Once he had his breath back, Hal rose to his feet and surveyed his reward. From the roof of Moynihan, he could see over all of Leeds. Close by, to the south, was St Peter’s Church, splayed like a cross with a great 140ft tall tower for a head. From the ground it was a daunting sight, taller and darker than anything else around it, but from the roof it seemed no bigger than the warehouses in the distance. Working clockwise, Hal picked out Kirkgate Market and the train station. He squinted into the sun at the town hall to the west, its domed clock tower dripping gold. He could just make out the top of the Parkinson Building’s rectangular tower, looking like a white brick stood on its end.
To the north and east was a sea of brown and red brick terraced houses as far as he could see. An image of his father flashed into Hal’s mind; another summer day, years ago, before his dad had got sick. They were at the beach. His dad was raking the sand to clear away any stones before laying the towels for Hal and his mum. The rake carved a trail of uniformly-spaced shallow trenches, which had fascinated Hal. Seeing his son’s interest, Hal’s dad kept raking the sand even after the towels were laid. He went from raking straight lines to drawing great swirling patterns, all of them made up of the same even rows. Looking now at the terraced houses, Hal’s mind swam.
He turned away from the city.
HAL SAT UP on the roof for hours, reading his book, taking occasional sips from his water flask. He had wanted to spend the day with Shahid, but he was glad he had had the roof to himself today. It was the first time since moving into Jackson House that he felt his time was his own. Between moving into the flat, meeting Shahid, spying on the Rag and Bone Man, and his days at the university, the last two weeks had rushed by him in a blur.
When Hal looked up from his book, the sun was much lower in the sky, casting long shadows over the rooftop. He had to get back before his mum realised where he was. Hal lowered himself down from the roof, his feet searching for the drainpipe bracket and the top of the window. His shirt slid up as he went down and the stone scratched his chest as he slipped lower. He couldn’t look down, so he kicked for the pipe and found the bracket, letting him shift his weight to his foot. He reached with one hand to find the window’s concrete border; his foot found the window handle and he laid his weight onto the grip. A shock ran through him as he felt the handle turn and give beneath him. Hal slipped and lost his footing on the drain bracket, suddenly dangling by one hand from the roof. He heard a bang from somewhere on the rooftop.
He was going to fall.
Hal felt a crushing pain in his wrist and the world dropped away. Images ran through his head like a stuttering projector: He was
—looking down at the ground from the roof—
—watching a circle of dancing shadows—
—looking down the lens of a camera—
—staring into dark water holding a stone—
—a dark tunnel—
—a muddy field—
They became a blur, indecipherable.
Then, finally, black.
LIGHT CREPT IN at the sides of Hal’s vision. He was looking up at the sky. A figure stood above him pulling on a glove.
“You are safe.”
The Rag and Bone Man. This close, Hal saw how the man’s skin was bleached white, giving his thin mouth the look of a scar carved into stone.
“Don’t be afraid, I have saved you,” the man said, again. “You slipped—”
“I saw—It was so clear—”
“—You have questions, but now is not the time. Your mother is coming and I will not be seen. Be happy, my Ward: you have broken from fate.”
The figure departed, using the service stairs to the top floor. The bang Hal had heard must have been the Rag and Bone Man charging the door to the roof.
Shakily, Hal stood, adrenaline still ebbing from his system. His ears beat with the throb of pumping blood. He tried to make sense of what had happened, what he had seen. He should have stopped the man from leaving, he thought. How did he know where he was? That he needed help?
Out of the confusion, one of the things the figure had said rose to the surface: Your mother is coming. Too late, Hal realised the beating in his ears was the sound of footsteps sprinting up the staircases of Moynihan building.
Hal’s mother marched out onto the rooftop and slapped him across the face, tears streaming from her eyes.
“What were you thinking?” She managed to get out, striking him again. “You stupid, stupid boy.”
Before Hal could answer, she had pulled him into her bosom, clutching him as though she were afraid he’d fall through the floor.
“You stupid boy,” she kept saying as she rocked him in her arms.
6
VISIONS HAUNTED HAL’S dreams that night. Dark water and lightning storms collided and confused him as he fitfully woke and fell back into sleep. Through them all, a man of stone with a china face loomed over him, his fingers piercing Hal’s wrists like nails.
Hal woke with the dawning light to find his bed sheets soaked through with sweat and a hot fever scratching at his skull. A wave of nausea overwhelmed him and he vomited down the side of his bed.
PEOPLE WERE MOVING Hal like a puppet, lifting his arms, opening his mouth, raising him up to a sitting position—he felt cold spots on his back—he couldn’t make sense of himself as he felt himself lowered back to bed.
IT WAS NIGHTTIME. A figure sat sleeping in an armchair opposite Hal’s bed. Hal reached for the glass of water on his bedside table. His exhausted arm failed him and he knocked the glass to the floor.
MORE PRODDING AND pushing from cold hands. Hal looked up at the old man gently turning and pressing his wrist. Hal stared at his arm, trying to make his eyes focus on the fingertip-sized welts on his wrist.
The man lay Hal’s arm back down on the bed covers and turned away from him to talk to two blurred silhouettes in the distance. The doctor’s voice was like a croaking toad; no words, just a bass rumble.
Hal tried to listen to what the doctor was saying, but it was too much. He closed his eyes and let sleep overtake him.
THE STONE MAN with the china face loomed over Hal in the dark.
“Rest up, my Ward.” The words slithered out of his slit of a mouth. “Come find me when you’re well. I have great plans for you. Great plans. First I’ll need to teach you to see, but then—great plans.”
When Hal woke the next morning, he was certain it had been a dream.
AFTER WHAT FELT like days trapped in his cocooned senses, Hal began to see and hear more clearly again, like a curtain of fog was slowly rising. His mum comforted him, explaining he had an infection.
“You’re going to be okay.”
Hal tried to smile. He still couldn’t lift his arms or raise his head, but it felt good to be out of the confused isolation of the past few days.
That night, despite his exhaustion—or perhaps because of it—he couldn’t sleep. He tossed in bed, weakly kicking at his covers. His skin felt like it was being lightly punctured with a thousand hot needles. The itching pain was all over, but it seemed to centre on his wrist and forehead, where rashes had broken out in the day.
Someone spent the night replacing cold flannels on his forehead, keeping his fever down.
As the light of the sun rose in the morning and Hal finally found himself able to drift off, he made out the figure of Eli dozing in the armchair opposite him.
ON THE DAYS Hal was more alert, Eli would read him stories from a book of Jewish fables. “My father read these to me as a boy when I was ill.”
Hal heard stories of a rabbi whose wife turned him into a wolf, and how the wolf roamed the forest eating any hunter who came for him. One day, when the King came to the forest, the wolf was able to befriend him and communicate to him the fate that had befallen him. The King went to the rabbi’s town and stole from the wife the ring the rabbi needed to turn back into a man.
Another story was about a rabbi who protected the Jews of a city by making a guardian out of cla
y, breathing life into it with a prayer. The clay man did the rabbi’s bidding and saved the Jewish people from an evil priest who wanted to harm them. Eventually, though, the creation turned on its master and its life had to be taken from it, returning it to a statue.
A lot of the stories confused Hal—they didn’t build to an ending or have a clear point—but he grew to like them simply because of the way Eli told them. He brought every character to life, with different voices and mannerisms; when he recounted a story, it was like something he had heard from a friend, not something written in a book. Hal hung on every word, and his exhaustion would fall away.
In the evenings, Hal’s mum would sit with him and they’d listen to the radio. He would often fall asleep like this.
WHEN THE FEVER finally broke, it left Hal diminished, sapped of energy. The doctor told his mum Hal would need his rest over the next few weeks, warning that any major exertion could make him ill again.
HAL AWOKE TO noises from the living room. His mum was talking to someone in hushed tones. Keeping the light off, he slipped out of bed and crept to the door; his mum had been leaving it ajar to stop his room from getting musty. He peered through the crack.
The living room was dark except for the light over the dining table. Hal’s mother sat at the table with a saucer and cup of tea in her hands. Although he could only see the back of him, Hal recognised the Rag and Bone Man immediately.
“The others told you about my gift, yes? But they won’t have told you what I told them, only that I read in the leaves things they didn’t know of themselves. Things that have happened, things that will.”
Hal could see the edge of the man’s face, outlined in shadow. In the daylight, it blended into his skin; but in this light, to Hal, it looked like the mask covered a black void.
“Why has Hal been talking about you in his sleep?” she asked. “Had you two spoken?”
The Rag and Bone Man held his hands before him, holding an imaginary cup and saucer. He twisted his wrist, bidding Hal’s mum to finish her tea. She drank it down quickly and he took the saucer, firmly tugging it from her grip. He raised the cup in the air, placed the saucer over it like a lid and set it on the tabletop.
“How—if you don’t mind my asking, do you—you can’t see, can you?” Hal’s mum said, putting her fingers to the bridge of her nose to indicate his mask.
“You’re sceptical. You think your friends are gullible—or worse, that they’ve lied to you. I don’t need eyes to see. I don’t need eyes to know, for instance, that the war killed your husband.”
“He didn’t die in the war,” Hal’s mum whispered, then louder. “He didn’t die in the war.”
“I didn’t say that,” the Rag Man said, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “He died in his noose, but the war is what killed him.”
Hal’s mum was taken aback. “Hal told you that?”
“The boy said nothing. The boy says nothing, you know that. You write about it in your diary.”
“How—?”
“I don’t need eyes to see these things. You trust that now, yes? This is why the others swear by me, but don’t share what I tell them. Come, it’s not all bad, your new life. You are in the grip of love. It’s a comfort, a new ear to empty worries into.”
“That’s enough,” Hal’s mum said, rising from her chair. “We’re finished.”
With a flourish, the Rag Man lifted the cup from the saucer.
“Be calm. The worst is over,” he said, tilting the saucer towards her, showing her the tea leaves. “The worst is over. There is a little more pain to come, but not your pain, and then the man has a gift for you: a ring, yes, but also a family, a home.”
Slowly sitting, “And Hal? What about Hal?”
“It’s not his future I’m reading, and I wouldn’t dream of sharing it while he’s watching.” The Rag Man turned to face Hal’s door, his eyeless mask staring straight at him. Hal fell back as if struck and scrabbled back into his bed.
He heard his door open slightly, but he shut his eyes, feigning sleep in the gloomy darkness. After a moment it closed again, this time shut.
“I think that’s enough for today,” Hal heard through the door. Then the sound of the front door.
“IT’S HARDER GETTING up there now, my mum’s on my case since your mum told her you nearly fell off the roof,” Shahid said, miming Hal’s fall with the piece of cake in his hand. “Still, I’ve managed to get a sheet up there to make a sun shade. And I didn’t tell you: my uncle’s got two folding sun loungers out the back of the shop that he says we can have if I work the weekend. If we can get some rope, we’ll be able to haul them up through the bathroom window, no trouble.”
“My mum’ll actually kill me if she catches me up there again,” Hal said. “I’m lucky I got ill right after or I think she might have wrung my neck. She still might, when I get better.”
“It’s what you get for going up there without me.”
“You just said you’d been up there to build a shade.”
“Yeah, I’m allowed to, I found that roof first. And it’s not like I should be waiting around for you to get your bed rest. School starts up again in three weeks. Besides, you still haven’t told me what happened. I’ve been hearing rumours around the estate that you were pushed.”
Hal frowned at Shahid, confused.
“You know, by the Rag and Bone Man.”
“He didn’t push me, he saved me,” Hal said. “And there’s more to it than that, besides.”
Hal told Shahid the whole story of it, how the Rag and Bone Man had somehow known Hal was going to fall and was right there when he needed to catch him, about the strange visions that Hal had had when the man grabbed his wrist—he showed Shahid the marks on his wrist—“and he knew, he knew that my mum was coming up the stairs.”
“There’s something going on with him.”
“That’s not all of it. He was here, in my flat, doing that thing with the tea leaves for my mum. He knew loads about her, stuff I didn’t even know.”
“What a creep!”
“I’m going to get answers as soon as I get out of bed.”
“When’s that?”
“The doctor says two weeks, but my mum’s going back to work tomorrow, so... tomorrow.”
Shahid’s face was the picture of disappointment. He had to work in his uncle’s shop tomorrow. Hal promised him he’d tell him everything that happened when they met up in the evening.
7
“MY WARD, YOU have come,” the Rag and Bone Man said as Hal approached, walking weakly through the courtyard. The tall figure beckoned Hal closer.
“I—I think you told me to come.”
“And now you can help me with my work. Show me your arm.” Hal pulled up his sleeve to show the scars on his wrist. “Good, it’s healing well.”
“When you grabbed me, I saw things. Images.”
“You saw what I see,” the Rag and Bone Man put two fingers to his mask, pressing them against his china eyes. “Though you won’t be able to make sense of it on your own.”
“What did they mean?”
“You will need to help me in return.” He pointed to his cart of rags and scraps. “For now, you will push this.”
Sapped of his strength by the fever, Hal struggled to keep up with the Rag and Bone Man, but the strange man gave him no help.
AS THEY WENT about the estate collecting scrap, Hal asked the Rag and Bone Man all the questions swirling around his head: what were the visions he’d seen? How had the man known he was going to fall? How he could get about the estate so easily without being able to see?
The Rag and Bone Man ignored every question. Instead, the man talked about objects.
“You must stop looking at them as inanimate things,” he said, plucking an old shawl from the cart. “Every object is alive with as much of a destiny as you. It has a history and a future and as much a say in both as you do. We are only ever seeing it at a point in its path.” He trailed the shawl through the a
ir like a comet crossing the sky. “Like people, some objects have richer lives than others. This shawl has had a long life, but a common existence.” He held it before him in both hands, stroking the fabric between his fingers. “It’s made from cotton Mrs King bought at the market. She dyed it blue in her sink, staining the enamel. She used to wear it most weeks as she went to work as a clerk at the bank. She was wearing it the day she heard her son had been in a car accident and when she rushed to the hospital to see him. She kept it in a drawer ever since—see how even she is touched by the object’s history, even though she does not see things as I do?—After leaving it seven years in a drawer, she finally decided to be rid of it, so it ended up in my cart.
“That is this shawl’s history. But its life is far from over, I will give it to Mrs Bell. She will wear it around the estate, and whenever Mrs King sees it, she will be reminded of her son. Eventually, she will snatch it from Mrs Bell and tear it in two. A common life.”
Hal attended every word, not sure if he believed any of it.
“So... fate is fixed?”
“There are many fates, but some are more likely than others.”
At the day’s end, the Rag and Bone Man took the cart from Hal and told him to find him again tomorrow.
LYING IN BED that night, Hal looked about his room, trying to hear the stories his belongings could tell. He wondered about the people who had owned his books before him and why they had given them up. His eyes came to rest on his dad’s coat hanging from the back of his door. He had found it in the attic when they’d been packing up the house, hidden at the bottom of a box in an old broken wardrobe: his dad’s old Army coat.
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