The Waking That Kills

by Stephen Gregory

  There was a huge full moon. And despite the growing storm, a clear sky. A single silvery-black cloud, like a ship which had broken her moorings, was dangerously adrift.

  Barefoot, only in my shorts and a shirt, I moved away from the house. It was marvellous to be among the trees as they shook and shuddered overhead. When I turned and looked back at the house, it was bright in the moonlight. Every feature of the tower and its battlements was etched into the sky. And then, when the cloud crossed the moon, a ripple of darkness passed over the house and was gone again... a living thing which had emerged from the forest, a slithering creature of the night.

  I paused by the pond. The water was strangely still. The moon was reflected in it, every blemish and pock, beautifully imperfect.

  The woodland roared around me. I went down to the car. The Scots pine bristled and creaked and groaned, but the car was unmoved. It was a rock, a ton of glacial granite. It had endured millennia of grinding through a river of ice, so a summer storm was nothing but a bit of noise. I opened the back of the car, climbed in and pulled the door shut. Just as the rain began.

  My own space again. The cosy warmth and the smells. And better for my bruised body, to lie flat on my back on the firmness of my father’s couch, instead of wallowing on the sofa. Yes, it was better, I could feel my spine and my ribs settling. I lay still and heard the first droplets of rain which found a way through the dense branches of the pine. There was a rumble of thunder... and suddenly, with a whoosh like an express train hurtling through a station, a mighty downpour which thrummed on the roof of the car.

  It brought with it a rattle of twigs. More than twigs, sometimes the thud of a bigger branch which the storm had loosened. I lay back and enjoyed it. I day-dreamed of a night I’d spent with my father, when I was little and he was a lithe, lanky man, and we’d parked in an orchard in Kent, the apples dropping from the trees and thumping on the roof of the Daimler. Amazing, now, to be lying in exactly this place, in this space, and hearing this sound. And then, such a flurry of rain and wind that the whole car shook. I day-dreamed of a night I’d spent with my father, when I was a teenager and he was a work-weary man, and we’d stopped in a field in Wales... and woken with a yell when the car was shaking as though a giant was turning it over. Only a cow, a big black and white cow scratching her backside on the back-side of the hearse.

  The wind was wild. The rain was heavier still. It came drenching through the trees, as though I’d camped under a waterfall. But the old car was weatherproof. It was warm inside. I wasn’t going to sleep, so I reached into my father’s tool-box and felt for his torch.

  A soft yellow beam, a circle of light on the velvety head-lining of the hearse. Again and again, it was me in this special space, where I’d spent so many days and nights of my youth. I made myself comfortable on the camp-bed with my father’s blanket, although a spasm of pain shot through my ribs when I moved too quickly, and I reached for the box of old newspapers.

  Not so old. My father had been working, or at least running the car and using it as a den, almost to the time he’d had his stroke. The torchlight was gentle on a blare of headlines: the triumphs and disasters of sportsmen and celebrities, their spectacular goals and shabby scandals. The beam faded, I shook the torch until it rallied a bit, and I dug deeper into the box. The paper I pulled out at random was last year’s, although somehow it had found itself near the bottom. The torchlight blinked, there was a second of darkness. I shook it harder, and the yellowy light flickered on a headline. Words jumped off the page. Atrocity. Blinded. Batik.

  The torch went off. At the same moment, the back door of the hearse flew open.

  The storm blasted in. Somebody – a brawling impact of arms and legs – tumbled in, and the wind slammed the door shut again.

  She was utterly breathless... sorry, sorry... and utterly drenched. She fell onto me in the pitchy dark. I felt her bare arms and legs and the splash of her hair, a shock of cold from a thin sodden shirt, and as she untangled herself... sorry, sorry... her breath was hot on my face.

  We recoiled from one another. I was hurt. An elbow or a knee had caught me square in the chest. Hissing with the pain, I hunched in one corner of the space and drew up my legs. I sensed the woman in the further corner, doing the same, withdrawing as far from me as she could. But the space was small. It steamed up, with the heat of her wet body and wet clothes. I could hear her shivering.

  ‘The storm woke me,’ she said at last, in a thin little voice. ‘I came downstairs and you weren’t there... I looked out and saw the light in your car...’

  I paused before answering. There were bewildering words in my head, left behind when the torch had failed. I said, ‘I couldn’t sleep. I came outside and down here. I was listening to the wind and the rain and reading last year’s news...’

  I heard her moving towards me. ‘Help me, will you?’ she whispered. ‘I can’t... I’m cold and it’s so wet it’s sticking to me...’

  I reached for her in the darkness. I pulled her shirt up and over her head. I took off my own shirt so she could dry herself with it, and then we lay together on the narrow bed, under my father’s old blanket.

  Chapter Eleven

  IN THE FIRST light of dawn, I was aware of her leaving. She slid away from me, thinking I was asleep, and I watched her wriggling into her shirt and working out how to undo and push open the heavy door at the back of the hearse. Probably she’d never tried to get out of a hearse before. But she managed it, she pushed with all her weight and slipped outside, and I heard her quick soft footsteps in the wet grass as she hurried away.

  It was the first time I’d seen her, that night. From the startling, explosive moment when she’d burst inside, until her furtive exit, it had been as dark as the grave. Really, not a glimmer of anything: the same blackness that the Daimler’s long-ago passengers had seen, screwed into their coffins and wafted to the cemetery or the flames of the crematorium.

  Juliet had made love to me, first of all with an almost animal urgency, and then again and again, with a lingering tenderness. Dark... more than dark... only the light of our imagination inside our heads.

  No. Twice, or maybe three times, there’d been a faraway flicker of lightning as the storm roared over and around us, and I’d seen her looming above me; a ghostly shape, her silvery skin, the gleam of her eyes or her mouth. And then the darkness again.

  She wouldn’t let me move. She bit my ear and her breath was hot, she told me I was wounded I was hurt I mustn’t move... she bit my lip and her mouth was hot, she told me I was hurt I was wounded I mustn’t move. I lay back and submitted to her healing. And I felt that she needed me.

  But no, she didn’t need me. In that impenetrable darkness, it wasn’t me she wanted. She whispered a name. Once, in a glimmer of lightning, she shouted a name. Not mine. All the time she was on me and I was in her, she was with someone else.

  In the first light of dawn I watched her leaving. I watched the wriggle of her body. I heard her, an elf, tip-toe through the dew.

  I WAITED UNTIL the light was better, before I reached for the newspapers. And then I hesitated. I was afraid of what I was going to read. I lay and waited longer than I needed to. And still I waited. I’d seen enough, before the torch went out, to make me sick of what I might read. And so I hid under the blanket. I pulled it over my head and closed my eyes. I smelled my body and I smelled the woman’s body on mine.

  At last I threw off the blanket and sat up. I rummaged among the newspapers. I read this, I read that, I crumpled them up and tossed them aside... I uncrumpled and re-read them, I screwed them into tighter and angrier fistfuls and flung them into a blizzard of paper. But the story I’d glimpsed in the night wasn’t there.

  A FEELING OF apprehension, almost a nausea in my stomach... I went slowly up the garden, barefoot, in my shirt and shorts, and wondered what we would talk about, what Juliet Lundy and I would say to one another when I appeared in the kitchen. Coffee and toast would be good. But it couldn’t be as s
imple as that, after yesterday and last night.

  Nothing was simple. I was bursting, and it should have been the easiest thing, without thinking for a fraction of a second, to pause beneath a tree on a beautiful summer’s morning and piss into the long grass. But where? The woodland was cleansed by the tremendous rains in the night. The oak and beech had had a work-out and a spring-clean, they’d shaken down a flutter of leaves and a litter of twigs and the whole world was sparkling fresh. So it wasn’t that easy, after the almost religious experience the boy had had in the nettles near the house, to just stop and do it.

  Ridiculous. The ridiculousness of it made me stop and huff. Back home, at night, after a few beers on my balcony, I just strolled down to the river... dangerous and exhilarating, to stand in the dense shadows of nippah, to stare into a gruesome tangle of mangrove roots, to piss for a long long minute and think of the crocodiles lurking nearby. Every few months a man or a child would be taken and drowned and eaten, not uncommon in the Baram river. But I was literally careless, the beer and just being in Borneo were a great source of bravado.

  Now, in a Lincolnshire garden, it was complicated. I was reluctant to piss in case I conjured the spirit of a lost airman, whose body was nibbled and gluey at the bottom of the North Sea.

  I pushed through the reed bed and pissed into the pond. So I left no trace, and there were no crocs to worry about. Only, far out in the middle, there was a slow, oily-green swirl on the surface, as though something big and old was moving in the darkness.

  Juliet was in the kitchen. She was wearing a faded, pale-blue cotton blouse and faded denim jeans. Her hair was still wet from the shower. She turned towards me, from where she was standing by the kettle, and we looked at one another for a silent moment until we both said, ‘Hi,’ at exactly the same time. She smiled at the chiming of our voices, a small smile, fragile with the hope that I would smile too. When I didn’t, she said, ‘Coffee? Toast?’ as if everything might be as simple as that.

  She gestured me to sit at the kitchen table. Strong coffee and home-made bread with butter and thick-cut marmalade. She remained standing, leaning against the counter where she’d boiled the kettle. When she bit into her toast, the butter ran onto her chin and she did a tiny squirmy giggle as she dabbed it with the back of her hand. ‘I’m so hungry,’ she said, ‘something’s made me so hungry.’ And I was hungry too. The nervousness in my stomach was still there, and another undeniable, disconcerting feeling which made my mouth go dry. I’d looked at her before, of course I had. In my first days at Chalke House I’d glanced at her throat and her neck and, in an oblique, abstracted way, imagined the small of her back. But now that I’d held her and touched her and tasted her and knew that I might do so again, something jumped inside me at the thought of it. Unsettling too, as I remembered how utterly invisible she’d been, in the coffin-darkness of the hearse.

  ‘Batik.’ The word sprang into my head. I said it without pausing to think.

  She stared at me over the rim of her coffee cup. She gulped and licked her lips and set the cup down on the counter.

  ‘A funny coincidence,’ I said. ‘Lawrence showed me what he’d done in school, and I was going to tell him I’d seen the kids in Borneo doing it too. And then, last night, I was reading those old newspapers in my Dad’s car and there it was. The word, I mean. A bit unusual. Batik.’

  She didn’t say anything. She raised her eyebrows and tried to smile, to show a polite interest in what I was saying. And then, giving up, she folded her arms across her chest and narrowed her eyes, as though daring me to go on.

  So I did. ‘Lawrence was showing me his batik and I thought it was good. But you didn’t seem so keen. I mean, like you didn’t want him to show it to me. Why’s that?’

  There was a timely distraction. We both glanced down at a gentle commotion on the floor.

  Gentle, commotion. The words wouldn’t usually work together, unless the agent concerned was a cat, whose speciality was a combination of stealth and violence. It was the orange cat, again, which had wrangled a pigeon bigger than itself into the tower bedroom, which had ambushed the grounded swift and borne it home for the boy to experiment on. Now, as if to defuse a difficult moment between its mistress and a nosey newcomer, the cat had overturned a laundry basket and was dragging Juliet’s wet shirt across the floor, the one she’d worn when she came to the hearse.

  ‘Bad puss...’ she hissed at it. She flapped with a tea-towel. The cat feinted from the blow and retreated under the table. One of its claws was snagged in the shirt, it couldn’t have let go if it tried, so it skulked in the shelter of the table legs and under my chair. When I bent and picked up the shirt and unhooked the cat’s claw from it, the animal swiped at my hand, a raking pass which didn’t break the skin, and at the same time, something else which must’ve been stuck inside the shirt dropped out.

  An odd sock? A handkerchief? The cat sprang onto it. It was a crumpled ball of newspaper.

  A perfect toy for the killer cat, something to menace and maul, to swat this way and that across the kitchen floor and chase and pounce on again. Each time Juliet bent to pick it up, the cat was too quick. It got there first and batted the ball of paper out of her reach.

  It could’ve looked like a game... a lissom woman and her tigerish pet playing in a sun-filled country kitchen. Until Juliet, lunging hopelessly for the third time where the cat had been, slung the tea-towel at it and said with tremendous force, ‘Fuck you, you fucking cat!’

  The ball of paper skidded to a halt against my bare foot and I bent to pick it up.

  ‘Give it to me,’ she said. She crossed the room and held out her hand, as if she were a schoolteacher and I were a naughty boy. ‘Give it to me.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I was starting to unfold the paper onto the table when Lawrence came in.

  Chapter Twelve

  LAWRENCE LUNDY. MY father had had trouble saying the words. Because of his stroke, he’d blurred them oddly in his mouth. He’d heard the name somewhere before, but it wouldn’t come back to him.

  And then at last it had. ‘Bad boy, bad boy...’ His face had twisted into a grimace of revulsion.

  Lawrence and Juliet Lundy stood over me, on either side of the table. They could both see what I’d got in front of me and knew what it was, they’d both tried to prevent me from seeing it. Now they stopped short of physically wresting the paper from me.

  ‘You would’ve found out sooner or later.’ It was the woman who spoke first. ‘To tell the truth, we were both surprised you hadn’t heard about it already. Of course I would’ve told you. We only thought to keep it back for a while because we weren’t sure you’d stay very long anyway.’ She said all this without looking at me, looking at her son as though the words would filter through him and then reach me. She glanced down at the paper. ‘Go ahead. And then me or Lawrence will try and make some sense out of it.’

  Lawrence had a sickly smile on his face. As usual he’d appeared in the kitchen unwashed and smelling of his bed. He must have thought I looked unusually tousled, unshaven and unshowered, in my bed-shirt and shorts. He wouldn’t know that I’d slept in the car and had just wandered in from the garden. In the same way that I got a waft of his sleepy body, he was inhaling the scent from me. Something in the smell of my shirt, my hair, something on my skin... as he watched me trying to open up the sheet of paper, he was leaning closer and more overpoweringly, invading my space.

  And sipping the air. Tasting it. When I glanced up and saw that odd little smile, I caught a glimpse of that ecstasy he’d experienced in the nettle-bed. It was a gleam of almost transcendental joy. A shiver ran through me. I saw him catch his mother’s eye and he mouthed the words at her, thinking I was too preoccupied to notice.

  ‘He’s here, Dad is here!’

  My smell. The fragrance of his mother’s body, on me. And I could hardly say, No, Lawrence, it’s me, it’s me you can smell, not the ghost of your father. He isn’t here, it’s a sunny summer’s mornin
g in your kitchen at home, there’s toast and marmalade and just you and me and your Mum and your pesky cat. No ghosts, alright? The smell is me, because me and your Mum had sex last night in the back of my car. Me, not your father!

  I couldn’t really say that. He was gleaming and glowing and towering over me, sniffing the air like a bloodhound.

  They watched me trying to undo the newspaper. It was difficult because it was wet. She’d grabbed it and squashed it into her shirt as she left the hearse, and in the kitchen she must have forgotten and slung the shirt into the laundry basket with the paper inside it. I prised it very gently open, like an archaeologist teasing the secrets from a manuscript discovered in a shipwreck.

  The Lincoln Gazette. Last October. Lawrence’s face, a mug-shot, nearly all of the front page of the paper. A zombie face. A shock of black hair, heavy black eyebrows, empty black eyes. His mouth a scar. Beneath the photo, simply the name. He looked dead. Hanged or drowned.

  BOY BLINDED BY BOILING WAX. ATROCITY IN SCHOOL BATIK LESSON.

  Lawrence Lundy, a student at Alford Secondary School, was taken into police custody yesterday afternoon and charged with assault. Lundy, 15, held two younger boys captive in the school’s art room and poured (continued on page 2)

  I tried to turn the page over, but it had already started to stick to the table. Sodden, it was breaking up. I may have spilled some marmalade, some butter or a slick of coffee... whatever it was, the paper was sticking and shearing, and when I tried to tear it off, the newsprint was a ghostly inverted reflection of its original self, back to front and...

  boiling wax onto their faces. Police were on the scene to rescue the boys and they were taken to St Mary’s Hospital. One of the boys, Toby Carroll, 12, was discharged the same evening. Simon Winton, 13, is still in hospital. There are fears he might...