by Matt Haig
'Where the —— are they?'
'They were sold yesterday. Both of them. They're currently thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic on their way to a silverware collector in Massachusetts.'
'You're ———– lying,' said another of them. He wore a bomber jacket. The holes in his balaclava revealed pale skin, intense dark eyes, and the fringe of a black moustache. 'What kind of ——– do you take us for?'
'He's not lying,' said your mother.
I remember the silent despair of our exchanged glance. Only five minutes before she had been with you and Reuben. She had only come downstairs to the shop because I had wanted help in preparing for the miniatures fair I was going to the next day.
She had been worn out. Reuben had been hard to settle. She had just switched the baby monitor on when we both turned sharply at the sound of smashed glass.
I see her standing there. Her long dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, the sleeves of her baggy blue shirt rolled to the elbows. She was a strong and fearless kind, your mother. A hands-on, wade-in type. Qualities she had inherited from Cynthia, but minus the theatrics.
Despite the despair I could see in her face, her voice tried to sound calm. 'The inkwells are gone,' she told them.
Behaviour breeds behaviour, she had always told me. One acts calm, one creates calm.
'You can search the whole shop,' I added. 'I assure you they're not here.'
This was the truth, but I wished it wasn't. Oh, Bryony, I wished I could have handed the inkwells over. Truly, I would have done it in an instant. I would have handed them the Holy Grail if I'd had it. But the inkwells were gone.
I know I have never told the full story of what happened next but now I am compelled to do so. I must walk through this raging fire that exists in my memory, the fire that has burned for years in my soul, a fire that has devoured us all. Now, I must tend to those flames.
A week before the break-in there had been an article in the York Daily Record about my miraculous find at a car-boot sale in Wakefield. This was back when I would stalk into such low hunting grounds. I found a kind of predatory thrill venturing onto those car parks and school fields, the thrill of a wolf walking into a flock of ill-guarded sheep.
The silver inkstands, though, had been completely unexpected. Toby jugs and the odd piece of broken furniture were more typical pickings. To find these matching treasures – their panels decorated with the most exquisite engravings (urns, horses, Bacchic heads) perched atop beautifully crafted lion-paw feet – had almost caused me to collapse on the spot. Below the arms and motto I found all my hopes confirmed: 'William Elliot. London, 1819.' Of course, my good Christian upbringing made me point out to the seller – a trollish lady with a Birmingham accent – that these items might be worth considerably more than the eighty pounds at which she had priced them. She doubled the figure and I rounded it up to two hundred, and she smiled as though I was an imbecile. A day later I had them tested with a dab of nitric acid and valued at twenty-five thousand pounds apiece.
'They're ———– here somewhere. What about that box?'
While the Coker candlestick hovered above my head, one of the other intruders pulled out a cardboard box from under a table.
'"The possession of Mr Cave",' he said, as he read my handwriting. The box was full of small items I was planning to take to the miniatures fair at the Railway Museum the following day.
The contents of the box were tipped onto the floor and, when no sign of any inkstands appeared among the snuff boxes and scent bottles, the intruders became more desperate. They looked at each other, wondering what to do. And then the man who had been waiting silently by the door stepped forward, signalling for the one with the candlestick to stand aside. He came closer, whistling an ominous G flat.
'Now, Mr Cave,' he said, after the whistle. He was more well spoken than the others, but somehow his voice contained a deeper terror. 'You have a choice. A pair of fractured skulls or a pair of inkstands. It is your call.'
'No, please, no, we're telling the truth,' your mother said. Her calm was beginning to crack as her eyes darted between the three men.
It was at this point that Reuben began to cry. I remember your mother's words as she looked over at the baby monitor, its white plastic as obvious in the room of old objects as an open eye on a corpse. 'Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet.' I remember her pleading stare, as though Reuben could see her through the tiny black holes of the speaker.
The intruders looked to the ceiling.
'No,' your mother said. 'They're not upstairs. The inkstands, I mean. They're not upstairs.'
'Where's the babby, Mr Cave?' said the one with the candlestick.
'Sorry?' I managed.
'The babby.'
Babby. Infinite terror in the violated world.
The well-spoken one met my eyes again.
'What's it going to take, Mr Cave? Would you really swap the life of your baby for fifty thousand pounds.'
Of course, he was bluffing. He was not going to go upstairs and order one of his thugs to beat our babies to death with a candlestick holder. I knew it, and prayed for your mother to know it too.
My prayer went unheeded.
'Do something, Terence,' she said. That whisper haunts me still. You see, Bryony, I did nothing. Nothing at all, for those crucial seconds. The man in front of me, the well-spoken man with the low whistle, nodded for the other two to head upstairs.
Your mother ran to block their path. Her hands gripped the door frame on both sides of her. 'Leave my children alone,' she said. There was fury as well as fear in her now. Wild eyes and a flash of teeth. The animal instinct to protect. 'Leave them alone.'
I stood there, rooted, thinking too fast and acting too slow. Every possible action I envisaged ended in a violence I knew I couldn't allow to happen.
But, of course, the violence happened anyway.
A gloved hand reached for her, as though her head was a vase on a shelf, a precious object to be vandalised. It was the one with the moustache and dark eyes. He flung her out of his way and she travelled halfway across the room. Her whole self – this infinite mass of emotions and experience – all useless against such physical force.
We had a pine mule chest, at that time, in the middle of the shop. Your mother hadn't wanted it. She doubted we'd ever get a return on the eleven hundred pounds we bought it for. It was me who had insisted, believing it would be a helpful item in terms of display. Indeed, we kept all manner of objects upon it – figures, glassware, a couple of jardinières – although few people had shown much interest in the chest itself.
She caught her head on one of the top corners, a hard piece of wood cut into a sharp right angle that hung out from the body of the chest. She slid and landed and lay there on the floor, her sleeves rolled up for a task she'd never finish. I knew he had killed her, and all their eyes knew it too, filled with a terror so different from my own.
There was a siren.
Mr Nair, the Pakistani gentleman who used to own the newsagent's, had heard them smash the window and had telephoned the police.
The intruders fled and were caught within a minute. I learned that later. At the time I knew little at all. I had fallen into shock, apparently. I couldn't speak to anyone that evening – not the police, not the ambulance people, not even Cynthia (it was left to a rather wonderful lady officer to make that call).
I remember, at one point, being with you two. You and your brother. I remember you were still asleep, still deaf to his continuing cries. I remember holding my hands to my ears, desperately trying to close out the sound, a sound that seemed to be responsible for everything. I wished for dreadful things, that evening. Terrible exchanges of fate. For days, weeks, months afterwards I did not trust myself around him. There would be times when he would cry and I would know that he was crying because he hated me, because he had an evil inside him that resented his life and everyone else's. There would be times when I would have to telephone Cynthia for her to come round
and I would shut myself away in the attic, or I would crouch behind the counter, scared of my own dark capabilities. One night I even called her at the theatre. I called during the interval and she had to leave the Tennessee Williams play she was in. Oh, they were terrible times.
Of course, I would never have done anything to hurt him. Yet at the time I did not trust myself. Part of me wanted to blame a crying baby for what was really my own responsibility.
'Do something,' she had said. Do something. Do something. Do something. But I had done nothing. I stood and did nothing and let her die. Never had I realised, before then, that I was this type of man. A coward. A man of fear and selfish instinct. So what else had I to discover about myself? What further shadows could be cast across my conscience? Such questions lead to all kinds of fears. Fears that did not cease when Andrew Hart, your mother's killer, was sentenced for his crimes.
He was a human. That was the hard thing to stomach. A human with a human name. In the courtroom, stripped of his balaclava, I had to acknowledge he was of the same species, a man with a strangely warm and stoic kind of demeanour. When I saw him, sitting there, with the intensity gone from the dark eyes, I knew I would never be able to trust a man's face again. A killer, I realised, can lurk in even the gentlest of smiles.
They sent him away, eventually. They locked him up in Ranby Prison.
And as for me? I was a weakened man, but a man who had got through. Even if I was never again able to look into my son's crying eyes without thinking of his mother's death.
My experience of grief has never been that of intense sadness, as people often claim to feel. Sadness slows things down, presses you into the sofa and drags out the day. Grief doesn't do that. Grief throws you out of a plane. Grief is terror, in its most undiluted form. The moment in the fall when you realise the parachute is not on your back. You pull the cord, but there is nothing. You keep pulling and pulling and pulling, and you know it is no good, but you can't stop because that would mean accepting the rather appalling fact of the ground, a fact that is moving at an impossible speed towards you, and that will smash you to pieces. And you want to stay whole, unbroken. But there you are, falling, and there is nothing you can do except keep believing in that parachute.
*
And so, there I was, two months after your mother died, pulling that cord.
I had gone to Nottinghamshire, for the Newark Antiques Fair, where I found myself at an arms and armouries stand. Amid the cutlasses, civil war helmets and Scottish dirks there was the usual collection of firearms, organised neatly along the front of the table. Normally, this was precisely the type of stand I would walk by without interest, avoiding the malodorous and ill-bred miscreants who crowd such places. Yet there I was, gazing with wonder at the fine and varied collection of pistols.
In particular I was staring into an open case, admiring the weapon lying on a burgundy velvet lining. A solid, powerful-looking percussion-lock pistol dating from the American Civil War, with intricately rendered leaf motifs engraved on the brass frame. 'New Haven Arms Co. No. 1. Pocket Volcanic Pistol with cartridges' read the yellowing certificate, in Wild West font. The cartridges were still there inside a lacquered tin, untouched and patiently waiting for their moment.
'A beauty, isn't she?' said the man behind the stall. An overweight specimen wearing a lumberjack shirt and drinking flask-hot coffee from a plastic cup.
'Yes,' I said. 'A beauty. Indeed.'
'She's a rare beast, that one. You won't find an American pistol from the 1860s in such a condition. Serial number 28 if you look at the grip. That makes it quite a collector's item.'
'So, it's in full working order?' I looked him straight in the eye and troubled him with the intensity of my gaze.
'Yeah. Yeah. It is.'
I laid it in my hands, and felt reassured by its weight. 'If I wanted to shoot, say, a rabbit at fifty paces I'd have no trouble?' I enquired.
He laughed, uneasily. 'Depends on your aim, I suppose. Not that I advocate actually using the weapon of course.'
'But I could?' I said, staring at the tin of bullets. 'Hypothetically. If Abraham Lincoln was shot today, in that same theatre, with this gun, he'd still die? Am I correct?'
He scratched his rough stubble. 'Yeah. You are.' Even within the unsavoury context of firearms collectors I could see I struck this lumberjack as a rather worrying character.
'Right,' I said. 'Good, good.'
You see, I was convinced it would happen again. Convinced there would be another break-in and I would be faced a second time with men in balaclavas threatening those I loved. 'Do something, Terence.' Her voice, in my mind, as I watched the man demonstrate how to clean the barrel and load the cartridges. The words still echoing as I pulled out my chequebook and made the purchase.
'Now, be careful with her,' the man warned, as if selling me his daughter.
'Yes,' I said, as my free-falling soul slowed its descent. 'Of course.'
You've always been a deep sleeper. That was the first difference we noticed between you and your brother. You slept, he cried. Even so, it was a risk setting up the baby monitor while you were in bed.
Indeed, I begin to wonder if I took such risks purposely, as though a hidden part of me always wanted to be caught. Something inside that was always working against my conscious intentions even when Reuben wasn't there.
You didn't wake, though. I plugged the monitor into the wall socket behind your wardrobe and hid it underneath, directly behind your rolled-up poster of Pablo Casals. You turned, in your bed, and I waited at your door for you to settle.
That same evening, in my room, I tested the speaker. I could hear you, I was sure. The reassuring rhythm of your breath shaping the quiet crackle that came out of there, through the same holes that had once transmitted your brother's fatal wail.
I heard your voice through the baby monitor. You were talking to Imogen on your mobile telephone about me, and about that boy.
'He came around,' you said.
'My dad wouldn't let me see him,' you said.
'It's like living with Hitler,' you said. 'Or Stalin.'
'If there was a search engine for brains he'd be searching mine right now,' you said. 'If he wasn't such a Victorian and could actually use a computer.'
'I've got to see Denny,' you said.
'You don't understand. I've got to,' you said.
'All right, I'll tell you. It's like I've known him for ever,' you said.
'It's like, when I'm with him, nothing else matters. It's like playing Beethoven or something. Like it's real. Like the whole world is just a bad dream and when I'm with him I wake up, like into myself, and know that everything is all right,' you said.
'Don't laugh, that's how I feel,' you said.
'I don't care,' you said.
'Shut up,' you said.
'No,' you said. 'No.'
'It's not like that,' you said.
'You're filth,' you said. 'Pure filth.'
'I don't care where he lives,' you said.
'Well, I find ways,' you said. You were quieter now.
'Last week,' you said.
Your words sunk quieter still, hiding secrets in the crackle, but I stayed determined to uncover them.
So, the next evening, two nights after your birthday, I dropped you off at the music college and I pulled away only to park further down the street. After what had happened on your birthday, I knew I couldn't be too suspicious.
When I saw you leave the building just two minutes after entering, I got out of the car and followed you. Where had you left your cello? You must have stored it somewhere inside the college, I suppose. Was there another student, helping you in all this? Weren't you feeling just a modicum of guilt, or worry, with the York Drama and Music Festival just around the corner? I never knew. All I could know was what I saw. And what I saw was your back, walking away from me, walking fast towards Clifford's Tower.
I stood, in a darkened doorway on Tower Street, and watched you sit in your new cl
othes on the sloping grass, waiting for him. You sat there for ten minutes and then he appeared, wearing a padded jacket, and gave you that parcel he had wanted to give you the day before. You opened it. Something in a frame. Denny placed himself next to you on the grass. Light was fading, and I couldn't see you clearly, but he was talking to you.
What was he saying? I had no idea. Maybe he was congratulating himself on his 'heroic' display at the stables. Maybe this was how he had claimed possession of your heart. Indeed, what else did he have to win you over? I prayed for you to see through whatever spell he had put on you. True heroes don't seek rewards, I thought to myself. They protect from a distance, from a shaded doorway, and stay invisible.
A lofty aim in this city, of course.
I heard feet and voices behind me, walking up the street. A procession of some kind. I turned and saw a man in a mock-Georgian long-coat and a wild blond beard, holding a lantern. Behind him was a group of around twenty tourists, walking in a thin line of couples and loners.
I could hear the guide's voice as the procession got nearer. 'You can see Clifford's Tower up ahead. Now, according to at least thirty witnesses over the last century, anguished screams have been heard from within the tower. Often this mortifying sound has been accompanied by the crackle of fire, which suggests they are hearing the long-dead victims of the Massacre of March . . .
I stepped back further into the doorway, knowing that you would soon notice the lantern or the voice and look towards Tower Street. I also had the feeling I knew this voice, but my mind was too busy with the fear that you would spot me to realise who this man was.
It is strange, how deep this fear was. Any other father might have stormed right over to you and dragged you home. Yet I had tried that, hadn't I, that night in the field? And where had that got me? No. I needed to stay unseen, and watch you undisturbed. If you knew your secrets were exposed you would have only sought more elaborate lies, and I would have been struggling to catch up. This way, I would stay a step ahead. That was how I rationalised it at the time. Yet wasn't there another part of me that wasn't so rational, a part that needed to watch you so that . . . ?
