The Book of Lost Things (2006) (6 page)

The doorbell rang, breaking the spell of harmony between David and Rose. It was the postman, and Rose went to greet him. When she returned, she asked David if he would like something to eat, but David said no. Already, he was feeling angry with himself for lowering his defenses against Rose, even if he had learned something as a result. He didn’t want her to think that everything was now all right between them, because it wasn’t, not at all. Instead, he left her alone in the kitchen and headed back to his bedroom.

On the way, he looked in on Georgie. The baby was fast asleep in his crib, his big gas helmet and the bellows for pumping air into it lying close by. It wasn’t his fault that he was here, David tried to tell himself. He didn’t ask to be brought into the world. Still, David couldn’t rouse himself to care terribly for him, and something tore inside him each time he saw his father holding the new arrival. He was like a symbol of all that was wrong, of all that had changed. After his mother had died, it had been just David and his father, and they had become closer as a result because they had only each other to rely upon. Now his father had Rose too, and a new son. But David, well, he didn’t have anyone else. It was just himself.

David left the baby and returned to his garret, where he spent the rest of the afternoon flicking through Jonathan Tulvey’s old books. He sat in the window seat and thought that Jonathan had sat in this seat, once upon a time. He had walked the same hallways, had eaten in the same kitchen, played in the same living room, had even slept in the same bed as David. Perhaps, somewhere back in time, he was still doing all of those things, and both David and Jonathan were now occupying the same space but at different stages in history, so that Jonathan passed like an unseen ghost through David’s world, unaware that he shared his bed each night with a stranger. The thought made David shiver, but it also gave him pleasure to think that two boys who were so much alike might somehow share such a connection.

He wondered what could have happened to Jonathan and to the little girl Anna. Perhaps they had run away, although David was old enough to understand that there was a great deal of difference between the kind of running away that happened in storybooks and the reality of what would face a boy of fourteen with a girl of seven in tow. It wouldn’t have taken them long to become tired and hungry if something had made them run away, and to regret what they had done. David’s father had told him that if he ever got lost, he was to find a policeman, or ask a grown-up to find one for him. He wasn’t to approach men who were by themselves, though. He was always to ask a lady, or a man and woman together, preferably ones with a child of their own. You couldn’t be too careful, his father would say. Was that what happened to Jonathan and Anna? Had they talked to the wrong person, someone who didn’t want to help them get home but instead had spirited them away, hiding them in a place where no one would ever find them? Why would someone do that?

As he lay on his bed, David knew there was an answer to that question. Before his mother had finally left for the not-quite-hospital, he had heard her discussing with his father the death of a local boy named Billy Golding, who had disappeared on his way home from school one day. Billy Golding didn’t go to David’s school and he wasn’t one of David’s friends, but David knew what he looked like because Billy was a very good soccer player who played in the park on Saturday mornings. People said that a man from Arsenal had spoken to Mr. Golding about Billy joining the club when he was older, but someone else said that Billy had just made that up and it wasn’t true at all. Then Billy went missing and the police came to the park two Saturdays in a row to talk to anyone who might know something about him. They spoke to David and his father, but David couldn’t help them and, after that second Saturday, the police didn’t come back to the park again.

Then, a couple of days later, David heard in school that Billy Golding’s body had been found down by the railway tracks.

That evening, as he got ready for bed, he heard his mother and father talking in their bedroom, and that was how he learned that Billy had been naked when he was discovered and that the police had arrested a man who lived with his mother in a clean little house not far from where the body was found. David knew from the way they were talking that something very bad had happened to Billy before he died, something to do with the man from the clean little house.

David’s mother had made a special effort that night to walk from her room in order to kiss David. She hugged him very tightly and warned him again about talking to strange men. She told him that he must always come straight home from school, and that if a stranger ever approached him and offered him sweets or promised to give him a pigeon for a pet if he would just go with him, then David was to keep on walking as fast as he could, and if the man tried to follow him, then David was to go up to the first house he came to and tell them what was happening. Whatever else he did, he must never, ever go with a stranger, no matter what the stranger said. David told her he would never do that. A question came to him as he made the promise to his mother, but he did not ask it. She looked worried enough as it was, and David didn’t want her to worry so much that she wouldn’t even let him go out to play. But the question stayed in his mind, even after she turned out the light and he was left in the darkness of his room. The question was:

But what if he made me go with him?

Now, in another bedroom, he thought of Jonathan Tulvey and Anna, and wondered if a man from a clean little house, a man who lived with his mother and kept sweets in his pockets, had made them go down with him to the railway tracks.

And there, in the darkness, he had played with them, in his way.

That evening at dinner, his father was talking about the war again. It still didn’t feel to David as if there was a war on. All of the fighting was happening far away, even if they did get to see some of it on newsreels when they went to the pictures. It was a lot duller than David had expected. War sounded quite exciting, but the reality, so far, had been very different. True, squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes often passed over the house, and there were always dogfights over the Channel. German bombers had been carrying out repeated raids on airfields to the south, even dropping bombs on St. Giles, Cripplegate in the East End (which Mr. Briggs described as “typical Nazi behavior” but which David’s father explained, rather less emotively, as a botched effort to destroy the Thameshaven oil refinery). Nevertheless, David felt removed from it all. It wasn’t as if it was happening in his own back garden. In London, people were taking items from crashed German planes as souvenirs, even though nobody was supposed to approach the wrecks, and Nazi pilots who bailed out provided regular excitement for the citizenry. Here, even though they were barely fifty miles from London, it was all very sedate.

His father folded the
Daily Express
beside his plate. The newspaper was thinner than it used to be, down to six pages. David’s father said that was because they had started rationing paper.
The Magnet
had stopped printing in July, depriving David of Billy Bunter, but there was still the
Boy’s Own
paper every month, which David always filed carefully alongside his Aircraft of the Fighting Powers books.

“Will you have to go and fight?” David asked his father, once dinner was over.

“No, I shouldn’t think so,” his father replied. “I’m more use to the war effort where I am.”

“Top secret,” said David.

His father smiled at him.

“Yes, top secret,” he said.

It still gave David a thrill to think that his father might be a spy, or at least know about spies. So far, it was the only interesting part of the war.

That night, David lay in his bed and watched the moonlight streaming through the window. The skies were clear, and the moon was very bright. After a time, his eyes closed, and he dreamed of wolves and little girls and an old king in a ruined castle, fast asleep on his throne. Railway tracks ran alongside the castle, and figures moved through the long grass that grew beside them. There was a boy and a girl, and the Crooked Man. They disappeared beneath the earth, and David smelled gumdrops and peppermints, and he heard a little girl crying before her voice was drowned out by the sound of an approaching train.

THE CROOKED MAN finally crossed over into David’s world at the start of September.

It had been a long, tense summer. His father spent more time at his place of work than he did at home, sometimes not sleeping in his own bed for two or three nights in a row. It was often too difficult for him to return to the house anyway once night fell. All of the road signs had been removed to thwart the Germans if they invaded, and on more than one occasion David’s father had managed to get lost while driving home in daylight. If he tried driving at night with his headlights off, who knew where he might end up?

Rose was finding motherhood difficult. David wondered if his own mother had found it as hard, if David had been as demanding as Georgie seemed to be. He hoped not. The stress of the situation had caused Rose’s tolerance for David and his moods to sink lower and lower. They barely talked to each other now, and David could tell that his father’s patience with both of them was almost extinguished. At dinner the night before, he had exploded when Rose had taken an innocuous remark of David’s as an insult and the two of them had begun to bicker.

“Why can’t you two just find a way to get along, for crying out loud!” his father had shouted. “I don’t come home for this. I can get all the tension and shouting matches I want at work.”

Georgie, seated in his high chair, started to cry.

“Now look what you’ve done,” said Rose. She threw her napkin down on the table and went to Georgie.

David’s father buried his head in his hands.

“So it’s all my fault,” he said.

“Well it’s not mine,” replied Rose.

Simultaneously, their eyes turned toward David.

“What?” he said. “You’re blaming me. Fine!”

He stomped away from the table, leaving his dinner unfinished. He was still hungry, but the stew was mainly vegetables with some nasty pieces of cheap sausage spread through it to break the monotony. He knew that he’d have to eat the rest of it tomorrow, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t going to taste any worse reheated than it did already. As he headed for his room, he expected to hear his father’s voice demanding that he return and finish his food, but nobody called him back. He sat down hard on his bed. He couldn’t wait for the summer holidays to be over. A place had been found for David in a school not far from the house, which would at least be better than spending every day with Rose and Georgie.

David was not seeing Dr. Moberley quite as often, mainly because nobody had time to take him into London. Anyway, the attacks had stopped, or so it appeared. He no longer fell to the ground or experienced blackouts, but something far stranger and more unsettling was now occurring, stranger even than the whisperings of the books, to which David had grown almost accustomed.

David was experiencing waking dreams. That was the only way he could find to describe them to himself. It felt like those moments late in the evening when you were reading or listening to the radio and you grew so tired that for an instant you fell asleep and started dreaming, except obviously you didn’t realize you’d fallen asleep so that the world suddenly seemed to become very strange. David would be playing in his room, or reading, or walking in the garden, and everything would shimmer. The walls would disappear, the book would fall from his hands, the garden would be replaced by hills and tall, gray trees. He would find himself in a new land, a twilight place of shadows and cold winds, heavy with the smell of wild animals. Sometimes, he would even hear voices. They were somehow familiar as they called to him, but as soon as he tried to concentrate on them, the vision would end and he would be back in his own world.

The strangest thing of all was that one of the voices sounded like his mother’s. It was the one that spoke loudest and clearest. She called to him from out of the darkness. She called to him, and she told him that she was alive.

The waking dreams were always strongest near the sunken garden, but David found them so disturbing that he tried to stay away from that part of the property as much as possible. In fact, so troubled was David by them that he was tempted to tell Dr. Moberley about them, if his father could make time for an appointment. Perhaps he would finally tell him about the whispering of the books too, David thought. The two might be linked, but then he thought of Dr. Moberley’s questions about David’s mother and remembered once again the threat of being “put away.” When David talked to him about missing his mother, Dr. Moberley would talk in turn about grief and loss, about how it was natural yet you had to try to get over it. But being sad about your mother dying was one thing; hearing her voice crying out from the shadows of a sunken garden, claiming to be alive behind the decaying brickwork, was quite another. David wasn’t sure how Dr. Moberley would respond to that. He didn’t want to be put away, but the dreams were frightening. He wanted them to stop.

It was one of his last days at home before school recommenced. Tiring of the house, David went for a walk in the woods at the back of the property. He picked up a big stick and scythed at the long grass. He found a spider’s web in a bush and tried to tempt the spider out with fragments of small sticks. He dropped one close to the center of the web, but nothing happened. David realized it was because the stick wasn’t moving. It was the struggles of the insect that alerted the spider, which made David think that perhaps spiders were a lot cleverer than anything so small had a right to be.

He looked back at the house and saw the window of his bedroom. The ivy growing on the walls almost surrounded the frame, making his room look more than ever like a part of the natural world. Now that he saw it from a distance, he noticed the ivy was thickest at his window and had barely touched any of the other windows on this side of the house. It had not spread across the lower parts of the wall either, the way ivy usually did, but had climbed straight and true along a narrow path to David’s window. Like the beanstalk in the fairy tale that led Jack to the giant, the ivy seemed to know precisely where it was going.