Boy on the Wire (11 page)

There is a can of petrol in the garage. I pour it over the wood and in the dusk I watch as the flames catch. They leap higher than me. Sparks fly off in the wind.

I walk back to the house, go into the bathroom, and in the mirror I see my face black with dust and soot. My hair stands on end, blown by the wind, infused with smoke. I sit in the lounge facing the window, watching the glow in the distance. The flames flicker. In front of the orange light I see black shapes, figures that run in front of the flames. I focus hard on them, but they appear and disappear too quickly. They run into the flames, first blocking out the light, then exploding with a whiter flame and disappearing again.

I see Peter. I see him go outside, walk through the window and out into the garden. At the edge of the flames he waits, then walks into the centre of the inferno. He turns and faces the house. The flames begin to take, his hair burning with a white flame. He makes no expression of pain, though his face begins to shine, his skin to melt, features drooping. The cheeks first, the nose, the jawbone: they drop off and fall into the fire below. The man and his sins burn. In his place, when the fire is out, a raw stump of flesh, still bubbling, spitting in the smoke.

I am in the house, in the room under the eaves. I am standing a few metres away from the edge of a cliff. I can see it clearly. My eyes are open. There is a boy, Peter, standing on the edge. Near the edge. A little way back. To his right is just shadow, but I know Paul is there. Peter turns to look at me. Then Paul emerges out of the grey and he looks at me too. The wind blows their hair. Summer in South Africa. They are tanned, their hair brown but with streaks bleached by the sun.

I feel it before I see it. In the darkness, a few metres away, the boy stands. Me. He is turned away, his back towards me.

He is turned away, his head bowed, but I know he wants to do me harm, to be rid of me, to stop me remembering. I know him. I know all about him. Or I will. I am starting to remember everything.

I shuffle back. I can hear my own breathing. The boy turns and takes a quick step towards me. I feel my back against the wall now and move slowly along it towards the door. The boy sees what I am doing and takes another step closer.

He frightens me, this child, this boy-ghost. He frightens me, but, as before, I want to take him in my arms, cradle him, hold him, and though he would struggle, hold him until his thrashing dies down, until he understands, until he understands the great void of thirty years. Until I understand.

He opens his mouth. It is as if he is under water. Bubbles emerge from his mouth and a sound, a deep distorted moan. I try to make out the words, but I cannot. I reach the door and step through it.

I feel the boy come after me. I feel him step through the doorway into the room, but then stop. He wants to call out to me. I sense it. Not harm, perhaps he does not wish me harm. But he does not want me there, and it comes to the same thing.

I wait in the corridor, wait for him to talk. He does not. I sense him searching for the words, but they do not come.

I start on the carpets. I prise up the metal strip at the doorways, then pull the carpet up, loosening it from the tacks as I go. These I remove one by one or hammer flat. When I am done, I walk through the house, and without carpets and furniture it echoes around me. I walk, hear footsteps – my own – then I hear others, or think I do. I stop and they stop too, but momentarily behind mine. The echo perhaps.

When the echoes die down, I wipe the dust and grit from my eyes. I open all the windows to try to get rid of some of the dust, but more blows in. I can feel myself drying out: I can feel the dust, the dirt, come in through my eyes, mouth, ears, pores – almost feel it getting into my bloodstream, stemming the flow. Movement becomes difficult, and after a while – I feel for some time I would be sitting, unable to move, feeling only the pain of grit in my open eyes – I start to crumble. A breeze would get up, one coming through the gaps under the doorways, and slowly I would start to disappear. My features would be the first to go. Nose, eyes, lips: just an ever-widening hole where my mouth goes into my throat and into my gut. The soles of my feet would be the last. The little eddies blow around on the tiles before settling in the cracks between the walls and the floors, or are caught by a gust and blown off into the garden, through the trees, and deep into the heart of the country. The source of the lie scattered to the winds.

I think about burning the house down. I keep a few reminders – the photographs, the watch, the drawing – and move the car away from the blaze, pour petrol inside and around the house. There is little to burn now. The flames would singe the concrete, ruin the paint and plaster work, but not much more than that. Perhaps the windows would crack in the heat and the roof beams collapse, leaving the house open to the sky, the wind and the rain. In time, birds would nest in the attic and maybe then the last whiff of my dead family would be gone.

But I do not burn the house down. Instead, I will burn the rest of what I have ripped out of it. I drag it all to the bottom of the garden and place it on the pile of ash.

I look at the bush that surrounds me and remember what was here.

In the garage I find a torch and a spade. Back at the scrub line I shine the torch back and forth, searching for a way in.

There is a section with sparser growth. An old path. I have to move branches out of the way. I sever one with the end of the spade. A few metres in there is a clearing. A mound, with a thin layer of weeds and scrub growing on it, occupies all of the space. I climb onto it. A bird begins to call. It runs at me, calling all the time. I turn my back on it and start to dig. Apart from the first few centimetres, it is not earth that comes up. My spade starts to turn up paper, plastic bags, juice cartons. I try to work out how old they are, but I cannot see a sell-by date. I turn up old batteries, broken glass. My hands grow black. Much of the rubbish has been burnt. That is what we used to have to do. We took our rubbish to the end of the property and burnt it ourselves.

I dig at different points in the clearing. I turn the torch and dig where it shines. There is no method to it. I spend hours there. I am not sure what I am looking for. A sign, proof that we were here, something to bring them back. Properly back.

I straighten up and take a rest at one point. I look at where the beam shines. Across the mound and into the bush at the other side. I can see branches, leaves, shadows. The night is still. There is only the sound of my own rasping breathing and the steam from my breath. I will get cold if I stop for long. The beam flickers. I look at the torch and the beam shining into the bush. Where it lands moves away from me. Back again. Away. I fall to my hands and knees. I am in a cold sweat.

There is movement in the bush. At the edges of the torch-light, something moves – an animal, a man. I can sense it if not see it. I know I cannot fall. If I do, it will be on me. It will not mind the dirt on me, the stench of me.

But I feel myself falling. Not from where I kneel but from higher up. I feel myself falling towards the torchlight in the bush. I travel at great speed but still it seems to take forever.

The man – for that is what I have decided it is – moves behind me. I try to turn, try to grab the torch and swing it around. But I cannot reach it. When I reach out one arm, the other cannot support me and I fall into the rubbish.

He comes closer and I raise myself again. The blackness closes further in. Now he is in front again – and behind. Like there is more than one of them. Four of them. I listen. I think I hear cackling from the bush. But there is nothing. Still only my breathing. I hold my breath. Now there is truly nothing.

I cannot hold it for long. I stumble to my feet. There is a cry, splitting the silence. My breathing is shallow now, and quick. I turn around and around, as if in a dance. Another cry. It is soft. I can’t work out where it comes from. I wheel around and try to face these things in the dark.

And I grow angry now. I shout. It is not a word I shout. It comes from deep inside, the cry of a dead man. I shout at the bush and if I listened I would hear it echo. I remember thinking this: a voice in the dark, bouncing against the hollow walls of abandoned buildings in an abandoned city.

The noises stop. I shine my torch at the bush. I can see something there. I step towards it. A figure emerges out of the leaves, picked out by my torchlight. It is me, a child again. I am standing looking further into the bush. I approach, and as I get closer, I see what I am looking at. Peter. Twelve-year-old Peter.

I am taken back. This is where I came after the scene with my mother in Paul’s room. Did I know I would find Peter here? Did I seek him out to tell him something, to talk to him? That part is lost.

I watch the boy – myself. I, he, has a camera in his hands. He puts it up to his face and presses the shutter. This is the photograph. The back of a boy hidden in the bush.

It is windy. The branches and leaves move back and forth. Above this, another noise – sobbing, from Peter. It stops as the photograph is taken. He turns, slowly, to his youngest brother.

They do not speak for some time. Then Peter opens his mouth. ‘Did you see what happened?’ His tone is flat.

I do not answer. I watch the boy – me – carefully, but his lips do not move. Not yet.

Peter again. ‘I don’t remember what happened. The doctor said I might not ever remember.’

I am silent.

‘The last thing I remember is leaving Mom and Dad on the rocks. They were setting out the picnic. Did you see what happened?’ he asks a second time.

And then, I nod. I see myself nodding. It is a slight movement. As if my head was being buffeted by the wind. Perhaps it was that after all and I did not mean to nod. The wind gets in here too. Cuts through the bush, moves limbs, bodies, tosses words away, distorts them.

‘Tell me. What did I do?’

The words hit me now as they must have done then. What did I do. I think those were the words. It is hard to tell.

I look at myself again, the eight-year-old me. His face, burnt by the sun and the wind from days spent playing outdoors, is blank. He is quiet. Then he opens his mouth. ‘I saw.’

There is silence for some time, except for the wind. The hair of the boys is blown back and forth.

‘Did I push him?’

It is dark, but I see my head move up and down. The wind again. Moving my head against my will. Peter sees it too, a small, almost imperceptible movement of the head. Yes, it was you. It was you. You and no one else.

Peter turns away. ‘What did you see?’ It is a whisper.

I do not answer. There is silence for some time.

He speaks again. ‘I killed him.’

‘I saw.’ I cannot tell whether the sentence is ended or interrupted.

‘Did I push him?’

I do not want to hear the answer. Me, the boy, twenty-eight years previously, about to answer yes, or simply nod again: that would be enough. Me, the adult, with that story stuck in him forever. A fish hook through a cheek and the flesh hardened over it.

Through branches I watch my brother crying and rocking back and forth on his heels. I know, knew then as a boy, I remember now, I knew then what I had done, what I have done. I knew what he had done too – Peter. I watch my brother, the camera forgotten now in my hands, and then I drop my eyes and look at my own feet and I know deep within the world has come to an end and that my chest holds more than it can bear.

I want to go to him now, but the distance between us is a chasm. Instead, I stand in the bush, staring at my feet, unable to look up, unwilling to look at what I’ve done.

I am a child again. I run from there. With the words hanging from the branches of the dried bush, I run. I crash back through the bush, run over the rubbish dump, and into the bush on the other side. I keep running, away from the house. I feel thorns in my feet, but I carry on. A branch hits me on the head, but I pick myself up and run blindly on and on until I crash into the fence at the bottom of the property. The barbed wire pierces me, clings to me. I try to pull myself off it, but it clings tighter. I feel my head spinning and the world begins to blacken.

And then the dogs come – the neighbour’s, strays maybe. There are four of them, five, perhaps more. They run through the bush towards me. I hang on the fence. I see their eyes in the shade. They hurl themselves at the fence and I hear their barks and on my face I feel their breath and in my throat the foul smell of rotting meat. The tooth of one of them catches me and there is blood and I watch it drip into the dust. I remember this: I watch the blood, the silent fall, as if slowed down. I do not watch the dogs. I do not care about them.

I hang there, separated by wire from dogs that would kill me if they could. I wait. I will wait for them. The wire cannot hold forever.

I grow still, my breathing slows. I hang there, entangled, wondering how long I could stay here. How long it would take until I dried out, dried out so much the wind could lift me up and blow me away.

The boy is found later. Not by his father or mother, but by someone else. He cannot remember who. Perhaps a family friend arrived to lend support.

I think of me as other, as somehow not the same flesh and blood as I am now. Between him and me there is a break, a fissure.

I remember the cold. Not the weather – the coldness of bones. The boy wakes to footsteps behind him, then a voice. He cannot hear what it says. The dogs have gone.

The man picks the boy off the fence, eases him off. Meat off a butcher’s spike. In truth he was not impaled, just pinned. The panic of an eight-year-old.

They return to the house, the boy in front, the man slightly behind. The boy looks at the ground, the man at the boy. I remember the back of my neck: ice-cold, as if gripped by an iron hand.

We step into the kitchen and my father is there, leaning over a sink, his hands on either side, head hanging down. He lifts it when he hears us come in. He looks at me, his boy. He looks at me and there is nothing on his face, a blankness that I, the man, had forgotten, but now remember. And it hits me again, the full force of this nothing.