The Waking That Kills Read online

  And then he stood up. In a couple of loping strides he’d crossed to the lamp and caught the cockchafer in his hands. He cupped it there, held his hands to one ear and then the other, and he listened as it roared and raged in its prison. He didn’t offer it to his mother or to me, as an adult might do by way of a conversation piece. It was nothing to do with us, nothing to do with anybody except himself. He was curiously alone, alone with the beetle, as though they were the only living things in all of that soft spring night.

  He crossed to the French windows. He stepped outside. As if to release the creature into the darkness.

  No. He opened his hands and dropped the beetle into the glass bowl of the paraffin lamp.

  For a mad second, it fizzled furiously around the flame. Then it ignited. An explosion of green and gold, it plopped into the paraffin and fizzed into a whiff of blue smoke.

  THE TORPOR OF the house was on me, and the weight of all the hours of travelling. I could hardly remember going up to my room, escorted to the door by the solicitous woman. I slept so deeply that a kind of vacuum sucked all my thoughts and dreams away and left me lying in a state of death-like nothingness...

  And yet, when I awoke in the middle of the night and stared around the room, unable to remember where on earth I was, I was suddenly and utterly conscious. Not a shred, not the tiniest cobweb of sleep clung to me, as I swung my feet out of bed and stood up. Something had woken me, aroused me from the deathliness of my sleep.

  There was a movement at my window and I cossed the room to look out.

  It was a movement I’d seen the previous afternoon, when I’d first arrived at the house. Not the flash of a falling, metallic object... not the dazzle of sunlight through the branches of a tall tree... but a crawling shadow, the shadow which had crawled like a live thing across the building and over the hills. Now, the same movement led my eyes from the sill of my window into the garden below me.

  Bright moonlight. A moon-shadow. Cast by a rag of cloud, it slid across the sky and dissolved into nothing.

  The moon quivered in the dark waters of the pond. The cloud-shadow had gone. It had become a figure, which moved across the lawn in stealthy silence.

  The boy. He stopped, and his own shadow was a pool of blackness, lapping around his feet. I froze at the window when he turned his face upwards. But he didn’t look at the house, he didn’t look at me, he stared at the moon until the whiteness of it blanched his skin. Then he trod swiftly across the lawn, the shadow flickering around and beneath him, until he came to the deep cover of a nettle-bed.

  It was the very spot where the pigeon had fallen. As lithe as the cat which had pursued its stricken prey, as smoothly as though his own shadow were a coating of oil, he simply folded himself into the undergrowth and disappeared completely. He was gone. I waited for him to emerge, looked for any swaying or stirring of the tall nettles, but there was no movement and he did not reappear. He was gone, as if he and his shadow were drowned forever.

  But, just as I was turning from the window to collapse onto the bed, the boy reappeared from the nettles. He was carrying something, a loose grey bundle which overflowed his hands as he walked with it towards the edge of the pond.

  He paused there, the moonlight on his face, and a big silvery moon floating in the black water. When he coiled himself like a spring, wound himself up and then uncoiled and hurled his bundle high into the night air, I could see for a second that it was the remains of the pigeon... a rag of grey feathers and a hollow carcase.

  It splashed onto the water, and the moon was shattered into a million shimmering fragments. Only for a moment... exerting its mighty magnetic pull upon its own pieces, the moon drew itself splendidly together and was whole again. It folded and rippled for another minute, until the surface of the water was still.

  From my upstairs window, I watched it happen. The boy stood and watched it from the edge of the pond. The bird floated, sinking slowly as the mat of feathers and gristle became waterlogged...

  But then, before it sank completely from sight, there was a sudden, sinewy swirling in the pond.

  A whirlpool... no, a kind of black hole appeared and gaped and sucked and... and the pigeon was gone. The pond, or something greedy and muscular from deep inside it, swallowed the remains of the bird.

  The boy had gone too. When I drew my heavy eyes from the moon in the water to the place where he’d been standing, there was nothing. No boy, no shadow, only a few grey feathers which had fallen from his hands.

  I blinked and stared. I must have been dreaming. As sudden and as sweet as morphine, once more the deathliness of sleep was on me. The weight of my limbs and my head was almost too much to support.

  I crossed back to the bed and fell onto it.

  Chapter Five

  THE BOY WAS still scratching at the blebs on his hands and wrists a few days later. He had a swipe of white blisters across his face too. I knew where and when he’d got the nettle stings, but he’d fended off his mother’s questions by telling her he’d been looking for birds’ nests in the garden; he said he thought there was a flycatcher starting to build on the brick wall of the derelict greenhouse, and he’d been pushing through the undergrowth to get a closer look. The boy and I were in his room in the tower. We’d started, rather shyly and hesitantly at first, to do some of the ‘home tutoring’ that ostensibly I’d been hired to do. He fidgeted and itched, and he read aloud to me from Lord of the Flies, a text he’d been studying at school before he’d persuaded his mother to take him away.

  He read beautifully. Odd, because he was still very curt, off-hand, when I tried to engage him in conversation about himself and his home, his family, school and so on. When I asked him to suggest some of the themes of the book, he looked at me as though I was the most predictable and boring of all the teachers he’d ever had, stifled a yawn and started to drawl contemptuously, ‘War, survival, isolation, the loss of innocence, death...’ a list he’d had to learn at school and trot out for homework or exams. I managed to stop him with my own loud theatrical yawn. And then, when I asked him to choose a passage in the book, a crisis which illustrated one of these themes, he turned straightaway to a well-thumbed page and read slowly, relishing the brilliant clarity of the words... the death of Piggy, the fat little boy hit by an enormous boulder, his body falling and falling through space and smashing onto the rocks below...

  He itched at his wrists. The blebs were tiny white blisters on the purpling of his veins. Beside him, on the rumpled bed where he was sprawling, the orange cat sprawled too. It lay flat on its back, ridiculously asleep: legs splayed, eyes tightly closed, head thrown back, its breath whistling through bared fangs. I watched the boy and listened to his reading: he and the killer-cat side by side, accomplices in the capture, defenestration and death of the gentle pigeon.

  He finished reading. In my mind’s eye, Piggy lay broken on the rocks, until a wave rolled over him and the sea sucked his body away.

  Now, a cool breeze blew through the open windows of the tower. The squadrons of aircraft clattered together, and for the first time in the few days I’d been at Chalke House, Lawrence volunteered to speak to me. If only to divert me from the book – a book he’d done to death in a classroom he’d hated, with boys he’d hated, with a teacher he’d hated – he glanced up to the ceiling and said, ‘That’s a Phantom, the green one, the fighter with the RAF roundel... it’s what my Dad flies, out of Coningsby.’

  Of all the hundred planes hanging from the rafters, I could only have identified a handful. Never an enthusiast as a boy, never interested in planes or cars or steam engines, I glanced up too and said, ‘I haven’t got a clue, Lawrence. Let me see...’ I pointed with my thumb. ‘That’s a Lancaster bomber, and there’s a Spitfire, and is that a Mosquito? Oh, and the airliner, the white one with the blue stripe, is that a Comet?’ I scanned around the rafters of the high room. ‘Green one? I don’t see it... which one do you mean?’

  He reacted explosively. One moment he was a drawling tee
nager lying limp and exhausted on his bed... and then he bounced onto his feet, reaching up, reaching up, his face suddenly clouded with a rushing of blood into his cheeks. The cat was out of the room in one long orange streak. The boy grabbed one of the planes, wrenched it off its thread and flung it onto the floor. It smashed into pieces.

  ‘Green!’ he was hissing at me. ‘Didn’t I say the green one? The Phantom he flies out of Coningsby!’

  He was calm again. The blood drained out of his face. His skin was as white as before, with only a residual blotchiness where the nettles had blistered him. He stepped off the bed and busied himself picking up the pieces of the shattered aircraft. ‘I can fix it, I can fix it,’ he was saying to himself, and then he turned to look at me over his shoulder, as though he’d suddenly remembered I was there, and he said more loudly, ‘I can fix it, I’m good at fixing things, it’s only a model.’

  He sat on the bed with the fragments in his hands. He spread them across the blanket and rearranged them, the bits of a puzzle, like an archaeologist about to reassemble the fossilised bones of a dinosaur he’d unearthed. His calmness was rather unnerving. I watched his hands, the long, white, bony fingers, as if I would detect a tremor or a twitch, some aftershock of anger. There was none. There was no quaver in his voice, when he said to me, ‘My mum will tell you. She’ll explain it all, I guess. I get angry. That’s why I’m here right now, that’s why I’m at home and not at school. That’s why you’re here.’

  Indeed. I wanted to tell him – to counter his burst of anger with a show of my own resentment of what he’d said – that I was there because I’d chosen to come, that I was staying of my own free will and not because I’d been summoned by his mother to take charge of her spoilt, solitary son. But I held my breath and didn’t say anything. For one reason, I knew from my experience of teaching how a few cross words too soon in a new relationship with pupils could make things prickly for weeks or even months; and furthermore, the matter-of-fact way the boy had spoken, without a trace of rancour in his voice, made me hold my tongue.

  As though he could read my thoughts, he turned his face towards me as he re-aligned the pieces of the plane on his bed, and with a quick, charming smile he said, ‘I’m sorry. I get angry. That’s all you need to know about me for the time being.’

  I followed him across the room to the open window. He picked up the binoculars and handed them to me. I held them to my eyes, readjusted the focus and looked as far as the silvery horizon. ‘On a clear day you can see the sea,’ he was saying, ‘and sometimes the planes taking off and coming back to Coningsby, where my Dad flies from...’

  I instinctively dipped the glasses when the top of the Scots pine blurred my view of the further distance. I changed the focus and followed the bristly blackness of the tree down and down to the very base of the trunk. The orange cat was sunbathing on the bonnet of the hearse. For a second, a spangle of light from the crazed windscreen dazzled me so that I held the binoculars away from my face and rubbed my eyes. It gave the boy the chance to take the glasses from me and put them back on the window-sill.

  ‘The garden and everything, I’ll show you. Come on.’ He gestured me to follow him out of the room and down the stairs.

  It was May. The woodland was busy with birdsong, and everywhere was bursting with the fresh greenery of brambles and nettles and sweet new grasses. And yet, somehow, a whispering uneasiness seemed to lie among the rambling acres of Chalke House. Despite the fanfare of the wren, despite the watery song of the robin and the fluting of the blackbird, the morning threw a smothering gauziness among the trees and across the overgrown lawns. The songs of the birds were oddly muted by something in the air... and as the boy and I strolled further from the house where the cover of the trees grew denser still, I began to feel it was he, the boy, who wore a cloak of stillness, his own space, his own quietness, which damped all the sounds around him.

  We paused at the lake, whose edges were fringed with a bed of reeds.

  ‘Pike...’ he said, and his eyes flickered over me as if he’d almost forgotten I was there and he couldn’t remember who I was. ‘My Dad told me there’s a pike in the lake, a monster, maybe a hundred years old... he told me he caught it once, when I was a baby, and he put it back into the water because it was so huge, so old, such a marvellous monster he couldn’t not put it back where it belongs.’

  He stared across the still, green water.

  ‘So deep,’ he said, more to himself than to me, ‘no one knows how deep it is, no one knows how big the pike is now, how old it really is.’

  He turned and looked at me. With a defiant cast in his eye, as though to pre-empt a display of schoolteacherly knowledge from his new tutor, he added, ‘But I know that the pike is there, and it’s a monster, and it’s a hundred years old, because my father’s seen it and he’s told me. I don’t need to see it for myself or read about it in books.’

  ‘We won’t just read books, Lawrence,’ I reassured him, as we walked away from the pond and closer to the Scots pine. ‘Your mother didn’t want me to come and do lots of the same old schoolwork with you, all the stuff you’ve been doing at school. I’ll just stay a while, just as long as you’re both happy to have me here, and as long as I’m happy to be here, and we’ll talk, or not talk, and maybe we’ll get to know each other a bit better. Or maybe we won’t.’

  I took his elbow to make him stop walking ahead of me, to make sure he was hearing what I was saying. ‘Lawrence, you don’t have to tell me anything about yourself, either you or your mother, that you don’t want me to know.’

  He looked at me with his head slightly on one side – a dark beady eye, the pelt of his hair as dense and glossy as an otter’s – oddly unsure of what I was saying. So I added, ‘Lawrence, I haven’t come here to try and solve you, like a puzzle. If we get on alright, that’s good. If we don’t, then I’ll move on. A few days ago I’d never heard of you or knew you existed.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s heard of me.’ He glanced down at my hand so that I let go of his arm, and he spun away from me, through the shade of the woodland.

  Lawrence Lundy. I remembered how my father had struggled to recall the name, how he’d chiselled the letters onto thin air, seen them hovering in front of his eyes as though they were carved onto cold, hard stone. Lawrence Lundy. The name meant nothing to me.

  The cat stood up on the bonnet of the Daimler. It stretched luxuriously as the boy stroked it from the top of its head to the very tip of its tail. Then it had had enough. It slipped off the car and slunk into the long grass, parting the tall blades with its nose and snaking its hips deeper in and in and disappearing. The boy fingered the shattered windscreen, the edges of the hole which the hammer had smashed into the car.

  ‘What was your mother doing up there?’ I asked him, with a jerk of my head up into the branches of the pine tree. She had already told me, the previous evening. So he answered, with that odd curl of a smile on his lips, not quite a sneer, ‘You mean you didn’t ask her? You arrived here and she dropped a hammer onto your car from high up in a tree and you didn’t ask her what she was doing up there?’ The smile slid off his mouth, as sudden as the slither of the cat from the bonnet of the car. ‘She told me she was hoping you’d ask me. She knew you would. She was up there trying to fix my tree-house. I think she already thinks you’ll have a go at helping her.’

  I did a deliberately comic blink at the roundabout way in which the information was being imparted. ‘I like to go up there,’ he went on. ‘It’s the view from my tower, only better. Not really a tree-house, but a kind of platform right at the top. My Dad built it so that I could see the planes as they take off from Coningsby and come back in. He likes to know that I’m watching him. He waggles his wings a bit when he comes in, so I know it’s him and he’s back safe and sound from manoeuvres...’

  I was opening the back of the hearse, for no real reason except to let in a bit of air or maybe intrigue the boy to keep on talking. He’
d been talking about his father, so I thought he might be interested in mine, not a dashing daredevil who hurtled himself through the skies in a million-pounds worth of jet plane, but a cranky old man who’d spent his life hunched over the gravestones of a hundred cemeteries or peering over the huge black steering wheel of a hearse.

  Lawrence leaned into the gloom of the car and he sniffed. Then he inhaled very slowly, holding each breath in his chest for a second before letting it out of his nose again... slowly, as though to capture the scent in the whiskery tunnels of his nostrils. He inhaled and exhaled a few times, like a bear or a badger investigating the lair of another creature it had discovered on its territory, almost as though, having gathered all the information he could from the smells in this strange dark den, he would cock a leg and piss onto the mottled paintwork of the hearse...

  He didn’t, of course. He cocked his head, politely, like a jackdaw listening to an unfamiliar sound – or, for me just back from Borneo, like a mynah trying to catch the strangeness of a sound in order to mimic it – as I told him about my father’s work as a mason and the purpose of having the Daimler as his workshop and hidey-hole and home-on-wheels. The boy was attentive and deferential. Indeed, he affected the mannerisms of a grown-up so exactly that I wasn’t sure whether he was really interested or just humouring me... he examined the tools in the tool-box, handling them very carefully as if they were my most precious family heirlooms, he hefted them from hand to hand and sniffed the oil on their blades and the decades of sweat ingrained into their wooden handles, he stroked the nap on the leathery gloves and...

  When he unfolded the flaps of the cardboard box – a boring old cardboard box which had been shoved into a corner by the couch – he recoiled from it as if there was a cobra coiled inside it.

  And then he was off. Before I could come out with a sudden ‘What’s up?’ or ‘Hey Lawrence, what’s the matter?’ he’d spun away from the car and was striding very fast and purposefully through the woodland, back towards the house. He paused and turned once, as though he’d bethought himself for being rude, and he shouted... not words, but a braying kind of noise such as grown-ups make when they leave a room to answer a telephone or switch off a forgotten frying-pan. In any case, he was gone in a moment.