‘Do it yourself then,’ he says to Mikey, ‘but that pumpkin has got to be out of here by teatime.’
The grave is dug and marked with two pieces of kindling tied up with string. Mikey writes a name in biro on a piece of paper which he Blu-tacks to the cross. Cyclops. He then prints out a notice which is Sellotaped to his bedroom door, in font size 58: KEEP OUT.
The next therapy session starts as badly as the first ended, with Mikey holding tight to the fire door in the waiting room, rattling the bar. When Sofia welcomes him in, he deliberately thumps his fist against the glass in the alarm box, not quite hard enough.
‘He’s cross,’ Edmund explains. ‘He knows I’m going to visit Diana. He wants to be there because they’ve done more tests and hope to be able to tell us how she’s doing, but I’ve said no.’
For ten minutes, Mikey crouches with his back to the fire exit and the therapist waits in the room. Edmund hovers between them, dry-mouthed with anxiety about missing the meeting with the consultant although he dreads the good news they might have. Elective mutism is a weapon Michael uses well. Edmund copies him; they stare each other out with silence. Eventually the boy knocks on the door to the room.
‘Hello, Michael.’
Mikey bends down, looking at the floor.
‘You look as though you’ve lost something.’
‘Yes,’ says Mikey.
Sofia and Edmund catch each other’s eye. Mikey is speaking. Sofia is smiling. She says she’ll help Michael to look for whatever it is he has lost, but as soon as she steps outside, Mikey slams the door. Everybody is on the outside now. Calmly, Sofia enters the numbers into the keypad, but as she opens the door, Mikey pushes her violently. She stumbles into the room and Mikey shuts her in, triumphant. Then, quite calmly, he lets himself in using the code, the one that only the adults are meant to know.
Driving to the hospital, the scene replays itself in Edmund’s mind with the sickening realisation that this is what Diana must have done, tricked him into going upstairs before violently locking him in the room. It was all being acted out in front of them so that what could not be said could at least be understood. Worst of all, finding his fishing map spread out in the study now makes sense: Diana must have realised at some point that she could not keep the boy locked up for ever, that eventually he would have to come out and then he would tell someone what had happened. The fishing map must have represented her final solution, her guide to the places on the river where the pools were deep enough and the current strong enough that a small boy learning to swim would not survive long.
And was that going to be her final revenge? Not enough for her to have taken away his child, but to have poisoned his river as well.
One day soon he will be able to ask her himself, because the consultant is delighted to tell him that Diana is conscious and able to respond to simple questions. Like did you plan to murder Mikey? And what sort of woman are you exactly?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
‘Can you see the Christmas card, Diana? Michael has drawn you a Christmas card. Can you open your eyes, Diana? She’s sleepy today, Michael,’ explains the nurse. ‘I think she’s tired.’ The staff are frequently having to remind Mikey his aunty needs to rest; to them, his over-eager interrogations are manifestations of his love for her.
Visits are like this now. Diana moves her eyes in response to the doctor’s questions. To the right for yes, to the left for no. Sometimes it looks as though she is smiling, but unwitting babies do that thing too, the physiological grin.
‘Can you hear me, Diana?’
Eyes right.
‘Where are you, Diana? Are you at home?’
Eyes left.
‘Are you in hospital?’
Eyes right.
‘I’m hopeful she’ll be able to talk, given time,’ says the doctor.
In the meantime, all the information on the questionnaire which Edmund finally completed is being used to establish her credentials as a fully paid-up living member of the present tense, but history is another country and no doubt the future is also a challenging concept. With great bitterness Edmund concludes a life sentence is little punishment at all if lived in the moment.
At the school Christmas concert, Mikey shines playing the piano and singing a solo. Edmund has to take some time in the car before he collects him, checking his red eyes in the rear-view mirror. Grace incorporates the boy into her shopping, her granddaughter’s carol service, their family trip to Santa. Together, all three of them choose an enormous tree for Wynhope from the same place that has always provided an enormous tree for Wynhope. The minimalist white snowflakes Diana bought in her first year at the house are discarded, and instead Edmund blows the dust from old cardboard boxes and they decorate the tree with the garish reindeer and faded Father Christmases of his childhood and finish it off with a tarnished angel. Booted and coated, they stomp through the frost-whitened park searching for holly with berries and mistletoe; the wreaths Mikey makes with Grace turn out to be for the head of the bronze boy and for Monty, who is less than impressed with his festive costume. The mistletoe is hung from the chandelier in the hall.
‘That’s so you can give someone a kiss,’ Edmund jokes.
‘Who?’ asks Mikey.
Not Diana, obviously. It should be hideous – the red and green trimmings of the season while his wife is trussed up in a neuro ward, paraplegia confirmed and a mind as soggy and stinking as a heap of Brussels sprouts – and there are still times when he weeps, late at night watching Christmas Special re-runs with Monty, but Edmund acknowledges that, if he is in mourning at all, it is for himself. The only other reason for weeping is this fear of her living.
The New Year has begun. It is almost 2 a.m. when he gets back to Wynhope, the taxi having gone the long way round to avoid the flooded roads. With Grace having offered to have Mikey, Edmund was free to be a grown-up and go to a proper party. He is quite pissed. Everyone there knew his wife was in hospital, but it didn’t stop several women coming on to him. Being a surrogate single father seems to have given him some sort of added appeal; he even felt something like a stirring of attraction in return. Nobody blamed him for anything, in fact quite the opposite: Sally draped over his shoulder – no use crying over spilt milk, darling, that’s the last thing Diana would want and everyone thinks you’re a wonderful father . . .
The rain is turning to hail, sweeping into the back porch, bouncing off the tiles, shining white and crazy in the light. Edmund leans unsteadily against the door. In the distance, the bass throb of a party in the village vibrates through the storm. He is alone. Diana comes and takes her place beside him, slips her cool hand under his shirt. Of all the occasions she loved New Year’s Eve the best, dressed up to the nines and choosing her jewellery, and the kissing and the vintage champagne and good times they had. Relatives were probably allowed to stay on the ward for midnight, he hadn’t even asked. Unlike the café and the entrance to the children’s wing, there is no tinsel in neuro. It is more of a Good Friday ward, but there has been a Christmas sort of feel to the place all the same. People love other people despite the wheelchair and the incontinence and a future of tapping out of wishes on adapted keyboards.
Edmund took his festive celebrations elsewhere, with a few drinks parties in the city as usual. The highlight was an outing to London as a Christmas/birthday treat all rolled into one for Mikey; it was a bit of a con, but at least the absence of birthday cards was less painful that way. As Mikey pointed out, Solomon wasn’t allowed to send one, and as Edmund thought privately, who else was there? The trip took the boy back to the past anyway; he pointed at the map on the underground, that was where he lived with Paul, he said. Mikey’s history was like reading the middle part of a trilogy and not quite knowing the plot or the characters from the beginning; the story could stand alone, as it said on the cover, but there was always the disconcerting sense that you were missing something. Particularly Valerie. More and more Edmund wished he’d known her the better to underst
and her son. All the little things he’d gathered indicated she was a rather brave and lovely lady, who did after all produce a rather brave and lovely son.
The first Christmas is always the hardest. He did the best he could: the lights in Regent Street, a visit to Hamleys where Edmund bought three brown bears as a stocking filler and a calendar that was on the Father Christmas list. He viewed it as a positive thing, Mikey being able to look ahead. He found the perfect one with a different musical instrument for every month – it was always music now with Mikey. He’d chosen a bright red boombox for his birthday present, having told Edmund that music was just a better way of talking. In the evening, they went to the pantomime. Beauty and the Beast.
‘And are there any children out there who think they can wake up the beast? Because the beast has gone to sleep and we need to wake him up for Christmas.’
‘I can sing,’ said Mikey and he climbed over the backs of the seats and the coats and bags and other people’s knees before Edmund could stop him.
Feeling physically sick, Edmund was terrified Mikey would commit himself to something impossible and make a fool of himself. No one ever made allowances, and he didn’t look like a child who had problems. On stage, the giant white rabbit was hopping between the children whose hands were up so high they were coming out of their sockets, confident girls in pantomime best and swaggering boys belting their names out to roars from their families. It was inevitable that he would settle on Mikey, this child with a magnetism that drew people to him then terrified them with its force.
‘The beast has promised he will wake up if we sing him a Christmas song. Do you think you can do that?’
A nod.
‘And what’s your name?’
‘Mikey.’
‘Can Mikey do that?’ the rabbit asked the audience.
‘Yes,’ they all roared.
‘I can’t hear you,’ the rabbit danced in a frenzy. ‘Can Mikey wake the beast in time for Christmas?’
‘Yes,’ they roared even louder, spectators in the gladiators’ arena.
‘Then Mikey, my boy, we’re all relying on you.’
The pantomime squirrels with gigantic tails climbed down from the trees (and even the trees had hands and faces), the owls flashed their luminous eyes from their perches, the grasshoppers and foxes and badgers gathered round the boy in the surreal woodland paradise, feigning anticipation on their masked faces and nose-snuffling paws.
‘What are you going to sing, Mikey?’
Mikey whispered to the rabbit and the rabbit whispered to the conductor and the conductor whispered to the violins who picked up their bows. The cellists leaned forwards in their seats, the oboist and the flautist and the bassoon raised their instruments to their lips, and the opening bars of ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ swelled and filled the auditorium. Everyone clapped and called their approval and then fell silent. Quietness in a theatre is as complete as quietness can be, thought Edmund, because everyone is holding their breath.
One thin boy, swamped by his hoodie, ignored the offer of a microphone and crept towards the beast and bent low to whisper in his grotesque ear.
‘We can’t hear you,’ called the white rabbit, waving the microphone towards the boy, but Mikey wasn’t listening to him. He was keeping his promise, he was singing to the beast.
‘We can’t hear you,’ chorused the audience as they roared with laughter. The conductor looked from the rabbit to the boy to his players and back again, then took matters into his own hands and finished the scene with a drum roll and a flourish.
There was the briefest suspension of time before the audience rose to its feet and cheered the dumb show. Beside the boy the sleeping beast rubbed its eyes and stretched, heaved its huge bulk from the forest floor and turned its monstrous head. With claws matted in hair, it reached into its sack.
‘A present, a present,’ screamed the white rabbit in delight.
Off the stage, down the steps, up the gangway, out of the exit, Mikey fled. Edmund’s response was instinctive. If he runs into the street, he’ll get run over, if he runs away, I’ll never find him, if I never find him, I’ll have lost everything.
‘I think he was a bit overcome by it all.’
An usher was standing very quietly at the entrance, her hand in his. In the street, Christmas lights swayed in the wind above the rain-shimmering pavements – illuminated planets this year, blue Earth, red Mars, silver Neptune, a universe of wonder – and behind them, in the theatre, the distant throbbing of ‘Rudolph, The Red-nosed Reindeer’ and all the other children, bringing the house down.
Falling into Edmund’s arms, Mikey sobbed. ‘I sang,’ he said, ‘and he woke up. Why were they laughing at me?’
‘It’s just that they couldn’t hear you,’ whispered Edmund. ‘You did sing and you must have sung beautifully. If you stay to the end, you’ll see that the beast changes because of the song you sang, because somebody loves him.’
Unsteady on his feet, Edmund is sheltering in the porch hiding from both the storm and the New Year. He sings as he remembers: ‘What can I give you, poor as I am?’
Diana’s Christmas offering to him was a guttural, primitive greeting of sorts. The single, apparently involuntary sound came from deep within her throat and was impossible to interpret. The nursing staff thought it must be the greatest gift of all, although unlike God’s offer at this time of year, Edmund was not raising his hopes. He takes no gifts for Diana. No gold, frankincense or myrrh, no hope, no love. At some level she must sense his urge to slip away, turn out the lights and leave her in darkness, and his visits to her prison are no better than a torturer peering through the spyhole, his footsteps and jangling keys his orchestra.
New Year. A favourite quote of his father’s comes to him. ‘I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ That’s what he sees in other visitors at the hospital, the hand outstretched, the light in the eyes. ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.’
So Edmund goes, out into the darkness.
Like pale ghosts, the sheep scatter from him as he leans into the spitting sleet and stumbles drunkenly across the park, boots sinking into the sodden ground and slowing his progress. Monty is close to him, fretting. Never has the chapel felt more like a refuge, high above the rapidly flooding pasture, its back turned against the wind. He has not been here for some time. At Christmas he took Mikey to the crib service in the village church instead and afterwards the vicar showed them the Christmas tree where people could write the names of people they’d lost on paper stars and hang them from the branches. It was a memory tree, he explained, because Christmas can be difficult. So many stars, so many lost. Mikey wrote ‘My Mum’ and Edmund helped him slip the cotton loop over the needles. It was something about the hovering vicar and the women at the back of the church handing round mince pies, but Edmund could not bring himself to hang his own stars, and then later he couldn’t bring himself to light candles in the chapel either. So now he is reading inscriptions in the dark, using the torch on his phone to search for affirmation of a New Year’s resolution he has already made.
Where, O Death, is thy sting? Where O Death, thy victory?
They asked all the wrong questions, these ancestors. What about the pyrrhic victory we call life? All of us, driven by the cruel biological imperative to go on living, regardless of the cost. Diana, ambivalent and hesitating in her shadowland, what does she choose? Diana, goddess of the crossroads. Edmund, protector of wealth. Were they both damned even as they were christened?
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
To the right of the door one of the earliest carvings in the chapel leers at him from the shadows: a primitive demon with a gaping mouth and lolling tongue, pinned down by a pentagon. A scholar once told him it was a sort of medieval graffiti. Edmund remembers taking Diana to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the two of them hand in hand laugh
ing at the Bruegels. The other side of this pillar has a very different picture scratched into the stone, difficult to make out even in daylight, but he can see the simplistic upright lines which are trees, the repeated horizontal lines which is the water, and the disintegrating roman numerals beneath, CXXXVII, the very earliest representation of his Wynhope Psalm. Even then everyone liked the bit about the rivers and the songs and forgot about the ending, which tonight strikes Edmund as the only bit that counts. ‘Daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed; happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.’ Death as revenge, death as punishment, eye for an eye, this Old Testament thinking does not usually feel comfortable to him, but in the third hour of that New Year it slips into the pew beside him and he finds himself taken with its company. When the chapel calls time and sends him back out into a black magic sort of night, there is no moon, only a thick and secret silence.
Shaking the rain from his coat, Edmund gravitates towards his computer and to a favourite site which seems particularly apt for a disoriented man on this, the first day. From its lonely orbit, the space station livestreams its unique view of the world. He finds its perspective soothing; how very slowly, slowly we are turning, turning; he imagines a vast pair of hands rotating the globe. It takes imagination to see the people on the planet ride, heads flung back and clinging on for dear life to the brown bits of land cast adrift amidst the flooding oceans, strapped into their hurricane and wildfire and mudslide experiences, their faces distorted by the calamitous wind, screaming for the cameras trained on their suffering. He’s seen their pain often enough on the news: the crowds fleeing their villages with torn shirts and masks across their smoke-blackened faces and bare feet and bicycles and the bodies of children amongst the bloated goats and matchstick huts and single shoes floating. It never seems they have much choice. Things happen. But tonight the vast disasters in the circling world have come down to this one act: him, Edmund, at a desk and a decision made to snatch the future back.
The Half Sister Page 30