Authors: Laura Wilson
‘It’s when there’s an outbreak of a particular illness, so that lots of people get it at once. Like measles.’
‘I had measles.’ Michael was looking at him now, uncertainty in his face.
‘Did you ask for it?’
The boy frowned for a moment, and Stratton could see that he was struggling. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, did it happen because you were bad? Because you deserved it?’
‘No!’ Now, he looked outraged.
‘There you are then,’ said Stratton, leaning over to twitch the cigarette from the boy’s fingers and stub it out on the side of the wastepaper basket. ‘Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Life isn’t always fair, you know.’
‘Then,’ said Michael, not like Roth now, but with the black-and-white absoluteness of childhood, ‘it’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Some things don’t make sense. Take what happened this afternoon.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Michael ducked his head and started to tug at one of the plasters on his injured knee.
‘I can understand that,’ said Stratton. ‘But I’d like you to tell me about what happened.’
Michael did some more fiddling, then raised his head and said, abruptly, ‘It was my fault.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘She came back because I kept on thinking about her. Mr Roth said not to, but I couldn’t help it.’
‘Telling yourself not to think about something doesn’t mean it won’t pop into your mind every now and then,’ said Stratton. ‘But it certainly wasn’t your fault.’
‘Mr Roth says thoughts are very powerful things,’ said Michael, stubbornly.
Giving this up as a bad job, Stratton said, ‘So you were out for a walk, were you?’
‘Yes. With Miss Kirkland and Miss Banting, and then the car came. She was staring at me.’
‘Ananda was?’
The boy’s face clouded at the mention of his mother’s name. ‘She’s gone mad, hasn’t she?’
‘Is that what Mr Roth said?’
‘Not exactly. But when she … went away, and you came, I
asked him what was happening, what everyone was talking about – because nobody would tell me, they just said we shouldn’t talk about it … Except that they
were
talking about it, about Mr Lloyd and the lady in the wood, when they thought I couldn’t hear, but when I asked Mr Roth where my mother was, he said something about people falling by the wayside. He said it as if it wasn’t important … he kept saying that the Work was what mattered, and we mustn’t get caught up in other things, and then you came and told me about the other boy, and then …’ Michael was blinking fast, now, trying to hold back tears, ‘she tried to kill me! I know she did. I wanted to jump out of the way, but I couldn’t move. Miss Banting jumped right in front of me and the car hit her.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Stratton, ‘when we’re scared of something – really scared – we sort of seize up. Our brains send the message to our muscles all right, but our muscles refuse to obey it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘It didn’t happen to Miss Banting,’ said Michael. ‘She
did
something. I just stood there.’
‘She wanted to protect you. That was her idea, and it was a good one, wasn’t it? She stopped you from being injured and she might even have saved your life.’
‘What you’re saying,’ Michael’s tone was flat, ‘is that she was better than I was when it happened. I’m supposed to be better than her, all the time, but I’m not, am I? And now she’s been hurt, and it’s my fault. She’s not … not going to die, is she?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Stratton. ‘We think she’s got a broken leg, and people don’t usually die of those. And you mustn’t think that’s your fault, because it isn’t. You didn’t make any of this happen.’
‘But it did happen! I only wanted my mother to come back because I missed her, and then … then …’ The boy’s face quivered and broke apart, tears coming now. ‘I don’t understand!’ He
leapt up and hurled himself at Stratton, an explosion of windmilling fists, puny blows catching him on the chest and arms. ‘Everyone thinks I do, but I don’t! And she tried to kill me, and then you said I’ve got a brother I didn’t even know about, and they all whisper and talk about me behind my back – they think I understand everything Mr Roth talks about, and how … how … important it is, and they won’t even tell me stuff about
her
, and …’ Stratton, closing on him, pinned the struggling form in a bear hug. Unable to fight any more, Michael went suddenly limp, allowing Stratton to rub his back.
‘Steady on, steady on,’ he murmured, as the boy gulped and hiccupped.
Stratton thought suddenly of his own children at the same age, and of Tom and his siblings, playing in their garden, and felt ready to bash someone. Stifling his rage, he said, ‘You must be tired.’
‘I am, a bit,’ Michael admitted. ‘We don’t have to talk about this stuff any more, do we?’
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
‘Then …’ Michael hesitated, his mouth still open.
‘If you stand like that for much longer,’ said Stratton, ‘you’ll catch a fly, like the old lady.’
‘Which old lady?’
‘In the song.’ Feeling foolish, Stratton stumbled through the barely remembered tune. ‘There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die.’
Michael gave a yelp of laughter. ‘That’s not how it goes. You’re not very good at singing, are you?’
‘Not very. Do you know it?’
‘Yes. Miss Banting used to sing it to me when I was little. She used to put me to bed when my mother …’ A flicker of wistfulness, almost entreaty, crossed his face, swiftly replaced with a hard, closed expression. ‘When she was too busy, which
was mostly. Miss Banting,’ he brightened again, ‘knows lots of songs.’
‘Well, let’s try it now, shall we? Even though I’m not very good. Let’s get your shoes off, and then you can lie down.’
Michael sat on the bed and allowed Stratton to kneel down and undo his laces. ‘Why don’t you get under the eiderdown? It’s a bit nippy in here.’
‘I suppose it will be all right, will it? I mean, I’m supposed to be having lessons and things.’
‘I don’t think anyone’s going to worry too much about that,’ said Stratton.
‘All right, then.’ The boy lay down and, as Stratton covered him over, said, ‘You will stay with me, won’t you?’
‘Yes, until you’re asleep. Now, close your eyes. You might want to close your ears, too, once I get going.’ Michael giggled, but did as he was told.
Stratton began to sing quietly, staring out of the window at the almost darkness and dredging his mind to reconstruct the words from dim memories of when Monica and Pete were small. Somewhere around swallowing the cow to catch the dog, he got muddled and stopped, expecting Michael to prompt him. When he looked over at the boy, he saw that he was fast asleep. There was something about the depth of it that reminded him of the way Monica and Pete had slept when they’d been feverish as children and how, in slumber, they had seemed to be healing themselves in front of his eyes.
If he’d ever had a stranger conversation, he was damned if he could remember it. As he looked at the boy’s beautiful, peaceful face, he thought of the first time they’d met. Michael had told him he was carrying a heavy burden, but it was nothing to the one on his own slender shoulders, the one he would have to try and make sense of – and escape from, if that were possible – in the years to come. And, unlike Stratton’s, it had been deliberately
placed there. With the best of intentions, but
intended
, all the same. What would his future be?
Children are resilient, he told himself. People are. But all the same … ‘Poor old lady,’ he murmured. ‘She swallowed a horse. She died of course.’
Jaws clenched, Ballard shot round a narrow corner too wide, narrowly missing a baker’s van that was coming in the opposite direction, barrelling past him with the bray of a horn and an inarticulate shout. Swearing, he ground the unfamiliar gears, praying that the thing wouldn’t stall. So far, he’d seen a couple of lorries, a petrol tanker and three cars, none of which was a Vauxhall Velox, and he was nearly at the London Road. Where the hell was she? Most of the turn-offs he’d passed had been farm tracks or lanes that led to villages. Reasoning that the fastest means of escape would be to stay on the larger roads, he’d ignored them, but what if he’d been wrong?
He stamped his foot on the accelerator and shot round another bend, spotting fresh manure and hoping like hell that he wasn’t about to run into a herd of cows. A blindingly vivid flash of himself slumped forward, the steering column embedded in his chest and the buckled wreck of the car surrounded by steaming, flailing, bellowing bovine flesh, made him squeeze his eyes shut. When he opened them again, a second later, it was just in time – Fuck! – to swerve around the last black-and-white rump as it disappeared through a gate in the hedge. Sweating with relief, he hurtled on down the road and through a village, spraying
gravel where the road was being mended, and, wincing at the imagined impact of an unsuspecting lorry ploughing into his side, straight across a junction. The road was wider now, and straight, with detached cottages dotted amongst the fields on either side. The engine’s whine turned to a scream as he flogged the car up a hill at sixty-five miles an hour, eyes popping with adrenalin as he crowned the ridge and scanned the countryside below. As he shot down the other side – seventy – seventy-five – the whole car rattling like buggery and his teeth with it, foot jamming the accelerator against the floor – he saw the boot of a black car disappear round a bend about a quarter of a mile away. If it was the Velox, it would certainly be faster than Stratton’s Ford Pop., even assuming that it had been serviced recently which, by the sound of things, wasn’t the case. Crouched rigidly over the steering wheel, he shot after it, blind across another junction and onwards, narrowly missing a kid on a bicycle and swerving round one bend, then another, too close to the edge of the road – no ditch, thank God, but the bare branches of the hedge clawed at the side of the car as he struggled to keep it on course. The car was now rattling so much that it felt as if it might break apart like something in a circus, the vibrations juddering his entire body so that he kept his mouth tight shut, fearful of biting his tongue.
Moments later, he saw the black boot of the car disappearing around another corner. He sped after it and caught sight of the letters BFY on the registration plate before it went round another corner. Then, on the straight, he saw the whole registration number and, inside the car, dark hair and then a flash of wild, white profile as the driver looked round, and knew that it must be Ananda. Closing on her, Ballard leant forward and switched his headlights on and off a couple of times to indicate that she should stop, before both cars careered round another corner, the Ford Pop. almost riding on her bumper. They rounded another
corner, then another, and then the Velox jinked suddenly left and swerved across the road. Ballard just had time to realise that one of the tyres must have burst when, with an almighty metallic bang, the car went straight into the sharp corner of a large white house. Caught by surprise – he was so intent on the Velox that he hadn’t even registered the building – Ballard wrenched the wheel round and stamped on the brake pedal, fighting to control his car as it skidded past the crash and embedded itself, in the last, frantic seconds of a high-speed nightmare, some yards up the road in the opposite hedge.
Ballard heard the tinkle of falling glass and opened his eyes to see, through the crazed glass of the windscreen, the stabbing branches and the buckled, steaming bonnet rising up in front of him. Not dead, then. His body, in its own collision with the steering wheel and instrument panel, felt not his own. He raised his head, inched himself back slightly in the seat and stared down stupidly at his chest, groin and knees. What were they doing there? What was he doing?
Hearing tapping on the window of the passenger door, Ballard turned his head and saw a man in an apron and shirtsleeves tugging at the handle, and, behind him, a dozen silent faces staring at him with the closed intensity of mourners looking into a coffin. A sudden absurd impulse to wave to them made him lift his hand, and then the air inside the car seemed to break apart as everything – sense, memory, pain – rushed back on the high, piercing clarity of a scream from across the road.
Tugged and manipulated by willing hands, Ballard managed to extract his legs from under the dashboard and crawl across the passenger seat. He shook his head at attempts to help him stand up, and, lowering himself gingerly onto the muddy verge on his hands and knees, struggled into a sitting position, leaning against the back wheel of the car. The aproned man squatted down in front of him, and a pair of liver-spotted claws draped a tartan blanket round his shoulders. Looking up, he saw a lizard-skinned grandmother with a fox fur round her shoulders, and next to her a barrel-shaped woman – or possibly a middle-aged, middle-weight wrestler impersonating a woman – in a too-small hat, with a fat, tightly buttoned child goggling puggily at him from behind her skirt. Now they’d seen that he was alive and – to some extent at least – mobile, all three adults looked censorious.
Ballard’s chest hurt. He ran a tongue over dry lips and tried to work some saliva into his mouth. ‘What’s happened to her?’
‘Your girlfriend?’ said the aproned man. ‘Well, she’s not too clever.’
‘Having a race, were you?’ said the barrel-shaped woman, who sounded, utterly incongruously, a great deal like Ron’s girlfriend Eth from
Take It From Here
.
Ballard shook his head. ‘Policeman.’
‘You?’ The woman wagged her head in disbelief.
‘Get away,’ said the aproned man. ‘That’s not a police car.’
‘It was an emergency. She’s a suspect.’
‘Well,’ said the man, unconvinced, ‘the manager’s called the police, just now. And,’ he added in a triumphant tone, as if it was conclusive proof of wrongdoing, ‘you’ve got a cut on your forehead.’
Ballard put his hand up and felt the wetness of blood. ‘What manager?’ he asked.
‘’s a hotel.’ The man stood up, waving the onlookers back. ‘See?’