The Waking That Kills (7 page)

‘Hey, what’s up, old girl? Did you think I’d left you here for good? Hey, you got a long way to go yet...’

But my voice sounded small and unconvincing. There was a quaver of uncertainty. I looked up into the blackened gantry of the pine, through the scaffold of branches which jutted from the towering trunk. I swivelled and stared high into the overwhelming foliage of the beech trees, the mature oak and chestnut which blotted the sky... and all around me, into the suffocating tangle of undergrowth, the dense barricades of nettle and cow-parsley and formidable bramble. The bottom of the garden? No, not a garden, but an acre or three of ancient English woodland, a shut-in world of its own, shutting out the rest of the world. But yes, the bottom. No wonder the car looked so forlorn, so crushed... as I looked up and around me, I remembered the last few miles of our journey, the descent from the clarity of the Lincolnshire farmland and its marvellous sky, down into the shadows of the wooded wolds, and down and down as though we’d stumbled into a hole and it was sucking us deeper...

At last, my own space. I opened the driver’s door and slid onto the seat, behind the big black steering-wheel. When the door fell shut with a snick of its well-oiled hinges, when I closed my eyes and inhaled the familiar scents of the old car, I had my own space again: thousands of miles from Borneo, and a long way from the puzzles of Juliet and Lawrence Lundy. Everything I touched in the car, the soles of my shoes on his pedals, through the seat of my pants and my spine on his leather upholstery, to my hands on his wheel... it was the touch of my father.

I could smell him. I could feel him. His son – me – I was sitting exactly in the place in the world he had made and claimed for himself.

But what was the good of that? I shook myself out of my cosy daydream. I hadn’t flown back so I could sit in a hearse and think about my father. He was alive and breathing and real and only a few miles away. ‘Hey old girl... hey, we gotta look after you, make sure you’re good to go. Maybe not today, or even tomorrow, but let’s make sure you’re up and running. We might want to get out of here.’

In a moment I’d felt for a lever under the steering-wheel and pinged open the bonnet. I slipped out of the car, moved around to the chromium radiator and heaved the bonnet open. A cavernous space, sooty and oily... the mighty engine, lovely, ugly, a mysterious mass of machinery, a Daimler which had swished hundreds of dead bodies to be buried or burned and swished my father from cemetery to cemetery all over England and France. I knew enough to find the dipstick and check the oil; of course it was fine, my father’s meticulous maintenance. I unscrewed the radiator cap, and of course the level of the water was fine. And so, leaving the bonnet yawning open, I slipped back into the car and turned the key.

Tick, tick. Tick
– the fuel pump. Wait a few seconds. I pressed the ignition button. The engine shuddered and coughed... sweetly slumbering, stirred into life.

Silent, almost silent. A whisper in the woodland. Hardly a sound. No one could have seen or heard what I was doing. But, as I got out of the car and walked around to watch the engine throbbing like open-heart surgery, a haze of blue smoke rose from the exhaust pipes and into the surrounding trees...

Chapter Eight

‘C
OLOUR-BLIND
? Y
OU
took Lawrence out of school because he’s colour-blind?’

Juliet had had a bit too much to drink. My fault really. It was quite late at night and we’d been sitting and talking in her living-room. The three of us had had dinner together, fillets of white fish she’d dug out of the freezer and done very simply with a few potatoes and peas, and then Lawrence had gone up to his tower. He was still sulky with me since the incident with the swift in the morning, and he’d looked sideways at me and his mother as we shared a bottle of white wine. So, after the meal, he’d sloped off to his own room.

And then Juliet and I had moved to the comfy old sofa near the open French windows. As dusk dissolved into twilight and became a deep, almost purple-black night, as the darkness of the trees gathered like a blanket around the house, we sat and talked. In the afternoon, during my communion with the car, I’d felt that I’d descended into a lower world, a soft and suffocating underworld... and now it was as though the woman and I were sinking deeper still and drowning in our cosy cushions.

Perhaps it was the gin. She’d made me a gin and tonic when we first sat down together, but I’d made the second one and the third. I’d been telling her about my life in Borneo. She listened with real interest, her pointy face close to mine, her squirrel face with its anxious eyes and quickly nibbling movements of her lips, her twitchy nose. She blinked a lot and she laughed abruptly. I told her about the school I’d been teaching in: a government secondary school in a logging-town called Marudi, miles inland from the coast of the South China Sea, on the banks of the enormous Baram river; I described my students, teenage boys and girls from the
kampongs
in the forest and along the forest tributaries, how they sat in their dusty classrooms with the fans stirring lazily overhead, the boys in the front rows in their neat white shirts and black
songkoks
, the girls in their crisp white
tudungs
in rows at the back. An Islamic school, in a strictly Islamic society, in which every lesson, every meeting and function was started with a prayer and finished with a prayer... where the boys and girls studied together but couldn’t sit side by side in the same classroom and had to be segregated into different rows.

‘They call me Mr Chris. I’m the only
orang putih
, the only white man in the school. When I go into class they all stand to attention and they chant in unison “Good morning, Mr Chris!” and stay standing until I tell them to sit down. Lovely kids, nice and smiley and well-behaved... the boys have names like Farouk and Faisal and Abdul Aziz and there’s about six Mohammads in every class... the girls are cute and funny and shy, Siti Hanisah and Nurul and Rokiah and Qistina and Rabiatul...’

She took a longer swig at her drink, tipping the glass so much that the ice slipped and bumped onto her upper lip. Gulping the mouthful down, she licked her lips with a slow swipe of her tongue and then, setting down the glass, she dabbed her chin, squirrel-like with the back of both hands. Time for a top-up...

I went on. ‘And because we start early in the mornings – I get up at five and I’m clocking in at six-thirty – school’s all over by one o’clock in the afternoon. I go home, a lovely big house on wooden stilts on the bank of the river, I have a shower and lunch and maybe take a nap because in the afternoon it’s sweltering hot, then at five I’m out running or on my bike, getting a bit of exercise once the day starts to cool down.’

I finished my drink too. The dregs were just ice-water. ‘And then,’ I said, waving my empty glass and picking up hers, ‘home again for another shower and feeling very thirsty after all the exertion. At six-thirty, exactly at sunset, the call to evening prayer comes wailing out of the mosque – it’s called the
maghrib
prayers – but for an infidel like me it means something else... time for a great big, hefty big, swirly big gin and tonic.’

I stood up, with a glass in each hand. ‘Juliet, the ones you make are nice, don’t get me wrong, nice and refreshing like lemonade or barley water. But shall I make the next one? The kind I make for myself in Borneo?’ I moved across the darkening room, in the direction of the drinks cabinet. ‘Have you read Somerset Maugham’s stories from South East Asia, when they have a
“gin stengah”
in the club in the evening? Well,
“stengah”
is the Malay word for half. So I make my gin and tonic the old-fashioned way, half tonic and half gin.’

And so we’d had a second drink together, and then a third. I made them. A tall glass half full of gin. Drop in a handful of ice, so that the level comes close to the top of the glass. Oh dear, not much room left, only enough for a splash of tonic. My fault. Later, when the night was so velvety-black that it seemed to oily-ooze from the woodland and through the French windows into the room itself, Juliet’s little frame was snuggled into the softness of the sofa. And I was feeling comfortably weightless, boneless, the alcohol loosening and dissolving my skeleton...

And loosening our tongues. I’d told her about the swift in the tower bedroom and how Lawrence and I had dealt with it, although I hadn’t mentioned the confrontation we’d had or the strange thing he’d muttered to me. I hadn’t told her, I thought I would never tell her, that for a bewildering moment I’d been afraid of her son. When the conversation had shifted from my cheery, uncomplicated students in Marudi to my first impressions of Lawrence and my inklings of the kind of progress we might make in forming a relationship, I’d recounted the earlier incident, when he’d lost his temper and smashed the model plane into pieces.

‘He gets angry,’ she said, ‘that’s the issue.’ She had a bit of trouble with the word, the sibilance on her tongue. ‘He gets angry. How did you make him so angry?’

‘I don’t know. He just exploded. He was trying to show me the kind of plane his father flies... the kind he used to fly... and I didn’t get which one he was talking about. The green one, the grey one... I don’t know, he’s got so many hanging on the ceiling up there, and they all look the same to me.’

She pricked up at something I’d said. Her face, which had fuddled and lost some of the sharpness of its features, flickered back into focus. ‘Look the same? That’s an issue with Lawrence. The colours, they all look the same to him. He’s colour-blind. What did you say to him? The green one, the grey one? Is that when he got so angry?’

‘Now you mention it, yes. That was when he lost his cool and yelled at me and smashed the plane.’

I shrugged at her and swilled some more gin. It was so strong that it caught the back of my throat and made my eyes water. A real Borneo
stengah
, the kind I’d drink on the balcony of my house with a saucer of olives... and my binoculars ready for the crocodiles which eased their bulk out of the undergrowth and into the river as the light was failing.

‘He over-reacted a bit, don’t you think? I mean, quite a lot of people are colour-blind, red and green and brown, that’s the commonest kind. I had an uncle, I remember my Dad telling me about him, he found out he was colour-blind during the war because he wanted to join the RAF or something and it meant he wouldn’t be able to...’

I stopped myself just in time. I made a pretence of spluttering on my gin. Juliet was suddenly very composed again, as though the alcohol had pickled her by now and she was preserved in pristine condition.

She levelled her eyes at me. ‘Think about it, Christopher. Yes, that’s why he gets angry. They told him at school he’s colour-blind. Usually it’s a trivial thing, it’s just one of those things, it’s nothing but a curiosity. But think about it. For a boy who idolises his father, who idolised his father, and who wanted more than anything else in the world to be like him, to be a...’

She paused, lifted her glass to her lips. But then she sniffed at the intense perfume and set it down. ‘Too strong for me.’ She made a smile with her lips, but it slipped off almost straightaway. ‘But now you know why I keep him at home, out of school.’

I frowned at her. ‘Because he’s colour-blind? Alright, so he gets angry, I understand all that. But is there anything more you want to tell me?’ I tried to lighten the mood again, because I’d seen her eyes welling with tears. ‘Hey, do you want another drink? I can make one of your nice lemonade versions, if you like?’

She started to stand up. Me too. It took us two or three attempts, because the sofa and all its cushions were as difficult to escape as the pitcher-plants I had in my faraway garden. At last we wobbled together, giggling a bit, and for a few moments she took hold of my arms to steady herself. Then she looked up at me and sniffed and said, ‘There’s a bit more to tell you, Christopher, yes. You’ll get the story from me or from Lawrence. But not now. Right now I need to go to bed and sleep off your great big, hefty big, swirly big gin and tonics...’

I closed the French window. She turned off the lights. I followed her to the foot of the stairs, waited, and she went up ahead of me. She turned at the top, on the first landing, where it was so dark I could hardly see her. Her disembodied voice floated down to me.

‘Don’t go away, Christopher,’ she said softly. I heard her take a long breath, and then it all came out in one breathless release of words. ‘I know you’re concerned about your father and you’re thinking about slipping away and leaving us to our own devices... me and Lawrence, we were in the tower this morning, I came up with more coffee for you and he said you’d gone out and we saw the smoke in the trees and guessed what you were doing... we thought you were going, going for good without even saying anything to us...’

She stopped. No more breath. There was a long empty silence. I couldn’t see her at all. I thought she might have vanished into her bedroom. But then her voice came again, even more quietly, no more than a whisper in the benighted house.