Breaking and Entering (28 page)

He switched off the windscreen wipers, listened to the silence. Both dog and child had quietened, and the merciless rifle-fire of rain which had assaulted the car windows for the last two hours or more had unaccountably ceased. He cleared his throat, feeling strangely disconcerted. He could do with a stiff drink, a shot of instant courage.

‘We're here!' he said, shaking Penny's arm.

She woke with her usual languor, too inert and sleep-dazed to take in what he was saying. Pippa didn't even stir, but remained huddled in the back.

‘Look, I'm going to have a recce,' he said, having explained once more that they had reached their destination. ‘See if I can find some way of driving up a bit closer. You stay here, okay? I won't be long.'

He grabbed his torch and anorak, and slipped between the trees which lined the lane. The heavy clouds suddenly gaped apart, to reveal a bold three-quarters moon, its light silvering the hills, spangling the wet undergrowth. He stood motionless and marvelling, savouring his reprieve. He had come through his ordeal and been rewarded.

‘Claptrap!' he muttered, rubbing his cricked neck. For a man with years of study behind him and a reputation for rational thought, he was becoming alarmingly susceptible to woolly superstition, if not self-delusion. Still, deluded or no, he did find the whole thing singular – the abrupt lull in the downpour, that imposing midnight moon.

He stumbled on, concerned about the fact that he'd left Penny and Pippa alone, yet magnetized by the scene ahead – this unlikely fragile settlement in the middle of a wilderness. He could discern a few parked cars and vans, the embers of a dying fire, a washing-line strung between two trees. The camp was small – about six or seven tents in all and a couple of more striking tepees – though there was no sign of their occupants; no sound except the snarling of a dog. Praying it was tethered, he edged towards the tents; starting in alarm as a shadow fell across his path. Someone was coming towards him; a small man, slight in build, though his long, distorted shadow made him taller, even dangerous. It was too dark to see the detail of his face, but his hair fell past his shoulders and his eyes were piercing points of light.

The man stepped forward, blocking Daniel's path. He tensed, ready to defend himself, but the man's voice was low and gentle – a mother's reassuring tone.

‘Welcome,' he said, stretching out his hand. ‘I've been expecting you a long time.'

Daniel lay on his back, staring at the darkness. The darkness was alive. It pressed down on his eyes and nose, tried to stop him breathing. It was also very cold, so he'd lost his toes and fingers. Maybe he was going to die. Dead people were cold. They must have sent him away to die.

At home he had a night-light – a nice, friendly lamp which shared the night with him – and his bedroom door was left ajar, so another piece of light came in and lay down on the floor beside his bed. And his tall safe parents slept next door, so he could call them if he had a frightening dream. There were eleven other beds in here, with eleven other boys, but no one he could call. The boys jeered at him because of the funny way he talked. But what was so funny? He had always talked like that.

It was too dark to see the boys, but he could hear their snuffly breathing. They all breathed different ways. Thompson made a whistly noise and McKenzie had a cold and sounded all bunged up. McKenzie's name was Michael, but you weren't allowed to call him that. They took your names away here, like they took away your sweets. ‘Daniel' had been confiscated.

He'd learned that word on his first day, along with ‘slave' and ‘beato'. ‘Beato' was a funny word which hurt. They beat you quite a lot. Last week, he'd run away – run back home to Africa. He didn't know the way, but he walked for ages and ages and cut his leg crawling through barbed wire. Mr Newman found him and drove him back in a big blue shiny car. Then they took his trousers down and hit him twelve times on his bottom. It left red marks, but you weren't allowed to cry.

The first night, he cried for hours. In the end, Matron came in and said he was disturbing the whole dormitory and had he got a pain? He was crying too much to answer, so she took him to the washroom and told him to wash his face. It was horrid in the washroom. There were white tiles on the floor and the windows had ghosts' faces in.

Matron was a woman, but she didn't look like one. She had a stiff white cap instead of hair, and she was flat in front where his black nanny had a big soft wobbly cushion. They didn't have real women in Wales, or girls, or dogs and cats, or any colours except grey. Everything was grey – the sky, the hills, the school, the food, and the uniform was scratchy grey. Tonight they'd had rhubarb and that was greyish pink. He had never heard of rhubarb. It was very sour and had lumps in like the stew.

McKenzie had poured water into his stew and made him eat it with his pudding-spoon. And after supper, he'd told him about the ghosts. Ghosts were white, not grey, and sometimes they'd had their heads chopped off, so they carried them under their arms. There were loads of ghosts in Wales, and two at Greystone Court. They came out at night and sort of floated along the corridors like smoke. He hadn't seen them yet, but they'd probably come tonight – creep into the dormitory and rise up over his bed.

He closed his eyes to keep them out, but the dark got even thicker then, heavy like his new school coat. He had never had a coat before, but the sun didn't reach as far as Wales, so you had to wear more clothes. He was freezing now, and the sheets were stiff like Matron, and his heart was ticking so loudly, he was frightened it would wake her and she'd come storming from her room. He tried to burrow further down the bed. Someone was sneaking in. Not Matron, but a ghost. He could hear its scary breathing. It hadn't got a head. He could smell it too – like frogspawn and wet socks.

‘Help!' he screamed, struggling to sit up. Something was wrapped all round him, getting in the way. He lashed out with his feet and fists, yelling for his mother, begging her to come.

And suddenly she did come. A torch was bobbing across the landing, and he could see her long brown hair, wavy and unbraided, the way she wore it at night. He grabbed the hair, twisting his fingers through the strands, to keep her there for ever. His tears were making wet marks on her nightdress, but he clung on even tighter, sobbing ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,' over and over, because he knew her name would scare the ghost away.

He felt her arms close round him, cried louder in relief, shuddering and gasping, as if once they'd started, the tears refused to turn off. His chest hurt from the sobs, which were exploding through his body like bubbles in a can of Tizer, popping in his throat. A hand began to stroke his hair, rhythmically and slowly, feathering down from his forehead to the back of his neck. She had never stroked his hair before, never let him press so close. Usually she told him to be brave and dry his eyes; that big boys didn't cry and that he mustn't wake his father. Then she would tiptoe back to her own room and leave pieces of the nightmare still twitching in the folds of the sheets. She never stayed for long. Both his parents were Busy – always Busy, even in the middle of the night.

But tonight she didn't go. She hadn't even ticked him off, or used her dark blue voice, which meant that she was cross with him and would have to tell his father. Perhaps she'd let him stay with her, and he could persuade her not to pack that loathsome trunk; not to send him back to school at all. The trunk was locked and roped, and he often wished they'd rope his mouth as well. Then he wouldn't let them down by crying when it was time to say goodbye. ‘Goodbye' was worse than ‘beato', a word which throbbed and stung.

‘No!' he panicked, hammering with his fists against her shoulder. ‘I'm not going back. I hate it there. I tried to run away.'

‘You can never run away, Daniel, not from your own pain.'

He jumped. The voice was wrong – a kindly and soft-timbred voice, but a man's voice, not a woman's. He hardly dared to open his eyes, and when he did he jerked away in horror. He had been clinging to another man: arms around his neck, head against his chest, fingers twisted through his long brown wavy hair. He was so mortified, so embarrassed by his outburst, he could only stare down at the ground, still confused as to where he was. The bare floorboards of the dormitory had changed into stones and rubble; a pile of bedding lay jumbled in the corner, his sleeping-bag still tangled round his ankles where he had tried to kick it off. His eyes moved slowly upwards, taking in the details of his prison. Not the bleak school billet with its metal beds, barred windows, but a ruin on the hillside, with crumbling rough-stone walls and a makeshift tarpaulin roof. The wavering pencil of torchlight seemed to emphasize the vastness of the night. Through the empty window-frame he could see only a small square of darkness, but he knew it stretched to infinity. He could hear its heavy breathing as it pressed down on the hills; could still taste its bitter blackness in his mouth.

He shivered. He was wearing two thick jerseys over his pyjamas, as well as woolly socks and a scarf, but there was no warmth in his body. He cast his eye over the other man's clothes – that ridiculously impractical robe which did look like a nightdress (and concealed God knew what beneath it); the long untidy hair – none too clean, and unnerving on a male.

‘Look here,' he stormed, turning on him furiously as a way of defusing his embarrassment. ‘It was an insane idea – making me sleep here.'

‘Yes.' The voice was soft. ‘Madness is sometimes very powerful. It can show us things we'd be blind to otherwise.'

Daniel ignored the cant. ‘Christ knows why I agreed,' he snapped. ‘I must have been mad myself.' He was enraged at his spineless submission; hardly able to believe that he had let himself be talked into spending this night alone – maybe several nights alone – away from all the others, even segregated from Penny, who was sleeping in the tent. It was to be his ‘initiation' period, but initiation into
what
, he wondered with a shudder of distaste?

‘You
are
mad, Darnel. You're angry. Angry with me, and still more angry with your parents.'

‘My parents? What the hell d'you mean? You've never met my parents. You know nothing whatsoever about me, and you're not likely to find out. We're leaving the moment it's light.'

‘That's a pity, Daniel, when it cost you so much to get here – so much indecision, so many sleepless nights.'

Daniel slumped down on the ground, startled once again by the man's uncanny insights.
Now
he remembered why he had agreed to be imprisoned here: he'd had no defence against such power. He had also been beguiled by his first night's remarkable sleep – a longer, deeper sleep than he'd had literally in years; lying in a tepee with a smoky wood-fire belching in the centre, and sharing the cramped space not just with Penny and Pippa, but with several other campers – the old and sick and halt – who were too frail to withstand the rigours of an ordinary tent. It was a miracle he had slept at all, let alone so well, and it had seemed further proof of the healer's mysterious skills.

Now he wondered if it had been a fluke, simply exhaustion after the drive. No, there was more to it than that: an overwhelming sense of peace, which had touched them all, even Pippa; a sense of genuine welcome and unquestioning acceptance into the family.

He had met more of the so-called family next day, but recoiled in dismay from the prospect of community living. He had assumed all along that he and Penny could pitch their tent at a distance; avoid living cheek by jowl with a bunch of total strangers and being sucked into the maelstrom of the camp. Yet the healer was a magnet, drawing everyone towards him, issuing his orders, deciding who slept where and who did what – a tyrant who could mind-read. Wasn't it peculiar, to say the least, that he should have materialized at the very moment he was screaming for his mother? The fellow couldn't possibly have heard him – not from four hundred yards away. He slept in his own tepee at the bottom of the hill, alongside the other campers, whilst this ruined house was halfway up the slope. So what had brought him dead on cue?

There was a sudden shift and clink of stones outside as an intruder or an animal disturbed them. Daniel squinted through the blank hole of the window, but could see nothing except darkness. The place was beginning to get to him, and the man's continued presence made him more and more uneasy. He was still overcome with shame that he had blubbed in his arms like that; utterly aghast that he could have mistaken a living man for the long-dead mother of his childhood.

‘Look, if it's all the same to you,' he said, wincing as he recalled his near-hysteria, ‘I'd rather you pushed off, okay? I want to get back to sleep.'

‘Yes,' said the healer, ‘you need to sleep soundly like a child – that child you weren't allowed to be. Goodnight.'

Daniel watched him go, the puny torch-beam swallowed up in blackness; the soft footsteps fading into nothing. He felt irrationally annoyed that the fellow should keep making such percipient remarks, but at least he was wrong in one respect – no way would he sleep soundly, not after what he'd been through. Never, since the age of eighteen, had he come so close to Greystone Court, not just geographically but in memory and emotion. And there were other, darker memories he dared not even confront, but which might erupt in his nightmares, waking him in panic again. Best not to sleep at all. He had no idea what time it was. One of the idiotic rules here was a ban on clocks and watches; a reliance on so-called ‘natural time'. It made him feel totally disoriented, as if he had lost the basic structure of his life. And what use was ‘natural time' when it was pitch dark outside and there was no way of telling if dawn was mercifully close or still endless hours away? He didn't even have a book to read. No wonder he had dreamed of school when his possessions were being confiscated with as much tyrannical relish as they had been thirty years ago – first his watch, then his books and radio. The healer called such things an obstacle; an escape from pain and therefore an impediment to healing; an interruption of ‘interior silence', whatever that was supposed to be.