The Waking That Kills

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘There’s no one here, there’s no one here...’ I was whispering into her hair, ‘ and no one’s going to hurt you... it’s all over and it’s horrible but it’s all over now... I’m going to stay and there’s just you and me and Lawrence and we’re all safe and no one’s going to hurt us and...’

  She was shuddering against me. I held her very tightly, her face buried in my chest.

  A curious and very wonderful thing happened. The wood pigeons clattered into the holly trees around us. We could hear them settling into the dense foliage, adjusting themselves into the armoury of spikes... and when she sniffed and wiped her nose on my shoulder and we both looked up to watch them, they were as plump and smug as choirboys preening in a vestry. As though the huge metallic clang had never happened and their life was as orderly as ever before, they started to coo.

  The wood-pigeon coo – the softest, sleepiest sound the world had ever heard. I felt her body relax against mine. She was boneless. The shuddering didn’t stop, but I realised she wasn’t crying anymore or frightened. She was giggling. The cotton-wool cooing was as marvellous as morphine. Everything was alright. How could it not be, with the fat, silly pigeons cooing so cosily over our heads?

  ‘All I want,’ she said eventually, spluttering with laughter, ‘all I want... all I want is to blubber onto your shirt, listen to these birds in the trees, and know that Lawrence is safe. That’s all I want, to know he’s safe.’ She looked up at me, and her face was streaky with tears, like a child awakening from a nightmare. ‘Stay with us and we’ll all feel safer.’

  SO. IT WAS a bit ironic, after that injunction, to be stumbling through the woodland with the battery bumping against my ribs, to try and start the car which might facilitate my leaving. But that was what we did. We covered her car with the tarpaulin, we dragged the mouldy green stuff across it, and it was no longer the ‘ultimate driving machine’ but a mouldering heap – disfigured, disembowelled, an animal which had died in the forest and would soon be fetid with fungi. I carried the battery. Juliet walked beside me.

  Before we got to the hearse, we found the boy. There was a crash of breaking glass. A whoop, like a head-hunter or a baboon. Another smash of glass.

  And the boy emerged from a dense green shadow into a shaft of sunlight, like an end-of-the-pier comedian bursting on-stage. ‘I found them! I think I found them! Come and look!’

  Blood. He shook his head and spattered us with blood. He was a grinning goof, in the same old t-shirt and shorts, with a fresh, big gash somewhere in his hair. I felt it splash onto my face and saw it on his mother’s. I dropped the battery. Before we could smear at the blood, he took hold of Juliet’s wrist in one hand and my wrist in the other and tugged us with him... and he was so strong, so hot and young and sinewy, that we could do no more than simply stumble behind him.

  He dragged us through a barricade of nettles and bramble, through a forest of elder and cow-parsley. He’d flattened them already on his way through, and in doing so he’d crushed the stalks into a sappy fume – heady, the green essence of summer. Some broken bricks underfoot, where a surprised toad sprang away from our clumsy tread... and we were into the derelict greenhouse I’d first spotted when I’d arrived at Chalke House.

  ‘I looked in the books!’ he was saying with great excitement. He still had us by the wrists, and his grip was harsh. ‘One of Dad’s books, I got it out last night, from under Mum’s bed when she was fast asleep... nowadays they never nest in natural places, I mean they always use barns or houses or old factories or churches or whatever, you know, man-made buildings to nest in... and here they are, in the greenhouse!’

  ‘But what’ve you done, Lawrence? Your head... let me see...’

  He let go of our wrists and bent towards her. Blood was welling from his scalp. Again, unnecessarily, he shook his head, with a kind of gruesome friskiness... and as a haze of it blurred into my eyes, I had a vision of a puppy I’d rescued from a monitor lizard in my garden, and its nose and mouth had been lashed by the lizard’s tail and it was licking at my face with a mixture of panic and joy and gratitude. ‘I was climbing the vine, I grabbed one of the old beams and the glass broke and... don’t worry Mum I’m alright I’m alright...’

  His mother was trying to inspect the wound, but he grappled her off him. The blood ran off his brow and down his nose and into his mouth. He grinned, and his teeth were red. ‘Come and see, let me show you...’

  The old greenhouse was a marvellous place. As big as a squash court, it was a grand structure of sagging beams and mossy glass, leaning wearily against an overgrown cliff. Difficult to tell, at first glance, if the ancient, serpentine vine which had torn up the brickwork of the floor and was feeling into every corner and space of the building with long, muscular tendrils... hard to say if the vine was pulling the greenhouse down or holding it up. Whatever else had been cultivated there, flowers or fruits or vegetables for the residents of Chalke House, had been overwhelmed by the flora of an English woodland. Yes, it was a fragrant wilderness, and nothing wrong with that.

  And all along the overhead rafters, the nests of the swifts. Dozens or scores of them. Not at all spectacular to look at – little cups of stuff stuck here and there, clumsy little cups that primary school kids might botch up with papier-mâché for an enthusiastic teacher – except that the boy was brimming with the joy of their discovery. He was spouting at his mother through his horrid red bubbly lips, all sorts of garbled facts he’d got from his father’s book from under her bed... about the swifts gathering their nest material in mid-air, catching straws and feathers and dust in flight and sticking it all to the rafters with their own saliva... all true and extraordinarily wonderful, except that I was watching him with a kind of morbid fascination, the fascination I’d felt when I’d been nude and afraid in the shadows and his mother had been naked and fearful in her bed and he’d been licking her.

  I looked at his teeth. The blood on them. His lips and the mucous blood on his tongue. His eyes were wild as he enthused like an eccentric professor, about the swifts and their mad, relentless flight. Now and then, as he waved his arms at the rafters, where after all there were no birds but only their gobbets of saliva and grass and other regurgitated fluids, a new gush of blood would burst out of his hair and dribble into his eyebrows. And I wanted to get out.

  ‘I’m going to come down here this evening, I’m going to stay down here and wait and watch them coming to roost! Look up there, that’s where I climbed up, there’s lots of holes in the glass, where the glass is broken... that’s where they come in!’

  I edged away from him. I passed my hands across my brows and nose and chin and felt the smear of his blood. He was enthusing to his mother, looming over her and quite unaware of my leaving. She shrank beneath him, quivering like a shrew he’d discovered in a damp corner of the greenhouse, amazed by his sheer size and power. So full of himself and his own strange purpose, he’d blanked out everything but this burgeoning project. He didn’t notice as I moved out of his range, but Juliet was overwhelmed.

  It was a relief to be alone in the woodland. The boy’s hectoring voice faded as I picked up the car battery and walked through the trees. It was about six o’clock, or later, one of the longest days of the year. It would be light until ten, cool and light: blissfully refreshing for me, after the unchanging years in the tropics, where the months were no different except for the roaring rains of monsoon. No seasons, and every evening at half past six, when the mosque was calling the faithful to the maghrib prayers, there was dusk and nightfall, from daylight to darkness, in a matter of fifteen minutes.

  A long, English summer’s evening, holier than a perfunctory prayer-time.

  I came to the hearse at the foot of the Scots pine. I looked into the dark foliage and I could see the trail of my fall, the branches bent and broken by my clumsy impact. Higher still, the spars of the tree-house, the pieces of a wooden pallet which Lawrence’s father had manhandled up there and lashed together, so that his son could have
access to his world, his infinite sky-world, where he hurtled god-like in his mighty machine. Where the swifts were hurtling and screaming, splinters of god in their own infinity.

  Lawrence had been there, but only as far as the crude platform his father had made for him. He would never go higher. He might stretch his hands to the blue, he might barely touch it. He might imagine the further, higher world of his father’s flight, and the flight of the swifts. It would be a dream of flying, and no more.

  I felt sorry for the boy, and for the boy he’d damaged, and I’d been moved by the depth of his mother’s hurt. But I’d never forgotten the reason for my returning to England, more important than my entanglement in the Lundy family at Chalke House. My father. And here was his car, which had rolled into the shadow of the pine and been scarred even as its wheels had stopped turning. Now the grasses were growing higher and higher around it. Neglected, it would be swallowed by the woodland, absorbed into this hidden valley, it would disappear without trace unless it got moving again. Me too.

  ‘Hey, you and me, we gotta look out for ourselves,’ I said to the car. ‘No one in the world knows where we are or where we’ve gone. If we get too comfy here, we ain’t goin’ nowhere...’

  The Daimler didn’t reply. It just eyed me with its huge round headlamps, as doleful and rheumy as a bloodhound. I opened the driver’s door, slid inside and pinged the bonnet-release catch. Again, the warm, earthy smell in the car was an instant hit on my memories – the feel of the leather and the carpets and the touch of my father’s hands on the wheel. With a renewed energy I got out and heaved open the bonnet, and the pain in my ribs was good, I was alive and it hurt and I had my own purpose in life, beyond the cobwebby entrapment of the Lundys. A minute later, wielding the tools which my father’s fingers had worn smooth over decades of use and meticulous maintenance, I’d disconnected the battery from the monstrous engine, lifted it out and connected the battery from Juliet’s BMW.

  I stood back and admired my handiwork. A new heart, transplanted from a young athlete into a wheezing pensioner.

  Juliet was there. I’d been aware of her presence for a while, I heard her come closer and I knew she was watching me. Like me, she’d smudged the blood on her face, rubbed it smooth into her complexion. But there were clotted streaks of it in her hair.

  She said, ‘I’ve sent Lawrence indoors. He’s alright, just a cut on his head, I told him to jump into the shower and get it clean.’ She frowned and added, ‘Is this going to work?’ just as I was settling into the hearse again. ‘I mean, I haven’t started my car for weeks. The last time I tried it was as dead as a dodo.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Now you tell me.’

  I turned the key in the ignition. The petrol pump ticked. I pressed the starter. Nothing. I pressed again. Not a groan or a murmur.

  ‘I just thought... I don’t know what I was thinking.’ She flapped at her hair with both hands, at some imaginary wasp. ‘I wasn’t thinking anything. When I found you with my car and the bonnet up and I was upset and...’

  I pressed the starter again. Not a thing. ‘Juliet,’ I said, ‘we walked down the garden together, with me lugging the battery, and so you knew what I was going to try and do, and you didn’t say anything. I don’t get it.’

  She shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to get,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I can understand you wanting to start the car, it doesn’t make sense not to, whether you’re trying to get out of here or not. But I was upset, I’ve told you that’s why I keep my own car covered up and hidden away, so that Lawrence can’t see it... and I was anxious because I didn’t know where he was.’ She shrugged again. ‘I’m sorry, that’s it. There’s nothing to get.’

  ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘never mind. There’s always tomorrow. We can phone, and someone will come.’ I saw her glum face, and something else too, a look in her eyes. She was hurt, but behind the fear in her demeanour I could sense the stubborn resilience of a wounded creature. Yes, she was bloodied and cornered, but she would defend her corner with a furious strength.

  I tried to make her smile. ‘Hey, don’t worry, I’ll phone and someone will come. This is England, not Borneo. There are no crocodiles in the pond, no head-hunters lurking in the jungle. In any case, look at you and me, all smeared with blood... if a party of head-hunters bumped into us now, they’d run a mile.’

  But she didn’t smile. ‘No one will come,’ she said, in such a cold, flat voice that I shivered at the chill in it. She turned and walked back to the house.

  Chapter Sixteen

  AND SO IT seemed that the two of them, Juliet and Lawrence Lundy, had, in their different ways, recovered the spirit of the missing airman. Her husband, his father – they’d found him again.

  Easier, first of all, to talk about Juliet. She fucked me inexhaustibly. She came to me in the night, she came to me in the daytime, in the first light of dawn and in the long afternoons, at dusk when the night was swaddling the valley and suffocating the house and us... yes, suffocating us, in a summery darkness. Was it the hottest summer in living memory? Memory, what was it, but a jumble of sensations: blurry snapshots, snatches of songs, dusty smells and fading perfume? Dreams and flashbacks. Who remembered anything? Who cared? Days and nights and maybe weeks went by, and Juliet Lundy was all the scent in my nostrils, all the taste on my tongue, all the sweetness and sweat on my fingertips. Memory, what was it? She was emptying my brain and re-filling it with herself.

  She called his name. She would rock and rock on top of me, and her eyes were elsewhere. She was on me, I was in her, but she would swivel her head and stare around the room as though he had just come in, as though he was standing there and watching us, as though he had tiptoed close and his breath was hot on the back of her neck, hot in her hair, hot in the small of her back as she rocked on top of me.

  In me, on me, she had repossessed her husband. Ironic, that the release she achieved when she collapsed on my chest and I could feel her very bones dissolve and all her fears and nightmares and memories of ugliness fall away from her... ironic that her release was won by her having me.

  And the boy? It was a wonder – no credit to me, but sheer chance or serendipity – that the swifts had re-connected him so sweetly with his lost father. The first encounter was a miraculous accident, when the bird had swerved into his room and fought among the dangling model planes and fallen onto his bed: a gift from the gods, a fragment of god, flung into his tormented world. It had fired his imagination, although I’d exerted myself over him and set it free. The second encounter, when, trespassing on their airy space, he’d batted at the swifts so precariously on his sky-platform, and for a moment he’d clutched at one of them and held it and it had wriggled free... after a tumbling descent through the sooty branches of the pine, after a nightmare in the jaws of a cat, it was festering in a box under the boy’s bed, buried alive in a coffin of pitch-blackness and its own oily mutes.

  And now the greenhouse. Throughout the summer, indeed for all the summers of Lawrence’s life and long before he was born, it had been the roosting place of the swifts of Chalke House. For decades they’d squeezed through crannies and cracks in the collapsing timbers, they’d found holes where the panes of glass had broken, and they’d enjoyed a warm, safe, fusty darkness: a perfect sanctuary for them, to build their nests and feed their chicks and rest their sickle wings after hours and hours of non-stop flight.

  ‘What on earth is he doing down there? Will you go down and look, please, Christopher?’

  Gin was not salving her. It was a balmy night in July. The French windows were wide open, it was ten or eleven o’clock or maybe later, and we were nestled in the cushions of her sofa. A hummingbird hawk-moth was whirring around the lamp-lit living-room, the most delicious and perfect piece of a midsummer’s midnight. It nuzzled into the curtains, clung for a second and shed a whisper of dust from its velvety wings, and then nuzzled its way out again. A tawny owl was calling, somewhere in the woodland. I heard the yelp of a fox.

&nb
sp; Gin was salving me. The moth and the owl and the fox and the gin. For a magical moment, the moth came bumbling into my face. I swept it away as gently as I could, because it snagged in my hair. It dropped into my empty glass. It fizzled in the pool of ice, and the sound of its humming-bird energy was loud until I tipped it onto the carpet ... where it shivered itself dry, achieved a clumsy lift-off, butted its way around the dim, dozy room and out of the open window.

  ‘Go and see, will you, Christopher? I hope he’s alright...’

  ‘We know what he’s doing, Juliet, the same as last night and the night before and so on. And we know he’s alright.’ Nevertheless, I extracted myself from the sofa, put down my empty glass and made for the window. ‘Are you coming?’ I turned and asked her. She said no, she wasn’t, she might go upstairs and watch from the boy’s tower.

  He was in the greenhouse. I found my way into it, even through the deep shadows of the trees and the dense undergrowth, because I could see the light of his torch. I pushed a way through the darkness. In the overhead branches of a horse chestnut, the owl fluttered away from my passing. No sound of the fox, although the scent of it was strong in my nostrils.

  ‘Hey, Lawrence...’ I didn’t want to blunder in and startle him, in his communion with the swifts. For the past week he’d gone down to the greenhouse at dusk, with his torch, with the sandwiches and flask of soup his mother had insisted on plying him with, to watch the swifts coming in to roost.

  ‘Hey Lawrence, are you there?’ I knew he was somewhere, I could see his torch propped into a clump of nettles and beaming into the rafters.

  A spectacle... not on the scale of the swiftlets’ caves at Mulu or Niah in Sarawak, where, every twilight, every day of the year, for thousands of years and long before any human had ever seen them, a million birds funnelled into the caverns in a vast black spiralling cloud. And at the same time, defying the probability of myriad aerial collisions, a million bats came out. Swifts and bats, in their hundreds of thousands, the birds going in and the bats coming out... and dashing among them, a hawk, snatching randomly here and there with its talons.