Fourth Horseman (6 page)

I
T WAS EARLY AFTERNOON
when I got home. Alex was out and the house had never seemed emptier. I wished Mum was there. I was proud of my independence, but just then I could have done with a bit of mothering.

Randall followed me as I wandered from room to room, wondering what to do with myself. In the end I gave in and took him for a walk, but I was jittery and he knew it, and neither of us much enjoyed being out. When we got back Dad still wasn’t home, so I peeled the potatoes, washed some broccoli and rooted round in the freezer for some burgers to go with them. There was still no sign of Dad. I phoned Alex on his mobile. I wanted to tell him what had happened, but he was clearly in the middle of something that was more fun than talking to me, and he was answering my questions in monosyllables. I asked him if he was coming home that night, even though I already knew he wasn’t. I suppose I hoped he’d take the hint and realize I needed him, but he was having way too good a time to pick up on subtleties.

So I put the potatoes on to boil and then phoned Dad at the lab.

‘Hi, Laurs,’ he said.

‘I’m putting on the dinner. Are you coming home?’

‘Might be a bit late.’ He sounded cheerful. ‘I’m feeling inspired. I think I could be on the verge of a breakthrough.’

‘That’s good,’ I said, without meaning it. ‘But I want you to come home. I want to talk to you about what happened today.’

‘Something in particular?’ he said.

‘Of course something in particular! The horseman!’

He went quiet, and stayed quiet for so long that I began to wonder whether the phone had gone dead.

‘Dad?’

He sighed deeply. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about that as well. I hope you haven’t been telling anyone about it.’

‘I haven’t,’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘Well, you don’t want to give people the wrong impression.’

That stopped me in my tracks for a moment. I could imagine how it might sound to someone who hadn’t seen what we had. ‘What should we do then, Dad?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We should both sleep on it. I think you’ll find that you’ll see it quite differently in the morning.’

‘Are you saying we imagined it?’

He didn’t answer my question. ‘Don’t worry your head about it, Laurs. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve finished what I’m doing.’

When Dad eventually came home I had already eaten. I waited while he had his dinner and then went in to help him with the clearing up.

‘Dad,’ I began, ‘what we saw today—’

He cut across me impatiently but he kept his voice calm. ‘Do you remember when Alex was little and he used to think there was a big goblin hiding in his chest of drawers?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Do you remember what you used to do?’

I did remember. I used to go in and help him take all his clothes out of the chest, then put them back in again so he could see there was nothing in there.

‘But this is nothing like that, Dad! I’m not a little kid. I haven’t had a nightmare.’

‘The principle is the same,’ he said, with that irritating studied patience. ‘We’ll have a look tomorrow in the woods, OK?’ While I struggled to find an appropriate answer he went on: ‘And do you know what I’m going to do now?’

‘What?’

‘I’m going to make you a huge mug of cocoa. And you’re going to have a good night’s sleep.’

Effectively silenced, I accepted the cocoa and took it up to bed. But the good night’s sleep was less easy to come by. Despite the cocoa I hardly slept at all. Everywhere my mind turned, the white horseman was there, standing quite still, staring straight past me, his eyes fixed on my dad.

When I went into the lab the next day to start working with the babies, I was as jumpy as they were and it wasn’t surprising that I didn’t make much progress. Dad seemed to have forgotten about his promise to have a look in the woods, but there was no need for it. I peered in as I arrived and again as I left. There was nothing there. But I didn’t forget. The little sleep I’d managed to get had done nothing to change my mind about what I had seen.

Usually when you see something remarkable, the image will stay with you for a while, then gradually fade. With the white horseman it was entirely different. The further I got from the place and the event, the more powerful the memory became. It was as though the image had scorched itself into my consciousness the way a bright light bleaches the retina and stays at the front of your vision long after it’s gone. More than that, the horseman grew in my memory. When we saw him in the woods he was life-size. Now, in my mind, he grew bigger, dwarfing the woods, the buildings, the city. I was certain that his appearance had a meaning, and a meaning that was particularly relevant to Dad. It was a warning, though of what I had no idea. I was sure that something dreadful was going to happen.

But as the days passed nothing dreadful did happen, and although the image of the rider and the way he made me feel were never far from the surface, I began gradually to lose my anxiety about it. I didn’t mention it to Alex because I didn’t want to alarm him, and although I was seeing a lot of Dad in the lab, nothing in his attitude suggested that he had changed his mind about talking. On the surface of things we were getting on well and enjoying working together, but beneath the surface was an uncomfortable tension; a huge, prickly no-go area.

I had a strong sense that something in Dad had changed. It was hard for me to put my finger on it, and it’s possible that the change was in me and that I was harbouring a grudge because of his refusal to talk about what had happened. But I think it was more than that. Dad behaved pretty much as he always had. He chatted about the same things, made the same kind of jokes, put the same effort into meeting our needs and being a good father. But something was missing. His spirit was damaged, or in retreat somewhere deep within himself. It was almost as though he was acting being our dad.

I went in to the lab for an hour or two after school every day. Handling the squirrels turned out to be a lot easier than I had expected. I found a good website called www.yourgerbilandyou.org, which told me all I needed to know and a lot more besides. The trick was to let them come to me and not the other way round. I worked on one group of six squirrels at a time. I would open the wire door in the top of the cage, put my hand in and just leave it there. In a surprisingly short space of time, the squirrels would come over to investigate. Provided I kept perfectly still while they sniffed around my hand, they would soon start testing it with their tiny paws, and then start climbing on to it. I learned one important lesson very early on and I was very lucky that I didn’t lose one of the squirrels in the process. In every group there were bold ones and timid ones, and it was the boldest of the bold ones that caught me off guard. The very first time she stepped on to my hand she realized that the arm extending above it was an escape route and ran straight up it. In retrospect it was pretty obvious, but I hadn’t had the sense to think of it and the gerbil website had neglected to mention the danger. Luckily, as soon as she found herself outside the cage she lost her nerve and hesitated, and in that split second I was able to block her ascent with my free hand. Again luckily, she dropped straight back down inside the cage instead of on top of it. If she had escaped into the room we might never have succeeded in catching her. After that I always wrapped a thick scarf around my arm when I put my hand into one of the cages and the fabric effectively blocked the escape hatch when the squirrels, as they invariably did, climbed upwards.

When they were quite happy standing on my hand and running up and down my arm, the next step was for me to gently start moving. At first the babies would scatter to the corners of the cage, but gradually they got used to it, and then I would bring up my thumb and touch the tops of their heads and their backs. When they were comfortable with that, which didn’t take as long as you’d expect, I would start closing my hand over them. To begin with I didn’t grip them at all, just let them slide away through the tunnel of my fingers. Slowly but surely I would tighten my hold, letting them get accustomed to the pressure but still leaving them in control. And that was it, really. By the time they were actually picked up for the first time they had come to see my hand as part of their furniture and they were hardly bothered at all. They always wriggled a bit, but they never tried to bite me no matter how firmly I needed to hold on.

The whole process took roughly ten days from beginning to end, depending on the animals themselves and their particular degree of courage. Some adapted much more quickly than that and some more slowly. There were times when it got boring and I half wished I hadn’t volunteered to do it, but at the beginning of my second week I was very glad that I had. Dad, after many failed attempts, finally got through to Mr Davenport and told him that he couldn’t manage without an assistant. He told me that it had been a ‘slightly delicate’ situation and that Davenport had put up strong objections, but when Dad told him that I was already going in there on a regular basis he acquiesced and agreed that if I kept a time sheet he would pay me eight pounds for every hour I worked as Dad’s assistant. I couldn’t believe it. I calculated that I had already earned over a hundred pounds the previous week, which was more money than I’d ever had in my hand at any one time. Things I hadn’t even bothered to dream about suddenly became possibilities.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Dad. ‘You have to put at least half of it into your savings.’

He wanted Mr Davenport to let me have my own card, and fingerprint access. It was vital, he insisted, because I would often be arriving when he was in the inner lab, and it would be far too complicated if he had to come out through the decontamination chamber every time I needed to come in. Davenport resisted. Dad insisted. Eventually Dad won, and was given the codes to enter my fingerprint details on the entry mechanism.

The one thing that Dad hadn’t taken into account when I volunteered to help him was what Alex was going to do while we were both at work. Alex said that he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself and didn’t mind being left on his own at home, but Dad wouldn’t hear of that. So Alex suggested that he could go round to Javed’s house every day. Dad said the odd day would be OK, but not every day. Dad wanted him to come along with me to the lab and entertain himself in the woods, but Alex said they didn’t make boys the way they used to, unfortunately, and he had no intention of taking up bird-watching or building tree houses. He would only come with us if Javed could come too. They could hang out together; maybe clear out one of the old sheds and put down some practice mats for their aikido. Dad had to consider it. He said Mr Davenport wouldn’t like it, but Alex said that since Mr Davenport never showed his face around the place there was no reason he should ever find out.

‘Javed won’t tell,’ said Alex. ‘If you get him to swear on it he won’t breathe a word. You could trust him with your life.’

‘I’m sure I could, but I’ve no intention of it,’ said Dad. But he did, after thinking long and hard, decide to trust him with the secret of the lab and of what he was doing there. It surprised me in one way, but in another it didn’t. There was something about Javed that inspired trust.

I don’t know why Dad made that decision. Perhaps it was just laziness; the easiest way to get round the problem of what to do with Alex. But sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t more significant than that; a sort of unconscious foresight. As though he knew what was coming and needed to have the possibility of a way out. Giving me access to the lab was one of the vital components. Letting Javed in on the secret of its existence was the other. Both those things were to be vital keys to everything that happened on that winter day, when Javed and Alex and I finally realized what it was all about, and took Dad’s fate into our own hands. Not that Javed broke his promise. He swore he would never tell anyone about Dad’s work and he didn’t. But if it hadn’t been for him, things would have turned out very differently.

F
OR A WEEK OR
two at the end of June, Dad was at a bit of a loose end. He had done as much work as he could on researching the genome information. What he needed now was a virus that he could start investigating. He had taken samples of blood from all the squirrels and he found some antibodies, which he kept for future reference, but he hadn’t found a single live virus. The babies were all bursting with health.

Mr Davenport had assured him he would find one. The only question was when. While he waited, Dad surfed the Internet and read through all the journals he got on subscription, keeping abreast of the latest developments in the field. When he was burned out with that he came and helped me with the squirrels. ‘Civilizing’ them, he called it. They needed to get used to his smell and his way of touching them, so the time wasn’t wasted. He was as cool and distant as he could be when we were working together, but I could tell that the little ones were getting under his skin. I caught him smiling sometimes as they scurried up his arm, and laughing when they tried to burrow down between his fingers with their tiny paws.

‘Maybe we should start a squirrel farm instead,’ I said to him once. ‘Or a little zoo, or one of those farms where town children go to get bitten by donkeys.’

He laughed, but nothing would make him change direction now. He said I shouldn’t give the squirrels names because it would make me too attached to them. They were experimental subjects, he said, not pets, and the only identification we needed was written on their little yellow ear tags. But I gave them all names anyway, partly because it was something to do with my mind while I was sitting there with my hand in the cage. All the red squirrels had names beginning with R and all the grey ones had names beginning with G. There were twenty-four greys and twelve reds, equal numbers of males and females, and I had fun thinking up the names. Some of the babies were quite distinctive, like Rosie, who had a golden streak along her back, and Greg, who had a bit of a squint. But most of them were pretty much impossible to tell apart, so the names, initially, were pretty meaningless really. But I did begin to think of them as pets. It was impossible not to.