The swifts. We were in their world. There were scores of them, and the sky was full of their screaming. They hurtled around us. They were black, like chips of jet, and they were breath-taking... the agility of their swerving, the rush and flicker of their wings, as though the air gave no resistance but was a vacuum through which they sped like fragments of pure energy.
‘A good idea?’ the boy said. ‘Ever given a lesson in a classroom like this before?’
‘It’s marvellous...’ I managed to say, ‘and the birds are marvellous...’ I found some more breath, despite the frailty of the bits and pieces I was hanging onto and the yawning space around me. ‘I’ve got a colony of them, swiftlets, maybe a hundred of them nesting under my house in Borneo... and there are millions, or maybe hundreds of thousands, in the limestone caves in the jungle...’
He was looking sideways at me. ‘I was joking,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean you had to start doing a lesson up here.’
‘Devil birds...’ I went on perversely. ‘There’s a lot of spooky folklore about them... because they’re black, I suppose, and because they scream like mad, and because they fly so fast and so high and never seem to rest... in the old days people weren’t sure where they roosted, and they made up stories that the swifts could sleep and fly at the same time, and mate and fly at the same time, or else they...’
The tree was swaying more and more. I squeezed my eyes shut again, opened them narrowly and saw through my lashes that we were higher than the boy’s tower. I rolled my head the other way and saw nothing but sky as far as a foam of cloud which might have been the North Sea horizon. I felt my stomach lurch and a bubble of nausea in my throat. Fighting it, swallowing it, determined to keep up a pretence of confidence, I heard myself muttering, ‘Tiny feet, almost nothing feet... their Latin name “apodidae” meaning “footless”... that’s the family name of the swifts and swiftlets...’
Enough. I gingerly edged off the pallet and grappled with the tree again, to try and start climbing down. The boy was watching me, unwittingly impressed by a teacher so determined to impart his dried-up pellets of knowledge. With a show of youthful bravado, he stood up, just as I was slithering down, and he flapped his arms at the birds which dashed around his head. There seemed to be more of them, they mobbed him as if he were a trespasser in their space. Preoccupied with my own safety, finding it harder to climb down than it had been climbing up, I glimpsed him towering above me: an alien in the sky-world of the swifts, a lanky teenage boy in shorts and a smelly t-shirt. A bird banged into his face, and he swiped at it as though it were a wasp. For a second, by sheer chance he caught it in his fist, but then it squirmed out and away and tried to regain its control of the air... but one of its wings was damaged and it tumbled past me, down and down through the branches of the Scots pine, disappearing somewhere far below.
‘Be careful, Lawrence!’ I called to him. ‘Get down! Come on, I’m going down now...’
Yes, it was harder. I couldn’t see my feet in the gloom. Time and again I lodged a foot between branch and trunk, and then my weight would either crunch my toes or the branch would sickeningly creak. Slowly, painfully, with the boy huffing impatiently just above my head, I got halfway down and paused. Daring as an ape, he skirted past me, and the smell of his stale shirt and adolescent sweat was strong in my nostrils. He swung easily downwards. My sickness had gone, it had been the movement of the treetop, like the swell of a lazy ocean, which had moved my stomach... but my hands were burning and my legs were jumping. Closer and closer to the ground, I glanced down to see the humped outline of the car and hear Juliet and Lawrence in a heated exchange. Just then, when she called up to me, ‘Are you alright, Christopher?’ and I called down, ‘Yes,’ my left foot was jammed against the trunk with all my weight excruciatingly on it. I tried to shift some of the pressure to my other foot...
The branch I was holding snapped off. The one under my foot snapped off. For a split-second, there was a blissful relief from the pain... and then I was falling.
My fall was slowed by one crunching impact after another, until I landed in a wreckage of branches and twigs and showering needles.
Juliet knelt to me. I couldn’t speak. ‘Oh my god, are you alright?’ she was asking again, and I was nodding and heaving for breath. I was fine, I was fine, I wanted to tell her, because the boy was looming over me with a wolfish smile and his Adam’s apple bobbing, and he was chuckling a lot of hilarious nonsense about the wild man of Borneo and orang-utans and...
I wasn’t completely fine. At first I’d felt nothing, because of the shock of my crash-landing. But when I tried to sit up, there was a dazzle, a blaze of white light in my head.
I cried out, a high, almost animal yelp. The pain rippled through my chest and into my brain.
T
HEY GOT ME
up to the house. Lawrence tugged me upright, arranged my arm across his shoulder, and I hopped agonisingly beside him, through the woodland.
Every hop was a torture. I’d turned an ankle... annoying, niggling... but it was the hurt in my chest which made me bite my lips and cry out again. Juliet said I’d cracked a rib; she’d heard, from other people who’d done it, that it was the most painful injury you could sustain. I didn’t need her to tell me. I could hardly breathe. The pain made me retch, and the pain of retching was worse.
A bizarre procession, through the dappled sunlight of a lovely June morning...
Me and the boy, conjoined, a wheezing, stumbling three-legged creature. A few paces behind us, a little light-footed woman, a kind of sprite or a faery huntress. And leading the way, the orange cat. It had emerged from the undergrowth as we’d started our journey from the Scots pine. Perfectly uninterested in what the ridiculous humans were doing, it had seen something much more fascinating. It had pounced on the disabled swift... pressed it firmly into the long grass and then caught it in its jaws. Now, with the bird in its mouth, the long black wings fluttering feebly, the cat was wonderfully exotic... a miniature tiger with a magnificent moustache.
So Lawrence lugged me to the house and lowered me onto the sofa. He couldn’t wait to get away. He affected concern for his stricken tutor, but it wasn’t very convincing. I was going to snarl at him about the car and whether he’d been in it... but he did his shifty sloping-off, again. I saw him grab the cat and prise the bird from its fangs; the swift was still alive, the terrified creature, and the boy cupped it in his hands and disappeared upstairs. I was going to growl at Juliet, that I’d arrived intact at Chalke House a fortnight ago and now I’d got a car with a shattered windscreen and a flat battery and myself excruciatingly crippled... but she was ministering to me, plumping me into a pile of cushions. I lay back and sipped the air. I watched the quick, nimble movements of her fingers and saw the anxiety on her face.
‘I’m so sorry, Christopher, I’m so sorry...’ she was whispering. The sibilance reminded me of the way her voice had altered the previous evening, when we’d shared this very sofa and swigged the gin together. ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry...’ and although it was only mid-morning, I thought how good it might be to share a stiff drink right now with this dizzy, fragile woman. ‘I tried to put him off, you heard me trying to put him off, it was such a silly idea to go up the tree, but he’s so selfish and stubborn and a show-off...’ She was holding my hands in hers. She had dust in her lashes and pine needles in her hair and twiggy smudges on her face. ‘Like his father, just like his father, just selfish and stubborn and showing-off...’
‘Did he go into my car last night?’ My voice was feeble.
The question stopped her dead. She said, ‘What?’ although she’d heard what I’d said.
‘I saw a light in the trees. I got up and looked out of the window, I saw a light in the trees and thought I was dreaming or it was fireflies or something...’ She let go of my hands. She was staring at me. I managed to wheeze a few more words. ‘I mean, what was he doing? What was the idea? To open the door and leave on the light and run down the battery so that...’
‘So that what?’ She pulled away from me and blinked, a bit too theatrically. ‘So your car couldn’t start and you’d be stuck here and couldn’t get away? Do you really think he’d do that to keep you here?’
‘Or was he looking for something? What? What was he looking for?’
She stood up very suddenly. She did the squirrel thing, smearing the moss and dust into her face with the backs of her hands. ‘I know you don’t know him,’ she said. ‘How could you, after just a few days here? Lawrence has dreams, he dreams of his father... and they’re more than just dreams, they’re a kind of unreality he’s created to help him forget the madness of his real world...’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘I’m sorry, Christopher, I’m sorry you’ve blundered into all this... and now this has happened and...’
She spun away, out of the room.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling. In my fall, my foot had caught in the branches and wrenched my ankle skew-whiff. Much worse, I might’ve cracked a rib. I lay as still as I could, breathing as shallowly as possible, and wondered at what the woman had said, the muddle of messages I’d got from her. Did she want me to stay and befriend her son, or was she sorry I’d come and she wanted me to go away? Was she angry with me, was I angry with her, were we angry with each other? The boy too, his moody sulky brooding, his explosion of anger, the glowering darkness in his manner... hard to explain, but it was more threatening than teenage truculence.
I shifted my weight on the sofa, I suddenly felt as though the mounded cushions were a quagmire into which I was sinking... but when I moved, the pain in my chest dazzled in my brain. I clenched my teeth, relaxed and sank back... and when the pain stopped, my head cleared and I realised there were two things I really, pragmatically, needed to do.
I extricated myself from the sofa, as desperate as a Dickensian convict drowning in a salt-marsh... no, not that bad, but I needed to get out and hobble through those French windows and into the wildness of the garden again. Because I was bursting to piss.
Despite the pain, I had to reach the nearest nettle-bed and piss... the morning coffees and the residual bellyful of gin. I stumbled to the undergrowth and unzipped and the relief was so good it almost made me forget the muddle in my head and the bruising fall from the tree. The spray was a glorious rainbow. The steam was pungent, as rank as the
macaque
in my Borneo garden. The droplets were jewels on the hairy leaves of the nettles. I pissed for a minute, maybe more. Eyes closed, nostrils flaring, emptying my thoughts.
And then the other thing. Never mind the conundrum of whether I should stay or not. I wasn’t going anywhere until I could jump-start the hearse or charge the flattened battery. Juliet had said there was a car at the back of the house. Hissing through my teeth, shaping obscenities on my lips, I went to look for it.
There it was, in a stand of holly. An ancient holly wood. The trees were centuries old. The boles were scarred like the limbs of a battle-weary warrior. An armoury of leaves enclosed and shadowed a car, swaddled in a mouldy green-brown tarpaulin.
It didn’t look promising. Juliet had said she didn’t go out much, indeed as seldom as possible. From the mossy-damp cover and the enveloping, almost submarine darkness, I guessed that, whatever it was, the car hadn’t been started for weeks.
I undid a knot of nylon rope under the back bumper and peeled the cover off the boot. Metallic-silver paintwork, the BMW logo... of course, she’d been a pilot’s wife, she was a pilot’s widow, of course she’d have something swish.
I peeled a bit more. The rear window was steamed up. Its careful covering with the tarpaulin wasn’t doing the car much good... it needed some air on it and in it, it needed starting and running and a snarly run into the sunshine.
I slithered off the whole of the tarpaulin, stood back and appraised the car.
Blood. A miscarriage. A horrid mess of red. There was a swirl of it on the roof and smeared down the windscreen, and the bonnet was a thick, congealed flow of deep, gleaming red paint. It was daubed on the roof, applied with ugly strokes of a big brush. On the bonnet, it had been poured straight from a tin or a bucket, luscious liquid runnels, dried into spools and whorls like lava from a volcano.
I tried the driver’s door. Locked. It was gloomy in the holly wood and so I leaned closer, to rest my weight and steady my breathing, and to see the extraordinary vandalism more closely.
On the roof... letters? Was it a word? I strained on tip-toe to try and make it out. Something like a big E and then... and then a voice behind me. Juliet’s voice.
‘Eye. I think that’s what it says. Like, an eye for an eye. That’s why we don’t go out.’
Not at all elfin, she was a wounded and embittered woman. She pushed past me. ‘I told you not to bother with the car,’ she snapped, and she started to tug the tarpaulin back on again. ‘I don’t cover it because I want to keep it nice. I cover it because it isn’t nice. I’m ashamed of it and I can’t go out in it, I’m ashamed to take it somewhere and get it fixed...’ She was struggling with the heavy material. ‘Help me. No, don’t help me, you’re hurt and you shouldn’t have come round here and...’
‘Who did it?’ I asked her. ‘What does it mean?’ A thought sprang into my head and out of my mouth before I could stop it. ‘Was it Lawrence?’
She just stared at me. Thinking she was pausing before an outburst of anger at what I’d suggested, I added quickly, ‘I’m sorry, no, it’s so ugly I’m sure he wouldn’t do that. But who? Why?’
She surprised me by smiling. But it was a twisted sneer of a smile. It was cruel and sad, and it carried the threat of something sarcastic that she was going to say.
‘Ugly? That’s funny. I mean, it’s funny you saying he wouldn’t do it because it’s ugly.’
Her shoulders started to shake. She was laughing and crying at the same time. She touched the crude letters, the word daubed red onto silver. Through a mumble of tears, she said, ‘He can do ugly. This is nothing, this is nothing but a bit of paint on a stupid...’