I warily allowed him to examine the discolouring skin, as I’d imagined him doing when I was in the shower. This time there were no cryptic signs to be discovered, it wasn’t a challenge which might undo all the dreams he’d held so precious. He said to me, ‘I can see all the colours, you know. A lot of people, even the so-called experts who examined me, they think that if you’re colour-blind you see everything in black and white. It’s not like that at all. Look...’ And with the tip of the finger he’d jabbed me with, he touched the bruises with exquisite gentleness and whispered, ‘Orange... a kind of yellowy... this is red going to purple...’ and seemed to relish the words in his mouth like charms or spells.
He got most of the colours right. Yes, he could see them and identify them and even roll the words on his tongue with a thrill of pleasure. He could enjoy them as much as I could, as much as the boys in the art club could until he’d splashed boiling wax into their eyes. But he got some of the colours wrong. Enough to spoil everything.
The wind dropped. The model planes stopped knocking together and there was a stillness in the trees in the woodland. It was so sudden that a new sound crept into the room. It was coming from under the bed, yes, like a creeping or a creaking, or a scratching. I cocked my head at it. The boy saw me listening, and his voice was unnecessarily loud when he butted into the quietness, ‘you were saying about the swiftlets in Sarawak...’ and he was poking his finger at my shirt again, dangerously close to my bruises, ‘you said you’ve got a flock of them under your house, and...’
‘What’s that noise?’
‘I couldn’t find much in the books about them,’ he went on, ‘but you said you’d got lots at home in Borneo, and thousands of them, or was it millions? in the caves nearby...’
I hushed him sharply, and he stopped. I said, ‘Listen, you’ve got a mouse or something under your bed, Lawrence. It’d better watch out for your killer cat. Shall I take a look?’
He didn’t move. He seemed resigned to let me nose around, as if he couldn’t be bothered with what I might find or he was just humouring me. I knelt down and peered into the shadows: dust and cobwebs, and the empty cardboard boxes in which the model planes had been packed. I thought that a mouse or a rat or even a squirrel might skitter past me, as I pushed some of the boxes gently aside, but there was no movement, only that sound: a scratch and a flutter. A bad smell. And when I laid my palm flat on one of the boxes, a feeble vibration.
I slid the box out. A Phantom. I opened it and the swift was lying in a pool of droppings. At first, stunned by the light, it was perfectly still. It wasn’t even breathing. I thought that the shock of my opening the box might have killed it. But then it shuddered... hardly alive, it quivered its long black wings like a dying butterfly, in an effort to unstick its matted feathers from the glue of its own mess.
‘What are you doing, Lawrence?’ I said softly. ‘Why have you done this?’
I glanced around at him. He was agitated; he was sitting on the edge of his bed with both his hands inside his shirt, scratching with his nails as hard as he could, at his chest, his arms, his neck, at the blebs of the nettle stings.
‘I want to keep it,’ he said. ‘You let the other one go, the one that came into my room. I want to keep this one. I caught it in the sky, at the top of the tree. I saved it from the cat. I mended it and tried to make it fly again. It still can’t, but I’m keeping it and maybe it’ll fly one day...’
‘It’ll never fly again. This poor little thing will never fly again, Lawrence. For heaven’s sake, look what you’ve done to it!’
He’d removed the plastic strut which he’d stuck onto its broken wing, but the feathers were botched with the glue he’d used. As I lifted it out of the box, it scrabbled at my hands with its pathetic, vestigial feet. It rowed at the air with all the strength left in its wings. It blinked its eyes, but they were blobbed with mucus and the yellow-white mutes it had squirted into the darkness and smeared around.
‘It’s going to die, Lawrence. It is dying, inside this shitty coffin. For heaven’s sake, can’t you smell it?’
‘Give it to me.’ He stopped scratching himself, reached forward and flicked the bird off my hands, back into the box. ‘Give it to me. Of course I can smell it. Why do you think I’ve sprayed around?’
He took the box from me, closed the lid and slid it back under the bed. End of lesson.
Chapter Fourteen
I WOKE SO suddenly that I heard myself yelp. I didn’t know where I was. I was in a bed in a dark room, startled from sleep by a beam of light on the window.
For a few moments I was at home, in my stilted house in Borneo. I listened for the mosque. Not a sound. It must be too early, only two or three o’clock in the middle of the night. The room felt big and empty around me, a shadowy space, it was my room in my home, and outside the window lay a slumbering forest and a huge whispering river.
A light. The wandering beam of a torch. Someone was out there, in my garden. I froze and listened, for an intruder trying my door or scaling the stilts to reach my window. I sat up and swung my legs out of bed... and the reality of the room came back to me, because someone was in my bed and stirring and waking and mumbling.
‘What is it? Who?’ She sat up and reached for me in the darkness. ‘Are you there?’
She was naked in my bed in my room. She’d come to me at midnight, as she’d come to the car in a torrential storm – a woodland elf, invisible but sweetly tangible. And after she’d made love to me, we’d slept so profoundly that my dreams of Borneo and Lincolnshire were entwined.
Now the dreams were gone. We were both starkly awake. Her first touch on my back froze too, when she noticed the light. We held our breath and listened, heard nothing, as a round yellow beam stroked this way and that across the front of the house and faded away.
We went to the window and looked out. The boy was outside on the grass. He was a pale figure in nothing but shorts, a torch in one hand and something else, his binoculars on a loop around his neck. As he moved beneath the trees, his body washed by the moonlight and then hidden in shadow, he would pause as though lost in thought, and then turn again to the house and play the torchlight on it.
We instinctively flinched from it. As the beam slid towards us, Juliet took my arm and pulled me away from the window. We waited and we watched as the light fell into the room. For a moment it bathed the narrow, rumpled bed, and then it moved on and the room was dark again.
‘What’s he doing?’ she whispered. I felt her body on mine as she pressed me back to the window. ‘What’s he looking for?’
One more raking pass across the house, too quick for us to avoid it, and the torchlight flicked off. Strangely, it made it easier for us to see the boy. There was a big moon, dimly shrouded in clouds which seemed to cling around it like cobwebs. It gave a gentle, silvery-grey light, and the boy’s body was lean and lithe as he went through the woodland and down to the pond. There he stopped, and he peered with intense fascination at the surface of the water. No movement, not a bubble or a ripple disturbed the glassy darkness. He did a strange thing: he dipped to the ground and put down the torch, he straightened up and clapped his hands once, and a second and a third time. It echoed, sudden and alien in the softness of the summer’s night. When he stopped clapping and the only sound was the stirring of the branches all around him, he waved his arms slowly, dreamily, at the pond, as if he might catch the attention of some torpid creature and awaken it.
‘He’s looking for the birds,’ I said.
He bent again, and I thought he might pick up the torch to flash it across the water. But no, he started pulling clumps of weed and grass and tossing them onto the surface. They landed like thistledown. Looking for anything larger and heavier to throw, he drifted into a huge black shadow beneath an oak tree and emerged with an armful of twigs and sticks. He tossed them into the air. For a few moments, the surface of the water splattered and splashed. But then it was still again.
The boy stood as still
as stone, and he stared across the pond.
At last he bent and reached for the torch. Deliberately, with a solemn purpose, so that the glimmer of the pond might not distract him, he strode back into the shadow of the oak and he braced himself, his body like a strong white fork set into the earth, to aim the binoculars at the moon. He stayed like that, a statue of a young god, for a minute and another minute, long enough for me and Juliet to look away from him and see what he was seeing.
The cobwebby moon. Fogged with cloud, as though the night had breathed on it and then forgotten to polish it clean.
The boy swung the binoculars away from his face. Thinking that the dampness of the woodland was on his lenses, he breathed on them and rubbed them on the hem of his shorts. Again and again he huffed on the lenses and wiped them, and he aimed at the moon. No, no good. Far beyond his reach, a negligible cloud was thwarting his vision.
‘The birds?’ The woman’s voice was very small. It trembled with fear. ‘What do you mean, the birds?’
‘The swifts. He can’t find where they’re roosting. He’s looked around the house, under the eaves and the battlements of his tower, but they aren’t there. I’ve looked too and I don’t know, and now he’s...’
‘Now he’s what? What are you talking about? I mean, the pond? The moon? What’s he doing?’
We turned from the window and she tipped her anxious face up to mine. I hesitated. Our bodies were inches apart, but there was a silence between us. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t find words for the foolishness I’d told the boy, the stories of ignorance and superstition. Not then, as we stood naked in the darkness of my bedroom. I couldn’t tell her why her son was transfixed by the moon, like a medieval lunatic. And when we glanced outside again, the boy was gone.
‘Where is he?’ Fear in her voice. ‘Is he coming inside?’
I heard his footsteps as he padded through the living-room and into the hallway. Heard him pause down there. It was so quiet, as the two of us strangled our breath and strained to listen, that I thought I could hear the boy’s breathing as he came up the stairs. Juliet made for the door, and in a moment of panic she flitted across the landing into her own room.
Her door was wide open. Mine too. I heard a flurry as she dived into her bed. I crossed to my bed and slipped under the sheet, just as the boy reached the landing and stopped.
Yes, I could hear his breathing. And I could smell him. I knew, although my eyes were tightly closed and I was pretending to be asleep, that he’d come into my room and was leaning over my bed and his face was only an inch from mine. I could smell his breath. He was so close I could hear him licking his lips. I could smell the woodland on his body, the grasses he’d torn up, the bosky fragrance of the branches he’d held against his skin. I thought of surprising him by flicking my eyes open and shouting into his face, for no reason except to show him I was as awake and sentient as he was... but then I sensed him moving away and out of my door.
I let him go. When I heard him cross the landing and go into his parents’ room, I took a breath and followed.
I stood in the shadows and watched him. Something about his movements... I’d sensed something different when he was outside, a sleepy kind of stealth, almost a slow-motion in his actions. Not the torpor of the swifts, which they could achieve when at last they rested from their manic hurtling, but the rhythm of his breathing and every step he took was slower, as though he were moving in water or some kind of dream. He stood over his mother and stared at her.
He was huge, nude, a towering man. He bent to her, as I’d felt him bend to me, and he put his mouth so close to hers I thought he might kiss her. No, he was smelling her. He was tasting her in long, greedy inhalations. His face touched her hair, I saw her hair move in his breath. He smelled her skin, where her shoulder was out of the sheets, and his tongue flickered out and he licked her.
He padded across to the wardrobe, opened it and pressed his face into the clothes hanging there... his father’s shirts and trousers, his RAF uniform. Moving to the dressing table, he picked up a bottle of after-shave, sniffed it and put it down. He picked up a hairbrush, a man’s, and he teased at the bristles until he’d extracted a spool of hair. He put down the brush, rolled the hair into a ball in the palm of his hand, sniffed it as though it were a rare and precious drug, and then he blew it away into the darkness.
And then he crossed to his mother’s bed again. I felt a swooping in my stomach: fear of what he might do.
He knelt on the floor. He slid under the bed. He slid so far that only his legs stuck out, and he was rummaging for something, feeling for something, searching...
Quite bizarre.
Me, a teacher from Borneo, stark naked in a house in the Lincolnshire wolds.
My father, gaga in Grimsby.
A woman, who’d been fucking me like a ferret barely an hour ago, paralysed by fear and flashing me a terrified look through slitted eyes.
Her son, a gangly youth with a record of horrible violence and an inclination to believe in ghosts, under her bed with his legs sticking out.
The boy emerged. He came out with a book. He stood up and blew the dust off it. It was one of his father’s bird books.
He opened it there and then, standing tall and lean by his mother’s bed. He flicked on the torch, riffled the pages and played the yellow beam onto them. They threw fluttering shadows on the ceiling, like images from the first magical moments of motion pictures. And, ‘Where, where, where...?’ the boy whispered through dry, dusty lips.
It was then I realised... I realised why his movements outside, by the unresponsive pond and under the foggy, ineffable moon, had seemed so slow. He was asleep. He’d been asleep all the time.
I knew, because he came out of his mother’s bedroom and past me without a glance in my direction, although I’d made a clumsy, belated effort to withdraw from the landing. He paused, yes he paused for a moment and tasted the air. He inhaled and pursed his lips like a sommelier, and he felt at the empty space where I’d been standing, as though somebody was still there.
With the faintest smile on his mouth, he disappeared up the narrow little staircase to his tower.
Chapter Fifteen
‘SO THIS IS where you are. I wondered where you’d gone.’ Juliet’s voice surprised me. I turned round. She was standing in the late afternoon sun, dappled in green, a denizen of the forest clothed in a glimmer of holly. She threw her arm up to her face, because something was dazzling her. ‘And I can’t find Lawrence. I thought maybe you’d gone out together. Do you know where he is? What are you doing?’
I’d been down to the hearse for some of my father’s tools and then around to the back of the house. As surreptitiously as possible, I’d taken the mouldy tarpaulin off her car. First of all, I’d managed to open the driver’s door and ping the bonnet-release catch. I’d heaved up the bonnet and with some difficulty I’d removed the battery.
My mind had been a muddle of thoughts. About the woman and me... I marvelled at myself and the kind of person I must be, because in all my several relationships with girls and women since my teens, I’d never once been the pursuer, they’d always come to me, to my room, to my bed and slipped into it. About my ribs, which I’d thought were getting better, and the discomfort was easing... until I wrestled the battery out the car, and the weight of it sent such a stabbing pain through my body that I yelped and nearly dropped the wretched lump onto the ground. The dense cover of holly, bristling darkly behind the house, had given me a sense of privacy, a retreat from the woman and the boy and whatever he was up to. I thought I knew what Lawrence was doing: he was looking for the place where the swifts might roost at night. Why, I wasn’t sure, but it seemed a harmless enough project to occupy him, and even his loony rambles in the garden were hardly worrisome, compared with the damage he’d done in the real world.
That was the way my mind was muddling, when I’d hidden myself in the holly wood and pulled the tarpaulin off the car. But then the real world had jumped o
ut. Eye – an eye for an eye – daubed in blood.
I winced at the ugliness of it, and all the hatred that had gone into it. When I touched the red paint and felt the thickness of it, the way it had pooled and set, I could feel the anger. The mother of a blinded boy had lifted a full, heavy bucket and tipped it, pouring out her pain and bitterness. That was reality. Lawrence Lundy mooching in the garden was... well, nothing, he was just a mooching teenager, indulging a mood.
The bonnet was still wide open, a glaring slab of red. Juliet threw up her arm to shield her eyes from it.
I was holding the battery. The deadly weight of it was stretching my arms and tugging my ribs. I said feebly, ‘I want to start up the Daimler. It doesn’t mean I’m running away or anything. It’s my Dad’s car and the battery’s flat and so I owe it to him to try and fix it.’
‘I hear you,’ she said. ‘But I can’t see...’ She strode past me, reached to the bonnet and pulled it shut. There was a tremendous clang, probably the loudest noise the valley had heard since the glacier was grinding it out. It echoed through the trees. A volley of wood-pigeons erupted into the sky.
In the silence that followed, Juliet appraised the damage to her car as though it had just happened, as though she’d never seen it before. I mean, I watched her and I could imagine how she’d first discovered it, returning to the car with her shopping, on a bright autumn day in a busy high street or a town centre car-park. She stared, she stared longer, she looked closely and she cocked her head at the horridness of it. And then? What did she do? She did what anyone, even the burliest, bravest man would have done... sensing a murderous anger in the air, she glanced around with fear in her eyes, in case the person who had done it was still there.
I felt a surge of compassion for her. She was only a little green elf. The prickliness of the holly gleamed on her. She was so small, so alone, so wounded, so afraid. Looking at her and the way she flinched from the shadows, I was suddenly so moved that I dropped the battery with a thud and took her into my arms.
The Waking That Kills Page 10