Pravda (13 page)

Next, too much rush and panic.

And somehow, as they scrambled over the improvised disco floor, Gabriel (in Superman socks) lost his footing on the polished parquet and—hands flailing to counter the slip—knocked the actual stereo, bounced the needle back onto the record, scratching the shiny black surface a second time and causing the speakers once more to yowl. Even as he was losing his balance, he saw his sister's teeth sink into her lip in pursuit of a plan that might alleviate the worst of what was to come. By the time he had bounded up again—less than an instant
later (denying himself even the luxury of a complete fall) and now with the same aim as Isabella—she was already moving past him toward their father's vast vinyl collection. The needle was broken, but at least they could hide the record.

He fumbled with the deck. His father was on the creaking stairs. The needle arm wouldn't lift for a moment, then freed itself. He swung around, looking for the sleeve. He wished with all his heart that he might magic his friends away. Instead they were frozen quivering-still, the realization that there was reason to fear out of all proportion to the damage done beginning to thumbnail itself into their faces.

Too late. As the storm broke through the door, Gabriel was only halfway to putting the ruined disk back in its sleeve and his sister halfway to setting a replacement on the turntable.

In truth, as Nicholas entered the room, he had already abandoned any adult restraint and was borne in a riptide of childish emotions. The evening's wine had thinned his blood, flooding the labyrinths of his intelligence all the more easily. His evening hijacked, even in the midst of its resentful torpor, he had caught them at it: deceit. Deceit—on top of their standing on the furniture, on top of their dancing about the place when he had expressly told them it was forbidden for this precise reason, on top of their willful inability to play fair when he had chosen to ignore their disobedience for the past hour. On top of everything else. At moments such as these he felt too young to be their father, too close: a dangerous rival, not custodian. And he was quite unable to command himself, even in front of eight-year-old children. He stood glowering on the threshold, gripping the door handle with long fingers, scouring one face and then the next.

"What the bloody hell is going
on?"

The children could find no place to look, so bowed their heads.

In three infuriated strides he crossed to his new stereo.

"What the bloody hell have you done?" This spoken under his breath but so that the room could well hear—as (with his infinite sympathy for inanimate objects) he detached the broken needle, revolved it between finger and thumb, and laid it gently down.

He turned, his voice rising in a steady climb to a furious shout: "I've just bought this, Gabriel." This was true, though the money was not his and had been meant for a very different purpose. "And it is not for you to be messing about with. Do you hear? Have you any idea how much these things cost? Have you any bloody idea?"

Only now did he see the ruined record in the boy's hand: two deep scores the color of sun-bleached bone in the shape of a jagged
V.

"You little
shit."

Though Gabriel knew well what was coming, he was caught by the speed of the strike and took the first blow full across the ear. The second caught him awkwardly coming the other way, across the opposite cheek, before he could raise his arm to protect himself. The pain delayed a moment, then rushed at him. Tears surged to the corners of his eyes and he was lost to the torture of fighting them back in front of his friends, face spun toward the wall.

Fury was heaving through Nicholas, gorging and swelling on itself, raging back and forth far beyond this moment, out across his whole life, annihilating all ancillary thought save for the resounding certainty of his own outraged conviction: that this—this night after night of staying in and looking after these bloody children—this had never been part of the bargain, that he had been cheated, that he (and he alone) was the victim of gross and iniquitous injustice. He was visibly swaying. Isabella was standing still in front of him, clasping the replacement record two thirds unsleeved across her chest, her wide eyes looking up at him, unblinking. The effort required not to say what he bloody well wanted to say almost defeated him.
Serve the old bastard right
And yet ... and yet, as always, something—something about Isabella, perhaps, or something in the expressions of the other two, or something residing in the deeper terror of what he would do or become or have to face without the money, without the house, without the daily collateral—something held him back. Instead he cuffed the girl lightly across the top of her head.

"Right, get your bags, get your things—you two, Susan, Dan, you are both going. Right now. Bloody move."

The friends had been motionless in their terrified tableau vivant since he had come in: the one standing unnaturally upright with hands strictly by his side, a child soldier traumatized to attention in front of the old fireplace; the other on the sofa, aware that her feet had been all this while on the furniture and so awkwardly half crouching as if in the act of disguising this fact. Now, released from the spell, the two gave themselves fully to efficiency and haste, as if unconsciously glad of the emotional cover they provided.

And already Nicholas felt himself tiring. His wretched circumstances at the age of thirty-eight, the thought of his wife out at her self-righteous work all night ("My own money, Nicholas, I make my own money, to spend how I will"), the house itself—all of it pressed in on him now, corralling him back to the more subdued ire of his habitual corner. The torrent was receding. His intelligence was re-emerging, asserting itself. And he could sense the shadow of his rage smirking at the histrionics of its master. Still, he had bound himself into the entire tedious performance—furious parent disciplines disgraceful children for the duration of an entire bloody evening. So he set his face.

"What the hell are you waiting for, Isabella? Get in the bloody car."

Gabriel sat in the front, the seat belt too high and chafing at his neck. His father was driving—the contortion of face and body far worse for being imagined rather than directly looked upon—driving with undue gesture and haste, braking too hard for the pedestrian crossing, accelerating unnecessarily as he pulled away.

Nicholas swore, then swerved hard into a petrol station. He got out to dribble another teacup's worth into the tank; he ran the car perpetually on the brink of empty and there was never enough for there and back.

Gabriel shifted for the first time and took the chance to look into the back. His sister's gaze was fixed on his seat, as if she expected smoke to coil any moment from the point of her stare. The others too were unnaturally still: a grazed knuckle on the armrest of the door, a disco girl's polka-dot-painted fingernail digging into the fake suede of the upholstery.

"Your dad is mad." White-faced, Susan mouthed the words and whirled her index finger at her temple.

There was nothing Gabriel could say.

They drove on. And the silence in the car seemed a worse agony than the shouting and the striking that had gone before, seemed to hold them all rigid as surely as if they were each pinned with a hundred tacks through pinches of the skin. And Gabriel felt instinctively, without the restrictive formality of articulation, that it was neither fear nor resentment that kept them all from meeting any other's eye; it was the shame. The livid, writhing embarrassment of every moment now being lived through: the shame of the blows—witnessed
blows—henceforth indelible in their individual histories; the shame of what lay ahead, of what he and Isabella must both face at school, of what would be known about them; and, worst of all, lurking beneath all these like some poisoned underground lake, the shame of the discovery that their father—champion, guarantor, backer—had turned out not to be the idol of their public boast but a public betrayer instead. This the most painful shame. And a shame he felt without the adult luxury of the long view, of independent resource—though immortal all the same for that.

But it was not the ride to Acton that Gabriel remembered most of all when he shut his eyes. It was the rest of the night.

Nothing had been eased and nothing spoken ninety minutes later, when the vast Victorian house reared up in the headlights. His father turned off the engine and stepped out of the car, his distance the shortest to the front door. But Gabriel sat very still, watching his sister walk around the hood while Nicholas fumbled for his key. Without looking back and expecting him to follow, they both disappeared inside, leaving the door ajar and a narrow triangle of light on the frayed gray mat.

But Gabriel did not move. Something held him there.

It was not exactly his conscious intention. But a minute passed and he simply remained motionless.

Then another minute came and went.

And still he did not shift to unbuckle his seat belt. But found himself staring dead ahead: the porch light, at this exact position of parking, somehow revealed the otherwise invisible smears on the windscreen left behind by long-vanished rain.

Three minutes passed in this observation and his attitude did not change—upright, legs together, as if ready for a new journey, selfconsciously breathing through his nose. And though yet without plot or purpose, the more he sat, the harder it was to move. And with each additional second, his resolve seemed to be hardening; yes, the more he sat, the more he knew that he had to go on sitting. And the more he sat, the harder it was to move. And that was all there was to it. Somehow he had become a fugitive from his own decisions—a boy in an adventure story, locked in the basement, stock-still, ear to the door, listening to the baddies decide what they were going to do with him.

The porch bulb was extinguished like a dare. The driveway darkened. He refocused on the opaque semicircular patterns left by the
wipers. To his left, the rhododendrons shuffled outside the passenger window. To his right, he could sense his father ducking down a little to get a look inside the car from the steps. And even though he could not see directly for fear of turning his head, even though the narrow angle of dead ahead was all he permitted himself, still Gabriel knew at once that this was the moment, that this was the test—that he must not move at all, not even the shiver of an eyelash; he must remain as still as the headstones in Highgate Cemetery.

His breathing stopped. And he summoned all the will he had in his eight-year-old soul. He would not breathe again until. He would not breathe again. He would not breathe.

His father was gone!

The front door shut.

He had done it.

He was alone.

For the next five minutes triumph surged through him. But just as quickly as it had arrived, his jubilation began to seep and shrink away, his veins to hollow. Pins and needles attacked his foot. The trees shifted again, disturbing the shadows. And all of a sudden he felt uncertain and scared. He tried to rally. He bent everything he had to the single purpose of containment. He sealed off his mind. He shut his eyes. His foot was killing him. Needle pin, pin needle. But the pain was something he could concentrate on, at least. The spasm must pass. If only he could survive the next minute. Survive the next minute. Count up to sixty.

He was totally convinced an hour must have elapsed, maybe longer. He was okay, though. He had come through it in some sort of waking sleep or trance or something. And the cramp had disappeared. And he reckoned he was good for the full adventure, whatever that might be. He allowed himself to relax slightly. Yeah, it was like he was in the book he was reading about three boys who ran a detective agency somewhere in faraway San Francis—

Shit!

His sister's light was on, directly above. And now off. And now on. And now off. Signals ... No, Is, no. Don't wreck it.
Please
don't wreck it. Off. On. Off. On. Off. Off. Staying off ... Of course, she would be able to see him better with no light. She must be looking out right now. All he had to do was signal in return. He could sense her face, just above and beyond the ceiling of his self-permitted vision. But once again he knew that the movement of a single nerve would mean mutiny and total collapse, and he would be up and out, and she would sneak down and open the front door, and he would run straight to his room, and she would come running after him, asking him all kinds of Isabella questions. So don't look up. How long would she be there? What was she doing? Was she waving? Don't look up. Don't look up.

The engine had cooled completely when the first serious shiver passed through him and the night began in earnest. The house now loomed like a phantom liner. He was sure of less and less. He could not tell the murmuring of the trees from the murmurs inside his own mind. Voices he had not sanctioned muttered rival commentaries in his head. Familiar faces came and went behind shadowy windows he could not see. And there was only his own stillness left to be relied upon.

His last conscious thought came as dead midnight fell. His chin dropping to his chest and the shivering properly upon him, he became dimly aware that Highgate church bells were chiming—twelve? Was it twelve? His feet and legs had long gone but it was still quite warm beneath him. Nestle into this warmth and let it spread up through him like a hot fountain. Count the church bells.

He was a stranger to the world after that. The fog rose as forecast from London below, creeping and stealing up Highgate Hill, whispering forth blind comrade the frost, until the windscreen rimed and the red hood turned all to pearl. But Gabriel was no longer looking through conscious eyes, because a feverish waking sleep had overtaken him and he was a pilgrim now, wandering through a bone-strewn valley in the story of a dark and evil land. Several times he thought perhaps he could make out the shape of Isabella s face again—his mysterious twin watching at her window, by his side, or over his shoulder—but he could not be certain. And anyway he did not want to lose count on his journey.