The Waking That Kills

by Stephen Gregory

  In a maudlin millisecond I had a dream come back to me, in a nightmare or a blur of reality.

  In my first month in Borneo, wet behind the ears and not a clue about how to live and eat and work and sleep there, I’d tacked up a mosquito-net over and around my bed, and clambered in, unwashed and sweaty with gin, and woke in the night with the net collapsed on top of me, enmeshing me, smothering me, suffocating me, so that I cried out loud and fought and fought to get out, while the sweat of the gin was on me and the mosquitoes whined in my ears and jabbed their bloodthirsty needles into my skin. A horrible trap I’d set for myself, and the more I struggled to get out and the louder I shouted the more I was enmeshed and ensnared and suffocating and...

  Juliet intervened.

  ‘Alright, Lawrence,’ with a toss of her head and a furious blinking, like a child annoyed at being woken from a daydream. ‘Lawrence, it’s alright. Chris is a teacher, and he’s travelled to a lot of places we’ve never been to and he knows a lot of things we don’t know. That’s why we asked him to come here.’

  Her voice was bright, but as tinny-empty as the bell on a bicycle. It chimed in the air, and the boy swatted it away with his hands. ‘More toast, more coffee?’ She persisted, as he ducked his head and sniggered behind his hair. ‘Or maybe you two men can help me tidy up a bit? Lawrence, can you put all this stuff back in the cupboard for me? Not the long-lost honey, of course.’

  She twittered on. Like the song of the robin, wistful for the passing of summer, brave in the face of an imminent winter. She seemed determined, after her relapse into a dream-world, to emerge into an everyday day and live in it, at least for the moment. And so she delegated the chore to her troubled, troubling son, as deliberately humdrum as the soap and batteries and shoe-polish and candles he rearranged into the cupboard.

  POSSESSION? WHY DID you, Dayangku Siti Hafizah Qurr’atul binti Hj. Mohammad Alimin, why did you fall onto the floor and start crying?

  You were always such a quiet and studious and serious girl. You sat at the front and blinked up at me from beneath your perfectly ironed tudong. You smiled at my orang putih jokes and you always did your homework. So why, when a bulldozer outside my classroom was chewing and gnawing at the forest, did the spirits of the fallen trees come whispering through the window and... and, well, why did the spirits of the forest possess you? Why did you tear off your tudong and start screaming so loudly, so madly, that a thousand other girls and boys and even teachers with degrees from Worcester and Gloucester and Brighton and York start screaming?

  Possession? Like this boy? Lawrence Lundy, the mad? Sniggering mad... sniggering mad, with insects in his mouth.

  I saw him. I saw him on the battlements of his tower. With his badminton racquet. Never mind fucking blue tits. I saw him, outside the windows of his tower, at night, swatting at the insects with his racquet, at the night bugs and cockchafers and moths until the racquet was encrusted with their gauzy and chitinous bodies, and then scraping them off and stuffing them into his mouth. I saw him. And I saw him, in the rafters of the old greenhouse, a mythical swift-boy, naked and dusty and drooling, a mythical boy from the pond, or from the moon, sicking up... sicking up a drool, a spittle... a mad boy.

  Possessed? He possessed his father. The ghost of him. The invisibility of him. The presence of him. The nubbing the nipples of a cat of him.

  And me? Afraid. Afraid for the boy, afraid of the boy? Afraid for Juliet, so fragile, so fey. She also, I saw it with my own eyes, she also saw... I saw her and the boy as they followed with their eyes, I saw with my own eyes, they saw someone come into the kitchen and sit at the table with the toast and the honey, and the cat came purring like a panther and jumped onto his lap...

  His? How could I say his? Or think his? Unless, me too, I saw something? No. I didn’t see anything, anyone.

  But at night, I heard voices. I heard a voice in the tower. Someone was talking.

  I AWOKE. I thought I awoke... and the woman was nude in the moonlight, beside me.

  She was lovely. The moon cast her body in silver and grey and an indescribable blue – nothing like the sea or the sky, but an ineffable blue from the shadows of the moon and its light through the clouds and the trees and our open window. She was asleep, and she smelled of sleep and our love-making and herself, so it couldn’t have been her voice I had heard. She was whispering; a tiny, faraway whisper, as she breathed, as she dreamed, which blew the fall of her hair across her lips. So it wasn’t her voice I’d heard.

  I slipped out of bed and onto the landing and listened. And I heard voices up in the tower.

  I tiptoed up and up the stairs.

  Pitch darkness. A narrowing space, as though I was burrowing my head and shoulders into a shrinking, suffocating nothingness, a kind of vacuum which might swallow and smother me. I controlled a panic of claustrophobia and trod to the top, where I took a huge breath and pushed open the door.

  The boy’s room was full of moonlight. Impossible, of course, but it seemed to fall into the tower from all four sides, filling the room with a powdery, chalk-dusty talcum of moonlight.

  He was sitting on his bed. Lawrence, it was his voice I’d heard. He turned and smiled at me. He beckoned me in. He was naked, like a god. His hair was dense and purple-black, and his nakedness was slick with an iridescent slime.

  A man was sitting on the bed with him. He was handsome and young and he was wearing his RAF suit. They had the pieces of a model aeroplane laid out on the bed between them, and a tube of glue, and they were making the model together.

  They both looked up at me. They smiled.

  When the boy smiled, a spittle oozed through his teeth. It was flecked with grey and black, the indigestible remains of the insects he’d swatted with his racquet and stuffed into his mouth.

  When his father smiled, his teeth were brown and broken. Sea-water dribbled out, and then a gush of it, the contents of his bloated, submarine belly.

  Oh god, oh fuck, I could smell it. You can smell things in dreams, the reeking rank viscosity of a drowned man. And I could feel it was hot, it splashed onto my bare bedroom feet.

  Bedroom? I awoke. I think I awoke. And I was in bed with Juliet.

  She was silvery nude and fast asleep beside me. I was naked too. The sheet had slipped off us, or maybe we had pushed it off because the night was so warm. I was suddenly wide awake, and the exposure of my own body in the moonlight was frightening.

  I awoke and I was afraid. Because someone else had come into the room and was staring at me.

  Yes you can smell in a dream you can smell the sweat of your fear from your own body, and you can smell the slimy sweat of a huge naked boy standing so close to you and looming so close that you can hear and smell his breathing...

  He stared down at me for a long moment, and then he moved around the foot of the bed, past the dressing-table and to the wardrobe. As he had done before, he opened the wardrobe, felt among the hanging clothes and nuzzled his shaggy head into them.

  But this time, something was different. The boy stepped back from the wardrobe and he smiled. He made a curious, beckoning gesture with both hands, as though inviting something or someone to come out. And then he waited.

  The clothes on their hangers, they moved. They moved aside. And a man stepped out.

  In his smart RAF uniform, dapper and self-assured, the boy’s father came out and he looked around the moonlit room. I was lying naked on his bed, beside the naked body of his wife, but he didn’t see me. He moved to the bed and looked down on the sleeping woman. He appraised her face and her body, and tears of joy seemed to shine in his eyes. But when he bent to kiss her, a bubble of rusty-brown water broke from his shattered teeth.

  He straightened up and adjusted his uniform – on parade. He went to the dressing-table and sat in front of the mirror. He smiled at himself, oblivious of the dead and decomposing ugliness of his mouth, and he took the brush from the table and brushed his hair with it. He set it down, satisfied with his dashing, jet-figh
ter-pilot good looks, and he sprayed himself with cologne.

  He went back into the wardrobe. He pushed the clothes aside and slipped between them. The boy closed the door on him. The boy went out of the room and I heard him go up to his tower.

  PREPOSITIONS ARE TRICKY. My students would say so. Small, inconspicuous little words, which look so unimportant, but which change the meaning of a sentence, change the meaning of everything.

  In the morning Juliet made love to me. She made love on me. And then, she made love without me. She rolled off me and lay still, staring up at the ceiling and at the dressing-table and at the wardrobe door. And she made love to herself.

  She’d woken me with a swift, slithering movement of her body, and she was straddling me, astride me, and making the most of my male, waking-up readiness. And there was something different in her, something akin to the change of the season. She’d been russet, she’d been tawny, she’d been the red squirrel or the marten, a marvellous forest creature, ever since she’d dropped from the pine like an elf on a gossamer thread. For me, exiled for years to the torrid tropical jungles and dreariness of the faraway mosque, she’d been the electric-blue shock of the jay and the flash of the yaffle in an old English woodland. I’d rubbed her and smelled her, the sweet fibrous earth and the fragrant mulch of the ancient trees.

  Now she’d changed. How to describe her body? It was weathered, it was chapped. The raw wind from the north sea had somehow funnelled down from the wolds and pinched her. The season had changed her. Everything must change. The sallow greenness of summer, the sappiness and pith, was drying up. I could taste the change in her mouth. There was something metallic in her mouth; it tasted like blood. It was the taste of autumn.

  I watched her and listened as she pleasured herself. And when she’d finished, with a sudden arching of her body and a dry croaking in the back of her throat, she’d asked me in a perfunctory, matter-of-fact way, ‘Was he here last night? Did he come in? I wasn’t sure if I heard him or I was just dreaming.’

  I hesitated and answered. ‘Lawrence? Yes, I think he...’

  She’d thrown me a queer, sideways look and rolled off the bed and tiptoed to the dressing-table.

  Naked, scented of me and then her own self-satisfaction, she looked very small, like a girl. She sat at the mirror. She puffed a cloud of cologne into the air and watched as the droplets caught the first of the morning light and then disappeared. She picked at a few hairs on the brush on the table and studied them minutely in her fingertips.

  ‘Lawrence?’ she said to her own reflection. ‘No, I didn’t mean Lawrence...’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I FOUND MYSELF doing a strange thing, later the same day, in the afternoon. I climbed the Scots pine to the very top and stood on the tree-house.

  Why did I do that? In the morning I was in the garden with the boy. We’d had a quiet breakfast together, the three of us and the cat, an almost eerily quiet breakfast with none of us speaking except to offer the tea and toast and pass the butter and the honey. I listened to the quietness of the woodland outside the kitchen window, almost like the whispering of a village church or a country churchyard, it reminded me of the long-ago autumn days I’d spent with my father as he chipped and chipped at the headstones and the names of the long-dead people lying beneath them. So we passed the butter and the honey, and I heard the robin again. This time I didn’t comment on it. I didn’t need to, it was so pure and cool and silvery-perfect. No, it was an absence of sound that caught my attention, if not the attention of the boy and the woman.

  The air was somehow empty and still. A sound we’d heard almost incessantly for weeks and weeks was no longer there. The swifts. Their aerial screaming. No more. They’d gone.

  I opened my mouth to remark on it. I saw the boy cocking his head to the window. I saw the gulp of his Adam’s apple, as he swallowed to clear the mucus in his throat and his sinuses, and listened hard. When our eyes met and he could see I was about to speak, he ducked away, hiding in the privacy of his own hair, to nibble noisily at a piece of toast as if the crunching of it would suffice to break the silence and prevent me from speaking.

  And so, into the garden. I followed him down to the pond. He glanced up a few times, and if I’d been expecting a hint of wistfulness that the sky was suddenly so empty, I didn’t see it. Odd, after the things he’d said about the birds not leaving, as if it was in the power of the mad mythical swift-boy to hold them back. It was odd to see him appraising the emptiness of the autumn morning with a kind of satisfaction.

  ‘You can help me,’ he said, as we came closer to the pond. ‘I’ve nearly finished, but you can help me with the rest of it.’

  The smell came to me. It was smell of my nightmares. A brackish slime. Outside, in the open air of the woodland garden, it wasn’t so nauseatingly strong as the reek of it which had caught in my nostrils, in my dreams. ‘We do it every year, around this time, me and my Dad. It lets the air into the water, otherwise the stuff all dies and goes rotten and sinks to the bottom and whatever...’

  He’d been stripping the weed from the pond. When? Maybe at night, in the moonlight, or in the long evenings when his mother and I had been sousing ourselves into sex and sleepiness with gin. ‘Do you want to help me finish it off? You’ll get very dirty and stinky, but it’s kind of fun too. Me and Dad, it’s something we do together every year.’

  He waded through the tall grasses and rushes at the edge of the water until he was knee-deep, reached through the green-brown surface and clawed at the weed below it. He leaned back with all his weight, and like a fisherman heaving ashore a net replete with his catch, he started dragging out a mat of the stuff. A mat of it, a rug of it, bigger and bigger and more and more until he splashed heavily backwards onto the dry land at the edge of the pond with a mighty carpet of weed, intact in one piece, and flopped it down onto the grass.

  ‘That’s what we do!’ Heaving with the effort, his face agleam with satisfaction, he said, ‘We get tons of it! Stinky! but I kind of love the smell and look! Look! It’s popping with insects!’

  There was a formidable, almost overwhelming fume of mud and decomposing vegetation: beautiful really, a smell of dying-off and putrefaction, over-ripe with the stench of its own richness. It was the countryside, the autumn, the world. A natural world of life and death and the turning of the seasons. And yes, the mat of weed was fizzing with the myriad creatures which had been dragged into the daylight – countless unidentifiable bugs and beetles and worms, tiny prehistoric beasts which the boy had trawled unceremoniously from the pond.

  I helped the boy to finish his job. He’d already cleared most of it, working secretly on his own, while Juliet and I had thought he was in the greenhouse or up in his tower, and I could see a trail of the slimy mats which he’d dragged away and into the woods somewhere. Together, we heaved more of it out of the water and dumped it under the trees. We were dripping wet and lathered in mud. Breathless, barely able to speak after we’d extracted an especially spectacular piece, a great congealed mass of tangled roots and fibres, he’d muttered something about composting it or recycling it in some way. Unlikely, because no one had done any real ‘gardening’ in the overgrown wilderness of Chalke House for years. But he could use it, he was using it, he mumbled to himself as we hauled it through the trees and towards the greenhouse.

  I didn’t know what he meant. No matter. In any case, the pond looked better for its autumn ‘spring-clean’. The water was a deep, murky, mulligatawny mirror.

  So it was done. I got the sense that I was dismissed. We’d spent an hour or two together and that was enough for him. There was such an air of abstraction in his manner, his face was so clouded with his own intense preoccupation, that he could no longer bother to glance at me. When I spoke to him, if only to express a platitude about ‘a job well done’ or ‘a good way to work up an appetite for lunch’, it was as though he couldn’t bear to have my voice pestering his ears. He didn’t want me around any more. He didn’t ju
st drift in the direction of the greenhouse; he headed off, quite purposefully, and threw a wary look over his shoulder to make sure I wasn’t following him.

  Fine with me. I watched him slink into the dense cover of the nettles and cow-parsley. In the ensuing silence, I waited until I felt myself truly and comfortably alone, and I walked further away from the house, deeper into the woodland.

  To the car, at the foot of the Scots pine. I hadn’t been there for a while.

  The Daimler was almost overgrown with grasses and thistles. And the tree had dropped its daily, nightly showering of needles and cones and brittle black twigs. The hearse, like a badger scenting a coolness in the air, was growing a shaggy overcoat to coincide with the end of summer.

  I didn’t open it up this time. I didn’t slide inside and sit behind the wheel and inhale the fragrant memories. At first, I made as if to swish some debris from the bonnet or the roof, but then I hesitated and stepped away. What was the point? The old car, so sleepy and still, so long neglected, was slipping into a slumber of hibernation... or rather, a torpor from which it might never awake. Moribund. What was the point of disturbing it? Time to let go.

  An eerie hush. I stared up and up, where we’d seen the swifts hurtling and screaming day in and day out since the very first week I’d arrived, and there was a clear blue silence. Up there, the devil-birds had relinquished their realm and gone away.

  Good. The boy, who was clinging to the memory of his dead father with such an obsessive madness that I’d been touched by the strength of his imaginings, would surely see a reason in the birds’ inevitable departure. Time to let go.

  I found myself climbing the tree. And in a few minutes, before I’d realised what I was doing, I was halfway up, my feet jammed uncomfortably into the notchy branches, and looking down through the sooty prickliness of a one-or-two-hundred-year-old pine tree at the ground below, and onto the roof of the hearse.