Disputed Land

by Tim Pears

  ‘I had to make sure,’ she replied, with irritating logic, ‘that none of the others knew where I was.’

  We stood in silence, side by side. We were almost touching. I became aware of Holly’s slow breathing, and adjusted my own to fit hers, inhaling, resting, exhaling. It began to amuse me, wondering whether she realised what I was doing. Then I became aware of her smell amongst the cotton and wool and camphor, a subtle perspiring sweetness. I felt myself lean imperceptibly closer to her in the pitch-black darkness.

  ‘Shhh!’ Holly suddenly uttered in my ear – though I’d said nothing for some minutes – and the next thing I knew the doors of the wardrobe were opened. What happened next took me a moment to fathom: I was assailed by something; something malleable, corporeal, alive; being applied to my face. After some seconds I realised what it was: Holly had put her hand over my mouth.

  I could hear Xan’s voice, ‘No, they’re not here,’ and Baz saying, ‘Are you sure? Have another look.’ The jackets and coats ruffled in front of me, and in the semi-darkness I saw Xan’s hand reach in, and float around, and withdraw.

  I was preoccupied, meanwhile, with how infuriating the situation was. There was no need whatsoever for Holly, after she’d hushed me, to have put her hand on my mouth, and keep it there, where it presently remained. But once she’d done so there was nothing I could do about it without giving myself, us, away. If I’d grabbed her hand and wrestled it loose, no doubt there’d have been a commotion; and if I’d muttered and hummed noises of objection the twins would have heard. So I stood there, mute, passive – as if thereby acknowledging, indeed, the necessity of her maddening intervention.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Xan.

  Behind him, Baz said, ‘I bet he’s in the attic like I said. We just missed him the first time. Come on.’

  ‘Sid and Holly must have both found him,’ Xan said, as he closed the door.

  After some moments I took hold of Holly’s wrist and tried to pull it away. She resisted at first, whispering, ‘They might be listening.’

  We struggled for a moment, until I felt her relinquish her hand.

  ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ I demanded.

  Her voice sounded nonchalant in the darkness. ‘I was worried you might squeak again,’ she said.

  Blood rushed to my head. ‘How would you like it?’ I asked, and put my left hand over her mouth. Somewhat to my surprise, Holly didn’t resist, but let my hand rest on her mouth, and we stood there like that for some time. My anger subsided. It ebbed away in the midst of confusion as I felt Holly’s lips open, and her tongue emerge, and taste the skin of my middle finger. I stood there, motionless, as Holly proceeded to explore my fingers with her tongue; and then her moist lips, kissing them; and then her teeth, with which she bit me.

  I didn’t exactly decide upon a course of action, it was more that I experienced myself having apparently begun to move my head around to face Holly’s, and at the same time withdraw my hand from her mouth. A moment later I discovered myself kissing her, and being kissed by her. My innards turned to liquid, my head filled with air. The bodily pleasures I would have regarded as supreme in my experience of life hitherto were rendered insignificant, facile, by the delicious sensations I now discovered.

  It was Holly Simmons, my cousin, but it felt like I was getting to know a complete stranger in an entirely novel way, one which the two of us invented as we explored together, a pair of young gods.

  No one disturbed us again for a long time, and we continued our mutual exploration with little pause. I think, looking back, that even as we indulged in this delectable game, which neither of us had planned, we knew already that it could go no further. There was no anxiety about whether or when or how another step should be taken. Perhaps it was for this reason that a pattern of my sexual destiny was laid down in that darkness: an enjoyment of kissing for its own sake, not merely as something that leads to something else.

  Eventually, one of us – I think it was Holly, though it could have been me – said that we ought to make our way downstairs. The others had probably all given up on us by now, we agreed, forgotten our very existence and were no doubt in the middle of a game of Racing Demon.

  I opened the wardobe door – which, fortunately, was possible from inside. The light was on in Grandpa’s dressing room. For a moment it seemed blinding. When I was able to look at Holly, who was smiling at me, I saw that something had changed. The flaws in her appearance – her cross-eyes, her snub nose, uneven teeth – had shifted, improved. She was prettier than she had been an hour earlier. My kissing, for which I clearly had a natural talent, had made her more attractive. I knew, of course (I wasn’t stupid) that what had happened was that I had made her feel attractive, and that this was enough, this self-belief, to make it a reality.

  It didn’t occur to me that what had shifted was my own perception, though as we walked through our grandparents’ bedroom and out on to the landing I did realise that Holly putting her hand over my mouth had made me forget the rules of the game: the whole point of Sardines was for everyone to gather in a hiding place. I should really have taken hold of Xan’s hand and pulled him in.

  We came downstairs and found everyone in the drawing room, not playing cards, as we’d expected, but sitting and standing in odd poses all around the room, in silence, like brooding statues. They didn’t see us at first, but when one did so all the others came swiftly to animated life.

  My father turned towards me and said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear the siren?’ Xan demanded.

  I realised now that some were missing from the company.

  ‘Grandma’s been taken to hospital,’ Sidney said. ‘She had a fall.’

  ‘The doctor came,’ my mother explained, ‘and said she needed to be kept under observation.’

  Dad told Holly that her mother had gone with Grandpa to the hospital. Everyone was staring at us. Holly burst into tears. I almost did the same, overwhelmed by the accumulation of shock, guilt, sadness all at once. My mother went over and gave Holly a hug. She held her for a long time, soothing her, and rubbing her back in a way I recognised immediately, not from sight but because I could feel the place down my own spine from when she did the same to me. It also occurred to me, perhaps for the first time, that my mother would have loved to have had a daughter.

  Our grandfather and Auntie Gwen got back from Shrewsbury shortly after eleven. The twins had gone to bed; Holly and I were in our pyjamas and dressing gowns. Grandpa looked tired. His short, stubbly hair seemed whiter than ever, his ruddy face pale.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t so late in the day they’d have let us bring her home.’

  ‘I’ll collect her in the morning,’ Auntie Gwen said. She took Holly off to sleep in her bed with her that night.

  I have very rarely suffered from insomnia. That night, however, I awoke at one-fourteen a.m., according to my illuminated watch. I lay there in my alcove, thinking about Grandpa, and whether this was to be his arduous ordeal for the rest of Grandma’s life: fitfully shuttling between their home and Shrewsbury, often in the dead of night. I nurtured some vague hope of drifting back to sleep, but with each passing minute I knew that there was no avoiding climbing out and going downstairs, to empty my bladder and to fetch a glass of water for my parched throat.

  Since I was heading for the kitchen anyway, I decided to use the downstairs lavatory rather than the bathroom at the end of the corridor on the first floor, so as not to disturb anyone. It meant disturbing the dogs, on the way through the pantry, but they only raised their heads and blinked drowsily at me, and went back to sleep. As I came stealthily back out into the hall, a shadowy figure passed silently a few yards ahead of me. It was a woman, dressed in pyjamas, who I identified immediately as Aunt Lorna. I stood unbreathing and watched her climb the stairs.

  The kitchen, with its many windows, took in just enough illumination from outside for me not to have to switch on a l
ight. I had the uncanny impression that any noise I made inside would disturb nocturnal animals outside, whilst if, on the other hand, I was quiet I might be rewarded by the sight of a fox stalking around the yard, a badger loping across the lawn. I managed to open the cupboard and take down a glass without making a sound. Pouring the water was trickier, but I held the glass up close to the spout and at an angle, so that when I turned on the tap a fraction the thin trickle of water fell on to and slid down the glass side of the tumbler. I even drank slowly, swallowing carefully, so as not to make the slightest sound, my eyes peeled, staring outside. I placed the glass on the draining rack.

  I could make out no movement in the darkness. Instead, I was disturbed by a creak in the room behind me, and turned: there was a figure emerging from the drawing room. It walked slowly through my grandparents’ TV and sitting area, entered the kitchen, turned right towards the door giving on to the hall, and stopped. I could just about discern the person’s head turning towards me, and I realised that, standing in front of the window, the light outside rendered my upper body in clearly apparent silhouette.

  I was pretty certain that the figure was that of a ghost, probably, it seemed to me, that of Grandma’s father – my own great-grandfather – who’d reluctantly sold the house to Grandpa. Perhaps his spirit just wouldn’t let go. The strange thing was that I wasn’t scared, or at least was able to hold my fear at arm’s length for the moment.

  ‘Is that you, Theo?’ the person asked. It was not a ghost, but my own father.

  I let out a long-held breath of relief. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Bit early in the morning to be getting up, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Even for such an early bird as you.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Who, me?’ Dad said. ‘Oh, I was lost, old chap. How about you? Are you okay?’

  I told him I’d woken up with a dry mouth and was just helping myself to a glass of water. I didn’t mention that I suspected it had been caused by a prolonged bout of kissing, with Holly, earlier that evening; nor did I question my father as to how he could have got lost in the house he’d grown up in. I was going to tell him that the coincidence of he and I both being up in the middle of the night was nothing, that actually three of us were. But then I figured he and Aunt Lorna had probably bumped into each other already.

  ‘Heading back up?’ he asked.

  I walked over to him. ‘Dad?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Theo,’ he said, his gentle voice calm, patient.

  ‘It must be so awful for Grandpa,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it must be,’ my father agreed. He opened his arm and I leaned in against his shoulder, shedding years in the intimate darkness. ‘Poor Pa,’ he said. I wasn’t a teenager any more as I sobbed against my father’s chest, but a young boy, wandering, dizzied by the grief and the rapture of what he’d found in his way.

  As we walked through the hall towards the stairs my father suddenly stopped and said, ‘Good God. Will you look at that?’

  We gazed out of the glass front door. Snow was falling, small, luminous flakes, drifting gently to the earth in the moonlight.

  V

  1

  We were due to go home after lunch the next day, Saturday. My parents had some engagement back in Oxford that evening. I, however, had no wish to leave. I awoke before my cousins, despite the interruption to my rest during the night, yanked my clothes on and skipped downstairs, fully expecting to find the house hemmed in by deep drifts of snow, its occupants marooned. When I could see none out of the front door I assumed it must be some kind of optical illusion, and carried on still full of hope into the kitchen, where I stood at the window, dismayed, unable to believe my eyes: whatever snow had fallen in the dead of night had melted. There was not a trace of it, no single patch of white in the garden, on the stable roof, even on the summits of distant hills. It was as if snow had never fallen, was an illusion, some obscure mutual dream of my father’s and mine. I could see no point in even mentioning it to anyone else. There then fell from the sky, however, another, immediate consolation: the great spotted woodpecker that had been reconnoitring the house these last days, and which I’d heard but not seen, now alighted upon one of the bird feeders right in front of the window. It nibbled assiduously for a few nervous, alert seconds, before flying away. It was an adult male, a patch of red on its nape amidst the splashes of black and white; more red on the undertail. I felt a firm hand on my shoulder.

  ‘He came to see you before you left,’ Grandpa said. ‘Worth waiting for, Theo,’ he added, in such a way as to suggest I’d somehow ordered it this way: planned the timing of the woodpecker’s visit and my parents’ schedule both, for which my grandfather was congratulating me.

  At breakfast, Auntie Gwen and my mother persuaded Grandpa to stay at home and let them collect Grandma from the hospital, to spare him one at least of the many trips he’d have to make.

  ‘Jockie will help you out, won’t he, Pa?’ my father asked.

  ‘Assuredly so,’ Grandpa replied.

  An hour later the other children had taken their place in the generational rota of breakfast and were munching toast or cereal. My father was doing the washing-up from the previous sitting, Grandpa was taking care of something or other in his study, and I was through in the TV area, talking to the dogs. Sel rolled on to her back as an invitation to me to scratch her tummy, Leda tried to lick my face. They both knew, apparently through psychic communion, that we were soon to go for a walk. When I heard piano music, my first assumption was that my father had found a portable radio, tuned it to BBC Radio 3, and placed it on the window sill in front of the kitchen sink, to listen to as he washed the dishes, as he did at home in Oxford, but even before I raised my head I knew that what I could hear was not broadcast but live music; and it was coming from the drawing room. Neither did I need to look at my cousins eating their breakfast to know that it wasn’t Sidney seated at the piano: what I could hear was as far from her clumsy punching of the keys as could be imagined. Rather, notes of a hypnotic beauty, being performed with the utmost delicacy and sensitivity, cascaded through the air like jewels made of sound.

  I stood up and walked towards the drawing room. I’m not sure anyone in the kitchen had even noticed the piano playing. My mind raced with crazy possibilities as to the sight that awaited me: the piano tuner was here; Grandma allowed some local child prodigy to use her piano for practice in the same generous way she used to let them ride her horses; a musical burglar had broken in and been waylaid by the baby grand, been unable to resist stopping to play it.

  I entered the room, with trepidation. Not because I expected to find a stranger, in truth, so much as because the music, and the playing of it, were so exquisite. I wouldn’t have pretended to a great knowledge of music, but owing to my parents’ tastes the classical repertoire had been a part of the background all my life. Yet I’d never heard anything so pure – yet oddly familiar – as this. Aunt Lorna was seated on the piano stool, her back straight, her chin up. Her head seemed to have lifted a little from her shoulders. She was reading sheet music, while her elegant fingers danced upon the keys of the piano.

  I stood there for a moment, watching, before I found myself moving towards her, drawn by a power I had no will to resist. I approached at a diagonal, a forty-five degree angle to Aunt Lorna’s line of vision, so that although her concentration, her absorption, was profound, she must have been aware of this person’s movement. The ethereal notes of the music seemed to lift me off the ground; I had no sensation of my feet treading upon the carpet.

  I’m not equipped to describe the music Aunt Lorna was playing. All I will say is that, in the space of no more than five romantic minutes, it summed up the ineffable possibilities of true love, as well as the impossibility of ever realising it. It suggested, moreover, love not only for one other human being, but for all those one loved; for this world we lived in; for life itself.

  I reached Aunt Lorna and stood behind her right shoulder. She was
playing the second of Granados’ Danzas españolas, the so-called ‘Oriental’. I understood, as she played, how much she suffered, living her life as she did with my crude Uncle Jonny and their diabolical twins. How such a sensitive woman was able to share a realm of such vulgarity was hard to imagine. I thought of Baz and Xan’s hideous karaoke, and could have wept for my aunt.

  When she’d finished, Lorna sat for a moment, still gazing at the sheet music, as if there were some extra item of information there visible only to someone who had just played the piece, an inaudible secret coda to that musical glimpse of divine truth.

  ‘That was so beautiful,’ I stammered, blushing, as Aunt Lorna got up. She showed no sign of surprise at my presence.

  ‘Thank you, Theo,’ she said, stroking my cheek, and left the room.

  It was only after she’d gone that a dire thought occurred to me: that the twins were both brilliant musicians. How could they not be? And that they had decided – possibly in conference with their mother – not to perform at the recital so as not to upstage their cousins: Sidney, Holly and I, we three uncultured novices.

  We walked straight up the lower flank of the hill, Grandpa stumping upwards with his head down, the dogs chasing scents in the dead bracken, Xan and Baz scrambling on ahead then halting, bent double, struggling to get their breath back, while the rest of us caught up and climbed past them. Then they’d overtake us again, yelling and panting and dashing after the dogs.

  Aunt Lorna chatted with Sidney about her A levels. Uncle Jonny had stayed behind to ‘take care of some business’. I pictured him down in the yard with his alternating phones, in uncivil conversation with other men stepping outside of their family homes. My father, though, was with us, and he was talking with Holly. I think he preferred to listen, because we were climbing steadily and no one could accuse Dad of being the fittest of men. I’m not sure what they were discussing. Summer holidays, it sounded like.