by Matt Haig
Table of Contents
Title
By the same author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Beginning
Page 14
Page 25
Page 28
Page 35
Page 44
Page 51
Page 54
Page 65
Page 67
Page 71
Page 77
Page 84
Page 90
Page 94
Page 102
Page 104
Page 119
Page 130
Page 134
Page 136
Page 143
Page 152
Page 156
Page 158
Page 161
Page 167
Page 172
Page 176
Page 182
Page 184
Page 187
Page 193
Page 195
Page 201
Page 207
Page 210
Acknowledgements
The Possession of Mr Cave
By the same author
The Last Family in England
The Dead Fathers Club
Shadow Forest
The Possession of
Mr Cave
MATT HAIG
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ISBN 9781407015910
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Published by Jonathan Cape 2008
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Copyright © Matt Haig 2008
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Version 1.0
To Andrea
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung,
The Development of Personality
But the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child's hands were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck, or his lips for ever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last.
Thomas De Quincey,
'Suspiria de Profundis: The Palimpsest'
Of course, you know where it begins.
It begins the way life begins, with the sound of screaming.
I was upstairs, at my desk, balancing the books. I recall being in a rather buoyant mood, having sold that afternoon a mid-Victorian drop-leaf table for a most welcome amount. It must have been half past seven. The sky outside the window was particularly beautiful, I remember thinking. One of those glorious May sunsets that crams all the beauty of the day into its dying moments.
Now, where were you? Yes: your bedroom. You were practising your cello, as you had been since Reuben had left to meet his friends at the tennis courts.
At the time I heard it, the scream, I had already lowered my gaze towards the park. I think I must have been looking over at the horse chestnuts, rather than the empty climbing frame, because I hadn't noticed anyone on East Mount Road. There was some kind of numerical discrepancy I was trying to solve; I can't remember what precisely.
Oh, I could hold that scene just there. I could write ten thousand words about that sunset, about that park, about the trivial queries of my profit and loss accounts. You see, as I write I am back inside that moment, I am back there in that room, wrapped up warm in that unknowing contentment. For this pen to push that evening on, to get to the moment where the sound of the scream actually meant something, seems a kind of crime. And yet I have to tell you how it was, exactly as I saw it, because this was the end and the start of everything, wasn't it? So come on, Terence, get on with it, you don't have all day.
The scream struck me first as a disturbance. An intrusion on the sweet sound of whatever Brahms sonata was floating to me from your bedroom. Then, before I knew why, it caused a kind of pain, a twist in my stomach, as if my body was understanding before my mind.
Simultaneous with the sound of the scream, there were other noises, coming from the same direction. Voices unified in a chant, repeating a two-syllable word or name I couldn't quite catch. I looked towards the noise and saw the first street lamp stutter into life. Something was hanging from the horizontal section of the pole. A dark blue shape that didn't immediately make sense, high above the ground.
There were people standing below – boys – and the hanging object and the chanting gained clarity in my mind at the same time.
'Reuben! Reuben! Reuben!'
I froze. Maybe too much of me was still lost in my account books as, for a second or so, I did nothing except watch.
My son was hanging from a lamp post, using the greatest of strength to risk his life for the sake of entertaining those he thought were friends.
I felt things sharpen and began to move, gaining momentum as I ran across the landing.
Your music stopped.
'Dad?' you asked me.
I rushed downstairs and through the shop. My hip knocked into something, a chest, causing one of the figurines to drop and smash.
I crossed the street and ran through the gate. I crossed the park at the pace of a younger self, flying over the leaves and grass and through the deserted play area. All the time I kept him in sight, as if to lose him for a second would cause his grip to weaken. I ran feeling the terror beat in my chest, behind my eyes and in my ears.
He shuffled his hands closer towards the vertical section of the post.
I could see his face now, glowing an unnatural yellow from the lamp. His teeth bared with the strain, his bulging eyes already knowing the insanity of his mistake.
Please, Bryony, understand this: the pain of a child is the pain of a parent. As I ran to your brother I knew I was running to myself.
I stepped on the park wall and jumped down to the pavement, landing badly. I twisted my ankle on the concrete but I fought against it as I ran towards him, as I called his name.
Your brother couldn't move. His face was twisted in agony. The glare of the light blanched his skin, releasing him of the birth mark he always hated.
I was getting closer now.
'Reuben!' I shouted. 'Reuben!'
He saw me as I pushed my way through his friends. I can still see his face and all the confusion and terror and helpl
essness it contained. In that moment of recognition, of distraction, the concentration he needed to stay exactly where he was suddenly faltered. I could feel it before it happened, a kind of gloating doom leaking out from the terraced houses. An invisible but all-encompassing evil that stole every last hope.
'Reuben! No!'
He fell, fast and heavy.
Within a second his screaming had stopped and he was on the concrete pavement in front of me.
Everything about him seemed so hideous and unnatural as he lay there, like an abandoned puppet. The crooked angles of his legs. The accelerated rhythm of his chest. The shining blood that spilt from his mouth.
'Get an ambulance,' I shouted at the crowd of boys who stood there in numb silence. 'Now!'
In the distance cars sped by on Blossom Street, heading into York or out to the supermarket, immune and unaware.
I crouched down and my hand touched his face and I pleaded with him to stay with me.
I begged him.
And it seemed like some kind of deliberate punishment, the way he died. I could see the decision in his eyes, as the substance of life retreated further and further from his body.
One of the boys, the smallest, vomited on the pavement.
Another – shaven-headed, sharp-eyed – staggered back, away, onto the empty road.
The tallest and most muscular of the group just stood there, looking at me, a shaded face inside a hood. I hated that boy and the brutal indifference of his face. I cursed the god who had made this boy stand there, breathing before me, while Reuben was dying on the pavement. Inside the desperate urgency of that moment I sensed there was something not quite right about that boy, as though he had been pasted onto the scene from another reality.
I picked up one of Reuben's heavy hands, his left, and saw his palm was still red and indented from holding onto the post. I rubbed it and I kept talking to him, words on top of words, but all the time I could see him retreating from his body, backing away. And then he said something.
'Don't go.' As if it was me who was leaving and not him. They were his last words.
The hand went cold, the night gathered closer and the ambulance came to confirm it was too late for anything to be done.
I remember I saw you across the park.
I remember leaving Reuben's body on the pavement.
I remember you asked me, 'Dad, what's happening?'
I remember saying, 'Go back, Petal, go back home. Please.'
I remember you asked about the ambulance.
I remember I ignored the question and repeated my demand.
I remember the boy in the hood, staring straight at you.
I remember I became insistent, I remember grabbing your arm and shouting, I remember being harsher with you than I had ever been.
I remember the look on your face and I remember you running back home, to the shop entrance, and the door closing. And the knowledge below the madness that I had betrayed you both.
As you know, for much of my life I have spent my time mending broken things. Repairing clock dials, restoring old chairs, retouching china. Over the years I have become accomplished at removing stains with ammonia, or a dab of white spirit. I can remove scratches from glass. I can simulate different grains of wood. And I can restore a corroded Tudor candlestick with vinegar, half a pint of hot water and a piece of fine wire wool.
To buy a George III mahogany dressing table suffering the scars and strains of two centuries, and then return it to its original glory, once gave me such a thrill. Or equally, to have Mrs Weeks come into the shop and run her informed fingers over a Worcester vase without detecting the cracks, not so long ago filled my soul with happiness.
It gave me a kind of power, I suppose. A means of defeating time. A way of insulating myself against this foul, mouldering age. And I cannot explain to you the desperate pain it gives me to know that I cannot restore our own private past in quite the same way.
Here is something you must understand.
There have been four people in this life I have truly loved, and out of those four, you are the only one remaining. All of the others died of unnatural causes. Son, wife, mother. All three before their time.
You love three people and they die. It hardly warrants a public inquiry, does it? No. How many would you have to love and watch die before people grew suspicious of that love? Five? Ten? A hundred? Three is nothing. A fig. Three is just plain old bad luck, even if it is three-quarters of all you have ever cared for in the world.
Oh, I have tried to be rational. Come on, Terence, I tell myself. None of these deaths were your responsibility. And, of course, my defence would hold up in a court of law.
But where are the courts of love? And what possible punishment could they enforce that was worse than grief? I came to believe, after Reuben died, that there was something wrong with me, and with the love I had to offer. I had failed Reuben. I let him die among friends I had never met.
I had loved him, but I always imagined there would be some later day when I could make everything up to him. I couldn't accept that these later days would never come.
Of course, the death of a child is, for any parent, always an impossible fact. You hear the opening bars of a familiar sonata and the music stops but you still feel those silent notes, their beauty and power no less real, no less complete. With Reuben I had been ignoring the tune. It had been there, all the time, played continuously for his fourteen years, but I had switched off, stopped listening. I was always concentrating on the shop, or on you, and left Reuben to his own devices.
So what I once ignored I strained to find, and if I strained hard enough I caught flashes, brief bursts of the life that was transformed but did not truly end. Notes returning not in pretty sequence, but as a cacophony, crashing over me with the weight of guilt.
The morning of the funeral I awoke to the sound of buzzing. A rather angry, sawing noise that cut its way through the darkness. I opened my eyes and raised my head from the pillow to see where it was coming from. The room, softly lit by the morning sun that filtered through the curtains, was all there. The framed photograph of your mother, the wardrobe, the Turner print, the French mantel clock. Everything, apart from the noise, was normal. It was only when I sat up further, propped on my elbows, that I identified the source. Low above the bed, over the section of blankets that covered my legs and feet, I saw what must have been five hundred small flies, hovering, just hovering, as if I was a sun-rotten corpse in the desert.
For a moment, there was no fear. The sight of these creatures, moving in short oval swirls, at first had a mesmeric effect. Then something changed. As if suddenly aware that I had woken, the flies began to move in one cloudlike motion further up the bed, towards my face. Soon they were all around me, a dark blizzard, with their angry, unstoppable noise getting louder every second. I dived down, deep under the blankets, hoping the flies wouldn't follow and with that sudden movement the noise stopped completely. I waited a second in the warm and cushioned dark, then resurfaced.
The flies had all disappeared, leaving no trace. I looked around again and, although the creatures had gone, I couldn't help but feel that the room was different, as if every object had shared my delusion.
I remember Cynthia and me talking in the car, patching our grief with small nothings, as the funeral procession rolled through the old Saxon streets. At one point she turned to you and said: 'You are doing so well.' You returned your grandmother's sad smile and I muttered an agreement. You were certainly remarkably composed, as you had been for much of the week. Too composed, I had thought, worried you were keeping it all locked in.
I tried to keep my thoughts on your brother but found them gravitating towards you, and to the effect your twin brother's death was having on your behaviour.
You hadn't played your cello all week. This, I told myself, was understandable. You had gone to the stables every evening, to take care of Turpin, but you hadn't ridden him since the day before Reuben died. This too was as might b
e expected. You had lost your twin brother and you were stranded now, an only child of an only parent. Still, something troubled me. You had been off school, and I had closed the shop, yet I don't think we had talked properly for the whole week. You had always found an excuse to leave the room (to check the iron, to feed Higgins, to go to the toilet). Even then, in that slow-moving car, you felt my eyes upon you and you seemed to wince, as though there was a heat to my gaze, scorching your cheek.
Cynthia's hand squeezed mine as we approached the church. I noticed her nails, decorated with their usual black varnish, her face painted in her macabre style, and remembered her tear-stained joke that morning about how the one useful thing with regard to her sense of fashion was that she never had to think what to wear for a funeral.
We pulled up at the church. We left the car with faces filled with the grief we felt, but also knew we had to show. As we walked past those cramped old graves of plague victims I thought of all the dead parents, separated from their children. Do you remember Cynthia's old ghost story? About the plague boy who had been buried outside York's walls, in line with the new laws, and the spirit of his mother rising up from the graveyard to search in vain for her son? She told you both it when you were younger, walking back with your oranges and candles from Christingle, and Reuben laughed at you for being scared.
It is strange. I feel myself sinking. You remember one thing and there is always something else, lurking below, pulling you under. But I must keep my head up. I must stay gulping the fresh air.
You may wonder why I need to relive these things, when you were there too, but I must tell you everything as I saw it, for you know only your side, and I know only mine, and hopefully when you read this account you will look behind what I have done and a kind of truth will emerge somewhere in that space, that airy space, between your reading and my writing. It is a vain hope, but the last I have, so I will cling to it, as I clung to you as we walked up the path.
Peter, the vicar, was at the other end of that path to meet us, ready to give sympathy and the necessary instructions. He said something to you, and Cynthia butted in on your behalf, defending you against any obligation to speak. It was then that I turned round and saw the boy who had been there the night Reuben died. The boy whom I had hated instantly, for the blank indifference I had seen in his face. His hood was gone. He stood in a cheap suit, wearing a black tie, yet I must admit he had a striking appearance. The pale skin and black hair and those eyes that seemed to contain a dark and brooding power. Something violent, and dangerous.
