The Boy Who Could See Death

by Salley Vickers

  His teacher’s widow, however, was intrigued rather than angry. ‘How did you know?’ and, when there was no answer, she persisted, ‘What did you see? Was it in his eyes?’

  When Eli was sixteen he fell head over heels in love with Iris Jackson. He had grown into a good-looking boy, with a head of jet-black hair and eyes ‘blue as the high heavens’, as his banished grandmother used to say, in the days she was still permitted to express a view on her only grandchild. Eli courted his love with the caution which had by now become second nature, never pushing too hard for what he wanted, so that by the time Iris was seventeen she was ready to go to the ‘next stage’, as in those days it was called.

  But one fateful evening, catching sight of Iris’s sister Debbie’s month-old baby, Eli audibly drew in his breath. Asked why by the vigilant Iris, he at first refused to speak. But he was in love and his second thought was that the girl he hoped to marry was owed a perfect candour. So, heart in mouth, he explained what he feared he had seen reflected in the tiny infant’s darkly shining pupils.

  Iris’s mother had disturbed Iris by suggesting that Eli often acted as though ‘he had something to hide’ and this sinister pronouncement from him further unnerved her. She became slower to answer his phone calls and soon an alternative interest, Wayne Healey, a well-muscled young man with a rugger background and no trace of ‘something funny’ about him, appeared. When Eli heard the tragic news that Debbie’s baby girl had died of meningitis, he guessed that he would not hear from Iris again.

  Time passed, and Eli learnt to conceal better what he saw when the mark of a coming death caught his unwilling eye. And with this concealment, as is the way, came other suppressions of spontaneity.

  Eli’s father, feeling ill at ease with a son apparently not evolving along traditional lines, became sarcastic and critical. That this stemmed from awkwardness rather than any real antipathy was no comfort to the boy, who, having withdrawn still more from contact with his peers, began to seem to his parents reserved and aloof and then even to become so with them.

  When Eli read the telltale signs in his mother’s face, he shaded his eyes from his father’s behind the dark glasses he had taken to wearing and suggested to his mother a drive, the two of them, in his father’s maroon Triumph Herald, to Box Hill. They walked there, recalling together, fondly, their picnics as a family when he was a small boy before … well, before everything of which neither of them could speak. Then Eli removed himself to the Welsh Marches, where he remained incommunicado for a month, leaving his father to manage his wife’s mortal heart attack alone.

  By this time, Eli was twenty-two and pretty much friendless. The remoteness of the Welsh countryside suited what had grown to be his temperament. He made a living of sorts – a ‘shiftless’ one, his father called it, on one of his son’s few returns to the family home – with casual labouring jobs and bits of skilled metalwork. For the dead Mr Lynch had left his mark.

  And if there is a universal sympathy in things, maybe it was not so surprising that one day Eli encountered Mrs Lynch, who had never forgotten the boy who had predicted her husband’s death. It was in fact metalwork that brought them back in touch.

  Eli had found a job helping out at the local garage, where odd jobs of household repairs were also taken in. This was in the days when not everyone automatically replaced a leaky kettle or a saucepan that had lost its handle, when kitchen items were made of reparable substances, often, in Wales, anyhow, of iron or tin.

  Maureen Lynch had the means to buy new. But she had retained, as a kind of honouring of her dead first husband, a belief in the virtue of ‘making good’. A saucepan, one she was fond of, had developed a shaky handle and she had taken it round to Glen Brennan’s garage to see if it could be set to rights.

  When the gawky young man with jet-black hair and a protruding Adam’s apple appeared from out the back to collect this article, she almost screamed with surprise, adding, more soberly, ‘Eli, Eli Faring, isn’t it?’

  Eli had reverted to his full name Eliot, since he had found that the shortening by which he had been known from birth tended to give rise to anti-Semitic prejudices, and he felt he already had enough on his plate without adding that woe besides. He blushed. But he recognized the handsome, red-haired woman with the slightly protuberant blue eyes; and he recognized that she had recognized him as the boy who had given her dead husband the flowers.

  ‘Mrs Lynch?’ It may have been flattering that she remembered him but his anonymity had become a protective fleece and he was disturbed by this interloper from his past.

  ‘Merrill now. Lynch as was. What are you doing in this backwater, Eli?’ It was as if she knew he had changed his name and was determined not to let him forget who he really was.

  ‘This and that.’

  Maureen Merrill’s second marriage had strengthened up her bossy side. ‘You’d better come round to our place for a bite of supper and say what you’ve been up to, Eli Faring.’

  Eli went. ‘Any port in a storm,’ he said to himself, quoting one of the favourite maxims of the grandmother who had unwittingly set him on the desolate path of alienation.

  Frank Merrill was proud of his brisk, good-looking wife who had brought order into a previously ragbag existence. He was intrigued rather than alarmed by her story of the young boy – who had so remarkably foreseen the death of her first husband when no one else had any idea that his health hung by a fraying thread – and was not at all averse to having Eli over to take a look at him. A kind of freak, his wife had intimated. And he had laughed. ‘A weirdo, eh? Well, it takes all sorts.’

  The Merrills lived in a roomy Welsh farmhouse from which Maureen Merrill ran a B and B, more for occupation than for any financial need. The death of her first husband had left her with a substantial life insurance payout and Frank, who, with no dependants, had retired from his business marketing toys for Christmas crackers, commanded a reasonable pension.

  Soon Eli was a frequent guest at the Merrills’, and it didn’t take long for Maureen to suggest one night, in bed after they’d had what Frank referred to as ‘a bit of a cuddle’, ‘How about we have the boy take the spare room, Frankie? We don’t have many guests and any that come can always go into the B and B wing.’

  Eli moved into the Merrills’ place with a tinge of reluctance. He had grown accustomed, if not reconciled, to isolation and feared too close a proximity to others. But there was no doubt that, after his Spartan accommodation over the garage, the room at the Merrills’, with its own washbasin and a fine view over Offa’s Dyke, was a lure.

  And then there was the fact that Mrs Merrill knew all about his gift (if ‘gift’ it was) and didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, for the first time here was someone who seemed to respect his ability, almost to revere it.

  During the first months at the Merrills’, Eli experienced a rare peace. He moved there just ahead of a spring that arrived over the Welsh Marches with an uncommonly tender beauty. The sky shone in hyacinth candescence over the white lambs, which tottered into their newborn world, seeming emissaries of promise. Beneath their unsteady hooves, the greening fields glowed in the light as the surrounding hedges and the ditches gleamed with pale yellow celandines. Surely, Eli Faring said to himself as he walked to work one day, this is God’s land.

  In those days Eli was thinking much about God. He made an oblique overture to the local priest, a man who had trained at Oxford and considered himself intellectually above his parish but with very little vocation for pastoral care. Afraid of the facts of life, he had a corresponding abhorrence of death and the pillars that ran down his face to his mouth grew more pronounced when Eli, very tentatively, raised the subject of his unusual talent. The priest, whose calling commanded that he should help to shepherd human souls out of life, abruptly turned the conversation to the works of Thomas Aquinas.

  The name ‘Thomas’ brought in its wake memories of the friend who had been the subject of the first of Eli’s mortal prophecies. It was not a happy associati
on. Eli politely filtered out the earnest vicar’s discussions of medieval theology and reverted to the safer wisdoms of the pagan countryside.

  Eli’s distance from humankind had brought about a corresponding closeness to nature. The natural world, being free of self-consciousness, harboured no fear of death, and thus he hoped, prayed, even, in his own fashion, that he could do it no harm.

  And during this period, the former Mrs Lynch seemed hospitality itself. Each evening Eli joined her and Frank for supper at their kitchen table, more a high tea, really: boiled eggs, slices of pink ham, homemade bread, teacakes and strong tea, all comforting reminders of the childhood he had lost. On Sundays Eli got in the way of accompanying his hostess on a walk – not the far-flung kind he made alone, but a pleasant enough ramble over fields that were not too muddy for her shoes – while Frank messed about in the outhouses with the vintage cars that were his passion.

  A little more than six months after Eli had moved in, Maureen Merrill said, ‘We’ve got Frank’s Aunt Ellen coming for tea this Saturday. It would be nice if you could join us.’ If this invitation was unnecessary, since he habitually joined the Merrills for tea, Eli didn’t, even inwardly, remark it.

  The tea, pork pie, beetroot and salad with salad cream, followed by stewed plums and junket, passed uneventfully. Frank’s Aunt Ellen (more a second cousin, it had been explained) was a tiny, shrivelled woman with curvature of the spine. She sat with her face bent over the blue and white plate, on which Maureen had loaded pie and salad, hardly speaking, except to utter quiet platitudes about the weather and the cost of living. But she had, Eli thought, a nice mouth, curving and kindly, which smiled at him, shyly, over the pie and later the stewed plums.

  After she had gone, driven home by Frank in one of the not-too-valuable vintage cars, Maureen Merrill said, ‘Did you happen to look at Auntie’s eyes at all, Eli?’

  Not too surprised by this question, for Mrs Merrill was nosy, he answered truthfully that he had.

  ‘See any, you know …?’

  The purport of the question hung in the air. Eli shook his head and went to his room. That night, he went to the local pub and got drunk on pale ale.

  The following morning he was late for breakfast, and, being nearly late for work too, Maureen scolded him, in the manner she had adopted, a gentle scold, like a mother’s, she would have said. But instead of responding with his customary sheepish grin, Eli sat over his tea and toast, saying nothing. Maureen assumed it was a hangover from the unaccustomed alcohol and began an equally maternal homily on the perils of drink. But he cut her short, quite savagely, and went off to work without the usual goodbye wave.

  That evening he again went down to the Lamb and Stag and came home half plastered, this time on whisky.

  The next evening Maureen accosted her lodger.

  ‘Eli, have you got it into your head that we were wanting you to tell us anything about Auntie Ellen because it would help us in any way, you know, to know when …?’ She shrugged and looked over to Frank as if for help, though everyone in the room was aware that Maureen looked for help from no one.

  The young man gazed past the protuberant blue eyes peering into his own. He cast a glance at Frank, who was standing in the doorway, wiping his oily hands on a rag, and his expression softened. ‘Nothing to worry about there.’

  At the end of the week, when Maureen Merrill went up to ‘do’ Eli’s room, she found it clean and tidy and stripped of all his possessions. There was a note on the bed. Thanks for all your hospitality. Eliot.

  In the post-Merrill days Eli eschewed human company, making tentative contact only when hunger pressed and funds had run dry. One day, when the wolf seemed crouched on the threshold, he passed a collection of caravans parked by the roadside. A woman sitting on the steps of one of these shouted to him as he passed, ‘Tell your fortune, my darling.’

  Eli stopped. Used as he was to telling, in a manner of speaking, the fortunes of others, he had never been challenged over his own. The woman, who had a knowing eye, spotted the hesitation.

  ‘Cross my palm with silver?’

  ‘I haven’t any money to spare.’

  The woman looked at him with shrewd green eyes. ‘You a natural?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A natural. Like me. You see things?’

  Eli stared at the ground and made no answer.

  ‘You do, don’t you, yeah? Come here, dear, there’s honour among thieves they say and ought to be among our kind, yes?’

  There is a comfort in being seen. None the less, Eli approached the woman warily, as if she were an animal who might spring and demolish him. But he did as he was told and held out a hand.

  ‘You a southpaw?’

  ‘Left-handed? Yes.’

  ‘Southpaws often have the knack. Let’s have a look at you.’

  She traced a line in his hand.

  ‘Not a long life but our kind don’t live long. You ever been married?’

  Eli shook his head.

  ‘I see a child. Pretty girl. A niece maybe?’

  ‘I’m an only child.’

  ‘Lonely that. But there’s a child waiting for you along the way. Now then, there’s money here if you want it.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘In your line. If you want it. The hand only tells what’s possible. It’s up to us whether we make it stick or not. Let’s have a look at love. Got a girlfriend?’

  Eli coloured. ‘No.’

  The woman’s knowing eyes raked him up and down. ‘Nice big fellow like you.’

  ‘I’d better get going.’

  ‘You want to come along with us? It’s not regular money but there’s enough and there’s company.’ Her hand slid up his back. He felt the pressure of strong fingers on his lumbar spine. ‘We all need company, darling.’

  Eli was a virgin. The woman with her hard lean limbs, though undoubtedly his elder by a decade at least, was not unattractive.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m Della. Delilah to those in the know. My mum was a church-going feminist. She liked it when the women won. And you’re …’

  He hesitated, wondering whether to try for a new name. New start, new name. But nothing came to him. ‘I’m Eli,’ Eli said.

  For the next two years Eli travelled with Della in her caravan. The ragged little troop was not true Romany, but there was, as Della said, Romany blood in there somewhere. She and her brother Tony had a grandmother who was rumoured to have come from distant Romany stock. Together the brother and sister worked fairs: Della was the palmist and mystic globe reader, Tony ran the Pop the Duck gallery, and fat Jeff and little Pauline, when they travelled with them, the Bouncy House of Horror.

  For a while Eli was simply regarded as Della’s man – useful for repairing the vans, inflating the Bouncy House and fixing its occasional punctures, acting as general dogsbody and, as Tony put it, ‘Seeing our Della’s okay.’

  And the sex was a comfort. Della was kind in bed, perhaps to compensate for a marked unkindness out of it. Out of it, she upbraided Eli for clumsiness, inexperience and what she called ‘nancy-boy’ weaknesses; but at night she was tolerant of his diffidence, even generous. There was something reassuring in her well-muscled body and her hard-soled feet, which rasped his flesh as she lodged them above his hipbones.

  She gave him other things too. Material things, lifted from various department stores. His favourite was a washbag printed with images of Donald Duck.

  For reasons unfathomed, despite her earlier suggestion of potential financial reward, Della was tactful about Eli’s ‘gift’, never inquiring too much into what it was or how he might use it. Until one day she said, idly, ‘Tony’s got a new fan. Take a look at him when you have a chance, darling.’

  Tony’s ‘fans’ were eclectic. Some were underage girls, often with tattoos like rashes on their bare arms; others were male and middle aged, or elderly, as was the case with this one, a portly man whose stomach cascaded in rolls into his too-short trous
ers. He was called, most unsuitably, for his manner was far from imperial, Rex.

  Rex wore shirts patterned with bright tropical birds and sported an earring, which added no element of jauntiness to his pale, jowelled face.

  ‘What you want me to look for?’ Eli asked, as if he didn’t know.

  ‘Oh, whatever you see.’

  ‘He got money?’

  For once Della misread him. ‘Tony reckons. A big house, anyway, and no relatives to leave it to.’

  ‘I’ll take a look next time.’

  ‘Next time’ was a barbecue where Tony cooked chicken wings, handing them round swathed in red paper napkins to stave off the barbecue sauce. Rex sat on an oil drum on which he beat out the rhythms of the music, making a fairground of the balmy evening from the portable CD player, his sausage fingers thrumming to indicate a familiarity with the tune, which it was evident he didn’t possess. Evident anyway to Eli.

  Later, lifting herself from Eli’s prone body, Della asked, with an unusual casualness, ‘See anything in our Tony’s Rex, honey?’ ‘Honey’ was a term she used when she wanted more of him than usual.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Eli, and turned over.

  He left the next day, while Della was at the bank, leaving behind the Donald Duck washbag.

  After this, life grew harder for Eli. Della had taken care of him in her way. Left to his own devices he was at a loss. He survived hand-to-mouth, eking out a living doing menial jobs where he could; but in his terror of his gift he could no longer look anyone straight in the eye, which gave him a shifty expression that didn’t inspire trust.

  One evening he hitched a lift with a landscape gardener on his way to a job on a Lincolnshire country estate. The gardener was one of those gregarious men who like to be of service. Recognizing a fellow being in a parlous condition, he told Eli that the estate was often short of workers and suggested he could put in a word for him with the manager. As luck would have it, the estate manager needed more men for the coming pheasant shoots, and, observing that he’d got a worker on his hands, one he could rely on, asked Eli to stay on when the season was over.