And then the other thing. Never mind the conundrum of whether I should stay or not. I wasn’t going anywhere until I could jump-start the hearse or charge the flattened battery. Juliet had said there was a car at the back of the house. Hissing through my teeth, shaping obscenities on my lips, I went to look for it.
There it was, in a stand of holly. An ancient holly wood. The trees were centuries old. The boles were scarred like the limbs of a battle-weary warrior. An armoury of leaves enclosed and shadowed a car, swaddled in a mouldy green-brown tarpaulin.
It didn’t look promising. Juliet had said she didn’t go out much, indeed as seldom as possible. From the mossy-damp cover and the enveloping, almost submarine darkness, I guessed that, whatever it was, the car hadn’t been started for weeks.
I undid a knot of nylon rope under the back bumper and peeled the cover off the boot. Metallic-silver paintwork, the BMW logo... of course, she’d been a pilot’s wife, she was a pilot’s widow, of course she’d have something swish.
I peeled a bit more. The rear window was steamed up. Its careful covering with the tarpaulin wasn’t doing the car much good... it needed some air on it and in it, it needed starting and running and a snarly run into the sunshine.
I slithered off the whole of the tarpaulin, stood back and appraised the car.
Blood. A miscarriage. A horrid mess of red. There was a swirl of it on the roof and smeared down the windscreen, and the bonnet was a thick, congealed flow of deep, gleaming red paint. It was daubed on the roof, applied with ugly strokes of a big brush. On the bonnet, it had been poured straight from a tin or a bucket, luscious liquid runnels, dried into spools and whorls like lava from a volcano.
I tried the driver’s door. Locked. It was gloomy in the holly wood and so I leaned closer, to rest my weight and steady my breathing, and to see the extraordinary vandalism more closely.
On the roof... letters? Was it a word? I strained on tip-toe to try and make it out. Something like a big E and then... and then a voice behind me. Juliet’s voice.
‘Eye. I think that’s what it says. Like, an eye for an eye. That’s why we don’t go out.’
Not at all elfin, she was a wounded and embittered woman. She pushed past me. ‘I told you not to bother with the car,’ she snapped, and she started to tug the tarpaulin back on again. ‘I don’t cover it because I want to keep it nice. I cover it because it isn’t nice. I’m ashamed of it and I can’t go out in it, I’m ashamed to take it somewhere and get it fixed...’ She was struggling with the heavy material. ‘Help me. No, don’t help me, you’re hurt and you shouldn’t have come round here and...’
‘Who did it?’ I asked her. ‘What does it mean?’ A thought sprang into my head and out of my mouth before I could stop it. ‘Was it Lawrence?’
She just stared at me. Thinking she was pausing before an outburst of anger at what I’d suggested, I added quickly, ‘I’m sorry, no, it’s so ugly I’m sure he wouldn’t do that. But who? Why?’
She surprised me by smiling. But it was a twisted sneer of a smile. It was cruel and sad, and it carried the threat of something sarcastic that she was going to say.
‘Ugly? That’s funny. I mean, it’s funny you saying he wouldn’t do it because it’s ugly.’
Her shoulders started to shake. She was laughing and crying at the same time. She touched the crude letters, the word daubed red onto silver. Through a mumble of tears, she said, ‘He can do ugly. This is nothing, this is nothing but a bit of paint on a stupid...’
She yanked with all her strength on the tarpaulin, and the effort stopped her crying. She covered the car. No longer a lean machine with a cryptic message botched onto it; just a mound of mottled green and brown moss, under a prickle of holly. When it was done, she took an enormous, quivering breath, smeared her hands up and down the front of her shirt and dabbed at her eyes. She sniffed and sniffed and, like a child, she wiped her nose on her sleeve.
‘Alright, let me help you now,’ she said. ‘Hold onto me, please, I want you to. And let me hold onto you. Please, I want to.’
She slipped an arm around my waist and I slipped my arm around hers. She seemed even tinier, with her body scrunched against mine. I didn’t feel I could lean any of my weight on her. But I was hurt, and she was hurting, and we helped one another around to the front of the house.
JULIET REARRANGED ME onto the sofa. I submitted to her. The cushions sucked me down again and somehow seemed to be absorbing the pain from my chest. She brought me a glass of water and a couple of paracetamol. When I closed my eyes and slipped into a shallow sleep, I dreamed of the swiftlets back home in Borneo.
THE MIDDLE OF the night, before the earliest cries of the mosque. Pitch darkness in my bedroom. Something had disturbed me, and I’d stared at the ceiling wondering why I’d woken. Then I’d realised that the power was off. No overhead fan. I was hot. I was naked, flat on my back, I’d pushed back the single sheet I usually slept under. The slowing and stopping of the fan had woken me. The stillness. The silence. The fuggy heat of a tropical night.
This was all in my dream, a dream of something that happened frequently out there: a power-cut in the night. I felt for the torch I kept at my bedside, flicked it on, got off the bed and padded through the living-room, opened the door and went down the stairs to the black empty space beneath the house.
The swiftlets erupted from their nests as I flashed the torch ahead of me. Hundreds of them. They’d stuck their flimsy cups of grass and saliva into every corner of the stilts and the beams which supported the house. Now, aroused from their roosting and confused by the wavering light, they spun off their nests and dashed madly around me.
I was naked. I felt the birds fluttering at my body. They were screaming, a hundred or two or three hundred blinded and bewildered birds, battering around my head, beating at the focus of light. Trying to ignore them, trying not to react by swatting at them with my free hand, I pressed onwards through the whirling mob...
Found the aluminium stepladder. Propped it against the wall. Aimed the torch up into the high corner and wobbled up the ladder to the fuse-cupboard.
It had happened in reality... and now, in my dream, it happened again. One of the birds slammed so hard into the torch that the light went out. For a second, as befuddled by the sudden darkness as they’d been bedazzled by the torch, the birds seemed to cling and stick onto me. I felt them all over my clammy hot skin; their mole-furry feathers between my legs, their spindly-sharp wings under my arms, and scratting with their tiny claws at my face. I slipped off the ladder and crashed onto the ground.
The pain unmanned me. I heard myself squeal like a piglet. At the very same moment, as if my squeal had woken him, the man in the mosque began his dismal, dreary droning. I lay still. I didn’t dare move. The swiftlets fell calm and returned to their nests. The sky lightened, imperceptibly at first, and then quickly, until the silhouettes of the coconut palms and banana in my compound took shape. When at last I tried to sit up, I squealed again...
SO SHRILL THAT I woke myself up. And found myself lying, in exquisite agony, on a muddle of cushions in the living-room in Chalke House.
I gritted my teeth. I tried not to breathe too hard. I squinted into the light from the surrounding woodland. Something fell past the window. Like a rag, or an old glove... the boy must’ve dropped it from the balcony of his tower.
Hearing his footsteps clattering downstairs, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I felt the wind of his body as he burst through the room and past me and into the garden. And his mother. She’d heard the boy and followed to see what he was up to. I kept my eyes shut, but I knew she’d paused and bent close to me because I caught the scent of coffee from her mouth, and then she was gone.
Intrigued, I forced myself to sit up. The cushions were a trap from which I struggled to escape. A quick exchange of voices... I looked out in time to see the boy bending into the long grasses, searching for whatever it was he’d lost from high in the tower. I guessed that it was the
swift he’d launched into space. Yes, he plucked it out of the grass, a bent and broken thing he was showing to his mother for a few moments before he folded it and pushed it inside his shirt. And then he was remonstrating with her, leaning over and jutting his jaw into her face, his voice unnecessarily loud... that he’d fixed it, he could fix it, he was good at fixing things. I would have hurried out to intervene, but every breath I took was like a blade in my side.
What happened next was oddly balletic. I mean, it was mannered, a scene from an absurd, modernistic play. The boy stopped his bullying. It just stopped as though a switch had been thrown. He stood, transfixed by something, entranced by something... yes, it sounds quaint and otherworldly, but he was enthralled. For a long moment he stared over his mother’s head, and she stared up at him; it was, yes, like some kind of tableau, their movements slowed to nothing. He was holding his breath. And then he opened his mouth and inhaled, tasting the air with his lips and his tongue. His nostrils flared. He was scenting the air, like a dog.
When he moved, it was with a curious, graceful momentum. An expression of intense rapture on his face, he glided away from her, lost in a trance. He crossed the tousled lawn and dived straight into the nearest, densest nettle-bed. With a whoop of excitement, he thrust his hands and bare arms and his face into the stinging leaves. When he turned and looked back at his mother, he was blotched and reddened, a rash of welts, and his face was alive with a visionary joy.
‘I did it! It worked! Mum, I did it!’
He tore off his shirt and threw it away. Holding the swift in one hand, he turned again into the nettles and deliberately swiped their hairy leaves across his chest and his neck. He grasped them and snuffled them with his nose. He inhaled the pungency of piss, he smeared the droplets which sparkled and splashed on his skin.
‘I fixed the bird and I made it fly again... and I made a wish and it worked! He’s back! Dad’s come back!’
His mother cried out to him, her face contorted with a fear of his madness. She was paralysed, unable to cross the lawn either to confront or comfort him. ‘It didn’t fly, it didn’t! He won’t come back, he can’t!’
But her voice was too feeble for him to hear.
Chapter Ten
ODD TO THINK how differently the rest of that summer might have turned out if I hadn’t pissed into the nettles. Or, on the other hand, if I’d spoken out from my bed of pain, as they’d both come harum-scarum back into the living-room, and I’d scotched his fantasy by saying, ‘No, Lawrence, it was me, it was me, I pissed into the nettles...’
But I had, and I didn’t. I pretended to be waking from an agonised sleep, that I’d heard a bit of a ruction outside but didn’t know what on earth was going on. I pretended I was surprised to see the woman so shaken and bleary with tears and the half-naked boy in a state of garbling euphoria. I was going to say, ‘It was me...’ but I didn’t. Why not? A ridiculous sense of embarrassment, that I’d done such a thing in a stranger’s garden? A reluctance to affront the fragile woman? The fear that I might further enflame the volatile boy? Whatever the reason, something constrained me from uttering a few simple, explanatory words. And a minute later, as they passed noisily through the living-room and disappeared, still wrangling in tremendous excitement, the moment to speak out had passed.
More moments passed. The day passed.
From time to time, Juliet and the boy came into the living-room to offer me or to show me things. The woman brought more water and paracetamol, and at midday a messy omelette and an untidy salad; tea in the afternoon and a little table strewn with out-of-date country-living magazines; as the light was fading, she did one of her lightweight gin and tonics, and then another which I persuaded her to make Borneo-style; and later, when the room was dark, with a hawk-moth butting and blundering at the lamp in the corner, she brought me a ham sandwich. But she hardly stopped to talk. She flitted, almost as flittery as the moth. All through the day, since the manic morning of tree-climbing and falling, the revelation of the car, the boy in ecstasy in the nettles, she’d thoroughly avoided talking to me. She’d come and gone and looked after me, but clearly she didn’t want to be ensnared in more than a polite, perfunctory conversation. I’d thought that the second gin might have loosened her up... but, although the one she gave me was so strong I could see its oily-blue swirls when I held it to the lamplight, I think she’d made hers weaker again. She didn’t want any difficult questions, about her, or her husband, or the car or the boy. So I didn’t ask any.
What did the boy bring me? Three things.
In the morning, not long after I’d been well and truly abandoned into the depths of the sofa and he’d gone whooping up into his tower, he came down to show me something he’d fixed. It was the model of the Phantom he’d smashed in a fit of rage, when I’d trespassed onto the taboo of his colour-blindness. He’d made a splendid job of it. It was meticulously repaired. Every detail looked perfect. All his own work. He seemed, in his swaggering, self-satisfied manner, as proud of the fact that he’d smashed the plane as the care he’d taken in mending it, as though it was his prerogative, it was in his power to destroy and then rebuild. I dutifully admired his handiwork. I could see his clumsy fingerprint-smudges in the glue he’d used, but I didn’t point them out.
In the afternoon he came down again. He’d changed into another shirt and a pair of jeans, no doubt encouraged by his mother, but he hadn’t showered. I could still smell the urine on his skin. For a bizarre millisecond I thought it was the moment to tell him, to blurt out that the piss he was wearing like an expensive cologne was mine. I didn’t. He’d brought me something else he’d fixed. Yes, it was the swift. He proffered it to me in his cupped hands, as though he’d mined some extraordinarily precious metals, fused them into an alloy the world had never seen before, and worked it into a miraculous piece of art...
It was indeed miraculous, but none of the miracle was of the boy’s creation. A tiny broken creature, just about alive, it lay panting on his open palms... no, not panting, because that word implies a force, a rhythm, an energy. The bird was, I thought, taking its last breaths. Utterly feeble, it was unutterably beautiful. So dark and mysterious; a fragment of life so far away from me, so distant from the boy, that it might have been an alien from another galaxy. Lawrence was proud of what he’d done: he’d mended the broken wing by super-gluing a piece of plastic onto it.
I started to say to him, ‘Look, Lawrence, you can’t just glue everything, you can’t just break things and glue them together again...’ But he was cock-a-hoop. It would live. He had rescued it from the jaws of the orange cat, he had sallied it from his tower on a risky but necessary test-flight, and now he had repaired it. It would live.
I braced myself the third time he came in. But it was a truly delicate and lovely thing he’d made. ‘I did this at school,’ he said, and he knelt by the sofa, where I was still lying and breathing gingerly. He cleared away the magazines from the table and unrolled a piece of material. On it there was a representation I recognised immediately: the Scots pine, seen from his tower, silhouetted against a velvet-blue night-sky with a huge silvery moon, its outline reflected in the deep black pond. ‘Batik,’ he said. ‘I did it in the art room at school. It was the only thing I liked doing there. You know batik? You do the design, you boil up the wax, you...’
Yes, I knew batik. The students in my school did it. Hot wax, boiling wax in a precarious pot. I was saying, ‘This is great, Lawrence, the design and the vision and the execution...’
He smiled at that last word, as if I’d hit a nerve, as if, by accident, I’d pinged a harmonic and a forgotten note was humming in his brain... and just then, before he could respond to the genuine compliment I’d paid him, his mother had come in. She did an odder thing than the accidental note I’d struck. Seeing what Lawrence was showing me, she hurried forward. She snatched the batik off the table. She crumpled it up in a careless bundle, as though it was nothing more than an old newspaper. And, ‘For heaven’s sake, Lawrenc
e!’ she spat at him, ‘what do you think you’re doing? Don’t you think? Don’t you think?’
And the two of them went out of the room again, in a caterwauling confusion. Leaving me confused.
It was just one of the things I didn’t mention to Juliet... later in the evening and into the night, when we were sipping our gin and eating our sandwiches, watching the hawk-moth butting and blundering in the lamp-lit corner.
I COULDN’T SLEEP. I’d been too long on the sofa, all day dozing off and waking in pain, dozing through the afternoon. Juliet, when she was ready for bed, insisted that I stayed where I was. She didn’t think it was a good idea for me to hike up to my own room, she thought I’d cracked a rib and going upstairs would be bad for me. She was very firm about it. She brought me a toothbrush and towel and let me go as far as the bathroom just off the hallway before making sure I was plopped onto the sofa again.
I lay awake and listened to the wind in the trees. It started as a whisper, became louder and busier, until all the woodland was stirring and swaying. I manoeuvred myself up and onto my feet and went outside, into a roiling commotion.
I was glad. The days and nights before, in the little lost world of Chalke House, had been so still and quiet. Not now. There was no sleep in the trees that night, no restive dreams, no cobwebby corners or shadowy secrets. The beech and the chestnut and the oak and the hornbeam, slumbering deep in the wolds, had had enough of the stillness. Now they thrust their heads up and out into the big skies of Lincolnshire... to taste a bigger night, to smell some cooler air and even a tang of salt from the distant sea...
The Waking That Kills Page 7