Authors: Alastair Bruce
In the room is a table and one chair. There are slits of light in the roof. A house in need of repair. I sniff the air again, trying to place the smell, like damp earth. Like a man has been living here, cooped up for weeks. He has planned this well, drawn me in, painted the backgrounds, erected the sets. Now I sit here in the house, a captive audience, and he shows me mirages – each wall, each surface, a white sheet. On it he projects images. When I reach for them, they disappear, like smoke. He sits in a dark room – I can see him – watching me, shadowing me.
A thought comes to me. The house next door. Though before I did not believe he was staying there, perhaps now that I have discovered him, he has moved back to safer ground. I go to the window from which I can see the house. The shutter sways in the breeze.
I run down the road and then up the drive of the neighbouring property. I have the axe in my hand. I run over thorns in my bare feet, but I barely notice. I ignore the shutter and instead go round to the porch entrance. Even from a few metres off, I can see the door is open. I cannot remember whether I left it open the last time I was here. I stand outside it.
‘I know you are in there.’
There is no answer.
‘I want to talk to you, just talk. Please.’ Again, it is like someone is speaking for me.
I step inside. There is the television. On the floor next to the laptop is a heap of DVDs. Many have been opened, the wrappers scattered around the room. I know I have opened some of them, but all of them? I do not know.
I walk through the rest of the house, flinging open doors and cupboards. He is not here.
The boy. The thought frightens me. I run back up to the road. I am not thinking clearly. I should have just gone through the hole in the fence. It is like I am being led.
As soon as I see the house, I know why. There is a light on. One of the upstairs bedrooms. I stand looking, then move quickly behind the tree. I retrace my movements. I went through the whole house turning off the lights. It is impossible I missed one. The doors to the bedrooms are all open – I would have noticed. I wait. Then movement, a figure shifting in front of the yellow light. The light spreads out behind him. In the centre, just darkness, the deepest black I can imagine. A figure standing in front of the light, now swaying, drifting in front of it, back and forth, back and forth. A moth, a lamp.
I cannot tell if the figure is looking at me or out the other way.
Suddenly it is dawn. I have not moved. It is dawn and there is someone at the window. I can see this very clearly, too clearly. There is someone there. The boy again, but older this time. A boy of twelve.
And I remember what I was watching when I was standing there, unable to sleep, not wanting to stay in bed. I remember hearing noises in the house, my father and mother shouting my name, and Peter’s, and footsteps past my room and down the stairs and then a car starting and I knew who it was. Of course I knew. I watched her drive up the road, and standing here all that time later I watch the car again. There she is inside it, and all I want to do now, and then, especially then, because I knew, somehow I knew what was coming, was to run to her and put myself in front of the car and not move. She would have to drive through me. Kill me, kill me instead. She would have to drive through me to go and do what she was going to do.
But I was frozen. I am frozen.
It took her fourteen hours. She left at night and it was midday when she went off the road. What was she doing for all that time? Did she sit by the side of the road watching the sun rise in her rearview mirror, hands clenched around the steering wheel?
You were wrong, Dad. You were wrong about this and other things too. So many things. Not too young to know at all.
I drop to my haunches at the base of the tree. It is dark again. With the tip of the axe I scrape at the bark.
I hear a voice when I get inside, a man’s voice. It comes from the lounge. I walk softly along the corridor. The voice speaks, then silence, then speaks again. A conversation on a phone. Or a man talking to himself.
I have left the axe behind. I do not remember putting it down. What is the voice saying? It is the same phrase over and over, but I cannot make it out. It sounds like ‘Flying and could not stop’. Heard so many times, it loses its meaning. It could be anything. Static from a distant galaxy.
I peer around the doorway. In the moonlight, standing in the corner of the room, his back towards me, my brother. I take a step back. His head jerks downwards but does not turn and I have not made a sound.
His head. It jerked and was pulled and it was like he was pulled up into the air, pulled by his neck. Do not fear the hanged man.
Another step back and I am out of sight. I close my eyes slowly so it is like a curtain being drawn.
I hear the door to the garden open. I look into the room again. He has gone. I step into the room and face the wall just like him. I stand where he stood, in his footprints if I could see them. The paint on the wall in front of me seems to shine. In it I think I can see myself, a grey figure melted into the wall. ‘I was flying,’ I say to myself.
I look up at the ceiling. I am looking for him there. It pains me to say it.
I am talking now. The words lost, the tone flat. I talk and the words are lost and I see myself come into the room and look at the figure talking. Time loops back on itself and I am lost too.
Another voice, a child’s this time. Faint, from upstairs. I go to stand in the corridor. It is muffled. I walk up the stairs and into the bedroom at the end of the corridor. Out of the window I see the branches of the tree being blown by the wind. That could be the noise. Wind blowing through cracks in the house. I open the door that leads to the attic. It is black inside. I step into the room. It smells in here, that smell when something has died – some creature that crawled into a far corner and starved to death. I wait for my eyes to adjust. There are pinpricks of light, as if the roof has stars. I see the outline of a table and hanging over it a rope tied to a roof beam. It moves. I think I imagine it. I stare at it for some time but I cannot decide if it is moving or not. Perhaps it is me swaying from side to side and the rope is still. Or the wind blowing through the roof. Or perhaps the rope is not there at all, not this time, and I am imagining it, bringing the past alive again. I lift my eyes and in the corner something black, darker than the surrounds.
I go up to it. A man’s coat hanging from a hook. Do I remember this from before? From just hours ago? Or was it days. I have lost track.
A smell comes from it. The sight of it, the smell of it makes me want to retch.
The child’s voice again. Not the wind. I strain to hear. It is quiet, as if far away. But I know it is not. It is coming from the coat, from behind it.
I go closer to it. I strain to make out what the voice is saying, but the words are like a foreign language to me. A nursery rhyme, the voice lilting.
I wish I had not come here. Not just this room, not just this house, this city, this country, this place that no longer knows me, that I can no longer call home. I regret the whole thing. The letters, the separation, the stories told: the whole thing, back to this very house where it all began. The true story, approaching me now from the end of a darkened tunnel, will break everything, everything that is not already lost.
I reach out and touch the coat. It is wet. Drops from it fall to the floor. The stink hits me again. I know what it is now, the smell. The smell Peter left behind. Meat warming in a butcher’s store after the electricity has failed.
The voice stops. I take the coat by the lapel and move it slowly to one side. Nothing. I let it fall back. I take a step backwards, then another. The voice again, louder, more insistent, angry even. The words.
I look behind me and through the door into the black of the outer room. Nothing. I rub my fingers together. They’re wet – from the coat. I sniff my fingers: urine. I look down. At my feet, spreading out from beneath the coat, a puddle. I back away. At the doorway I stop again. I hear the words – different words.
‘You’re a liar, John Hyde. You’re a liar, John Hyde.’
It is soft but it echoes around the room and sets my ears ringing. I want to put my hands over my ears and close my eyes and run from there. But there, sticking out from under the coat, the bare white feet of a child, urine running over his ankles onto the floor.
I do not run from this. I could not anyway. I could leave the room, the house, the country. I could return to Rachel, if she would have me, which I doubt; return to my job or find a new one. I could get on a plane and retreat over the African continent. But if I do that, I know if I do that, if I were to board the plane, take my seat, watch a movie, I know that when the lights went out all I would have to do is turn my head and there, a few rows back, sitting quietly in the dark, the child, staring at me, staring, unblinking, at me.
I sit down, my back against the wall. I watch the feet of the boy – my feet. I watch as the toes wriggle.
I see the coat move. I want the boy to come out. And yet I don’t want him to come out – I dread it. Pearls for eyes. The tongue of a snake.
I try to talk. I try to say something. Anything. I take a breath, form my lips, but I cannot do it. I don’t know what to say.
Outside the wind stops. The house is silent.
10
There are four of us in the car: me, Peter, and in the front our mother and father. I reach into the pocket of the seat in front of me and pull out a toy, an Action Man. Paul’s. He left it there when we went down to the river valley.
Peter is out of the hospital. He was only kept in for two nights.
We’re driving back from the police station. I am surprised we are all going home. I thought they would keep at least some of us behind. Peter, my father, me.
But they let us all go. They listened and asked questions, then let us go.
We’re driving back home. I cannot look at Peter. I am turned to face the window. He is too. In the window I can see his reflection, and he mine. He watches me as I watch him. Whichever way I turn, I feel his eyes on me. I want to get out of the car. I imagine doing this. I remember now. I remember wanting to get out of the car and walk along the road. Somehow I would find my way back to Barrydale and to the mountain pass and the pool, climb down to the rock pool where Paul died, sit on the rock and look at the water. The sun would be shining, warming the rocks. I would be alone, quiet, sitting on the spot where my father hauled first Peter’s then Paul’s body out, where my father hit Peter on the chest and put his mouth to his and hit him again and again, so much that I wanted him to stop, so much that I thought for a short while my father had killed him, hoped even. But his body convulsed and water dripped out of his mouth and Peter was not the one who died that day. I think water came out of his mouth. I could not see it. I was still on the ledge watching, hiding. It was too far away to see, to see that.
I would sit on the rock, sit very still and wait patiently, and after some time Paul would come out of the water, climb out and sit next to me in the sun, a half smile on his face. We would not talk. I would watch drops of water fall from his skin.
The journey is silent. Not one word is spoken. I remember that.
My father looks at me. The whole journey, he too keeps his eyes on me. Why are you looking at me? Stop looking at me. I haven’t done anything.
As I stare out of the window, I remember the earlier journey, with my head out of the window, the wind in my face, the laughter from inside the car and the urge to scream, to scream loud enough to burst their eardrums as I felt the scorecard taken from my lap and then watched it float away.
We pull up to our house. This house. Everyone stays in the car. No one moves. Perhaps a word from someone would have made things better. Not better, but provided a start from which things could get better.
And that might have stopped what was about to happen.
We listen to the ticking of the engine. My father, my mother, Peter. We sit as if we could stay there forever.
Calm – that is the wrong word, perhaps, but it is how I remember it – silent calm. My mother was not crying. My father did not speak. Neither did Peter. We were each still there, still at the river with Paul.
But we could not stay forever. It would have been better if we had. Perhaps the story would end there. A family sits in a car for eternity. They are calm following the death of a child. They sit and the days pass. One after the other they wither, shrivel up, the car rusts and what remains of them blows away in the wind.
My father moves first, my mother next, then Peter. I am still sitting in the car after they have all got out. My father has opened the boot and is carrying bags inside. I want to talk. All I want to do is talk. I want someone to say something, say anything, I want to hear someone else say something. But no one does.
Peter walks off to the garden. I watch my father watching Peter. He looks at Peter and doesn’t call him back. I look at my father’s face. I try to read it. I am only eight. I don’t know what it means. It is blank to me. I try to remember what I was thinking at that point, what I was feeling towards them, towards Peter most of all. Did I hate him then? Did I blame him for what had happened? That too is gone. I remember the day it happened, at least I think I do, I remember other moments, but the things that I want to remember, the things that will reveal the truth to me, seem to be lost. Things are coming back, some of them – flashes. But I need to know more. I need to get inside it, relive it. I have seen only shadows, the leavings of moments.
I looked at my father, standing there in the drive, and I remember thinking, he is far away, far away from me.
Far away, but I felt he knew what I was thinking. He and I knew. He ran past the ledge and would have seen me, though he did not stop. Though my father was looking away, I felt him watching me – from his back, beneath his shirt, the stirrings of another. I can see the bones move in his back, eye sockets peering through skin. Stop looking at me.
My mother was already inside. She had left my father to lock up. I went to find her. I had not planned anything, not planned to say anything. I found her in Paul’s bedroom and stood at the door. She had her back to me. I heard a soft noise, like a bird. She held something to her face: a shirt. I tiptoed up behind her. I was carrying a toy truck or car. No, Paul’s Action Man. I was carrying it and I stood behind her and then dropped it. It made only the softest of sounds, but she jumped and half rose from the bed. The shirt, one of Paul’s, slipped from her grasp as she rose. It was as if she had been pulled up like a puppet. Her arms swung out and I don’t know if she meant to hit me. I think not. I don’t know. She swung at me and her hand hit me on the ear. I felt dizzy and fell to the floor. She screamed then. I had never heard her scream. She had not done that before, not since the first moments after Paul died. For days she had been quiet. But not any more.
She swung around, her arms in an arc. I fell to the floor and she crawled back, her back to the wall, again, as if she was being pulled, dragged by some force unseen. As if, rather, I was some kind of monster, the thing of nightmares.
I didn’t do anything, Mommy. I didn’t do anything.
She screamed, ‘Get out. Get out. Get out.’ I remember her saying it three times. I got out. I was crawling at first too, then running.
My father was standing outside. I don’t know how long he had been there. He was standing still. I ran into him, bounced off him. He did not try to catch me, did not try to stop me. I bounced off him and ran to the top of the stairs. I looked back. He was still standing there, not looking at me but into the room. He had not moved. Daddy.
I walked down the stairs. I took them one at a time. Left foot first, then the right, onto the same step. I wanted to go back to them, both of them, one on either side of me, their arms around me, or even just touching me. I wanted to go back and I thought of going back with every step, but I did not. Each step took me further away. They could not have blamed me. They were upset. Their son had died in a tragic accident. That is what they would have thought. They were not there. They did not see what happened.
When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I ran barefoot into the garden, into the heat. I ran along the grass – I remember it crackling under my feet, burning. Through the burning grass I ran, and I can see myself now, as if standing on the roof of the house. I watch myself run away, growing ever smaller, until my edges, the boy’s edges, start to break up and he disappears into the heat haze, into the dust, into the bush, to find Peter. To find Peter, and – though I do not think I knew it then, and was not planning it – to begin the story.
I leave the attic, crawling out of the door, standing up only when I am out of the room. I walk down the corridor. From one of the rooms I hear laughter. I put my ear to the wall but do not go into the room. The laughter does not get any louder. Instead, all I hear is a hum from my ear against the wall – the sound of an ocean.
In another room there is crying. The voices of children, men, women. Or, just one man, one woman.
‘Paul?’ I whisper it.
From the main bedroom I hear sobbing. I run towards this. I think it will be the same as the laughter, though. Just the sound of the house, the house shifting in time. But it is not. There is a woman sitting on the bed. She has her back to me. She has long, dark hair. She is wearing a nightdress and seems old. Not in years but in her bearing, the nightdress, the hairstyle. She is from another age. She sobs while sitting on the end of the bed.
I knock on the door – just once. She stops crying, goes completely still. Her back straightens and she begins to turn towards the door.
When I see her face, I can see it is my mother. She turns to me and looks straight at me. She can see me, across these years. Her eyes are focused on mine, not some point behind me. She has red eyes. She is holding a photograph. I can see the picture. It is me. Not my brothers, not the dead one – me. Why me? The picture is crumpled.
I take a step towards her and she is gone.
I go up to where she was sitting on the bed. I place my hand on the spot. It is cold. I look at the place, looking for an impression, a dent. There is nothing.
The axe is on the driveway. In the garage I find a crowbar and a saw.
I start ripping out the cupboards in the bedrooms. The wood splits, cracks, falls to the floor. I hack at them with the axe, prise off bits with the crowbar. I lift pieces, which I throw through the windows to the garden below. I am not wearing gloves and my hands start bleeding.
In some places, I expose raw plaster; in others, brick. I am covered in dust. What doesn’t fit through the windows I carry downstairs and throw onto the lawn. I take the fittings from the lights and throw these out too.
I start on the room that was mine. There is a desk and drawers built in under the window and a cupboard on the opposite wall. A memory comes to me. I am lying in bed. I am ill, the same illness I had when Paul appeared to me. There is a noise in my ears. The sea. Constant waves of noise. Not the sea. Static from a radio, growing louder, then softer. The door opens. Someone, my mother, my father, looks in. They come into the room and walk up to the bed. They, too, seem to pulse, growing larger then smaller. Whoever it is stands next to the bed and does not sit down. I see lips move, but I hear nothing over the static. I try to work out from their expression what they are saying, but I cannot. I am lost, half asleep, feverish. When the door closes, I wake up properly. There is a wrenching in my gut as I remember then what happened just a few days before.
I lie there and I am covered in scabs. They crust over me. If I move, I crackle as if on fire.
There are words that come then. I cannot remember who says them, or if they are spoken at all. ‘Where did you hurt yourself? How did you get those cuts?’
I try to summon up this memory. I try to reach back to the waking child’s memory and take it, hold it for myself. But it slips away. What did he know?
In my old room, I do the desk first. I take the axe to the middle of it, then work on where it joins the walls. Then I take the doors off the cupboards. I carry these downstairs, then the shelves. The board at the back of the cupboards has come loose and when I push it I can see a space between it and the wall. Another memory: I hid something here. I cannot remember what. I put my hand in the space between cupboard and wall, but it doesn’t fit. A child’s hand could but not mine. I break the wood.
There is a piece of paper, yellowed with age. It is a picture, a drawing by a child. It shows mountains, a river. There are two stick figures in the picture. They have wings on their backs. Angels. They fly off the edge of the cliff, wings spread wide.
At the edge of the drawing, standing on the cliff watching them fly, is another child. He has his arms out, reaching for them, calling them back. A big red O where his mouth should be.
I work more quickly now, leaving large bits of broken furniture clinging to the walls. The carpets are filled with splinters. I am barefoot. I see bloody footprints. I do not feel any pain, though. I finish my bedroom, then move onto the others. In the main bedroom I leave just the bed. The sheet is covered in dust, splinters, flakes of paint. I leave Peter’s old bedroom, the one with the door to the attic.
It takes me a day to do the upstairs. Downstairs it is only the kitchen and the lounge with its shelves to do. It takes another day to dismantle these. I do not eat, and drink only water. I sleep for just a few hours at a time.
I leave the bed during the night. I move into the passageway, aware of eyes high up on the walls, blinking down at me, recording everything they see.
I close my eyes and support myself on the wall with a hand. If I close them, perhaps he will come to me, perhaps he will appear. Peter – I can sense him, sense him wanting to be here.
The carpets are filled with blood. They ooze beneath my feet. I am shivering. The windows are open and a cold wind blows in. I take a step forward but my legs struggle to move. They are weighed down. I am trying to walk on the bottom of a river bed, my feet tied to blocks of concrete.
I suck in water, cough, have to kneel. I kneel, then sit and try to steady my breathing. It is as if I am trying to lift the whole house with every rise of my chest.
I sit opposite the stairway. I concentrate on my breathing but it gets harder. Peter is on the stairs. He has drugged me. It is the only explanation. He has drugged me and I am paralysed. He is crawling up the stairs, one at a time, his face blue, eyes bulging. His body twitches, convulses as it crawls up the stairs. On his back – I can see it from this angle – the burnt image of a child’s hand.
I would move. I would move, go back to bed, close the door, close my eyes. I would move and be free of this, be free of all this, but I cannot move because the boy is there too. He stands silent next to me, so close I could reach out and touch him – touch his hair, his pale skin. The blood comes from his leg. It runs like a river into the carpet.
The corridor is white, as if filled with mist, with smoke. In time it fades and I can move again. I rub my arms. They are covered in fine drops. They sit on the hairs of my arms. I am silver.
I take everything to the back garden, all the wood and broken furniture. I drag it piece by piece to the bottom of the garden, pulling it across the lawn. It sticks in places and rips up the grass. I breathe in the dust it creates. After a while there are furrows in the ground, lines drawn from the back door to a pile of broken furniture at the bottom of the garden. Looking down at the house from above, this is what would be seen: lines traced in sand and along one of them, an ant dragging a load. From it a plume of dust rises, drifts across the scene until it is lost in the expanse of sky.