The Waking That Kills (3 page)

Christopher Beal, a twenty-eight-year-old English teacher, six years in a government secondary school in a logging-town called Marudi, on the Baram river, Sarawak. The reality was me, a tousled ex-pat, jetlagged and a bit hung-over, whose hands shook a little and rattled the ice in the gin and tonic.

She smiled, a sudden snarl of pointed little teeth. It was an odd response to what I’d just told her, that I’d flown home at short notice because my father had had a stroke and moved into a nursing-home. ‘He’s been a monumental mason all his life,’ I was saying, ‘carving the names on headstones, re-carving the names on war-graves. That’s his car, he converted it into a workshop and...’

But she didn’t seem to be listening to me, and I realised that the snarly smile was directed past my face and over my shoulder. I glanced around, thinking that someone had come into the room and was standing silently behind me. But there was no one.

Her eyes flickered beyond me. The smile quivered and vanished from her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought I heard... I mean, I’m sorry to hear about your father.’

She was herself again. She’d been distracted, she’d been elsewhere, somewhere in a dim corner of the dark room. She folded my papers and slipped them back into their envelope. ‘So, your father... now that he’s settled reasonably comfortably, and you’ll be able to go and visit him as often as you like, you can stay here for the summer and be a friend for Lawrence.’

She pulled herself together. A cliché, but that was what she did, she seemed to tug at the outermost corners of her concentration and draw them tightly in, excluding, shutting out, blinkering out anything else which might distract her from the reason I was there.

‘That’s what Lawrence needs,’ she said, ‘not a counsellor or an analyst – he’s had so many of those that we’ve lost count and none of them’s been any good – and not really a tutor, although that’s what I put on the advertisement. He needs someone nice and kind and patient, to be his friend, a kind of brother...’

Her voice tailed away. She swigged from her glass and then swirled the ice cubes round and round at the bottom. We both stood up. She was a head shorter than me, so she tilted her smudged, anxious little face up towards me. She dipped a piece of tissue into the ice-water in her glass and dabbed deftly at the scratches on my forehead. I could smell the gin on her breath and the scent of soap from her skin, as she cleaned my negligible wound. And at the same time she was whispering, ‘I don’t know how much you’ve heard about Lawrence. I mean, do you get the news out there, the newspapers? In any case, whatever you’ve read, whatever you’ve heard, just be a friend for him. Please, that’s all I need, that’s all he needs.’

She took me upstairs to meet Lawrence Lundy.

Chapter Three

‘H
E LIVES IN
the tower,’ she said.

On the first floor landing of the house, she beckoned me to follow her and disappeared into a narrow spiral staircase. It was cool and dark in there, just wide enough for one person to be going up or down, and the white-washed walls had dropped a powder as fine as talcum on every step. Her little body swayed above me, up and up, and her footsteps were almost silent, just a slip and a slither of friction on the velvet dust. I put out a hand to steady myself against the wall of the staircase, as it wound and wound around me, and I felt the dry powder on my fingertips – indeed, when my arm brushed the wall, the whiteness glimmered on the material of my shirt. It grew darker as we climbed further away from the landing below us, but then, all of a sudden, the woman reached up, pushed open an arched wooden doorway and a pale wash of daylight, clouded with chalky dust, flooded the staircase.

‘Lawrence,’ she called out, and then drew me up and into a big, sun-filled room. ‘Are you there, Lawrence? He’s here, the gentleman’s arrived...’

The boy turned to face us. He’d been standing at a window with a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes, but he lowered them on a strap round his neck and crossed the room towards me.

He was as unlike his mother as any son could possibly be. Almost as tall as me, Lawrence Lundy was a sinewy, lanky fifteen-year-old with purple-black, mole-dark hair. His face, unusually narrow and gaunt for a teenage boy, was downy; at least, the light from the window from which he’d been staring shone on the down as he angled his face one way and another. His Adam’s apple bobbed and bulged as he said, ‘Hello,’ in a manly voice, and his handshake was bony. Beside him, his mother looked even smaller than she had before, a pantomime elf clutching the hand of a pantomime ogre. He was dusky-dark, his hair like a pelt, the bristle of his eyebrows and the gleam of his incipient whiskers... while the sunlight caught her bright quick colours as she looked from her son to me with an imploring smile, with the unmistakable plea in her eyes that we should straightaway like each other...

The boy seemed less interested in me than in the smudges on his mother’s face. He loomed over her, and, although she tried to fend him off with exasperated swipes of her hands, he feinted at her cheeks and her forehead with his long white fingers. The tower-room was a grand airy space, with wide windows on all four sides, and the views of the woodland valley, right up to the distant ridge of the wolds and further to a hazy, blue horizon, gave the sensation of being in the eyrie of some huge bird of prey. The windows were open, and a breeze was moving and tinkling dozens or even scores of model aircraft which hung from the rafters of the high ceiling... a hundred planes of different shapes and sizes and colours, a myriad squadron which swerved and banked in such a chill wind that it might have come all the way from the faraway coast of the North Sea. A door opened directly onto the odd parapet I’d glimpsed from the lawn – and just then, before I could comment on the unusual, marvellous room and interrupt the woman and her son in their teasing play, there was a sudden commotion...

An orange cat sprang from the parapet and into the room, holding a pigeon in its jaws.

The bird, a wood-pigeon which seemed to be as big as the cat itself, was beating and thrashing with all its strength, and yet the cat tiptoed between the three of us as though we weren’t there, sprang effortlessly from the floor onto the boy’s unmade bed and pressed the struggling creature deep into the rumpled sheets. In the few seconds it took for any of us to react, the pigeon fought itself out of the jaws of the cat and sculled across the bed, was pounced on and recaptured, shaken violently and pinioned...

The boy, Lawrence, took two long strides to his bed. His mother gave a little squeak, with both her hands pressed to her mouth. He took the cat by the scruff, lifted it from its prey and dropped it unceremoniously onto the floor. Straightaway he had the exhausted pigeon in a close, firm grip. Unable to move, it hissed and panted and stared around the room with bulging, red eyes. In another moment the boy had crossed to the open door, and before his mother could say more than, ‘No, Lawrence... I don’t think it can...’ he’d tossed the bird off the parapet and into mid-air.

‘Lawrence, no... it can’t...’ his mother said again, but it was too late.

Whether the boy had meant to rescue the pigeon by enabling it to flutter into the nearest tree or had simply dumped it out of the tower, it made no difference. He leaned over the parapet and chuckled hoarsely, a dry rasping sound in the back of his throat, ‘Go on, fly... go on, fly!’ I followed the woman outside, in time to see the bird falling and falling, beating one of its wings pathetically in a futile attempt to remain airborne, wheeling and tumbling until it landed upside down in a nettle-bed and sank into the undergrowth.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of brilliant orange... the cat shot out of the tower-room and down the spiral staircase. A moment later, as the boy and his mother and I craned over the parapet, we saw the cat reappear far below us. It sprang out of the house, through the open French windows. It paused on the lawn, long enough to sense and locate the flutter and flap of the broken bird... it must have sensed, in the way that perhaps only implacable killers can do, that the pigeon was fatally crippled... and it strolled nonchalantly across the grass, head down, swaying its hips like a lioness, and slunk at last into the nettle-bed from which the sound of the fluttering was coming.

I was watching the boy, whose friend I was going to be. Lawrence Lundy. The name still meant nothing to me, although I’d seen my father almost apoplectic in his efforts to tell me where he’d heard it or read it before. Quite oblivious of me – indeed, he’d spoken only one word to me and barely glanced in my direction for more than a second or two – the boy now lifted the binoculars to his face and pointed them down to the spot where the bird had crash-landed, where the cat had disappeared.

He was holding his breath. Then he licked his lips and swallowed, so that the bulge in his throat rose and fell and was still again. The smile on his mouth was like a scar. I saw a prickling of tears in his mother’s eyes.

Chapter Four

I
’D SEEN THE
advertisement pinned up in a newsagent’s stall on Lincoln station.

I’d got off the train there to make the connection to Grimsby. With a few minutes to spare, I’d bought a newspaper and a chocolate bar and scanned the notice-board for the possibility of renting a bed-sitting-room or a cottage or even a caravan to use as my base while I was settling my father into his home. There was a hand-written note on water-marked paper, large, cursive letters from the broad nib of a fountain-pen: ‘Home tutor needed for a teenage boy, to live as part of the family in a comfortable, quiet, country house. Chalke House, 0392 0897.’ Straightaway, on an impulse, I’d used the handful of change the newsagent had given me to make the call from the telephone kiosk on the platform.

The Grimsby train was pulling in. The station loudspeaker started blaring. The call-box swallowed coin after coin. I shouted my name and the purpose of my call into the receiver and could barely make out the breathless voice of a woman suggesting I visit as soon as I could make it, even tomorrow, Monday, and some directions for me to find the house... ‘Lawrence, my son’s name is Lawrence Lundy, he’s fifteen and...’ The voice was so faint I could hardly hear it. My coins ran out. The train was going to leave. No more than a minute since I’d first read the advertisement, I was scrambling onto the train for Grimsby, with the dim notion of a job and even a home for the coming summer months.

‘Y
OU WERE VERY
brave to come at all,’ the woman was saying.

Juliet Lundy, the imp from the tree-tops, had bathed and changed into a loose cotton robe. I’d showered in my own bathroom, adjoining a spare bedroom which looked across the dark brown pond and into the woodland. A cool twilit evening... the French windows were still open, and she was nestling on the sofa with her feet tucked underneath her. It was a large, untidy, comfortably dusty lounge; the inside of the house was covered with a powdering of chalky dust which sighed and sifted with every breath and movement of the building’s inhabitants. After a sherry, we’d eaten lamb sandwiches, apparently the leftovers from the previous day’s Sunday lunch, but delicious with a minty salad and a bottle of red wine.

Dusk gathered around the house. The darkness crept out of the surrounding woodland, folded onto the tower, the battlements, the obliquely angled roofs of Chalke House and all its softly rounded corners. The room was pleasantly gloomy. The only light was a shaded lamp in the corner and a paraffin lamp just outside, where the boy was sitting and reading.

‘I meant it when I said I didn’t think you’d turn up,’ the woman went on. ‘Yesterday, on the phone, you could hardly hear a word I was saying, and you were shouting over that awful loudspeaker. When you didn’t try to call again, I thought you weren’t interested. But you came, so thank you for that.’ She made a vague gesture of toasting me with her wine glass. ‘If you want to stay for a few days or a week and see what we’re like, that’s all I can really expect.’