Dark Companions (35 page)

It was Saturday; I wanted to forget Monday. Besides, I imagined all schools were as frightening. “No, I’m all right,” I said.

“Are you happy at school now?” she said incredulously.

“Yes, it’s all right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, really, it’s all right. I mean, I’m happy now.”

The snap of the letter slot saved me from further lying. Three birthday cards: two from neighbours who talked to me when I served them in the shop—an old lady who always carried a poodle, our next-door neighbour Dr Flynn—and a card from my parents. I’d seen all three cards in the shop, which spoiled them somehow.

As I stood in the hall I heard my father. “You’ve got to control yourself,” he was saying. “You only upset the child. If you didn’t go on at him he wouldn’t be half so bad.”

It infuriated me to be called a child. “But I worry so,” my mother said brokenly. “He can’t look after himself.”

“You don’t let him try. You’ll have him afraid to go up to bed next.”

But I already was. Was that my mother’s fault? I remembered her putting the nightlight by my bed when I was very young, checking the flex and the bulb each night— I’d taken to lying awake, dreading that one or the other would fail. Standing in the hall, I saw dimly that my mother and I encouraged each other’s fears. One of us had to stop. I had to stop. Even when I was frightened, I mustn’t let her see. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d hidden my feelings from her. In the living-room I said “I’m going upstairs to play.”

Sometimes in summer I didn’t mind playing there—but this was March, and a dark day. Still, I could switch the light on. And my room contained the only table I could have to myself and my jigsaw.

I spilled the jigsaw onto the table. The chair sat with its back to the dark yawn of the fireplace; I moved it hastily to the foot of the bed, facing the door. I spread the jigsaw. There was a piece of the edge, another. By lunchtime I’d assembled the edge. “You look pleased with yourself,” my father said.

I didn’t notice the approach of night. I was fitting together my own blue sky above fragmented cottages. After dinner I hurried to put in the pieces I’d placed mentally while eating. I hesitated outside my room. I should have to reach into the dark for the light switch. When I did, the wallpaper filled with bright multiplied aeroplanes and engines. I wished we could afford to redecorate my room, it seemed childish now.

The fireplace gaped. I retrieved the fireguard from the cupboard under the stairs, where my father had stored it now the nights were a little warmer. It covered the soot-encrusted yawn. The room felt comfortable now. I’d never seen before how much space it gave me for play.

I even felt safe in bed. I switched out the nightlight—but that was too much; I grabbed the light. I didn’t mind its glow on its own, without the jagged lurid jig of the shadows. And the fireguard was comforting. It made me feel that nothing could emerge from the chimney.

On Monday I took my space stories to school. People asked to look at them; eventually they lent me books. In the following weeks some of my fears began to fade. Questions darting from desk to desk still made me uneasy, but if I had to stand up without the answer at least I knew the other boys weren’t sneering at me, not all of them; I was beginning to have friends. I started to sympathise with their own ignorant silences. In the July examinations I was more relaxed, and scored more marks. I was even sorry to leave my friends for the summer; I invited some of them home.

I felt triumphant. I’d calmed my mother and my room all by myself, just by realising what had to be done. I suppose that sense of triumph helped me. It must have given me a little strength with which to face the real terror.

It was early August, the week before our holiday. My mother was worrying over the luggage, my father was trying to calculate his accounts; they were beginning to chafe against each other. I went to my room, to stay out of their way.

I was halfway through a jigsaw, which one of my friends had swapped for mine. People sat in back gardens, letting the evening settle on them; between the houses the sky was pale yellow. I inserted pieces easily, relaxed by the nearness of our holiday. I listened to the slowing of the city, a radio fluttering along a street, something moving behind the fireguard, in the chimney.

No. It was my mother in the next room, moving luggage. It was someone dragging, dragging something, anything, outside. But I couldn’t deceive my ears. In the chimney something large had moved.

It might have been a bird, stunned or dying, struggling feebly—except that a bird would have sounded wilder. It could have been a mouse, even a rat, if such things are found in chimneys. But it sounded like a large body, groping stealthily in the dark: something large that didn’t want me to hear it. It sounded like the worst terror of my infancy.

I’d almost forgotten that. When I was three years old my mother had let me watch television; it was bad for my eyes, but just this once, near Christmas—I’d seen two children asleep in bed, an enormous crimson man emerging from the fireplace, creeping towards them. They weren’t going to wake up! “Burglar! Burglar!” I’d screamed, beginning to cry. “No, dear, it’s Father Christmas,” my mother said, hastily switching off the television. “He always comes out of the chimney.”

Perhaps if she’d said “down” rather than “out of”… For months after that, and in the weeks before several Christmases, I lay awake listening fearfully for movement in the chimney: I was sure a fat grinning figure would creep upon me if I slept. My mother had told me the presents that appeared at the end of my bed were left by Father Christmas, but now the mysterious visitor had a face and a huge body, squeezed into the dark chimney among the soot. When I heard the wind breathing in the chimney I had to trap my screams between my lips.

Of course at last I began to suspect there was no Father Christmas: how did he manage to steal into my father’s shop for my presents? He was a childish idea, I was almost sure—but I was too embarrassed to ask my parents or my friends. But I wanted not to believe in him, that silent lurker in the chimney; and now I didn’t, not really. Except that something large was moving softly behind the fireguard.

It had stopped. I stared at the wire mesh, half expecting a fat pale face to stare out of the grate. There was nothing but the fenced dark. Cats were moaning in a garden, an ice-cream van wandered brightly. After a while I forced myself to pull the fireguard away.

I was taller than the fireplace now. But I had to stoop to peer up the dark soot-ridged throat, and then it loomed over me, darkness full of menace, of the threat of a huge figure bursting out at me, its red mouth crammed with sparkling teeth. As I peered up, trembling a little, and tried to persuade myself that what I’d heard had flown away or scurried back into its hole, soot came trickling down from the dark—and I heard the sound of a huge body squeezed into the sooty passage, settling itself carefully, more comfortably in its burrow.

I slammed the guard into place and fled. I had to gulp to breathe. I ran onto the landing, trying to catch my breath so as to cry for help. Downstairs my mother was nervously asking whether she should pack another of my father’s shirts. “Yes, if you like,” he said irritably.

No, I mustn’t cry out. I’d vowed not to upset her. But how could I go back into my room? Suddenly I had a thought that seemed to help. At school we’d learned how sweeps had used to send small boys up chimneys; there had hardly been room for the boys to climb. How could a large man fit in there?

He couldn’t. Gradually I managed to persuade myself. At last I opened the door of my room. The chimney was silent; there was no wind. I tried not to think that he was holding himself still, waiting to squeeze out stealthily, waiting for the dark. Later, lying in the steady glow from my plastic lantern, I tried to hold on to the silence, tried to believe there was nothing near me to shatter it. There was nothing except, eventually, sleep.

Perhaps if I’d cried out on the landing I would have been saved from my fear. But I was happy with my rationality. Only once, nearly asleep, I wished the fire were lit
,
because it would burn anything that might be hiding in the chimney; that had never occurred to me before. But it didn’t matter, for the next day we went on holiday.

My parents liked to sleep in the sunlight, beneath newspaper masks; in the evenings they liked to stroll along the wide sandy streets. I didn’t, and befriended Nigel, the son of another family who were staying in the boarding-house. My mother encouraged the friendship: such a nice boy, two years older than me; he’d look after me. He had money, and the hope of a moustache shadowing his pimply upper lip. One evening he took me to the fairground, where we met two girls; he and the older girl went to buy ice creams while her young friend and I stared at each other timidly. I couldn’t believe the young girl didn’t like jigsaws. Later, while I was contradicting her, Nigel and his companion disappeared behind the Ghost Train—but Nigel reappeared almost at once, red-faced, his left cheek redder. “Where’s Rose?” I asked, bewildered.

“She had to go.” He seemed furious that I’d asked.

“Isn’t she coming back?”

“No.” He was glancing irritably about for a change of subject. “What a super bike,” he said, pointing as it glided between the stalls. ‘Have you got a bike?”

“No,” I said. “I keep asking Father Christmas, but—”
 

I wished that hadn’t got past me, for he was staring at me, winking at the young girl.“Do you still believe in him?” he demanded scornfully.

“No, of course I don’t. I was only kidding.” Did he believe me? He was edging towards the young girl now, putting his arm around her; soon she excused herself, and didn’t come back—I never knew her name. I was annoyed he’d made her run away. “Where did Rose go?” I said persistently.

He didn’t tell me. But perhaps he resented my insistence, for as the family left the boarding-house I heard him say loudly to his mother “He still believes in Father Christmas.” My mother heard that too, and glanced anxiously at me.

Well, I didn’t. There was nobody in the chimney, waiting for me to come home. I didn’t care that we were going home the next day. That night I pulled away the fireguard and saw a fat pale face hanging down into the fireplace, like an underbelly, upside down and smiling. But I managed to wake, and eventually the sea lulled me back to sleep.

As soon as we reached home I ran upstairs. I uncovered the fireplace and stood staring, to discover what I felt. Gradually I filled with the scorn Nigel would have felt, had he known of my fear. How could I have been so childish? The chimney was only a passage for smoke, a hole into which the wind wandered sometimes. That night, exhausted by the journey home, I slept at once.

The nights darkened into October; the darkness behind the mesh grew thicker. I’d used to feel, as summer waned, that the chimney was insinuating its darkness into my room. Now the sight only reminded me I’d have a fire soon. The fire would be comforting.

It was October when my father’s Christmas cards arrived, on a Saturday; I was working in the shop. It annoyed him to have to anticipate Christmas so much, to compete with the supermarket. I hardly noticed the cards: my head felt muffled, my body cold—perhaps it was the weather’s sudden hint of winter.
 

My mother came to the shop that afternoon. I watched her pretend not to have seen the cards. When I looked away she began to pick them up timidly, as if they were unfaithful letters, glancing anxiously at me. I didn’t know what was in her mind. My head was throbbing. I wasn’t going home sick; I earned pocket money in the shop. Besides, I didn’t want my father to think I was still weak.

Nor did I want my mother to worry. That night I lay slumped in a chair, pretending to read. Words trickled down the page; I felt like dirty clothes someone had thrown on the chair. My father was at the shop taking stock. My mother sat gazing at me. I pretended harder; the words waltzed slowly. At last she said “Are you listening?”

I was now, though I didn’t look up. “Yes,” I said hoarsely, unplugging my throat with a roar.

“Do you remember when you were a baby? There was a film you saw, of Father Christmas coming out of the chimney.” Her voice sounded bravely careless, falsely light, as if she were determined to make some awful revelation. I couldn’t look up. “Yes,” I said.

Her silence made me glance up. She looked as she had on my first day at school: full of loss, of despair. Perhaps she was realising I had to grow up, but to my throbbing head her look suggested only terror—as if she were about to deliver me up as a sacrifice. “I couldn’t tell you the truth then,” she said. “You were too young.”

The truth was terror; her expression promised that. “Father Christmas isn’t really like that,” she said.

My illness must have shown by then. She gazed at me; her lips trembled. “I can’t,” she said, turning her face away. “Your father must tell you.”

But that left me poised on the edge of terror. I felt unnerved, rustily tense. I wanted very much to lie down. “I’m going to my room,” I said. I stumbled upstairs, hardly aware of doing so. As much as anything I was fleeing her unease. The stairs swayed a little, they felt unnaturally soft underfoot. I hurried dully into my room. I slapped the light switch and missed. I was walking uncontrollably forward into blinding dark. A figure came to meet me, soft and huge in the dark of my room.

I cried out. I managed to stagger back onto the landing, grabbing the light switch as I went. The lighted room was empty: My mother came running upstairs, almost falling. “What is it, what is it?” she cried.

I mustn’t say. “I’m ill. I feel sick.” I did, and a minute later I was. She patted my back as I knelt by the toilet. When she’d put me to bed she made to go next door for the doctor. “Don’t leave me,” I pleaded. The walls of the room swayed as if tugged by firelight; the fireplace was huge and very dark. As soon as my father opened the front door she ran downstairs, crying “He’s ill, he’s ill! Go for the doctor!”

The doctor came and prescribed for my fever. My mother sat up beside me. Eventually my father came to suggest it was time she went to bed. They were going to leave me alone in my room. “Make a fire,” I pleaded.