Boy on the Wire (9 page)

I feel myself grow cold. I remember the open door behind me. I picture something emerging from it. Something dark, emerging into the light of the room, tiptoeing up to me crouched at the window.

Not just something. Peter. A sight more terrifying than anything I could imagine.

I turn. There is nothing. Still the cold.

I look out of the window again. The boy is gone. But then I look down and there he is, standing at the side of the house, pressed against the bricks. I pulled my head inside for less than a second. Or was it longer? It might have been longer. Have I been standing here for minutes, lost in a dream, before waking again?

I watch the boy and slowly he turns his head, turns towards me and looks up and meets my gaze. His eyes are black. The blackest things I have seen. The sun, perhaps, is in my eyes, and has burnt a patch in my vision so that when I look at this child I see only blackness.

I pull my head inside and lean against the wall. It is cold in here. I edge along the wall, my face to it, so I cannot see behind me. I do not want to look.

The boy’s face. The face from the photograph.

I can still hear the nursery rhyme. Fly away, Peter.

Once out of the room, I run down the stairs and through the front door and round the corner of the house where I saw the boy, but he has gone. I circle the house and turn around and search the other way but it is all light here, no shadows, and I cannot see him.

The front door has closed behind me. I drop the keys as I take them out of my pocket, and when I bend down to pick them up, I see him again. Right next to me. I can see his feet, his calves, his knees. Just that. If I move quickly, lunge at him, I could catch him. I do not move. The legs do not move either. On his right knee there is a cut. It is healing, but it is deep. When it was cut, I could see bone.

He is barefoot. I stay bent to the ground, next to him, my skin tingling, expecting a touch. The boy’s feet have the brown skin of a child who spends all day in the sun. The nails are bitten. He moves a toe. No, he is trembling. He cannot help it. He is afraid. Scared to death – of what I do not know. It is I who should be fearful. I dare not look at him, dare not move at all.

I smell it before I see it – urine. His leg darkens, urine washing away dust. A puddle forms around his toes.

Then I move. Just a fraction. But the boy moves too. I see his feet swivel and legs begin to turn. I see footprints in the dust next to me. The boy’s feet still damp. They leave prints but in the sun, the wind, they vanish quickly. I try to move more quickly, to stand up at least, but I cannot. There is a force holding me back, pressing down on me. I watch the legs disappear. By the time I stand, the boy is disappearing around the side of the house. I look back and the prints are gone, the dust undisturbed.

I follow. I walk away from the walls so I cannot be surprised by him hiding around a corner. I see him in the distance. He has moved very quickly. I see him stop and turn around. He looks back, but not at me, at a spot to the left of where I stand and higher up. I turn around.

And then, in the dusk, I see Peter. It is him, there is no doubt. I do not know what to make of it except that I know it is him. He is inside, standing at a window on the second floor in one of the bedrooms, my bedroom. He stands there and his figure is white and though I can barely see him, I can see he is looking at the boy too.

The look on his face. It keeps me here, in front of the wall, keeps me here as surely as if there were stakes through my arms and legs. I watch, watch him watching the boy, the wall pressing into my skull, until the room darkens and he fades with the last of the light.

9

Standing there, pinned to the wall, I go through how this could happen, if it has happened. I think back to what I saw when I arrived at the house for the first time. I knocked on the door and received no reply. I walked around the house and found the kitchen door open. I walked through each room, but somehow I knew where to look: his bedroom that he had as a child. Being the eldest, he got the one with the extra room in the eaves. We played in there sometimes. I remember a model railway, miniature trees, houses.

I walked into the bedroom, and then opened the door to the second room and there was Peter, floating in the air before me. And then – it may have been minutes or even days – the police arrived.

I find myself going through scenarios. Mirrors, cameras. Was I watching a screen and recorded events playing out in front of me? Were the police officers who arrived in on the plan? Why would he do this, construct this charade? It makes no sense. Perhaps it was the only way he could think of to convince me to stay, his guilt blinding him to the absurdity.

The vision of him at the window is now more real to me than the memory of my brother flying for the second and last time in his life.

I move away from the wall, but I do not remember moving, do not remember going inside. There is a time – how long I do not know – that is simply gone.

If I think of this time that is gone, I find myself imagining being in the bungalow, watching the screen, watching a man running through rooms, aimlessly, chasing ghosts.

It is night-time and I am in bed. The house is quiet. I can sense he is not here. I get out of bed and go through the other rooms on the floor. In each, I stop to look around and open the cupboards. There is nothing inside. In the room before the main bedroom, after I have closed the cupboard, I look out of the window, the one that faces the road. I am about to turn away from the window when I see, out there on the road, leaning against a tree, a man. At least, the shape of a man. That is what it seems to be. It is hard to tell. If I look straight at it, it seems not to be there. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the shifting of black against the grey tree trunk. I stand in the dark, wondering if I can be seen too, wondering if I should go out there, check it is what I think it is. I don’t think I can be seen. I am not standing in the light. I watch him. After a while the movement stops.

I go back to bed but do not sleep. Every hour or so, I check the window. Every time the shape remains. When it starts to get light, I look again and there is nothing there.

Later I am asleep. I know I am asleep because I have a dream. In the dream I am lying in bed. The moon picks out my shape. I have left the curtains open. In the doorway, and this is how I know it is a dream, stands a man. At least I think it is a man. He has no face. Where his mouth and eyes should be there is only shadow. The darkness seems to come from him. At his sides, fingers curl. They are long, too long. They curl back on themselves, the fingernails inches long.

Though it is a dream, I have a sense of time. Or that is how it seems. The man is there for hours, watching me sleep. When I wake, it is light and he has disappeared.

A photograph is next to the bed. I pick it up. Peter and Paul laugh together in the foreground. I can hear the laughter through the years. It echoes through the empty house. They are almost the same height. Behind Peter’s laughter could there have been jealousy? He might have believed his younger brother would one day be taller, stronger than him. Somehow I find the thought reassuring, as if it is something to hold on to. I look at myself, sullen in the background – or, not sullen, simply caught at the wrong moment. I cannot remember, too long ago to remember.

The next night, I go back to the window to see if Peter is there in the road again. I will call him Peter. It is too dark to see. I turn off all the lights in the house and stand at the window, waiting. I stare at the spot where I saw something and I stare for so long I cannot tell whether what I see this time is there or is a memory of the night before.

I take an axe from the garage and go out of the kitchen door. At the corner of the house, I peer round at the trees lining the road. I cannot see the place where Peter was standing from here. I move quickly away from the house towards the fence at the side of the property. Halfway is a tree. I hide behind it. From here I can make out a head. It does not seem to be looking this way. Once at the fence, I walk alongside it towards the road. It is darker here because of the hedge in the neighbour’s garden. I climb over the fence and walk along the verge, keeping to the shadows. The head peers out from the tree, framed against the sky.

I step closer. It does not move and I slip behind the tree. We stand on opposite sides of it. Me and the man on whom all this, all that has passed, rests. I wait, take a breath. And then it just comes out. I do not plan it and have done it before I realise I am doing it. Instead of showing myself to him, surprising him, taking the axe to him and ending it – for what would I lose by killing a man who is already dead, a man who is himself a killer – I speak.

‘John.’ I say my own name. It puzzles me. I look at the ground, at my feet, at the axe in my hands. It floors me, this word. I sink to my knees.

Then it comes to me – what I meant to say, or, I make it up, something that makes sense. I say again, my voice soft, ‘It is me, John.’ But I know he is no longer there. I feel the withdrawing, the absence of him. I wake up on the couch in the larger of the two houses. It is dark. Still dark or dark again, I do not know. Then I realise there is something covering my face. A cloth. I fling it off and sit upright. There is no one else in the room. My face is damp, the cloth wet.

I listen. The darkness was not only from the cloth. It is night. I am losing track of time.

The room has not changed. The chair faces the same way out into the garden. The photos are next to it. The curtains have not been touched; everything is in its place from what I can see. From the rooms above, a sound. Not a sound, a presence. I close my eyes, but hear nothing, not even the wind outside. This is wrong. I should be able to hear that, hear something at least. I open my eyes a fraction. You could not tell, if you looked at me, that they are open. My eyes are slits, the world dark.

Peter stands in front of me.

He stands in front of me, arms at his sides, just two metres away. I stay seated on the couch and he standing in front of me. He looks like me, a slightly older, thinner me.

He moves his lips. It is like I am drugged, half asleep. I still cannot hear. I strain to catch his words, but I cannot. I cannot move either or he will know I have seen him.

I try to read his lips. ‘Look at me, John,’ he is saying.

I am looking. I am looking, but tell me what you want me to see. I think this but do not say it.

Then he turns and disappears into the dark. Slowly I begin to hear again as the house comes back to life. A sort of life. It starts with the wind outside, then the creaking of the wood, the bricks, the tiles. Then the voices – lots of them. I can distinguish different voices at first. It does not bother me that I recognise them: my father’s, mother’s, the other boys’. They mix into one another, speak over each other, louder and louder. They sound like flies. I cannot hear again, this time for the noise. The voices grow louder and louder and I close my eyes and lie back on the couch. I turn to the back of the couch and place my hands over my ears.

He is back. I cannot explain it. I cannot explain where he is when I cannot see him, how he manages to live here or close by without leaving more signs. He leaves some traces: a familiar smell, photographs in different places from where I’ve left them, a shadow down the corridor that disappears when I approach.

His death a lie, like so much else with him.

I get up later. I walk through the house but he does not show himself. I do not go into the room under the eaves. Though I saw nothing earlier, he may be in there, living in a corner like a hermit, blanket on the floor, an open tin, a small fire, the rest of his belongings stashed in a gap between the roof and walls. I sniff the air for smoke.

I take a shower for the first time in days. I stand under the water and watch it run off me. I keep my eyes open, watching, even letting the soap run over them.

I stare at myself in the mirror. My shoulders slump, I look older, I’ve lost weight. I shave off my beard. After I have dressed, I lie down on the bed. Though I have only just woken, I sleep again.

When I wake, I remember having seen Peter standing over me, reaching out a hand and brushing away a strand of hair. I wipe my hand over my face. It is like a spider has crawled over it.

I try to put these thoughts to one side, to step outside of them. I think of Rachel. I want to pick up the phone, hear her voice.

I close my eyes and try to picture her. Dark blonde hair. The down at the back of her neck. Grey eyes. A freckle on her cheek. The scar just below her knee, like mine. A cycling accident when she was twelve. Or did she trip on that hill in the Chilterns? I am beginning to question everything. I see her in Battersea Park, lying under a tree in the long grass, one foot flat on the grass, the other leg straight. Her arm behind her head. I see these things. I try to see into her face, try to get her to look at me, try to get closer to her. I see parts of her. The whole of her is somewhere else, just out of my gaze.

I open my eyes and there is the boy. He stands out on the lawn in the bright sunshine. He looks into the house, straight at me.

I need to keep him away. He sends a chill through me, the way he looks at me. He knows everything. A boy should not know that much.

Though I fear this apparition, at the same time I want to go to him, to hold him, to cup his blond head in my hand.

I wonder, looking out at him, if that is mist I can see. It looks like mist rising from him, water evaporating in the sun. It comes off him, floats around him, his edges blurred. I close my eyes again and see – imagine I see – the boy coming closer, moving haltingly. The right leg leads, the left coming to meet it. I had a limp for a few days after the accident. I remember this now. When he moves his leg forward, his head dips. Like a dog. I am about to be torn apart. He is so small, a tiny child almost swallowed by the sun and the dust. He, the dog-boy, comes to the window, places his face against the glass. I do not move. He moves his lips, but no sound comes out. They make a shape and the lips form words. The words seem like ‘Help me’.

I knew the boy I saw was not just some child wandering onto an abandoned property in search of adventure. I knew it, but it is a hard thing to say.

I look at the photograph again. To check, I tell myself. I look at the third figure in the background, then back out into the garden at the boy. They are the same. Even to the extent their colours are faded, they are the same. I have to accept – somehow, I do not know how – the child is me.

Time passes. I am gone. It is like I am an old man. I smell decay. It comes off me, wafts up through the roof, sifting into each room. My hands are wrinkled, dried out. And, through all this, outside in the garden, looking in at the window, I see the boy, this thing I cannot think of as a boy any more. He stares in at me, stares through me. I am stranded here in an unknown time, a forgotten place. All that is left is for the creature to find a way in. It is coming – it takes a step forward, a quick step, a lowering of the shoulders, a mock charge. The world is silent.

And now, they are all there. I cannot pinpoint the moment they arrive. It seems natural that they should be there. The man, the woman, the three children: my family. Me at the end, eyes poked out. Black holes. What have you seen? I have my back half-turned to my family. I cower. There is no other word for it. I flinch at the sight of them.

They stare at me through the window. My father – he stands at the window, arms at his sides, staring in at me and there is nothing to stop him coming in, nothing to stop any of them coming in. My mother at his side: her hair is grey. It was never grey. They stare through the window and I wait for them, wait for them to step through it. A film of water. I force myself to look away, away and up at the ceiling, the blankness there. I move my arms so they hang from the chair. I try to relax my breathing.

And then I feel it.

Hair beneath my fingers.

I cannot move them.

The touch is light. It could be nothing. A breeze. Yet, it is not nothing.

I look outside and the smallest child has gone. Only four of them now. They look in at me, at us.

A head shifts beneath my fingers. I feel the soft touch of a scalp. I want to move my fingers, to stroke the head of the child beneath them – give him and me some comfort in our fear – but I cannot move. I cannot give this. Not to him. I cannot give him what he wants.

I am frightened, more frightened than I have ever been in my life. Not of this. Not this, this thing beneath my fingers, or them out there. Of something I cannot name.

The boy does not move either. Fractionally maybe, but perhaps it is just his hair moving in the breeze.

He is just a boy, a child. Of course he won’t make the first move. Of course it is not up to him.

I sit here, my eyes closed, my face wet. I make no sound. Through me flows everything: Paul, Peter, my mother and father, Rachel.

I sit here until – and I do not know when it changes, I have no awareness of the day ending – it is dark and the boy has gone and when I look, everyone else has gone too and the garden is empty.

I wander the house, touching the walls, turning off every light, leaving the house in darkness. I climb the stairs and go to the attic entrance. Outside I call softly, ‘Are you in there?’ I feel awkward doing so. ‘Peter?’

‘Leave him alone. Can you hear me? Leave the boy alone. He does not understand, did not understand.’ I do not plan the words. They just come.

I stand outside the door with my hand on it. Eventually I push it open and step inside. There is a smell in the air, a lingering scent. I recognise it but cannot place it. My neck tingles. I have the torch I found in the bedroom with me. It casts a dim light. I shine it around the room but there is no one else there.