The Waking That Kills (28 page)

She couldn’t do it. In a clumsy replay of the time when I’d first laid eyes on her, she tumbled herself back down again. She landed giddily, tearfully, on her knees beside me. Her face was all smudged with bark and moss. She was pleading.

I had no choice but to step forward, as though I might chase after the boy and stop him.

I was naked, barefoot, I could hardly see. Every touch of the tree on my body was like a jab or a poke from a mean-spirited opponent, thwarting all my attempts to close on it. But once I’d achieved the first two or three holds, with my feet jammed agonisingly against the great black trunk and my hands burning, I realised that continuing might be no less painful than slithering down, and so I kept on climbing, until I saw the open sky above me. I was still ten or fifteen feet below him, but I made out the boy kneeling on the spars of the tree-house. He was gripping them and the knotted bits of rope, adjusting to the precariousness as the highest branches swayed in the morning breeze. And then he stood up.

He didn’t know I was there. I could have called out to him, I was about to call out, but I didn’t. I stopped myself, because I thought that my voice might surprise him and he might fall, and another part of me was saying, with a twinge of guilt, that I just didn’t want to. Fuck, I’d done enough. I’d put up with enough turmoil and bedlam and pain. Let the boy do what he wanted, for whatever half-baked reasons, and then he could climb down again. Let me be a disinterested spectator, in this final moment of the story, and then I’d be out of it and away from Chalke House as soon as it was all over.

He stood up and braced himself with his legs apart. He was god-like against the sky. His long black hair fluttered in the wind. Every muscle was defined, in his back and his shoulders, through his thighs and calves to the very splay of his feet on the planks. He looked unshakable. He was a young god of the sky and nothing would unsettle him.

Perfect. Not a cloud, not a whirling of crows, not a faraway vapour-trail. Not a blemish in the infinite blue.

I peered down, and I could just see Juliet, who’d moved away from the base of the tree and closer to the pond, so that she could watch where her son had emerged intact and erect at the very top. The height made my head spin. A bubble of nausea rose into my throat. And by the time I’d taken a breath and peered upwards again, the boy was cupping the swift in both his hands and holding it aloft, stretching up with his arms, on tip-toes, as if he would touch the sky itself.

Simple, really. An act of simplicity and wonder.

The bird opened its wings and quivered them, feeling the movement of the air through its feathers. And then it clapped the marvellous wings, once and twice and a third time, and it arose from the boy’s hands.

For a moment, moth-like, it beat around his head, it was in his hair and his eyes and clawing at his face with its tiny feet, but then it spiralled away and rocketed skyward. The sheer vertical speed of it, the power... miraculous. A second later, as my poor eyes tried to follow, the swift had disappeared forever.

And the boy?

He swayed to one side. He brought down his left arm as though to swat into his hair, as though the bird or a memory of it was still distracting him. He wobbled. To compensate, he shuffled his feet and maybe he snagged the ropes with his toes or... His right knee buckled, he dipped to the planks and brushed them with his fingers to try and steady himself.

And a strange thing. The sound he made from deep in his throat was not panic, or fear. It wasn’t weeping. It sounded more like a gurgle of laughter. So that when he straightened up again, he did so with such a rush of energy, as though his body were charged with the joy of releasing the bird, that he teetered to the very edge of the platform.

And then he was gone. He spread his arms and lifted his face to the sky, and he was gone.

He barely brushed the branches as he fell. Whatever the source of the energy which had propelled him from the tree-house, whether he’d lost his footing or he’d launched himself after the swift, he spun past me, clear of the tree itself. I watched him fall.

At the same time, I saw in a dreadful millisecond that Juliet had moved back towards the tree. She must have seen the boy faltering and dashed instinctively forward. I heard her scream. I saw her little white face upturned. At the last moment, as he plummeted towards her, I saw her lunge against the side of the Daimler. In a mad, maternal effort to save her son, she was right there, beneath him, when he smashed onto the bonnet.

M
Y FIRST REACTION...
I must admit, was to stay where I was. I clung to the trunk of the tree, I stared down and down, and I listened.

There was no movement, nothing at all, no groans or whimpers. A pair of wood pigeons, which had erupted from the overgrown cliff beside the greenhouse, rattled away on their stiff, grey wings and then there was silence. A mean and wretched thought crept into my mind, and I tried to shoo it out. I was out of reach of the Lundys and I could hide in the dark, prickly branches as long as I liked, or I could climb to the sky and just breathe, on my own. The thought skulked around my brain for a few shameful moments, like a hyena, slavering and hunched, circling a campfire in the dead of night. Until I drove it away. And I steeled myself to climb down the tree.

They were both dead. The boy had broken his mother’s bones with his own. Her body was dented into the car. He’d struck her with all his weight, driving his knees into her chest. For himself, his head had found the very spot where her hammer had impacted the windscreen... and he’d punched a greater hole in it, his head and shoulders buried deep into the car itself. When I opened the door, the mess of his face was pooling blood onto the leather upholstery and under the driver’s seat.

I found myself walking in a daze, towards the house. I wasn’t thinking much. I was overcome by a tremendous weariness, an overpowering torpor. I did everything slowly and deliberately, in the strangely comfortable knowledge that there was no need for speed or heroic action. Juliet and Lawrence Lundy were dead. Nothing would change that.

I turned around the back of the house, with a vague idea of appraising the woman’s car. It was ugly, I didn’t like it, it was all bloody and horrid, so I tugged at the tarpaulin and covered it completely. I went indoors and wandered from room to room, with the creeping intention of clearing-up or making amends in some desultory way. I picked up bottles from the living-room and dropped them into a bin in the kitchen. Upstairs, I straightened the sheets on Juliet’s bed, which were stained with cold-cream and honey and crumbly with the wax she’d peeled off my body. I picked up some of her clothes, folded them and put them into the wardrobe, where her husband’s suits and uniform were hanging. I rearranged the combs and brushes on her dressing-table.

In my own room, on the pillow there was an eerie impression of my own head, where the molten wax had cooled into a skin. I touched it, a ghostly imprint preserved for posterity. But then I crumpled it into pieces. Absent-mindedly, I kicked the empty saucepan under the bed.

I went up to the boy’s room. It was as untidy as ever, his clothes strewn around and the sheets all rumpled. The model planes swung in the breeze from the open windows. The same... it was just the same as it had been when Juliet had first taken me there and introduced me to her son. Even the cat. The orange cat was lying there, as if this was just another day and nothing had ever changed.

One difference. It was cooler. I went onto the balcony and looked out. I picked up the boy’s binoculars and swept them across the horizon of trees, to the rickety planks at the top of the Scots pine, down to the greenhouse and the dim outline of the Daimler. I shivered. The wind from the sea was cooler. It would be autumn, and I was naked.

I found my clothes, a pair of pants and shirt, and carried them downstairs. Of course I called the police, I plugged in the phone and there was a nice lady and she sounded a bit shaky when I told her there’d been an accident and there were two dead bodies, and I tried to reassure her and could someone come as soon as possible? I remember I started to put on... no, I started to think about putting on my clothes. It would have made me feel normal. More than my negligible little business of tidying-up, my shirt and pants might almost have made me feel real again. But no, when I put down the phone, I just dropped the clothes and...

I waited in the woodland for the police to come.

I wandered down there, but I didn’t want to go near the car. Ugly. I peered through the trees and saw it, my father’s car, which he’d maintained so lovingly. So was that it? The end of its journey? After years of dignified, decorous toil as a hearse, and then a second career as a workshop and a home, it was dumped, with a dead boy’s head smashed into the windscreen and the dead boy’s mother crushed onto the bonnet. Was that it?

I didn’t go near the car. I remember I stood near the pond, and when I saw the green-brown stillness of the water, I thought of the way that the Lundys had tipped the dying birds into it. It made me look up into the sky again, as if I might catch a last glimpse of the swift that the boy had released, or any of the swifts which might still be lingering in Lincolnshire. It made me hurry to the greenhouse. One last, important thing to do...

I suppose that was how they found me, the police, when they came to Chalke House.

They would’ve driven into the overgrown beech wood, the oak wood, the medieval forest in the valley of the wolds, much deeper and denser than when I’d first arrived in May, with the grasses so tall they could hardly nose their neat, new police cars to the open back door of the hearse.

They would’ve got out and stared, incredulous. A carpet of dead birds, fifty or a hundred? No, some of them still alive, and crawling and fluttering. A Daimler hearse. Two dead bodies on the bonnet.

And they found me. I was in the greenhouse, I’d climbed the vine and I was clinging to the roof, as high up as I could get. I was pulling out the wads of weed that the boy had put there. A policeman came in, having gazed on the dreadfulness at the foot of the Scots pine, and saw me, a man dangling from the ceiling, a naked man stuck with feathers and spittle. He must have cried out,
what are you doing up there?
And I would’ve answered,
what does it look like? I’m taking out the weed, I’m opening the holes... how else will the swifts, after their miraculous migration, be able to return to their nests next year?

Epilogue

T
HE NURSE LED
me up the stairs to my father’s room, opened the door and let me in. She’d told me he was weakening, he wasn’t eating, he couldn’t speak. She said she’d tried to call me on the number I’d used, but it sounded like the phone was disconnected. I followed her upstairs. I was carrying quite a heavy wooden box, and she wanted to help me with the door.

He was propped up in his armchair. A skeleton of himself, swaddled in an enormous dressing-gown. He looked so thin and fragile that he might topple out of the chair if I touched him or the cushions which bolstered him in place. A shrunken man. But his eyes glimmered with warmth and recognition as I moved toward him. I put down the box, leaned to him and kissed his forehead.

I pulled up another chair and sat down, close enough so that my knees touched his. I gently took hold of his hands. They were very warm, and when his fingers closed on mine with surprising strength, I felt a tingle of tears in my eyes.

At first I didn’t speak. It seemed enough that I was there, with him. I wanted to say I was sorry I hadn’t been to see him through the months of the summer, maybe to express some inkling of what had happened to prevent my coming. But the way he stared at the wounds on my face, as though he might read them, made me pause. I could see in his eyes that he was trying to recall something, a name he’d seen somewhere or read somewhere, or maybe just a word...

The burns on my face, the scalding, had dried into a spatter of red scabs. I’d studied them myself in the mirror, as they’d gradually stopped weeping and become encrusted. Unmistakably a splatter of liquid, from one side of my face to the other. He was studying it all, and his mind was figuring.

Thinking to distract him, I prised his fingers open so that I could press the keys of the Daimler into his hands. I told him that the car had been great. He folded his hands around the keys, for their familiarity, their age, and everything they signified for him, the places he’d been to and all the work he’d done. I said, would he like to see these? And I opened his tool box, which I’d brought out of the car and carried from the faraway wolds to his room in Grimsby. I was glad, because a light of love and joy and pride gleamed in his eyes as he stroked the smooth wooden handles of his hammers, as he tested the blades of his chisels with the ball of his thumb. The box itself, I lifted it onto my knees so he could smell the oils, the very cloths he’d used to wipe and clean and treasure the tools of his trade.

At last I set the box down and carefully rearranged the tools into it. When I closed the lid, with the sweet little thud of wood on wood he’d heard hundreds of times, I looked up to see he’d lolled his head back on his pillow and shut his eyes. I took his hands again. He squeezed, but his grip was weaker. He was very tired. More than that, he was shrinking into the cushions of the chair. Weakening, the nurse had said.