The Man Who Built the World (26 page)

Soon
.

He turns his thoughts to his father.
Matt is worried. For months now, ever since (––––––––––) his father has been so despondent, so depressed. As though nothing will ever get better. (––––––––––) won’t ever recover.

It will
. It always does. Whatever
it
is, it will get better.

Matt’s problem is that he has the same feelings.
Most of the time the tangible despair that seems to surround him leaves him feeling weak and depressed, other times it manifests itself as a violent anger, as though he were a battered remote-controlled toy beneath the controls of a vindictive kid. Like last week, for instance, when he got in a scrap with Simon Camwell in the playground and ended up with a scuffed cheek and bruised eye. A fight over nothing: Sy had looked at Matt sideways and Matt had flipped. Sy Camwell had a reputation for being
solid
, but all thoughts of personal safety had fled as Matt waded in. He had done okay, getting a couple of punches in before Sy had, inevitably, pounded him to the floor. After his anger had dissolved into regret and dismay, Matt had silently thanked the teacher on break duty for stepping in while he still had half a face left. Old Birkswill; Matt could almost forgive him for the stupid homework.

Matt often hears his father now as he tramps around the house, slamming doors, kicking chairs and other obstructions out of his path like someone kicking Coca Cola cans about in the park.
He
throws
bags into the back of the car rather than puts them; he
shouts
for Matt to hurry rather than simply calling. His father seems on the verge of some sort of breakdown, but Matt cannot ascertain why. He knows his (––––––––––) mother (––––––––––) is (––––––––––) sick, but she’ll (––––––––––) get better; she’ll be (––––––––––) out of that (––––––––––) out of that

(
–––––room–––––
)

She’ll come downstairs soon.

Perhaps the problem is Bethany. Matt’s kid sister is now six years old, and his father’s worry increases as time passes. She’s grown too old for her silence to be passed off as late development; now that physical shortcomings have been ruled out there is no answer left other than some form of mental deficiency. But Matt can’t look at her and believe for one moment that Bethany has any sort of handicap. He only has to glance at her eyes, see the intelligence there and he
knows
that she is fully aware and comprehending, that there is no more wrong with her ability to speak than there is with his own. And frankly, he finds that a little terrifying.

The kids in the village scream and shout like a flock of angry birds as they walk to school in the morning, and Matt wishes
just for once
Bethany would do the same. She doesn’t even
act
like them, not to mention her apparently self–imposed silence. As he watches her wandering the corridors, a feeling running down his back like the touch of a cold, dead hand, he can only think of a tiny, moving porcelain doll, patrolling the house like a sentry on the border of Toyland. Except in the Toyland Matt sees there aren’t any bright green bouncing balls and wobbling policemen and bears wearing pinafores; no cars that talk, pixies that bake cherry fruit cakes, not even any dark forests filled with nasty golliwogs. No, the Toyland Matt sees is grey and lifeless; the houses are half collapsed, the paint stripped off, the windows smashed and the doors kicked in, the roads are cracked and traveled only by rolling tumbleweeds (yes, in Matt’s mind Toyland has tumbleweeds), the pond where children once played and threw pieces of marzipan flapjack to the ducks has dried up to a sticky, lifeless marsh; the trees are all dead and their brittle branches are the grey of plaster casts: when the wind blows their branches snap away and fall to shatter on the barren, cracked earth.

Nothing lives in Matt’s Toyland; only the endlessly patrolling, wraith
-like form of his mute little sister. And somehow, in her silent innocence she becomes something sinister. A monster.

He gets nightmares now.
Although he doesn’t like to think about them, he has little choice for they won’t disappear from his mind like (––––––––––) will. They sit there and linger on his shoulder as he struggles with his stupid English assignments.

He closes his workbook.
On the inside cover, the last thing he sees is a mass of scribbled pen marks in a rough circle, obscuring what had been written beneath.
I fancy Carrie Becker
; wiped out when she started to hang with Mark Delland, the cool kid whose parents worked in Exeter and who came to school wearing a designer label school uniform. With his weird family and his spacker sister (at least that was how the nastier school kids referred to Bethany behind his back, and occasionally to his face) Matt couldn’t compete with that.

Might as well just wipe out that dream. Like all the others.

He feels suddenly tired. He still has homework to do, and it’s only four o’clock, but Dad won’t have tea ready until at least seven (Mother never cooks it anymore, Mother never (––––––––––)

Might as well have a nap.

He lies down, the book tossed to the floor below his bed. The window from his room looks out of the front of the house, and he can see the top of the church tower and beyond it the edge of Dartmoor, a huge mound of granite crags and peaty earth that rises over the village like a giant green wave. The geography of Tamerton amazes him at times, the way the village is set into such a hollow that you can stand at the edge of the moors and look across to the woods rising up the side of the valley on the other side, and not even realise the village is there. Hidden out of sight like a lost treasure (
or something forgotten, unwanted
, his mind spits back at him).

Except for the church tower that is.
Rising up out of the trees like the last standing spire of a buried city, it is the only sign that the village is there. Matt often wonders whether if the church were to fall, would the tide of the moors just continue on its jolly way and swallow up the whole village for good? Just absorb it as food like the green blobs in Fifties B–Movies? He thinks perhaps it might. Nothing worth saving, not even Carrie Becker, now she’s with that slimy posh toff Delland.

He gets up, pulls the curtains closed on the trees, the church tower and the distant rise of the moors, and goes back to his bed.
He lies down, facing away from the door, staring at the red theatre curtain pulled across the world until his eyes drop and he sleeps.

#

He wakes to the sound of what at first he thinks is a wind rushing past his ears, as though he has fallen from a plane without a parachute. The room smells of something dead, something rotten, a smell he associates with that of a fox’s crushed corpse he walked past on the way to school the other week. Kicked to the side of the road to rot in peace, it had been dead some length of time judging by the discoloured meat of the ripped open torso, and the hordes of maggots that writhed inside the animal’s body cavity like worker ants. Normally he caught the bus, but that day he had been late. The smell had made his stomach beat at the root of his throat, and he had crossed the road to get away but he had needed to run almost fifty yards before he left it completely behind him.

The smell of death and sickness.
And something else, something
physical
. Something . . . touching him.

Hands.
Hands on his forehead. He can feel one of them running across his temple, fingers crinkled and dry like old cloth. The other is somewhere near his shoulder, rubbing over his clothes, but the fingers are reaching for his neck, for the soft skin there.

And he knows where the smell comes from.

A terror grips him. A terror that far exceeds that of watching the Daleks from behind the sofa, of going to bed thinking Freddy Krueger would be in his dreams. The terror far exceeds walking past the graveyard at night, in the
fog,
and even eclipses that fear of his sister that is growing with each passing day.

And he hears the wind revert to a whisper; knows the wind is gone, was never there.
He listens, tries to pick the words out of the thundering of his heart and the juddering breathing that betrays his attempts to pretend he still sleeps.

‘My sweet boy . . . oh, my sweet boy . . . how so very much I love you, more than life, more than words, more than
Heaven . . .’

She’s got out.
He has to open his eyes.
Has
to.

Somewhere beyond the inconceivable terror that has him in its grip and is squeezing, squeezing, is the sound of running feet, the sound of a man’s desperate shouts, a name he re
cognises as his own and a voice he should recognise, but can’t . . .
can’t
. . . he can’t think past this, can’t think past this, can’t envisage anything beyond the absolute terror he feels . . . but against his will and his reasoning, slowly his eyes open –

‘I love you Matty . . . I love you more than life, more than this world, more than an
ything . . . more than life . . .’

Her face leans over him and at first he feels like a brick has struck him in the face, smashing through all the glass walls and the mental blocks and the ignorance and the denial – a hammer that has crashed through his world and his belief to show him the vile, hideous visage of the wretch that once he had called
Mother
, as she – it
it
IT
– leans over him, breathing dirty, putrid breath into his face while her ugly, misshapen mouth forms words of love around a black tongue and green, rotting teeth, and her pale lusterless eyes cry yellow tears of pus down on to his face. He screams his sadness and his revile, but his words seem sucked from the air as though swallowed by this . . . this
creature
like raindrops falling into a lake, and he struggles to escape her grip but finds his body dead with pins and needles. He coughs, and spots of blood fleck the filthy gown that she wears.

Somewhere below him, behind him, all around him he hears the sounds of shouting, of someone hollering his name in a choking, tearful voice.
Matt tries to shout back but she is on top of him and her weight suffocates him despite the frailty he can sense in her limbs. Her fingers continue to stroke his face, and he feels his eyes grow heavy until eventually they drop closed as though she is coaxing the life out of him, taking part of him into her, absorbing his life like a sponge absorbing a stain. He cries hot tears, for himself, for her, for them both.

‘Oh, my beautiful boy . . .’

He hears a crack like thunder, and tries to roll his head to look as movement comes in the corner of his eye in an explosion of grey and black. Only when the huge, looming figure of his father appears from nowhere does Matt start to respond, but by now he is too weak to do anything except loll his head back on the bed, his eyes wanting to roll, his consciousness wanting to flee. His first and only thought is that he is the intended victim of a murder as he sees the heavy lug hammer in his father’s hands.

Matt wants to cry, wants to shed fat, hot tears as he looks up at his father, but cannot; his own eyes are too weak, too
drained
to comprehend the effort, and instead he just stares up blearily like a street drunk at a police officer. His father’s face overflows with love, but also with the terrible, bitter sadness Matt sees on TV in the eyes of refugees, burns victims, the families of murdered children –
Why me? What have I done to deserve this? Is there no
justice
in the world?
– and for a second he sees the terribly unfair indecision in his father’s eyes as he looks first at his son and then at the pitiful, wasted creature that had once been his perfect, angelic wife.

Then his father’s face cracks like a TV screen into shards of misery and the lug hammer swings.

Reflex shuts Matt’s eyes so he only hears the sound of the blow landing, but it is something he will never,
ever
forget. For one thing, nothing strikes
him
. He saw, and he recognised both the look in his father’s eyes, caught in Catch 22 with an endless, impossible choice to make but no time to make it, and the sudden miserable assurance that whichever answer he chose would be wrong.

Matt knows it could have easily been him.

He sees nothing, but the sound will haunt him until the day he dies. Like the hollow sound of a coconut being split by something big, something heavy, followed by a winded groan, and then the weight on top of him shifts as the body slides to the floor, lands with another thud, lies still.

Matt hears a cry, a horrible shrieking sound and he
cannot
open his eyes; he holds them shut until he thinks his pupils might burst inside his head, filling his vision with a hot, oily substance, as he hears first one, then another blow land before the hammer clatters away to the corner of the room.

‘Do not open your eyes
!
’ a voice roars, and Matt screams but obeys, because he can hear the violence of the toiling storm inside his father’s head, knows his father has slipped over the edge, will leave this room a broken man and will never recover. A wound has opened in his mind, one that can never be treated or will ever heal.