Surrender (13 page)

There’s fire in my fingers. I burn everything I touch.

Lights are on in Gabriel’s house. It’s been a while since I was here. Everything looks the same in the feather-red light. The building is wood, painted cream. Across the garden stands the fence where years ago I carved my name. The angel treated the scratchings like a holy relic. His only proof of me. I was so often tempted to scrub the letters off. After a while, the weather did it for me. Now there’s no word, no name, no proof, just the fence.

I put my fiery hands in my pockets, walk away from the crackling light. Cross the lawn to where the night’s gathered black as mortal sin. Surrender, the dark’s dog, follows me. We sit down with our spines to the wall.

I look up. See the gutter. The stars, the moon, the smoke.

From somewhere an alarm starts howling. I fold my hand round Surrender’s muzzle so he cannot join the song.

We’re sitting against the wall of the house and above us there’s a window with a curtain and four bars. Beyond the window is the angel. He must know that we are here.

I will slip a wrist between the bars and when I run my fingers down the glass, the sound will be granite screaming.

Time is shorter than I’d thought: very well. I haven’t seen Finnigan for more than a year. It seems longer than that. This small room irked him when he was last here; my weakness infuriated him. He’d urged me to get up and walk. He’d flirted with Sarah and been rude to the doctor. I’d had to ask him to leave. He’d done so in black temper, and I knew that one day he’d return.

Sarah has shut the door behind her, but that won’t slow him down. I whisper an incantation that’s both protection and welcome. I can hear an alarm’s piercing wail. I can hardly hear myself think.

We walked side-by-side up the steep flank of Rabbit Road, me edgy as a hare until the scrub stood between us and anybody who might see; though I simmered with pride to be with her, I dreaded the consequences of being seen. Any of Mulyan’s young men might take offense at my filling a place better occupied by them; anyone, seeing me, might mention it to my mother and father. Each snapping twig made my heart leap; each rolling pebble chilled my blood. I kept my eyes on the peak. Though she talked, I couldn’t listen. It was a relief to reach the peak, where we shrank to smaller than specks. Overlooking green gullies and the forest’s canopy, Evangeline rolled cigarettes and we sat, not together, but with a companionable closeness. In the small sahara of earth between us I piled stones and listened, saying little. Evangeline, like Finnigan, talked of the future. Her eyes on the grizzled tip of her cigarette, she told me that she worried she would never leave Mulyan, that the only horizons in her life were the icy horizons of our mountain range, that her world would be contained in the view from the dead end of Rabbit Road. I said, “If you stayed here forever, it wouldn’t be wrong. It wouldn’t stop you living a good life.”

She looked through cat tails of smoke. “You think?”

“Life is lived on the inside. What’s outside doesn’t matter.”

She thought about this, her cigarette pluming. It prickled my skin, knowing my words were in her head. She waved away the smoke and asked, “What’s inside you?”

The question bothered me, I glanced away. I glimpsed my elbows, my jutting kneecaps. What was inside me. I felt conscious of it. “Colors, maybe.”

“Colors! Which ones?”

“Blue.” Blood pulsed through my fingers; I was aware of my feet, the size of my hands. Everything worked smoothly. “Green.”

“Hmm. Nice colors.”

I nodded; I had hardly dared to look at her, not during the climb up the road, not now while we sat on the rocks. I was conscious of my skin, my teeth, my blowing hair. In my wrists was a matchbox collection of bones. She leaned on the hand that had no cigarette. “Colors,” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed. I see you every day, Anwell, but I don’t know anything about you. I wonder why we weren’t friends before.”

Later that day, I told Finnigan she’d said that. “I wonder why we weren’t friends before.” It seemed like a compliment. Finnigan giggled with unpleasant mirth. “
I wonder why we weren’t friends before
. Did you tell her,” he answered, “that you don’t want to be friends? Did you tell her you’ve already got a friend?”

He was perched in a birch tree, as if he’d flown there. It was early evening and the low sun blinded me. I stared up at him, anger blowing like a banner. He had much and I had little, yet still he’d spoil it for me. “Stay out of it,” I warned. “You stay away.”

Finnigan twitched a branch, an arboreal shrug. He was black and white as a lemur. “All I’m saying is you’d better be careful. You better remember she only wants to be friends.”

I swung away. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“If you won’t listen, don’t come crawling later. Maybe I’ll be gone.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t make empty threats.”

“Have I ever, Gabriel?”

I stopped, and looked back. A tornado of midges was swirling round the birch. From somewhere came the cobbly sound of a horse trotting on a road. “You can’t change the rules, Finnigan. We made a promise. Like reflections and blood brothers — remember? You promised to be here when I need you.”

“I remember,” he said. “But I was lying.”

I stared at him; he lounged in the leaves and looked smug at me. I could have shaken him from the boughs and clubbed him. His clothes hung in rags, his hair was filthy. He looked leaner, more sinewy, than ever; he was brown and stained, but his eyes shone, as always, with a ruby brilliance; from his face the hyena smiled. There was no point arguing with him in this mood. The setting sun washed the lawn orange and lemon; the scent of roses turned in the air. A cicada scraped its wings. From the chicken coop I felt the study of pale, thoughtless eyes. “Where’s Surrender?”

“Who knows. He’s feral, that dog. Won’t come when he’s called, won’t do what he’s told.”

I said nothing; I longed to be gone. I wanted to be somewhere on my own, to reflect in private on this long day. This morning I had knelt in the grass with a duckling, and everything had been the same; now, at dusk, nothing was. “I’ll find him.”

“Why? He doesn’t want you to. I think you should leave him alone.”

“He’s my dog,” I retorted. “Not yours.”

Finnigan didn’t flinch. But as I walked away he said, “You lied too.”

Against my instincts I looked back.

He was upside-down like a monkey, swinging. “You lied to Evangeline. You said you liked her, but you still lied.”

I should have kicked him in the stomach, trampled him into the earth; I could feel his will to undermine and disconcert me. “What do you mean?”

He grinned, lopsided, gruesomely. “The colors were never blue and green. The colors are soot and pearl.”

I put my hands over my ears and just walked away.

If I could have my life over again I’d want back just those few weeks of summer. Not a minute longer — not a moment of Finnigan in the birch tree, not a moment of the day I would soon spend in the forest while the world imploded around me. No, just these few weeks in between. They weren’t perfect — I was anguished and edgy, and plagued by doubt. But at least, for their duration, I was alive.

A small town has as many eyes as a fly; Evangeline became the secrecy around which my existence turned. No one must know; vitally, my mother mustn’t. Sometimes I would lie in a sweat, tormented by visions of what would happen if she discovered the truth. I never invited Evangeline to the house; inside it, I never mentioned her name. I did not look out the window if she was walking by. I pretended nothing had changed. But, in my head, she’d become a vast choppy sea that drowned out all other things. I closed my books, overlooked Surrender, chewed my nails to the quick. For hours at a time I gave Finnigan no thought. I was distracted, morose, feverish, vacant, I felt I lived in some pleasantly maddening cage, where my thoughts could roam but never beyond her. My father observed I was moping like a fool; my mother leveled on me an insect stare and decided, “It’s his age. It’s a foolish age.”

Father said, “I wasn’t foolish at his age.”

I have defied you
, I itched to tell them: though you’d make it otherwise, I am just like anyone else; like anybody should do, I’ve reached a foolish age. Of course I said nothing, and was proud to hold my tongue, because I didn’t
want
Evangeline’s name spoken inside the house, didn’t want it dragged across the floor. Only secrecy shielded her from my mother and father; only in secrecy could she remain pristine.

I struggled to find ways of explaining this to her — finally I realized I could save my breath. Evangeline never tried to take my hand. She never suggested that we sit together in the rotunda or walk arm-in-arm along the street. She never asked to come to the house, never telephoned and left a message for me. She didn’t invite me to join herself and her friends when they went swimming in the river or day-tripped to a neighboring town. She would smile at me if we passed in the street, she would not say my name. She was content to exist on the fringes. We circled each other’s lives like moons.

We met among trees and on the edges of fields and by the creek where ebony snakes slid under stones; it suited us to meet this way, in wild places, like migrating birds. We never arranged our meetings — sometimes days would go by and I wouldn’t see her. Then I’d round a corner and there she would be, slouched smoking, as if waiting, and I would stop and talk to her. “It’s funny how we find each other,” I told Finnigan. “It’s fate.”

“It’s not funny,” he replied. “It’s not fate. You’re following her around.”

“What? I’m
not
!”

“You are. You’re the hunter and the gatherer. You’re the lurker-in-the-shade. You’re the symphony of stalking —”

“It’s a small town!”

“Yeah, a small town. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to hide, except in a crowd.”

Air hissed past my teeth. That morning Evangeline and I had passed in the park. Neither of us was alone. My father was tweaking the leaves of the roses there, accusing them of spreading black-spot across town. Evangeline walked by, accompanied by two friends. They gave us a wide berth. I knew their names, and they all knew mine, but none of us said anything, I kept my eyes down, and Evangeline continued the tale she was telling her friends. She was louder and more frivolous with them than with me. To Finnigan I said, “You know I can’t talk to her in public. You know what people — what my parents — would say. My life is already hard, Finnigan: why do you try to make it worse? What terrible thing have I done to you?”

Like a fox he looked at me. He said, “You shut me in a refrigerator.”

I staggered. “What?”

He barked with laughter and swirled away. “Gabriel, take a joke!”

If I had the chance to live again those few weeks of the summer I was sixteen I would exorcise from them these miserable spats with him; I would strip them of everything except the dawns and midnights and the hours I spent alone with Evangeline: the summer, thus experienced, would be without flaw. Sometimes I would invite her on rambling walks, and if she was doing nothing else then she’d sometimes follow me. She would slap her pockets for her tobacco and as we walked she would smoke one cigarette while rolling another. I knew places where nobody went, and our walks would take us there. We scaled the peak of McAlister’s Bluff, where Jaffy Avalon the shape-changer discovered it took more than faith in one’s shape-changing talents to make wings out of bare arms. We followed the disused railway tracks, Evangeline balanced on the rails, until the tracks became crusty with rust and disintegrated into the soil. We picked blackberries and ate them, though neither of us liked the taste. One balmy dusk we climbed the junkyard fence and wandered among life’s leftovers, stoves, billycarts, wild cats, chunks of wall, and Evangeline, hands on hips, surveyed everything and decided, “This is where you’d dump a body.”

“You think so?”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

Summer lit the world.

We walked into the forests that encircled the town. I have never liked them, their dark throat, their sullen height, their slump-shouldered gloom. But Evangeline walked steadily into their maw, and I followed her. She wanted to see the swathes which, years ago, the firebug had burned. The furnaced forest was green again, though here and there stood leafless trunks cindered to the core; on the scruffy dirt lay stiff black limbs tangled in morning glory. Evangeline touched her palm to the charcoal, murmured, “Poor things.”

I scanned the treetops for Finnigan. I never felt closer to him than when I trespassed on his territory. Dark and dirty, sulky, oppressive, he was like a creature that the leaves and creaking timber had spawned. I never saw him, but I felt observed. He scoffed, “Watch you mooching after her like a mutt — why would I waste my time?” It didn’t make me believe him. He shrugged, unconcerned. “It’s not me you need to worry about, Gabriel.”

This I knew, believed.

I was careful not to give my parents reason to ask where I’d been or where I was going or any questions at all; I was careful not to give them any cause for complaint. I distilled the charms of angelhood; I oozed meek compliance. I remembered how, as a child, I’d tried to build a wall of good behavior behind which Vernon and I might hide: I could never make the wall strong enough; it was forever toppling and leaving us exposed. Now I was older, and had Evangeline to protect: I could try harder. I did my chores efficiently and without being told. I cleaned, shopped, washed, swept. I cut firewood and, from my empire of chickens and ducks, selected, once a fortnight, the unfortunate who would taste the ax. I’d deliver Mother’s supper to her room, then take a place opposite my father at the blood-dark dining table. Father rarely spoke while we ate, and certainly never mentioned his legal work, which he deemed me too unimaginative to comprehend. Imagine it, however, I did; I thought of the hours he spent settling divorces and selling farms and drawing up wills. I thought of all the hours behind him and all the hours to come, the boredom of it, the sameness. I imagined him at his aerie window, overseeing the town. In his spare time he continued a desultory campaign against McIllwraith, unable to abandon it for fear of appearing defeated or proven wrong — he took great sport in reminding the townsfolk that the arsonist had never, in fact, been caught. A proud man, he refused to acknowledge his alienation from the world. He made no comment on his crumpled home life. He ignored the silence that descended when he entered any room. He kept company with his roses and steadfastly believed that everything was as it should be.