I lay on the tree-house and I watched. Again, and again, his hand emerged from a hole in the roof. And each time it withdrew, he left the hole stuffed with a wad of grass or leaves or...
Swimming against the mossy-green glass of the ceiling, clinging with his prehensile fingers and toes, he was repairing the broken panes. No, he was blocking the holes where the glass had broken.
‘W
HAT ON EARTH
have you been doing up there? Why on earth did you...?’
Juliet was standing at the foot of the tree when I scrambled down from the lowest branches. I was winded and sore, but more or less intact. The descent had been harder than the ascent, and now my hands were burning more fiercely than before and I was struggling to get my breath.
She went on, seeing that I was unable to speak for the moment, ‘I’ve been watching you. I was looking for Lawrence so I went up to his room, to see if he was there and get his washing and stuff. At first I thought it was him. I mean, I saw someone on the top of the tree and of course I thought it was Lawrence. When I looked through his binoculars and saw it was you, I... I don’t know... I was watching you and wondering what on earth you were doing up there...’
It all came out in her stream of words, all the stress in her voice, her worry for me and for her son, and her face was pinched with anxiety. She saw how I rubbed at my hands and wrists, and she took hold of me to massage some strength back into my fingers. I said to her, ‘I’m alright, Juliet, I’m fine, I just wanted to...’
She dropped my hands and stepped back. ‘You stink,’ she said. Her face twisted in disgust, the quick snickering snarl of a stoat or an otter. ‘Look at you, you’re filthy. And Lawrence’s room, it stinks the same, his sheets and clothes...’ She narrowed her eyes and shook her head, like an angry and confused little girl. ‘What’s going on? Can’t we just be normal, do normal things, instead of all this mad stuff with birds and climbing trees and wading in ponds and...?’ She stared up at me in exasperation. ‘I mean, Chris, I thought we got you here to make things calm and straight and, well, normal. But it doesn’t feel like that right now ... I mean, where is Lawrence, have you got any idea where he is, or are you too busy climbing trees and...? Where is he?’
I tried to touch her, but she recoiled from me, from the mud on my body and the blackness of the bark on my hands. I heard my platitudes again... when and where had I become so good at them?... in Borneo, my daily patter with the smug Malays and the complacent Chinese and my sweet, deferential students? I heard myself, as at last she let me take hold of her and press her sobbing, shuddering body into my shirt. ‘Hey Juliet, he’s alright, he’s going to be alright, I know exactly where he is and what he’s doing. I went up the tree because I wanted to be sure the swifts have gone. It was a kind of project for him, and yes, I know he got a bit too... a bit too wrapped up in it, like a teenager with his own weird perspective on something I’d meant to be just an interest for him. But now the birds have gone. They’ve gone, and I’ll make him see that they had to go, it’s quite natural and all’s right with the world...’
Her body was calming. She was breathing more slowly. She wiped her eyes on my sleeve, so when she looked up at me she was smeared with tears and pond-slime, a ghastly gothic mascara.
‘He’s in the greenhouse,’ I said. ‘The thing with the pond, well, he told me he used to do it with his father every year, to freshen up the water, to let the air in or whatever. So I helped him finish it off. Good clean fun, that’s all. He’s dragged a lot of the weed to the greenhouse, he said something about compost or something, and right now he’s fixing some of the broken panes in the roof...’
I pulled an incredulous face, and elicited a rueful smile from her. ‘Yes, I know, teenagers are weird, and Lawrence is weirder than most, if you don’t mind me saying so. Nobody’s done any gardening around here for years, and suddenly he’s got the urge to... well, I’ve no idea actually.’
I took her by the hand and tugged her along with me. ‘Come on, let’s go and look. And then the three of us’ll go up to the house and get cleaned up and get some lunch. Alright?’
T
HROUGH THE BRAMBLES
and nettles and parsley. The unmistakable perfume of autumn. And a trail of weed from the pond.
The door of the greenhouse was shut. In the gloom of the undergrowth, the panes of glass were barely opaque. I peered through. No movement of the boy. But a shadow moving. A huge black and brown shadow, moving.
I pushed at the door and called out. ‘Hey Lawrence...?’
It didn’t budge. I pushed harder, with more weight and with my foot at the bottom of it. It grated open – an inch, another inch – with a nasty scraping sound. There were lumps of half-bricks, piled behind it.
‘No you... No I don’t want you...’
The boy was there. For a second he was leaning against the door, to keep it shut. His face was in the crack, hissing at me. ‘No, you can’t, I don’t want you...!’ And then, as it opened wider, ‘Get in! Get in!’
And his arm snaked out. It seized mine with a sinewy force and yanked me through. It shot out and yanked his mother, as though she was a rag-doll. And then he was shoving the door shut again and heaping the rubble of half-bricks behind it.
So we were inside. With the boy. And with hundreds of birds.
In one body, like a flock of roosting starlings, the swifts swept this way and that, around the confined space of the greenhouse. One body. It was as though the boy had entrapped a single miraculous creature and it was exploring the limits of its prison in a mood of terrible, pent-up anger. Anger, yes. The thrumming of hundreds of wings and the hurtle of a hundred bodies... the energy in the suffocating space was more than that. It was a rage against imprisonment, a lust for freedom.
The smell? The noise? A fetid, screaming madness...
The swifts were in our faces, in our hair, in our mouths. They moved as one, a panther of birds, sleek and sudden and a marvellous muscle. But then, as we stumbled over the uneven bricks of the greenhouse floor and gazed around us, as I looked up and saw how he’d stuffed the holes in the ceiling with wads of weed from the pond, the creature that the boy had captured seemed to shatter into smithereens. Where there’d been a swooping black shadow, swerving from one corner of the space to another, it broke into pieces.
There was a twittering chaos. The flock fell apart, and a hundred birds blundered and smashed and collided with each other and the mossy green glass. Here and there, one of them spiralled out of control and crash-landed, crippled, sculling round and round on the ground like a dizzy clockwork toy... another, and another, and...
‘Let them out!’ I yelled at the boy. I had to yell, above the silly hysteria of the birds. It was infectious, and this time no one to quell it but me. ‘Let them out, Lawrence! Let them out!’ I was moving back to the door to kick at the bricks and pull it, grating and screeching, open.
But he was too quick for me. For a brief, unmanly moment, we grappled together; me and the mythical bird-boy from the shadows of the moon, from the stench of the pond, and he was too strong.
‘I told you! he yelled back at me, as he leaned on the door and held it shut. He shouted into my ears, which were baffled by the featheriness, by the sooty-brown chaos swarming around my head. ‘They don’t have to go, they don’t have to! I told, I told you!’
I
’M AT THE
bus stop. It’s a beautiful day. Morning or afternoon, I’m not sure. Early afternoon, I think, the sun is warm and bright in a cloudless sky, lowering to a faraway horizon.
I’m carrying nothing. No bag, not even a jacket or a spare shirt. But when I pat at my pockets, an experienced traveller checking the only essentials I need, I’ve got wallet and passport and car-keys. Not sure when I’ll need the keys. I feel better having them with me, there’s some meaning or symbolism in having the keys even though the car is... not sure where the car is. Passport and wallet and keys. Nervous, I don’t know, I pat at my pockets and stand at the roadside.
The sky is high and empty. Not a cloud. The country is vast and empty. Not a tree. I’m breathing. It feels good.
The bus. Suddenly it’s right in front of me. The door hisses open. Before I can move a muscle or say anything, the fat woman trussed like a turkey in her bus driver’s uniform shoots out her hand and grabs me. Snarling ugly.
Don’t just fucking stand there, get in and leave that fucking mad bitch and fucking mad boy and fucking get in...
I’m sitting at the back. I can see rows of people in front of me, their shoulders and their long black hair. They all have black hair. Some of the women are holding children, who swivel their faces and stare at me. There’s a man with a cockerel.
I look along the aisle and try to focus on the view through the windscreen. The way ahead is brown and incredibly smooth... as smooth as glass. So smooth and wide that the driver is leaning us all this way and that, through one long sweeping bend after another. So fast, so smooth. I stare ahead, through the long narrow tube in front of me and past the other passengers, and we sway with the swooping rhythm of the powerful machine. Spatter. Sometimes a spatter of brown water hits the windscreen. One swish of the wiper and it’s clear. Faster and faster. It’s almost like flying.
Bang
. A series of juddering bangs. Hit something – a log or a croc? We’re rolling. It’s all black and brown and people shouting, women and children and a man with a cockerel. Filling with water. Upside down. The shouting stops, and the voices are gurgling, gargling...
Trapped. I’m trapped at the back, at the bottom, there’s no way out, no way to go except down and down and darker and darker until it’s only a huge swirling blackness and such a pain in my chest that I shout with all my might and a beautiful bright silver bubble blooms from my mouth...
I watch it float away from me. Mine. My air. Leaving me. Leaving me empty.
And then...
Tap tap tap.
Someone, something, somebody is tapping... trying to get in, to get me out... I reach out and bang with my fist at metal or glass or whatever it is, and the tapping is louder, more insistent... and I burst out of my dying place, my coffin, somehow. I claw myself up and up, towards the light.
There’s my bubble of air. Mine. My air. I reach for it...
He’s sitting on his bed. The window behind him is wide open and there’s the estuary, the sea. It looks so cool and grey and the air is so cool and clean that I reach out for it, I take it like a cool silk scarf and reel it in, through the window, and wrap it loosely around my neck.
Tap tap tap.
He’s sitting on his bed in his room which smells of him, and he’s tapping at a headstone. He’s propped it up, on the floor of his room, so that he can sit with it balanced between his knees, and he’s chipping at it, striking the handle of his chisel with his hammer. Every time he taps, a powder of grey dust puffs into the air and falls like a whisper onto the carpet.
He looks up at me. His mouth is horribly twisted. His chin is shiny with spittle. His smile is grotesque, but in his eyes there’s a glimmer of warmth for me and the satisfaction of the job he’s doing. He moves his lips, and they ooze another trickle of saliva. He mumbles, but his words are unmistakable. ‘Nearly finished. The last letter. And I’m done.’
Sick with fear, for him. Sick in my stomach, sadness for him. I can’t see his side of the headstone, only the back of it. But I guess, from the twist of the smile on his face and the light in his eyes, that he’s tapping the letters of his own name. A very old man. My father. Ready for death.
‘Dad? You’re alright, Dad... I love you, Dad...’ I move towards him.
Before I can touch him, he speaks again. ‘For you. It’s for you.’
Sick with fear, for him, for me. I sit on the bed beside him and put my arm on his bony, cold shoulders. Cold, because the wind from the estuary is on his back and I want to take off my grey scarf and wrap it around him. Scarf? There’s no scarf, only the shiver of an autumn afternoon. He angles the headstone towards me, so that I can see what he’s doing.
It’s finished. He leans to it and blows the dust from the last letter. Lawrence Lundy.
D
EATH CAMP.
I
MAGINE
a death camp.
I’d been through the house, looking for Juliet and Lawrence. I suppose I knew where they were, but I was hoping to find them somewhere else, in a normal place, doing something normal. So I went through the shabby, comfortable living-room, strewn with cushions, smelling of cat, powdered with chalk dust, a litter of country magazines and glasses and bottles, and slices of lemon, and glasses and bottles... No one there. I went around the back of the house to the holly wood, where a smart silver car was botched all over with a mess of blood, dried to a clotted, congealed kind of scab, as though it was a piece of a bigger car and had been amputated and discarded after some horrific accident. There was no one in the kitchen. It looked normal and smelled of normal things, like toast. I stood and stared around the room. Toast. What a word! I longed for toast, and honey, and sitting at a kitchen table with a woman and her son and eating toast and honey. But there was no one.
I went up to my room. I wasn’t there. I went into Juliet’s room, where the bed was a tangle of sheets. I felt at them, I smelled at them. I stood at her dressing-table and picked up the hairbrush and picked the hairs from it. I held my breath and stared at the door of the wardrobe and I willed it to open, I stood there and I willed the wardrobe door to open and a man to step out... that the clothes on their hangers would slide apart and he would come out, in his RAF uniform, his face puffy and grey, his eyes glaucous and moist and a slather of sea-water on his lips. But he didn’t. Fuck, it would’ve been something, somebody. I moved to the wardrobe and opened it and I nuzzled my face into the hanging clothes, as I’d seen the boy do, as though it might be the magic sign or the spell to conjure somebody, something, but there was no one. Not even a slithery hand came out, to touch my face with its clammy, rotting fingers.