Deathwatch (18 page)

“I’m supposed to be at a friend’s house doing homework anyway, so they won’t be worrying. I need to talk to Uncle Walter, Cat. He’s the only person who will know what to do.”

Cat could think of few things she would like to do less. She had absolutely no desire to see Danny’s Uncle Walter. He knew things about her and none of it good. On the other hand, she didn’t trust Danny to sort it out entirely himself. She wanted to know as well. And if she was with Danny, she’d be safe. There was a weird thought!

“Help me blow the candles out.” And they did. Downstairs, Cat went into her parents’ room. Her mum was sleeping. Cat wished she could tell her everything. But there was just too much to explain. And anyway, nothing bad could come just from going to talk to Danny’s uncle. Maybe he
could
reassure them. If he had been with Danny’s brother all that evening, that would be that.

One thing she knew for certain – if she still had doubts after she’d spoken to him, she would tell her parents everything. Just thinking that made her feel better.

There could be no harm in delaying for an hour, she told herself.

She shook her mum’s shoulder gently. “Mum, I’m just going round to my friend’s house, OK?”

“Whose house?”

“Friend from school – we’ve got a bit of homework to finish.”

It worked every time, thought Cat, as her mum murmured agreement.

After texting her dad to say she’d gone to a friend’s house and would be back soon, Cat went out of the house with Danny. They left plenty of lights on, and Polly asleep in her bed downstairs, dreaming of a world full of cats, rabbits and squirrels and a warm fire to lie beside afterwards.

Wrapped up against the sheeting rain, they hurried along the street, round the corner and into the next street, past some more stupid ghosts, pumpkins and fairies, and one white rabbit in tears, down the cobbled road, and in a couple of minutes came to the building where Danny said his uncle lived.

As they stood in the slight shelter of the doorway, and waited for his voice to answer the intercom, Cat looked up. It was an old building, originally one enormous house but now divided into flats. Its huge square tower at one end made it one of the tallest buildings around, and the view from the windows up there must be spectacular. Soon a metallic voice came through the grid: “Yes?”

“It’s Danny. Can I come up?” A pause. A long pause.

Then the buzz of the door and Danny pushed it open. “Come on!”

“I don’t like this, Danny.” Cat felt distinctly uncomfortable.

“Don’t be silly. It’s going to be fine. Uncle Walter will sort everything. He’ll know what to do.”

Cat knew what she wanted to do: run back home and curl up in her room, safe with her mum and dog, and wait for her dad and Angus to come back. Nothing could harm her there. But here, about to go up the stairs to a strange man who knew all sorts of things about her? Not the most fun-sounding suggestion of the year.

She vowed to stay for ten minutes only. Then she’d go back home and tell her mum. Everything.

She wished her friends were here. They wouldn’t know any better than her what to do but they could at least do it together. She had a real urge to text them … but to say what? That she was with Danny, about to go into his uncle’s flat to ask questions about his schizophrenic brother? To find out if he’d tried to kill her? Completely stupid idea.

Trust Danny to get her into this. Never trust someone who collects insects.

She stepped into the building. There was a bicycle leaning against the wall of the vestibule. Wet footprints staining the floor. A smell of petrol. And, hanging from a hook, a motorbike tarpaulin.

Danny pushed open a door on the left and she looked up the staircase, hesitated, and followed him up the stairs.

HE
is private and warm in his room, at his desk overlooking the surrounding streets. The rain slides, slanting across the large windowpanes, and the wind drags the branches of the trees in a crazy dance.

He likes being alone. There have been times in his life when too many people have been around him. He avoids groups where possible. Most people worry about too much and too little – they have no idea of reality. He has seen things to turn the mind and the stomach, things that most people see only in films or nightmares. He has seen war.

Everything is coming together now. His fingers are tired, as they rattle across the keys of his computer. His book is well on its way. The book is about his experiences. It
has
made him feel much better. Cathartic, people say it is, to write unbearable memories down. And it has been. Though the act of finding the words to convey the raw and terrible events has been painful. But each time a little less so.

Now he can write almost without crying.

The notebook with its thick paper lies beside him, full of circles and plans, mind maps and links and question marks, though with almost all the question marks at last crossed out.

He has interest from a publisher. Though he does not wish for fame or fortune. Wealth is wicked and all property is theft. He is not writing this for money, but for himself. And for all his friends who died while he lived. Often when he closes his eyes, he sees them, sees their throats split as if screaming through shrapnel and the sharp flames of gunfire. He smells acid smoke and tastes vomit. Oddly, the taste of grapefruit is at the back of his throat too. He does not know why. It is bitter and thin and nasty and should not be there.

When Walter had discovered, weeks ago, that his own nephew had actually been going out with the daughter of Dr Bill McPherson, that had been a shocking moment. He had almost knocked on the man’s door and shouted his pent-up anger at him. But where would that have got him? This was not supposed to be about Bill McPherson.

But it has been impossible not to watch the house, not while writing these memoirs, not when every time he looks up from his desk he sees the shiny black door. There are now too many reasons to watch.

Before Walter went off to the First Gulf War, he and his wife had been happy. He’d come back home in 1991. Victorious. Well, 358 Allied deaths and countless thousands of Iraqis. Sounded like a victory, didn’t it? If measured like that.

But two of the deaths had been Walter’s closest friends. He’d seen them die. And so had Bill McPherson, the doctor on duty when the casualties were brought in, their wounds too horrific to describe. Doctor, yes; professional soldier, no. Just one of those part-timers, Territorial Army, joined for the action and excitement and never expected to be called up for real war.

Walter, his right hand shielding the hole in one man’s skull, the left hand gripped painfully in the dying man’s fist, had yelled at him to do something. But the doctor had refused, his face passive. “In a minute,” he’d said. Busy, he’d said he was. Busy. With an officer and a mangled arm. So Walter’s friend had died, with Walter’s hand still sticky where the skull had been. And the other hand painful long after the dying grip had vanished. With his other friend simply moaning more and more quietly until the moan disappeared altogether and Walter realized that he was dead too, while nurses and doctors bustled round in the heat and dust, doing their best, and Bill McPherson focused on the one soldier whose arm he was trying to save.

In Walter’s grief, people had told him that he was in shock and being unreasonable, that Bill McPherson had only done what he must do – save the life he was working on before any others that came in after, and that a gaping head wound was a hopeless case. But Walter had been the one with his hand on that wound. He’d been the one who watched his friend’s glazed eyes as he slipped away.

When “victory” had come, and Walter had found himself standing mute on a British harbourside some months later, his wife running towards him, he had felt numb. Had not been able to put his arms round her, kiss her, tell her he loved her. Because he didn’t, not any more. How could you? How could you go from death and pain and hate and fear to a woman’s warm perfume?

Despite this, and the rows, the anger, his silent evenings staring at a whisky bottle, his wife had become pregnant, maybe a year later. She’d told him straightaway, looking at him with frightened, hopeful eyes as though she dreamed that this might change everything. Out of death, might come life. Out of horror, could come pastel love and warm milk and baby clothes.

It hadn’t. Things had got worse. Trapped and guilty, he felt by then. And he had been cruel to Sheila, he knew that. Knew it even at the time, but could not bite his tongue and stop the acid words before they were said.

And when the baby – a girl – had been stillborn a few months later, how could Sheila not have blamed him? How could everyone not have blamed him? After all, he’d blamed himself.

His daughter would have been Cat’s age now. And that was the problem. Not his, but Sheila’s. Her grief had never entirely gone away. In many ways, she had coped unbelievably well. When he’d left her, disappearing one sad sunny day two months later and leaving only a gutless handwritten note, she’d been helped by friends – including his sister, Danny and David’s mother. And eventually, eventually, she had come through her grief, got herself together and gone back to work. Computers. Brilliant, she was. But she’d changed.

She no longer wanted to be near people. Now she lived alone, a strangely simple life. But that summer, she’d been talking to Danny – always had a soft spot for him, she did – and, to cut a long story short, she’d realized that Danny had been going out with the daughter of Bill McPherson, a man her husband had often talked of when drunk and angry or when he woke screaming and sobbing from a nightmare. And she’d seen Cat one day, seen her glowing health and, frankly, beauty, and realized that Bill McPherson had the daughter she should have had, while she had no one.

So she’d gone off the rails. Not mad. Because it wasn’t really mad, was it? It was totally, utterly sane and reasonable to feel jealous and hurt and angry and sad. Nothing mad about that.

But he worries about her, and what she might do in her fury. Things she’s been saying seem … over the top. The way she watches the house: he’s seen her from his window. So now he sometimes finds himself watching the girl, sometimes even following her on his bike. If he knows that Sheila is following, then Walter will too, to keep an eye on her.

And now he has David to worry about too, poor lad. There’s real madness.

But where is David? He should be here. Walter has agreed to keep him with him at all times. He has seemed much better. And this evening Walter has let him go to buy beans or something. There had not seemed any harm in that. He’d gone on his motorbike, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t.

Come on, David! Walter is irritated. He wants to get on with his writing. And David’s absence is stopping him. Not that he is worried, but until David is settled down in his own room, with the endless DVDs he watches, Walter cannot immerse himself in his work.

He looks out of the window. Most of the leaves have gone now. He can see the street where the McPhersons live, see the girl’s window, see the lights on behind shutters and curtains, see her own light on with no shutters. Suddenly the light goes off, and he sees her face bend down to blow out a candle which is burning on her windowsill.

He has no warm feelings for her. She hurt his younger nephew with her cruel behaviour. She looks spoilt, with that thick rich hair and that expensive house. But he does not exactly hate her. She’s only a girl, a kid.

He doesn’t like people like her, though. People who always have so much more than they need. His nose wrinkles in contempt for such greed.

He turns away from his window.

Where is David? What is he doing?

Walter calms himself by looking at his new insect, the one that had arrived only that day. He has not written the card for it yet. It is the one that Danny helped him choose recently.

He looks at the insect for a few moments, feeling his tension ease. David will come back. He will be fine. Sheila will calm down again. Everything will work out.

The creature is extraordinary. It is green and smooth. And, when alive, moves slowly. It has the amazing ability to turn its head completely round, and to look behind itself. The eyes point forward, allowing it to see like humans. If it was alive.

And so, flexing the fingers of his left hand, always stiff in cold weather ever since the war – not that he specifically injured it, just that ever since the day his friend gripped him as he died, his hand has felt different, cold, cramped, as though the blood goes to it only when forced – he holds down the waiting card and begins to write, in slow, well formed letters: Mantodea –
Choeradodis stalii
. And he blows the ink dry before placing it next to the insect sitting waiting in its clear plastic box.

He smiles.

The doorbell rings. David. At last!

He goes to the intercom. “David?”

“It’s Danny. Can I come up?” Danny! Danny was becoming annoying. He was always worrying about David. His parents should be the ones to listen to his problems, or his friends. Didn’t he realize his uncle was busy? He must have a word with Danny’s mother, Walter’s sister. Not that she would welcome his call. She didn’t like the way he was getting too close to David and Danny. She and Walter had never got on. Well, she’d let one son go off the rails – not surprising if she felt she’d failed and was screwed up by guilt. She was always so judgemental. But what did she know about the real world? Cushioned, she was. What he’d seen in the Gulf was unspeakably terrible. But even though Iraq had damaged him, it had given him his edge, had made him human. He knew what being alive meant because he knew what death meant.

He said nothing but pressed the buzzer and waited for the boy to reach the top of the stairs.