At first, he thinks they will speak. He imagines they will explain why they are here, at least, but they don't say anything, they just come into the room and surround him, casual as you please, thinking about what they are going to do next. He can see that they don't have a plan, they are just there. He can also see that the dark-haired boy wants to say something, but Andrew doesn't imagine he actually knows why they are here, and anyway, the boy is afraid of the others. Afraid, or maybe ashamed. It's the same thing sometimes. When Andrew was a child, he couldn't go outside the house, and he thought it was because he was afraid, but it wasn't just that. It was shame—and he thought it would be easy to say that he was ashamed of himself, though it wasn't even just that. He was ashamed of himself, when he went out into the world, but he was only shamed by being there, among others. He never felt that way at home. It was the shame of being with other people. He was afraid, too, but it was his shame, mostly, that frightened him. And it seems to him now that the dark-haired boy feels the same way. Maybe not all the time. Maybe he feels like one of the gang, most days, but tonight he is afraid, and ashamed, and Andrew feels afraid for him, because the others—the gang—will easily be able to smell that shame, that's what a gang is good at, smelling out the ones who are not altogether convinced, the ones who are ashamed. So Andrew thinks it will probably go very badly for the boy, if he isn't very careful. Of course, he knows it will go badly for himself.
It's the girl who starts things in motion. Everything is an event, everything begins. Sometimes you don't see that beginning, or you find it in the wrong place, but this time it's easy. The girl, who is not as pretty as she thinks, comes over to where Andrew is, standing up now, though he doesn't remember getting out of the chair. She pulls something out of her pocket. Andrew doesn't see what it is at first, and he draws back, then he looks and sees that's it nothing, just a little penknife. He almost laughs at that—but then she jabs him with it and, slipping it sideways, draws it along his bare arm. It stings like hell and he realizes it might have been a penknife, once, but she has sharpened it at the point and on the edges, so now it is a weapon. She is about to cut him again, and he tries to back away, then a voice comes, one of the boys. “Come on, Eddie,” the voice says. “Leave something for somebody else.”
What he says makes Andrew realize how scared he is. He hasn't been frightened before, he's been more angry, annoyed that these people had come uninvited into his dad's favorite room, into where he kept all his stuff, his maps and pictures and the Book. He turns to the boy who has just spoken, because this one is the ringleader and Andrew knows he needs to speak to the one in charge. He wants to tell them to get out of this room. But when he sees the boy's face—so hard, so amused by all this—he realizes there is no hope. They are all standing together, or all but the girl: the Leader, who is big and square and heartless-looking, a fat boy with spiky hair and one very dark eyebrow, the dark-haired boy, who is still hanging back, looking uncertain and maybe a little bit scared, and another boy, dressed in a grubby old Picasso “Dove” T-shirt and tie-bleached shorts, who looks oddly like a smaller version of the Leader, a likeness that is half natural and half worked on. The girl is still standing next to Andrew, and for a moment nobody is moving. They are all just standing there, looking at one another—and it is that, that stillness, that silence that resembles the moment just before everybody looks round at one another and laughs, it is this that makes Andrew desperate, so that he runs straight at them, trying to slip past the Leader and through, to where the dark-haired boy is, next to the door. Andrew thinks, if he can get to him, this boy will allow him to slip through and, though he may not get away, then at least they will all be out of his dad's special room.
It's an almost risible act, though, even Andrew sees that. The Leader simply lunges out and grabs him as he tries to get by, then he shoves him down to the floor and kicks him, hard. This is a signal to the others, and they all wade in, kicking, punching, one of them—the girl probably— sticking him with something small and sharp. Then someone takes hold of his arm and drags him up against the wall. Whoever it is props him up there—and Andrew sees that it's the Leader, the thickset boy, and he's talking, only Andrew can't hear what he's saying, because his head is singing, it's all noise inside his head like bells ringing, not church bells, but like the bells in old town halls in travel programs, those sonneries they always make a feature of in documentaries about Belgium or Holland. So, by the time he comes back to the room, he's missed what the Leader is saying. He can't really see the boy's face, either, it's mostly a blur close to and then, farther away, on the wall opposite, something comes into focus. Andrew sees it, and he realizes that this is something he has predicted, maybe something he has brought upon himself. Because his dad always said it: words are cheap, but pictures are a different story. You take a picture and you put it in the room, then you are taking on something magical, you are opening yourself to a possibility.
The picture he sees is one that he put up after his dad died. Even then, he knew the old man wouldn't have approved. It was too strong, too powerful. What Andrew saw in it was a fragment of history, a detail from a forgotten war, but he hadn't understood the power of the image, not until he looks up now and sees it, as if for the first time. It is a picture of a soldier, probably a young man not much older than these children, standing over the body of his enemies. He is wearing a mask, of the kind that anyone can buy in a joke shop, a Halloween mask with a skull-like face and stringy gray hair, a scary mask. He is carrying what might be an automatic rifle, dressed in a combination of army fatigues and casual clothes, trainers or tennis shoes on his feet, like any boy out for a Saturday afternoon, only he is looking down at what remains of a man, a ruined mess of a corpse, sprawled barefoot on the tarmac, his limbs absurdly twisted. The boy is glancing down at this man in passing, but he is still walking: it is a casual moment of appraisal; there is no emotion here, just a mild curiosity. Andrew had chosen this image for the wall because he liked the mask, and he was awed by the notion that this was a historic and terrible moment, captured on camera—by whom?—in the most casual manner. He'd wondered about the photographer, about how close he was and whether he was afraid the boy might shoot him. He'd wondered if the boy felt anything behind the mask, and if the mask allowed him to go about the business of killing with a sense that it wasn't really his doing, that he was simply performing a role. Maybe it gave the boy courage, too. Maybe this boy had been afraid, all the time he was growing up, that he might end up like this, killed by a scary monster and left to rot on an anonymous road, so he'd put on this mask and become the scary monster himself, the victor, not the victim, the one who keeps moving, killing everything in its path, rather than the one who is mown down before he even knows it. Andrew knew it was a terrifying picture, a terrible moment, and he had thought long and hard about using it for the wall, but he hadn't recognized the true power of this image, a power his dad would have seen right away. “It's all right to be afraid of dreams,” his father had told him once, when Andrew woke up after a nightmare, crying and calling out for help. It was good to be afraid of dreams, if the dreams were scary— and it was good to be afraid of certain pictures, because pictures had just as much power as dreams.
Now, Andrew can see this picture, and he thinks at first it is a sort of prophecy, or premonition. But it's more than that. Someone is cutting his hands with something and he wants to scream, but he doesn't make a sound, he just keeps his eyes fixed on that picture. He wants these children to see it, to find their way to this picture through his attention, so he keeps his eyes fixed on that masked face. He keeps his eyes fixed on the picture and he tries to consider what they are doing to his hands as something other than pain, or rather, a different kind of pain, a shared pain, a courtesy. A courtesy and a bearing witness. A testimony, a testimonial, a testament. Not his particular pain, but all pain, everywhere. Not just this soldier's death, but every murder, every killing, every human life lost in war and genocide. Every human
life, in its living and in its death. He keeps his eyes fixed on the picture and he considers how pain changes, when it is a courtesy and a testament, he notices how the body stops and listens to itself, in response to this pain. They are slashing at him now and he keeps his eyes fixed on the picture, and he lets his body listen to itself, going outside time, bearing witness, moving away from these children by surrendering to them. Because he cannot change this and he cannot end it. They cut his hands and his arms, they stab at his face, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the picture. These children are going to kill him, he knows that. Like this dead soldier, he will die for no reason, other than cruelty, so he keeps his eyes on the picture and he bears witness to that.
After a while, though, something breaks through his fixed gaze and he hears a voice, a pleading voice, a boy's voice. It's the dark-haired boy, and he is trying to get them to stop what they are doing.
“I don't think it's him,” the boy says. “I don't think this is the guy.”
“Why not, Leonard?” the Likeness asks—and there is danger in his voice. Leonard had better watch out for himself.
“He's not the type,” Leonard says. Andrew is touched by this. He's grateful to this boy for coming to his defense, if that's really what he's doing. Though maybe it's himself he is defending. Maybe he is bearing witness to something too. “Come on,” Leonard says. “Let's just leave him and get out of here.”
The Likeness whips round now and turns on him. “Why don't you stop fucking whining?” he says. He's really angry with Leonard, and this isn't a new thing.
Leonard stands firm. He's quiet, maybe a little mournful. “He's not the one,” he says, pretty well knowing that it doesn't matter now what he says.
“Who gives a fuck!” the Likeness screams, his face angry and barking, like a dog at the end of a chain.
Something in the room snaps then. They've all stopped what they have been doing, all gathered around him, hemming him in, but they have run out of steam now. It had started to get repetitive and they'd got bored. They'd wanted to do something bigger, something final. After this exchange, though, they back away, circling round Leonard, leaving Andrew on the floor, though the fat one, the one with the Eyebrow, keeps his eye on him, fixing him there with his attention. Or so he thinks—only nobody is fixed, nobody is holding anybody down. Andrew's not going anywhere, not because he's being held in place by some fat kid's staring eyes, but because he's suddenly tired of it all. Or maybe he is just tired of himself. We do tire of ourselves, he thinks, and if we can't find something else to take an interest in, then it gets pretty tedious, being human. We tire of the self, of the shape of it, and its slightly exaggerated colors; most of all, we tire of its constant noise and just long for a little quiet. Andrew thinks he remembers a time when his self was smaller than it had become by the time those kids turned up in his father's little study. He seems to remember a different shape, more muted colors, like the colors you catch glimpses of through snow on a winter's day. But most of all, he remembers something smaller and quieter. That would have been before his dad died. Afterward, he'd just sat around the house watching television or going through his dad's old stuff and he had lost contact with the world. All the same things were there, all the same machinery was there, but he didn't know how it worked. He didn't know how other people worked and he'd lost any real interest in doing things so that his lonely self just grew and grew, like some exotic hothouse plant. Those kids didn't know how it worked either, but they still wanted to do things and that was why they had come to his house, so that they could see themselves doing something. Andrew can imagine them poking sticks at an animal in a cage, or tipping baby birds out of their nests, and he knows he is nothing to them but bigger, slightly noisier game. When they hurt him, they do it with the same odd, almost tender curiosity about themselves, and what they are capable of, that they would have felt tormenting a kitten. Look at me, this is what I can do. It's a dangerous thing to get started on, because you don't know where it might end until it's too late. How it will end now, tonight, is easy enough to predict. It's a simple, almost logical progression, a progression from fists and feet to an old gas lighter for the cooker they found in the kitchen, then the knives in the drawers and the razor blades in the bathroom. Andrew had been angry when it all started, but by the end he was just hopelessly sorry about what they were doing.
The Leader intervenes in the dogfight, but he's not trying to make the peace. He's face-to-face with Leonard now, the Likeness backing him up, bristling and craning his neck, ready to kill. “How do you know he's not the type?” the Leader says. For a moment, Andrew wants to know what they are talking about, he wants somebody to go back to the beginning and explain why they are all here, and what is going on, but then he's too tired and maybe too scared for that. He just wants this to be over.
“How do you know he is?” Leonard asks. “We haven't even asked him anything. I thought we came here to question him, to find out what he knows about Liam and the others.”
This is a challenge to the Leader, Andrew can see that, and the boy doesn't like it. “We didn't come here to question anybody,” he says. “We came for revenge on this ponce.”
“Nobody told me that,” Leonard says.
The Leader does a little incredulous, music-hall turnaround for his troops. “Well,” he says. “Did you hear that, boys and girls?” He spreads his hands out. “Nobody told Leonard that.”
The Likeness is loving this. “Nobody told him what, Jimmy?”
“Why we came here,” Jimmy says.
“And why did we come, Jimmy?” the Likeness asks.
“Ain't telling ya,” Jimmy says, flaring away from the group with a mad laugh, and they all burst into activity again, rested from their labors, looking around for some new fun, some new trick. The girl goes out and rummages around in the kitchen; a moment later, she runs back in again with the big scissors, the ones with the red handles. She's really excited, jumping up and down almost on tiptoe.
“Let's cut off his pee-pee,” she screams.
The Eyebrow snorts. “ Pee-pee,” he mutters, looking at Andrew like he is in on the joke.
“God, Eddie,” the Leader says. “What is it with you and scissors?” He looks sad now that he has faced down Leonard's challenge, and Andrew thinks the boy is beginning to understand that Leonard is right, that maybe they are in the wrong house, but he can't let it register, in his own mind, or in the minds of the others, that he is wrong. He has waited for so long to do something, and now that all this has started, he has to see it through. Andrew understands that. But he can also see there is another reason for his sadness, and it has to do with Leonard, who is standing apart from the rest, watching, not prepared to do more to help, but no longer willing to be a part of what's happening. It has to do with Leonard, not just because the unexpected challenge is upsetting to the Leader—he is only a boy, after all— but because he likes Leonard, and now he knows they aren't together anymore, they're on opposite sides, totally separated. Meanwhile, the Likeness has been going through the stuff on the table and he's found a spike; Andrew doesn't know what it's for, maybe for sticking documents. He doesn't know where the boy found it; he didn't even know his dad had had one of those. “Let's do his eyes,” the Likeness says, grinning savagely. He looks at the Leader. “Let's do his eyes with this.”
Suddenly Andrew starts screaming at them, shouting and screaming like an animal, like a mad person. At the same time, Leonard starts shouting too. Andrew thinks at first that Leonard is going to try and stop the others from hurting him anymore, then he realizes that his defender is angry with him.
“Shut up!” Leonard shouts. He pushes Andrew into the corner again and starts raining blows on him, kicking, first with one leg, then with the other, and shouting all the time. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” He goes on like that for a long time, maybe a minute, and then, with a horror that gradually gives way to gratitude, Andrew begins to understand what is happening. The boy is trying to rescue him.
He's inflicting a smaller pain to avoid a greater, he's buying time, or maybe he's trying to make a more merciful end of it all. He keeps kicking and stamping, and nobody does anything to stop it, and then Andrew is swimming, his body is moving, rising, buoyed up, as if he had fallen into water and, after descending briefly, had started to rise, borne up on the tide, suddenly light. And all at once he is far away from the room, and he is dreaming, he thinks, drifting through something that feels like sleep, even if it isn't. He's dreaming something that, even as he watches it unfold, doesn't seem to be his dream at all, but something he remembers from somewhere, a story that belongs, not to someone else so much as to the air, like radio: a vision of a world that anyone might enter if he chose, or if he knew how. In the dream, Andrew is in a large country house, a vast, rambling mansion full of dark, dank-smelling rooms. Every thing is in shadow, there is almost no furniture, the walls are bare, the smell of damp and rot is everywhere. He moves through the house and he smells it, on the staircase, in the hallway, in the huge, still rooms, but he doesn't mind it at all, because he is there for a reason, he has a purpose. He is moving quickly, searching for something, determined, though he is not quite sure what it is he is looking for, and the more he searches, the emptier the house seems, till there is almost nothing, no staircase, no walls, no windows, only a space that is still the space inside a house, and a sensation of weightlessness as he goes on and on, searching, searching, a sensation of weightlessness that belongs, not to him but to the house, and then not to the house, but to everything. The whole world, the entire universe, is empty, weightless, without form or substance. Everything is melting away, becoming insubstantial, and the only solid fact that remains is whatever it is he is searching for. And then he finds it, and it's nothing, or it's light, not a light but light itself, just a shimmer of light that grows and brightens as it surrounds and then includes him, till he slips entirely into its great, wide whiteness. And it's peaceful, now, peaceful and a little silly, like the games Dad used to play, back when he was well. And he remembers an old rhyme his father used to say, something he had read somewhere, or maybe he made it up himself, because he did that sometimes, he made up silly little stories and rhymes from time to time. It was a stupid rhyme, just pure silliness, but Andrew had liked it for some reason. He couldn't remember all the words, just the ending, and first it was just himself remembering it, then he could hear his father saying it, as if he were there, sitting at the table in the room and they were safe again. Time had gone away and nobody could touch them. And he could hear his dad, it was his dad's voice, with a bit of a smile in it, repeating the words:
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