The Waking That Kills

by Stephen Gregory

  Noon. A green salad. And chilled white wine; the shock of it was so delicious, I’d gulped it like cordial. She topped me up, although I tried to stop her with my hand over my glass. The little hit of alcohol buzzed in my brain and awakened the blurry buzziness of the previous night’s drinking. And I could feel the sun on my forehead, on the back of my neck. But the salad was good, and the olive oil from the world outside, all the better for the second glass of wine I’d tried to refuse. I saw her exchange a glance with her son, when, by a sleight of hand, she poured me a third.

  Bucolic... alcoholic... we finished lunch, and the room was a heavenly haze. It seemed to purr, with a soft, humming kind of energy. Or maybe it was the hum in my head. ‘Poor baby...’ she was whispering as she pressed me gently, firmly into the cushions of the sofa. She wetted a napkin with water from the ice-bucket and laid it on my brow. It felt like a big, cool kiss. ‘Poor baby, I guess in Borneo you don’t go out in the midday sun, mad dogs and Englishmen and all that. Just stay there and stay cool.’

  I slept. And the orange cat wasn’t orange anymore. It was covered in blood.

  It dashed into the room, through the open windows. A dream, it must have been, because in the real, waking world there were no cats which had once been big and bushy with orange stripes and then slick and dripping in blood. With a bubbling yowl, because the blood was in its mouth as well, it launched itself from the carpet and landed on my chest with a soggy thump. For a moment, its face was dribbling onto mine. Then it was off again and hurtling helter-skelter about the room, as though it was on fire and the blaze on its body was a torture.

  I leapt up. Apart from the madness of the cat, the room looked real. My head was throbbing. I saw the remains of lunch on a tray on the floor, the bottle of wine up-ended in the ice-bucket. Unable to yowl anymore, its throat a gurgle of blood, the cat fled to the window again and out.

  Asleep... I must have been. A blood-sodden cat? Bloody footprints around and around the carpets of a country living-room? The blood was on my face. I touched it with my fingers. It didn’t smell like blood. I followed the trail outside, and through the muzziness of my sleeping brain I heard an agitation of voices.

  The boy was braying, manly, stentorian. And Juliet... was she laughing or sobbing? ‘Get down from there! Are you mad? You’ve killed it!’

  I rounded the corner of the house, into the holly wood, where a drunken dream became nightmare.

  Buckets of blood? Lawrence was covered in it. In his little boy’s pants, he was kneeling on the roof of the car, which had been a sleek silver BMW for a fighter-pilot, his pretty wife and his wholesome son, before death and madness and blindness were visited on the Lundy family. Shouting, the boy was on the roof. He had a plastic bucket up there and he was sloshing a solution of soap and water everywhere and scrubbing at it with a brush. The red paint, which had been slopped on the car to avenge the child whom Lawrence had blinded, was now partially dissolved and smeared into a gory mess.

  ‘Help me, Mum!’ And she, Juliet Lundy, was botched with the blood as well, with the solution of paint and soap and some kind of turpentine the boy must have added to the mix. She was stripped to her bra and pants. Giggling, weeping? She reached up and took down the empty bucket from the boy. Then, with a huge effort which tautened the muscles of her stomach and lifted her breasts, she stretched up to him with another full bucket of soapy solution.

  The red slush was everywhere. As they lathered and swabbed the car, as though it was a war-horse returned from battle, the horrid stuff slithered off in streams and swirls and pooled into the holly wood. The boy was slick with it. The woman was gleaming.

  They saw the cat before they saw me. For some perverse reason, suicidally disorientated, it returned to the scene of its dousing. It blundered through the poisoned grasses, in such a panic for its life that it banged its face on the car door. So that the boy heard it and looked down and...

  ‘No, Lawrence, please no not again please no!’ his mother cried out.

  Too late to stop him. With a savage grin on his face, he stood up tall on the roof of the car. He could have been naked, because his pants were as red and wet as the rest of his body, so he looked like a pantomime savage, or the real thing from a long-ago scene of blood-letting and sacrifice. The grin, and the whites of his eyes as they rolled in heathen ecstasy, were the only glimmers of whiteness on his body.

  He yelled, ‘Here puss, you come back for more?’ and tipped the bucket.

  The sheer weight of the liquid knocked the cat over. It lay in the puddle, quivering. I stumbled forward, they both looked up and saw me, and indeed it was Juliet who reached down and picked up the cat before I could get there.

  Asleep? A dream? All three of us seemed to awaken at that moment.

  Me first. I heard my own voice, my tongue furry with wine. ‘What the fuck are you doing? Are you fucking crazy?’

  And the woman. All but naked. Dripping red, a denizen of the wood who’d dropped from the trees all prickled and smeary with her own blood. She adjusted the mask of her face, from bewilderment at seeing me there, to her quick, elfin smile, and she opened her mouth to answer. ‘Crazy? No, we...’

  The boy. He jumped off the car and loomed over us. I was afraid. I felt the adrenaline of imminent violence flooding my arms. For a second he towered over me and every muscle in his face was horribly clenched. He glared at me, his eyes pale with rage, his teeth clenched so hard they might crack in his mouth. He didn’t recognise me. I was a stranger intruding on the bizarre ritual he was performing. But then his muscles relaxed a little and he stepped back and he knew who I was – a busybody who’d blundered through a dream and trespassed into the terrible privacy of his nightmare. He bared his teeth. ‘Fucking crazy? Yes, we are!’

  And the cat. Just then, cradled in the woman’s arms, it shook its head and sneezed. It opened its eyes and blinked, deciding it might not die after all. In any case, the second and cleaner bucketful it had just suffered had sluiced off most of the earlier, concentrated redness which the boy must’ve thrown over it. With an angry spluttering, it wriggled to the ground and shot away, disappearing around the corner of the house like a flame.

  There was an awkward silence on us.

  Mother and son, their bare feet squelched into the sodden grass. They looked awkwardly at each other’s bodies. Me, I heard an echo of my blurted words, in my befuddled head, in the dense foliage of the woodland.

  And then, ‘We did your father’s car, remember?’ It was Lawrence who spoke. ‘We cleaned it up, remember? Why did we do that? Do you know if he’s still alive?’

  His eyes were dead and cold. Strange, in such a boiling boy. When I didn’t answer, my tongue too numb to make words, he looked over and past me and into the empty corner where the cat had vanished. He stared at the emptiness, and he smiled.

  ‘So we’re doing my Dad’s car,’ he said very softly. ‘He’s still around.’

  THE THREE OF us showered together. Me and Juliet and the cat.

  Leaving Lawrence outside, where, in a mood of bliss and rage, he resumed his lathering of the car, Juliet and I went into the house and upstairs. She picked up the cat on the way, which had been rubbing its body up and down the length of the sofa and leaving a rosy wet smear. Sleight of hand, a feminine magic, how did she do it, managing a blurry, befuddled me and her slippery self and the wriggling cat at the same time? With a shimmying side-step at the foot of the stairs, she was in and out of the kitchen, in and out of the fridge, and then somehow, summoning all her pixie spells, she had the three of us under the shower in less than a minute with a simultaneous pop of a bottle and a clink of glasses.

  ‘Keep your clothes on.’ Me, in my shirt and trousers, the cool water coursing over my head. She, still in her bra and pants, her body pink with the dissolving paint. The cat tried to escape, but she closed the bathroom door and it cowered in a corner while we drank our first glass of champagne. ‘Keep your clothes on,’ she whispered against the whispering of the water, �
��he might scratch.’ And I held the cat close while it wailed and fought and she soaped it and rinsed it and soaped it and rinsed it, until all its resistance was worn down and the redness was gone and the wretched beast was a shivering skinny drowned-rat. At last I dropped it gently down. It shook itself orange again.

  We let it out. We drank champagne and we showered together.

  ‘WHERE’S LAWRENCE? WHAT’S he doing?’

  She didn’t seem to hear me. ‘Hair of the dog,’ she said. ‘And cat.’

  We were drinking into the evening. For a change we’d carried a couple of chairs into the garden and watched the dusk and the twilight settling onto the trees. She said it was too smelly in the living-room, where the cat had rubbed itself and dried itself and licked itself back into a gorgeous bouffant cloud of fur; otherwise it seemed none the worse for its experience, its starring role in my afternoon nightmare. But the house was strong with that rank, dank odour of wet animal, so we sat outside, barefoot in a glorious gloaming, and surrendered deeper into the gentle embrace of alcohol.

  By now it was very dark. The moon was invisible, hardly a glow of silver to show where it might have been hidden in cloud. No stars. Even the looming bulk of the woodland was lost in the blackness, part of a vast, infinite sky. We’d eaten earlier, bits and pieces of left-overs Juliet had got out of the fridge. Lawrence snatched and gobbled, wolfish as any teenage boy, and the hue of his skin, his face and his bony fingers, was still tinged with the blood of my waking dream. Juliet and I, we’d eaten quickly too, our appetites whetted by sex and champagne and the first two doses of gin, and then we’d come outside.

  ‘Is he still in the tower?’ I tried again. She hadn’t heard me before, and we couldn’t see each other at all. I heard her swallowing the last of another gin and tonic, sucking on a piece of ice, and I could smell on her the lotion we’d used for our long and leisurely showering. But I couldn’t see her, I couldn’t see anything. ‘He was upstairs a while ago,’ I said. ‘I heard him on his battlements. I heard him coughing. Do you think he’s alright?’

  Her voice. Disembodied. ‘Why shouldn’t he be? What do you mean?’

  I chose my words carefully. ‘He wasn’t really alright this afternoon, was he? I mean, was he alright?’

  There was a longer pause. I heard her swirling her glass and drinking it down. She was choosing her words too.

  ‘Of course he’s not alright.’ Her voice was soft and slurry, she had had plenty to drink and she had a piece of ice in her mouth. ‘As you know, as you’ve gathered since you arrived here, he’s got a... a preoccupation with his father, which you’d kind of expect, after what happened to him. And then... and then the horrible business last winter. Sometimes he thinks... I mean sometimes he imagines his father is still here, or he’s waiting on pins for him to come back at any moment... or...’

  She stopped. We both held our breath and listened. It was as though, because we were talking about the boy, we could feel his presence, he’d crept close, invisible, and was listening to what we were saying. I shuddered at the thought of it. I felt him standing right behind me, holding his breath too, so close he could lean down and breathe on the back of my neck or curl his fingers around my throat. I listened for him, for any movement, and my scalp prickled. He was somewhere nearby, in the garden with us, or in the house. And yet the garden and even the house were invisible.

  ‘And me?’ I said. I took a deeper breath and, emboldened by the darkness and the alcohol, dared to ask the questions which had been entangling themselves like cobwebs in the corners of my brain. ‘And me, who does he think I am? I mean, am I a father-figure for him, does he see me as a kind of replacement for the father he’s lost, or another kind of intruder on the empty space his father’s left behind?’

  She didn’t say anything. I couldn’t hear her breathing.

  ‘Because...’ I went on, trying to clarify my thoughts, trying to make something of the cobwebby stuff in my head, ‘because I’m getting mixed messages, aren’t I? From Lawrence. Sometimes we’re alright together and I feel as though I’m doing what you said you wanted me to do, to be a friend or a brother, a companion, and I even imagine I’m a kind of half-adequate stand-in for his father... at least for the summer, like a man around the house, someone he can bond with and do things with, even if it’s only tinkering with the car or playing a bit of badminton.’

  Still no response, although I waited in the darkness for her to take in what I was saying. I thought I heard the creak of her chair as shifted her weight on it. But no voice.

  ‘But then...’ I took the chance to proffer the more worrying side of the ideas I’d been weighing, ‘but then, I’ve got to tell you, Juliet... and you must’ve seen it too, like this afternoon when I interrupted your mad car-washing thing... sometimes he looks at me as though... well, as though he could kill me.’

  The last two words came out, dull and blunt in the night air. I let them drop into the silence.

  ‘I mean, what does he want from me? Is he glad I’m here, because his father has gone? Or does he hate me being here, because his father has gone?’

  There was a long, long, longer silence. Nothing but silence. The cobwebs in my head fluttered. By speaking my mind I’d breathed on them and shifted the gathering dust. But now I felt them falling still again, as the vibration slowed and stopped.

  In exasperation, as my words faded into nothing, apparently as airy as the skidding of the bats in the enveloping night, I said louder, ‘Hey Juliet, are you there, are you listening? And what about you? What do you want me for? I mean, when we’re drinking gin, when we’re making love, is it me, or is it him?’

  Nothing. Nothing.

  At last I huffed into the void, started to try and stand up. ‘I need another drink, I need some light, I need... not sure what the fuck I need...’ I felt for her hand, felt for the chair beside me. ‘Juliet, I’m going in and...’

  She wasn’t there. Her chair was empty.

  I slumped down again. I waited, blind. How long had she been gone? Had she heard a word I’d said? I waited, thinking any moment the lamp would flick on in the living-room and a soft yellow glow would fall into the garden. It didn’t happen.

  I struggled up, felt for the French windows and stepped inside.

  Coffin-blackness. Coffin-silence.

  No. I could hear breathing. Someone was there.

  The air moved around me. Something, someone, brushed past me. I heard a gasp, and there were fingers touching my face.

  And three voices rang out, at the very same moment.

  Mine. ‘Juliet?’

  Hers. ‘Lawrence?’

  His. ‘Dad?’

  And then we were fumbling together, groping to locate one another, to identify who and what...

  The boy said, ‘Dad? Are you...?’ and his hands were clammy on my skin.

  The woman, ‘Who is it? Oh god please...’ and I smelled the panic on her gin-breath.

  My own voice, shaking with an unwonted fear. ‘For fuck’s sake, a light, for fuck’s sake, can’t you just...?’

  There was a shattering crash, as one of them, or me, toppled the lamp in the corner. And the cat was somewhere. It spat and screeched and its fur was electric as it squirmed through the room and out.

  ‘Dad?’ The boy’s breath was in my face. I shoved past, my bare feet crunching on broken glass, and found the doorway to the hall.

  Fumbled for the switch. Turned the light on.

  AN ONLOOKER, A fly on the wall, would’ve thought we were all mad.

  Not that we were doing anything manic. We weren’t doing anything at all. But in the way we stood and swayed and ogled one another, there was more than a whiff of insanity.

  Whiff... the room was pungent with alcohol and wet cat and teenage boy. The overhead light was too bright. We blinked at one another, in a curious tableau, as though the three of us, inmates of a grim institution for the dangerously deranged, were humouring a drama teacher and doing some kind of batty theatre-therapy.
Freeze. He, or more likely she, had told us to freeze whenever the light came on.

  I was barefoot, with blood oozing between my toes. Giddy drunk, tousled and bleary, and staring fearfully around as if I was expecting somebody else to walk in through the open French windows. The woman was in a half-crouching, half-cringing position, her knees bent, her face screwed up and her arms over her head, as if expecting to be hit.

  And the boy? As we unfolded our bodies from the assault of the light, it was the boy who radiated an aura of distraction.

  Mad? Hard to say. He was more or less naked, in his bed shorts or some other tattered pants. With a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. Holding a badminton racquet. Mad? He wasn’t himself. He was changing, he was changed.

  ‘Lawrence? What on earth...?’ His mother moved to touch him, but he flinched away.

  The smell of him was strong. Something animal, a fume of some feathery dust seemed to rise from his bare skin. Dusty. Where he’d been gleaming with paint in the afternoon, now a film of the chalky powder which covered every surface of every room of the old house had clung to him. And hairy? I saw, we must both of us have seen, that he was hairier than before... an illusion of the sudden light?... but his hair was too long, the pelt of it fell across his brow and shadowed his eyes, it was shaggy on his ears and it formed a pointy tuft at the nape of his neck as though it would grow along his spine like a mane. And his face was more than downy. It showed in the glare of the overhead bulb. He’d never shaved, but now he needed to. He had a bluey-velvet nap on his cheeks and the first blurring of a moustache on his upper lip.

  He was bent, like his mother, cringing from the light. He looked up at me through the fall of his hair and he opened his whiskery mouth. At the very same moment as his mother whispered again, ‘My love, are you...?’ and feinted at his head with a wary hand, he started to cough.