The grasses and nettles swished where he’d hurried off. And then the woodland was utterly still.
I peered into the cardboard box which seemed to have startled the boy so much. No cobra. Only a heap of newspapers, a glimpse of headlines about a miners’ strike, a sensational murder, a Hollywood divorce...
I swung the door of the hearse shut. It was so heavy, the hinges so sweetly oiled, that it closed itself with a click. There was no other sound in the fragrant shade of the Scots pine.
Except... except... another sound I hadn’t heard for more than a year. A favourite of mine, which I didn’t know I’d missed so much during my sultry perpetual summer in Borneo. A favourite sound of an English summer.
The swifts. I peered up and up through the branches of the pine. High in the pale blue sky, the swifts were hurtling and screaming, screaming their lungfuls of screams in giddy, madcap flight.
Chapter Six
‘YOUR FACE IS better.’
I was in the kitchen with Juliet. She’d made me coffee and toast for breakfast and she was doing some baking. She’d taken two rings off her wedding finger and dropped them into an egg cup on a shelf behind her, and she was spreading flour all over the big wooden table. She’d already managed to dab her face with powdery smudges, and now she was starting to make her mixture in a glass bowl.
I hid a smile in my mug of coffee. Everything she did, since I’d first met her dangling out of the tree with moss and pine needles in her hair, seemed childishly untidy and slapdash, in the way that a puppy or a very young kitten might leave its own trail of untidiness. But nice. I liked her and I liked the house, its carelessly comfortable, lived-in feeling. And now, in her country-kitchen, as she stood at the wide table and swept it with flour, she looked again like an elf or a pixie of the household, somehow too small for the place, but busy and quick and... and messy. I couldn’t help smiling, managed not to burst out laughing, at the way she pushed the hair out of her eyes and left her forehead ghostly with flour, her hair like a mist of cobwebs. And yet, despite the mess she was making, there was a cavalier expertise in her movements... she’d done it all many times before, and the end result, the scones she was assembling, would no doubt be delicious.
She blinked at me, frowned. She knew I was amused. ‘Your face is better,’ she said, to change the focus of attention from her to me. ‘It was just a scratch. Could’ve been a lot worse, if you’d got some glass in your eyes...’
She crossed the kitchen towards me and peered closer. She had flour on her lashes. ‘You’re alright now. But I don’t suppose you’ll ever get the windscreen fixed, will you? I mean, how do you find parts for a car like that? What year is it? Something from the 50s or 60s?’
‘Don’t worry about the car,’ I said. I finished off my coffee and toast and carried the mug and plate to the sink. I was going to go upstairs and try to engage Lawrence, or at least see if he was awake and out of bed. After all, it was a bright morning at the end of May, it was going to be a hotter and hotter day, and that was why I was there, in Chalke House in Lincolnshire, to engage a troubled teenage boy and be some kind of mentor for him. I couldn’t just sit in the kitchen watching an attractively fey, dizzy woman making scones. ‘Don’t worry about the car. It’s not going anywhere, not at the moment. And my father’s never going to need it again.’ I added, to smooth over any guilt she might be feeling about the damage she’d caused and also just to sound helpful, ‘You must have a car here, if you ever want me to run out and get anything…?’
She’d made the scones and put them on a tray, into the oven. She said, ‘It’s round the back of the house. I go out as seldom as possible, just to do a big shop that’ll last us for weeks. I don’t want to go out, nor does Lawrence. And anyway, the car’s a mess.’
As I rinsed my mug in the sink, she stood beside me and rinsed the flour off her hands. We shared the same flow of water from the cold tap. Our hands touched. Our hips touched. A bit awkward, so I thought of something to say, ‘I could take a look, if you like? Check the oil and water and stuff?’
‘No.’ She said it too sharply. ‘No, don’t.’
She turned away. I watched her as she reached for the egg cup and slipped her rings back onto her finger. It prompted me to ask, ‘And where is your husband? Lawrence has mentioned his father a few times...’
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll make you another coffee. Lawrence won’t be up yet. You don’t have to clock in and start work, like you do in your school in Borneo.’
So we sat opposite one another at the table and drank coffee. It didn’t take long for her to tell me what had happened, only long enough for me to take a few sips and burn my lips and for the smell of the cooking scones to fill the kitchen. Last autumn, her husband had taken off on a routine training flight, a Tuesday morning, the 13th September, with two other Phantoms... and as she talked she drew into the flour on the table with her left forefinger, to illustrate what had happened. A dot in the flour for the air-base at RAF Coningsby, a line in the flour to the coast, the line continuing across a powdery white sea, and then a sudden angry squiggle where her husband’s plane had impacted with the water, smashed into pieces and sunk.
She looked across the table at me. ‘Missing, presumed dead. One moment he was on a regular sortie... the other pilots said it was a clear, calm day and they were going out to sea and up the coast... and then he was gone.’ Again she squiggled into the flour, to mark the spot where the plane had vanished. ‘They couldn’t explain it. They’d circled back to see what had happened, seen nothing on the surface but a slick of oil... he’d just gone. There was a lot of searching. They opened an enquiry.’ She made one big circle around the scribble into which her husband had disappeared. ‘Missing, presumed dead. The enquiry was closed.’
There was a long silence. We both sipped our coffee. The kitchen door opened and the boy came in. He was tousled and bleary, in a t-shirt and shorts, straight out of bed. He paused for a moment to appraise the scene and then went across to where his mother was sitting and stood behind her. As he squinted and frowned at the mysteriously chaotic diagram on the table, he put his hands on her shoulders, moved them closer to her neck. He looked very big, his face pale and unsmiling. She looked very small, more like a little sister than his mother, and somehow vulnerable. He loomed over her and his white bony fingers tightened near her throat. She didn’t cringe, at the weight of his hands or the sinewy maleness he was exerting over her, but neither did she relax as one might relax at the first caress of a masseur.
‘So what’s all this?’ he said. He bent so close to her that her hair fluttered when he whispered the same words again. ‘So what’s all this, Mummy? What’ve you been telling my new teacher? Telling him a story?’
He took an enormous breath, inhaling long and slowly and holding the air in his chest for a long time. And then, at last, he blew with all his strength. The flour puthered up and up from the table. For a few seconds, until his breath ran out, there was a white powdery haboob in the middle of the room. He stopped and the dust settled.
‘End of story,’ he said. There was nothing but a smooth film of flour on the table: a ghostly palimpsest.
He crossed to the oven, opened it, snatched a tea-towel and lifted out the tray of scones. They looked perfect, they smelled delicious. Juliet slid some of them onto a plate and told us to take them upstairs to the tower.
I WAS PUZZLING over what the woman had told me, unsure whether or not to broach the subject with the boy, feeling a knot of nervous apprehension in my stomach as I climbed the narrow stairs behind and followed him into his room. I didn’t know what we were going to do that morning, if we were going to read or listen to some music or share some ideas from a newspaper or magazine; the account of his father’s death had left me quite unready for any kind of structured tutoring of the boy. So I was relieved when he just gestured me to sit down in an old armchair by the open balcony window, and he set about re-assembling the model aeroplane he’d smashed the other da
y.
I watched him and I wondered what he was thinking. He bent his head and gulped his Adam’s apple and examined the shards of plastic he’d spread all over his bed. Obviously he didn’t want to talk to me or listen to me talking. Perhaps, as he applied himself to the rebuilding of the toy, he was imagining the wreckage of the real Phantom which would never be mended, which had disappeared to the bottom of the North Sea with the body of his father.
I ate a scone. I looked out of the window, past the Scots pine and the spars of the tree-house in it, towards the horizon where the coast might be, where my father would be. I pictured him so vividly in his room in the nursing-home that I could conjure the smell of him and his things. How odd, I thought, for me to be sitting in this strange tower, in this strange house, with a strange boy I’d never met until a week ago... to have flown thousands of miles from Borneo to settle my own father, and now to find my head fuddled with someone else’s worry and frustration. For a moment it rankled with me, the unfairness. I should’ve done it myself... I mean, before the boy had come into the kitchen and erased the complicated mess his mother had made on the table, I should’ve done it myself. I should’ve stood up and stopped her talking. I should’ve swept the flour from the table with one swipe of my hand and reminded her I’d come back to England to comfort my own father, not her, not her son...
Screaming. Screaming outside. So high-pitched that it was more like a whistle than a scream. An alien sound. Inhuman.
Something, a black projectile, hurtled through the open window and into the room.
The boy leapt off the bed and scattered the splinters of plastic onto the floor. I clenched my hand on the scone so suddenly that it exploded into crumbs.
A swift. The bird had swerved through the window, and now it was battering and beating hopelessly among the model planes which dangled from the ceiling. And screaming a pathetic rasping scream, so hoarse and high that it scratched at the very limit of human hearing...
The boy stood up on his bed. Like a silly kid in his t-shirt and pants, he bounced up and down and flailed his hands at the bird, as though to swat it like a shuttlecock. He clapped at it, as though he might catch it, or crush it. ‘Leave it, Lawrence, leave it...’ I was calling to him, ‘just leave it and it’ll find its way out...’ but he bounced like a child and giggled in a manic high-pitched way, a sound as alien as the weakening screams of the swift. The bird snagged its long black wings among the invisible threads of nylon. Entangled for a moment, it writhed and freed itself and cut at the wings of the green and grey toys. The planes clattered together. There was an oddly musical clacking of hollow plastic and the mad, feeble fluttering of the bird.
‘For heaven’s sake, Lawrence, just leave the thing!’ And as he sprang off the bed and loomed towards me, his eyes flaring with anger, the bird flopped from the ceiling. I’d seen a split-second of an uncontrollable threat in his face... but the fall of the swift, the way it spiralled softly down and crash-landed on the bed with nothing but a puff of sound, made both of us turn and stare and forget each other.
We sat on the bed and leaned over it, the two of us.
Exhausted. Dying? The swift lay on the bed-cover, heaving so hard that its little chest might burst. Black, uniformly black... no, the darkest, deepest brown, its plumage as smooth as the richest, most expensive chocolate... sooty-black, as we bent over it and took away the light. A slim tubular body, perfectly aerodynamic. Wings so long, longer than its body, like scythes for cutting and carving and slicing the air. The swift: the ultimate flying-machine, more exquisitely refined for flying than any device a man could ever dream.
I glanced at the boy. He was aghast. I don’t think he was breathing. Every part of his being, apart from his eyes which goggled at the creature which had hurtled into his room and bedazzled the pathetic plastic things he’d hung on his ceiling before exhausting itself almost to death... every other part of him was stopped. I don’t think he was breathing. I think his heart might have stopped beating.
Then he touched the bird. With the tip of one finger he felt where the breast was heaving. He stroked the length of one wing. He touched the feet, the nothing-feet, almost nothing but the feeblest of claws. He stroked the wide whiskery mouth, from which the screams had come until all of its breath was gone. He marvelled at the swift, for it was truly marvellous.
And, before our eyes, it seemed to fill itself with life again. It was a kind of miracle. Somehow, by a strange magic of its own, a kind of magnetism of the life-force which it could feel in the air of an English springtime, the bird drew into its tiny, mighty body the energy it needed to live again.
Like an injured butterfly, it manoeuvred its wings free and clapped them above its body. It tried to take off, but maybe the bedding was too soft beneath its belly, too yielding of even its almost-weightlessness, and it was too cosily sunk into it. Again, and a third time, the bird clapped its wings. But it couldn’t get any purchase on the air.
So I made to pick it up. The boy, remembering to breathe, said, ‘No, I want it.’
I ignored him. I cupped the bird very gently, allowing the wings to fall clear of my fingers, stood up and carried it towards the balcony window. The boy, so close behind me that I could smell his sleepy unwashed body, said again, ‘No, I want it... what are you doing?’
And when I placed the swift on the parapet outside, high above the garden and the pond and level with the foliage of the trees and the towering pine, he clamped his hand onto mine. He was very strong. He was as tall as me. His eyes stared into mine, empty, blank, and his breath was stale. I felt a lurch in my belly, as though I’d been picked up and dropped into a place I hadn’t been for as long as I could remember. Fear... a small dark space in my being... a feeling I’d almost forgotten in the comfortable years of my lucky life.
His hand was heavier still. It was clammy and cold. ‘I want the bird. It came into my room, in my house.’
‘Yes, it’s your room, Lawrence, and it’s your house,’ I said, ‘but it isn’t your bird.’ I heard a tremor in my voice. I licked my lips and went on. ‘So take your hand off my hand, and we’ll let the bird go free. If you’re interested in the swifts there’s a lot we can talk about, and we can watch them, we can learn about them from up here in your wonderful tower. But this little thing, this lovely living thing has the whole of the summer ahead of it and then a long way to go in the autumn.’
He lifted his hand off mine. He stepped back. I lifted my hand away from the swift.
It had had time to gather its energy, to steady its breathing and calm the air in its lungs. As though it was the most natural thing for a living creature to do, it simply rolled off the parapet. It fell like a rag for a yard or two, and then scissored its wings. This time, with nothing to hinder its perfection, the bird rocketed up and up into the blue until it was no more than a speck.
A speck, beyond our vision. A scream, beyond our hearing.
Lawrence watched it go. Then he spun away from me and back into the room. Over his shoulder he muttered something. I half-heard what he said, half-understood.
‘What did you say, Lawrence? I didn’t catch...’ He shrugged and sat on his bed again, feeling on the floor for the broken pieces of his model plane. Above his head, the toys on their nylon threads were swaying silently in the breeze, never touching, as though their make-believe air-space had never been invaded.
I went out of the room. As I trod down the stairs from the tower, I suddenly realised what he’d said to me. The words came to me so clearly that I stopped in the shadows and listened to them inside my head. ‘I’ll tell my father what you did. When he comes back, I’ll tell him.’
Chapter Seven
NEEDING TO GET out of the house and away from the woman and the boy, I went down to the bottom of the garden.
When I left Lawrence in his tower, I’d first of all gone to my room, thinking to sit and think in my own space, or to lie on my bed and wonder at what she and he had said to me that morning. But it wasn’t my sp
ace, it wasn’t my room, it wasn’t my bed, it was a bedroom assigned to me by a couple of strangers in their strange house. I needed to connect myself with something that was really mine, away from this muddle of dusty back-stories and muttered half-secrets.
So I flung myself out of the room and downstairs. I tiptoed past the kitchen where Juliet was clattering so noisily at the sink that she couldn’t possibly have heard me go by, and outside through the French windows of the lounge.
Down the garden, to the car. My father’s car.
Nothing to do with the Lundy family, nothing to do with the otherworld of Chalke House buried in the folds of the Lincolnshire wolds. I needed, for a short while, to touch – yes, physically touch – the reason why I’d come back to England.
Even in the week or two since I’d arrived, the grasses had grown fast and thick around the wheels of the Daimler. The bodywork, already so matt and dull, a grey-green patina where the paint had long ago been black, was dusted with a fall of bark and twigs from the Scots pine. I passed a hand over the windscreen, where the glass had been smashed by the impact of the claw-hammer, and picked off clumps of needles. The car looked very tired, and oddly disconsolate. The enormous chrome radiator had bloomed a rash of rust, and the orbs of the headlamps were like tearful eyes.
‘Hey, what’s up, old girl? Did you think I’d left you here for good? Hey, you got a long way to go yet...’
But my voice sounded small and unconvincing. There was a quaver of uncertainty. I looked up into the blackened gantry of the pine, through the scaffold of branches which jutted from the towering trunk. I swivelled and stared high into the overwhelming foliage of the beech trees, the mature oak and chestnut which blotted the sky... and all around me, into the suffocating tangle of undergrowth, the dense barricades of nettle and cow-parsley and formidable bramble. The bottom of the garden? No, not a garden, but an acre or three of ancient English woodland, a shut-in world of its own, shutting out the rest of the world. But yes, the bottom. No wonder the car looked so forlorn, so crushed... as I looked up and around me, I remembered the last few miles of our journey, the descent from the clarity of the Lincolnshire farmland and its marvellous sky, down into the shadows of the wooded wolds, and down and down as though we’d stumbled into a hole and it was sucking us deeper...
The Waking That Kills Page 4