“Who’s Bernard?” I asked at length.
“I hate him.”
“How long has he been there?”
“Three weeks, on and off,” he returned, shivering; it was a warm, close evening and I wondered at his quivering arms. He turned to me. “I want to move in with you. I can’t stand being at home. Let me live with you.”
His face was deadly serious. I gasped incredulously. “You can’t do that!” I said, making light of it with a grin.
He rose, his arms flailing. “I hate him! I hate him! I hate them both!”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I Don’t?” he laughed, and his tone suggested not the slightest humour. “They’re trying to kill me!”
I frowned. He was sounding hysterical as well as looking the part. “That’s stupid!” I cautioned. “She’s your mother.”
“I tell you, they all want Max dead, everyone does. They won’t be satisfied until he’s been squashed out of existence.”
“Who are ‘they’, Max?” I asked. “I think you’re getting paranoid.”
He came to me, knelt before me and gripped me on the arms. “Look, I’m begging you, Collie, let me live with you. I like your house; I like your mum and dad. I’d be happy there, I know I would. If I stay where I am I’ll go mad. And they’ll kill me off, you wait and see. One day there won’t be a Max anymore. Talk to your mum, eh? She’ll understand.”
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“I’m as good as you,” he spat, slashing the air with his fist.
“You’re being stupid,” I protested.
“You’re good in class, you’re good at most things,” he said. “You’ve got a good life, what with your mum and dad…” but these last words seemed to stick in his throat. He turned away and faced the sunset. “You ever heard of a Changeling?” he asked solemnly. I had to admit to him that I hadn’t. He faced me and his face was wreathed in loathing; I felt myself move backwards instinctively at the unsettling sight. “Of course you’d have to say that, wouldn’t you?” his voice was scathing, laced with menace. It wasn’t Max anymore. “But I’ve worked out what’s going on, in spite of all that you’ve done to stop me finding out – you, my mum – everyone. I know the truth. I know who you are, and I know who I am. And do you know what? I realise what it is I have to do now. You see, I have to find a solution to all of those people who are in league with each other, who’ve worked with each other against me. And the more I look at the situation, the more I have to accept that there is only one solution.”
I had never seen insanity; I had only vague notions about padded cells and straightjackets. They were images of fancy, the stuff of novels and films. I did not think for one minute that what Max said was in any way fantastic, or related to a disturbed mind. Not then. How could I? He was distraught over something – over Bernard, perhaps, because I’d seen him act similar before when other men came into his mother’s life. The emotions play weird games with the head, I thought, thinking of my jealousy over Ruby, a girl I hadn’t talked to till that very afternoon. So I attempted to calm him down; but every word I uttered seemed to inflame him more, as if I were verbally throwing petrol on a fearsome mental conflagration.
“I can’t rest till the changeling’s dead!” he wailed, eyes wide and feral-like. “Understand? The changeling’s got to die!” He gripped me tightly by the arms and the pressure of his digging fingertips was immense.
He babbled a whole lot more, but by this time I was more than a little concerned and his words made no impact on the hardening soundproofed shell of my own thoughts. I pushed him away, rising from the rock and trying to laugh the whole thing off. My efforts were useless. He raised his fist, and for one terrible moment I thought he was going to strike me. We stared at each other for what seemed long minutes but could only have been a second or two. I could read in his eyes that there was some kind of fierce internal battle going on in his mind.
He tore off down The Mount and into the masses of bushes and trees at its base.
My first instinct was to go, and yet I felt I couldn’t leave my friend in such a distressed state. So I called his name for ten minutes or so. When there was no answer, save for the rumbling of coal wagons in the distance and night painted the scene below in an opaque inky wash, I turned and headed home; but not without a backward glance towards where the trees formed a murky puddle. I had the feeling that something dangerous and animal-like prowled the tangled expanse. I ran and didn’t stop running until I reached the friendly, jaundiced oasis of sodium-lit terraced-fringed streets.
* * * *
Wednesday
Nothing brings to mind the end of something, the cutting off of an era, the severing of ties, like death. During early youth everything, like the summer, is forever, and it is difficult to conceive of an end to things – an actual end. I wallowed in my youth like all young people accepting it as a right, as something inevitable, planned, ordered. Then bits of it started to flake away, to drop off, to wither and die, and I realised that things change. All things change. My Uncle Geoffrey keeled over and died of a heart attack while taking his coat off the peg in the hall. My Uncle Geoffrey! He was a permanent fixture in my life, like a sturdy shelf - humorous, large, gruff, and smelling of Brylcreem and fried onions. There. Solid. And then he was dead. Someone had picked up a celestial chisel and hacked away at my little existence, chipping away at my Uncle Geoffrey, and like a chunk of cold white marble he lay in the hall until my Auntie Clarissa came home from bingo, pleased with herself for having won twenty pounds and a huge family-sized tin of Quality Street.
I had never before attended a funeral. I had never before seen my father cry; but there again he’d never lost a brother. The leaden atmosphere, the black clothes, the polished black hearse, I found it all quite demoralising, and yet morbidly curious. I wondered why such a beautiful looking wooden coffin, with exquisite brass-work that caught the Sun like frozen fire, should be lowered into such a dirty great hole to rot. I wondered too why even those whom I knew for certain didn’t like my Uncle Geoffrey finally admitted to my Auntie Clarissa that he was a great chap, and that everyone loved him dearly – something even the vicar confirmed in church during the service. I wondered why I had to go out and buy a new pair of black trousers that chaffed my inner thighs raw.
We gathered later in a darkened front room for ham sandwiches and cups of tea, with the tin of Quality Street sitting open in the middle of the table, hands dipping into it, tossing back the centres they didn’t like. I stared around me as if I were a visitor to this planet. And, like Christmas and Easter and going away on a holiday the first two weeks in June, I realised that the funeral was little more than a ritual, all of them performances, and not, as I’d long imagined, the natural order of things like the Sun coming up in the morning, or a bottle of milk always in the door of the fridge. It was a shock, as I watched relatives acting most peculiar, becoming changed beings almost, involved as they were in a scenario I had never witnessed. Dancing to a script I could only guess at. My uncle’s death marked the end of my innocence. Life was not forever. And the big round tin of Quality Street piled to the top with sweets in brilliantly coloured wrappers, which looked like it would last forever, by the end of the afternoon was all but empty.
It was only a matter of months later that Mr Walton died. My ex-teacher had been a heavy smoker apparently, and set his bed alight one night. I imagined him sitting there, his broad back propped up by a pillow, labouring over the maths questions he’d set his pupils the following day, then becoming tired with it, the little tab end toppling from the puffy pink cliff of his lower lip to land silently on the bedcovers. There followed a steady smouldering, the spectre-like whorls of smoke and the smell of singed blanket curling around his bulbous nose, yet failing to alert the slumbering teacher. I imagined his bed completely engulfed in flames, reaching up to the ceiling and leaving a dark smoke patch there. And the list of maths questions refusing to burn, lying contemptuously in the middle of the flames u
ntouched by the inferno, screeching, “You’ll never destroy me! Never! Never! I’ll see you all on Monday!”
And that was another aspect of my life wiped out. My entire time in junior school had become more of a memory than before. I felt as if the life I lived was like the crossing of an immense bridge, and as I progressed I looked back only to see bits of it falling away, making it impossible to return. Both my Uncle Geoffrey and Mr Walton, once strong wooden planks on my footbridge, had become worn, rotten, and then had been rudely dislodged, tumbling into the hazy, mist-wreathed gorge of my memory. I would never see them again, and they took away part of me into the depths with them.
Strangely enough these feelings returned when they took away Morecambe. I’m not saying we became good friends, because it is impossible between the jailer and the jailed; it is not easy to forgive someone who gave you four stitches across the forehead and left a permanent scar there as a reminder. But he had become someone to whom I’d grown fond of, if only because he was the only accessible human being there had been near me for years. He had shown warmth, compassion even; he had watched me run my races and had been there for both triumphs and failures; he’d brought me a chocolate bar or two when I wasn’t supposed to have them; he’d provided pens, paper. He’d called me Philip.
But one day, when I went out into the yard as usual, there was only Wise and another strange man I’d never seen before. “Where’s…?” I began, but realised only I knew him as Morecambe. I didn’t know his real name. Wise knew who I meant, of course.
“He’ll not be coming,” he said tersely. I detected more than a hint of malice in his eyes.
“Why?” I said. “Is he unwell?” I was genuinely concerned for him. I noticed how overweight he’d been getting and was worried his heart might give way, like Uncle Geoffrey’s did. I even told him so one day, and he chided me for being such a fusspot. He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, so there was little need to worry on his account, he said.
“He’ll not be coming again,” said Wise.
“I want him back!” I protested, suddenly very anxious. “Is it his heart?”
They just stared at me. “Exercise,” said Wise.
“I don’t want to. I want…” I wish I knew his name. His real name.
“Fine, then don’t exercise,” he said, leaning against a wall. His colleague looked on and grinned maliciously.
“He’s ok, though?” I persisted.
“He’s fine. Sacked but fine.”
I hung my head. Bleak despair thumped me in the chest. “I want to go back inside,” I insisted.
“Orders are orders. You’ve got another twenty-five minutes yet.”
I pounded on the locked door. “Let me back in!” I screamed. “Open the bloody door!”
They didn’t of course. They had their orders. Twenty-five minutes later I was let in. Throwing myself onto my bed I wept like a child all over again. Just as with my Uncle Geoffrey, Mr Walton, my mother, my father and Ruby, this was another plank prised from my bridge and thrown over the side. More than ever I felt the crushing weight of loneliness, the horrifying suffocation of intense desperation, and more than ever I was determined I could not go on like this and should kill myself. But as soon as I formulated this desire, I retracted it, and vowed instead to kill Wise. So I picked up the only weapon I could lay my hands on; a pen – my ordinary plastic pen – and pondered on the possibility of thrusting it into Wise’s black heart. Would it penetrate cotton and flesh? Would it reach deep into his heart? How much pressure would it take to drive it home? I put it against my own chest and imagined it going in. Yes, it should work. They’ll pay for taking away Morecambe. I dwelt on the notion for days. That is, until they came in and took away my pen.
I nearly went mad. It was as if I’d lost a limb, so powerful was the urge to write and yet having nothing at hand with which to do so, staring instead at my paper which they’d left me, staring like a drug addict before a cabinet stuffed with cocaine without having the key to open it. My routine was in tatters, my life thrown like paper to the wind. I screamed inside my head, an incessant hellish wailing that haunted me throughout the day and the entire night as I lay in fitful sleep. It became worse as the days mounted, till I swear it hurt; my entire being was in pain, muscles and fibres throbbing, aching, stretching and twisting into tortuous positions. Eventually I knelt before the mirror and I clasped my hands together as if in prayer, my eyes peering imploringly back at me like two hot coals, my cheeks smeared with tears and glossy under the harsh lights.
“Give me back my pen! Please, please, please, give me back my pen!”
Two days later it was returned to me. I uttered an ecstatic yelp, holding it across both palms, staring at it, gently hoisting it to the light, twirling it, kissing it - writing with it. I would never again dare to think of killing Wise with my pen. And unlike my Uncle Geoffrey and Morecambe, my mother and father and Ruby, my beautiful pen had come back to me!
* * * *
10
Carl
He carefully slid the white gloves onto the pale stick-like pegs of his slender, manicured fingers. The action was unhurried, measured, the cotton smoothed around individual digits. So intent was he on the process that he noticed with delight every microscopic piece of cotton that tore itself free to float from the gloves, circling in the vortex created by his languorous movements. Finally he held the dazzlingly white gloves before his eyes, searching for creases, the fingers swaying to and fro, as if the shrouded dead were stirring. He positioned his hands before him, as he’d seen the surgeons do on television prior to an operation, clinically clean, kept away from potential contamination, and made his way to the bookcase.
This always gave him a thrill. As good as anything sexual. As good as foreplay. Not that he could remember much of that. He faced the Regency mahogany breakfront bookcase, with its ebony linings, its ebony mouldings, its reek of polish and quality, of something long-lived and precious. His eyes scrutinised the details, as they always did, as if seeing them for the very first time. The pleasure rushed into him like a shot in the arm, and he was aware of the distorted figure that was himself reflected in the glowing grain and the slightly distorted, rippled glass, aware of the smile of utter gratification that lingered on the reflection’s thin lips pasted onto the book spines beyond. He allowed himself to bask in the feeling, even closing his eyes momentarily to savour the subtleties of the sensations that washed over him.
He imagined that it was a pleasure, too, for the bookcase, this ritualised meeting. After all, he’d saved her, hadn’t he? He’d been the one that saw her tucked away in amongst old fridges, Formica tables, racing bikes and frayed settees. His was probably the first loving hand to have stroked the wood with anything like tenderness in God knows how many years. The poor old girl, he’d thought. You poor, poor thing! Grease and dust caked the surface, scars, fresh and old, were carved into its once proud body, a pane of glass was cracked; and he touched each place of hurt in turn, the agony of the piece tearing through his fingers and into his chest like an electric shock. “How much?” he remembered asking the man with the fat face and wet lips when he saw the bookcase for the first time.
“It’s old,” the man replied, his tongue pushing into the side of his mouth, avaricious eyes looking over him. He knew there was money to be made here.
“I know it’s old,” he’d replied tersely. “How much do you want for it?”
“What’ll you give?”
“Fifty pounds.”
The man laughed, but his eyes didn’t laugh along with him. “Bugger off!” he said. “I ain’t that stupid!”
“One hundred,” Carl offered quickly.
The fat face grinned a carp’s grin. “It’s a beauty,” he said.
“It’s a mess. I’ll have a lot of work on my hands getting this anything like decent. And it isn’t that old either,” Carl said.
“Oh yeah? I know it’s old.”
“How old?”
The fat man�
��s face crumpled up in thought, one eye closing and the other looking at him suspiciously. He rubbed the stubble on his numerous chins, the sound grating. “’Bout hundred years old,” he ventured, though with uncertainty. Almost a question.
Which was wrong, of course. “You’re right. About a hundred years old. But that isn’t old. I’ll give you one hundred and fifty quid for her, that’s all she’s worth.” He took out his wallet, thumbed through the notes that he always kept in reserve, for just such occasions.
Fat face groaned, like he was having a limb twisted or something. But his eyes had settled on the small wad of twenties and he was hooked. It almost always worked, Carl thought. One look at a few notes was all it took, like a woman flashing her knickers. Eventually he grunted an affirmative. The deal was struck.
She was worth ten times that even then.
The immaculate whiteness of his glove stood in sharp contrast to the reddish-gold blush of the wood as he lifted his thin fingers to take the tiny ornamented gold key that stood proud from the lock. He twisted it and there was a satisfyingly soft ‘thunk’ as the lock clicked open. The cabinet doors swung slowly apart, like the gentle unfolding of a butterfly’s translucent wings. The familiar smells rushed out to greet him, children racing to a long-absent father. Old paper, old ink, old leather. If the smells had a colour, he thought, they would be shades of grey. He could smell grey. His lips stretched as the smile became a grin, and his eyes all but disappeared, sinking into folds of baggy, age-creased skin.
Carl hurriedly moved to a small round table and an armchair that sat in the centre of the room. They were the only pieces of furniture remaining from when his parents owned the house. Three massive bookcases, each one just about filled to capacity, taking up three walls. There was no need for anything else, he felt. He glanced idly at the place where the sofa had been, where his father had spent untold hours in front of the TV, and where he’d finally gasped his last in front of Kojak. The curtains had been closed then, in mourning; the curtains were still closed, the room kept in permanent dusk for fear of fading the book spines. His father would have choked in disbelief if he’d seen what use he’d put the room to. “A bloody library?” he’d have blurted.
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