With Your Crooked Heart

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘She fucking did it,’ breathes Johnnie. He doesn’t seem to notice the clamour of metal. Not letting the car breathe, he forces it on up the track, banging, juddering but steady, to the top where the rotten gate leans into the wall. And up, on to the slick tarmac Paul paid for, on to the track that belongs to the house. Johnnie stops the car, and the key comes out of the ignition with a slight, firm click.

  Silence pours down on them as Anna lets out her breath. Johnnie gets out of the car, walks around to the back, bends down. Anna twists in her seat.

  ‘Aren’t you going to park down at the house?’ she asks. Johnnie stands up, wipes his hands on a thick white handkerchief, shakes his head.

  ‘Someone might steal it here,’ says Anna.

  Johnnie laughs. ‘The exhaust’s fucked,’ he says. He looks so happy about it that she finds herself laughing too.

  ‘Nice bit of driving, eh, Anna?’ She nods. ‘I’ll teach you to drive,’ he says, ‘soon as you’re seventeen. What are you now?’

  ‘Nearly eleven.’

  ‘You can practise on this track though. It’s private. Listen, tomorrow we’re going to have a lesson, Anna. Just you and me. How about that?’

  ‘OK,’ says Anna, in her smallest, most pressed-down voice. If she shows how much she wants it, it won’t happen.

  They walk under the beech tree, past dark, high walls, down to the house. Johnnie stops by a pool of water, collected in what looks like a stone sink set in the wall.

  ‘Don’t put your hands in there, Johnnie! You’ve got oil on them.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you? It’ll wash off, won’t it?’

  ‘That’s our drinking water. It’s the water for the house.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Anna. What, you mean you come out here with a bucket?’

  ‘No, it goes through that pipe there. It’s spring water.’

  ‘You really drink this stuff? It’s got to be filthy. Out in the open air and everything.’

  ‘Dad says it’s cleaner than tap water in London.’

  ‘Is it? OK, Anna, you put your hands in. Give me a drink.’ She dips her cupped hands in the water. It’s cold, with an end-of-winter coldness that lasts well into spring.

  ‘It’s soft water,’ she says, trailing her fingers through it.

  ‘All water’s soft.’

  ‘Not like London water.’

  ‘London water’s the best in the world. It’s been through some class kidneys. Here, Anna, wouldn’t you like to go back to London?’

  Anna looks up. ‘No.’

  ‘Not even to see your —’

  ‘No. I like it here.’

  ‘She gave me something for you.’

  ‘She didn’t. You never saw her.’ But she wants to believe it. He watches the struggle in her eyes. ‘What is it, Johnnie? What’ve you got?’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘It isn’t anything. You’re just saying it.’

  ‘I’ve got it here in my pocket —’

  She springs, her wet fingers quick as wires.

  ‘Hey, leave off that, Anna, you don’t get anything like that. What about that drink of water you were going to get for me?’

  ‘I’m not getting you anything. Not till you tell me about Mum.’

  ‘Go on. Please.’

  And suddenly she softens. She scoops up a double handful of water and holds it out to him. He leans forward, ducks his head, sucks up the water. His nose is wet.

  ‘You look like a horse drinking, Johnnie.’ But she gives him more, and the rest of it sparkles down between them, on to the green-furred cobbles. It’s always dank this side of the house, facing into the hill, bounded by walls.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. It tastes nice.’

  There’s no sound behind them, but at the same moment Anna and Johnnie turn, and there is Paul, at the top of the three stone steps that lead down into the house. His look isn’t for Anna. It grazes her, it embraces Johnnie. Then the two men stand off, without touching or greeting one another.

  ‘Where’s the car?’ asks Paul.

  ‘Up at the gate.’ Johnnie nods, indicating behind him.

  ‘Why don’t you bring it down to the house?’

  ‘It’s OK where it is.’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Her dad knows. He heard the car coming up from the river. Maybe he could tell from the sound that the exhaust’s broken. Her dad knows about things like that. But he wants to make Johnnie show him. And suddenly they are standing together, the two men: her father, her uncle, but before that they are brothers, and that has nothing to do with her. She slips past them.

  It is late. The wreck of a meal lies on the table, the candles are stubs, the iron stove holds a heap of red coals. The air is thick with cigarette smoke. Paul leans into the candle flame to light another Marlboro. Sonia has gone to bed. Outside the frame of candlelight the rest of the room hangs in shadow. Flagstone floor, stone walls and fireplace, long, dark wooden table. The windows look out over more stone, the flagged terrace that’s the boat-deck of this house slung into the side of the valley, high above the river, the mill chimney, the distant town whose street-lamps are too far off to pollute the night sky.

  ‘Are those real owls?’ asks Johnnie suddenly.

  ‘Course they’re real. What else would they be?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Sometimes things that sound too real, they’re not real, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Wouldn’t like to be something they’ve got their eye on.’

  ‘They lock on,’ says Paul, ‘like missiles. It’s war out there.’

  ‘It was you told me I ought to come up here and sort my head out.’

  ‘Well, you did,’ says Paul. He looks at Johnnie, with his hair cut short again, because that’s the fashion. Too short for Paul’s taste. ‘And now here you are. Do you like it?’

  Johnnie stands, stretches, glances behind him at the black space of window. ‘You ought to get some curtains up, Paul. Anybody could be looking in.’

  ‘There’s no one to look in.’

  ‘You ought to get a dog.’

  ‘I’m getting a dog.’ Paul pauses for effect. ‘Cocker spaniel.’

  ‘Cocker spaniel! 1 said a dog.’

  ‘I don’t want one of those.’

  ‘A Dobermann.’

  ‘I don’t need any of that.’

  ‘What about Anna?’

  ‘Anna’s all right.’

  ‘Even when you’re away?’

  ‘She’s not on her own. Sonia’s here.’

  ‘Sonia!’

  ‘It’s not London. Sonia’s fine. I moved your car, Johnnie.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because it’s a stupid car. People don’t have cars like that round here. People don’t need cars like that round here.’

  ‘It’s a good car.’

  ‘Then why treat it like shit? It’s down by the barn.’

  Johnnie yawns again, his arms up, his fists knuckling childishly on each side of his head. He smiles at his brother, his softest, most beguiling smile. ‘It’s only a car,’ he says. ‘If it’s fucked, I’ll get another.’

  Paul’s mouth aches with what he mustn’t say. Say the wrong thing to Johnnie and he’s off, the lid comes down. He doesn’t hear you any more, he doesn’t even see you. You’re just a shadow blocking the way that’s lit up for Johnnie.

  ‘Come up to the attic. Come and see my new toy,’ says Paul.

  ‘You been buying another computer?’

  ‘No. Better than that.’

  They climb the wide, shallow stairs to the first floor. Funny how the silence of people sleeping is almost like a sound. Anna, Sonia. Their doors are shut. Anna has never been afraid of the dark. The house is noisier than the London house, even though it’s miles from anywhere. There’s water: the river, the streams that run to it down the hillside. This valley leaks from every pore. The boards creak like Paul thinks a wooden ship must creak at anchor. Back and forth, back an
d forth, as if someone’s walking, walking, all night long. There are mice. All old houses have mice. There are two or three cats to keep them down. Rats in the barn, though there’s nothing for them in there now. Just a big, cold space. A real barn’s never cold. He ought to do something with it.

  Up to the next floor, open the door in the wall. The staircase to the attics is narrow and bare. He hasn’t bothered to carpet it, because he likes to hear footsteps. He doesn’t want anyone coming upon him silently. Johnnie behind him, breathing. Then the three doors in front of him, each one plain and small. He takes the right-hand door.

  ‘What are the other rooms?’ asks Johnnie.

  ‘That’s my office. I knocked out the wall.’

  ‘Where are we going, then?’

  ‘My observatory,’ says Paul. He snaps on the light.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a telescope.’

  ‘Christ, Paul, you could be a Peeping Tom on Mars with that thing. When did you get it?’

  ‘Last Christmas.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘The stars.’

  ‘You mean you’re into astrology?’

  ‘Astronomy.’

  Johnnie touches the telescope. The cylinder is five feet long.

  ‘Russian,’ says Paul.

  ‘It’s a big bastard, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the minimum. Anything less, you’re just playing around.’

  The walls show the geography of the sky. They make it fixed. They will never match the wheeling of the earth, the sweep of the planets, the dumb explosions of the stars.

  ‘It’s all moving,’ says Paul. ‘All of it. Even the sun’s moving.’

  ‘The sun? I thought it was the earth that moved.’

  ‘Yeah, the sun as well. The whole galaxy’s turning on its axis.’

  Johnnie turns on Paul a look that Paul knows well. Not exactly disbelief, more an unwillingness to know more.

  ‘I should’ve done more maths at school,’ Paul goes on. ‘Did you know, they predicted exactly where Neptune was going to be, before anybody discovered it? Just through mathematics. So when they found it, it wasn’t only finding a planet. Because the maths worked, then it meant physics worked all through the universe. Which they didn’t know before.’

  ‘That the sort of thing you’re doing, then, with the telescope?’

  ‘They discovered Neptune in 1846.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know maths. I couldn’t work all that stuff out.’ Paul’s charged anger fills the room. Johnnie says nothing. He knows Paul, and he knows that anger. Paul’s bought the telescope, bought books, charts, software. Found out enough beforehand so he won’t show himself up in front of the guy in the shop. He’s a fast learner. Too fast not to come up slap against the things he doesn’t know and can’t understand, not without going back to basics. And he won’t do that. My observatory. Johnnie knows that it’s only to him Paul ever says the words that give flesh to his secret dreams. Sonia probably thinks he’s up here plotting how to screw the Customs & Excise.

  ‘After they discovered Neptune, they knew there was another one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Planet. Another planet.’

  ‘You going to let me have a look through that thing? How do you look up it?’

  ‘You don’t. You look down here, through this eye-piece, down into the lens. There’s a mirror at the bottom that sends you right along the cylinder.’

  Paul slides back the attic window. The telescope squats, waiting.

  ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘Get out of the way, you don’t just look down it, you’ve got to adjust it. Don’t touch that band, it’s on a permanent setting.’

  Johnnie gets out of the way. His brother frowns, fiddles. ‘The instructions were crap,’ he mutters. ‘All written in Russian.’

  ‘How’d you read them, then?’

  ‘Well, not in Russian as such. But it might as well have been. All the thinking was done in Russian, plus they parked some English words on top of it. There. There you are. Don’t move it. Just look straight down.’

  Johnnie looks straight down. A wobble of light, much too big and sharp, swings towards him. He blinks. He wants to shut his eyes. He looks for long enough, then straightens himself.

  ‘Fucking unbelievable,’ he says politely.

  ‘What’ve you got?’ mutters Paul, settling over the eye-piece again. ‘Oh yeah. Good. That’s the Bear. Ursa Major.’ For a long time, it seems to Johnnie, he remains transfixed. Occasionally he makes a tiny adjustment to the band. At last, reluctantly, he draws back.

  ‘Sorry, Johnnie. It should be you looking. I can do it any night.’

  ‘That’s all right. What’s Sonia think of all this, then?’

  ‘She’s never been up here.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘No. She’s never been up here.’

  ‘What, you don’t let her? There’s a big invisible Keep Out sign at the bottom of the stairs?’

  Paul frowns. He crosses to the window to shut it, but his attention is caught by something. A sound. Voices down in the wood, carrying clearly on the night wind. The moon’s up, sinking away from fulness. Near-gibbous. There are clouds coming in from the south-west to clot the purity of the night sky. And those voices. Clear, but not clear enough to make words. Shouting drunk.

  ‘I thought it was all quiet in the country,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘They’re on their way back from the pub.’

  ‘It’s half-past one in the morning, Paul.’

  ‘They don’t keep pub hours round here.’

  Johnnie’s at the window. The closeness of his brother’s body always disturbs Paul. Johnnie was a beautiful baby. Johnnie has a way of touching you, leaning into you as if the normal spaces between people don’t count for him.

  ‘I’m knackered,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘You need to get away,’ says Paul. He finds himself speaking fast, in the voice that never works with Johnnie. Why is it he can’t learn? He hears himself going on. ‘Listen. You stay here a month. That stuff you’re doing, you think you’re on top of it, but you’re never on top of it. It’s on top of you. Finish. We’ve got the business, you don’t have to do any of that stuff. Listen, two more years and I’ll make you a full partner. Half-shares. How’s that sound? You stay here a month. You’ve got to get out of it, Johnnie.’

  ‘Not now,’ says Johnnie. His voice is stifled. ‘It’s not the right time.’

  ‘It’s never the right fucking time. It never will be. Not till you’re doing fourteen years. Everybody thinks they’re magic till they get caught, Johnnie, it’s not just you. Everybody thinks they’ll just do one more job, then they’ll finish. And they never, ever do. Not till someone finishes it for them.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘I know.’

  You’re frightened, Paul thinks. A Dobermann’s no more use than a cocker spaniel when it comes to that kind of frightened.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ says Johnnie suddenly, in a light voice that sounds as if it’s on the edge of laughter.

  ‘Course you did,’ says Paul.

  ‘No,’ says Johnnie. ‘I mean a real mistake.’

  Paul says nothing. He puts his hand on Johnnie’s shoulder. In a rush Johnnie turns to him, clings as tight as the kid with the shaven head did the night the breathing finally stopped. Mum got up from the side of Dad’s bed and wound her rosary into his dead fingers. Paul takes his brother in his arms. Under the cotton shirt Johnnie is burning. The near-gibbous moon races through cloud, the planets move. The galaxy turns on its slow axis, pulled by a gravity no stronger than the one which drags Johnnie from his brother’s arms.

  Thirteen

  Paul can’t sleep, so he watches the stars. He thinks about all it takes to make a gas cloud become a supernova, and about the volatility of everything that looks stable through his telescope. His mind is full of the words he’s learned, in o
rder to have words for what he sees. The facts are polished with language. That’s what he never understood at school, when they talked about vocabulary. Education is about getting new words because you need them. Neutron, ring nebula, helium flash, planetesimals. Things like that can’t exist in your mind until you know the words for them. Imagine people knowing all the words for the growth and death of a star, even though they’ll never see it. The cycle is too long: human beings are nothing beside it.

  The words Paul’s learned press up against his lips, but he never speaks them aloud. He reads, then writes things down in a red notebook, but he never turns the pages back to look again at what he’s written. He watches planets swim through space into the grasp of his telescope. They are public, yet as private as dreams. He doesn’t speak of this, not to Sonia, not even to Johnnie, though when he brought Johnnie up here maybe the thought was at the back of his mind that these words might be shared. And not to Anna. It has never even crossed Paul’s mind to show the stars to Anna. Why should she care? He never did, at her age.

  ‘I made a mistake.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘I mean a real mistake.’

  Even the sun’s middle-aged, and it’s seen everything. Johnnie thinks I don’t know, but I do. Of course I do. It’s my business to know what he knows. You put such things out of your mind. You use words that don’t educate anyone. You say, ‘He’s sorted.’ You say, ‘I took care of him.’

  And to yourself you say, black hole. You can never see a black hole. That’s where everything changes, where stars die, where even the laws of physics don’t work any more. Light cannot get out, because these are outlaw places where the bandits of gravity have taken over. Paul smiles.

  He won’t sleep now. He might as well stay up, and cat-nap between five and seven. That’s got him through a day before now. He’s awake, and the stars are awake with him, both of them seizing their time. Downstairs, Johnnie’s sleeping. He sleeps like the dead, always has done. Or so he says.