The Waking That Kills

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘I got a better idea,’ he interrupted. ‘But we might get a bit dirty. So I’ll keep this shirt on a bit longer. For this morning, at least. Hey, Mr Chris, are you any good at climbing?’

  Juliet tried to dissuade him, but she couldn’t. She wheedled at him to go upstairs and get changed and spend some cool, calm, quality time with me... He ignored her.

  She carried on trying to dissuade him, as we followed him meekly out of the French windows and into the woodland. But he hardly seemed to hear her, as he strode ahead. He was wresting the initiative back from her. She had had her time with me and told me who-knows-what family secrets and rumours and tittle-tattle, lubricated by wine and gin and snuggled into the sofa all night, and now, on a brightening summer’s morning at the beginning of June, he was in charge and we were going to do what he wanted to do, never mind the so-called grown-ups who were fuzzy and fuddled and hung-over.

  We came to the foot of the Scots pine.

  First of all we appraised the car. It was impossible not to. Shabby and neglected, a hulking ton-weight of rust and blistered wood and wormy leather, it was still amazing: a Daimler hearse, in a Lincolnshire woodland. It wouldn’t matter how often you strolled down there, on a frosty winter’s afternoon or a moonlit midsummer’s night, it would always be something to happen on, an extraordinary thing to behold.

  So we paused and cocked our heads at the car. We couldn’t help it. With its showering of twigs and moss, and the smash in the glass as though it had had a wonderful adventure with gangsters and shotguns, the mighty machine was a picture. For a moment I thought – and I was sure Juliet was thinking and hoping too – it might be such a distraction, such an anomaly in the scheme of things which might or might not happen that morning, that Lawrence’s idea might be forgotten.

  To prolong the moment, and to postpone what the boy was wanting to do, I skirted the car and had a closer look. I kicked at the tyres. I rubbed at the rust on the radiator grille. And, my hand going instinctively to the handle of the driver’s door, I saw that it was ajar.

  ‘Funny,’ I said, opening the door wide. ‘I’m sure I closed it properly. Leave it open and the courtesy light stays on and the battery goes flat...’

  Sure enough, no light. No soft green light from the little bulb in the headlining of the car. I felt under the front seat, where I’d left the ignition key, slotted it in and turned it and heard the reassuring tick of the fuel pump priming. But then, when I pressed the starter button there was nothing but a click.

  ‘It’s dead. Not going anywhere.’

  Juliet and Lawrence stood and watched, as I tried again. Futile, the second and third attempts. I was puzzled and annoyed. Puzzled, because I was certain I’d shut the door the other day, when I’d started the car and warmed it up and then switched off. Annoyed, because the presence of my father was so strong that I could hear him chuntering... I’d had the car a couple of weeks and already neglected its maintenance. Juliet folded her arms across her chest and frowned. The boy met my eyes without blinking, for one second. Then he looked away, and his hand went to his neck and he rubbed at the place where the nettles had swiped him in the night.

  I let the door swing shut on its own weight. I went round to the back, muttering, ‘Jump leads, my father’s got everything in here, I’m sure there’ll be jump leads...’ I opened the door to the yawning space which had been his workshop and living-room and bedroom, clambered in and reached across the box of newspapers for the toolbox. When I lifted the lid, the leads uncoiled and sprang out, a black snake and a red one, as if they’d been waiting for me in the darkness. I was saying over my shoulder, ‘Is it possible to get your car down here, Juliet, and try to get this poor old thing started?’ and at the same time the snakes reminded me of how Lawrence had recoiled from the newspapers when he’d first peered into the car.

  I climbed out of the hearse. My eyes fell on the headlines at the top of the pile: a football match, a hat-trick in a cup final or something. I did a double-take and read the headline again.

  Before I could turn my thoughts into words, Lawrence butted in. ‘So are we up for this?’ My jumble of suspicions – the light I’d seen in the night, the boy’s off-hand remark about his sleeplessness, the car door ajar, and now the papers rearranged – my suspicions stayed jumbled. They were real, as real as the sting of a nettle... but they needed an itch to create a visible rash, needed a scratch to form the clear white blebs. Before I could ask Lawrence why he’d been in the car in the night, he’d said with an exaggerated boldness, ‘So, are we up for this? Can’t you hear them? Let’s get up there!’

  It was no good Juliet trying again to dissuade her son. High in the sky, above and around the very top of the Scots pine, the swifts were screaming. The boy wanted to climb to the tree-house, and he wanted me to go with him. He wanted the upper-hand, he wanted to exert some kind of authority over me, to give me the option of feebly declining the challenge or letting him take me where his dare-devil father had been, to the summit of the tallest tree in the woodland. The other day, in his room, I’d somehow diminished him, by overruling him on his own territory. So now he said, with a crowing self-confidence, ‘Mum, listen. He’s a teacher, he wants to teach me about the swifts. So what’s best? Sitting in my bedroom with a bird-book, reading and looking at the pictures and peeping out of the window with our binoculars? Or climbing into the sky, to be with the swifts, to be where the swifts live? What’s best?’ And turning to me, claiming the moment by tugging the jump-leads out of my hand, he said, ‘What’s best, Mr Teacher? What do you think?’

  He handed the jump-leads to his mother. ‘Of course I’m up for it,’ I said.

  IT WAS EASY at first. Despite my muzzy head, I was still fit from all my running and cycling on hot tropical afternoons. Lawrence swarmed up and up the tree and I followed, more slowly and deliberately. He was lighter, sinewy-strong, and he moved so easily through the dry black branches that he seemed to be dancing. I paused for breath and looked down. Juliet seemed a long way away, her face turned up, her mouth open and her eyes anxious. Beside her, the bulk of the car was a huge rounded boulder, dropped by a prehistoric glacier. I blew on my hands, which were burning from the coarseness of the bark, and I continued to climb.

  And my legs were shaking. I wasn’t afraid, exposed like a rock-climber on a slabby cliff; I was comfortable with the height because the darkness around me was like a cage, through which I couldn’t fall even if I lost my grip and slipped. But the pressure of notching my feet into smaller and smaller spaces as the branches thinned out had started my legs quivering. I pulled myself up with my arms and saw Lawrence up there, already adjusting his frame onto the spars of the tree-house.

  At last I clambered on board beside him... on board, because the tree-house was nothing more than the pieces of an old wooden pallet which had somehow been manhandled up and lashed onto the flimsy topmost branches... it felt like the debris of a shipwreck, a makeshift raft adrift on an ocean. I lugged myself onto it. I closed my eyes and hung on, to calm the thudding in my chest, and was alarmed when I opened my eyes again to see the vastness of the sky and feel the tree swaying.

  ‘You did alright.’ Lawrence was grinning at me. He was sitting cross-legged, quite at ease in his eyrie. I crouched beside him, and he must have seen my knuckles whiten as I gripped the knotted ropes which barely held the structure together. A little bit begrudgingly, he admitted, ‘You did alright, I didn’t think you’d make it...’ and, his idea of fun, he shook the thing with all his strength so that it creaked and groaned.

  The swifts. We were in their world. There were scores of them, and the sky was full of their screaming. They hurtled around us. They were black, like chips of jet, and they were breath-taking... the agility of their swerving, the rush and flicker of their wings, as though the air gave no resistance but was a vacuum through which they sped like fragments of pure energy.

  ‘A good idea?’ the boy said. ‘Ever given a lesson in a classroom like this before?’

/>   ‘It’s marvellous...’ I managed to say, ‘and the birds are marvellous...’ I found some more breath, despite the frailty of the bits and pieces I was hanging onto and the yawning space around me. ‘I’ve got a colony of them, swiftlets, maybe a hundred of them nesting under my house in Borneo... and there are millions, or maybe hundreds of thousands, in the limestone caves in the jungle...’

  He was looking sideways at me. ‘I was joking,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean you had to start doing a lesson up here.’

  ‘Devil birds...’ I went on perversely. ‘There’s a lot of spooky folklore about them... because they’re black, I suppose, and because they scream like mad, and because they fly so fast and so high and never seem to rest... in the old days people weren’t sure where they roosted, and they made up stories that the swifts could sleep and fly at the same time, and mate and fly at the same time, or else they...’

  The tree was swaying more and more. I squeezed my eyes shut again, opened them narrowly and saw through my lashes that we were higher than the boy’s tower. I rolled my head the other way and saw nothing but sky as far as a foam of cloud which might have been the North Sea horizon. I felt my stomach lurch and a bubble of nausea in my throat. Fighting it, swallowing it, determined to keep up a pretence of confidence, I heard myself muttering, ‘Tiny feet, almost nothing feet... their Latin name “apodidae” meaning “footless”... that’s the family name of the swifts and swiftlets...’

  Enough. I gingerly edged off the pallet and grappled with the tree again, to try and start climbing down. The boy was watching me, unwittingly impressed by a teacher so determined to impart his dried-up pellets of knowledge. With a show of youthful bravado, he stood up, just as I was slithering down, and he flapped his arms at the birds which dashed around his head. There seemed to be more of them, they mobbed him as if he were a trespasser in their space. Preoccupied with my own safety, finding it harder to climb down than it had been climbing up, I glimpsed him towering above me: an alien in the sky-world of the swifts, a lanky teenage boy in shorts and a smelly t-shirt. A bird banged into his face, and he swiped at it as though it were a wasp. For a second, by sheer chance he caught it in his fist, but then it squirmed out and away and tried to regain its control of the air... but one of its wings was damaged and it tumbled past me, down and down through the branches of the Scots pine, disappearing somewhere far below.

  ‘Be careful, Lawrence!’ I called to him. ‘Get down! Come on, I’m going down now...’

  Yes, it was harder. I couldn’t see my feet in the gloom. Time and again I lodged a foot between branch and trunk, and then my weight would either crunch my toes or the branch would sickeningly creak. Slowly, painfully, with the boy huffing impatiently just above my head, I got halfway down and paused. Daring as an ape, he skirted past me, and the smell of his stale shirt and adolescent sweat was strong in my nostrils. He swung easily downwards. My sickness had gone, it had been the movement of the treetop, like the swell of a lazy ocean, which had moved my stomach... but my hands were burning and my legs were jumping. Closer and closer to the ground, I glanced down to see the humped outline of the car and hear Juliet and Lawrence in a heated exchange. Just then, when she called up to me, ‘Are you alright, Christopher?’ and I called down, ‘Yes,’ my left foot was jammed against the trunk with all my weight excruciatingly on it. I tried to shift some of the pressure to my other foot...

  The branch I was holding snapped off. The one under my foot snapped off. For a split-second, there was a blissful relief from the pain... and then I was falling.

  My fall was slowed by one crunching impact after another, until I landed in a wreckage of branches and twigs and showering needles.

  Juliet knelt to me. I couldn’t speak. ‘Oh my god, are you alright?’ she was asking again, and I was nodding and heaving for breath. I was fine, I was fine, I wanted to tell her, because the boy was looming over me with a wolfish smile and his Adam’s apple bobbing, and he was chuckling a lot of hilarious nonsense about the wild man of Borneo and orang-utans and...

  I wasn’t completely fine. At first I’d felt nothing, because of the shock of my crash-landing. But when I tried to sit up, there was a dazzle, a blaze of white light in my head.

  I cried out, a high, almost animal yelp. The pain rippled through my chest and into my brain.

  THEY GOT ME up to the house. Lawrence tugged me upright, arranged my arm across his shoulder, and I hopped agonisingly beside him, through the woodland.

  Every hop was a torture. I’d turned an ankle... annoying, niggling... but it was the hurt in my chest which made me bite my lips and cry out again. Juliet said I’d cracked a rib; she’d heard, from other people who’d done it, that it was the most painful injury you could sustain. I didn’t need her to tell me. I could hardly breathe. The pain made me retch, and the pain of retching was worse.

  A bizarre procession, through the dappled sunlight of a lovely June morning...

  Me and the boy, conjoined, a wheezing, stumbling three-legged creature. A few paces behind us, a little light-footed woman, a kind of sprite or a faery huntress. And leading the way, the orange cat. It had emerged from the undergrowth as we’d started our journey from the Scots pine. Perfectly uninterested in what the ridiculous humans were doing, it had seen something much more fascinating. It had pounced on the disabled swift... pressed it firmly into the long grass and then caught it in its jaws. Now, with the bird in its mouth, the long black wings fluttering feebly, the cat was wonderfully exotic... a miniature tiger with a magnificent moustache.

  So Lawrence lugged me to the house and lowered me onto the sofa. He couldn’t wait to get away. He affected concern for his stricken tutor, but it wasn’t very convincing. I was going to snarl at him about the car and whether he’d been in it... but he did his shifty sloping-off, again. I saw him grab the cat and prise the bird from its fangs; the swift was still alive, the terrified creature, and the boy cupped it in his hands and disappeared upstairs. I was going to growl at Juliet, that I’d arrived intact at Chalke House a fortnight ago and now I’d got a car with a shattered windscreen and a flat battery and myself excruciatingly crippled... but she was ministering to me, plumping me into a pile of cushions. I lay back and sipped the air. I watched the quick, nimble movements of her fingers and saw the anxiety on her face.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Christopher, I’m so sorry...’ she was whispering. The sibilance reminded me of the way her voice had altered the previous evening, when we’d shared this very sofa and swigged the gin together. ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry...’ and although it was only mid-morning, I thought how good it might be to share a stiff drink right now with this dizzy, fragile woman. ‘I tried to put him off, you heard me trying to put him off, it was such a silly idea to go up the tree, but he’s so selfish and stubborn and a show-off...’ She was holding my hands in hers. She had dust in her lashes and pine needles in her hair and twiggy smudges on her face. ‘Like his father, just like his father, just selfish and stubborn and showing-off...’

  ‘Did he go into my car last night?’ My voice was feeble.

  The question stopped her dead. She said, ‘What?’ although she’d heard what I’d said.

  ‘I saw a light in the trees. I got up and looked out of the window, I saw a light in the trees and thought I was dreaming or it was fireflies or something...’ She let go of my hands. She was staring at me. I managed to wheeze a few more words. ‘I mean, what was he doing? What was the idea? To open the door and leave on the light and run down the battery so that...’

  ‘So that what?’ She pulled away from me and blinked, a bit too theatrically. ‘So your car couldn’t start and you’d be stuck here and couldn’t get away? Do you really think he’d do that to keep you here?’

  ‘Or was he looking for something? What? What was he looking for?’

  She stood up very suddenly. She did the squirrel thing, smearing the moss and dust into her face with the backs of her hands. ‘I know you don’t know him,’ she said. ‘How could you, afte
r just a few days here? Lawrence has dreams, he dreams of his father... and they’re more than just dreams, they’re a kind of unreality he’s created to help him forget the madness of his real world...’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘I’m sorry, Christopher, I’m sorry you’ve blundered into all this... and now this has happened and...’

  She spun away, out of the room.

  I lay back and stared at the ceiling. In my fall, my foot had caught in the branches and wrenched my ankle skew-whiff. Much worse, I might’ve cracked a rib. I lay as still as I could, breathing as shallowly as possible, and wondered at what the woman had said, the muddle of messages I’d got from her. Did she want me to stay and befriend her son, or was she sorry I’d come and she wanted me to go away? Was she angry with me, was I angry with her, were we angry with each other? The boy too, his moody sulky brooding, his explosion of anger, the glowering darkness in his manner... hard to explain, but it was more threatening than teenage truculence.

  I shifted my weight on the sofa, I suddenly felt as though the mounded cushions were a quagmire into which I was sinking... but when I moved, the pain in my chest dazzled in my brain. I clenched my teeth, relaxed and sank back... and when the pain stopped, my head cleared and I realised there were two things I really, pragmatically, needed to do.

  I extricated myself from the sofa, as desperate as a Dickensian convict drowning in a salt-marsh... no, not that bad, but I needed to get out and hobble through those French windows and into the wildness of the garden again. Because I was bursting to piss.

  Despite the pain, I had to reach the nearest nettle-bed and piss... the morning coffees and the residual bellyful of gin. I stumbled to the undergrowth and unzipped and the relief was so good it almost made me forget the muddle in my head and the bruising fall from the tree. The spray was a glorious rainbow. The steam was pungent, as rank as the macaque in my Borneo garden. The droplets were jewels on the hairy leaves of the nettles. I pissed for a minute, maybe more. Eyes closed, nostrils flaring, emptying my thoughts.