by Adam Thorpe
After their bedtime story and the goodnight kisses, hearing her parents safely downstairs, Tammy produced the camera from under her pillow and took photos of her sisters with the flash. They stood on their beds and Alicia showed her tummy, and so did Beans; Tammy giggled so much she couldn’t take any more.
She allowed Alicia to take one of her; she pretended to be very afraid in her bed, clutching the sheet to her neck and moving her face around like plasticine until it was the most terrified she could make it and signalling with her hand when it was ready. She didn’t think the photo would come out, because Alicia moved the camera down a little when she pressed the button. ‘That’ll be blurred,’ she whispered. Beans watched with a very serious look from her metal cot. Then they got really scared, because they heard creaks from the attic, as if there was a monster or a ghost up there. Or perhaps Jean-Luc in his dark glasses.
‘It’s only Jamie,’ Tammy remembered.
But she knew, watching her father checking the windows and hearing him lock up, that Jean-Luc was the real danger. She pictured, drifting into slumber, the big stone house surrounded by CCTV cameras like the ones outside her school, keeping them safe from any old Tom, Dick or Harry who might be inclined to (and here the voices of her teachers and of the nice policewoman who came round to explain the dangers of the outside world spiralled gently together into sleep).
The house rose around them in its shuttered, night-time guise, indifferent to it all, creaking and shuffling through the decades, the centuries. Nick was standing on the vast roof with an urgent letter to post and the rain was falling in light swathes, rendering the tiles as slippery as ice. He had no idea that this wasn’t all as real as anything else, and was very afraid. Someone was about to push him, but he didn’t know who. He began to slide anyhow and surfaced with a start as the verge slipped away from under him, replaced by depth. There was depth in life, after all, he was demonstrating to his students. His lectures were renowned because he gave practical demonstrations on slippery roofs. This was why he’d been made a professor.
He hadn’t been. That was Peter Osterhauser. The darkness in the bedroom might have been the darkness of death, though they spoke of a point of light. His heart raced unevenly. The only light was the sickly green glow from the digital clock, recording the countdown with remorseless, if illusory, precision.
The point is, he heard himself thinking, who will know about your sacrifices, your trying to be good, to be just? There are no teachers in the sky, no end-of-term marks, no congratulations from the headmaster. It’s the bullies and the nasties who enjoy themselves, who gain, who seize the day and never pay for it, after, because there is no after. It’s Henton, Smythe and Rollick. It’s the greedy ones. The corporation rookers. The traffickers of politics. The Hummer-cruising sniggerers. Oile, oleum, elaia. Who cares about the judgement of history? They don’t, because they’ll be dead.
It was as if he’d never kicked free of being fifteen, sixteen.
Last April, a year ago almost to the day, his old schoolfriend Duncan drove all the way from Stafford, where he was a devoted poverty campaigner, with a rope, a camping stool and a piece of paper, to ancient Ickthin Forest in Devon, part of which bordered his and Nick’s old boarding school, Hilmorton Academy. There he parked the car and walked some fifty yards into the trees, unfolded the stool, and hanged himself from a mammoth oak tree’s lower limb, just high enough to take his feet off the ground when he kicked the stool away. He had told nobody. He was fifty-three. Everyone, as always in these circumstances, was left stunned, bewildered, and riddled with guilt. Nick had felt himself go cold inside.
Now, away from his work, away from the endless deadlines and hassles and urgent messages, he had time to contemplate. He stared, wide awake at three in the morning in a room in France that had scarcely lost its strangeness, its foreign smell, and contemplated the meaning of Duncan’s suicide. Duncan Haighley had been one of his closest and oldest friends. Why had he driven all the way down, back to school? Why had that been necessary? Duncan had not enjoyed Hilmorton, but neither had he hated it; failing to shine as Nick had shone, Duncan had been a quiet, unassuming boy of an underrated intelligence and a tremendous social conscience that extended to a sometimes tedious puritanism and tendentiousness, especially when he embraced green politics. But how right Duncan had been all along! And how wrong his friend!
Nick now imagined him hanging there like a flitch of bacon and felt nauseous rather than tearful. A small girl had discovered Duncan, by ill luck, and run back to tell her parents about the man with the crooked head staring at her from the sky. And so the damage branches out, tremors through the air, passes from person to person. She will carry a little particle of Duncan’s despair like a cancerous cell through her life, and maybe it will ruin that life, waking her in nightmare with an image she can scarcely trace – for surely her parents will never have mentioned it, hoping the growing mind would leave it behind, or not understand what it really meant.
But nothing is forgotten, Nick heard himself saying in the vaults of his own mind, staring into the blackness. Nothing is forgotten. What was that playful, slightly cocky phrase that opened his first important paper on the mandate system in Africa?
We would do well to remember that history is more about amnesia than memory.
He took half of one of his mild sleeping pills. Forced amnesia, he reflected.
When he woke up again, the clock face was in competition with a grey wash brimming the edges of the shutters. Nearly eight. Sarah was breathing gently, nothing visible but her glossy black-and-loganberry hair. He needed a pee.
Checking on the way back, he saw the girls had all got up: the bedroom was empty. It was like a trick of light, the kicked-back duvets about to become his daughters, sleeping.
He listened blearily at the top of the stairs for the sing-song murmur of Spot or Rupert or Thomas. Silence. Sarah stirred from under the duvet, seeking more air. He thought of waking her, saw her mouth open as if in sorrow or pain, her breath noisier, someone else’s dead hand protruding, hanging off the edge. It was hers: the sparse light glinted on her golden rings. Beans had woken her up several times in the night.
His heart inflated and beat its swollen hammer against his upper ribs, fighting the backwash from the sleeping pill.
He saw, at the top of the narrow stairs, the low attic door was open. He went up quietly. The fug brushed his face like a thick and familiar cloth. Jamie’s sleeping bag on the mattress was zipped open, and he was not in it. It was thrown back violently, exposing the ructions of the bottom sheet, a small litter of broken matches and pellets of dirt and his white iPod. Otherwise, the attic was surprisingly clean, its swept boards still witness to Jamie’s burst of energy. The parachute silk, strung between the far Velux and the door, gave the huge room a somewhat unearthly, luminous glow. A nice space.
The Velux window was slightly open, he noticed. It was speckled with raindrops: it must have rained in the night, but not much. He closed it in case it rained again. The window seemed to startle the attic with its rectangle of sky; through the slicked glass he saw the big new sun wobble in solution, like a soluble, orange tablet.
Nick wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or concerned. Now and again Jamie had done very strange things while on drugs: walked along the edge of a flat roof in Dunstable shouting at passers-by. Turned up to work in a despatch-rider’s office with only his helmet on. Plucked a dead bird in the middle of a dual carriageway near Southport. He was not 100 per cent reliable.
Ominousness.
They weren’t in the sitting room. They weren’t in the kitchen. He checked out the few remaining rooms in the house, including the scullery with Jamie’s Door, knowing that the silence made this all pointless. He wanted to burst into laughter, a fit of hilarity swelling in his belly. The kitchen door was unlocked, interestingly: a bird took off from a tree and flew away without a care in the world through the fresh morning air, which still smelt of wetness, of large wet clouds.
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He said to himself: these things only happen in stories. His girls had been kidnapped. It would be in the news. Under the remorseless, lascivious, fantasising gaze of the British press, urging everything into simulacra. He really did have a desire to laugh. He dressed silently in two minutes flat, as he heard himself saying in the ensuing inquest. My wife slept on. I didn’t want to wake my wife. He thought he might be going mad, entertaining such absurd and almost evilly nasty thoughts.
The plump sun, still low and reddish-orange, was split in two by a black pencil-line of cloud. Other clouds were dashed higgledy-piggledy in long snakes and puffy ladders, as livid as bruises. A solitary red squirrel flew over the yard and rippled vertically up a trunk into the leaves, chattering angrily. He stared after it. The dawn birds were a sea of thoughtful mutterings, with the occasional loud burst nearby that startled him each time.
The swimming pool was a block of dark green, reflecting the dark green slopes beyond. Its tiles shone with wet. The barn and goatshed were empty, with the kind of nonchalant vacuity that only mindless objects can conjure. It annoyed him. The fresh morning sunlight was flooding the yard either side of the house’s broad shadow.
He stood by the pool, staring in. He wondered whether to shout. Jamie would be taking them on a harmless walk, that was all there was to it. Two sides of the same coin: one awful, one fine. It was a question of how life flicked it, how it fell.
He put his hand into the pool’s water and to his surprise his fingers disappeared. The very water was dark green, as though someone had poured in a bucket of dye. Pea soup. Robin Hood’s livery. Even darker than before it was cleaned.
An inch or so of transparency, then his hand vanished like a squid’s tentacles into the depths. Jean-Luc might have done this, he thought, switching it on and off like a light. A fly struggled in the skin of it, the first victim of the day. His old-looking and scaled-down face, pasted onto his silhouetted head and shoulders, scowled up out of the gloom. It was like staring into himself at bad moments, when he felt like disappearing, dissolving.
Was this a very bad moment? He looked up and wondered if he was being watched, not by security cameras, but by a pair of binoculars. It was only then that he noticed the shoes, abandoned by the metal steps: Alicia’s pink, unbuckled pair were sitting on the edge, placed carefully side by side as if someone had sucked her right out of them. Or as if, cartoon-like, she had taken a dive, leaving a little puff of exhaust.
He pulled his sleeve right back and swirled his hand about in the water for a minute or so, until his flesh turned too cold.
He loped in a sudden fit of excitement right round the house. As long as he kept scurrying about, he could keep his terror in check. He hurtled through the archway and circled the house once, scuffling on his long legs, panting audibly, glancing into the car then up the track. He called out their names in turn, but not wildly. Sensibly. As if playing hide-and-seek. The countryside, so much wilder here than cosy England, didn’t even bother to reply. He came back to the lifeless pool-hut and rapped on the window, as if they might have been hiding inside. His three girls. With Jamie. The pool began to scare him with glimpsed faces, white and sightless, pressed against the glass of the surface. He remembered the toad, mysteriously vanishing when the pool cleared.
The cellars! Hope flickered and burnt its little incandescent spot in his chest. He checked the three that weren’t padlocked, slipping on the worn steps down, looking behind and into vats and barrels and the grape-crusher with its massive wooden screw. A worm-chewed ladder disintegrated in his hands. A horse-collar fell, huge and heavy with a flurry of straps and hooks and powdered by dust. He hadn’t ever noticed the old bicycle, or the wooden hay-fork veiled like a bride in cobwebs. They were so motionless, and he was so busy. He coughed. He was wasting time. This was all plain silly.
The locked cellar, fastened by two combination padlocks on each bolt, had a tiny window with a thick grille at shin-level: there was nothing but blackness inside, like a solid cube.
He hurried across the yard and shouted into the woods, standing uncertainly on the tumbled wall. His voice rose and shattered against the quiet. He repeated their names politely and waited, wobbling on the loose stones. His pseudopolyps stirred like a frayed collar.
The intense callousness of foliage.
The absolute indifference of the natural world.
The dense self-absorption of the beasts, pitiless, specialised. No wonder we wanted to take our revenge on it all.
He waited in the stillness, speckled only by birdsong. All these strangely meditative moments in a life: the sigh of the withdrawing surf before the breakers’ crash, the anguish.
He came back to the pool, finding it harder and harder to breathe. The water gave nothing back. It was a screw-top lid. Jamie could swim, and Tammy too, but Alicia could only thrash with wings and Beans could only sink calmly, without any fuss.
He would have to wake Sarah. He couldn’t stand the idea. All that panic, that anxiety, that bother.
And the three of them would still be floating. Or maybe not. Why did they dredge pools and rivers to find the dead? He picked up Alicia’s pink shoes and smelt them like a tracker dog. Leather and sweat. No, plastic. He shouted their names again and his voice evaporated in his throat, already suffering.
He loped to the house and up the stairs in his shambling, long-limbed ungainliness. Sarah was standing in the bedroom in her nightie, blearily raising her eyebrows.
‘Did you sleep badly or something? What are you doing with Alicia’s shoes?’
‘I think,’ he said, hoarsely searching for breath, ‘they’ve gone for a walk with Jamie.’
‘Oh, he’s re-emerged, has he? You think? Have you been jogging?
‘Actually, I’m conjecturing.’ He took a deep breath and blew it out like smoke. ‘I’m attempting not to panic.’
‘I’m sure they’re fine,’ she said, already whipping off her nightie.
* * *
‘Jamie’s with them,’ he said. ‘I’m assuming.’
‘Can we assume?’ They were both hurrying down the stairs, if steadily. Sarah was white but calm. She was actually quite good in emergencies.
‘Will they have gone up the track, Nick?’
‘Which way?’
‘You take one way, I’ll take t’other,’ she said, oddly like her mother in a good mood.
‘We mustn’t give Jamie the impression we’re worried,’ said Nick, by the main door. ‘That we don’t trust him.’
‘He knows already, unless he’s really thick.’
‘He’s not thick at all,’ said Nick, surprised.
The house had them in its mouth, behind its teeth. It was grinning. But it was not biting. The yard looked like a great desert plain to be crossed without water.
‘I’ll go towards the road,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m going to shout their names.’
‘Done that.’
‘Of course everything’s all right, really. We’re all so paranoid. I’m in a state of dread most of the time. A waste of my life.’
‘Several times,’ he continued.
‘We’re completely over-dramatising,’ she snorted. ‘Did you check the barn properly, Nick? Check it again. Oh, shit.’
She shouted their names at the yard as if cross with it. He waited politely for the silence to draw down its curtain and confirmed he had checked the barn with great thoroughness. She pictured him picking through the barn’s clutter with tweezers, when he had in fact nipped in and out.
‘Oh. What’s happened to the pool?’
She was standing on the edge. He had the impression it had got worse in less than twenty minutes. A rim of scum was now visible where the water lapped at the sides. Where it entered the water, the alarm’s white pipe was smeared green. Nothing but shadows broke the surface as she dipped her hand in and swept it about, making the filters tut and mutter. He imagined her fingers touching something she wouldn’t want to touch, but he hadn’t yet told her exactly where he’d
found the shoes.
‘Pools do that, apparently,’ he said. ‘Overnight.’
‘Jamie was floating in a pool in my dream last night and it was all murky,’ she said, looking very round-shouldered.
‘Sarah, don’t even begin to go that way. Everything’s fine. They’ve gone for a walk with Jamie.’
‘Great,’ she said, already moving off. ‘They’ve gone for a walk with Jamie. Just great. Just so consoling. And Alicia’s in bare feet. Scorpions? Snakes? Huge red ants?’
When he was four, Jamie would only do a poo if his father was present. This meant, when Nick had lectures, meetings or tutorials all day, his son would hold it in and develop stomach pains and scream and Helena would phone the college, leaving messages imploring him to come back home if only for ten minutes. Nick became a laughing stock among his colleagues: Sir John Seeley never suffered this. Helena would not use euphemisms, that was the trouble: she believed infants were closer to the arcane powers, that the planet should be run by children. Nick reckoned the planet run by Jamie would be proximate to the Third Reich, or perhaps the Central African Empire under Bokassa. But he would speed back on his bicycle from a seminar on ‘The Role of British Intelligence in Imperialist Statism’ and stand by the loo as Jamie, staring at his father with a strange little smile, would deliver the goods on his throne.
Now Jamie had the same expression, made more malignant by twenty-one years of practice. He was holding the tin with Alicia’s chocolate cake inside. Nick had just been up the rear track almost to the rocks and back, calling and calling, lonely between the trees, feeling as if climate change – which had recently begun to give him sleepless nights – had been toppled from its Olympian status and replaced by something far worse.
‘Jamie!’
‘Yo.’
‘Where are the girls, Jamie?’
‘The girls,’ Sarah echoed, unexpectedly just behind, the lid on her panic rattling.
Jamie said, putting the tin down on the kitchen table and raising his two hands in mock-placation, ‘Why so unhappy, man?’ They could smell him from the door. He must have been pretty much in the same clothes for the whole two-week sojourn in the attic.
