The Waking That Kills (27 page)

I pressed my hands to my ears as hard as I could, as though I might squeeze the noise out, squeeze it dribbling out of my sinuses like a blockage of foul-smelling yellow mucus. At last it stopped. And when I opened my ears again and listened, the robin was singing his cool, clean song. Holier than a dawnful of mosques.

If only it could have been as simple as that. If the swifts would die and the story was over. If the death of the birds would mean an awakening from nightmare, into the daylight of reality. If only...

Chapter Twenty-Four

I
HEARD HER
shouting for her son, and so I rolled off the bed.

I sat on the edge of it for a few moments and inhaled a series of long, deep breaths. What do they call it, in books, in movies – a kind of Garden of Gethsemane moment? When the hero knows it’s near the end and it’ll take one more push towards a climax, or else he could just roll over and stay in bed and nurse the wounds he’d already sustained, and honourably... well, honourably, he could just not show up for the resolution of the story?

I was naked. I could hardly see. I didn’t feel like a hero. I groped around for my pants or a shirt and remembered they’d be in the bathroom or in my own room and I’d never find them. I crawled to the shower and doused myself, because my body was burning and my face was blistering. No clothes, good excuse...

Bad excuse. I didn’t need clothes. In the whole of this story – apart from an early visit to my father, and then a foray into the outside world of the village, to a higher sphere of light and air and a shop with almost nothing in it and a snarling woman trussed-up in her horrid little bus – there were no other people but me and the woman and the boy. Only the three of us. A triangle. And we’d seen each other naked or half-naked enough times; we’d pissed in the nettles, we’d groped into the pond, we’d made love, we’d snuggled and snuffled and smelled each other’s bodies, we’d grappled and fought more than enough times not to be coy, or squeamish, or gawky.

I stood up and felt my way down the stairs, through the hallway and the living-room. Out into the garden.

No excuses. I was blinded, I was burnt. Why the fuck would I need clothes?

How marvellous it felt, the cool air on my skin. Through my slitted eyelids I could barely see the light of dawn: it was a grey blur, my eyeballs had been boiled in their sockets like eggs in a pan. But yes, the conventional wisdom was true, that the removal of one sense enhanced the others. So the breeze was bliss on my body, the movement of the leaves in the trees was a murmuring of sweet voices, and the forest was deliciously fragrant. If only... futile to imagine it... but if only I could have blocked out the reality, or unreality, of what I was doing in that Lincolnshire woodland, it would have been joy.

No. It all came back to me, with the voice of the woman. She was calling very loudly, ‘Lawrence, Lawrence!’ and the tremor of fear in the stress on the first syllable struck a chill in the autumn morning. I stumbled towards the sound. In the confusion of my mind, which hadn’t really awakened from the horrors of the night, I jumped to the conclusion that her shouting meant one thing, that she’d gone to the greenhouse and couldn’t get in. The boy was inside and had blocked the door so weightily with bricks that she couldn’t get in. Indeed, as I fumbled my way through the undergrowth in what I thought was the right direction, I imagined her hammering at the door, shoving on it and hearing it grate and screech on the crumbly obstruction behind it, unable to open it, and knowing that the boy was in there and... and what was he doing in there, something so odd or eccentric or worse, so appalling, that he mustn’t allow his own mother inside to see it?

I fell headlong into a barricade of nettles. I banged my face into a rubble of half-bricks and knew I was near the greenhouse. I felt no pain, no hurt to myself, to my own skin or flesh or bones, because, overwhelming any assault or injury to my own being, the terror in my belly was the image I’d had before, when I’d blundered in and seen the boy up there, in the roof, hanging, his throat upturned... and when I’d thought for a grotesque split-second that he’d...

And so now, as I heard Juliet’s cries and the wrenching, motherly fear in them, I felt a sickness in my stomach for what the boy might have done... the release he’d sought from his madness, a big beautiful boy dangling himself and throttling himself and inflicting an unspeakable pain on his mother. I almost retched at the thought of what I would find.

Somehow, I was on my feet again. I beat at the nettles with my arms and hands and swept them aside. And forcing myself to let more and more daylight onto my scalded eyes, I struggled to the door of the greenhouse.

It was open. I fell inside.

No one. Nothing. I strained to look up at the roof. No birds, no boy. No frantic woman, who, in my damaged mind’s-eye, I’d pictured staring up and up at a horror beyond every mother’s worst imaginings.

‘Chris, he’s not there...’ She pounced on me and dragged me outside. ‘He’s not there... where is he? Oh god, what are you doing?’

She was in a dithering panic; an elfin woman, smelling of cold-cream and honey and bird-shit, desperate to find her teenage son. She appraised me, stark naked, bruised and blinded and bewildered, in the doorway of a derelict Victorian greenhouse, my nudity marked with rude red burns on my face and my chest, my face blistered with a scald of wax. And then, as though I was a dancing bear in a medieval fair, she lugged me away from the greenhouse and towards the pond.

I could feel the cooler breeze from its surface. I squinted into the reflected daylight and saw her moving through the reeds, pushing them aside with her hands, and heard her insistent murmuring, her moaning of her son’s name, as if, at any moment, she might discover his body. I tried to follow her, if only to demonstrate some solidarity, to make a gesture of team-work in her search. But she waded ahead of me, deeper, and I could see her up to her knees, up to her waist, feeling into the water for her boy.

Gone... she lost her footing, stepped into a hole in the muddy bottom or over the brink of the shallow ledge, and with a sudden whoosh she sank out of sight, only to reappear and flounder back to the shore, to grab me so hard she collapsed me and fell on top of me.

She was heaving with the shock, she was slithery with mud. Her hair was slick. Her face was a smear of cold green water and hot tears.

‘Find him, Chris... Please help me find him! Has he gone back to his room? Where is he?’

At her suggestion, we both looked back towards the house. Chalke House, I narrowed my eyes and swept it from one side to the other as I’d done on my first arrival. It was all grainy, my eyeballs felt raw, although they’d been so cooked. Chalke House – a grand, shabby hunting-lodge, trying to be impressive, with its turrets and its toothy mock-battlements, but looming rather queerly in the morning light. Very English, unique, a gentleman’s folly from the 19th century... and...

And a figure at the open window of the tower?

If we’d hoped to see the boy up there and watching us, watching our folly in the pond... or a figure in squadron-blue, raising a hand in a lazy wave...

No, we didn’t. I saw that same crawling shadow, the very one which had crawled across the face of the house on the day I’d arrived. But this time, at the end of a summer in which I’d been seduced and smothered in nightmare, there was no one at the window. Even Juliet Lundy, who was hungry with all her eyes to see anything, to see a uniformed ghost or her son safe and sound... she didn’t see anyone.

She manhandled me down to the car.

I sprawled against its flanks. It felt huge. I leaned all my weight on its familiar hugeness. Car – too paltry a word. Hearse, too humdrum. Daimler... yes, the name resounded of stately homes and gentlemen’s clubs, and, better still, of my father and my childhood, the days we’d spent together in the long-ago but never-forgotten corners of an English countryside.

But something was different. Something in the touch of the dusty, rusting paintwork was different. An energy. Such a strange and unsettling energy that I stood away. And then I reached out and touched it again. Felt it. A hum of energy. It was alive.

‘He’s here,’ I said very softly.

I turned to the woman. She was standing so still, her eyes so dead and empty, that I thought she hadn’t heard me. ‘He’s here, he’s inside.’

She just nodded. And she followed me around to the back of the hearse and watched as I opened the door.

It opened silently, on its oiled hinges. No horrible creaking. The thing we saw inside was strange and horrid enough...

The birds, there were dozens or scores or a hundred birds. They were the living, the barely living, harvested from among the dead and brought to this place of death, to live until they died. Purgatory, a limbo between life and hell. There was a crawling, murmuring mound of them, like bees in a hive, a heap of furry bodies bumbling together. The adults were downy black, dusky brown, and the juveniles, which would have relished a miraculous adventure to the Mediterranean and Morocco, or even an oasis in Tamanrasset or Timbuktu ... they were grey and white and a quivering mass of pure energy.

Wasted energy. A stink of wasted life. As I opened the door wider, they started to fall out onto the grass. They slithered out, and they were all broken. They flapped and fluttered – hopeless, purposeless, the utter paradox of what they’d been born to be. They were flightless swifts.

‘I still got one.’ His great bare legs, and a bare muscular torso. His crowing voice. ‘I still got one ...’

The boy emerged.

He’d been lying beneath the rug of birds. They spilled off him. He sat up, with a lunatic grin on his mouth. He saw me and his mother standing in the open doorway of the hearse, and he said, ‘I came down in the night, I got the last of the living, and brought them in here.’ He giggled horribly, a girly mad giggle. ‘In here, a place for the dead, for their final journey.’ And then, as he peered closer towards me and I could see the spittle and feathers stuck around his chin and smell the sickly, shitty pungency of the birds on his body, he said, ‘Look at you... what the fuck happened to your face?’

And he heaved himself out of the hearse.

Some of the birds stuck to his skin, they clung to him with their feeble feet, as if he, their tormentor, might yet grant them some kind of release. But he brushed them off with a careless hand. He trod carelessly on the cripples in the grass. With a twisted smile on his face, he said, ‘Alright Mr Teacher, Mr always-right Mr Teacher...’ and I could feel him looming over me, a dark, stale-smelling figure, more like an ogre than a teenage boy. I could feel the chuckling laughter in him, as he said, ‘And your pants? What happened to your pants? You come here in your big black car and knowing stuff, and now look at you, you can’t see fuck all and you don’t know fuck all, and no pants...’

‘Lawrence, please...’ His mother was there, trying to take him in her arms and comfort him, console him, because, like me when I’d first felt the dangerous tingle from the car, she was afraid of the anger in him. ‘Lawrence, please, I love you, I don’t want you to be upset. Let’s all go up to the house and we can...’

‘Upset?’ He brushed her off, as if she were an annoying fly. ‘You don’t want me to be upset because my Dad’s gone away and I’ll never fly because some stupid spotty student said so, and I blinded some stupid kid and...’ He struggled to stop himself, turned to me and leaned close. I could smell his furry, cotton-wool breath. ‘Alright, so I can’t keep them all. So you were right, you were right, Mr Teacher. It’s time to let go.’

And then, grotesquely, he was kissing me.

I could feel his lips on my wounded neck, his open mouth and tongue, as though he was trying to heal my blistered skin with the same secretion of saliva he’d learned from the swifts. He enveloped me in his arms, and I could feel him shuddering, his whole big body sobbing and shuddering, and his hot wet kisses on my neck and my face. And then he enfolded his mother in an enormous, smothering embrace and, ‘Oh Mummy, my Mummy, my little Mummy...’ he was kissing her and blubbering.

He wrenched himself away, although his mother clung to him as if the wrenching would break her heart. ‘See?’ He said to me, through the tears in his mouth. ‘See? I still got one. That’s all I need.’

Clenched firmly but softly in his right hand, he had a swift.

For a moment he opened his hand and revealed the bird, long enough for me to see that it was whole, it was bright-eyed and alert and superbly intact. And then he lowered his weeping head to it, and he was whispering, ‘You’re the last one, the only one. You can fly, you can fly to the moon if you want to. Maybe I can come with you.’

It opened its wings and held them up. They were perfect. But before it could clap them and try to lift off from his palm, he closed it up in both his hands, with great care, as though it were an exquisite fan made of paper or silk.

He moved from the car to the Scots pine and he started to climb.

‘Oh no, Lawrence, no...’ she was crying out. But in no time at all, he was ten and twenty and thirty feet above us. He swarmed upwards, knowing the holds from his previous ascents, gripping strongly with his left hand and using his other wrist and arm as a lever as he held the bird in his right hand. As I stared after him, a shower of sooty bark fell onto my face and onto my eyes, so that I had to look away and rub excruciatingly at them with my fists. Juliet was calling after him, ‘Oh Lawrence, be careful, be careful...’ and to me, ‘Chris please, can’t you stop him, can’t you do something?’ And, as I hesitated, she shoved me aside. Before I could try to reason with her, make her see the futility of what she was doing, she was climbing, she was wriggling her way through the branches, panting and mewing and trying to keep up her frantic calls to her son.