The Outcast (34 page)

Sweet.’

Dicky raised a fist – stopped himself – took another step towards him. Now, thought Lewis, do it now.

‘Why don’t you?’ he said,‘Go on, do it.’

Dicky considered his options. Lewis had that vacant look he’d always had, like somebody hypnotised, hidden away – but he was dangerous too, he’d been violent in the past and Dicky wasn’t sure.

‘Go on, do it,’ said Lewis, softly.

So Dicky hit him. His fist went into Lewis’s face, hard, and his knuckles cracked and he felt the jolt up his arm and into his shoulder, a flash of beauty as he hit him.

Lewis’s head snapped back and he went back a couple of paces, and Dicky recovered from punching him and stepped away, frightened and light on his feet, with his hands up to shield himself. Except that Lewis didn’t come for him – or do anything except stay where he was, and blink a little and look back at him with that same vague look.

‘Is that the best you can do?’ he said,‘Is that it?’

He had blood in his mouth, Dicky saw his teeth were coloured with it, but he didn’t put his hand up to check, like a normal person would.

It was hard for Dicky to think straight. His hand was hot where he had punched Lewis, and it felt naughty to be standing in his dining room with everyone in the house and this boy they were all so scared of, ready to take a beating from him. He pretended to be thinking – but then went for Lewis quickly, to catch him off guard, left, then right, like a boxer, like he’d been taught at school, and Lewis went back again.There was no need to be quick about it; the boy didn’t even put his hands up.The

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punches landed just where he wanted them, in his mouth, where he’d said ‘Tamsin’; and on his eye, where he’d looked at her.

Dicky shook his hand out, getting his breath. It hurt him badly to hit the boy’s face so hard and Lewis was beginning to look damaged and confused, but then he opened his arms wide and came towards him.

‘Do it again,’ he said,‘do it again.’

‘You are insane,’ Dicky said, because he’d often wondered – and it gave him a feeling of delight that Lewis was just crazy, and could be beaten like this and then taken away somewhere out of sight and forgotten about.

‘Come on,’ said Lewis,‘is it good?’

So Dicky hit him again and had enough of the thrill of it not to feel the pain in his own hands at all, but he was getting tired now and not so coordinated, feeling himself coming to an end.

Lewis was getting closer to where he needed to be. The pain was blurring his sight and he went to his knees and couldn’t have stayed standing. Dicky stood over him, panting. His tongue felt thick and hot in his mouth. He saw Kit in his mind – on her knees the times he’d forced her down – and thought how he always had to be careful with her, not to let it show and not to break her body; but with this boy, who was big, there was no need to be careful, he could try to break him. He wiped the sweat off his face and looked down at Lewis.

Lewis hadn’t much idea where Dicky was and seemed to have trouble holding his head up.

‘What? Can’t you see me, boy? Over here.’

Then Lewis did hold his head up and he looked at Dicky, and

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even with the blood and the state of his face, Dicky could see him smiling.

‘Go to hell,’ he said, and that was an end to it: one kick to the stomach and one to the head, and Lewis went down and stopped moving. It was done.

Dicky waited. He wet his tongue to get rid of the hot feeling in it and swallowed. He straightened his jacket and smoothed his hair and went over to the door.

At the door he stopped, thinking suddenly of what he’d have to say to people. It would be all right, it was only the servants; and if the boy was still there after church, he’d call the police to take him away.They’d probably give him a medal.

Dicky went into the hall and closed the door behind him. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his hands. He left the house and the car was waiting, with the girls and Claire in the back, and he got in beside Preston and shut the door. He glanced over at Preston.

‘All right then,’ he said and the car moved off.

Dicky hid his hands, which were throbbing and bruised, by his sides. Preston still had the strapping on his nose where Lewis had kicked his face, and Dicky wanted to show him his hands and say,‘Got him!’ and laugh about it with him, but he kept quiet and gripped his handkerchief and looked out of the window and willed himself to think sensibly. He hadn’t been frightened for long; it was understandable that he’d been scared, it had been a shock to see Lewis standing there in the room with him, and he had looked dangerous to begin with.

Dicky watched the hedges go by, and letTamsin and Claire go on with their silly conversations in the back. He could barely keep a straight face. His hands were hurting him more and more

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from where he had beaten Lewis, and everything looked bright and leaping and marvellous to him. He’d left Lewis lying there and he didn’t know if he was dead or alive or blinded or broken. He hoped it was very bad.

The church came into sight and Dicky took out his handker- chief and wiped his hands, hiding them down behind his thigh and checking the bruising.

Preston stopped the car by the gate to the churchyard and left the engine running while he got out and let the women out first, and then Dicky. Dicky put his hands in his pockets and went through the people and smiled and laughed as usual, but made sure he got into the church quickly so that he could sit and relish it better. He saw Gilbert and wanted to tell him what he’d done to Lewis, and laugh at him, but found he couldn’t meet his eye. He pitied him for his crazy son and his dead wife, and for being so weak and letting Alice drink publicly the way she did. How did the old joke go? One drunken wife might be looked upon as a misfortune, but two . . . He wanted to say what he’d done and slap him on the back and apologise, and tell him Lewis was there for Gilbert to collect, or for someone from an insane asylum to come and scrape him up from the floor.

Dicky got to his pew, at the front, and stood aside for the women to go in ahead of him, and said good morning to the vicar and sat down. Then he let himself think about it again, the way it had felt to beat Lewis, and he had less shame about his excitement than he did when he punished Kit because there was something pure about this violence, and more honourable, and getting excited at violence like that was normal, and part of being a man. He played it in his mind as people came in behind him: hitting Lewis – who was younger, and taller – hitting him in the face and the side of his head, and

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across his mouth with his fist that was bleeding, and getting him to his knees.

‘Darling—’ said Claire, and nudged him with her elbow. The organ had started and he’d forgotten to stand up.

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C
hapter
F
ourteen
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Lewis felt the sun come through the window onto his head.The carpet against his cheek was a familiar, childhood sort of feeling. He started to move and seemed to fall into the dark and then tilt back into the room and away again. He kept still for a bit and then he felt his teeth with his tongue and they were all there. They felt loose in his head, but his tongue couldn’t feel loose- ness. It felt as if his skull, and everything that had held it together – the cement he’d never been aware of – had been crushed and had shifted. It hadn’t broken, though. His teeth were there. He opened his eyes. His eyes were there. He could see.At least, he was sure one of his eyes was there; the other felt very hot, and when he blinked it didn’t move. He waited.Then he lifted his hand – which didn’t hurt and felt lovely and free – up to his eye. It was very big, it wasn’t a hole or a gap or some- thing frightening, it was just too big and sticky. It was full of blood. He tried to blink again and his eye opened and was very blurred for a while, but not blind. The blood had come from his eyebrow, which was split wide. He sat up and waited for the floor to straighten out, then got to his knees and his feet and held onto the back of a dining chair to do it. He had a very bad pain down the side of his face, in his cheekbone, like being hit with an iron bar, and when he tried to touch the cheekbone it

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hurt so much that his vision went black. He held on to the chair and waited. The door opened and the maid came in to clear, and saw him and gave a sort of yell.

‘Sorry,’ he said and she went out.

After a second she came back to shut the door on him and he heard her walking away and then some shouting. He wanted to laugh, but didn’t want to have to move his face to do it. There was a weird moment when he saw his reflection and hadn’t known there was a mirror there, and nearly yelled himself. He looked pretty bad. He needed to spit some blood out, but he didn’t want to do so onto the carpet.Then he remembered it was Dicky’s carpet, so he spat the blood onto it, and then some more. The blood was coming from his lip, but it felt like it was just running into his mouth from the inside of his head, as if his whole head was blood. He wasn’t really hurting now. Except for the cheekbone, which was bright-white pain and very bad, the rest of him felt all right, and different from other fights because his hands weren’t hurting. His hands usually hurt. Jeanie had put his hand in a bowl of iced water when he had been fighting once, but he pictured it being in prison, and that wasn’t right; and he thought of a knife fight he’d seen in prison when a man had his cheek cut open so you could see his teeth through it; and he remembered punching Ed and how hot the woods had been, with the heavy sun coming through the trees and the blazing fields afterwards, and he started to feel sleepy and wanted to lie down in the stubble fields in the sun and rest. Then the church bells stopped pealing. He hadn’t noticed they were still ringing until they stopped, and when they did he remembered everything.

He went out of the house by the garden door. Walking was good, and the air on his face was good too, and he went down

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the drive and onto the road and towards the village, walking straight, but quite slowly, because of not seeing very well and his head feeling full of blood.

Kit stood next to Tamsin and sang the hymn and listened to Dicky’s big voice singing over them.When the organ stopped, and the ragged voices had trailed away, they all sat down.The vicar started to speak and Kit didn’t listen, but looked down at her hands and things floated into her mind: school assem- blies, French verbs, Swiss Alps, lakes, and sleeping and lone- liness, and that she felt cold after the hot day outside. And Lewis. Lewis.There was the vicar’s voice and somebody whis- pering at the back of the church and a little girl giggling, and then the church doors clattered and opened. Everybody turned to look, and Kit turned too, a little late, and saw Lewis. The people all saw him, and at the sight of him in the doorway there was an intake of breath; there were no words, there was shock.

The people nearest him went back. Lewis walked up the aisle of the church and there was nothing for anybody to say. He was looking for Kit, and when he saw her he moved quickly and reached past her father and pulled her towards him. Dicky shrank back and didn’t realise Lewis was grabbing Kit and pulling her out until it was done.

Lewis held Kit around the waist, like a hostage, so that she faced the people. Her back was pressed against him and she saw his face close up before he turned her, but she couldn’t read his expression because of the beating, and he looked terrifying and not like himself. She felt very weak and she looked around the faces staring at her with a sense of unreality.They all had the same expression; her mother, Tamsin, Dicky, all of the people

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she knew, staring at her, held so hard like that in the church, in front of them and no-one moving or saying anything. She looked at their fear and part of her wanted to say,‘It’s all right, it’s just Lewis’, but she was shocked too, and couldn’t speak, and she couldn’t breathe very well because he was gripping her. He held her, and then she felt his cheek come down next to her and he pressed his face against her head and whispered in her ear,‘I’m sorry. Sorry—’

Then immediately it was much worse, because he grasped her top, pulled her blouse out from her waistband and yanked it up to show her body, and she closed her eyes. She went very soft, like an animal that’s frightened so that it can’t move, and she kept her eyes closed and felt her body exposed. She under- stood he wasn’t trying to hurt her. Still, nobody spoke and she felt Lewis turn her, display her, turn her round so that every- body could see. His body was hot, pressed against her back, and his arm gripped her and his hands felt big on her and she felt the air on her bare skin as he showed her, and then he said,‘This is not a secret any more.’

Kit felt a wave of sickness and couldn’t have opened her eyes, and he was having to hold her just to keep her upright and his arms felt strong.

‘He does this – he does this to her. He hit Tamsin.’ Then, much quieter, bending down to her again,‘He mustn’t do it to you any more.’

His voice was sweet and soft and close up to her.

‘Tamsin?’ said Lewis, and Kit opened her eyes and saw her sister looking at Lewis. ‘Tamsin?’ he said again. ‘Didn’t your father do that?’

Tamsin kept staring at Lewis and didn’t speak. Then she looked down to the ground.

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‘Let go of my daughter.’

Her father’s voice was strong and loud and Lewis pushed down Kit’s top, pressing it around her.

There was movement near them, people were preparing to react – something would happen. Lewis backed away with Kit, and Kit saw her father seem to grow, and he took a step towards her and reached out his hand. Kit ducked shy of the hand as it came towards her.

Lewis kept on holding her, drawing back, and Kit saw that her father’s hand was cut and bruised. Kit saw it. Everybody saw it, and that she shied away from him. Dicky looked quickly round the faces and his look was fearful.

Kit felt Lewis relax his hold on her and a jolt went through her body, like needles, like the blood starting up again and she pulled away from him. He didn’t try to hold on to her and she ran out of the church.