Slade House

by David Mitchell

  “Mind?” says Mum. “Meeting Sir Yehudi? Of course I don’t mind, I just…can’t quite believe I’m awake.”

  “Bravissima.” Lady Grayer takes Mum by the arm and steers her towards the big house. “Don’t be shy—Yehudi’s a teddy bear. Why don’t you chaps”—she turns to Jonah and me—“amuse yourselves in this glorious sunshine for a little while? Mrs. Polanski’s making coffee éclairs, so be sure to work up an appetite.”

  · · ·

  “Eat a damson, Nathan,” says Jonah, handing me a fruit from the tree. He sits down at the base of one tree, so I sit down against its neighbor.

  “Thanks.” Its warm slushy flesh tastes of early August mornings. “Is Yehudi Menuhin really visiting?”

  Jonah gives me a look I don’t understand. “Why on earth would Norah lie?”

  I’ve never met a boy who calls his mum by her Christian name. Dad’d call it “very modern.” “I didn’t say she is lying. It’s just that he’s an incredibly famous virtuoso violinist.”

  Jonah spits his damson stone into tall pink daisies. “Even incredibly famous virtuoso violinists need friends. So how old are you, Nathan? Thirteen?”

  “Bang on.” I spit my stone farther. “You?”

  “Same,” he says. “My birthday’s in October.”

  “February.” I’m older, if shorter. “What school do you go to?”

  “School and I never saw eye to eye,” says Jonah. “So to speak.”

  I don’t understand. “You’re a kid. You have to go. It’s the law.”

  “The law and I never got on, either. ’Nother damson?”

  “Thanks. But what about the truancy officer?”

  Jonah’s face may mean he’s puzzled. Mrs. Marconi and me have been working on “puzzled.” “The what officer?”

  I don’t get it. He must know. “Are you taking the piss?”

  Jonah says, “I wouldn’t dream of taking your piss. What would I do with it?” That’s kind of witty, but if I ever used it on Gaz Ingram he’d crucify me on the rugby posts. “Seriously, I’m taught at home.”

  “That must be ace. Who teaches you? Your mum?”

  Jonah says, “Our master,” and looks at me.

  His eyes hurt, so I look away. Master’s like a posh word for “teacher.” “What’s he like?”

  Jonah says, not like he’s trying to boast, “A true genius.”

  “I’m dead jealous,” I admit. “I hate my school. Hate it.”

  “If you don’t fit into the system, the system makes life hell. Is your father a pianist too, like your mother?”

  I like talking about Dad as much as I hate talking about school. “No. Dad lives in Salisbury but Salisbury in Rhodesia, not Wiltshire. Dad’s from there, from Rhodesia, and he works as a trainer for the Rhodesian Army. Lots of kids tell fibs about their dads, but I’m not. My dad’s an ace marksman. He can put a bullet between a man’s eyes at a hundred meters. He let me watch him once.”

  “He let you watch him put a bullet between a man’s eyes?”

  “It was a shop dummy at a rifle range near Aldershot. It had a rainbow wig and an Adolf Hitler mustache.”

  Doves or pigeons coo in the damson trees. No one’s ever very sure if doves and pigeons are the same bird or not.

  “Must be tough,” says Jonah, “your father being so far away.”

  I shrug. Mum told me to keep shtum about the divorce.

  “Have you ever visited Africa?” asks Jonah.

  “No, but Dad promised I can visit next Christmas. I was meant to go last Christmas, but Dad suddenly had lots of soldiers to train. When it’s winter here, it’s summer there.” I’m about to tell Jonah about the safari Dad’s going to take me on, but Mrs. Marconi says talking’s like ping-pong: you take turns. “What job does your dad do?”

  I’m expecting Jonah to tell me his father’s an admiral or a judge or something lordly, but no. “Father died. Shot. It was an accident on a pheasant shoot. It all happened a long, long time ago.”

  Can’t be that long ago, I think, but I just say, “Right.”

  The purple foxgloves sway like something’s there…

  · · ·

  …but there isn’t, and Jonah says, “Tell me about your recurring nightmare, Nathan.” We’re sitting by the pond on warm paving slabs. The pond’s a long rectangle, with water lilies and a bronze statue of Neptune in the middle gone turquoise and bruised. The pond’s bigger than our whole garden, which is really just a muddy yard with a washing line and rubbish bins. Dad’s lodge in Rhodesia has land going down to a river where there’re hippos. I think of Mrs. Marconi telling me to “Focus on the subject.” “How do you know about my nightmare?”

  “You have that hunted look,” says Jonah.

  I lob a pebble up, high over the water. Its arc is maths.

  “Is your nightmare anything to do with your scars?”

  Immediately my hand’s pulled my hair down over the white-and-pink-streaked area below my right ear, to hide where the damage shows the most. The stone goes plop! but the splash is invisible. I won’t think about the mastiff launching itself at me, its fangs pulling skin off my cheek like roast chicken, its eyes as it shook me like a doll, its teeth locked around my jawbone; or the weeks in hospital, the injections, the drugs, the surgery, the faces people make; or how the mastiff’s still waiting for me when I fall asleep.

  A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, “Its wings are like cellophane,” and I say, “I was just thinking that,” but Jonah says, “Just thinking what?” so maybe I just thought he’d said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. I’ve noticed it before.

  In the house, Mum’s playing warm-up arpeggios.

  The dragonfly’s gone. “Do you have nightmares?” I ask.

  “I have nightmares,” says Jonah, “about running out of food.”

  “Go to bed with a packet of digestives,” I tell him.

  Jonah’s teeth are perfect, like the smiley kid with zero fillings off the Colgate advert. “Not that kind of food, Nathan.”

  “What other kinds of food are there?” I ask.

  A skylark’s Morse-coding from a far far far far star.

  “Food that makes you hungrier, the more of it you eat,” says Jonah.

  Shrubs tremble blurrily like they’re being sketched in.

  “No wonder you don’t go to a normal school,” I say.

  Jonah winds a stem of grass round his thumb…

  · · ·

  …and snaps it. The pond’s gone and we’re under a tree, so obviously it’s another stem of grass, a later snap. The Valium’s throbbing in my fingertips now, and the sunlight’s a harpist. Fallen leaves on the shaved lawn are shaped like tiny fans. “This tree’s a ginkgo tree,” says Jonah. “Whoever lived at Slade House half a century ago planted it.” I start arranging ginkgo leaves into a large Africa, about one foot from Cairo to Johannesburg. Jonah’s lying on his back now, either asleep or just with his eyes closed. He hasn’t asked me about football once, or said I’m gay for liking classical music. Maybe this is like having a friend. Time must’ve passed, because my Africa’s finished. I don’t know the time exactly because last Sunday I took my watch apart to improve it, and when I put it back together again some pieces were missing. Not quite like Humpty Dumpty. Mum cried when she saw the watch’s insides and shut herself in her room so I had to eat cornflakes for tea again. I don’t know why she got upset. The watch was old, dead old, made long before I was even born. The leaves I remove for Lake Victoria, I use for Madagascar.

  “Wow,” says Jonah, leaning his head on an elbow.

  Do you say “Thanks” when someone says “Wow”? I don’t know, so I play safe and ask, “Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not?”

  Gentle applause flutters down from an upstai
rs room.

  “My sister and I are a different species,” says Jonah, “but the experiment part is redundant. We pass ourselves off as normal, or anything we want to be. Do you want to play fox and hounds?”

  “We walked past a pub called The Fox and Hounds.”

  “It’s been there since the 1930s. Smells like the 1930s too, if you ever go in. My sister and I borrowed its name for a game. Want to play? It’s a race, basically.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll meet her later. Fox and hounds is a race. We start off at opposite corners of the house. We both shout, ‘Fox and hounds, one two three!’ and on the ‘three’ we start running, anti-clockwise, until one of us catches the other. The catcher is the hound and the one who’s caught is the fox. Simple. Up for it?”

  If I say no to Jonah he might call me a wuss or a spazzo. “Okay. But shouldn’t it be called ‘fox and hound’ if there’s only one hound?”

  Jonah’s face goes through two or three expressions I can’t read. “Henceforth, Nathan, it’ll be known as ‘fox and hound.’ ”

  · · ·

  Slade House looms up. The red ivy’s redder than red ivy normally is. The ground floor windows are too high off the ground to see inside, and anyway they only reflect the sky and clouds. “You stay here,” Jonah tells me at the front right corner. “I’ll go round the back. Once we start, run anti-clockwise—up this way.” Off Jonah trots down the side of the house, which is walled by a holly hedge. While I’m waiting, I notice someone moving in the window nearest to me. I step closer, peering up. It’s a woman. Another guest at Lady Norah Grayer’s soirée, I suppose, or maybe a servant. She’s got one of those beehive hairstyles that ladies on Dad’s old LPs had; her forehead’s furrowed and her mouth’s slowly opening and closing like a goldfish. Like she’s repeating the same word over and over and over. I can’t hear what she’s saying because the window’s shut, so I tell her, “I can’t hear you.” I take a step forwards, but she vanishes and there’s only reflected sky. So I take a step back, and she’s there again. It’s like one of those pictures you get in cereal boxes where it looks like the image is moving when you tilt it slightly. The beehive woman could be saying, “No, no, no”; or “Go, go, go”; or it might be “Oh, oh, oh.” Before I work it out, I hear Jonah’s voice down the holly path, saying, “Ready, Nathan?”

  I shout, “Ready!” and when I look back at the window the beehive woman’s gone, and I can’t get her back wherever I stand or however I tilt my head. I take up my starting position at the corner.

  “Fox and hound!” calls Jonah, and I call it too. “One, two—”

  · · ·

  “Three!” I shout back and leg it down the holly path—slap slap slap go my shoes, and the echo’s whack whack whack. Jonah’s taller than me and maybe he’d beat me over a hundred meters, but I could still end up as the hound and not the fox because it’s stamina that counts over longer distances, and I’m at the end of the side path already, where I was expecting a view of Cranbury Avenue, but there’s just a long brick wall and fir trees and a narrow strip of lawn that goes by in a blur. I pound along and swing round on a drainpipe, sprint down another chilly side path sliced with blades of light coming through a high fence with brambles poking between the slats, then I’m out front again where I smack into a butterfly bush and butterflies blizzard up all orange and black and red and white and one goes in my mouth so I spit it out and I leap over the rockery and nearly trip up when I land but I don’t. Along I run past steps climbing to the front door, past the beehive woman’s window but she’s gone now and then round the corner and I’m pounding back down the echoey holly path, starting to get a stitch in my side but I’ll ignore it, and the holly’s scratching the back of my hand like it’s pushing in, and I wonder if Jonah’s gaining on me or I’m gaining on Jonah but not for long because I’m back at the back of Slade House, where the fir trees are thicker and bigger and the wall blurrier, and I keep running running running round the corner to where the brambles really are choking through the fence now, scratching my shins my neck and now I’m afraid I’ll be the fox not the hound, and round the front the sun’s gone in, or gone out, or gone away, and the flowers are withered and there’s not a single butterfly on the butterfly bush, just dead ones smeared into the path, powder-paint skid marks with one half-dead one, flapping a bit…

  I’ve stopped, because the far end of the garden, the wall with the small black door—it’s gone all faint and dim. Not because of evening. It can’t even be four o’clock yet. Not because it’s misty, either. I look up—the sky’s still bluish, like it was before. It’s the garden itself. The garden’s fading away.

  I turn round to tell Jonah to stop the game, something’s wrong, we need a grown-up. Any second now he’ll come hurtling round the far corner. The brambles sway like underwater tentacles. I glance back at the garden. There was a sundial but it’s gone now, and the damson trees too. Am I going blind? I want Dad to tell me it’s fine, I’m not going blind, but Dad’s in Rhodesia, so I want Mum. Where’s Jonah? What if this dissolving’s got him too? Now the lattice tunnel thing’s erased. What do you do when you’re visiting someone’s house and their garden starts vanishing? The blankness is moving closer like a storm front. Then, at the far end of the brambly side path, Jonah appears, and I relax for a second because he’ll know what to do, but as I watch, the running-boy shape gets fuzzier and becomes a growling darkness with darker eyes, eyes that know me, and fangs that’ll finish what they started and it’s pounding after me in sickening slow motion, big as a cantering horse and I’d scream if I could but I can’t my chest’s full of molten panic it’s choking me choking it’s wolves it’s winter it’s bones it’s cartilage skin liver lungs it’s Hunger it’s Hunger it’s Hunger and Run! I run towards the steps of Slade House my feet slipping on the pebbles like in dreams but if I fall it’ll have me, and I’ve only got moments left and I stumble up the steps and grip the doorknob turn please turn it’s stuck no no no it’s scratched gold it’s stiff it’s ridged does it turn yes no yes no twist pull push pull turn twist I’m falling forwards onto a scratchy doormat on black and white tiles and my shriek’s like a shriek shrieked into a cardboard box all stifled and muted—

  · · ·

  “What on earth’s the matter, Nathan?” I’m on my banged knees on a carpet in a hallway, my heart’s going slap slap slap slap slap slap but it’s slowing, it’s slowing, I’m safe, and Lady Grayer’s standing right here holding a tray with a little iron teapot on it with vapor snaking up from the spout. “Are you unwell? Shall I fetch your mother?”

  Woozily, I get up. “Something’s outside, Norah.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. What kind of a something?”

  “I mean, a, a, a…kind of…” A kind of what? “Dog.”

  “Oh, that’s Izzy, from next door. Daft as a brush, and she will insist on doing her business in the herb garden. It’s jolly annoying, but then she’s very sweet.”

  “No, it was a…bigger…and the garden was vanishing.”

  Lady Norah Grayer does a smile, though I’m not sure why. “Fabulous to see boys using their imaginations! Jonah’s cousins kneel before the TV with their Atari thingummies, their bleepy-bleepy space games, and I tell them, ‘It’s a beautiful day! Play outside!’ and they say, ‘Yeah, yeah, Auntie Norah, if you say so.’ ”

  The hallway has black and white tiles like a chessboard. I smell coffee, polish, cigar smoke and lilies. Through a little diamond-shaped window in the door, I peer out and see the garden. It’s not at all dissolved. Down the far end, I can see the small black iron door onto Slade Alley. I must have imagined too hard. Down the stairs comes Tchaikovsky’s “Chant de l’alouette.” It’s Mum.

  Norah Grayer asks, “Nathan, are you feeling all right?”

  I looked up Valium in a medical encyclopedia at the library and in rare cases it can make you hallucinate and you have to tell your doctor immediately. I guess I’m
rare. “Yes, thanks,” I say. “Jonah and me were playing fox and hound and I think I got carried away.”

  “I thought you and Jonah might have a rapport—and golly gosh, Yehudi and your mother are getting on like a house on fire! You go on up to the soirée, up both these flights of stairs. I’ll find Jonah, and we’ll bring the éclairs. Up you go now. Don’t be shy.”

  · · ·

  I take off my shoes and put them side by side and climb the first flight of stairs. The walls are paneled and the stair carpet’s thick as snow and beige like nougat. Up ahead, there’s a little landing where a grandfather clock’s going krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk…but first I pass a portrait of a girl, younger than me, plastered with freckles, and wearing a pinafore thing from Victorian times. She’s dead lifelike. The banister glides under my fingertips. Mum plays the last note of “Chant de l’alouette” and I hear applause. Applause makes her happy. When she’s sad, it’s only crackers and bananas for dinner. The next portrait’s of a bushy-browed man in a regimental uniform: the Royal Fusiliers. I know because Dad got me a book about British Army regiments and I memorized it. Krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk goes the clock. The last portrait before the landing is a pinched lady in a hat who looks a lot like Mrs. Stone, our Religion teacher. If Mrs. Marconi asked me to guess, I’d say this hat lady was wishing she was anywhere but here. From the little landing, another flight of stairs to my right carries on up to a pale door. The clock’s really tall. I put my ear against its wooden chest and hear its heart: krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk…It has no hands. It’s got words instead, on its old, pale-as-bone clock face, saying TIME IS and under that TIME WAS and under that TIME IS NOT. Up the second flight of steps, the next picture’s of a man who’s twenty or so, with slick black hair and squinty eyes and a look like he’s unwrapped a present and can’t work out what it is. The last-but-one portrait’s a lady I recognize. It’s the hair. The lady I saw in the window. Same dangly earrings, too, but a dreamy smile instead of streaky eyeshadow. She must be a friend of the Grayers. Look at that mauve vein in her neck, it’s throbbing, and a murmur’s in my ear saying, Run now, as fast as you can, the way you came in…and I say, “What?” and the voice stops. Was it even there? It’s Valium. Maybe I shouldn’t take any more for a while. Only a few steps to the pale door now, and I hear Mum’s voice on the other side: “Oh no, Yehudi, you mustn’t make me hog the limelight when there’s so much talent in the room!” The reply is too soft to hear, but people laugh. Mum, too. When did I last hear Mum laugh like that? “You’re all too kind,” I hear her say. “How could I say no?” Then she starts up “Danseuses de Delphes.” I take two or three steps and draw level with the last portrait.