The Waking That Kills (12 page)

She didn’t say anything. She raised her eyebrows and tried to smile, to show a polite interest in what I was saying. And then, giving up, she folded her arms across her chest and narrowed her eyes, as though daring me to go on.

So I did. ‘Lawrence was showing me his batik and I thought it was good. But you didn’t seem so keen. I mean, like you didn’t want him to show it to me. Why’s that?’

There was a timely distraction. We both glanced down at a gentle commotion on the floor.

Gentle, commotion. The words wouldn’t usually work together, unless the agent concerned was a cat, whose speciality was a combination of stealth and violence. It was the orange cat, again, which had wrangled a pigeon bigger than itself into the tower bedroom, which had ambushed the grounded swift and borne it home for the boy to experiment on. Now, as if to defuse a difficult moment between its mistress and a nosey newcomer, the cat had overturned a laundry basket and was dragging Juliet’s wet shirt across the floor, the one she’d worn when she came to the hearse.

‘Bad puss...’ she hissed at it. She flapped with a tea-towel. The cat feinted from the blow and retreated under the table. One of its claws was snagged in the shirt, it couldn’t have let go if it tried, so it skulked in the shelter of the table legs and under my chair. When I bent and picked up the shirt and unhooked the cat’s claw from it, the animal swiped at my hand, a raking pass which didn’t break the skin, and at the same time, something else which must’ve been stuck inside the shirt dropped out.

An odd sock? A handkerchief? The cat sprang onto it. It was a crumpled ball of newspaper.

A perfect toy for the killer cat, something to menace and maul, to swat this way and that across the kitchen floor and chase and pounce on again. Each time Juliet bent to pick it up, the cat was too quick. It got there first and batted the ball of paper out of her reach.

It could’ve looked like a game... a lissom woman and her tigerish pet playing in a sun-filled country kitchen. Until Juliet, lunging hopelessly for the third time where the cat had been, slung the tea-towel at it and said with tremendous force, ‘Fuck you, you fucking cat!’

The ball of paper skidded to a halt against my bare foot and I bent to pick it up.

‘Give it to me,’ she said. She crossed the room and held out her hand, as if she were a schoolteacher and I were a naughty boy. ‘Give it to me.’

‘No,’ I said.

I was starting to unfold the paper onto the table when Lawrence came in.

Chapter Twelve

L
AWRENCE
L
UNDY.
M
Y
father had had trouble saying the words. Because of his stroke, he’d blurred them oddly in his mouth. He’d heard the name somewhere before, but it wouldn’t come back to him.

And then at last it had. ‘Bad boy, bad boy...’ His face had twisted into a grimace of revulsion.

Lawrence and Juliet Lundy stood over me, on either side of the table. They could both see what I’d got in front of me and knew what it was, they’d both tried to prevent me from seeing it. Now they stopped short of physically wresting the paper from me.

‘You would’ve found out sooner or later.’ It was the woman who spoke first. ‘To tell the truth, we were both surprised you hadn’t heard about it already. Of course I would’ve told you. We only thought to keep it back for a while because we weren’t sure you’d stay very long anyway.’ She said all this without looking at me, looking at her son as though the words would filter through him and then reach me. She glanced down at the paper. ‘Go ahead. And then me or Lawrence will try and make some sense out of it.’

Lawrence had a sickly smile on his face. As usual he’d appeared in the kitchen unwashed and smelling of his bed. He must have thought I looked unusually tousled, unshaven and unshowered, in my bed-shirt and shorts. He wouldn’t know that I’d slept in the car and had just wandered in from the garden. In the same way that I got a waft of his sleepy body, he was inhaling the scent from me. Something in the smell of my shirt, my hair, something on my skin... as he watched me trying to open up the sheet of paper, he was leaning closer and more overpoweringly, invading my space.

And sipping the air. Tasting it. When I glanced up and saw that odd little smile, I caught a glimpse of that ecstasy he’d experienced in the nettle-bed. It was a gleam of almost transcendental joy. A shiver ran through me. I saw him catch his mother’s eye and he mouthed the words at her, thinking I was too preoccupied to notice.

‘He’s here, Dad is here!’

My smell. The fragrance of his mother’s body, on me. And I could hardly say,
No, Lawrence, it’s me, it’s me you can smell, not the ghost of your father. He isn’t here, it’s a sunny summer’s morning in your kitchen at home, there’s toast and marmalade and just you and me and your Mum and your pesky cat. No ghosts, alright? The smell is me, because me and your Mum had sex last night in the back of my car. Me, not your father!

I couldn’t really say that. He was gleaming and glowing and towering over me, sniffing the air like a bloodhound.

They watched me trying to undo the newspaper. It was difficult because it was wet. She’d grabbed it and squashed it into her shirt as she left the hearse, and in the kitchen she must have forgotten and slung the shirt into the laundry basket with the paper inside it. I prised it very gently open, like an archaeologist teasing the secrets from a manuscript discovered in a shipwreck.

The
Lincoln Gazette
. Last October. Lawrence’s face, a mug-shot, nearly all of the front page of the paper. A zombie face. A shock of black hair, heavy black eyebrows, empty black eyes. His mouth a scar. Beneath the photo, simply the name. He looked dead. Hanged or drowned.

BOY BLINDED BY BOILING WAX. ATROCITY IN SCHOOL BATIK LESSON.

Lawrence Lundy, a student at Alford Secondary School, was taken into police custody yesterday afternoon and charged with assault. Lundy, 15, held two younger boys captive in the school’s art room and poured (continued on page 2)

I tried to turn the page over, but it had already started to stick to the table. Sodden, it was breaking up. I may have spilled some marmalade, some butter or a slick of coffee... whatever it was, the paper was sticking and shearing, and when I tried to tear it off, the newsprint was a ghostly inverted reflection of its original self, back to front and...

boiling wax onto their faces. Police were on the scene to rescue the boys and they were taken to St Mary’s Hospital. One of the boys, Toby Carroll, 12, was discharged the same evening. Simon Winton, 13, is still in hospital. There are fears he might...

Lawrence leaned over my shoulder. He clawed the paper off the table. It shredded under his nails. ‘The photo’s terrible,’ he said. ‘I was nervous. The story’s alright, the facts are kind of alright, but...’

He clawed again and again at the table. His nails made a horrid grating noise. It reminded me of how the orange cat had batted the ball of newspaper backwards and forwards around the kitchen and then its desultory, instinctive swipe at my hand. I leaned back in my chair and let him do it. He scrunched the paper into a tighter and tinier ball, like a child making the cruellest snowball of grit and compacted ice... and perversely, because it had taken some doing and an unexpected fuck you to get it from the cat, he tossed it onto the floor... where the animal pounced, smote it out of the room with a top-spin forehand and disappeared into the garden.

‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ Lawrence said.

IT’S A PISSY
tuesday morning. we drive to school and it’s still dark because it’s like october and it feels like we’re burrowing deeper and deeper into a miserable long winter. it’s raining. leaves blowing everywhere, they’re falling off the trees and blowing everywhere and the road and pavements are kind of black and shiny.

mum drops me at school. tuesday is crap, school is crap full stop, but tuesday’s the worst. the morning’s maths and english, lord of the fucking flies again with mr ramsay just reading it to us in his plummy reading-aloud voice. death by boredom. tuna sandwich in the canteen and then it’s art club in the afternoon. which is good. I mean it’s all crap but art club is the only time in the week when my head isn’t just banging with boredom.

art club with mr bray. he smells, his clothes and his hair smell of cigarettes and his fingers are yellowy with nicotine. drink too, on his breath, even in the mornings, I guess it’s from lots of beer or whisky or something the night before.

but he’s an artist. I mean, really. I’ve seen his stuff. I don’t know why he’s a teacher, like ramsay and all the others who are just so crap and ordinary and boring. he plays music in his art room too.

so it’s tuesday afternoon. there’s bray and me and two other kids in the art room. it’s pissing down outside and already getting dark, only three or half-past, and the tree outside is scratching on the window. bray says it’s a quince or something, he says it’s rare maybe the only one in the county. I don’t care what it is, but I kind of like the scratchy sound, the rhythm of it and the rain. bray’s got some jazz on, piano and bass and drums, says it’s errol garner. I like it. and we’re doing batik. so the room’s warm and fuggy and nice, with a big pan of wax heating up on the gas ring in the corner.

someone comes in. a girl. a woman, I guess. annoying, it spoils the private art club thing. bray says she’s a student from lincoln university doing her teaching practice and wants to watch the club. she’s thin and white with thin ratty hair, smells of some kind of cream for spots. a wash-out, I can tell straight off. trying to be nice. pathetic. she’s been in the room two minutes and I want her to piss off.

worse, she’s doing a project. she’s got a lot of big books and stuff and bray says she’s going to do some tests on us. so I’m starting to feel scratchy because it’s spoilt the mood and the music, and even the quince on the window is annoying scratchy instead of part of the music and rain and a nice dark afternoon...

bray goes out. I guess he thinks he can slip out for a coffee or a drink or something because the student’s there.

she calls me over, I have to leave what I’m doing, even though the pan of wax is boiling bubbling and I want to paint it onto my material, and she sits me down with her at bray’s table.

big heavy books she’s got. she turns the pages and there are lots of dots and spots and different colours. she asks me what I can see, any shapes or numbers or letters in the dots. some of them are clear. some of them a bit vague, I’m not sure. and pages where there’s nothing, nothing but kind of washed-out pastel colours with no shapes or letters or numbers or anything.

she’s looking at me funny sideways. asks me to try some of the pages again. and she’s writing stuff in her little exercise book. One of the other kids, a little twat called carroll, that’s his surname, he’s a boy called carroll, wanders over and he’s looking over my shoulder and he kind of snorts each time I say there’s nothing. I turn round and tell him to fuck off.

the student-girl-woman goes red. the other twat called winton comes over. I can feel him there behind me and I can hear him sniggering, so I turn round again and tell him to fuck off too.

student’s very red. not blushing, but blotchy. thin sea-weedy hair and a big spot on her chin and blotchy. she stares at me so I stare at her and she looks scared. she pushes weedy bits of hair behind her ear and she writes in her book. her ear’s red too. I want to tell her to fuck off.

when I stand up and walk away, she calls after me, like trying to be nice and friendly but her voice shaking because she’s nervous and weak and frightened of me. she’s saying stuff like don’t worry it’s quite common, it’s mostly boys, reds and greens and browns the commonest type... and she’s wittering on and her voice is scratchy and grating and she’s saying stuff like they call it colour-blindness but it’s nothing serious and won’t make any difference you just see things differently and...

I walk back towards her and put my face right up to hers and whisper look I don’t want to hear this so fuck off will you

so she does. she scurries out of the room like she’s going to piss herself, with her big magic books and her secret little note book, a spotty little student-witch with her silly spells.

I can’t remember the rest of it so clearly. I remember rubbing my eyes a lot. rubbing them because... I don’t know I’m mad because she said about blindness it makes me feel angry for my eyes, for being blind, not really blind but... I mean she can see stuff I can’t see, and the twats carroll and winton are sniggering because I can’t see stuff they can see and there’s something wrong with me and

angry. angry with the student doing her experiment on me for her fucking project... angry with the other kids. I go to the door and lock it.

I jab carroll in the stomach. that’s all it takes. he falls onto the floor like he’s choking, like he can’t breathe. I shove winton so hard he goes down too. he isn’t sniggering anymore. like he’s crying, frightened because I locked the door.