The Waking That Kills

by Stephen Gregory

  At last, my own space. I opened the driver’s door and slid onto the seat, behind the big black steering-wheel. When the door fell shut with a snick of its well-oiled hinges, when I closed my eyes and inhaled the familiar scents of the old car, I had my own space again: thousands of miles from Borneo, and a long way from the puzzles of Juliet and Lawrence Lundy. Everything I touched in the car, the soles of my shoes on his pedals, through the seat of my pants and my spine on his leather upholstery, to my hands on his wheel... it was the touch of my father.

  I could smell him. I could feel him. His son – me – I was sitting exactly in the place in the world he had made and claimed for himself.

  But what was the good of that? I shook myself out of my cosy daydream. I hadn’t flown back so I could sit in a hearse and think about my father. He was alive and breathing and real and only a few miles away. ‘Hey old girl... hey, we gotta look after you, make sure you’re good to go. Maybe not today, or even tomorrow, but let’s make sure you’re up and running. We might want to get out of here.’

  In a moment I’d felt for a lever under the steering-wheel and pinged open the bonnet. I slipped out of the car, moved around to the chromium radiator and heaved the bonnet open. A cavernous space, sooty and oily... the mighty engine, lovely, ugly, a mysterious mass of machinery, a Daimler which had swished hundreds of dead bodies to be buried or burned and swished my father from cemetery to cemetery all over England and France. I knew enough to find the dipstick and check the oil; of course it was fine, my father’s meticulous maintenance. I unscrewed the radiator cap, and of course the level of the water was fine. And so, leaving the bonnet yawning open, I slipped back into the car and turned the key.

  Tick, tick. Tick – the fuel pump. Wait a few seconds. I pressed the ignition button. The engine shuddered and coughed... sweetly slumbering, stirred into life.

  Silent, almost silent. A whisper in the woodland. Hardly a sound. No one could have seen or heard what I was doing. But, as I got out of the car and walked around to watch the engine throbbing like open-heart surgery, a haze of blue smoke rose from the exhaust pipes and into the surrounding trees...

  Chapter Eight

  ‘COLOUR-BLIND? YOU took Lawrence out of school because he’s colour-blind?’

  Juliet had had a bit too much to drink. My fault really. It was quite late at night and we’d been sitting and talking in her living-room. The three of us had had dinner together, fillets of white fish she’d dug out of the freezer and done very simply with a few potatoes and peas, and then Lawrence had gone up to his tower. He was still sulky with me since the incident with the swift in the morning, and he’d looked sideways at me and his mother as we shared a bottle of white wine. So, after the meal, he’d sloped off to his own room.

  And then Juliet and I had moved to the comfy old sofa near the open French windows. As dusk dissolved into twilight and became a deep, almost purple-black night, as the darkness of the trees gathered like a blanket around the house, we sat and talked. In the afternoon, during my communion with the car, I’d felt that I’d descended into a lower world, a soft and suffocating underworld... and now it was as though the woman and I were sinking deeper still and drowning in our cosy cushions.

  Perhaps it was the gin. She’d made me a gin and tonic when we first sat down together, but I’d made the second one and the third. I’d been telling her about my life in Borneo. She listened with real interest, her pointy face close to mine, her squirrel face with its anxious eyes and quickly nibbling movements of her lips, her twitchy nose. She blinked a lot and she laughed abruptly. I told her about the school I’d been teaching in: a government secondary school in a logging-town called Marudi, miles inland from the coast of the South China Sea, on the banks of the enormous Baram river; I described my students, teenage boys and girls from the kampongs in the forest and along the forest tributaries, how they sat in their dusty classrooms with the fans stirring lazily overhead, the boys in the front rows in their neat white shirts and black songkoks, the girls in their crisp white tudungs in rows at the back. An Islamic school, in a strictly Islamic society, in which every lesson, every meeting and function was started with a prayer and finished with a prayer... where the boys and girls studied together but couldn’t sit side by side in the same classroom and had to be segregated into different rows.

  ‘They call me Mr Chris. I’m the only orang putih, the only white man in the school. When I go into class they all stand to attention and they chant in unison “Good morning, Mr Chris!” and stay standing until I tell them to sit down. Lovely kids, nice and smiley and well-behaved... the boys have names like Farouk and Faisal and Abdul Aziz and there’s about six Mohammads in every class... the girls are cute and funny and shy, Siti Hanisah and Nurul and Rokiah and Qistina and Rabiatul...’

  She took a longer swig at her drink, tipping the glass so much that the ice slipped and bumped onto her upper lip. Gulping the mouthful down, she licked her lips with a slow swipe of her tongue and then, setting down the glass, she dabbed her chin, squirrel-like with the back of both hands. Time for a top-up...

  I went on. ‘And because we start early in the mornings – I get up at five and I’m clocking in at six-thirty – school’s all over by one o’clock in the afternoon. I go home, a lovely big house on wooden stilts on the bank of the river, I have a shower and lunch and maybe take a nap because in the afternoon it’s sweltering hot, then at five I’m out running or on my bike, getting a bit of exercise once the day starts to cool down.’

  I finished my drink too. The dregs were just ice-water. ‘And then,’ I said, waving my empty glass and picking up hers, ‘home again for another shower and feeling very thirsty after all the exertion. At six-thirty, exactly at sunset, the call to evening prayer comes wailing out of the mosque – it’s called the maghrib prayers – but for an infidel like me it means something else... time for a great big, hefty big, swirly big gin and tonic.’

  I stood up, with a glass in each hand. ‘Juliet, the ones you make are nice, don’t get me wrong, nice and refreshing like lemonade or barley water. But shall I make the next one? The kind I make for myself in Borneo?’ I moved across the darkening room, in the direction of the drinks cabinet. ‘Have you read Somerset Maugham’s stories from South East Asia, when they have a “gin stengah” in the club in the evening? Well, “stengah” is the Malay word for half. So I make my gin and tonic the old-fashioned way, half tonic and half gin.’

  And so we’d had a second drink together, and then a third. I made them. A tall glass half full of gin. Drop in a handful of ice, so that the level comes close to the top of the glass. Oh dear, not much room left, only enough for a splash of tonic. My fault. Later, when the night was so velvety-black that it seemed to oily-ooze from the woodland and through the French windows into the room itself, Juliet’s little frame was snuggled into the softness of the sofa. And I was feeling comfortably weightless, boneless, the alcohol loosening and dissolving my skeleton...

  And loosening our tongues. I’d told her about the swift in the tower bedroom and how Lawrence and I had dealt with it, although I hadn’t mentioned the confrontation we’d had or the strange thing he’d muttered to me. I hadn’t told her, I thought I would never tell her, that for a bewildering moment I’d been afraid of her son. When the conversation had shifted from my cheery, uncomplicated students in Marudi to my first impressions of Lawrence and my inklings of the kind of progress we might make in forming a relationship, I’d recounted the earlier incident, when he’d lost his temper and smashed the model plane into pieces.

  ‘He gets angry,’ she said, ‘that’s the issue.’ She had a bit of trouble with the word, the sibilance on her tongue. ‘He gets angry. How did you make him so angry?’

  ‘I don’t know. He just exploded. He was trying to show me the kind of plane his father flies... the kind he used to fly... and I didn’t get which one he was talking about. The green one, the grey one... I don’t know, he’s got so many hanging on the ceiling up there, and they all
look the same to me.’

  She pricked up at something I’d said. Her face, which had fuddled and lost some of the sharpness of its features, flickered back into focus. ‘Look the same? That’s an issue with Lawrence. The colours, they all look the same to him. He’s colour-blind. What did you say to him? The green one, the grey one? Is that when he got so angry?’

  ‘Now you mention it, yes. That was when he lost his cool and yelled at me and smashed the plane.’

  I shrugged at her and swilled some more gin. It was so strong that it caught the back of my throat and made my eyes water. A real Borneo stengah, the kind I’d drink on the balcony of my house with a saucer of olives... and my binoculars ready for the crocodiles which eased their bulk out of the undergrowth and into the river as the light was failing.

  ‘He over-reacted a bit, don’t you think? I mean, quite a lot of people are colour-blind, red and green and brown, that’s the commonest kind. I had an uncle, I remember my Dad telling me about him, he found out he was colour-blind during the war because he wanted to join the RAF or something and it meant he wouldn’t be able to...’

  I stopped myself just in time. I made a pretence of spluttering on my gin. Juliet was suddenly very composed again, as though the alcohol had pickled her by now and she was preserved in pristine condition.

  She levelled her eyes at me. ‘Think about it, Christopher. Yes, that’s why he gets angry. They told him at school he’s colour-blind. Usually it’s a trivial thing, it’s just one of those things, it’s nothing but a curiosity. But think about it. For a boy who idolises his father, who idolised his father, and who wanted more than anything else in the world to be like him, to be a...’

  She paused, lifted her glass to her lips. But then she sniffed at the intense perfume and set it down. ‘Too strong for me.’ She made a smile with her lips, but it slipped off almost straightaway. ‘But now you know why I keep him at home, out of school.’

  I frowned at her. ‘Because he’s colour-blind? Alright, so he gets angry, I understand all that. But is there anything more you want to tell me?’ I tried to lighten the mood again, because I’d seen her eyes welling with tears. ‘Hey, do you want another drink? I can make one of your nice lemonade versions, if you like?’

  She started to stand up. Me too. It took us two or three attempts, because the sofa and all its cushions were as difficult to escape as the pitcher-plants I had in my faraway garden. At last we wobbled together, giggling a bit, and for a few moments she took hold of my arms to steady herself. Then she looked up at me and sniffed and said, ‘There’s a bit more to tell you, Christopher, yes. You’ll get the story from me or from Lawrence. But not now. Right now I need to go to bed and sleep off your great big, hefty big, swirly big gin and tonics...’

  I closed the French window. She turned off the lights. I followed her to the foot of the stairs, waited, and she went up ahead of me. She turned at the top, on the first landing, where it was so dark I could hardly see her. Her disembodied voice floated down to me.

  ‘Don’t go away, Christopher,’ she said softly. I heard her take a long breath, and then it all came out in one breathless release of words. ‘I know you’re concerned about your father and you’re thinking about slipping away and leaving us to our own devices... me and Lawrence, we were in the tower this morning, I came up with more coffee for you and he said you’d gone out and we saw the smoke in the trees and guessed what you were doing... we thought you were going, going for good without even saying anything to us...’

  She stopped. No more breath. There was a long empty silence. I couldn’t see her at all. I thought she might have vanished into her bedroom. But then her voice came again, even more quietly, no more than a whisper in the benighted house.

  ‘Don’t go away just yet. We both need you. We all need you.’

  I WAS DREAMING of fireflies.

  Sometimes, faraway in the place I called home, I might fall asleep on my balcony. Only nine o’clock, I might have had a drink or two or three and watched the darkness fall until the river was black and the forest was black and even the sky was a whirl of blackness... and I might fall asleep on my balcony, in my easy chair, and slop the drink into my lap.

  And then wake up. And see the trees alight with fireflies. Hundreds of them, or thousands. The forest of Borneo a spangle of silvery lights, and their reflection in the river... a marvel... and for me, who would set my alarm for five in the morning, time to climb out of my armchair and stumble indoors to bed.

  Now I was dreaming of fireflies, in my bed in my room in Chalke House in Lincolnshire, England. But when I woke with a start I saw nothing. The space around me was utterly black. Not a single glow in a slumbering forest, not a gleam in a mighty, mysterious river.

  Nothing. Wide awake, I got out of the bed. I had to, I had an urge to look and look and find a vestige of my dream...

  And when I peered out of the window I saw it. A light in the darkness, as if a tiny piece of my dream had escaped and found its way into the real, waking world...

  There was a light in the trees.

  I opened my window wide. The night was cool and fresh after my stupor of sleep. The trees moved in a lovely breeze. The foliage stirred. And a light flickered, beyond the pond, in the darkness of the woodland.

  Was it real, or a part of my dream? Was it real, or one of the fireflies I’d been dreaming, burned onto my eyeballs and still there, although I was awake?

  I closed my eyes and rubbed their lids. I opened them again and saw the trees stirring. I felt the cool breath of a spring night on my face and on my neck.

  But the light was gone. Nothing. No starlight above me, not a glimmer of moonlight on the surface of the pond.

  I slipped back into bed and dreamed of nothing.

  Chapter Nine

  WE WERE ALL a bit quiet at breakfast the following morning. Juliet looked wanly at me over a mug of coffee, blew on it and sipped and then smiled with a frothy moustache.

  ‘How do you do it?’ she said, with a husky, hung-over voice. ‘I mean, how do you drink gin like that and then get up at five o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘I have an alarm call,’ I answered. My voice was a bit throaty too. ‘The mosque. At five o’clock... it feels like the dead of night and I feel like death, and this guy is wailing from a bloody great loudspeaker a couple of hundred yards from my house...’

  I grimaced at her, deliberately dunking my mouth deep into my coffee to imitate her moustache. ‘But no, really, I don’t drink like that in the week. I guess I was showing off last night, trying to look like an old Borneo hand...’

  Unusually early, Lawrence was there too. He pulled a face, a snarly sneer with his upper lip, listening to me and his mother exchanging our morning-after banter. We were in cahoots, me and Juliet... he must’ve thought we’d been drinking and talking and spilling all sorts of beans while he was upstairs alone in his tower. He narrowed his eyes at his mother, as if, by doing so, he might burrow his brain into hers and find out what precious secrets she’d divulged to this latest incomer. That was why he’d got up and come down so early, in his t-shirt and shorts, because he knew we’d been up late together and he wanted to intercept any more indiscretions. But she just fluttered her eyelashes at him and then mock-rubbed at her temples, signifying that she was an adult with an alcohol-induced headache and he was excluded from the aftermath, because he was a boy and he should mind his own business.

  He was miffed. Good. I winked at Juliet and she winked back.

  He noticed. I think she meant him to notice and tease him, because he was in a funk of jealousy over her cosiness with me. He made a big play of nonchalance, busying himself with the toaster, and, to try and jolly him out of it, she leaned over and touched his downy arm. ‘Hey, isn’t it about time you changed into another shirt?’ she said. ‘How long are you going to live in this thing, day and night? What’ve you got stuck on the back?’

  He wriggled away from her touch, but not before she’d picked off two or three tiny
green burrs. ‘Where’ve you been? You’ve got lots of these stuck on you...’

  He shrugged. His face darkened, and he pretended to be preoccupied with poking a knife deep inside the toaster to dig out a smouldering crust. With his other hand he started scratching at the bare skin of his neck. He had a new rash of nettle blebs there.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘I woke up in the middle of the night and went outside. I’d had that dream again. I thought Dad was back. I went outside and down the garden ’cos I thought he was back.’

  ‘Silly boy,’ she said very softly. A shadow had crossed her face too, the same one which had darkened his. She stood up and behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. ‘You and your dreams, you big bony silly boy...’ She pressed her mouth between his shoulder blades. ‘Phew, you’re a bit whiffy, aren’t you? Throw this old thing into the wash and run upstairs and get a shower. You’ll feel a lot better and you and Christopher can spend some time together.’

  ‘What about the birds, Lawrence? The swifts?’ I said. ‘We can get a good look at them from your tower, with your binoculars. You must have a bird book or something in the house, we can read up about them and...’