A spectacle, not on the scale of prehistoric Borneo, but lovely in Lincolnshire.
As the light faded on the wooded valley of Chalke House, the swifts came into the greenhouse. Hundreds of them. And the boy would crouch inside, waiting, listening, and when the birds came in through the broken panes with a rush and a rustle of their wonderful wings, he was ready with his torch.
‘Lawrence?’ No reply. ‘Are you there, Lawrence?’
I felt my way gingerly over the uneven brickwork underfoot, felt the bristle of nettles on my hands and arms as I pushed my way in. There was his torch. I saw, in the yellowy light which spilled from it, his packet of sandwiches untouched and the unopened flask. No boy, although the place in the cow-parsley where he would crouch and hide was flattened to the shape of his body.
I’d watched the spectacle with him. Crepuscular, gloaming, twilight... the words were lovely, and in England on a midsummer’s night the reality was lovely too. Just as the light was fading, to be lying in a bower of elder and bramble, with the shrew and the toad and a shiver of moths... to lie back and watch the darkness of dusk through the mossy windows of a derelict greenhouse... no sound until the swifts came furtling, hustling and snuggling in. And then to catch them, to hold them, to play them in the beam of the torch.
This time, no boy. ‘Lawrence? Where are you?’
The birds were in. I could hear them in the spaces above me. Their black velvet-furry bodies. Their mole-furriness. The rafters above me were rustling and whispering, alive with the roosting of the swifts. They were clinging to their gobbets of nests. They were snuggling together, folding their wings after all the hours of flying, steadying their breath after lungfuls of screaming, fidgeting away the last of their frenetic energy until they might sleep. To achieve a release, a torpor. I could hear them. I could smell their dust, and the breath of their whiskery mouths.
But no boy. ‘Oh shit, what are you doing, Lawrence, are you there?’ Not sure why, I felt sick in my stomach.
His torch was pointing where the rafters were crawling with birds. I moved to the torch and picked it up and waved its beam around me. ‘Lawrence? Are you there? Oh shit Lawrence where are you?’
He was up there, hanging. I shook the torch, its feeble yellow beam.
Juliet would be watching from the tower. We’d watched from there together, and it was lovely to stand on the boy’s battlements and see the greenhouse down in the woods, to see the torchlight sweeping this way and that and know what the boy was doing, that he was safe and cosseted in his faery-world of the birds and the moles and the voles and the moths... safe, albeit in his own otherworld, his abstract unreality. We’d watched together, myself uncomfortably disinterested, Juliet sick with worry for the boy, but feeling that, at least for the time being, he was safe from harm or from self-harm.
It was our secret, private son-et-lumiere. The light was the rhythmic movement of the torch inside the derelict building, soft on the mossy panes and sparkling where the panes were broken. And the sound – the fox and the owl, and sometimes, unnecessarily beautiful, the song of a blackbird in the dead of night.
I looked up. He was hanging. ‘Oh shit no Lawrence what...?’
For a terrible second, my stomach lurched. Worse than nausea. Fear in my bowels, loosening them.
He was at the top of the vine, where it had snaked the length of the building and was prising open the very timbers of the roof. His face was turned up, away from me, and his body was dangling.
‘Lawrence... what the fuck...?’
The torchlight faded from yellow to a wash of pale-silver. For another second, as I craned my head so hard my neck was aching, all I could make out was his bare legs swinging in mid-air, the bare skin of his belly where his t-shirt rode up, and the whiteness of his throat, stretched.
Fuck! I banged the torch into the palm of my hand fuck it was bright again. His face swivelled down to me.
‘Hey Chris, this is amazing... can you get up here? And bring the torch?’
So I scrambled, somehow, up the vine. It would have been easy, but my ribs seemed to grind together with every tug of my arms on the sinuous branches. I couldn’t speak when I made it close to the rafters. Lawrence’s face hung close to mine. With the sinewy athleticism of youth, he swung from beam to beam like a lemur. Yes, he’d been hanging, from his fingertips, as he communed with the rustling, roosting swifts.
I clung to the vine. He steadied himself next to me, took the torch from me and stroked its beam fondly among the birds. They were crawling around his head, he nuzzled his face among them. He was lit with a strange glow of joy. His eyes were wild, he gleamed with sweat, his smile was wet. His lips and his chin gleamed with saliva, and wisps of feathers and dust had stuck there.
‘My birds...’ he was murmuring, although his voice was lost in the furry friction of their bodies. ‘My birds, my sky, my space...’
The sibilance was a part of the rustling. For me, the words had no meaning, they were a whisper from the secret shadows of his mind – a puzzle, a poem, a prayer?
I slithered down the vine. He was still up there as I slipped away and out of the greenhouse. My head was troubled by what I’d seen, and tormented by what I’d thought I’d seen.
Not all of the swifts were in the greenhouse with Lawrence Lundy. As I moved through the midnight garden, I paused and looked up at the moon; a gleam of white satin, dappled with grey, where millions of swifts from all over the world were clinging with their tiny, negligible feet. Again I paused, and I heard a swirl and a splash... where a few stragglers, too exhausted to fly to the moon, were seeking their rest in the deep dark mud of the pond.
Juliet was already downstairs in the living-room as I entered through the French windows. ‘I was watching the light and it looked lovely,’ she said. ‘Is Lawrence alright?’
Although her voice was bright, she looked so brittle that the slightest jarring word might break her into little pieces. She had no idea what I’d seen down there, or the horror I’d imagined. She was trying to look nonchalant, but she came towards me with a terrible pleading in her eyes. To make sure she got the answer she wanted, she pressed me with the two things she thought might soothe me.
A big, swirly gin and tonic... she touched my cheek with the glass, an icy kiss. And she moved her body against mine. I hesitated for a moment and answered. ‘Yes, he’s alright.’
Chapter Seventeen
WHEN I AWOKE the following morning the house was unusually quiet. It felt empty, as though I were the only human being alive and breathing in it. Outside my window the trees were still. The birdsong seemed faint and faraway. The world was muffled in a cotton-wool silence.
Juliet hadn’t come to me in the night. After our drink together, we’d stood outside and watched the torchlight flickering far down the garden, inside the neglected greenhouse. It was probably one o’clock in the morning. She was worried because it was so late and suggested we might go and tell Lawrence to give it a rest and come in; but I’d tried to comfort her by saying he would stop when he’d had enough and get himself to bed. The truth was, I thought she was too fragile to see him as I’d seen him, like a person possessed in some kind of horror movie, crawling on the ceiling with a spittle of regurgitated insects stuck around his mouth. But just then, as we’d been dithering about what to do, the torchlight had clicked off. The pale figure of the boy was moving through the trees and towards the house. Good. We’d slipped indoors before he reached us. Before he came in through the French windows, we were up on the landing, she’d gone into her bedroom and I’d gone into mine.
No, Juliet didn’t come to my room that night. I’d heard the boy moving around downstairs, closing the windows and switching off the lamp, and then he’d come softly upstairs and continued up to his tower. I must have fallen asleep, so tired that I hadn’t washed or brushed my teeth or even taken off my shirt and pants. Sometime later, I’d woken with a start, and with a dry mouth and a stirring of desire in my belly. The woman was standing at
my door. She was perfectly still, and the cast of the moon showed her nakedness beneath a thin white slip. She seemed to be watching me, perhaps thinking I was still asleep. And when I licked my lips and whispered, ‘Juliet... are you coming, Juliet?’ she was gone. I heard the creak of her footsteps as she went upstairs to the tower.
A breathless morning. I got out of bed, crossed the landing and looked into her room. The bed was empty. I tiptoed upstairs so gently that a mouse might’ve made more sound on the ancient floorboards, and the powdering of chalk-dust as it puthered around me. At the top, the door was ajar and I peered inside.
A sweetly slumbering room. Windows wide open on a summer’s morning. The squadron of model planes hung motionless. The orange cat was asleep on the foot of the bed. Juliet and Lawrence were sleeping too, her hair fluttering in his breath, like fairy-tale children in an enchanted castle.
The cat stirred and stretched, arching so hard that it quivered the bed. I moved down the stairs and heard behind me the mumbles and movement of awakening.
Yes, the whole house was comfortably dusty, every inch of everything touched with dust as soft as talcum, but the phone in the living-room looked as though it hadn’t been used for weeks or months. It was furry with cobwebs, and the chalk was a whisper of whiteness on it, as though a wizard had sworn it to silence. Even when I blew on it, and then puffed as hard as I could, the dust stayed stubbornly where it was. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. The phone was dead.
No mystery. It hadn’t been cut off in some gothic thunderstorm. The wires hadn’t been sliced by an axe-murderer. Someone had simply pulled the plug out of the socket. So I pushed it back in, expecting nothing more than the purr of the dialling-tone in my ear.
A blink of orange lights. And a voice. A message on the speaker-phone.
A horrid voice, snarling and ranting. A guttural torrent of words. A woman, barely human... you fucking bitch and your mad fucking bastard boy you can fucking rot in hell the both of you and if you ever come out of your fucking madhouse I’ll tear your fucking eyes out you fucking bitch and your mad...
I tried to stop it. It was loud and ugly and unstoppable. I jabbed randomly at the blinking lights – fucking eyes out you fucking bitch and your fucking bastard son – but then there was a flurry of bare feet and a couple of bare arms shoved me out of the way, and Juliet was yanking at the plug... I’ll fucking tear your fucking eyes out you mad fucking bitch... until she pulled it out of the socket again.
She stood over me, panting, white with anger. ‘What are you playing at? Why can’t you just...? I mean, the car, the phone, why can’t you just...’
‘Just what?’ I tried to be calm, in the face of her glaring and blustering. ‘Hey, Juliet, I’m sorry I’m just trying the phone alright? I checked out your car because someone flattened the battery on mine... hey it doesn’t matter that you just watched and said nothing while I lugged your battery down there and you knew all the time it was dead, but, hey, I’m sorry, now I’m just trying the phone to try and...’
‘Try and what? Try and what?’ She took a very deep breath and stood away from me. ‘I’m sorry, no I’m sorry, of course you want to...’ She moved to the French windows, opened them and gulped at the morning air to calm herself down. ‘I’m sorry, I was in the kitchen, I heard the voice, I only heard it once before and I pulled out the phone and I’ve been too frightened to use it ever since.’
I crossed to her and folded my arms around her. She was trembling, as though she might quiver herself to death. Leveret. For a split-second I recalled, so vividly that the name came to me, a churchyard in Sixpenny Handley, my Dad working, and me surprising a buzzard amongst the overgrown gravestones... how clumsily it flapped away, how I picked up the leveret it had had in its talons, and how it was trembling, as though its little heart would burst. I held her close. I could smell the boy’s body on her, his breath in her hair. ‘Hey Juliet, it’s alright... I heard it, I heard it by accident and it’s horrible... I understand why you’re afraid, why you’re so upset...’
She clung to me. My hands went to a favourite place, the sweet hollow in the small of her back, and I pressed her even closer. For a mad moment I thought of taking her, manfully carrying her, to the cool grasses of the woodland or even the rough, dry blankets in the back of the hearse.
But we heard the boy on the stairs. I let her go, she let me go.
‘Maybe we don’t need the phone,’ I said, before he came into the room. ‘Is it far to the village? Is there a shop? I mean, I’ll take a walk and get bread and milk and stuff.’ I lifted her face to mine, made mine as theatrically portentous as I could, and added, ‘More important than food, we need gin.’
Chapter Eighteen
NO GIN. I got port.
‘Any port in a storm,’ I said, and it wasn’t very funny except that we’d nearly emptied the first bottle and we were ready to giggle at anything.
It was late again, dark, so it must have been after ten o’clock, and we were sunk into that sofa, the most ensnaring, all-consuming, carnivorous pitcher plant of all sofas. Lawrence had, to give him the credit he deserved, cooked us the sausages I’d brought back. He’d burnt them, yes, but then he’d squashed them between slices of white bread and smothered them with ketchup so we’d had to admit, a bit begrudgingly because they looked such a messy burnt-offering, that they tasted delicious. Another slosh of port, and the sausage sandwiches could’ve been Cordon Bleu from the Savoy.
I’d tried to make my account of the day’s expedition as light as possible. I told her how, after striding out of the driveway of Chalke House, I’d laboured up the wooded hillside for what seemed like an interminable hour, my ribs twingeing with every step. I’d spouted to Juliet, as we rolled the port in our mouths and snuggled deeper into the cushions, that the walk was nothing really, nothing compared to the slog to the summit of Mount Kinabalu in Sabah or the trek through the Bario Highlands of Sarawak and the breathtaking scramble to the pinnacles at Mulu... except that the climb up a gently dappled Lincolnshire lane had almost knocked me out, and every breath I’d taken was a lancing pain in my chest.
At last I’d emerged into the fresh open sunlight of the wolds, the first time I’d felt it on my face since the day I’d arrived at Chalke House and rolled the Daimler into the shadow of the Scots pine. Another half hour and I’d come to a village. With a shop. And it made – I was saying to Juliet, and I saw how the port had smudged her lips and her teeth and her tongue was a darker pink like some kind of luscious sea anemone – it made some of the seediest kampongs along the Baram river look rather salubrious. That was the word I used, and I tried it again because it rolled very nicely on my own, undoubtedly pink and luscious tongue. Not a salubrious village.
There was some kind of garage or workshop, next to a duckpond. It was a muddle of sheds, collapsed together in the kind of accretion achieved by submerged shipwrecks: rusting corrugated-iron colonised by masses of parasitic growth, in this case, a plague of purple fireweed. I shouted hello, and a man appeared. He was so oily and squat that it was impossible to approximate his age more accurately than to say he might have been thirty or seventy, clad in a filthy string vest and brown corduroy trousers held up by a length of rope. He was hawking into a rag and then wiping his hands with it. He’d emerged from beneath an indeterminate car from a not-so-bygone age – a Hillman or a Humber, not-so-long-ago defunct but utterly nondescript except to the saddest of enthusiasts.
I was going to ask him if he might ‘come out’ to Chalke House and get the Daimler started, but it looked to me, from the way he swiped at his hands with the rag and swatted at his mouth with it, that surfacing from under the Hillman-Humber thing was about as far as he might ever come. And in any case, an ancient, spavined, one-eyed bullmastiff was lumbering along beside him and growling, so I smiled and waved and retreated hurriedly.
The village? A clutter of post-war pre-fab bungalows. The shop? I described it to Juliet. I didn’t suppose she’d ever been there, she
would have swished by in the silver BMW and onwards to the supermarket in Alford. The shop had many shelves, most of them empty. Gin? The little girl behind the counter, looking after ‘business’ for her Daddy who’d gone out, didn’t know what it was. She had toilet rolls. She had processed cheese. She had a bit of bacon and the sausages in the freezer. And port, from South Africa. I’d bundled it all into the rucksack I’d brought with me and come clanking out of the shop, the bottles digging uncomfortably into my spine.
Juliet had found my account quite picturesque. Alright, so I’d embellished the garage and the shop a little bit, the mechanic and his dog, and the bareness of the shelves in the shop, which compared unfavourably with the wondrous accumulation of bits and pieces to be found in even the shabbiest kedai in the kampongs of Marudi. I poured us another glass of the cooking-port. Lawrence had gone up to his tower, deciding to give the roosting swifts a rest from his intrusion with the torch. There was a wind in the woodland, a rustling commotion, so we cosied together for a downpour like the one which had thundered on the roof of the hearse the first time she’d come to me.
Any port in a storm. But the storm had not come. The wind grew stronger and there was a rumble of faraway thunder. But no rain. The leaves of the broad-leaved trees turned this way and that and the branches groaned. No rain.
I didn’t tell her about the bus...
As I’d been leaving the village and frankly not relishing the long walk back with the heavy rucksack, I’d stopped at a roadside bench to rearrange the bottles and stuff so they wouldn’t dig into me.
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