For there is a world touched
neither by sight, touch, smell, nor by hearing, but by the Spirit of a Person. If you will only believe, Kevin, then you will see that what I say is true. And there are other planets akin to our Earth, inhabited by great multitudes of living, breathing creatures. Would that I could convince you of these things! But I must be brief. My last breath is nigh. You will find that this great house, Pitterdown Manor, holds many Secrets. You are the new Keeper of the Tradition, Kevin. You have inherited the Gift. You may be called to Serve at any time. You should not hesitate, nor should you fear anything, if your heart remains courageous and pure.
Here are the things you will need:
Firstly, the Key-Ring, which is hidden beneath the mantelpiece in the Blue …
In that instant, Kevin heard Father’s heavy tread just behind him and he whirled, clutching the letter to his chest, his cheeks flaming scarlet.
Father halted three feet away, a look of intense suspicion suffusing his face. His hands were clenched into fists by his sides.
“What are you hiding, boy?”
“Nothing
,” Kevin blurted out. His nostrils detected a whiff of alcohol. Father had been drinking. His guts clenched up into an icy ball and he sank to the floor before Father’s looming figure, knowing that nothing he could say or do now would avert a beating. Nevertheless, he tried, “I’m sorry, sir.”
“You pathetic little bastard!” snarled Harold. “Give me that!”
Father’s thick fingers tore the letter from Kevin’s numbed grasp. It took him several long moments to realise that he was holding it upside-down; then he righted it and began to read–myopically. Colour rose to his face, and as Kevin watched in horrified fascination, that thick purple vein started pulsing dangerously in the middle of his forehead. Purple blotches spread like a fierce rash down his neck, until Kevin thought something must surely explode–and his hands! They were shaking!
Deliberately,
his blunt, powerful fingers began to shred the letter. Time crawled as each individual piece floated slowly down through the air to build a silent snowfall around Father’s elegant, expensive loafers. Each heartbeat throbbed in Kevin’s eardrums with painful intensity. He saw Harold Jenkins’ mouth open in a bitter snarl, unrecognisably twisted. Kevin became aware of his own pleading babble.
With
the inevitability of death itself, Father’s foot lifted and swung into a brutal kick that smashed him against the open fireplace. Pain stabbed into his side as wet heat splashed down his leg. Shame preceded a stench of burning flesh, and an awful, all-consuming burning …
* * * *
Gagging on the sharp reek of antiseptic, Kevin awoke. For a blissful second, he imagined that he might be dreaming and that if he only turned over, he would wake up to find sunlight streaming in through the gap in his heavy drapes. But his body felt strange. As he breathed, searing pain attacked his left side. He was dimly aware of a catalogue of other hurts. He tried to open his eyes, but there was something covering them. So he reached up and tried to take it off.
“Here, don’t do that!” cried a soft, concerned voice. A gentle hand that reminded him of his mother’s before she became ill
, stopped him.
“What?” he croaked.
“Just lay you down, sonny,” continued the voice. “You’ve been burnt bad. There’s a bandage over your eyes, and you’re laid on your stomach so as not to aggravate your back.”
In a rush,
Kevin remembered the letter, Father’s anger, the beating …
“Water,” he whispered.
The hand held his head. A glass pressed against his lips, allowing a wondrously cool sip of water to trickle down the back of his throat. Kevin coughed and cried out and collapsed against the pillow, sweating in a wave of nausea.
“Soft you, soft you!” said his nurse tenderly, wiping his cheeks with something cool and wet. “You’re not to move so, sonny. With such an accident
, you’re lucky to be alive at all! Softly now.”
Kevin
realised from the timbre of her voice that his nurse must be quite old. So they were calling it an accident, were they? There had been many ‘accidents’ over the years. Usually it was a whipping or a thick cane applied to his buttocks and legs, leaving welts and weals. He recalled a time when he was five, when Mother had tried to intervene, but after Father turned on her, she had never again tried to help him. He wondered how she had been able to shut her eyes and ears to what was going on. Mother was not a very strong person. During the early years, the little stories and lies had multiplied. ‘A cycling accident,’ she would lie, as his teacher nodded. That was before he became too ill to attend school. ‘Kevin’s such an active boy. He’s always getting himself into these little bumps and scrapes.’
One day blazed in his memory;
the day his father’s business partner had cleaned up and disappeared, leaving him with a pile of debt and no business to run. He had woken up when Father arrived home, slamming the door. First there was shouting downstairs, then after a while, his father’s heavy tread on the stairs. Kevin knew the creak of the third-last step–it was to be avoided when he had gone without supper, and stolen down to the kitchen to see what food there was to be had. He trembled in his bed, hoping that the heavy footsteps would pass down to the end of the hall. He heard Father’s laboured breathing outside his door. For a long time, that was all. Then, the door handle creaked and turned, outlining Father’s burly frame against the hallway’s light. Kevin pretended to be asleep. But the inexorable fear had already clenched his bowels, and his bladder emptied itself despite his frenzied, silent battle to prevent it. Father stood still so long that Kevin secretly began to hope he was safe.
The big nose lifted and sniffed the air–once, and once again. “Wet our bed, have we?” he slurred loudly. “Nine years old, and a bed-wetter. How revolting–to think his mother whelped such a weakling. Nine,
and still he wets his bed.” He stepped closer, raising his voice. “You know what happens to bed-wetters, don’t you, Kevin? You know? Speak, boy! If you have a tongue in your craven little head, speak!”
“S-Sir!” stammered
Kevin.
“Don’t you hide from
me, boy!” roared his father, undoing his belt clumsily. “You’ll get your punishment! Just like your mother, sucking up when you’ve done wrong! Well, I’ll teach you a lesson, boy. I’ll teach you good!”
At
those times, Kevin’s mind watched his body from a distance; as the blows rained down, his mind was safe elsewhere. But he still felt every weal and every stripe. He felt it when the belt was exchanged for Father’s meaty fists, and even an interminable time later, when the big arms wrapped roughly around his shoulders and Father began to sob into the pillow–great, wrenching sobs of disgust and brokenness.
* * * *
“Another accident? You’re pathetic!”
Kevin
stared blankly ahead, saying nothing. He lay on his stomach, head cocked to one side.
“You know, they had to replace that carpet in the Library,” his brother continued. His tone was a carbon copy of Fa
ther’s, as was his personality.
Kevin
did not even flicker his eyelids in recognition.
“
Father told me what happened,” Brian added. “It’s always snivelling little Kevin this and helpless little Kevin that. Oh, we just need to call the nurse because the weasel’s done it again. Well–I’ve had enough! You’re a disgrace to the family! A humiliation!”
He made no response.
Brian’s voice dripped with malicious glee. “Playing the silent game, are we, Kevin?” Deliberately, he leaned over the bed and pulled down the sheets, exposing a burnt and bandaged back. He slapped the bandages, drawing from Kevin a high-pitched squeal of agony. “Poor ailing Kevin. Found our voice now? I’m speaking to you, moron!”
A t
ear squeezed down Kevin’s cheek.
Brian, who was five years older and a law student since his failure at business–another aspect in which he took after
Father–brought his hand down to Kevin’s side, the side that had been kicked. Almost gently, he trapped Kevin’s wrist in his thick fingers and said, “I suggest that you start talking, or I’ll make you wish you were never born. You probably wish it anyway, but I can make your wishes come true.”
When there was still no response from the inert figure, Brian tapped him on the ribs exactly where Father had kicked him. “Does this hurt?” he inquired solicitously, to
Kevin’s answering moan of pain. He would have covered his ribs, but that was why Brian held his wrist–subtlety was not one of Brian’s strong points. “How many broken ribs was it? Now, why don’t we consider this a lesson that you will
not
forget? When I say ‘speak’, you speak. When I want you to listen, you listen.” He punctuated this statement with another hard tap. “When Father asks you to behave, you behave!” Another sharp tap, another strangled moan. “You’re responsible for Father’s drinking, you know–it’s because of worrying about your miserable existence that he drinks! Don’t you ever give me the silent treatment again!”
This time he used his full strength to punch
Kevin in the ribs. There was a dull crack, a stabbing pain, and a deluge of darkness.
* * * *
Recovery took months. The burns described a long stripe from the region of his left kidney to his right shoulder blade. There were further burns on and behind his right ear. Brian had broken two more of his ribs, which was the more painful injury. Luckily he had been yanked away from the fire quickly, so the burns were not life-threatening. But the scars remained. He needed plastic surgery for his ear.
Already introspective and lonely by nature,
Kevin withdrew even further into himself, spending the days in bed and asking the servants to fetch him books from the Library. Father disappeared on an extended business trip to the Continent and Brian was back at his studies.
But he was troubled in spirit.
A futile rage would grow in his breast after Father’s attacks, symbolised by the humiliating inability to control his bladder. In a miserable caricature of a man, this continued lack of self-control was his greatest shame. He despised himself. He heaped up castigation in an inner voice more scathing and more hurtful than any Father or Brian had ever used.
To survive the abuse
, he had learned to withdraw deep within, a tortoise into its shell, to lose his identity in the world of imagination. He learned to curl up and endure. He took refuge in that endless realm–which was why the Library was his solace. It was why he hid there. To him books were portals to inviolable places and a means of forgetting, at least for a time, who and what he was. A life lived vicariously was better than anything real. Denied what he assumed were the ordinary pleasures of travel, attending university, or whatever else people his age did, he had only the Library. To tell the truth, he had no idea what others did. His only friends over the years had been doctors and nurses, come to assess his condition or administer his many medications.
Pills, pills, and more pills. There was a
multi-coloured handful to take every morning, and more at lunch and teatime–fifty-seven varieties in all. He knew how each tasted. He wondered that he did not rattle descending stairs. Every morning, after a breakfast of oat porridge and a slice of brown toast, washed down with a cup of Earl Grey tea, he would line up the pills on his tray and ritually down them one by one. Kevin had once tried eschewing this daily regimen–and nearly died from an asthma attack two days later. Never again.
He had
the misfortune to be born into a dysfunctional family. Kevin’s upper lip curled in aristocratic disdain. Father, who despite the inheritance money, was unable to make any success of his business ventures, who after his first debacle had taken to the bottle with a vengeance, turning himself over the years into a drunkard and an abuser. With the inheritance, which was far more substantial than Father had ever dreamed, he could have retired to a kingly living. But instead he was unable to let go, unable to accept failure. He became a tyrant, violent and depressed. At times, Kevin felt he would rather have been born a Dickensian orphan than a Jenkins.
He watched the fields grow lush and the days balmy with summer, and ached for freedom from his life sentence.
* * * *
Key words
and phrases from Great-Grandmother’s letter had leapt off the page and were now recalled with inexplicable clarity, as though the act of reading had somehow transcribed them simultaneously upon the tablet of his memory. Usually when Kevin read a book, he remembered more about how it
felt
than the particular words or plot elements. He read for unadulterated escape, the more unlike reality the better, similar to a philosopher who sallies forth against concept, ideology, meaning, and knowledge, yet remains safely within the confines of his ivory tower, having essayed no real risk. But the letter had shaken him. The sheer tenacity of those phrases in his memory terrified him. No doses of Freud, Tolstoy, Dickens, or
Narnia
, no weighty treatise on the Aztecs nor a compendium of Greek mythology, nor any lengthy grappling with Darwin’s
Origin of the Species
, could distract him for more than ten minutes at a time from the contents of that letter. Even now, as he gave up on Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
with a sigh of extreme irritation, he could not forget it.