strange down by the river and everyone else thinks she’s disappeared completely. And Marina wouldn’t believe me. Told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  ‘She’s a very strange woman. I don’t like to know about her. All that Old Age business.’

  ‘It’s called New Age, Mum.’

  ‘Reverend Jeffrey ought to talk to her about it. God will not like it. Whatever you call it.’

  Uh-oh, Horace thought, here comes God. Mostly he liked it that Mum was so into church and everything – it gave her lots of other people to fuss over and boss around and force to eat her food – but sometimes the subject started her off on one of her lectures. Miss Clifton might be a total psycho, and look like a grown-up pretending to be a mosher, but at least she never lectured you.

  I know her a lot better than you do, he thought, and the slow burn of his secret lit up and spread through him, sunshine on a stone. Loads better than you think I do. You have absolutely no idea how much I know about Miss Clifton.

  So where had she gone? What was the priest doing looking for her all the way over here on the wrong side of the river?

  He closed his eyes involuntarily and saw again the strangely dishevelled figure bending over the water, trailing hooked fingers through its surface as if hunting raw fish. All wrong somehow.

  He shook the memory out of his head. Who cares? he thought. His secret was still safe. He still had the key to the boat. Everything’ll be all right tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow’ll be a better day.

  ‘Well. All right.’

  Hester was a shadow in the driver’s seat, her face ghostly in the glow of the dashboard. Gavin slumped in the seat next to her and stared out at the road’s contortions. Engine-warmed air washed over them.

  ‘So,’ Hester began again. She snuck a glance across at him, perhaps checking that he was awake.

  After a while she sighed. ‘The thing is, I know just what it’s like. When you’re being pestered to talk and all you want to do is be quiet. Truly I do.’ She glanced across again. ‘Can I at least ask if you’re OK?’

  ‘I’ll survive,’ Gav said.

  He wondered whether even that much was true.

  Now that he was watching the world go by, sealed behind glass, smelling car smells and listening to car noises, passing isolated houses and villages – bright windows through which he glimpsed scenes from an ordinary night, a man feeding a baby in a high chair, the spectral blue radiance of a television on a white wall – he couldn’t get hold of the day he’d just lived through. It was as phantasmal as the TV images, and as quickly lost from view behind him. There couldn’t be any such ancient houses. There were no such girls who’d never heard swear words and didn’t know where China was, no such clawed feet scraping stone. He’d imagined it all. He was imagining things. You’re imagining things, Gav. Except this time, at last, at long last, he knew he wasn’t.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You know,’ she said, in the same mild conversational tone he remembered from the train, as though as far as she was concerned ferrying a haunted teenager back and forth along twisting country lanes at night was as ordinary as driving to work, ‘I hadn’t thought about it yet. Wherever you like. Should I take you back to the station?’

  ‘The station?’

  ‘I can put you on a train. If you want to go straight home.’

  ‘God no. Not that.’

  She gave him a long curious look before turning back to the road. ‘My house, then. To start with. If that’s all right with you?’

  He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t think of anywhere else. He couldn’t think of anywhere at all, the bright windows, the rooms with TVs and fathers and children. She manoeuvred the car round a twisting descent and over a brief bridge barely wider than it was. The road was a black stream, down which their little white bubble floated.

  ‘So,’ she said eventually, much as Mr Bushy used to do when no one in the class could answer the question he’d put before them and he gave up and tried a new one. ‘Did your aunt turn up in the end?’

  Gav winced. Of all the things he didn’t want to think about, that was the worst.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Her eyebrows lifted slightly. ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘As I say,’ she said quietly, ‘I entirely understand.’

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. Usually whenever anyone said I understand to him, it meant the exact opposite. It was what Mum said when she actually wanted to say I don’t believe you. But this time it didn’t matter who believed him or not. The things he’d seen and heard loomed in the darkness behind, impossible, unforgettable.

  He shivered violently. Hester made a solicitous noise and twisted a dial on the dashboard. The petrol-flavoured air turned warmer.

  ‘I should never have left you on your own,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He hugged his hands under his arms to stop them trembling. ‘Not your fault.’

  ‘I don’t know what possessed me to do a thing like that.’

  ‘I do,’ Gav said.

  The car twitched. Stubble in the hedge clattered against Gav’s window like claws. Hester pulled the wheel straight again, her hands suddenly tight.

  ‘Careful,’ Gav added.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Why had he said it? Why hadn’t he just kept his mouth shut like usual?

  Because, he realised, she really did understand. He thought of the newspaper clippings in Auntie Gwen’s weird scrapbook. Hester Lightfoot, the Nutty Professor.

  ‘I know.’ He kept his eyes on the ghostly white circle ahead, the dark skimming past. ‘What made you do it. So it’s OK. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Hester said, after a short silence. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’

  Perhaps it was all because of talking to Marina. She’d unlocked the part of him that had stayed silent about these things for the past four years, and now he couldn’t close it again. Or perhaps it was because he couldn’t any longer see the difference between saying it and not saying it, not after what had just happened to him. With a twist of pain he wondered where Marina was now. If she was anywhere.

  ‘“Let the boy go in,”’ Gavin said.

  He was pitched forward hard as the car twisted crazily in the narrow lane. Hester braced her arms against the steering wheel as if she was about to tear it loose.

  ‘What?’ she said, all mildness gone. ‘You heard that?’

  He braced himself in the seat. ‘Watch it.’

  ‘Say it again.’ Her fingers flexed convulsively on the wheel. ‘Say the words again. Please, Gavin.’

  ‘“Let the boy go in.”’

  She went so quiet he was afraid he’d turned her to stone. The car drifted worryingly.

  ‘Um.’ Gav stole a look across and saw her staring straight ahead as if seeing some other nightscape altogether. ‘Mind the . . .’ The word ‘hedge’ was lost in the abrupt scrape of twigs against the door. Hester jerked her head round as if she’d just woken up.

  ‘God, sorry.’ She got the car back under control. They drove up to a benighted village of dark houses and mournfully solitary streetlights. ‘I’m all right. Sorry about that.’

  ‘Not your fault,’ he said. ‘None of it is.’

  ‘None of it?’ she echoed him distantly, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  Everyone had always told Gav it was his fault. Stop being stupid, Gavin. You’re j
ust making it up. But it wasn’t, and he hadn’t been. He’d been right all along, and so had she.

  ‘You’re not crazy,’ he said. ‘You never were.’

  She raised one hand to her mouth and whispered something inaudible into it.

  ‘The voices,’ Gav added. He was worried she’d go into a trance if he didn’t make her say something. ‘And all that. It’s not your fault.’

  She turned to look at him. It was too dark to see her expression.

  ‘May I ask,’ she said, ‘how you know all this?’

  ‘There was a thing in the paper. Sorry about your job.’

  A brief and unhappy laugh. ‘That’s not really the part I was asking about, but thank you.’

  ‘I got kicked out ’cos they thought I was mad too. Well, suspended. But I’m not. You aren’t either.’

  They both kept their eyes ahead, on the shallow pool of light and the dark beyond.

  ‘You know that for sure, do you?’ she said eventually.

  ‘One of them’s real, at least.’

  ‘One of . . . ?’

  ‘Your voices.’

  She turned again and looked at him for so long he was sure she’d drive off the road.

  ‘There’s only one,’ she said at last. ‘There’s only ever been one.’ She sounded steady, but Gav thought he could hear the depths of pain below the calm surface. ‘But you see, “I hear voices” sounded so much better than “I hear a voice.” Much easier to say. It’s almost a joke, isn’t it? “I hear voices.” Whereas in the singular it suddenly sounds so very . . . intimate. Not just hallucinations everywhere like, oh, you know, like mad people have. One particular conversation instead. With just you as its victim, and your tormentor almost like someone in the family.’

  Gavin became acutely aware of the distance between them, though it was only half the width of a car.

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘No. It’s all right now, anyway.’

  They watched the road slide under them in silence.

  ‘Actually,’ she went on after a while, ‘I’ve always known I was sane.’ They’d come to a stretch of road Gav thought he recognised from the previous evening. It ran through a tall open wood, silhouettes of trees around them like pillars in a church. ‘I always knew it wasn’t actually a’ – her fingers made quotation marks in the air – ‘voice in my head. That’s what I tried to say, when it all became too much and I felt I had to say something. I’ve always felt . . . whole. In myself. I’ve always known she was . . .’ Hester sighed. ‘Someone else. Some other person or being or ghost or what have you who for some reason, or maybe for no reason at all, attached herself to me. I know, it sounds properly insane, doesn’t it?’