Slade House

by David Mitchell

  Which is me.

  Me, Nathan Bishop…

  Wearing exactly what I’m wearing now. This tweed jacket. This bow tie. Only in the picture I’ve got no eyes. That’s my big nose, the zit on my chin I’ve had all week, my scarring from the mastiff under my ear, but no eyes. A joke? Is this funny? I never know. Mum must’ve sent a school photograph plus photographs of the clothes I was going to be wearing to Norah Grayer, and she got the artist to paint this. How else? This isn’t bad Valium, is it? Is it? I blink hard at the portrait, then kick the skirting board; not hard enough to break my toe, but hard enough to hurt. When I don’t wake up, I know I’m awake. The clock’s going krunk-kronk-krunk-kronk and I’m trembling with anger. I know anger when I feel it. Anger’s an easy one, it’s like being a boiling kettle. Why did Mum play a joke on me on a day she told me to Act Normal? Normally I’d wait until Debussy was over before opening the pale door but Mum doesn’t deserve manners today so I put my hand on the doorknob.

  · · ·

  I sit up in bed. What bed? Not my bed in my titchy room in England, that’s for sure: This is three times the size, with sunlight blasting through the curtains and Luke Skywalker on the sheet-thing. My head’s humming. My mouth’s dry. There’s a desk; a bookshelf full of National Geographics; strings of beads over the doorway; a million insects outside; a Zulu-style tribal shield and spear decorated with tinsel that brings the answer closer now, closer, closer…

  Dad’s lodge in the Bushveld. I let out this bark of relief and all my dream-anger at Mum goes phffft. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m in Rhodesia! Yesterday I flew here on a British Airways flight, all on my own, my very first time on a plane, and asked for the fish pie because I didn’t know what boeuf bourguignon was. Dad and Joy met me at the airport in his jeep. On the way here we saw zebras and giraffes. No spooky portraits, no Slade House, no mastiff. Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. It’s a shame Jonah’s not real, though. I lift up the curtain by my bed and see slopes of woodland and grassland, going on forever. Down below’s the brown river where there’re hippos. Dad sent me a Polaroid of this exact view. It’s on my wall at home in England by my pillow, but here it’s the actual view. African birds, African morning, African birdsong. I smell bacon and get up. I’m in my Kays Catalogue pajamas. The pine floor’s knotty, warm and grooved on the soles of my feet, and the strings of beads are like lots of fingertips on my face…

  · · ·

  Dad’s at the table, reading his Rhodesian Reporter and dressed in his short-sleeved khaki shirt. “The Kraken wakes.” Dad always says that in the mornings. It’s the title of a book by John Wyndham about a monster who melts the ice caps and floods the world.

  I sit down. “Morning, Dad.”

  Dad folds his newspaper. “Well, I wanted to wake you for your first African dawn, but Joy said, ‘No, let the poor lad sleep in, he flew twelve hours nonstop.’ So we’ll do all that tomorrow. Hungry?” I nod—I guess I must be—and Dad tilts his head at the kitchen hatch: “Joy? Violet? Young man needs his chow!”

  The hatch opens and Joy appears. “Nathan!” I knew about Joy, who Mum calls “your father’s dolly bird,” but it was still a jolt to see Dad holding hands with another woman. They’re going to have a baby in June, so they must’ve had sexual intercourse. The baby’ll be my half brother or half sister, but it hasn’t got a name yet. I wonder what it does all day. “Sleep well?” says Joy. Joy’s got a Rhodesian accent like Dad’s.

  “Yes. Mad dreams, though.”

  “I always have mad dreams after a long-haul flight. OJ, bacon sandwich do you, Nathan?”

  I like how Joy says “OJ.” Mum would hate it. “Yes please.”

  “He’ll need some coffee too,” says Dad.

  “Mum says I’m too young for caffeinated drinks,” I say.

  “Horse pucky,” says Dad. “Coffee’s the elixir of life, and Rhodesian coffee’s the purest on earth. You’re having some.”

  “OJ, bacon sandwich and coffee, coming up,” says Joy. “I’ll get Violet on it straightaway.” The hatch closes. Violet’s the maid. Mum often used to shout at Dad, “I’m not your bloody maid, you know, Frank!” Dad lights his pipe, and the smell of his tobacco brings back memories of when he and Mum were married. He says from the corner of his mouth, “Tell me about this dream of yours, matey.”

  The gazelle’s head’s distracting, and so are Dad’s grandfather’s muskets from the Boer War and the ceiling fan. “Mum took me to see a lady, like a lord-and-lady-type lady. The house was missing so we asked a sort of window cleaner man but he didn’t know either…then we found it, it was this big house like in To the Manor Born. There was a boy called Jonah but he turned into a big dog. Yehudi Menuhin was there too, and Mum played with him upstairs”—Dad snorts a laugh—“and then I saw a portrait of me, but my eyes were missing, and…” I see a small black iron door in the corner. “That door was there, too.”

  Dad looks round. “Dreams do that. Mix reality with moonshine. You were asking about my gun-room door before you turned in last night. Don’t you remember?”

  I must’ve, if Dad says so. “It all felt so real when I was in it.”

  “I know it felt real, but you can see it wasn’t. Right?” I look at Dad’s brown eyes, crinkly lines, tanned skin, grayish streaks in his sandy hair, his nose like mine. A clock’s going krunk…kronk…krunk…kronk…and there’s a trumpeting noise outside, not far away. I look at Dad, hoping it is what I think it is. “Dead right, matey: a herd drifted across the river yesterday afternoon. We’ll go see ’em later, but first, line your stomach.”

  “Here we go,” says Joy, placing a tray in front of me. “Your first African breakfast.” My bacon sandwich looks epic, with a triple layer of rashers, and ketchup dribbling out.

  “That’s God’s own bacon sarnie,” I say. Someone said that line on a sitcom I saw once and lots of people laughed.

  “Well, aren’t you the charmer?” says Joy. “Wonder who you get that from…”

  Dad puts his arm around Joy’s waist. “Try the coffee first. It’ll make a man of you.” I lift the mug and peer down. Inside’s black as oil, as holes in space, as Bibles.

  “Violet ground the beans just now,” says Joy.

  “God’s own coffee,” says Dad. “Drink up now, matey.”

  Some stupid part of me says, No, don’t, you mustn’t.

  “Your mother’ll never know,” says Dad. “Our little secret.”

  The mug’s so wide it covers my nose like a gas mask.

  The mug’s so wide it covers my eyes, my whole head.

  Then whatever’s in there starts gulping me down.

  · · ·

  Time passed, but I don’t know how much. A slit of light opens its eye and becomes a long flame. Cold bright star white. A candle, on a candlestick, on the scarred floorboards. The candlestick’s dull silver or pewter or lead and it’s got symbols on it, or maybe letters from a dead language. The flame’s not moving, it’s as if time’s unspooled and jammed. Three faces hang in the gloom. Lady Grayer on my left, but she’s younger now, younger than Mum. To my right is Jonah Grayer but he’s older than the Jonah in the garden. They’re twins, I think. They’re wearing gray cloaks with hoods half down; his hair’s short and hers is long, and it’s gold instead of black like before; and they’re kneeling like they’re praying, or meditating. They’re still as waxworks. If they’re breathing, I can’t see it. The third face is Nathan Bishop’s, opposite me. I’m a reflection in a mirror, a tall rectangle, standing on the floor. I’m still wearing the tweed jacket from Oxfam, and the bow tie. When I try to move, I can’t. Not a muscle. I can’t turn my head, or lift my hand, or speak, or blink, even. Like I’ve been paralyzed. It’s scary as hell, but I can’t even go Mmm
fff like scared gagged people do. I’m pretty sure this can’t be heaven or hell, but I know it’s not Rhodesia. Dad’s lodge was a kind of vision. I’d pray it’s only the Valium making me see this, but I don’t believe in God. I’m in an attic, judging from the sloping ceiling and rafters. Are the Grayers prisoners like me? They look like the Midwich Cuckoos. Where’s Yehudi Menuhin, all the guests, the soirée? Where’s my mum?

  · · ·

  The flame comes to life, and the symbols on the candlestick change, and keep changing as if it’s thinking fast and the symbols are its thoughts. Jonah Grayer’s head shifts. His clothes rustle. “Your mother sends her apologies,” he says, touching his face as if he’s testing whether it still fits. “She had to leave.” I try to ask “Why? Where?” but nothing I need to speak—jaw, tongue, lips—works. Why would Mum leave without me? The me in the mirror gazes back. Neither of us can move. Norah Grayer’s flexing her fingers like she’s just waking up. Did they inject me with something? “Every time I come back to my body,” she says, “it feels less of a homecoming, and more like entering an alien shell. A more enfeebled one. Do you know, I want to be free of it?”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” says Jonah. “If anything happened to your birth-body, your soul would dissolve like a sugar cube and—”

  “I know perfectly well what would happen.” Norah Grayer’s voice is chillier and throatier now. “The hairdresser paid an uninvited visit, I saw.”

  Jonah asks, “What hairdresser are you talking about?”

  “Our previous guest. Your ‘Honey Pie.’ She appeared in a window. Then on the stairs, by her portrait, she tried to give some sort of a warning to the boy.”

  “Her afterimage showed up in a window, you mean. It happens. The girl is gone, as gone as a smoke ring puffed out years ago in a gale off Rockall. It’s harmless.”

  A brownish moth fusses around the candle flame.

  “They’re getting bolder,” says Norah Grayer. “The time will come when a ‘harmless afterimage’ will sabotage an Open Day.”

  “If—if—our Theater of the Mind were ever ‘sabotaged’ and a guest escaped, we’d simply call our friends the Blackwatermen to bring them back again. That’s why we pay them. Handsomely.”

  “You underestimate ordinary people, Jonah. You always did.”

  “Would it kill you, sister, to once, just once, say, ‘Top job, a superb orison, you’ve landed us a juicy, tenderized soul to pay the power bills for the next nine years—bon appetit!’?”

  “Your African lodge could not have been a cornier ersatz mishmash, brother, if Tarzan had swung in on a vine.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be real; it only had to match the Bushveld the guest imagined. Anyway, the boy’s mentally abnormal. He hasn’t even noticed his lungs have stopped working.” Jonah now looks at me like Gaz Ingram does.

  It’s true. I’m not breathing. My switched-off body hasn’t raised the alarm. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

  “Oh, stop sniveling, for Christ’s sake,” groans Jonah. “I cannot abide snivelers. Your father would be ashamed of you. Why, I never sniveled when I was your age.”

  “ ‘Never sniveled’?” snorts Norah. “When Mother died—”

  “Let’s reminisce later, sister. Dinner is served. It’s warm, confused, afraid, it’s imbibed banjax, and it’s ready for filleting.”

  The Grayer twins make letters in the air with their hands. There’s a slow thickening in the dark, above the candle, at a little above head height. The thickening becomes a something. Something fleshy, lumpish, fist-size, pulsing blood red, wine red, blood red, wine red, faster and brighter, the size of a human head, but more like a heart as big as a football, just suspended there. Veins grow out of it, like jellyfish tentacles, and twist like ivy through the air. They’re coming for me. I can’t turn my head or even shut my eyes. Some of the vein-things finger their way into my mouth, others into my ears, two up my nostrils. When I see my reflection, I’d scream if I could, or pass out, but I can’t. Then a dot of pain opens up on my forehead.

  In the mirror, there’s a black spot there. Something…

  …oozes out, and hovers there inches from my eyes, look: a clear cloud of stars, small enough to fit in your cupped palms. My soul.

  Look.

  Look.

  Beautiful as, as…

  Beautiful.

  The Grayer twins lean in, their faces shining like Christmas, and I know what they’re hungry for. They pucker up their lips and suck. The round cloud stretches doughily into two smaller round clouds…and splits. One half of my soul goes into Jonah’s mouth, and the other into Norah’s. They shut their eyes like Mum did the time we saw Vladimir Ashkenazy at the Royal Albert Hall. Bliss. Bliss. Inside my skull, I howl and my howl echoes on and on and on and on but nothing lasts forever…The big beating heart-thing’s gone, and the Grayer twins are back kneeling where they were before. Time’s slowed down to nothing. The flame’s stopped flickering. The brownish moth is frozen an inch away from it. Cold bright star white. The Nathan in the mirror’s gone, and if he’s gone, I’m—

  “Good evening, here are today’s headlines at six o’clock on Saturday, October the twenty-second. Speaking at a press conference in Downing Street today, the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, rejected criticism of the government’s ban on broadcast interviews with members of the Irish Republican party, Sinn Féin. Mr. Hurd said—” I switched off the radio, got out of my car and looked up at the pub. The Fox and Hounds. A memory came back to me, of me and Julie popping in for a drink here one time. We were house-hunting, and we’d viewed a place on Cranbury Avenue, one street up. It’d sounded all right in the estate agent’s but a right bloody shithole it turned out to be—damp, gloomy, with a garden too small to bury a corpse in, it was so depressing we needed a liquid pick-me-up just to face the drive home. Five years ago, that was. Five years, one wedding, one dismal honeymoon in Venice, four Christmases with Julie’s god-awful pinko tree-hugging relatives, fifteen hundred bowls of Shredded Wheat, two hundred and fifty bottles of wine, thirty haircuts, three toasters, three cats, two promotions, one Vauxhall Astra, a few boxes of Durex, two emergency visits to the dentist, dozens of arguments of assorted sizes and one beefed-up assault charge later, Julie’s still living in our cottage with a view of woods and horses, and I’m in a flat behind the multistory car park. Mr. Justice Jones said I was lucky I wasn’t booted out of the force. Thank God me and Julie’d never had kids, otherwise she’d be shafting me for child support as well as compensation for her “disfigurement.” Grasping bitch. Five years gone. Blink of a bloody eye.

  · · ·

  I set off down Westwood Road, eyes peeled. I asked a woman in a miniskirt and ratty fake fur coat—on the game, I’d bet a tenner—if she’d heard of Slade Alley, but she shook her head and strode by without stopping. A jogger ran past in a blur of orange and black but joggers are tossers. Three Asian kids went trundling past on skateboards, but I’d had enough of our curry-munching cousins for one day so I didn’t ask them. The multi-culty brigade bleat on about racism in the force, but I’d like to see them keep order in a town full of Everywherestanis whose only two words of English are “police” and “harassment,” and whose alleged women walk about in tall black tents. There’s more to public order than holding hands and singing “Ebony and Ivory.”

  The streetlights came on and it was looking like it might rain: the sort of weather that used to give Julie her mysterious headaches. I was tired after a long and stressful day and at the “sod this for a game of soldiers” stage, and if our chief super was anyone but Trevor Doolan I’d have buggered off home to the remains of last night’s tandoori takeaway, had a laugh at the Sharons and Waynes on Blind Date, then seen if Gonzo and a few of the lads were up for a pint. Unfortunately Trevor Doolan is our chief super and a walking bloody lie detector to boot, and come Monday he’d be asking me some rectal probe of a question that I’d only be able to answer if I’d really followed up Famous Fred Pink
’s “lead.” It’d be “Describe this alley to me, then, Edmonds…” or some such. With my appraisal in November and the Malik Inquiry due to report in two weeks, my tongue has to stay firmly up Doolan’s arse. So down Westwood Road I trogged, looking left, looking right, searching high and low for Slade Alley. Could it have been blocked off since Fred Pink’s day, I wondered, and the land given to the house-owners? The Council sometimes do that, with our blessing; alleyways are trouble spots. I got to the end of the road where the A2 skims past a park and dropped my fag down a gutter. A guy with a busted nose was sat behind the wheel of a St. John ambulance and I nearly asked him if he knew Slade Alley, but then I thought, Bugger it, and headed back towards my car. Maybe a swift beer at The Fox and Hounds, I thought. Exorcise Julie’s ghost.

  · · ·

  About halfway back down Westwood Road I happened upon an altercation between a five-foot-nothing traffic warden and two brick shithouses at least eighteen inches taller, wearing fluorescent yellow jackets and with their backs to me. Builders, I could just bloody tell. None of the trio noticed me strolling up behind them. “Then your little notebook’s wrong.” Builder One was prodding the traffic warden on the knot of his tie. “We weren’t here until after four, gettit?”

  “I was ’ere,” wheezed the traffic warden, who was the spit of that Lech Wałęsa, that Polish leader, but with an even droopier mustache. “My watch—”