The Waking That Kills (5 page)

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.

The grasses and nettles swished where he’d hurried off. And then the woodland was utterly still.

I peered into the cardboard box which seemed to have startled the boy so much. No cobra. Only a heap of newspapers, a glimpse of headlines about a miners’ strike, a sensational murder, a Hollywood divorce...

I swung the door of the hearse shut. It was so heavy, the hinges so sweetly oiled, that it closed itself with a click. There was no other sound in the fragrant shade of the Scots pine.

Except... except... another sound I hadn’t heard for more than a year. A favourite of mine, which I didn’t know I’d missed so much during my sultry perpetual summer in Borneo. A favourite sound of an English summer.

The swifts. I peered up and up through the branches of the pine. High in the pale blue sky, the swifts were hurtling and screaming, screaming their lungfuls of screams in giddy, madcap flight.

Chapter Six

‘Y
OUR FACE IS
better.’

I was in the kitchen with Juliet. She’d made me coffee and toast for breakfast and she was doing some baking. She’d taken two rings off her wedding finger and dropped them into an egg cup on a shelf behind her, and she was spreading flour all over the big wooden table. She’d already managed to dab her face with powdery smudges, and now she was starting to make her mixture in a glass bowl.

I hid a smile in my mug of coffee. Everything she did, since I’d first met her dangling out of the tree with moss and pine needles in her hair, seemed childishly untidy and slapdash, in the way that a puppy or a very young kitten might leave its own trail of untidiness. But nice. I liked her and I liked the house, its carelessly comfortable, lived-in feeling. And now, in her country-kitchen, as she stood at the wide table and swept it with flour, she looked again like an elf or a pixie of the household, somehow too small for the place, but busy and quick and... and messy. I couldn’t help smiling, managed not to burst out laughing, at the way she pushed the hair out of her eyes and left her forehead ghostly with flour, her hair like a mist of cobwebs. And yet, despite the mess she was making, there was a cavalier expertise in her movements... she’d done it all many times before, and the end result, the scones she was assembling, would no doubt be delicious.

She blinked at me, frowned. She knew I was amused. ‘Your face is better,’ she said, to change the focus of attention from her to me. ‘It was just a scratch. Could’ve been a lot worse, if you’d got some glass in your eyes...’

She crossed the kitchen towards me and peered closer. She had flour on her lashes. ‘You’re alright now. But I don’t suppose you’ll ever get the windscreen fixed, will you? I mean, how do you find parts for a car like that? What year is it? Something from the 50s or 60s?’

‘Don’t worry about the car,’ I said. I finished off my coffee and toast and carried the mug and plate to the sink. I was going to go upstairs and try to engage Lawrence, or at least see if he was awake and out of bed. After all, it was a bright morning at the end of May, it was going to be a hotter and hotter day, and that was why I was there, in Chalke House in Lincolnshire, to engage a troubled teenage boy and be some kind of mentor for him. I couldn’t just sit in the kitchen watching an attractively fey, dizzy woman making scones. ‘Don’t worry about the car. It’s not going anywhere, not at the moment. And my father’s never going to need it again.’ I added, to smooth over any guilt she might be feeling about the damage she’d caused and also just to sound helpful, ‘You must have a car here, if you ever want me to run out and get anything…?’

She’d made the scones and put them on a tray, into the oven. She said, ‘It’s round the back of the house. I go out as seldom as possible, just to do a big shop that’ll last us for weeks. I don’t want to go out, nor does Lawrence. And anyway, the car’s a mess.’

As I rinsed my mug in the sink, she stood beside me and rinsed the flour off her hands. We shared the same flow of water from the cold tap. Our hands touched. Our hips touched. A bit awkward, so I thought of something to say, ‘I could take a look, if you like? Check the oil and water and stuff?’

‘No.’ She said it too sharply. ‘No, don’t.’