The Waking That Kills (20 page)

In the daytime, we did it in the garden. Juliet on top, always, worried about my ribs, although the bruises had faded from black to purple to a kind of Tuscan ochre... concerned for my ribs, that was the reason she put into words. In the hearse, she pressed me down, her body forked on top of me, my father’s blanket coarse beneath my back. Under the Scots pine, she forked me into the sweet dry needles. At night she came to my room. In the moonlight, she was a silvery nymph who’d slipped into the house from the shadows of the woodland and captured me, a trophy she might take back to her faery-world. Or a wild creature. She pinned me down, panting and staring fiercely around her, like a hawk on a feebly-fluttering thrush.

For those brief moments of uncontrollable ecstasy, she didn’t seem to know or care who I was or where I’d come from. It was a kind of madness. In her head, she was making love to a man whose body was decomposing in the North Sea, a corpse, nibbled rotten, but more or less intact because it was encased in a helmet and flying-suit.

Yes, I engaged with Lawrence.

One day, nearly all of a pleasantly pointless summer’s day, we worked on the hearse. I remember suggesting it to him at the breakfast table and he agreed with a shrug. In the morning, when the shade was cool and we could hear the swifts screaming around the remains of the tree-house, we opened the bonnet of the car and cleaned the engine. By no means an expert myself, I expounded the pedigree of the sooty machine – the same XK straight-six which powered the Jaguar saloons and sports-cars and even the legendary D-type which had won the Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans. We checked the oil, extracting the dip-stick and wiping it clean. We checked the water in the radiator. We tested the tension in the fan-belt as though we knew what we were doing. And then, until Juliet called from the house that it was time for lunch, we salved the smooth surfaces of the engine and the black rubber hoses with oil, every mysterious bit whose name we didn’t know.

It looked great, as though we were entering it for a classic-car competition. But all the time I was thinking, and no doubt the boy was thinking too, that the car wouldn’t go, however great it looked. Quite incongruous beneath the bonnet, there was a flat battery from a modern German car. And the Daimler’s own battery was flat too.

But we didn’t stop. We worked with great seriousness, as reverent as priests with the body of a pharaoh, preparing it for some spurious afterlife. It was dead, the heart of it was dead. But thanks to our earnest ministrations, the corpse was fragrant and clean.

‘How are you boys doing down there?’ Juliet was amused. Also, she was pleased. She presided over the pâté and salad she’d spread out, some of the bounty she’d received from beyond the borders of her domain. She smiled on us, on her boys. She had us where she wanted us, safe and sound and no reason to go elsewhere.

In the afternoon, we opened the car itself and cleaned it out. I sprayed furniture polish on the sunburnt woodwork beneath the windscreen and around the dash. Lawrence buffed as though his life depended on it, and the whorls of walnut re-appeared like magic. I applied unction to the upholstery and Lawrence buffed until the leather was gleaming. We took everything out of the capacious, corpse-carrying compartment in the back, we swept and dusted. We discovered a system of runnels in the floor, and a hole with a plug in it under the driver’s seat; and Lawrence, pretending great wisdom in such arcane matters, declared it was there to drain out blood and other bodily fluids which dripped from the caskets.

I wasn’t so sure. But I didn’t know, so I nodded and agreed with the possibility. And the macabre supposition was part of our business; our painstaking maintenance of a vehicle which didn’t go, and in any case, was already close to its retirement as chicken-shed or tool-cupboard.

We didn’t stop until the evening. For a few moments we’d thought about tackling the rust-pitted chrome of the classic, fluted radiator, and the chrome bumpers and headlamps. But no. We stood back and appraised the hulk looming in the woodland.

Yes, we’d been honouring my father, who was dribbling in an old people’s home in Grimsby. But the futility of what we were doing dawned on me. I remember I blinked and stared at the car. I narrowed my eyes and looked and I saw what it was: a superannuated hearse, subsiding into the long grass on its slowly deflating tyres.

Lawrence and I glanced sideways at one another. No, we weren’t going to polish the chrome. We walked back to the house. I didn’t know what the boy was thinking, but for myself it was a mixture of satisfaction – that I’d engaged busily with him as I’d been hired to do – and dismay, an inescapable sense of the surreal.

S
TRANGE DAYS.
W
HAT
else did we do? How did the dream-like days of summer unfold?

‘Anyone for tennis?’ The boy came down from his tower with a couple of badminton racquets and a battered shuttlecock.

It was a sweltering, airless afternoon. Me and Juliet and Lawrence, we carried our drinks of lemon barley water outside, to a flatter space of tousled grass beside the pond, and we took turns to swat the shuttlecock backwards and forwards until most of the feathers had been knocked off it. At last, when I’d smashed it far over Lawrence’s head and into the nettles, he’d groped around and suddenly declared, ‘Even better, this’ll do nicely,’ before turning towards me and hitting something high into the air.

Even as it floated down, spinning and twirling in a dazzle of sunlight, I could see it was a bird.

A fledgling blue tit. Dead, of course. Either he’d seen it dead or it had died the moment he’d smacked it with the racquet. In any case, my instinct was to step away and let it land.

But I surprised myself. He shouted, ‘Go on, Chris, hit it!’ And I did.

The woman was laughing. The boy was laughing. I heard myself laughing. And for a horrid, hilarious half-minute we played the best rally of the afternoon, popping the blue tit back and forth a dozen or twenty times.

It got smaller and smaller. At last it disintegrated in a puff of feathers. Still laughing, we collapsed onto the grass and drank our lemon barley water.

S
O THE DAYS
and the weeks went by. If I’d thought Borneo was a dream from which I would never wake up – where I’d been steam-rollered by the mosque, unmanned by the heat, lulled into niceness by the niceness of my students, slugged into unconsciousness by gin – then the summer at Chalke House was
sama sama
, as they said in Malay. Same difference. The same contagion of torpor. The dream was intoxicating.

Me and Lawrence, we discovered the garden of Chalke House. I stumbled on a bed of mint, so swallowed by fireweed that it had almost disappeared. Me and Lawrence, we scythed the fireweed and the mint was revealed, its perfume fresh and clean in the smuggy heat of July. It inspired us to look again, into the smothering wilderness, and find what men had planted, what previous owners of the house had done...

We found rosemary, we found lavender. There was a burgeoning stand of rhubarb, so strong that when we’d cut away the suffocating grasses we could hear its muscular, rubbery growth. Mint and rosemary and lavender and rhubarb... and horse radish, a superb and secret root, secreting its heat in a jungle of cow-parsley.

And lupins, a peppery miracle. My favourite from a childhood in my father’s garden. Me and Lawrence, we found lupins, lost in the overgrown woodland of Chalke House.

And what did we do, not knowing or caring what day it was... in June or July or August or whatever?

We cut lupins by the armful and carried them into the house. Juliet put them in vases, in her shabby, seductive living-room. We drank gin. We had rosemary with the lamb they’d delivered from the outside world, we had horse radish with a succulent steak. We had rhubarb with the cream they’d smuggled in. We washed it down with wine from Chile or California.

And at midnight, when Lawrence had gone to bed, she would take me into the woodland, where the wren was ticking and the owl was calling, and roll me into the mint, for a dreamy herbal fucking.

Chapter Twenty

V
IRGINIA
W
OOLF WROTE
, in one of her celebrated letters, ‘Life is a dream. ’tis the waking that kills us.’

When does a dream become nightmare? What is the transitional moment, when the pleasant, random ridiculousness of a dream alters and shifts and is tinged with fear?

I could feel it happening at Chalke House. The woman – her laughter, which had seemed so blithe and fey, was jarring into the cackle of a woodpecker; her silvery body, which had come to me as a miraculous sprite, was pinning me down. The boy – his teenage gawkiness, as daft and clumsy as my boys in Borneo, was now imbued with a strange, nude, muscular strength.

And their collusion. The two of them. I’d had an inkling when I’d arrived that they were riven somehow, there was a rift I was required to heal. No, not now. No, longer: a month or six weeks or two months later. Whether it was me who’d achieved their reunion or some other energy afoot in the woodland, they were together again, and a force to be reckoned with. What did they want of me? Who did they want me to be? Who did they think I was?

‘P
OOR BABY... YOU
just stay there and stay cool...’

She’d coaxed me, one lunchtime, into a second and then a third glass of wine I hadn’t really wanted. It had been a hot, hot morning, and the three of us had been cutting the grass outside the French windows. Why? Because Lawrence had emerged from his communing with the swifts in the greenhouse with an ancient, rusty scythe he’d discovered, an antique trophy he wanted to try out, and in any case it was that kind of late summer morning when the air was heady with elder and you could hear the gorse-pods popping in the heat. A day to be bucolic. Stripped to the waist, me and the boy, spectated by the woman, we’d wielded the scythe this way and that and managed to flatten a lot of the grass with the blunt blade.

She’d disappeared into the house and made lunch. Dizzy with the sun on my head, aware of the sinewy leanness of the boy’s body as it gleamed with sweat, I’d drooped into the shade of a horse chestnut until she called us indoors.

Noon. A green salad. And chilled white wine; the shock of it was so delicious, I’d gulped it like cordial. She topped me up, although I tried to stop her with my hand over my glass. The little hit of alcohol buzzed in my brain and awakened the blurry buzziness of the previous night’s drinking. And I could feel the sun on my forehead, on the back of my neck. But the salad was good, and the olive oil from the world outside, all the better for the second glass of wine I’d tried to refuse. I saw her exchange a glance with her son, when, by a sleight of hand, she poured me a third.

Bucolic... alcoholic... we finished lunch, and the room was a heavenly haze. It seemed to purr, with a soft, humming kind of energy. Or maybe it was the hum in my head. ‘Poor baby...’ she was whispering as she pressed me gently, firmly into the cushions of the sofa. She wetted a napkin with water from the ice-bucket and laid it on my brow. It felt like a big, cool kiss. ‘Poor baby, I guess in Borneo you don’t go out in the midday sun, mad dogs and Englishmen and all that. Just stay there and stay cool.’

I slept. And the orange cat wasn’t orange anymore. It was covered in blood.

It dashed into the room, through the open windows. A dream, it must have been, because in the real, waking world there were no cats which had once been big and bushy with orange stripes and then slick and dripping in blood. With a bubbling yowl, because the blood was in its mouth as well, it launched itself from the carpet and landed on my chest with a soggy thump. For a moment, its face was dribbling onto mine. Then it was off again and hurtling helter-skelter about the room, as though it was on fire and the blaze on its body was a torture.

I leapt up. Apart from the madness of the cat, the room looked real. My head was throbbing. I saw the remains of lunch on a tray on the floor, the bottle of wine up-ended in the ice-bucket. Unable to yowl anymore, its throat a gurgle of blood, the cat fled to the window again and out.

Asleep... I must have been. A blood-sodden cat? Bloody footprints around and around the carpets of a country living-room? The blood was on my face. I touched it with my fingers. It didn’t smell like blood. I followed the trail outside, and through the muzziness of my sleeping brain I heard an agitation of voices.

The boy was braying, manly, stentorian. And Juliet... was she laughing or sobbing? ‘Get down from there! Are you mad? You’ve killed it!’

I rounded the corner of the house, into the holly wood, where a drunken dream became nightmare.

Buckets of blood? Lawrence was covered in it. In his little boy’s pants, he was kneeling on the roof of the car, which had been a sleek silver BMW for a fighter-pilot, his pretty wife and his wholesome son, before death and madness and blindness were visited on the Lundy family. Shouting, the boy was on the roof. He had a plastic bucket up there and he was sloshing a solution of soap and water everywhere and scrubbing at it with a brush. The red paint, which had been slopped on the car to avenge the child whom Lawrence had blinded, was now partially dissolved and smeared into a gory mess.