It was open. I fell inside.
No one. Nothing. I strained to look up at the roof. No birds, no boy. No frantic woman, who, in my damaged mind’s-eye, I’d pictured staring up and up at a horror beyond every mother’s worst imaginings.
‘Chris, he’s not there...’ She pounced on me and dragged me outside. ‘He’s not there... where is he? Oh god, what are you doing?’
She was in a dithering panic; an elfin woman, smelling of cold-cream and honey and bird-shit, desperate to find her teenage son. She appraised me, stark naked, bruised and blinded and bewildered, in the doorway of a derelict Victorian greenhouse, my nudity marked with rude red burns on my face and my chest, my face blistered with a scald of wax. And then, as though I was a dancing bear in a medieval fair, she lugged me away from the greenhouse and towards the pond.
I could feel the cooler breeze from its surface. I squinted into the reflected daylight and saw her moving through the reeds, pushing them aside with her hands, and heard her insistent murmuring, her moaning of her son’s name, as if, at any moment, she might discover his body. I tried to follow her, if only to demonstrate some solidarity, to make a gesture of team-work in her search. But she waded ahead of me, deeper, and I could see her up to her knees, up to her waist, feeling into the water for her boy.
Gone... she lost her footing, stepped into a hole in the muddy bottom or over the brink of the shallow ledge, and with a sudden whoosh she sank out of sight, only to reappear and flounder back to the shore, to grab me so hard she collapsed me and fell on top of me.
She was heaving with the shock, she was slithery with mud. Her hair was slick. Her face was a smear of cold green water and hot tears.
‘Find him, Chris... Please help me find him! Has he gone back to his room? Where is he?’
At her suggestion, we both looked back towards the house. Chalke House, I narrowed my eyes and swept it from one side to the other as I’d done on my first arrival. It was all grainy, my eyeballs felt raw, although they’d been so cooked. Chalke House – a grand, shabby hunting-lodge, trying to be impressive, with its turrets and its toothy mock-battlements, but looming rather queerly in the morning light. Very English, unique, a gentleman’s folly from the 19th century... and...
And a figure at the open window of the tower?
If we’d hoped to see the boy up there and watching us, watching our folly in the pond... or a figure in squadron-blue, raising a hand in a lazy wave...
No, we didn’t. I saw that same crawling shadow, the very one which had crawled across the face of the house on the day I’d arrived. But this time, at the end of a summer in which I’d been seduced and smothered in nightmare, there was no one at the window. Even Juliet Lundy, who was hungry with all her eyes to see anything, to see a uniformed ghost or her son safe and sound... she didn’t see anyone.
She manhandled me down to the car.
I sprawled against its flanks. It felt huge. I leaned all my weight on its familiar hugeness. Car – too paltry a word. Hearse, too humdrum. Daimler... yes, the name resounded of stately homes and gentlemen’s clubs, and, better still, of my father and my childhood, the days we’d spent together in the long-ago but never-forgotten corners of an English countryside.
But something was different. Something in the touch of the dusty, rusting paintwork was different. An energy. Such a strange and unsettling energy that I stood away. And then I reached out and touched it again. Felt it. A hum of energy. It was alive.
‘He’s here,’ I said very softly.
I turned to the woman. She was standing so still, her eyes so dead and empty, that I thought she hadn’t heard me. ‘He’s here, he’s inside.’
She just nodded. And she followed me around to the back of the hearse and watched as I opened the door.
It opened silently, on its oiled hinges. No horrible creaking. The thing we saw inside was strange and horrid enough...
The birds, there were dozens or scores or a hundred birds. They were the living, the barely living, harvested from among the dead and brought to this place of death, to live until they died. Purgatory, a limbo between life and hell. There was a crawling, murmuring mound of them, like bees in a hive, a heap of furry bodies bumbling together. The adults were downy black, dusky brown, and the juveniles, which would have relished a miraculous adventure to the Mediterranean and Morocco, or even an oasis in Tamanrasset or Timbuktu ... they were grey and white and a quivering mass of pure energy.
Wasted energy. A stink of wasted life. As I opened the door wider, they started to fall out onto the grass. They slithered out, and they were all broken. They flapped and fluttered – hopeless, purposeless, the utter paradox of what they’d been born to be. They were flightless swifts.
‘I still got one.’ His great bare legs, and a bare muscular torso. His crowing voice. ‘I still got one ...’
The boy emerged.
He’d been lying beneath the rug of birds. They spilled off him. He sat up, with a lunatic grin on his mouth. He saw me and his mother standing in the open doorway of the hearse, and he said, ‘I came down in the night, I got the last of the living, and brought them in here.’ He giggled horribly, a girly mad giggle. ‘In here, a place for the dead, for their final journey.’ And then, as he peered closer towards me and I could see the spittle and feathers stuck around his chin and smell the sickly, shitty pungency of the birds on his body, he said, ‘Look at you... what the fuck happened to your face?’
And he heaved himself out of the hearse.
Some of the birds stuck to his skin, they clung to him with their feeble feet, as if he, their tormentor, might yet grant them some kind of release. But he brushed them off with a careless hand. He trod carelessly on the cripples in the grass. With a twisted smile on his face, he said, ‘Alright Mr Teacher, Mr always-right Mr Teacher...’ and I could feel him looming over me, a dark, stale-smelling figure, more like an ogre than a teenage boy. I could feel the chuckling laughter in him, as he said, ‘And your pants? What happened to your pants? You come here in your big black car and knowing stuff, and now look at you, you can’t see fuck all and you don’t know fuck all, and no pants...’
‘Lawrence, please...’ His mother was there, trying to take him in her arms and comfort him, console him, because, like me when I’d first felt the dangerous tingle from the car, she was afraid of the anger in him. ‘Lawrence, please, I love you, I don’t want you to be upset. Let’s all go up to the house and we can...’
‘Upset?’ He brushed her off, as if she were an annoying fly. ‘You don’t want me to be upset because my Dad’s gone away and I’ll never fly because some stupid spotty student said so, and I blinded some stupid kid and...’ He struggled to stop himself, turned to me and leaned close. I could smell his furry, cotton-wool breath. ‘Alright, so I can’t keep them all. So you were right, you were right, Mr Teacher. It’s time to let go.’
And then, grotesquely, he was kissing me.
I could feel his lips on my wounded neck, his open mouth and tongue, as though he was trying to heal my blistered skin with the same secretion of saliva he’d learned from the swifts. He enveloped me in his arms, and I could feel him shuddering, his whole big body sobbing and shuddering, and his hot wet kisses on my neck and my face. And then he enfolded his mother in an enormous, smothering embrace and, ‘Oh Mummy, my Mummy, my little Mummy...’ he was kissing her and blubbering.
He wrenched himself away, although his mother clung to him as if the wrenching would break her heart. ‘See?’ He said to me, through the tears in his mouth. ‘See? I still got one. That’s all I need.’
Clenched firmly but softly in his right hand, he had a swift.
For a moment he opened his hand and revealed the bird, long enough for me to see that it was whole, it was bright-eyed and alert and superbly intact. And then he lowered his weeping head to it, and he was whispering, ‘You’re the last one, the only one. You can fly, you can fly to the moon if you want to. Maybe I can come with you.’
It opened its win
gs and held them up. They were perfect. But before it could clap them and try to lift off from his palm, he closed it up in both his hands, with great care, as though it were an exquisite fan made of paper or silk.
He moved from the car to the Scots pine and he started to climb.
‘Oh no, Lawrence, no...’ she was crying out. But in no time at all, he was ten and twenty and thirty feet above us. He swarmed upwards, knowing the holds from his previous ascents, gripping strongly with his left hand and using his other wrist and arm as a lever as he held the bird in his right hand. As I stared after him, a shower of sooty bark fell onto my face and onto my eyes, so that I had to look away and rub excruciatingly at them with my fists. Juliet was calling after him, ‘Oh Lawrence, be careful, be careful...’ and to me, ‘Chris please, can’t you stop him, can’t you do something?’ And, as I hesitated, she shoved me aside. Before I could try to reason with her, make her see the futility of what she was doing, she was climbing, she was wriggling her way through the branches, panting and mewing and trying to keep up her frantic calls to her son.
She couldn’t do it. In a clumsy replay of the time when I’d first laid eyes on her, she tumbled herself back down again. She landed giddily, tearfully, on her knees beside me. Her face was all smudged with bark and moss. She was pleading.
I had no choice but to step forward, as though I might chase after the boy and stop him.
I was naked, barefoot, I could hardly see. Every touch of the tree on my body was like a jab or a poke from a mean-spirited opponent, thwarting all my attempts to close on it. But once I’d achieved the first two or three holds, with my feet jammed agonisingly against the great black trunk and my hands burning, I realised that continuing might be no less painful than slithering down, and so I kept on climbing, until I saw the open sky above me. I was still ten or fifteen feet below him, but I made out the boy kneeling on the spars of the tree-house. He was gripping them and the knotted bits of rope, adjusting to the precariousness as the highest branches swayed in the morning breeze. And then he stood up.
He didn’t know I was there. I could have called out to him, I was about to call out, but I didn’t. I stopped myself, because I thought that my voice might surprise him and he might fall, and another part of me was saying, with a twinge of guilt, that I just didn’t want to. Fuck, I’d done enough. I’d put up with enough turmoil and bedlam and pain. Let the boy do what he wanted, for whatever half-baked reasons, and then he could climb down again. Let me be a disinterested spectator, in this final moment of the story, and then I’d be out of it and away from Chalke House as soon as it was all over.
He stood up and braced himself with his legs apart. He was god-like against the sky. His long black hair fluttered in the wind. Every muscle was defined, in his back and his shoulders, through his thighs and calves to the very splay of his feet on the planks. He looked unshakable. He was a young god of the sky and nothing would unsettle him.
Perfect. Not a cloud, not a whirling of crows, not a faraway vapour-trail. Not a blemish in the infinite blue.
I peered down, and I could just see Juliet, who’d moved away from the base of the tree and closer to the pond, so that she could watch where her son had emerged intact and erect at the very top. The height made my head spin. A bubble of nausea rose into my throat. And by the time I’d taken a breath and peered upwards again, the boy was cupping the swift in both his hands and holding it aloft, stretching up with his arms, on tip-toes, as if he would touch the sky itself.
Simple, really. An act of simplicity and wonder.
The bird opened its wings and quivered them, feeling the movement of the air through its feathers. And then it clapped the marvellous wings, once and twice and a third time, and it arose from the boy’s hands.
For a moment, moth-like, it beat around his head, it was in his hair and his eyes and clawing at his face with its tiny feet, but then it spiralled away and rocketed skyward. The sheer vertical speed of it, the power... miraculous. A second later, as my poor eyes tried to follow, the swift had disappeared forever.
And the boy?
He swayed to one side. He brought down his left arm as though to swat into his hair, as though the bird or a memory of it was still distracting him. He wobbled. To compensate, he shuffled his feet and maybe he snagged the ropes with his toes or... His right knee buckled, he dipped to the planks and brushed them with his fingers to try and steady himself.
And a strange thing. The sound he made from deep in his throat was not panic, or fear. It wasn’t weeping. It sounded more like a gurgle of laughter. So that when he straightened up again, he did so with such a rush of energy, as though his body were charged with the joy of releasing the bird, that he teetered to the very edge of the platform.
And then he was gone. He spread his arms and lifted his face to the sky, and he was gone.
He barely brushed the branches as he fell. Whatever the source of the energy which had propelled him from the tree-house, whether he’d lost his footing or he’d launched himself after the swift, he spun past me, clear of the tree itself. I watched him fall.
At the same time, I saw in a dreadful millisecond that Juliet had moved back towards the tree. She must have seen the boy faltering and dashed instinctively forward. I heard her scream. I saw her little white face upturned. At the last moment, as he plummeted towards her, I saw her lunge against the side of the Daimler. In a mad, maternal effort to save her son, she was right there, beneath him, when he smashed onto the bonnet.
MY FIRST REACTION... I must admit, was to stay where I was. I clung to the trunk of the tree, I stared down and down, and I listened.
There was no movement, nothing at all, no groans or whimpers. A pair of wood pigeons, which had erupted from the overgrown cliff beside the greenhouse, rattled away on their stiff, grey wings and then there was silence. A mean and wretched thought crept into my mind, and I tried to shoo it out. I was out of reach of the Lundys and I could hide in the dark, prickly branches as long as I liked, or I could climb to the sky and just breathe, on my own. The thought skulked around my brain for a few shameful moments, like a hyena, slavering and hunched, circling a campfire in the dead of night. Until I drove it away. And I steeled myself to climb down the tree.
They were both dead. The boy had broken his mother’s bones with his own. Her body was dented into the car. He’d struck her with all his weight, driving his knees into her chest. For himself, his head had found the very spot where her hammer had impacted the windscreen... and he’d punched a greater hole in it, his head and shoulders buried deep into the car itself. When I opened the door, the mess of his face was pooling blood onto the leather upholstery and under the driver’s seat.
I found myself walking in a daze, towards the house. I wasn’t thinking much. I was overcome by a tremendous weariness, an overpowering torpor. I did everything slowly and deliberately, in the strangely comfortable knowledge that there was no need for speed or heroic action. Juliet and Lawrence Lundy were dead. Nothing would change that.
I turned around the back of the house, with a vague idea of appraising the woman’s car. It was ugly, I didn’t like it, it was all bloody and horrid, so I tugged at the tarpaulin and covered it completely. I went indoors and wandered from room to room, with the creeping intention of clearing-up or making amends in some desultory way. I picked up bottles from the living-room and dropped them into a bin in the kitchen. Upstairs, I straightened the sheets on Juliet’s bed, which were stained with cold-cream and honey and crumbly with the wax she’d peeled off my body. I picked up some of her clothes, folded them and put them into the wardrobe, where her husband’s suits and uniform were hanging. I rearranged the combs and brushes on her dressing-table.
In my own room, on the pillow there was an eerie impression of my own head, where the molten wax had cooled into a skin. I touched it, a ghostly imprint preserved for posterity. But then I crumpled it into pieces. Absent-mindedly, I kicked the empty saucepan under the bed.
I went up to the
boy’s room. It was as untidy as ever, his clothes strewn around and the sheets all rumpled. The model planes swung in the breeze from the open windows. The same... it was just the same as it had been when Juliet had first taken me there and introduced me to her son. Even the cat. The orange cat was lying there, as if this was just another day and nothing had ever changed.
One difference. It was cooler. I went onto the balcony and looked out. I picked up the boy’s binoculars and swept them across the horizon of trees, to the rickety planks at the top of the Scots pine, down to the greenhouse and the dim outline of the Daimler. I shivered. The wind from the sea was cooler. It would be autumn, and I was naked.
I found my clothes, a pair of pants and shirt, and carried them downstairs. Of course I called the police, I plugged in the phone and there was a nice lady and she sounded a bit shaky when I told her there’d been an accident and there were two dead bodies, and I tried to reassure her and could someone come as soon as possible? I remember I started to put on... no, I started to think about putting on my clothes. It would have made me feel normal. More than my negligible little business of tidying-up, my shirt and pants might almost have made me feel real again. But no, when I put down the phone, I just dropped the clothes and...
I waited in the woodland for the police to come.
I wandered down there, but I didn’t want to go near the car. Ugly. I peered through the trees and saw it, my father’s car, which he’d maintained so lovingly. So was that it? The end of its journey? After years of dignified, decorous toil as a hearse, and then a second career as a workshop and a home, it was dumped, with a dead boy’s head smashed into the windscreen and the dead boy’s mother crushed onto the bonnet. Was that it?
I didn’t go near the car. I remember I stood near the pond, and when I saw the green-brown stillness of the water, I thought of the way that the Lundys had tipped the dying birds into it. It made me look up into the sky again, as if I might catch a last glimpse of the swift that the boy had released, or any of the swifts which might still be lingering in Lincolnshire. It made me hurry to the greenhouse. One last, important thing to do...
The Waking That Kills Page 20