Couldn’t be.
Then another bang, followed by a blattering roar that died almost instantly.
No.
She was already racing down the gravel path before the noise had faded in her ears.
Faces blurred as she tore along the front of the house. She weaved through a group of visitors moving
away from the ticket office and collided with a large man taking a photograph, who was as solid as a sandbag. Her mouth would not work; she apologized with her eyes, holding him at arm’s length as if to get her bearings, slipping past him, and sprinted up the road past the chapel, towards the noise. Again, there was an ear-blistering roar, much louder, an angry sound that rasped through the grounds, shattering the peace of the still afternoon.
She cut across the grass, then on to the asphalt path, the route Edward had taken her last Saturday, just a week ago. A week ago when she was unaware that Meredith was dead and that Max Gabriel was dying. When Phoebe Hawkins still had two arms. She prayed silently as she ran.
Please don’t let anything bad happen. Please let them be all right
.
Past a huge cornfield that was all cut and baled up, she saw the tall, rusting corrugated iron barn ahead of her. There was a bang, a short, fiendish roar that drummed the walls of the barn, then silence. Rafts of oily smoke drifted towards her. Her speed quickened in panic. Then as she hurtled round to the front she saw Edward and Tristram standing on two oil drums in front of the aeroplane, turning the propeller, that was much higher than either of them, with difficulty, having to stretch up and strain hard. Having a great game. Frannie stopped, horrified.
‘OK!’ Edward yelled, bracing himself.
‘OK!’ Tristram yelled back, bracing himself also, holding the propeller steady for a moment.
‘Edward!’ Frannie screamed. ‘Edward! Tristram!’
There was a clattering sound as they swung the propeller sharply downwards. Then it began revolving, slowly, on its own, and with a deafening noise the
engine burst into life, picking up speed, the blades of the propeller vanishing into a transparent blur. Thick exhaust fumes billowed out. The biplane shook and the barn drummed with the din.
The boys were swaying, fighting to keep their balance in the vortex of suction from the propeller. Edward windmilled his arms desperately, the drum rocking crazily beneath him, pitching him forward; he was beginning to fall towards the propeller.
Frannie was half demented with horror. ‘Edward!’ she screamed but she could not even hear if her voice had come out. ‘Edwa –’
He struggled to get his balance back, grabbed Tristram by the shoulders and they both fell forwards, then rocked back, swayed forwards again. Then, suddenly, the drums pitched over, throwing them both backwards on to the ground. Tristram lay motionless. Edward covered his head with his hands and rolled clear.
Frannie never forgot what happened next. Tristram climbed to his knees, and remained there, dazed, looking directly at her. The plane began to creep forwards towards him. ‘Tristr –’ she choked on her own terror. Launched herself towards him. Her foot caught in a crack and the hard concrete slammed into her chest.
Winded, she saw movement to her left, someone running, it was just a blob. The blob became a man in his late fifties, wearing a soiled lumberjack shirt. But Tristram stayed on his knees, looking at her and at the approaching man.
The concrete tearing skin from her hands, Frannie powered herself forward to the little boy who was kneeling less than two yards in front of the propeller. She stumbled back to her feet, felt the air sucking at her, ‘TRISTRAAAAMMMM!’
By now her T-shirt was ripped from inside her jeans and icy air flailed her bare back; her hair beat her face like knotted string.
A look of guilty panic sheeted over Tristram’s face and he stood up, then backed away. Backed towards the propeller that was looming up on him.
‘Tristram! It’s OK, Tristram!’ Frannie called, but her voice was choked and raw, and it came out as a squeak rather than a shout. She stretched forward with her hands, only a few feet away from grabbing him. The propeller closed on the boy like a shadow.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see the man closing also. Then everything slowed as if suddenly there was all the time in the world. She was aware of strange details: the rubber soles of her trainers compacting on the concrete then expanding, springing her into the air, absorbing her weight as she landed again, compacting, expanding, the wind from the propeller lifting the strands of grey hair from the man’s head, exposing the bald area beneath; the wind billowing his shirt like a sail.
There was a strange sound that echoed in her head. A
chinnggg
like a lawnmower blade striking a stone. At first she thought Tristram had been hit by a pillow. Thousands of tiny little shreds hung in the air, like feathers. Then they were gone.
He’d disappeared.
The propeller was inches from her own face now, its draught tearing her mouth open, freezing her eyes. She flung herself sideways and the blade scythed over her; the din of the engine drilling out her eardrums, fumes filling her lungs like cotton wool. A wheel struck her in the back and the shadow of the wing passed across her as she lay flattened. Dust, pebbles and grit peppered her face, stinging it like hail.
Slowly, she climbed to her feet. Through blurred eyes she saw Tristram standing near her. He was fine. He was OK! Relief surged through her. Then she realized it wasn’t Tristram, it was Edward, with fluff in his hair and spots of blood all over him. He was staring at a pair of Bermudas that had legs sticking out of them at one end, the feet in tiny trainers. Out of the other end protruded ragged flesh, unwinding coils of intestine and a few inches of sharp, white backbone like the shaft of a broken spear. A small lake of blood was slowly spreading out across the concrete and draining into the weed-filled cracks.
Someone was clambering into the cockpit of the plane: the man in the lumberjack shirt, she dimly registered. The roar of the engine ceased suddenly and there was just the shuttering sound of the propeller. Then silence. The plane was no longer moving. The tiny shreds of hair and bone and flesh that hung from the fuselage and wings also lay scattered across the concrete. Later, when she looked in the mirror, she saw that she was covered in them, too.
Fragments of the afternoon played themselves back to Frannie at random. Moments; segments of moments; details. She could not focus on any one part of what had happened for more than a few seconds without her brain switching channels.
She stared blankly around the drawing-room, trying to orientate herself. The drawing-room was real time. She was in the drawing-room. Then she was outside on the concrete hard, hurtling herself towards Tristram. Brambles tore at the windscreen of the Range Rover, rattling and shrieking. The roar of the aero-engine drummed through the barn. The Tiger Moth rolled forwards. The propeller came up behind Tristram like a shadow. The Range Rover was returning with Charles and Oliver inside it: the lusty bellow of its engine; the crunch of its tyres on the gravel; the two men emerging, cheery voiced, innocent of what lay ahead, glancing with only mild curiosity at the police car drawn up behind Charles’s battered Toyota Landcruiser and the sign that said
PRIVATE. NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT
. The policeman approaching Charles and Oliver, Frannie beside him. Edward at that moment coming around the side of the building with his Game Boy, and the ting-tack-tang … ting-tack-tang … that seemed for a brief instant to be the only sound in the world.
Then the hideous sound Charles had made, a howl of anguish that sounded as if it were drawn from the bowels of the earth.
Now she sat on a sofa, holding a glass in her hand,
in front of an unlit fire. Wind rattled the window-panes. ‘My fault, all my fault.’ She heard herself speaking as if she were somewhere else, in another room, detached.
There was whisky in the glass: hard, neat Scotch that singed her mouth, burned her stomach. It did not relieve the shock or the pain, but it battened them in another compartment and as long as it did, she would be all right.
The pills helped too, helped to dull everything a little, delay reality by a few more hours. Oliver had given them to her. The doctor had given them to Oliver. The doctor who had made her stings better last weekend, who had come and taken Charles away. Oliver’s face seemed to get bigger and smaller. It stretched out sideways then shrank. The doctor had told Oliver she should not drink with the pills.
The channel changed. Tiny scraps clung to the silver fuselage and to the engine cowling. The propeller still spun but the sound had gone mute. Then she was back in the drawing-room again. Bands of tension etched like scratches across her scalp.
‘My fault,’ she repeated.
Oliver sat beside her. ‘No,’ he said.
‘It is.’
‘Kids have to be watched all the time. No one understands that until they have kids of their own. It’s not your fault.’
His voice sounded strange as if she were hearing it through glass. She wondered if she had died. Oliver was looking at her oddly. Maybe I was killed by the plane and no one told me. She reached out to touch his hand but closed on air. She tried again, took his wrist, felt the hairs and the firm muscle, pressed her face into his neck, smelled his ears, his shampoo, his skin, held him tightly.
There was a picture of the aeroplane on the mantelpiece, and in the kitchen; there seemed to be pictures of it in every room. Oliver, Edward and Edward’s mother standing in front of it, laughing at the camera.
‘I should have stayed with them, followed them.’
‘I should have padlocked the barn,’ he said.
‘Where was the ignition key for the plane?’
‘It doesn’t have a key; just a couple of magneto switches on the dash. It never occurred to me that he – they –’ his voice shuttered off, like the propeller, into silence.
Frannie drank some more, held the glass close to her face, inhaling the fumes. Everything was out of kilter, as if new laws of the universe had been written and nobody had told her. The world was now a place where a group of kids could get killed and maimed just by sitting around a table with an upturned glass; where a small boy could kill and maim just by thinking about it. Maybe it was Oliver who had written the new laws? The stuff on the wall in the library. The hieroglyphics. She closed her eyes. Madness was not very far away; just a glass of whisky or a small blue pill separated her from it.
Her own turn was not very far away either. And she did not know what separated her from that.
A crash of breaking glass upstairs startled them both. Oliver jumped up and ran out into the corridor. She followed him into the hall, and up the stairs to the landing where all they could hear was a low moaning sound that Frannie thought at first was the wind.
It was coming from Edward’s room. She realized it was not moaning but chanting. Oliver gripped the round brass handle; his knuckles were white. For a moment he remained motionless then he slowly opened the door, pushing hard against the draught of cold air that blasted out at them.
The room was in darkness, the windows were broken. The curtains thrashed, tearing at their rods, the rings sliding and clacking, the fabric hissing. In the midst of it all Edward lay in his bed, asleep on his back, the steady chant coming from his mouth.
‘
… murotaccep menoissimer ni rutednuffe sitlum orp te sibov orp iuq iedif muiretsym itnematset inretea te ivon iem siniugnas xilac mine tse cih …
’
Frannie felt panicked. A toy car rolled along a shelf and fell at her feet. Oliver ushered her back out of the room and closed the door softly.
‘What on earth is it?’ she whispered. ‘What’s going on.
He raised a hand, motioning her to stay, strode down to his own room and came back moments later with a small ghetto-blaster. He opened Edward’s door a few inches and switched on the red recording light, and the tape revolved with a shuffle. Edward’s flat monotone sounded along the passageway: ‘…
muem suproc mine tse coh. Senmo coh xe etacudnam te, etipicca: snecid, sius silupicsid euqtided, tigerf, tixid eneb, snega saitarg metnetopinmo muus mertap mued et da muleac ni siluco sitavele te saus sunam selibarenev ca satcnas ni menap tipecca ruteretap mauq eidirp iuq …
’
Oliver closed the door and stopped the tape, then walked back along the corridor to his room, switched on the light, waited for her to come in and closed the door. The room looked neat and orderly, but it felt very cold. The candles in the two iron holders either side of the bed had been replaced. In the bright light the room felt strange. Oliver’s face was white and lined, had aged twenty years since the morning. He sat on the edge of the four-poster bed and put the recorder down beside him, then looked at her gravely. ‘You didn’t recognize that?’
She stayed close to the door, feeling unwelcome.
‘What is it? One of the Arabic languages?’ She observed the cherubs and nudes painted on the walls; the thick rugs, the shirts on their metal hangers hooked on to the wardrobe door. The row of polished shoes with their wooden trees on the floor. Alien. It was all alien.
‘I’ll play it backwards,’ he said. ‘You might find that helps.’ He opened the wardrobe, rummaged in the back and pulled out an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. He played back the tape, recording it on to the reel-to-reel, then pressed the machine’s reverse play button. Edward’s voice immediately sounded clearer.
‘
… Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis mei, novi et aeterni testamenti: mysterium fidei: qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum
.’
She prowled near the door like a caged animal. He watched her with haunted eyes. His worn plimsoles were sunk into the shag rug beside the bed and his head was sunk into his shoulders. She translated, her voice trembling, the words that she knew so well, had memorized since earliest childhood. It had been a long time since she had heard them in Latin.
‘For this is the Chalice of my Blood of the new and eternal testament,’ she said falteringly, unable to take her eyes from Oliver. ‘The mystery of the faith; which shall be shed for you and for the multitude of mankind so that sins may be forgiven.’