The Waking That Kills

by Stephen Gregory

  Lawrence leaned over my shoulder. He clawed the paper off the table. It shredded under his nails. ‘The photo’s terrible,’ he said. ‘I was nervous. The story’s alright, the facts are kind of alright, but...’

  He clawed again and again at the table. His nails made a horrid grating noise. It reminded me of how the orange cat had batted the ball of newspaper backwards and forwards around the kitchen and then its desultory, instinctive swipe at my hand. I leaned back in my chair and let him do it. He scrunched the paper into a tighter and tinier ball, like a child making the cruellest snowball of grit and compacted ice... and perversely, because it had taken some doing and an unexpected fuck you to get it from the cat, he tossed it onto the floor... where the animal pounced, smote it out of the room with a top-spin forehand and disappeared into the garden.

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ Lawrence said.

  IT’S A PISSY tuesday morning. we drive to school and it’s still dark because it’s like october and it feels like we’re burrowing deeper and deeper into a miserable long winter. it’s raining. leaves blowing everywhere, they’re falling off the trees and blowing everywhere and the road and pavements are kind of black and shiny.

  mum drops me at school. tuesday is crap, school is crap full stop, but tuesday’s the worst. the morning’s maths and english, lord of the fucking flies again with mr ramsay just reading it to us in his plummy reading-aloud voice. death by boredom. tuna sandwich in the canteen and then it’s art club in the afternoon. which is good. I mean it’s all crap but art club is the only time in the week when my head isn’t just banging with boredom.

  art club with mr bray. he smells, his clothes and his hair smell of cigarettes and his fingers are yellowy with nicotine. drink too, on his breath, even in the mornings, I guess it’s from lots of beer or whisky or something the night before.

  but he’s an artist. I mean, really. I’ve seen his stuff. I don’t know why he’s a teacher, like ramsay and all the others who are just so crap and ordinary and boring. he plays music in his art room too.

  so it’s tuesday afternoon. there’s bray and me and two other kids in the art room. it’s pissing down outside and already getting dark, only three or half-past, and the tree outside is scratching on the window. bray says it’s a quince or something, he says it’s rare maybe the only one in the county. I don’t care what it is, but I kind of like the scratchy sound, the rhythm of it and the rain. bray’s got some jazz on, piano and bass and drums, says it’s errol garner. I like it. and we’re doing batik. so the room’s warm and fuggy and nice, with a big pan of wax heating up on the gas ring in the corner.

  someone comes in. a girl. a woman, I guess. annoying, it spoils the private art club thing. bray says she’s a student from lincoln university doing her teaching practice and wants to watch the club. she’s thin and white with thin ratty hair, smells of some kind of cream for spots. a wash-out, I can tell straight off. trying to be nice. pathetic. she’s been in the room two minutes and I want her to piss off.

  worse, she’s doing a project. she’s got a lot of big books and stuff and bray says she’s going to do some tests on us. so I’m starting to feel scratchy because it’s spoilt the mood and the music, and even the quince on the window is annoying scratchy instead of part of the music and rain and a nice dark afternoon...

  bray goes out. I guess he thinks he can slip out for a coffee or a drink or something because the student’s there.

  she calls me over, I have to leave what I’m doing, even though the pan of wax is boiling bubbling and I want to paint it onto my material, and she sits me down with her at bray’s table.

  big heavy books she’s got. she turns the pages and there are lots of dots and spots and different colours. she asks me what I can see, any shapes or numbers or letters in the dots. some of them are clear. some of them a bit vague, I’m not sure. and pages where there’s nothing, nothing but kind of washed-out pastel colours with no shapes or letters or numbers or anything.

  she’s looking at me funny sideways. asks me to try some of the pages again. and she’s writing stuff in her little exercise book. One of the other kids, a little twat called carroll, that’s his surname, he’s a boy called carroll, wanders over and he’s looking over my shoulder and he kind of snorts each time I say there’s nothing. I turn round and tell him to fuck off.

  the student-girl-woman goes red. the other twat called winton comes over. I can feel him there behind me and I can hear him sniggering, so I turn round again and tell him to fuck off too.

  student’s very red. not blushing, but blotchy. thin sea-weedy hair and a big spot on her chin and blotchy. she stares at me so I stare at her and she looks scared. she pushes weedy bits of hair behind her ear and she writes in her book. her ear’s red too. I want to tell her to fuck off.

  when I stand up and walk away, she calls after me, like trying to be nice and friendly but her voice shaking because she’s nervous and weak and frightened of me. she’s saying stuff like don’t worry it’s quite common, it’s mostly boys, reds and greens and browns the commonest type... and she’s wittering on and her voice is scratchy and grating and she’s saying stuff like they call it colour-blindness but it’s nothing serious and won’t make any difference you just see things differently and...

  I walk back towards her and put my face right up to hers and whisper look I don’t want to hear this so fuck off will you

  so she does. she scurries out of the room like she’s going to piss herself, with her big magic books and her secret little note book, a spotty little student-witch with her silly spells.

  I can’t remember the rest of it so clearly. I remember rubbing my eyes a lot. rubbing them because... I don’t know I’m mad because she said about blindness it makes me feel angry for my eyes, for being blind, not really blind but... I mean she can see stuff I can’t see, and the twats carroll and winton are sniggering because I can’t see stuff they can see and there’s something wrong with me and

  angry. angry with the student doing her experiment on me for her fucking project... angry with the other kids. I go to the door and lock it.

  I jab carroll in the stomach. that’s all it takes. he falls onto the floor like he’s choking, like he can’t breathe. I shove winton so hard he goes down too. he isn’t sniggering anymore. like he’s crying, frightened because I locked the door.

  got a feeling, a kind of calm feeling. know what I’m going to do. don’t need to think. suddenly it’s nice again. art club, a dark rainy cosy october afternoon.

  erroll garner. quince. batik. and the wax is boiling.

  someone’s banging on the door, someone’s shouting outside...

  I get the wax off the gas ring, carry it across to the kids.

  white faces. big eyes. big eyes better than mine.

  not fair. so I pour the wax.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I SPENT A long time in the shower. I ran the water as cold as I could get it and stood there in my shirt and shorts. And then I peeled them off and soaped myself from head to toe and examined my body.

  The bruises on my ribs were changing colour: yellows and browns and darkening blotches of purple at the different points of impact with the branches of the Scots pine. I soaped and rinsed and massaged gingerly with my fingertips, and I wondered what the boy might make of the varying shades.

  Colours and shapes... whatever he might see in the bruises which were altering as my body adjusted to the pain, that afternoon in the school artroom had been life-changing for him. A few thoughtless words had blighted his prospects of emulating the father he hero-worshipped, his boyish dreams had been shattered, he’d been grounded. A trivial thing, for a teenage boy to be colour-blind, not uncommon or noteworthy, unless it simply, unalterably, thwarted everything.

  Life-changing for one of the other boys too. So Juliet had told me, when Lawrence had finished his horribly casual drawling of what he’d done and he’d loafed into the garden. She’d closed the story with a pithy footnote: one of the boys
had been permanently blinded by the wax.

  ‘So now you know,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t take him out of school because he’s colour-blind. He was kept in a kind of detention-centre and they ran all sorts of psychiatric tests on him. I was here on my own and it was awful. Whenever I went to the village or into town I had people staring at me and even calling me in the street. And someone did that paint-job on my car, I don’t know who, maybe the boy’s mother or father or someone...’

  She’d crossed the room towards me. I thought she was going to touch me or hold me, or she wanted to be touched or held by me, but she went past and looked out of the door to see where Lawrence had gone.

  We’d both looked out. He was outside with the cat. He’d confiscated the newspaper from it. It had torn the ball open, and bits of the newsprint were scattered on the grass, like the feathers of a bird it had killed. Now, belying its prowess as a hunter, it was rolling on its back and letting the boy tickle its furry white belly. The boy, having lulled the cat into an almost hypnotic state, straightened up and wandered down the garden, where he tossed the ball high into the air and watched it splash into the middle of the pond.

  ‘You smell of us.’ Juliet had turned to me at last. Her hands went to my waist and I winced in anticipation of her touching my ribs. Hiding her face close to my chest, she’d said, ‘You smell of us. Go and get showered and then do what you want. You could pack up your stuff and get out of here. It’s a thirty-minute walk to the top of the lane and there’s a bus every hour.’ She lifted her face and looked up at me. ‘But I want you to stay. And I think, in his odd, perverse sort of way, Lawrence wants you to stay as well.’

  I wasn’t so sure about that. And I wasn’t sure what was happening with me and Juliet. My body, a foolish man’s body, seemed to know. Despite the coldness of the shower, it reacted unequivocally when I thought of our love-making in the hearse.

  So what did I do? Get the bus back to Grimsby? I put on my favourite t-shirt, the one I used for my late-afternoon runs into the jungle, worn and washed seven days a week for years. It had faded to grey, but the print on it was still clear: Sarawak, Borneo, with a representation of a hornbill surrounded by the scroll-work typical of the ethnic Iban. And I went upstairs to the tower.

  The boy had showered too. Indeed his room was more fragrant, or less pungent than usual. He’d sprayed something around, an air-freshener or a cologne. He’d opened the windows on all four sides, and the very sky, with all the scents of the woodland and the summer itself, was breezing in. The model planes were whirling and clacking overhead, engaged in an endless dog-fight, and the boy and his cat were sprawled on the bed. He didn’t seem at all surprised that I’d come in. He had some books open in front of him, and, as though I’d been there all the time and we’d been engaged in a conversation, he was saying, ‘Yes, the footless birds, the Latin name for swifts and swiftlets is apodidae, meaning footless... because their feet are so small and feeble and almost nothing at all...’

  He turned and looked at me as I stood in the doorway. ‘And what was it you were saying about devil-birds and some kind of spooky folklore? I like the idea that they’re so specialised for flying that their feet have shrivelled. I mean, like the planes my Dad flies, they’re so awesome in flight that any other kind of unnecessary stuff’s been designed out of them.’

  I hesitated in the doorway. He waved me closer to look at the books he’d spread onto the bed. ‘They’re my Dad’s,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d dig them out. I think there are more somewhere, under Mum and Dad’s bed or something.’

  I hesitated for another second, and then I sat on the bed. I could’ve turned and walked out. A bus every hour. But I sat on the bed, and I heard myself windily speaking, as though it was someone else’s voice in the blustering room... ‘devil-birds, yes, because they’re so dark and mysterious and screaming like crazy, hurtling and swerving and never stopping... and legends about the swifts, mating in mid-air and sleeping in mid-air... and when it gets dark and the swifts go quiet and disappear, they vanish into ponds and lakes and they stay there all night, deep in the mud at the bottom...’

  The boy had almost stopped breathing. He was sipping the air and holding it in his chest and letting it seep out again. My voice took up again, windswept, weaving in the clack and clatter of the planes on the ceiling. ‘...or they go to the moon, look hard and you’ll see the moon is shaded and blotched with patches of grey... enormous flocks of swifts, clinging with their tiny feet and roosting all night...’

  Thoughtful, he reached under his pillow and pulled something out. It was the piece in batik he’d brought to show me the other day. The Scots pine, the bright moon, the dark pond.

  He stared at it and pursed his lips. ‘Funny, I did this,’ he said very softly, almost wistfully, ‘I did this in the art club with Mr Bray last year, before... before it all happened. And now you’re here and we’re talking about it and I never thought... I mean I’d never really noticed the swifts before, I’d never really seen them. But look, look what I did... I’ve even done the little grey shadows, the swifts roosting on the moon...’

  Indeed he had. It was beautifully executed. We examined it closely. ‘And now you’ll always see them,’ I said, ‘you’ll see them and marvel at them until it’s time for them to go away at the end of the summer.’

  ‘Maybe they won’t go away,’ he said. ‘Do the things you like always have to go away?’

  He folded the batik and pushed it under his pillow again. He did it with a childish gesture which was odd in such a rangy, manly boy: he had a downy face, hairy legs with great muscular calves like a cyclist’s, an Adam’s apple like a golf-ball in his throat, but he kept the picture he’d done in art club under his pillow, like a comforter.

  He noticed me watching him. ‘I made it for my Dad,’ he said, with a shrug and a mocking smile. ‘I keep it here for when he comes back. The big tree, because he built the tree-house so I could go up there and watch for him coming back from his missions... the pond, because he told me stuff about it since I was little, about the monster pike and stuff... and the moon, well, it just looks good, and now it’s good because I got the swifts on it and it...’

  He shrugged again. The self-deprecating smile. He was almost charming.

  No. Monstrously, he was wooing me. I couldn’t help staring at him, with a kind of dreadful fascination. Fascination for a boy who, less than an hour ago, had described in a weary nonchalant voice an atrocity he’d committed. And a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. A dread of whatever ugliness he might still be capable of.

  No, Lawrence Lundy was not charming. Enthralling? I didn’t want to be in thrall to his fake little smile, to the complicated trap I was slithering into. Captivating, like the pitcher plants in my Borneo garden – slippery, inescapable, carnivorous.

  I met his eyes. His eyes met mine. And a strange thing happened. In a breezy, sunlit room, on a morning in June, an ice-cold shiver ran down my spine. I was afraid.

  SARAWAK, BORNEO... MAGICAL words. When I’d made the decision to stay a bit longer at Chalke House and go upstairs to the boy in his tower, I’d deliberately put on the t-shirt as a kind of visual aid, a conversation piece, the sort of thing educationalists had started calling ‘realia’ – anything a teacher might take into a lesson, other than books, to interest his students. Sure enough, when the smile slipped off Lawrence’s face and he noticed the shirt, he read the words aloud. They hung in the cool English air of his bedroom, as mysterious as the human skulls I’d seen hanging in the smoke-blackened rafters of the longhouses on the Baram river.

  I told him more about my life out there, that many of my students were Iban from the kampongs in the rainforest, whose tradition of head-hunting had persisted until fairly recent times. There were stories that, when north Borneo had been occupied by the Japanese in World War II, the Iban had been encouraged to take the heads of enemy soldiers who strayed too deep into the jungle. I’d been invited to my students’ homes for the annual fes
tival of gawai, to stay the night and drink their brain-damaging tuak, and, eventually collapsing onto the bamboo floors of the longhouse, I’d drifted into a nightmarish sleep with the cobwebby skulls dangling over my head...

  It wasn’t difficult to regale the boy. Man-eating crocodiles, the scorpion in my bathroom, the cobra in my backyard. The folklore of the indigenous people, their tales of witchcraft and superstition. The veneer of Islam – the cry of the mosque in the darkness before dawn, in the glare of the day, in the golden light of the evening and again at night, as though the drone of repetition might smother all pre-existing thought.

  ‘And what’s this, the bird?’ he asked.

  ‘Hornbill. It’s a symbol of Borneo, so typically a part of the island, like the orang-utan or the proboscis monkeys, that it’s always used on tourist brochures and souvenirs and things. For me, they’re a real part of my life out there. Every afternoon, at about five o’clock, I get a flock of them coming up river, I’ve counted more than fifty sometimes. They pause in my compound, they crash into one of my trees and rest for a while and then they carry on upstream, on their way to roosting somewhere in the forest.’

  ‘And the pattern? What’s all this?’

  He took me by surprise. Not the question, about the Iban scrollwork on my shirt, but the way he jabbed at it with a bony finger and caught me hard in the ribs.

  ‘Hey, watch out...’ I gasped and jumped away from him.

  He mouthed a word which could have been sorry, hard to tell because his lips were curled into a smirky sneer. And then he managed to say, ‘Sorry, I forgot,’ as I stood away from his bed and tried to ease the pain by pressing the flat of my hand onto the bruises. ‘Sorry, let me see ..’