Feather Boy

by Nicky Singer

  Scrape. Pause. Scrape.

  “Ssh,” I say to Niker.

  “What?”

  “Listen.”

  “To what?”

  “That noise.”

  He listens.

  Scrape. Pause. Scrape.

  “Hear it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it, Niker?” I want him to be as scared as I’ve been.

  “Well, Norbert, I’d say it was the incredibly sinister sound of a tree branch scraping against a pane of glass. What would you say?”

  But I’m not saying anything because I’ve just noticed the brick. Or rather the lack of brick. Of course, some of the dark shapes on the floor probably are bricks, but they don’t look like my brick. The one that can be up against the door. But isn’t. Which means either no-one’s been in the house since I was here last or – that someone’s in the house right now.

  “Brick,” I say.

  “Don’t start,” says Niker. He kicks his way across the rubble and holds opens the door to the inner house. “After you.”

  I pick my way slowly across the room, climb the step and then stop. I don’t want to be first into the corridor. Not just because of what might lie ahead but because of what will definitely lie behind. Niker. I don’t want to have my back to him.

  “Can we speed things up a bit here, Norbie?” There’s a shove at the base of my spine and then I’m in the corridor. He is quickly in behind me and the door swings shut. I think he will push me again. But he doesn’t. We are both held by the quality of the dark. It’s like someone’s thrown black paint in our eyes. I feel I ought to be able to rub it away, but I can’t.

  After a moment Niker says: “You got anything useful in that bag of yours?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a torch, for instance?”

  “Yes. Yes! I have.”

  I unbuckle the backpack and dip in my hand. Sleeping bag, crisp packet, apple, crisp packet, bottle of Evian water, penknife, crisp packet again. What if the torch never made it? Ridiculous. Crisp packet, apple, crisp packet. What if I left the torch on the bed? Packed everything else, but forgot the torch? I begin to scrabble. Crisps. Don’t panic. Of course it’s here, I can feel the weight of it. Although the weight could be the bottle of water. It’s Dad’s torch, the sealed black rubber one he used to keep in the car. Mum laughed at him, called it the Mackintosh Torch, offered to buy it matching wellingtons.

  “Norbert…”

  “Yes… yes… Got it!”

  “Give it here.”

  Niker almost snatches the torch from me.

  “Yeuch – what do you call this?”

  “Car torch.”

  “Rubber truncheon more like.” I can sense him turning it, searching for the ‘on’ button.

  “It’s waterproof.”

  “Ideal,” says Niker. “Ah!” He locates the button. The beam is pale and insubstantial. He points the torch at the floor and then the ceiling. The beam barely reaches. “Does it have any setting other than dim? No, don’t bother to answer that, Norbert.”

  Now he has the torch, Niker takes the lead. Quietly, I follow.

  “What’s that?”

  He’s found the gap between the floor and the skirting board. The torchlight flickers over the filing cabinets, the desk, the lamp shades, the sink.

  “Basement,” I say.

  “Basement!” scoffs Niker. “Den, more like. Problem with you, Norbert, is you have no imagination.”

  Problem with me is I have too much imagination. We are coming to the entrance hall, the one with the sledgehammered terracotta tiles. And I can hear that creak again. The wooden-gallows sound.

  Creak. Cre-eak.

  I look at Niker. He’s got the torch low on the tiles. Can’t he hear the creak?

  “Jeez,” says Niker. “Who’s done this?” He picks up a broken tile and runs his finger down the edge. “Sharp as a knife, this. You could kill someone with one of these. Death by tile.” As he stands up, I see him slip the shard into his pocket.

  Creak. Creak.

  Now he hears it. He turns towards the sound, faces the stairs, points the torch. But the beam doesn’t quite reach.

  “Did…”

  “Ssh!” He extends his arm as if that will make the beam reach the bottom tread. It doesn’t. And in any case the light is faltering, tremoring between dim and very dim.

  Creak. Crea-ak.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the sound of the house,” I say.

  “Houses don’t make sounds,” Niker says.

  “This one does.”

  He thrusts the torch into my face. I don’t know whether he’s looking for knowledge or fear. Niker would make a good interrogator. But not with this light. It’s weakening by the minute. The moment. And Niker knows it, which is why he has it shining at me and not the stairs now because the beam does, just, reach my face. And he is pretending – as I am – that the batteries are not fading when they clearly are fading. The light wavers, it flickers, off, on, off, on. And then off. Off. No light at all. Not hazy. Not gloomy. But pitch black. I cannot see Niker. He cannot see me.

  There’s an appalled silence and then he yells: “You jerk! You stupid, idiotic, brainless jerk!” I hear him wrestling with the torch, pulling and pushing and tearing, as if he could bring it back to life by throttling it. “You’re a moron,” he continues. “An imbecile. A halfwit. A quarterwit. A drongo. How could you bring a torch with dud batteries, you, you… GERBIL!”

  “You,” I mention, “didn’t bring a torch at all.”

  He lunges towards my voice. I feel the force of his body as wind moving. But he never arrives. He catches a foot on one of the loose tiles, skids and falls. I hear a hard object, the torch presumably, ricochet off a wall. I’m glad. He doesn’t have a truncheon now.

  “Ow!” he shrieks.

  “Shut up,” I hiss.

  “What!”

  “I said, Shut up. There could be other people in the house.” But suddenly I don’t think so. If anyone was in the house then they would have come to investigate by now. This gives me a small surge of confidence. This and two other facts: one, that my eyes are already getting accustomed to the dark; and two, that the dark should be to my advantage anyway. After all I know Chance House and Niker doesn’t. Although of course, it will get slightly lighter as we get to the top of the house. The mesh is only on the windows of the first two floors.

  “Come on,” I say, “get up.”

  He paws up at me. When our hands meet, he grips mine tightly.

  “Shall I go first?” I offer.

  “You’re joking.”

  He stumbles past me to where he knows the stairs begin, steadies himself to find the banister. With the banister he can be safe. He thinks. Underfoot is the stripped wallpaper, but he’s going carefully. He negotiates it with apparent ease. I let him get a tread or two in front of me. He’s gaining confidence, lifting his feet automatically, used now to the depth of tread, the glue-stiff paper. Then, all of a sudden he’s on it.

  Sinking in.

  “Oh God, oh no! Norbert!”

  “It’s only lagging,” I say, casually.

  “What!”

  “You know, that spongy stuff they put round boilers, to keep the heat in?” It’s under my feet now. The suck and squish of it. Niker is breathing hard and I don’t need a 100-watt lightbulb to tell what his expression is. I contemplate saying out loud the little thing that’s nagging him, i.e., “You see I have been here before, Niker”, but I remember he’s got the tile shard in his pocket, so I don’t.

  He ploughs on, up the stairs to the turn and then, hugging the wall, across the landing. Halfway up the next flight of stairs is the fire door. Niker pauses but I don’t think it’s because he sees the door. Even I, who know it’s there, can only see shadows. It would be decent of me to warn him. But I don’t.

  He grips on to the banister again and begins the last ascent. He’s going slightly faster now, maybe because h
e’s angry. Maybe because there’s no paper on the stairs here. I keep close behind him, pressurising him to keep up the speed. The fire door is white wood and glass. Niker smashes straight into it. He reels from the impact and I’m too close so he knocks into me, and we both lose our footing and fall. Him on top. His elbow is in my nose and my bum bounces down two treads, but I still think it’s worth it. Niker is moaning. Really moaning. Although I think it’s mainly the shock.

  “That door was open,” I mention as I pull myself out from under him. “Last time.” The boldness makes me feel all shivery.

  He continues to moan. But I think he’s heard me.

  “Still got your sleeping bag?” I ask. My backpack is still firmly strapped on, though I don’t hold out much hope for uncrushed crisps.

  Niker has dropped his bag.

  “Do you want me to look for you?” I offer. And then I say, “Are you all right?”

  “In slightly under an hour,” says Niker, dragging himself to a sitting position, “I have fallen over a microwave, tripped on some sharp tiles, slammed into a door that should never have been there, slammed so hard into the said door that even my bruises have bruises, and you ask if I’m all right. Of course, I’m all right, you stupid jerk. Why wouldn’t I be?” He glares in my direction. “And yes, you can get my sleeping bag.”

  I contemplate going back down to the landing and claiming not to be able to find it. But then I remind myself that I’m not really a mean person (and maybe I’m also mindful of that shard) so I do my best and there it is, as expected, in the corner. It’s come to rest by a piece of corroded pipe. I can feel the powdery rust on the metal opening. And as it’s only a small piece of piping, about the length of my thumb, I pop it into Niker’s drawstring bag, pushing it down into what I hope is the opening of his sleeping bag. I think I’m getting the hang of this darkness business.

  I take the bag back up the stairs and hand it to him.

  “Are there really ducks?” he asks then.

  “Yes,” I say.

  There’s a pause into which he could insert the word “sorry”, but he doesn’t.

  “Come on,” he says.

  We walk side by side up the last of the stairs. The door to Top Floor Flat, Chance House, is open, just as before. As I expected there is slightly more light here, partly because of the unmeshed windows but also because two of the rooms look over the front of the house, so there is some filtering streetlight. Niker scans the kitchen, the sitting room, the sledgehammered bathroom, and then sees the front room with the mattress.

  “Five star,” he says. “That’ll be my room.”

  “Suit yourself,” I say. The back room is pulling me. Somehow, in my imagination, I haven’t got further than this: the dark, the fear. Niker. But now there’s something else. I think it’s David Sorrel. Wanting me in that room, as though there is something to find after all. As though Edith Sorrel’s wisdom is in there and, last time, I just missed it.

  I turn towards the room. The door is as I left it. Ajar. I begin walking, my body heavy, somnambulant, as though I’m sleepwalking. I don’t want Niker to come with me. But he does, following so close behind me he’s almost treading on my heels. We pass through the door.

  “Ducks,” I say. A million duck eyes stare at us.

  “I expect Mrs Sorrel told you,” says Niker. “You were discussing home furnishings, then and now, and she told you.”

  I don’t bother to answer that, because I’m moving towards the window with the star of glass cut from it. I feel quite determined, quite peaceful. I am, after all, the sort of boy who can fly.

  “What are you doing?” says Niker suddenly.

  “Just want to look out the window.”

  “No,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “No!” He dodges in front of me.

  “Get out of my way, Niker.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

  “The window’s broken. You’re three floors up.”

  “I know that, Niker.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I told you. I’m going to look out of the window.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. That’s all.”

  He moves aside, but not so far that he couldn’t grab me if he wanted to.

  There is light coming through the window. The clouds have cleared. There are stars again. Hundreds of millions of stars. And also a moon. A huge silver disc hung in the sky like some giant coin. It’s so beautiful, so perfect, that I want to reach through the hole in the glass and touch it. And I will. But not yet. Not with Niker here.

  I turn around, take off my backpack and make a show of searching for a clean space at the back of the room on which to lay my sleeping bag. “Hey – looks like you’ve got the best deal with that mattress,” I say. He watches me arrange things, take out the packet of plain crisps, the bottle of water.

  “I think it would be better if we stuck together,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say. “But no thanks. If you want crisps…”

  “No.”

  “See you in the morning then,” I say cheerily.

  “I’m not letting you sleep in here by yourself.”

  “You mean you don’t want to sleep in there by yourself.”

  “No, I don’t mean that.”

  “What do you mean then?”

  “I just don’t think you should sleep in here.”

  “Why? Because of David Sorrel?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What are you afraid of, Niker?”

  “Me? I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “Well, push off then.” I begin to remove my donkey jacket. “Nightie, night, Niker. Oh – and shut the door, will you?”

  Grudgingly, he retreats. “I’ll be listening,” he says. “If you go anywhere near that window…”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  He doesn’t shut the door, but the configuration of the rooms is such that, I know, even with both doors wide open, he will not be able to see the star hole window.

  I have plenty of time so I wait. Take a sip of water and open one of the bags of crisps. They are crushed, as expected, and I crush them some more, so Niker will think I’m eating. I even wait after I hear the zip of his sleeping bag. Then, just as I think he may be drifting off, he suddenly shouts across the landing: “Did you bring a good book?”

  “No, I got the telly,” I call back.

  “This mattress is disgusting. It’s got bird shit on it.”

  “Well, don’t go on. Everyone will want it.”

  “Fancy a chat? You know, person to person? This long-distance stuff can get expensive.”

  “No thanks.” I yawn. “I’m on the way out. Just going to tidy up my three-course dinner, then it’s bed byes for me. Curtains.”

  “Curtains?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Norbert?”

  “Yeah?”

  He leaves the sort of pause that my mum leaves before she says “I love you”.

  Niker says: “There’s a piece of piping in my sleeping bag.”

  “Rusty piping?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I’ve got the same. I think it must be a free sample.”

  “Norbert?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why aren’t you funny at school?”

  “Why aren’t you nice at school?”

  “Sure you don’t need me to join you in the master bedroom?”

  “Sure. Night, Niker.”

  He shuts up after that. I think about waiting until I can hear him snore. But if he doesn’t snore that could be a long time. So I give it about five minutes and then I pick a stealthy way across the bare floorboards. Of course one of them creaks, but Niker either doesn’t hear or doesn’t react. Perhaps he’s getting used to the noises the house makes. Perhaps he really is asleep. Please let him be asleep.

  And please let there be no clouds. I need the
sky to be clear. I need… Yes! I arrive at the window and there it is again. My perfect, magnetic moon. You can see why tides follow the moon. I feel the pull myself, the power of that huge planet hanging there, just beyond the broken glass. The latch of the window is old-fashioned, an arm of metal, heavy, pierced like a belt and painted cream. I lift it and know at once that the window is quite free. It will open with the gentlest of pushes.

  I push.

  And that’s when the heavens come into the room, or I go out of it. The moon, the stars, the night wind, the vault of the sky. I inhabit it all and it inhabits me. The freedom, the vastness, the power. And also the beauty. And of course I’m not going to jump. I know that I cannot fly. Not with wings anyway. But I can fly, yes. Can stand bold at the top of Chance House because I have walked up each step of my fear and arrived here. Twice. And that gives the power. Power over myself and power over Niker. Who is still afraid. I breathe deep, inhaling and exhaling the possibilities of this night and, just for a moment, I feel gigantic. I feel capable of anything.

  “No!” Niker screams from the door. “Don’t do it!” He sprints across the room and rugby-tackles me to the ground.

  “Oh no, no – I don’t believe it!” His hands are on the back of my sweatshirt. “What have you done! What is this!” he yells.

  “Tomato sauce,” I say, or rather I mumble as my face is squashed to the floor.

  “It’s blood,” he says. “It’s the shape of a star!”

  “Trust me,” I say, spitting. “It’s tomato sauce. Courtesy of one Mr Deep-Fat, Vinney’s Chip Shop. I’ll tell you about it some other time. Now, do you think I could get up, please?”

  He lets me go and then jumps up himself, pulls shut the window and stands guard, blocking the sky.

  “What do you think you were doing?” he demands.

  I can’t tell him I was feeling gigantic, so I just say: “None of your business.”

  “If you fall out,” he says, “they’ll blame me. They’ll think I pushed you.”

  “Oh,” I say, “is that what’s bothering you? Mind you, who’d know? From my position on the concrete, I wouldn’t be doing a lot of talking.”

  “This is not a joking matter.”

  “Isn’t it? I thought everything was a joke with you. Shane Perkiss, Jon Pinkman…”