The Waking That Kills (26 page)

Even that would have been normal, compared to what I was going to find.

I went up to the tower. I thought I might find the woman and the boy there, in bed together. Or the boy and his father, enjoying some quality time, a dead man and a mad boy chuckling and joshing and exchanging their stories of being dead and being mad. I pushed the door open and there was no one. The room stank of the pond. Indeed, the sheets on the bed, black with mud, were fizzing with the bugs and beetles and worms the boy had brought on his body. High on the ceiling, the model planes hung so still, they didn’t move or touch. There was a silence and a smell of death.

Death camp. I knew they were there, but I’d been searching the house in the vain hope that I might find them in a room, talking or eating or doing something in a room like normal people do.

They were in the greenhouse.

A submarine, almost subterranean light. I pushed the door open, I leaned with all my weight because someone had piled a rubble of bricks behind it. They didn’t hear me come in, even the grating of the door as I shoved it open.

Juliet was holding the bag. Lawrence was shovelling.

She was a small, thin figure, covered in dust and feathers, and she was bending low and holding open a black plastic bag. Cowed. Beaten. I stood at the door and looked at her and tried to remember her as I’d seen her before – the russet elf of the woods, the red squirrel, the marten, the naked nymph astride me, silvery in the moonlight. No. Not now. She was a figure from a terrible wartime scene. All grey and thin, beaten.

The boy had a spade and he was shovelling the bodies of the birds from the floor of the greenhouse and into the bag. Even as he shovelled them up and launched them with a whispery hiss off the spade and into the bag, another bird, here and there, would drop from the ceiling and onto the floor. I stood at the doorway and looked up. There were still dozens of swifts up there, they were snuggling and twittering together in a furry, feathery, living and breathing confusion of bodies. But, as they fought for space, as they rummaged and scrabbled with their clumsy long wings and negligible feet to find somewhere to cling onto, one of them, and then another, lacking the strength or the will to hang on, would spill away from the murmuring mass of birds and fall... and with no space, no time, to find a purchase on the air, it would spin out of control and land with a poor little slap on the ground. Pathetic, the way it rowed and crawled among the bodies of the birds that had already fallen, as though it might hide among them.

And then the spade. The boy came with the spade and swished them into the black plastic bag. Some of them dead. Some still alive. Swish, swish. Onto the spade, into the bag.

‘Can’t you see? Are you blind?’

The boy didn’t answer. Then he looked me in the eyes. ‘Blind?’ He echoed my word, as if he’d never heard it before. And then he said it again, ‘Blind...’ relishing it this time, with a glimmer of a memory of something bad he’d done. Juliet didn’t seem to hear me at all. She was too busy bagging the bodies of the birds that the boy had been shovelling. They had two bags full, one each. I stood back and watched, appalled, an abstracted spectator watching some grainy, black and white footage of a wartime atrocity.

They went out of the greenhouse, bent like slaves under the weight of their bags. I followed them. The woodland was trying to be normal. The robin was singing. A jay shrieked and fluttered through the branches of a horse chestnut, black and white and electric-blue. But then the world, looking down on the boy and his mother so mired in nightmare that they might never awaken, fell still as they went by. The robin stopped singing, although he’d waited all summer to find his voice again. The jay shuffled its kaleidoscopic wings and was silent.

They, the boy and his mother, tipped their bags into the pond.

We’d cleaned the pond. Lawrence, in the night in his pants in the mud, had cleaned the pond. It was a clear brown soup. He up-ended his bag and tipped out thirty or fifty swifts. Juliet did the same, another thirty or fifty birds. They floated on the surface. Some of them rowed with their wings, like water-boatmen or other aquatic insects. The pond was covered with the dead and dying... sailors from a torpedoed battleship, dead or half-dead, or still alive and knowing that the cold or their loss of blood would kill them... or that something terrible and invisible in the darkness would smell their blood and rise from the depths and...

Something did.

There was a slow, oily swirl in the water. Something down there – no need to hurry such a sumptuous feast – was stirring the soup with its ancient, muscular tail. The pike, hypnotic in its primeval ugliness, older than the house and the garden and as old as the pond itself... it swirled through the surface and swallowed bird after bird after bird in a feat of gargantuan greed.

A feeding frenzy? No, the pike was a god of the pond. It didn’t do frenzy. It accepted sacrifices from its poor blind believers in the world above its world, and did a relentless, godly gluttony.

For a minute, no more, the water turned and stirred in a rich, brown broth. Until all the swifts were gone. Not one of them was left on the surface. They were swallowed whole, or they were taken down and stored in a shadowy green larder.

I followed the boy and his mother back to the greenhouse. They were like trolls or troglodytes, slaves in a death camp. No good trying to engage the boy or reason with him, nothing I could say would make him change his mind. He had wadded the broken panes so tightly, so thoroughly caulked the ribs and stanchions of the building, that nothing could ever escape it.

Against their wills, against all of their wisdom, the swifts were his prisoners. Just as, in his mother’s wardrobe, he had contained the very being of his father. Release... for the birds, for himself and his mother and me... a release from the nightmare was in his power.

Chapter Twenty-Three

F
OOTSTEPS ON THE
stairs.

This time I’m really awake and listening. Not dreaming. And not just listening. I’m lying on my bed and all of my body is wired, prickling with the energy and adrenaline of listening. I’m awake. I’m not dreaming. My whole being is awake. My blood is awake.

I’m in my own little room.

No food that evening. Not even a sandwich or a burnt sausage. Only gin. No tonic or ice or lemon; all run out. The last of the gin, we drank it neat, in a dreary silence. The boy was... I don’t know where he was. The cat was... the cat was trawling the reed beds of the pond for a bedraggled bird. A cockchafer bumbled into the room and into my glass, and as I sat and swayed and soused myself and felt it nipping at my lips with its pincers, it drowned in my dregs. It died, sozzled in alcohol, and I drank the gin it had drowned in, like the disgusting snake-juice and beetle-juice I’d drunk in Borneo. Later... who knows when? Midnight or one or two o’clock? Whenever we’d dropped the sad empty bottle and our glasses onto the floor and abandoned the room to the moths and the bats which whirled through the open windows… I’d slipped into bed with the woman. And she’d snarled at me to fuck off. So I snarled back at her and slipped out of her bed. Anyway, she smelled of bird-shit and feathers; brackish and deadly.

So I’m in my own little room. I hate. Not sure. I hate all of it. Most of it. Not sure. Drunk, really.

I heard someone in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards. Juliet, hungry, looking for something to eat? Or the boy?

And now, footsteps on the stairs.

Not trying to be quiet, no tip-toe. Pausing and stopping and waiting. Carrying something? As though balancing. Balancing something?

I’m holding my breath. It’s fear, and it’s listening. I can’t breathe and listen at the same time. I hold a breath so long that my chest is hurting. And when, at last, I open my mouth and inhale because my lungs are bursting, I smell something.

Smell. Can you smell in your dreams?

The sweat of a sebaceous body, the rank unmistakable smell of a boy? The mud from a pond, the black and fetid mud that’s been dredged from hundreds of years ago, medieval mud smeared on a sweaty teenage boy? The smell of my dreams.

But I’m awake, and this is a different smell. It’s warm, it’s homely, it’s the smell of a rainy autumn afternoon in a kitchen or a classroom.

It’s coming up the stairs. A hot smell.

My mind is swarming, and my body is wired so hard it’s prickling with listening and can’t move. Hot smell. Top of the stairs. My brain is trying to connect, and my body is so charged with the energy of waking and waiting that it’s clenched onto the bed.

He comes in. The boy. He looms in the doorway and he stops. Because the thing he’s carrying is heavy and it’s slopping and spilling. A splash of hot stuff onto the floor.

He steadies himself, balances. He lunges across the room and sloshes the saucepan at me.

I
REMEMBER,
I rolled to one side and heard the whack of the boiling-hot liquid on my pillow.

Whack! Because in an instant it was no longer a liquid. It was a fist of molten wax, punching into the impression of my head on the pillow.

I felt the splatter of it, on my neck and chest, a scalding-hot skin on my face. On my eyelids.

Another moment, and I was standing, I was a madman flailing around the room, half-blinded and squealing like a piglet and groping in the air for the boy to grab or hit or...

He hit me. There was a clanging impact on the side of my head, the saucepan, still hot. Again... he must have stepped away from my futile fists and slammed the flat hot surface of the pan into my ribs. I could smell him, his body and his breath, and the wax on my face was a dazzling pain. And someone else, the woman was there, the two of them foul with the fume of the greenhouse and their gruesome toil. She was yelling at him and yelling at me. There was a scrummage of naked bodies and a blinding darkness, and all I could do was shove my way through it, connecting a haphazard punch with him or with her and blundering out of the room.

Seconds later, I was under the shower.

My head and face and all my body, drunk and burnt and beaten, I stood until my quivering knees gave way and I collapsed in a heap. I lay there, mewing, and I curled up like a baby, letting the water cascade onto me. For minutes? For an hour? So wounded that all I wanted was to lie with my face in the water and my arms wrapped around my chest, in expectation of more blows, more scalding, more pain.

I felt the wax congealing in my hair and on my skin. With my eyes tightly closed, in a cocoon of blindness, I picked at it with my fingers and it peeled away like a jelly of burnt flesh. It was in my mouth.

T
HE WATER SWITCHED
off. It dribbled and stopped.

She had me on my feet and she was patting me dry with a soft towel. She led me out of the bathroom and into her room, where she put me to bed with such tenderness I might have been a dying child or an old man about to take his last breath. She laid me on the bed, like she was laying me out. I was all but dead, a living corpse. And there, through the small hours of that night, she salved me with her hands, with her lips, with her body.

She applied a cold cream to the burns on my chest and head, where the boy had struck me with the pan. She held a cool damp cloth to my face and neck, and she whispered that my eyebrows and even my eyelids were burnt, but my eyes, she whispered, my eyes were safe. She made me open them, she looked long and deep, and then she let me close them again, because the pain of their searing was too much. She went downstairs and came back with honey, and she smeared it onto my wounds for the antibiotic qualities she said it had. All through the night she held me, she healed me. From time to time she got out of the bed and I heard her go to the window, to feel the coolness of the air and to look out, and so she could come back with her skin as cool as the night.

At last the morning came. I heard the shiver of a breeze in the trees, and the first, gentle, experimental phrases of the robin.

‘He’s in the greenhouse,’ she whispered to me. ‘He’s my son and he needs me and I love him more than anything, whatever he’s done to you and to other people. I love him, whatever he does, whatever he’s doing.’

I felt her moving away. I heard her putting on some clothes. She leaned to me and said, ‘He’s down there, I saw him in the night. I think he was carrying out more of the birds. I guess they’re all dead. It’s better if they’re dead. Then it’s over.’

She went out.

Oh god. Oh god. If only.

I lay in my private darkness, with my eyes screwed shut. They were burning, as painful as if the boiling wax had just been poured in. A sound swam into my brain, out of my memory, an early morning sound. The sound of dawn.

No, not the silvery sweetness of the robin or the mellow fluting of the blackbird. No. An expression of such indescribable dreariness that would eclipse all the joy of an English woodland. The mosque, it was in my head. Oh god... god is great, yes I submit I give in I surrender, I collapse under the weight of the sheer repetition, the dinning and relentless repetition, I give in I give in... oh fuck.