Dedication: Blood is for someone back in Brighton, who I love and miss very much. He was the only friend I said goodbye to on the day I left, in 2020, and when he was giving me a lift in his car (helping to collect a load of my stuff for the van) he said to me, from nowhere, ‘I want you to write me… twelve ghost stories.’ So I promised that I would. This is one of twelve. I’m posting a printout tomorrow, inscribed with a promise that I will not wait another thirty-seven months before writing the next.
Originally I posted this one chapter a day, over the four days before Halloween, with the fifth chapter on Halloween itself. This is all five chapters together, subject to a fortnight more’s occasional tinkering.
Tx
BLOOD
for R.P.K.
I.
It was a Saturday in November, and the flat was freezing. The boiler was dead, and Jake’s mother had been on the telephone trying to get it fixed every free moment from Wednesday to Friday. There had been tears. The last calls she made, on Saturday morning, were one to her half-sister, asking if they could stay, just for the weekend, and another, to Matthew’s parents, asking if Jake could stay with them until Monday. In between those calls had been a small crisis, caused deliberately by Jake, in which he had complained relentlessly that he didn’t want to go to his ‘auntie’s; he wanted to stay at home, alone. There was absolutely no way he was old enough for that, and his proposed alternative was treated — with a profane reminder of the lack of hot water and heating — as it deserved to be treated. In the end a compromise was reached, and his mother called Matthew’s parents. They were more than happy for Jake to stay. Jake’s mother was more than happy for a little time off from him, though she berated herself for thinking that.
Jake also felt glum; he regretted the trouble he had caused, and what it had led to, because at least, at his auntie’s, his mother would have been there. Really he had just been protesting because he despised his auntie’s mean little cat, and the fact the vegetables were always slimy. What he had done now was consigned himself to a whole weekend without his mother, in an environment where he felt uncomfortable. Jake liked Matthew, but he didn’t know him very well, and it had been a while since they had seen each other. He was a friend from Jake’s previous school.
So, late morning on Saturday, right in the middle of more stress and whinnying from Jake, Matthew’s parents had pulled up in their shiny family estate. The handover had been easier than expected: Jake’s mother told him to behave, told him that she loved him, and he had got in the car without a fuss. His mother had waved at him and ducked back inside their freezing ground-floor flat, as the tyres crackled on the ground, and Jim drove them into town for lunch.
Jake and his mother did not tend to go to restaurants, and he was a bit daunted by much of what went on, but he enjoyed his pizza, and he loved the slice of pie covered in ice cream that followed it. Despite this, he already wanted to go home. At some bellyaching from Matthew, there followed a little shopping. To Jake’s delight, Matthew’s parents — unlike his own mother — had no problem with spending a bit of money on him, and both boys were given the exciting limit of twenty pounds each. Jake was still irrationally annoyed with his mother, and deliberately buried the idea that she probably would be happy to spend money, if only she could. Matthew’s parents were quite surprised to see, when both boys joined them at the queue for the till in HMV, that each was holding his own copy of SPICE by the Spice Girls. Their questions were: Isn’t that for girls? and Aren’t you going to buy something different?; and even though neither question was serious, the boys both thought to themselves that they were nevertheless stupid things to say. On the drive back to their house, Matthew tore the plastic wrapping off and investigated every part of his purchase thoroughly. Jake kept his pristine; he meant to open it only when he got back home.
Jake did like being in a car, especially on journeys like this one. He could stare out across landscapes which changed slowly in layers, from his smooth-moving vantage, like in Looney Tunes cartoons set in the Wild West. He would choose a bush, or a sheep, or a wooden post, and depending on how far away it was, judge how quickly it would seem to go past. It was a strange, rather lonely-looking place, the sky almost oppressive with the horizon everywhere being so flat; it was somewhere Jake had only ever been when on the way to somewhere else, never outside of a car — and this time, as he watched the slant landscape slide past, something caught his eye. Things that seemed to line up. It might have been the vegetation along a river, although he got the feeling that wasn’t the case. He looked across the car and out of the other side. This distinctive edge, whatever it was, was there too, stretching toward the horizon in the opposite direction.
As they got slowly closer to what he had seen, Jake became a little nervous, realising of course that if the patterns on either side met up, forming a line, the road they were on was sure to go through it. He had accidentally created for himself something to anticipate, by imagining that what the car was due to cross very soon indeed was some sort of ancient ditch, or ridge — was something that they would all feel like a speedbump. He did not feel anticipation, however; he felt anxiety, or even fear.
Matthew and his parents were so oblivious to what Jake had seen that he wondered if he had seen nothing at all. The car went without a jolt across whatever it was, whether ancient or imaginary, and suddenly Jake sneezed. It had come from nowhere. The dog started barking.
‘Shut your face!’ shouted Matthew’s father, loudly and unreasonably. The dog continued barking.
‘Leave him alone, Jim’, said Matthew’s mother. ‘It made me jump. Bless you, Jacob.’
Both boys had recognized that the dog — whose name was Stitch — had begun to bark simultaneous with Jake’s sneezing, rather than because he was startled by it, but neither was in the mood to say anything. Jake empathized with the dog barking, he felt alarm too. As they had crossed whatever that boundary was, he had been flooded quickly with the sense not only that he had received appallingly bad news, but that the bad news was all his fault. He had no idea why, or what he had done, but he was in terrible, terrible trouble. His skin felt the way it felt on the bus to swimming, which he hated. He wanted to go home.
Matthew and his parents lived in what seemed to Jake to be a farmhouse, but they did not to his knowledge run a farm. It was old, but it was not pretty. They all scurried in quickly, cowering ineffectually from light rain. Matthew glanced at Jake’s bag and made a face which somehow clearly indicated he felt it was too big for one weekend. He accidentally got in the way of Jake’s attempt to dash to the downstairs toilet, and made it there first. Jim rolled his eyes a little, and pointed Jake to the upstairs bathroom, so Jake cantered upstairs and went for the wee he’d needed the whole drive long. He washed his hands, saw his big green eyes in the mirror, stuck his tongue out at himself, dried his hands, and emerged onto an empty, quiet landing, where he waited until he heard the downstairs flush go and the door open. He did not know where it was that Matthew went, and neither right now did he want to know. The sound of the television downstairs told him that someone had been into the living room, and probably was still there.
Jake passed the door of Matthew’s parents’ bedroom, on his way toward the stairs. He readily gave in to an instinct to be nosey, and looked in, quickly; it was empty, and a bit of a mess. He continued along the landing, to the top of the staircase. He froze, as he came down the first few steps, at the sight of Matthew’s mother, below; she was hurrying from the kitchen through the hallway into the room where the TV was. Jake listened to her as she inhaled, and yawned, somehow briskly — bent it into a happy yelp of relief as soon as she noticed it happening — before flopping herself down onto what sounded like a very comfortable chair. He heard a magazine slide off and land on the floor.
Matthew’s house was not only a big old house, which shared no walls with any other houses, but had two, maybe three toilets, and the downstairs one was Jake’s favourite. It was a comforting room, largely because it felt a little isolated. It did not have a working lock, but was still quite a safe place for spending long periods of time. Jake had made a mental note the last time he was here that someone opening that door, thinking the room was empty, would hear you before they saw you, if you reacted in time. Given the right conditions, Jake could easily be someone who reacted in time, he thought. The conditions in this case were anyway very pressing: he did not want to be caught sat on a toilet, with his trousers up, hiding, in his friend’s house. Hiding for no reason that he would be able to give, if pressed (and he would be, if he was found, he was sure of it); hiding for no reason that he could even come up with for himself. He wasn’t reading, he wasn’t crying, he didn’t have a GameBoy, he just needed a lot of time alone.
In order to make his way to this clattery sanctuary — its corners comfortingly dotted with spider webs, dusty pipes, and bright plastic bottles of cleaning product — all he had to do was descend the remaining stairs and make his way down the hallway undetected, which, thanks to the soft rug in the hall, and the loud television, would be easy, he hoped. Except that right away, a stair creaked loudly.
Stitch heard him, and looked up, but didn’t bark. He’d got away with it. He crept, ever more confidently. Soon he was on solid ground. Yet just as he was passing the doorway of their large living room, suddenly Jim was visible, lunging in the direction of a side-table — directly towards the door — to grab a newspaper. Jake did not stand a chance: he was spotted immediately.
‘Ah! It’s yourself!’
Jim sometimes liked to do voices. This one was a cartoon of a generic Irish accent. Doing silly voices was a harmless and often successful habit of his for appearing to be humorous, when that was a mode he thought would be appropriate or helpful, but for which he felt otherwise ill-equipped. Jake certainly enjoyed it — without his silly voices, Matthew’s father could seem imposing and taciturn — and without really meaning to, he beamed back into the room, genuinely relaxing for a moment.
Jim seemed to waddle a little further toward the door, such that Jake didn’t know whether he was supposed to be going in or waiting where he was; so, he hovered at the doorway.
‘Joining us are you, young Jake?’
Jake’s face, without his meaning it to, became suddenly both worried and confused, and Jim shot him a broad, sincere grin, almost a laugh, but certainly not at anyone’s expense. ‘I’m joking, Jacob. You two can make your own entertainment for a while. I, for one, am going to sit on my arse.’
What had been the sound of Countdown became the sound of adverts, and Matthew’s mother muted the TV. She turned round to Jake, who hadn’t moved from the doorway. ‘We’ll be eating around half seven though, Jacob, if that’s alright with you.’
He wondered, quickly, what it would be like to be someone who could respond that, actually, that wasn’t okay. To be a house guest ready to make your hosts change their schedule. It wasn’t that he thought it rude or unreasonable, he just couldn’t imagine being someone who could do it. He smiled and nodded, unsure what to say.
Fortunately, Jim interrupted. ‘In the meantime…’ he said, ‘How about…’ — and he winced a little in pain as he reached to grab a large, matt, golden-cardboard box of chocolates from the other end of the side-table — ‘How... about… one of these? Don’t tell her, though.’
Jake’s face let loose another ungainly, honest smile, which revealed more about his immediate response to this proposition than he’d have liked. Matthew’s mother shot Jim an affectionate glance, which he knew well, implying that it was all very funny to paint her as the authoritarian of the house, but she only had so much patience for it. Jake gathered himself, walked fully into the living room, and spoke for some reason as if a boy several years his junior: ‘Yes please, Mr. Coleman.’
Jim took care to lift the lid off rather grandly, if a little falteringly, and the pantomime of wondrous revelation was surprisingly effective. He enjoyed it himself more than he had been expecting, though it was, to an extent, done out of familiar desperation. They never did know what to do with Jake, and he only got more and more like himself as he got older.
The box was now open, magnificently. Jim pulled from it a soft, corrugated brown sheet, briefly frowning at the implication that an upper layer of chocolates must already have been finished. The inside of the lid immediately panicked Jake, as it offered gorgeous drawings and long, two-line descriptions of every one of the chocolates before him: it promised an assortment of treasures from which he would have to choose, while Jim waited for him to choose, and potentially he would regret his choice; potentially he would — but suddenly relief. He would not have to choose. It was fine. The first one he read in the lid was almost certainly what would turn out to be his favourite choice, even if he could have read all of them in time. He couldn’t be sure, but it was likely enough that it meant some awful awkward pause could be avoided.
In his relief, his right arm sprang up, faster than he had expected, to the matching chocolate.
‘N-n-nuh! Not that one!’ Jim said, abruptly pulling the box a few inches back toward him. It so happened that he forgot to do a silly voice.
Jake flinched. Maybe he had been too quick to grab at his treat. No, it wasn’t that — he’d said ‘not that one’. So it had been a bad choice. Why had it been a bad choice? Immediately as he looked up at Jim's face, he heard himself draw a short gasp — which meant Jim, and Matthew’s mother, had probably heard it too — he felt his upper-arm muscles clench near the elbows; he felt — and hated — how wide his eyes suddenly were, how far up his face he could tell his eyebrows were. Most of him in this way was immediately rendered tight, and tense; and in the same instant he became aware too that — yes — Jim had been joking. He had forgotten to do the voice, but still had delivered his line with a big grin, one which Jake had noticed a second too late.
Why did adults always do this, though? Jake genuinely thought he had done something wrong: Jim had deliberately made him think he had done something wrong. He had not, of course he had not, but he had been startled anyway, and this was how grown-ups played, he supposed. Though, actually, he recalled: his friends were beginning to realise they could do this to him too. He did not like it. He could not seem to be suspicious by instinct; not in time, anyway. Invariably, he was too slow to remember to distrust anyone, let alone to discover what would happen if he did: people were always too quick to wrong-foot him. Perhaps if people took their games more slowly, he would find them a little less mean-spirited, he sometimes thought; he would be able to join in — and this is what he was asking himself yet again now: why his mind should go so quickly in some ways, and so slowly in others. Distracted by the sound of a kettle from the kitchen, he looked at the sofa, and realised Matthew’s mother had left the room without him noticing.
He had an overwhelming sense of being locked into the tension in his own arms and face, as if this particular grown-up joke had been lowered onto the front of him like the padded safety-cage on a roller-coaster. He returned his gaze to the array of chocolates, not sure where else to direct it. As his eyebrows floated back down and the tautness across his face subsided, he became aware of the fact — found it briefly a very strange fact — that he had two eyes.
Jim had seen this brief moment of worry flicker onto Jake’s face, seen it bolt down through the rest of him, and as those beseeching eyes had widened up at him he had felt a small cringe of guilt. He said, ‘Whichever you like, Jake’, and held the box of chocolates forward again, smiling kindly downwards. But the edges of his face were taut in a mixture of pity and tired disappointment. Jake recognized both, and felt a familiar tug — threatening to become that lapping, rainy misery by which he discovered in greater and greater detail that he had made someone feel bad about themselves without meaning to — it might have emerged as a sob, had he not still been quite rigid, had he not been wondering which part of his ears could be so cavernous as to echo a heartbeat the way they were now. Perhaps it was the same hidden chamber onto which they seemed to open when he yawned.
This interaction didn’t take nearly as long as either of them felt it took. A few seconds later, Jake — as if his first choice really had been inappropriate — had selected a different chocolate. It would have been his second choice in any case, probably. Jim pushed the lid back onto the box, and was relieved to see that this strange, slightly pathetic little boy’s spirit seemed not to have been crushed after all. Jake gratefully noticed the gentle hiss of air escaping from the lid, as he was himself still trying not to breathe too loudly, and was for distraction looking down at the chocolate which he now held between two fingers and the thumb of his left hand. Although the back was flat, the front of the chocolate was moulded in the shape of a barrel. The lid of the box had mentioned that it had brandy in it, but Jake had chosen it because he liked the picture of the barrel. It reminded him of Saint Bernards, and of a game he used to have, one that had got lost in the move, called Pop-Up Pirate. Could this really have brandy in it? His mother’s rare-enough but almost ritual enjoyment of the brandy on the high shelf in the cupboard at home had led Jake to believe it was immensely precious.
Matthew bounded into the living room, and clambering onto it from behind flung himself down heavily on the sofa, just where his mother had sat. Jim told him off for climbing but handed him the box of chocolates. He went for a dark sphere covered in brown dust and ate it straight away. Jake, never one to wolf anything down when observed, especially not a treat, raised his to his mouth, just as it was becoming sticky on his fingers and thumb, and tried to bite off an upper half. Immediately a pungent flare flickered up through his nostrils, and a slick of thin liquid bolted out of the tiny barrel, toward the lavish carpet: it wasn’t ‘brandy flavour’, as he had expected; it was a hollow shell of chocolate with a trove of liqueur inside. This was the moment Jake learned that such things existed, and learned as well that you ought really to eat them either very carefully or in one go.
As he tensed, again, trying not to spill any more, and the vapours slightly stung inside his nose, there was an incredibly loud bang elsewhere. Something slamming. He lost a nascent sneeze with the surprise of it. Everyone else jumped, too, and Stitch tore to the end of the hallway and locked himself rigid by the door of the downstairs toilet, barking at it like a sentry. Matthew’s mother, still in the kitchen and audibly flustered, shouted to nobody in particular whether they would mind not doing that so loudly, please. Jim and the boys just looked at each other uselessly.
As Jim got up to investigate, Jake furtively looked down. The brandy, or whatever it was, had narrowly missed his white T-shirt, and on the carpet was now a tiny damp patch. Luckily, the colour at that point in the pattern was dark, and the precious liquid would not become a visible stain.
II.
Jake and Matthew passed the time in a sort of games room, which also had a tumble drier in it in the corner. They listened to their new music, and Jake watched Matthew play computer games. This was his preference, as he didn’t have a console at home and felt cackhanded when he tried to play — but Matthew felt bad about it, and tried to devise a way for Jake to ‘join in’ which involved essentially getting him to run a book, and having them both place bets on how Matthew would do. Jake didn’t need Matthew to do this, and he tried to say so, but he thought it was kind of him that he did.
There was a mishap during dinner when Matthew, messing about, knocked his glass of squash over, right onto Jake’s plate. Matthew’s mother immediately grabbed Jake’s wet chicken kiev, wiped it with paper towels, and stuck it under the grill; Jim said he’d have it, and she answered, well, maybe we’ll share it. Half and half. Onto a new plate from the cupboard, for Jake, Matthew’s mother donated her own kiev, and Jim put about half his peas and carrots next to it. Jake was perversely delighted by all this, since he was always anxious about doing something wrong when eating at other people’s houses, and the fact that Matthew had done something stupid was a great relief to him. In terms of being stressful to his hosts, it would be hard to do worse.
After that, Jake found his way to the downstairs toilet and hid in there for twenty minutes. Taking this time to wind down, and to think, did not go well for him; the desire to go home reasserted itself, and became, this late in the day, overwhelming. Instead of re-joining Matthew, he began to haunt the ground floor of the house looking for the telephone.
He had done this before: he would ring his mum, he would beg to go home, and she would be frustrated and angry, but she would, eventually, if he was lucky, come and get him. In his pocket was a piece of paper on which his mother had written her half-sister’s telephone number, which he kept taking out and re-reading, as if he had to memorize it.
The phone at one end of the hallway didn’t work; there was no dial tone. Jake went and hid in the bathroom for another five minutes. Very rarely did he find himself actually crying. For now he felt shaken, but calm — he was as exhausted, as hollowed-out, as if he had been crying, but he had not. He never did, in the moments of experiencing it most intensely, recall the word ‘homesickness’, so he never found out whether it would have helped to do so. They can’t just not have a phone, he thought; and on a second search of the ground floor he discovered what could only be the one working telephone, which was in the kitchen, by the back door, and was nestled under a busy corkboard in a chaos of notes, phonebooks, diaries, pens, pencils, and elastic bands.
It rang. Jake started and stood bolt upright, considering his options. He couldn’t run back into the hallway, as someone would be coming to take the call. Briefly he considered hiding under the table, but he would be found, and he would be embarrassed. So he opened the back door and stepped outside, closing it after him as quickly as he could. It was still light outside, just. Jake wandered about, nowhere in particular, for a few minutes, anxiously. If it got much later, his mother, when he got hold of her, might be able to say to him, no — it’s too late to come and get you.
It made Jake jump when Matthew leapt out from behind the corner of the house, roaring like a T-rex. He was on a rescue mission. Jake’s search for the phone had been conducted, or so he thought, discreetly; but Matthew’s parents knew exactly what was going on, and had been expecting it, because it happened every single time. Matthew’s mother had primed Matthew, earlier, to make sure Jake was okay in general; and just now she had briefly excused herself from her phonecall, having seen Jake in the gloom outside through the window, and had shouted through the house to Matthew, telling him to go out and make sure Jake was alright.
Matthew was not a guileful boy, but he was generous in spirit and had a lot of ideas. His tactic was simply to throw a whole load of them at Jake until one landed well. ‘We could do MarioKart? Or we could go in the top field, climb the cross trees? Maybe Stitch can come? We can… hit some nettles? ’ Jake wanted to go home, still, and Matthew could see it. ‘Have you seen the secret passage?’
Jake wanted to see the secret passage. Matthew had done it. Jake was thrilled by this idea, and couldn’t disguise it. He tried to make Matthew take him back in via the front door, so that they weren’t spotted by his mum, who was still on the phone, but Matthew just said ‘No, it’s in here.’ And they clattered in, veering round the kitchen table toward an old wooden door with a calendar pinned to it.
‘What are you boys up to?’
‘Nothing mum!’ said Matthew, opening the door. The room was full of food. He grabbed Jake’s arm. ‘In here!’
They were inside a larder, with walls of stone and ancient rickety shelves from floor to ceiling. Or maybe it was a pantry. Jake didn’t know the difference. Matthew stretched his arm past Jake and pulled the door shut. It was cold in there, among the tins and jars, and pitch dark. Jake heard Matthew jostle and knock things as he turned around tightly. There was a bash, a rattle, a creak, a snapping noise, then the sound of a pull-cord, and Jake saw that the back of this storeroom opened with a rickety door into a narrow staircase, going upwards and around. It really was a secret passage!
‘Come on.’
They went in, and went up — every step sounded hollow, and their shoes made a loud cantering rhythm — until another wormwood-riddled door at the top opened onto the landing, about halfway down it. The toilet, bedrooms, and the main stairs were to their right, at the end. Jake wondered why these second secret stairs existed at all, while also envying them intensely. He thought they were the best thing he had seen in a house. The old door to the secret passage slammed heavily behind them, making Matthew’s mother jump all the way downstairs. She apologised down the phone.
‘This is the fields that were here before the farm was here,’ said Matthew, pointing at a framed map on the wall. He had unexpectedly assumed the mode of tour-guide. So it is a farm, thought Jake. Matthew carried on, toward the far end of the landing, saying ‘boring’ or ‘don’t know’ to a few pictures and portraits before stopping at the last. ‘This is… nanna’s… mum’s… mum. Nanna’s nanna. Oh, and that’s where dad goes at night.’
Jake looked where he was pointing, to a floor-to-ceiling alcove, off the left of the very end of the landing. He asked what it was.
‘He’s got a slipdisc.’
Jake didn’t know what that was, or what to say, but his face must have asked for him.
‘It’s a kind of a bad back. Sometimes it’s so bad in the night he goes and stands there instead of sleeping. Or sometimes he does sleep, but standing up. If you keep this one shut, the light from there doesn’t get there in the morning,’ Matthew said, slapping his flat palm on a wooden panel and then waving in the direction of distant windows. Jake hadn’t even noticed that the end wall of the landing had a shuttered window. He had questions, but he didn’t voice them, or even have the chance to.
‘Pills don’t work on a slipdisc: it’s a different kind of pain,’ Matthew said, authoritatively. ‘One night, I went for a wee, in the night, and I saw dad was there. I went down there to talk to him, and he didn’t even open his eyes… all he said was “ssssshhhhhh” a few times. So I went to bed… and then in the morning, he didn’t remember!’
Jake was sincerely awed by this. Matthew had mimicked the ‘ssssshhhhh’ noise very, very quietly, and without putting his finger to his lips — but he had closed his eyes, and held his head slightly higher. Jake did not get as far as feeling sorry for Jim; he was simply stunned to imagine that someone could be in so much pain that they turned to stone, or in this case to furniture. He realised he had been imagining Jim as an imposing old grandfather clock, surveying the corridor from one end, like the one downstairs.
Matthew rushed up another staircase, leaving Jake waiting for a minute, before returning with a couple of very heavy looking jumpers. They were going outside after all. They returned to ground level via the less secret route, Matthew grabbed a torch from the pocket of a vast coat in the porch, and Jake followed him out into the dusk.
For a time they were aimless. Matthew equipped them both with plastic rods, two foot long each, which were useless for pretend sword fighting — they kept getting caught on each other — but excellent, it turned out, for bashing down thickets of stinging nettles. Stitch was with them, and every layer of nettles beaten back or down seemed to reveal to him exciting new odours worthy of intense investigation. After a while, Jake examined his rod, and noticed it was not a cylinder but a sort of X shape, and that it had strange moulded bits at intervals along it. He asked about it.
‘It’s for an electric fence,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s plastic so the electricity doesn’t—’
Jake realised just as Matthew did that electricity didn’t go through wooden fence posts either. Matthew said, ‘It’s probably on! We should go and piss on it.’
The word surprised Jake more than the suggestion, but they were, he thought, far out of earshot of any parents. As he had this thought, he heard Matthew’s mother yell from the back door: ‘Matthew! Jacob! Where are you? Have you boys got Stitch with you?’ — and Matthew, louder than Jake had ever heard anyone shout, responded ‘Yeah, he’s here!’
Stitch lolloped back to the farmhouse to the calling of Matthew’s mother. He had to have injections because he was old, Matthew explained.
Not five minutes later they were a field away from the immediate grounds of the house, in a far corner; and perpendicular to the fence they’d been following was a thin white string stretching as far as they could see in either direction, flecked with silver, and held taut and upright by the same plastic poles they were holding. Occasionally there was a faint click. Jake didn’t need a piss — he’d had a piss before, he said, using the word deliberately — which Matthew teased was a lie, saying he was just scared of getting electrocuted. Matthew stood a foot and a half back from this lethal cable, pulled his dick out of his jeans, pointed it forward, and swung his hips from side to side: there was a delay of about a second before a magnificent fusillade of piss sprayed all over, some of it toward the fence, but no small amount splashing on Jake.
Jake really didn’t care about getting some piss on him, he was preoccupied with the sincere terror that his friend was about to be zapped to a crisp, and that he would have to run back to the farm with the terrible news, or run along the fence to switch the battery off, or... he didn’t know. He wiped the back of his hand on his jeans. Matthew meanwhile was having a great time. Nothing at all electrical had happened. He grabbed Jake’s hand, still laughing, then said, ‘Wait…’ and rested his other hand on the white fence. Nothing happened. Jake frowned. And as he frowned, the pain and the jolt went through both of them and smarted their hands, and they both yelped, and fell about laughing. They joined hands again, and this time it was Jake’s turn to press his hand on the fence. He happened to time it so the jolt was immediate, and again they were flung apart in pain and pleasure. It was an indescribably weird feeling. They shocked themselves nine more times.
Half an hour later, further up this gentle hill, perhaps a kilometre from the house, Matthew luxuriated all of eight feet up a tree. His feet were on one bough, and he gripped firmly with both his hands onto a bough above; he kept swaying his body in all directions as he chatted, sometimes wrapping his hands and swivelling his feet and turning completely around like a gymnast in the branches. He was completely at home, he had had years of knowing his way around these trees. Jake was almost as high up, in a tree just opposite, clinging on so tightly that Matthew could have been forgiven for worrying about him — but he didn’t. There were five trees, planted in an X shape, like the dots on a die. From a distance it looked like a lonely copse on the horizon, crowning a shallow hill.
The boys, as they swung and clung and clambered about, could see for miles in every direction. Jake found the light to be spooky, but the experience, all of it at once, to be overwhelmingly new and beautiful. The fields all about had been drained of their green and magicked into an encircling estuary of charcoal patches, desolate blue clumps like bruises in the dark, and mysterious animal noises. The mysterious animal noises sounded, to Jake, like they were sad, like they were going to stay sad forever. Meanwhile in one special direction the horizon underlined a low, glowing curtain of blazing pink. Jake let the sight of it hypnotize him.
‘That’s town,’ said Matthew, pointing.
Slightly to the left of the pink fire, and down a bit in the darkness, were the speckly golden flickers of distant human habitation. It looked unlikely. Town, thought Jake, had been strange; he hadn’t liked it. The first thing that came to mind when he recalled it now was that he hadn’t spotted any other children there. There were not enough pedestrian crossings, and traffic had been constant. There were basically two roads running through it, which met at a crossing. It was a small town, all steep and crinkled up, and all of it different heights, as if it was the shell of a vast mollusc, two or three miles across, the un-buried half of which had been smashed or eroded away, so that all that remained was a dense-packed pit of baroquely wrangled gaps and ridges. You could walk down one side-street for a bit, having gone the wrong way, and get past a bank of stickyweed, only to look beyond it and see, yards below you, the rooves of a terrace, as if you were on a cliff-edge above them. It hadn’t helped, when they had got lost earlier, that in this tiny, tightly-packed town, none of the little alleyways which anywhere else would connect a place to itself were places you could go through. They were always closed off at some point. Jake had counted seventeen PRIVATE PROPERTY signs before he got bored of it. He hated those signs; they reminded him of a painted board saying KEEP OUT which had stuck forever in his memory from an old film called 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. In that instance, it had meant mortal danger. Here, or rather there, in the wrong little town nestled in the dark below the horizon, they had just meant that any attempt to wander deeper into its whorls was bluntly curtailed. Jake, who was having a fragile day anyway, had become genuinely hurt and enraged, had encountered those signposted stoppages, like a caged animal, as a cumulative and barbaric amputation of his freedom to explore, perhaps even to escape. It was as if the mollusc — the actual soft wibbly creature that had lived in that huge buried shell — had once had thousands of tiny tendrils, all of them mutilated and pinked in the last few centuries by gates and signs and alarm systems. In particular he was thinking now about the river that cut through the town: he didn’t understand why the riverbank, which he thought was something you should be able to walk along, was all just people’s gardens, and you weren’t allowed in. Were you allowed through their bit of water in a boat, he thought. And what if you were a cat, or a dog, or if you were a fish in the river, how could they stop you?
‘Are you cold? I think we should go back, I’m cold,’ Matthew said, vanishing Jake’s intense reverie in an instant, as if he was tearing a cobweb.
Jake blinked and shook his head with this return to reality. He could have sworn it had got darker, and the pink over there — he thought of it as a corner, now — had got fainter, smaller, and redder. As to Matthew’s suggestion, he was undecided. He wanted to stay out, but Matthew was right, it was cold. And it would be properly dark, soon. He wondered about a compromise, and suggested they go through one more gate, one field further in the direction opposite the last of the light.
‘I don’t go past the cross trees,’ said Matthew. Jake had no answer to this. ‘It’s bad past here.’
Jake started to ask a question, but Matthew interrupted. ‘If you go all the way down, as far as the marsh…’
There was an immense silence, as big as the starry sky.
‘Dad says down there used to be the sea,’ Matthew suddenly said; and then he shocked Jake by leaping all the way to the ground in a single movement. He landed heavily, fell forward onto his palms, picked himself up, and dusted his hands: ‘It’s where we’re going fishing tomorrow. Race you to the other fence!’
Jake climbed down, carefully, before making a clumsy final drop from the lowest bough. Matthew, sportingly, had waited for this; but as soon as Jake’s feet were on the ground, he was away. Onyourmarksgetsetgo!, one word. They tore to the other side of the field, as fast as they possibly could without falling flat on their faces.
Matthew declared himself the winner, for good reason. As their own panting subsided, both boys heard someone breathe out, loudly. It was right next to them, just behind and between them, barely two feet above. Just once, a single exhalation. They jumped apart from each other, away from it, and both yelled wordlessly.
‘Who is it?!’ bellowed Matthew, without thinking.
There was nobody there. There was moonlight enough to see that there was nobody there. Matthew smiled, and started laughing. Jake took a little longer to move on from the shock; he turned the torch on and shined it about, but it didn’t make any difference. He got Matthew to stop laughing and stand still for a second, and it was indeed total silence that they listened to. Even the sad animal noises seemed to have stopped.
‘This one isn’t electric,’ said Matthew, firmly grasping an un-barbed few inches of barbed wire in his fist and yanking the fence they had arrived at back and forth. As they walked homeward along it, they decided between them that it was night-time, and that despite the tinctures of moonlight the torch should be switched on the whole time. The first thing it illuminated, a yard ahead, was a salt-lick, hanging from the fence. Jake had never seen one, and Matthew explained what it was for. What he couldn’t explain was why there seemed to be a splash of blood on it, so they got closer to investigate, and found underneath it a dead bird. It looked like it had been run over; its head was completely caved in.
‘Ahh!’ said Matthew, suddenly very excited. ‘When we were at Rookery there was a massive dead bird. We found it in orienteering.’
Jake had left Matthew’s school just one term before this notorious trip. Every year, the kids in that form were taken to an outdoor education centre and stayed there for a whole week. Jake would have dreaded it, a week away from home. He would also, as this very evening demonstrated, have had a splendid time, so long as he was distracted out of his clinginess and his homesickness.
‘They gave us this sort of pack— it was all— there was— I can’t remember, it was compasses and that sort of thing. Maps of the hill and the bit where Rookery was, and the first day, the first task on the whole week, there was a sheet for points. If you found a bone it was five points, if you got an eggshell it was ten points. I can’t remember the other ones. Oh a feather! That was one point or something. I was on a team with Edward and Louis, Jon, Jenna Bryher, and Carl Kay, and we got halfway up the hill when we found this big huge dead bird, it was a black bird but it wasn’t a blackbird, it was massive, and it was crawling with maggots and its eyes were all dripping out on its beak. It was better than anything we had already, and it was a hundred percent better than anything any other team had.’
Jake kept turning to grin at him, even in the dark.
‘We got it back to Rookery car park and dropped it on the floor and its guts and maggots all fell out, and Miss Morgan screamed!’
Jake loved this story, from beginning to end. He cackled at the joy of the adventure, and at the misfortune of the squeamish classroom assistant, even though she’d been his favourite.
‘Mr Wilson was cross with us, but he wasn’t really cross. He said we’d get a bonus point, but actually, we didn’t get one. We should have got eight hundred.’
They discussed the point-scoring system, and how unjust it was that the Downash House team hadn’t been awarded any points whatsoever for their game-changingly impressive cadaver. There followed a period of quiet, as they tramped along, and Matthew at last got lost in thought. His mention of the sea, plus the more recent mention of compasses, had got Jake fantasizing about his favourite thing, which was old-fashioned ships. He thought of all old-fashioned ships as pirate ships. He knew about compasses, and about sextants, and how to read maps, and he even knew that it was possible to navigate by the stars, though he hadn’t yet been able to understand anything which claimed to explain how. He had a quick look upwards, but recognized only Orion and his belt.
Jake mused aloud to Matthew about the idea he was having, which was orienteering, but at sea. Navigation, and also finding. Matthew countered that there was nothing to find at sea, and Jake joked that you got seaweed, for one point; and planks, and mermaids, and if you were lucky you got treasure. He couldn’t quite tell in the dimness whether Matthew was laughing at him or at his jokes, but it didn’t matter right now. He had been put, at last, at his ease, and he was comfortable and happy.
Matthew, who had the torch, pointed it toward the fence, at a large clump of matted, off-white wool that was tangled there. ‘Look, that’s three points, probably!’ And he walked over to it. ‘It’s a piranha,’ he said, mockingly; but it was a good-natured concession in a very weak disguise.
Jake’s fancy was still steering by the stars. ‘I wish I could go on a pirate ship,’ he said, kicking a wooden fence post repeatedly.
‘Ow, shit!’ — as Jake had spoken, Matthew had roughly tugged the wool from the fence, and a barb on the wire had dragged along the back of his hand and gouged it. He was already bleeding, and as he shook his hand as if to dry it, drips landed on his jumper. He tried to rub the blood away, or in, with the palm of his other hand, but it didn’t help. Jake looked on, wide-eyed. Matthew picked up the torch he’d dropped and got Jake to shine it at his wound. It was not as bad as they thought, but it was over an inch long, and it was still bleeding. Jake tried a swear, about how it must fucking hurt.
‘It fucking does.’
Despite this upset, they stamped the last of the way back to the farm in a good mood. Jake felt different, as if he was a different person. He had completely forgotten that he had ever not wanted to be there; and just as it wasn’t he who had spilled something at dinner, it also wasn’t he who had injured himself. Matthew’s parents were briefly alarmed, when the boys made a grand racket re-entering the bright, warm kitchen; but the wound was cleaned, and dressed, and bandaged, and Matthew was very proud of it indeed. As they sat there in the kitchen, Matthew declared, suddenly and embarrassingly: ‘Jake wants to be a pirate.’
Jake’s face froze. Matthew’s parents both looked at him incredulously for a few seconds, while Matthew grinned broadly. It was his mother who laughed first, utterly surprised that piracy, of all things, should be what Jake daydreamt about. It hadn’t been an unkind laugh, though, and Jake didn’t feel the need to mount a defence, nor to mention that that wasn’t quite what he’d said. ‘We’ll have to get you a parrot,’ said Matthew’s mother.
‘Pirates are very different these days, Jake,’ said Jim, without further explanation.
Matthew ignored his wittering parents: ‘And, we heard a ghost, over from the cross trees.’ He leapt down from his chair and shouted ‘Arrr!’ at everyone in turn — louder each time — before scampering out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the toilet. They heard the door slam, then bounce, then wobble open again as a shout of ‘Shiver me timbers!’ and a happy laugh clattered back down the hallway.
III.
Bedtime when it finally came happened painlessly enough, with none of the expected emotional wobbles from Jake. The boys whirled about each other, at Matthew’s lead, in a finely-choreographed dance of toothbrushes and pyjamas, played out between the bathroom and a magical cupboard on the landing which halfway through provided them both with comforting, newly-warm towels.
The boys might have been allowed, had they got back a little earlier, and not been delayed by injury, to build a den of blankets and pillows in the living room downstairs; but for tonight, Matthew would be up the top flight of stairs, in his own room, which was oddly small for the house, was decorated with a frieze of rocket-ships and planets, and did not have space even for an arrangement of sofa cushions on the floor. Jake would be in the spare room, opposite the main bedroom. Every summer, and Christmas break, it became Matthew’s older brother’s room again, but tonight it would be Jake’s. The bed, which was right by the door, was already made, an inviting and luxurious den of white cotton, with a heavy grey blanket on top.
The dark in this room was not especially worrying to Jake; in fact, the bed being so close to the door, he decided not to put the light on at all, but to crouch on the end of the bed and push the door shut. When he burrowed himself under the covers, he relaxed further still. Even though he desperately wished he was in his own bed — desperately wished the clock at the far end of the downstairs hallway did not somehow project its ticking through the silence upstairs and into the room, into every room, as if it were mere feet away — whatever happened now, Jake would at least not have to encounter anyone, not any more. His day was over: he had spent time with a friend, he was somewhere unfamiliar, and it had all gone unexpectedly well; but it was an almost bodily relief that he could now be alone again.
He got into bed, slid both of his hands underneath the deep, lavish pillows, found a position he liked, and after not many minutes with his face pressed into the topmost of them, he was enjoying the earliest hints of feeling like a river, of beginning to curve outward toward sleep, when something inside his nose caught his attention. It was strange and indistinct, at first. In a second it was like a grain of something, whirring into and out of clarity, as if powered by a microscopic motor or the shrill buzzing of a flea. It became a little irritating. He sniffed twice, which did nothing, except to make him screw his face up, and to confirm this sensation as the impish spark which desires in its dancing to become a sneeze.
He mustn’t sneeze, he immediately warned himself. Although this roused him a little, he did not quite remember that he was alone in the room, and the warning intensified as it arrived because Jake in his drowsiness believed that Matthew was asleep a few feet away.
The longer he stayed in one position, the more potent the little grain became. Although he tried rolling around a few times, and variously contorting his nose and mouth, it seemed to move about on its own, inviting the uncomfortable idea that his face had tunnels in it, and that a tiny bee was exploring them. He had been stung by a bee last summer, on his left earlobe.
As Jake swam about the memory of that sting, of all the gorgeous, kind attention he had been paid afterward by the people at the farm shop — and of the delicious pink lemonade he had been given as a treat — the effort not to sneeze transformed itself: the image was of a small flue or release-valve, a grubby pipe protruding from the top of an outbuilding, and he came to imagine he was drifting just inches above it — freely in the air he was a tarpaulin, or was somehow flying one, like an enchanted carpet; it was edged with several brass-ringed holes, which he could neither feel nor see, but he knew for sure that if one of these should accidentally align itself above the pipe, it would catch on it, and there would be a tremendous release of pressure. He must avoid it.
Soon his dream was was no longer airborne, and what had been the obscure presence of a bee became a visible ant, disappearing and reappearing among the soft mossy underlayers of a patch of grass until Jake could no longer follow it. A boy wearing shabby canvas shorts and a sailor’s neckerchief sat opposite him, cross-legged in the blazing sun, leaning forward as he intently rubbed dock-leaves into the side of his knee. It was pink with painful-looking bumps, so there were clearly stinging nettles about, thought Jake: he must avoid them. The boy’s name was Sorrel, and a beautiful simple tattoo on his shoulder seemed to show a constellation.
In the knapsack on the grass between them Jake found small plastic knives in primary colours. There was also a handkerchief, a plastic toy moulded in the shape of a half-opened box of matches, whose wind-up cog seemed to do nothing, five gleaming-white teeth, huge teeth, the size of chocolates, but human teeth still, and a sheaf of treasure-maps — the writing all sans-serif, in boxes with rounded corners — each one laminated in the manner of a pizza-restaurant menu.
The heat of the sun on Jake’s skin set glowing in him an instinct for adventure. But he was fearful, too. Sorrel kept looking at something, darting a glance along a tiny waterway edged with reeds; he seemed to be looking almost as far as the horizon, but he wouldn’t say why.
Details of reality sketched themselves in, like the revealed forms of a landscape as dawn breaks over it. Jake became aware, gradually — it grew sharper each time he inhaled — of the smell of metal, perhaps of keys, or of the bright smell left on fingers which had held them. He was waking up. His dreams had carried him through colourful, heady landscapes, tinctured with summer, the beach, lagoons, maps, unfamiliar shapes in the stars, and had induced in him an almost tearful yearning to be clambering upon vast boats, shirtless in the sun and performing tasks vital for a voyage: all these fantasies, freighted with such promise and warmth, beaded and snaked away like rain from a waterproof surface — with every breath they lost form or hue, gave way further to something else — it was sharper, and colder, to be awake again, and claustrophobic in the sudden dark. It was, noticed Jake, impossible to see anything at all. This was his first clear thought, the one that told him he was awake.
His nose was runny. He sniffed, automatically, thought he smelled metal again, and dragged the fingers of his right hand first under his right nostril, then under his left. He sat up a little and held his hand flat in front of him to look at it, forgetting that he was in total darkness. His cheek felt warm and wet, and slippery; he rubbed his hand on his pyjamas, to dry it off, felt his pillow, which was also damp, and swallowed.
Under his nose, his face still seemed to be wet. With his other hand this time he wiped across his nose, and his mouth, again. Then he felt something emerge from his right nostril, and heard on the duvet in front of him the soft, heavy tap of a drip landing. Wiping his mouth there seemed a constant flow now. He really was streaming — yet he didn’t feel unwell, and was aware neither of having sneezed, nor of having the slightest sense of needing to. The memory of dreamt nettles to be avoided flickered through him, vanishingly. Into the back of his throat he felt something trickle. He swallowed, twice, beginning to panic, clutching at his throat as he swallowed a third time, more forcefully. His nose was now running non-stop, and it was dripping down the front of him, as well as in his mouth, onto the very back of his tongue.
Not even half a minute had passed, but chaos had made itself swiftly known; Jake was hectically smearing his hands across his mouth, his face, rubbing his eyes with sticky hands, pushing them up across his forehead and even through his hair. Frantically licking his lips achieved absolutely nothing, and at last he realised, in the dark with his palms open, as his head jutted forward over them, that his open mouth was full of blood. Every part of his face and hands was clammy and slick with it.
His first thought was to put something up his nose: gobstoppers, or aniseed balls, or even chewing gum. The tactic seemed to belong to the dreams he had just been wrenched from, and even as it struck him he knew it would not have worked — never mind where he was supposed to find such equipment in the middle of the night. Then with a shock that made him sit completely upright, like in the films, he thought of the bedclothes. Everything was almost certainly expensive. His mother would probably go spare, whatever that meant: someone ‘going spare’ was a threat, and the person to whom it was usually attached was his father, which was why he had never seen it happen — but he knew that it was very bad.
There was nothing he could do about that now. He would walk quietly across the landing to the bathroom, to have a look at himself, and have a wash. Maybe he could bung small damp balls of toilet paper up his nose. He did not, he thought, have to wait as long as usual for his dick to go back to normal, but he wasn’t taking into account how long he had been smearing blood over everything in a pitch-dark panic. Perhaps if it had all taken longer — or much less long — he would not have had to encounter anyone.
When he got to the bedroom door, forgetting the state of his hands, he pushed whatever garment was hanging out of the way to find the latch. He angled the door open, back into the room, and saw that the landing was a little less dark, tinted chilly grey by what must have been dazzlingly bright moonlight, if you could have seen it directly, from outside. Jake realised suddenly that since he was not going to the toilet, and since also nobody was awake, he needn’t have waited for his dick to go soft at all.
As if to prove him wrong immediately, there was a rattle from the door opposite. It opened, quickly, and Matthew’s mother padded out backwards in a light-blue towelled dressing gown, carefully closing the door behind her, almost silently. Jake froze, still a few feet back in his room. Matthew’s mother turned around, looking, if at anything, at the floor, and where should have been a closed door she saw two feet and a pair of pyjama-bottoms in the shadows.
‘Oh!’ she shrieked, tearing into the silence like a seagull — and again, much louder, spotting before she had time to recover that Jake’s face was covered with blood — ‘Oh! My fucking Christ! Jacob!’
He remained completely still, though he felt his eyes get bigger again; to her, this only made him look more shocking. For some reason he grabbed his right hand with his left and held it tightly in front of him. They both felt sticky, and were mottled black with blood in the dim blueish light.
Matthew’s mother breathed in, heavily, closing her eyes on this hellish apparition, before breathing out and quite deliberately opening them again to the sight of what she reminded herself was a timid little boy. Her body relaxed, and she next spoke tenderly, and far quieter. ‘For crying out loud, Jacob. What’s happened?’
He didn’t know what the first part meant, really, but it seemed like he didn’t need to. He stepped forward into the vague, blue light of the landing. His calm became less eerie to Matthew’s mother as she realised that he hadn’t fallen over, or bashed into something. There would have been tears. For a heart-stopping second it crossed her mind that Matthew might have done this to him. Yet Jake’s face was placid now, almost content; certainly he returned her gaze with the hint of an endearing, apologetic smile.
‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘Is it still going?’ Neither she nor he could quite tell; the blood around his mouth was still so wet. She crouched a little, felt for the correct part of his nose, and pinched it. Quickly she realised this was awkward, and pinched her own nose in demonstration instead. ‘Can you pinch it, here? And hold your head back for me, like this?’
Matthew’s mother wasn’t convinced this technique, in itself, did any good at all — didn’t some people say to hang your head downward? — but she knew that it worked well enough to distract the child, which was what needed to happen now. The blood would stop when it stopped, if it hadn’t already; in the meantime, Jake simply needed a project. Her face tensed as, suddenly, the shock over, she realised why she was out of bed.
‘Oh, hang on. Sorry — I’m absolutely busting.’
She plunged her hand into the bathroom and grabbed a pink box of scented tissues for Jake, which he took with his free hand. She went in and pulled the cord which turned the light on; something heavy and ornamental dangling on the end rapped on the wall a couple of times as it bounced. ‘Just… stay there a second for me,’ she said, as she shut the door. Jake shot a sudden glance at the far end of the landing, wondering whether Jim was stood there, hearing all this. It was so dark there that he couldn’t make out a thing.
Jake thought Matthew’s mother went for a very long wee. It was louder than the clock downstairs. He was glad he could wee toward the sides on purpose, avoiding the water, so that it made less noise. He was staring through the blur of his own hand, which was pinching his nose tight enough to hurt; his neck was bent exaggeratedly upwards as far as he could, also until it hurt, his shoulders were unnecessarily hunched, and with his other hand he was holding the box of tissues uselessly out in front of him like a tray. Eventually he heard a flush, then the sound of running water, then the clunk of the lock as it resonated through the wood of the door.
‘Come on,’ said Matthew’s mother, as the door opened. The warm light in there made everything very different, and was immensely reassuring; Jake was happy that he was about to go into it.
They stood in front of the sink and looked together into the bathroom mirror. At last he saw his face. He was absolutely covered in blood. His face, the front of his pyjamas, his hands and forearms, right up inside his sleeves. His mouth dropped slightly open and the white rings of his eyes shone back at him. Thin clumps of his fringe were pasted to his forehead in red.
‘You look like you’re done up for Halloween!’
Matthew’s mother was relieved that Jake, atrocious as he looked, seemed not to be upset or in pain, let alone presenting her with a medical emergency. Matthew would have taken this in his stride, had this happened to him; Jake, she would have expected to panic. Yet he seemed to be gliding through it, almost absent, as if the very disjunct between the apparent chaos of the situation and its actual peril — how disproportionately alarming is an innocuous nosebleed; how much more shocking at first sight for the witness, in this case, than for the victim — was just the short-circuit his otherwise overwhelming anxiety required. He even seemed content, if a little ghostly.
She wrung out the bloody flannel with which she had begun to clean his face, leaving it in the sink, and began dabbing large clumps of toilet roll under the hot tap. From nowhere, it occurred to Jake that she was being nicer to him than his own mother would have been. He found the feeling of being looked after by Matthew’s mother extremely relaxing, and he wondered what her name was. He noticed her curly, light-brown hair, with some jealousy, and made wildly inaccurate guesses as to how old she might be.
The lightswitch of the guest bedroom had a curiously resonant mechanism, as if it was bolted to the body of a guitar, and when Matthew’s mother flicked it on — illuminating a grey blanket and a bed of expensive white sheets, which looked for all the world like an animal had been torn apart in them — what should have been a flat, plasticky click seemed instead to tock through the walls in sinister, throaty fanfare. Whatever strange vowel it had produced around the room, Matthew’s mother seemed to echo or continue it as she tutted pensively and stared at the bedclothes. She breathed out through her teeth, in a fraught sigh, constricted high up in her throat and reflected in a slight grimace on her face. ‘God,’ she said, quietly, and gathered herself with a slow breath. ‘Okay.’
Jake watched silently while Matthew’s mother removed the two pillowcases and the duvet cover. There was also a white fitted sheet, which had somehow escaped the blood; this she left where it was. She rummaged quickly in that magical cupboard on the landing for some old towels; unfortunately, none were darker than blood, but she found an enormous and very ropey-looking one, frayed and straggly at the edges, which had accompanied them on countless family holidays and had been laid out flat on many a beach. It was blue, with a pattern of wide stripes and concentric circles; tonight, it would function as a makeshift pillowcase.
The manoeuvre was almost complete. The two bloodsoaked pillow-cases were now in the bath, along with the duvet cover and the blanket. She put the plug in and yawned, rubbing one of her eyes with the side of her hand as she put the cold tap on full, pulling the pillow-cases so that they were directly underneath it. She started to make the bed again, having checked with Jake she hoped he didn’t mind a duvet with no cover.
Throughout all this, Jake remained stood there, clean but shaken, in the moonlight on the landing, and still holding the box of tissues. Matthew’s mother was very, very tired, and beginning to show the merest hint of impatience; Jake was just so mutely, almost uncomprehendingly present, somehow filling more space than the shape of him took up, and he seemed to her to be desirous of something he wasn’t articulating. He was under and around her feet like a cat, and she was far from sure that leaving these sheets in water wouldn’t make them worse, even if she had the energy to change the water before she slept again, which she did not.
As he got back into the bed, Jake felt a little like he was climbing: it was the middle of the night, they were both tired, harrowed after their witching-hour encounter, and everything seemed that much more effortful. Matthew’s mother said to him that he should knock on their bedroom door if anything more happened, which Jake knew he absolutely would not and could not do, even under the worst circumstances.
‘Night-night, Jacob,’ said Matthew’s mother. ‘See you in the morning.’
He curled up, wriggling a little as soon as she turned off the loud light-switch — it sounded this time like a metal sink tapped with a wooden spoon, if anything — and she shut the door as gently as she could. Against Jake’s cheek, the texture of the careworn towel wrapped around the pillow was so unusual and so pleasant that he couldn’t help smiling as he went back to sleep.
IV.
Jake fiddled with a cord tied around his left wrist. He was in the countryside again, walking and leaping with some difficulty across a flat grey-green landscape scored with waterways and dotted with soft knolls. It was getting dark, making the sky even more enormous and oppressive over the flat, encircling horizon. There were none of Jake’s beloved pylons to be seen, but the sparse, gnarled, grandfatherly trees seemed to form their own inscrutable networks, as if connected in vast filaments by invisible cables in the air.
He was following an older boy — older, but nowhere near as old as Matthew’s brother — who was wearing a heavy knapsack, yet still bounding around. The older boy gave the impression, very much unlike Jake, of being stronger than almost everything in his immediate surroundings. He clearly knew very well where he was going and what he was doing, and Jake struggled to keep up: the older boy sometimes went too fast, or took leaps that were longer than Jake could manage in one go. Often enough, Jake found himself distracted by something, just for a second, but then looked up to see that the older boy was somehow ten yards in the distance.
They must have been near a road, as three or four cars hummed past, somewhere behind them, when the older boy suddenly decided it was time to sit and rest for a while. Jake was becoming ever more concerned that the light was fading, and the older boy was not putting him at ease, despite his confidence and his self-assurance. The older boy pulled some bread from his bag and tore a chunk off. He ate vigorously, and spoke with his mouth full.
‘Blood’s called blood before you bleed. What do you call tears before you cry?’
The older boy was not pondering aloud: this was a confidently-delivered puzzle. Jake didn’t answer him — not because he thought the riddle meant nothing, but because he was anxious that he was being asked a trick question. He did find himself looking around at the landscape, and absently he observed: ‘It must have grown across a scar.’
‘Every second ago,’ said the older boy. ‘In case it overflowed!’ and he leapt up — excitedly, as if keen to show Jake that he didn’t know the half of it — and quickly selected two good-sized twigs, or rather sticks, from the ground, each as long as a ruler, before handing one to him. Then they walked together, through some trees, and down a shallow bank thick with brambles, to a small but strongly-flowing brook, and the older boy explained what they were going to play.
The game was almost identical to Poohsticks, except that before dropping anything into the river — and the older boy began to demonstrate for him — you had to firm up a slick of mucus in your mouth, and deposit it along the length of your stick by licking it from end to end. It was called Helterwash, and just like Poohsticks, it had originated at an actual bridge: this one. The bridge was barely a bridge — it seemed to be made from two planks dovetailed together and laid flat, over what was in any case barely a river. Jake believed that he could easily have jumped across it; he also believed that it would be dangerous to try. Painstakingly he covered his stick in spit, and the rough textures of lichen and bark glanced on his tongue.
The older boy wrapped a strong arm around Jake’s shoulders as they looked up-river, and Jake saw that he had a tattoo of a constellation. The older boy turned him around, so that they both faced downstream. ‘You know there’ll be hell to pay if you go all the way down, as far as the marsh…’
Jake felt a rush of terror. He hadn’t gone as far as the marsh, he wanted to insist, he hadn’t done that.
The older boy pointed far downriver: ‘There, see.’
Jake looked, and saw nothing there.
‘That’s Cutlass Waller.’
Jake saw nobody there.
‘He hates it here that much, he’d kill you for bringing him.’
Jake hadn’t stopped staring downriver. There was nobody there. The older boy was disturbed, but shook his fear away. ‘We’ll do this anyway.’
So they turned around, and faced up-river again. After counting to three together, both boys let go of their sticks. They dropped simultaneously into the water; their falls were precisely the same, even the splashes identical. Jake spun back round as fast as he could. The river, a little deeper and more intense now, was flowing fast. Anything floating on it should have appeared on the other side of the tiny bridge in a second, but nothing did. Jake didn’t know whether the sticks had vanished, or whether they were ten feet downriver already. The sky was balefully different, greyer and more cruel, the trees closer and darker. The older boy had vanished to thin air the moment Jake ducked round and out from his arm. Now, he felt cold, he was completely alone. He wondered where everyone was, and why he was there.
As if in answer to the question he hadn’t voiced — first, they were gone, they were nowhere; second, he had no friends, they were never real — he felt a slick of warm liquid run from his nose down over his lip, and a drop of blood landed with a gentle tock in the river. Into a large and quickly-widening circle beneath the surface an image formed itself in deep red, with a wide streak of bony white curving across it like a fanfare of violent teeth.
In this image, something alive of the landscape was silently screaming at Jake, and he knew that it meant to kill him. He heard someone breathe out, just inches behind his head, and for a moment he froze. Then he jumped feet first into the river.
Jake was wide awake. Completely awake, immediately, and terrified. The thought that had torn him from sleep was that it was too late, that he was going to die — now, he knew he was alive, but he still believed that something was going to harm him. His feet were freezing cold. He wriggled his toes to check they weren’t wet. They weren’t.
He grabbed the duvet with his feet, and clumsily tried to pull it back down over them. This did nothing other than to yank the duvet down from his neck, leaving his chest uncovered. This hadn’t been the situation before. He tried again, and the same thing happened. The heavy grey woollen blanket was simply gone. He could not bear to leave his feet sticking out; also, he wanted to be able to snuggle up with the duvet almost to his face. This was horrible. This was the opposite, he thought, of that thing people said about a problem being like a carpet too big for a room. This was a duvet too short for him, and he was not even very tall.
He did all that he could do, which was to curl up almost foetally and try, desperately try, to remain under the duvet. He was so exhausted that an unhappy feeling echoed, met, and joined with his current trouble. Perhaps if people took their games more slowly, he thought, he would find them a little less mean-spirited. Perhaps if the duvet was longer, his feet wouldn’t be cold. The duvet wouldn’t ever be longer and people wouldn’t ever take their games more slowly. The two ideas took on the same sad shape, then melted apart again into something else.
As scrambled as his thoughts were, some of them very nearly dreams, it took forever to fall truly asleep. Jake was uncomfortable, and completely miserable. As much as he wanted to deny it, he was still scared. Something had wanted to harm him, and now his feet were exposed, and a blanket had vanished.
His third dream arrived deep in the night, and placed him among banks of reeds.
There were some distant trees. It was night in the dream, too. He heard a gentle breeze, and insects. His feet creaked; he was on a very small bridge, a familiar bridge, and stretching into the distance before him in shrill moonlight was an empty riverbed. It was as if he’d never woken — he hadn’t moved — except that the water was gone. He’d never seen an empty river. For a short while he did nothing; he simply stood silent and still, listening for anyone else. There was no-one.
He looked straight down, and saw that a patch of the bed was stained dark with a residue of dry blood. He recognized it as the image he had seen before, the one that felt like a scream, but looking now flat, atrophied, dead, as if only a depth of water gave it form and power. Where its white streak had been there were some grey rocks. Carefully he clambered down from the low bridge, first sitting on it — so that his swinging feet were almost on the riverbed already — and then gently pushed himself off.
He crouched down, for a better look. The red which formed the image felt, on twigs and leaves, like a kind of rusty mildew. But it was on the dry mud too, and not just on its surface; it seemed to be its colour, rather than just a dust on top. The row of stones, indistinct in the moonlight, were on closer inspection teeth. Human teeth, yet too big for any human. Each was a little larger than the end-part of his thumb. They looked pitted with dents and holes, and were ridged with black streaks. He went to pick one up.
Immediately he thought, not that one. So he hovered for half a second over another, before tentatively pulling at it. It seemed very slightly to resist, to pull back as if attached to something, but all of a sudden it gave way and came loose. He gasped at a sharp stab, deep inside his nose. Alert, and worried, he stood up again and noticed the moonlight illuminating a bank of nettles; it was revelatory, it was as if they had turned from dead to alive, or even as if they had never been there before. He remembered the thin nervy threads by which alone his milk teeth had been attached, in their final hours, and remembered how painful they sometimes were — and he remembered how much they bled if ever that thread was snapped. True enough, on the riverbed, into the rusty red of the image, from where he had plucked its tooth, began to trickle blood.
From somewhere he recalled something. Quicker than he knew what he was doing, he tried to bite into the tooth: his instinct was that it ought to contain a reservoir, and that reservoir would contain — yes! — brandy — which absolutely was good for you, wasn’t it; those wonderful big dogs used to carry it in barrels for explorers — or maybe it was a barrel of rum. Pirates would have drunk rum, in emergencies.
He could not bite into the tooth. The hardness he encountered hurt him, and although it did not hurt him in his front teeth, the shock of it made him feel as if it did. He nearly dropped it — and in nearly dropping it, he looked at his feet. They were wet. The riverbed was bleeding, profusely — startled, he stepped backward with an audible splash — and of course it was; he had ripped a tooth from it. Only, it wasn’t blood. At least it seemed not to be blood. It was water; it was clear water. Certainly, while it had flooded only over the deep red of the image, it had appeared in the dark to be blood. But now, the entire river was filling with water.
It rose faster than he had ever believed water could rise. It was very soon well above the level of his trainers. He panicked; he raised the tooth to his face again but this time opened his mouth as wide as he could and placed the tooth right into the deepest, leftmost corner of his jaws — and he crunched. It worked. The horrible tooth broke open, and as it broke open, there was a stench in his mouth of pure decay — it made him retch, he had never tasted something so foul — and out onto his tongue flooded its watery contents. The sudden salinity of it was a shock, and he retched again. This was not brandy, this was sea-water. If it was not sea-water, perhaps it was tears.
Whatever it was, in his mouth was salt-water, and all around him — up to his waist now, gaining an inch a second — was fresh-water. Now, with a few feet of water above it, the image on the river-bed was vibrant and vital again. It was missing a tooth, it was furious, and the vicious hatred of the landscape — of this violently angry ridge or scar — was compressed into it. He couldn’t move. The idea of everything seemed to fuse violently into a single grain: the knowledge, the certainty, that he was dying. Drowning. The water went over his mouth, he began to choke, and something grabbed hold of his ankles.
That single grain split open into a surge of desire, as the torrent furious now splashed into his eyes and ears, and Jake felt different, as if he was a different person — he simply let himself fall, backwards into the water — he knew the older boy was Sorrel, he wished that Sorrel was there — it was a rope around his ankles, he felt it tightening — he wanted to see the stars from a ship, he wanted adventure, piracy, he wanted to be on deck! — and he wanted to be without his soaking clothes, climbing up to the crow’s nest, he wanted the water to be far below him, and for himself to be warm above it — more than anything he yearned for the stars because somehow via those stars he could find his way to being at last shirtless in the sun, performing tasks vital for a voyage.
Whatever had grabbed him was formidably strong. It flung him upward, and just when he thought he would fall, it flung him with ferocious violence back down into the water. He was being pulled into the air and smashed back down, into the river, and every thought he had of the sea and the stars was making it stronger, more violent. Ten feet up, then twenty feet up, then fifty feet, over and over and over and over, and then, he heard in his ears, Dad says it used to be the sea! It used to be the sea. It used to be the sea! I want the same thing you want, he thought. He tried to scream it: I want the same thing you want!
Whatever demon or ghost had hold of him now dragged him, dripping, as high as a topmast into the air; then, a final punishment for what he had dared to think, he saw the rickety bridge hurtling towards his face as he was flung toward it. There was just enough time to think: my head is going to be cracked open.
The jolt out from the nightmare made Jake scream. He had flown in dreams before, but never been flung. He had been bullied and beaten in dreams before, but had never been murdered. He instantly felt that the towel round the pillow was soaking wet, and sticky, and so was his face. He was completely covered in blood once again. He could have cried. But his dreams had terrified him, had made him terrified of everything, so he was stuck. He couldn’t go into the bathroom and bleed in the sink, because everything now was frightening. The loud switch that echoed through the walls, the fact that his feet if he stretched his legs were exposed to the cold and the darkness, the menacing tick from the clock downstairs, the stolen blanket, the possibility that a half-asleep man, muted and paralyzed by pain, was at the far end of the landing, listening. In desperation he held his nose, right at the base, clamped it shut with a thumb and forefinger. He would just wait for the bleeding to stop.
It didn’t work. His mouth simply started to fill with blood, and he began to panic. He swallowed, sort of retching but managed to keep his mouth shut; he lunged to where the lightswitch was and flicked it. The echo in the wall was cavernous. He darted his eyes round the room hoping there would be a glass or a bowl or a vase, anything, but there was not.
He saw that the heavy grey blanket had just slid onto the floor; he saw that somehow the duvet had rotated ninety degrees so that most of it was draped off the bed, and he had been trying to fit all of himself, from his chin to his toes, underneath its width. Ordinarily these two discoveries would have each been an enormous relief, but he was about to choke, or vomit, or both, if he did not manage to spit a mouthful of blood, so they were just distractions. Under the window opposite he saw a wooden chest. Its presence made his decision for him. He ran over, stepped up onto the chest, pulled the curtains, frantically opened the window, and explosively spluttered and spat a mouthful of blood out into the night.
He wished so much that it would just be over. His nose dripped, cruelly and unrelentingly. He was stuck like this, with his head out of a window, on a freezing night, until it stopped. He wished he could have just gone into the bathroom. Now that he was awake, though, he still couldn’t shake his fears; and they were mixed, moreover, with the more wakeful anxiety of not wanting to disturb Matthew’s parents any more than he already had. So he stood, jammed painfully against the window frame, for an eternity.
He considered trying to sleep there, in that painful, stupid position. It was the worst night he’d ever had, but he knew that he had to get some more sleep somehow. His nose dripped again. It was slowing, but not stopping. He decided to hold it shut again, make a dash over to the bed, wrap the duvet around himself like a king, and return to his position at the window. Maybe he could bring a pillow, because the frame was so hard and uncomfortable.
The attempt to get the duvet went well, and he managed also to hit the lightswitch so as to make the room dark again. He was very upset to notice that it was getting light outside. He dropped the duvet, though, and realised that getting it to come with him required two hands. He wouldn’t go back for a pillow. After all, he thought, what a stupid idea; there was every chance he would just drop the pillow out of the window. Unless — he looked out the window. There was no roof there to catch a dropped pillow; just a sheer drop. His eyes widened as he saw, at the bottom of that sheer drop, a patch of ground that was stained dark by his own blood. It may not have had any depth, but it was the size of a puddle, the puddles you saw in the park.
It was another twenty minutes before the bleeding stopped. To Jake it seemed like five hours. He felt shattered, and scared, and alone. But it had stopped. Finally, the bleeding had stopped. It seemed very unfair to him that this was the fourth time in one night he was trying to fall asleep, and dawn had already broken. He became briefly clear-headed and efficient, realising that he no longer had to stay where he was: he would get immediately to bed, and try to think of something comforting. As if it was all one single manoeuvre he shut the window, drew the curtains, got into bed with his robe of a duvet the right way round, snuggled like he had never snuggled before, shut his eyes, and imagined he was staring out of a window in his mother’s car, travelling home at night across the long road that crossed the marsh, the reflective markers and markings which anchored drivers ticking comfortingly past him as he was portered by into the dark.
V.
Matthew’s mother knocked gently on the guest-room door. The room was warm and dark, and Jake was in bed, and very comfortable. Her knock roused him from half-awake to fully awake.
‘Morning, Jacob. Time to get up!’
He realised he was not at home; then he remembered, in stages, as if in an order or sequence, firstly that he was at Matthew’s house, secondly that he was in the spare room, and thirdly — with a wince — that he had bled all over their white bedclothes. He remembered leaning out of the window and waiting forever for his nose to stop dripping onto the ground outside. He must have been barely awake when he shut the window and got back into bed, because he had no memory of doing so. He did remember looking down at his blood.
‘Are you awake, Jacob?’
He was excited, having suddenly remembered that breakfast in Matthew’s house was, to him, a relatively lavish event, involving lots of things to choose from laid out grandly on the sturdy old kitchen table. The big stove in the kitchen would be going, and would smell wonderful. As a matter of course, they would have those miniature packets of cereal, the ones that came in sets of eight, which he was not allowed at home because they were expensive. ‘Yes. Good morning, Mrs Coleman!’ he called out, to the door, in a deliberately chirpy tone.
‘Are you decent?’ she said, opening the door slowly without waiting for a reply. ‘I hope there wasn’t any more blood!’
Jake was resolved not to mention the dry, red puddle outside the window. Prompted by her remark, his mind, still half in the world of dreams, wandered back to the start of the bleeding, then wandered even further: he remembered the speck deep inside his nose, and the intense feelings of needing to avoid it; he remembered his sticky hands, and the taste of metal; he remembered something about a game; he remembered a drop of his blood forming a circle in a river; he remembered the same river, drained; he anxiously revisited the image of snapping an oversized tooth off, by its tiny tender thread, from a bloodstain in that river’s dry bed; he remembered hearing a single breath right next to him, in a dream — he remembered him and Matthew both hearing a single breath right next to them, over by the cross trees — and something massive smashed into the window. Jake gasped and looked round, and Matthew’s mother shrieked. They had both felt the impact of it, through the floors, the walls, the bed.
She went over, opened the curtains, opened the window itself, and looked out. Jake was worried she would spot his blood on the frame. For a second there was silence, but then, an even louder scream. She ducked back in from the window and dashed across to the landing, shouting her husband’s name over and over again. Jake heard her running downstairs, and he got out of bed and padded quickly, still in his pyjamas, to the window. Stuck to his blood on the frame were now a few short strands of hair, brown and russet and grey, and what looked like new, wet blood. On the ground below, right in the middle of the big patch of Jake’s blood, was Stitch, clearly dead, and bleeding out.
Before Matthew’s parents had got Matthew downstairs, before they had even started to argue frenziedly about who to telephone, it seemed obvious to them both that the dog’s skull had been smashed in with something awesomely heavy. Worse, because unbelievably it was possible for things to be worse than that, his body had been sliced down the middle and his ribcage wrenched open. Inside was the remains of a small bonfire of lichen and broken-up twigs; ash, in parts, but seemingly extinguished by some sort of mucus or slime. They didn’t in the shock of it all notice that their beloved dog was bleeding onto a stain that had already been there.
Jim was sick, next to the recycling boxes. His sick was black, an acrid slick of coffee, which reminded him that none of them had eaten yet; and so began in him a fatherly but also self-serving project, emotionally, of keeping it together by getting on with the morning. Everyone would cope better if they ate, and he would be the force of calm and normality. He well knew his wife and son might be incredulous, and even angry with him, for this, but he was in total shock, and had defaulted in this time of crisis to a very simple and stoic version of who he was; so he went inside to make sure Matthew and Jacob had some food. Matthew’s mother, who was incapable with tears and shock, and who Jim knew would refuse the very idea of eating anything, had already gone upstairs in a panic, to find out where Matthew was.
Jim went in, in a daze, put some toast on, and decided in the first instance to ring a family friend who was a vet, albeit a farm vet, for immediate but personal advice. He had a horrible idea that any advice would have to involve the police, since what had happened seemed so deliberate. He couldn’t think who or what else could it possibly involve — certainly not any kind of emergency vet. He had never seen something so completely dead — nothing he had known when it was alive, at least. The violence and power of what had been done to Stitch’s skull was such an uncanny contrast — as he thought of how on earth to describe what had happened — to the precision of the slice down his abdomen, that Jim leaned over the sink and was sick again.
By the time he had eaten a round of toast, in the unusually dark kitchen, it had started to rain again, heavily. The charcoal-grey clouds made for a completely sunless sky, made it feel almost like dusk, but it was not yet ten in the morning. Matthew was outside now, refusing to talk to anyone. It did occur to his mother that he should be spared, protected, from seeing the corpse, but he was having none of it. Before she had even finished talking he had bolted outside for a good look at what had become of his favourite creature in the world. His face now was bright red, and his eyes and nose were sore and raw with tears and snot. When he wasn’t crying, he was trembling, and the whole brightly-dressed shape of him convulsed every time the crying started up again.
‘I’m going to ring Lucy, I think — see if she can come over,’ said Matthew’s mother to Jim as he rounded the corner of the house. She was standing over Stitch, what was left of him, and crossing her arms tightly to keep warm. She was staring, utterly uncomprehending, at the twigs and lichen and ash piled on Stitch’s exposed organs, watching it all darken quickly with damp in the wet of the weather. How could there possibly have been a fire here, in the time it took her to run downstairs? Who had done this? Why would anyone do this? All she said aloud was, ‘Should we put a tarpaulin on him, do you think?’
Jim hugged her, but didn’t answer her question. ‘I’ve been thinking I should take the boys fishing — like we were going to do anyway. Maybe in about half an hour.’
‘Fishing?’
‘I mean… what else do you want me to do with them? Nowhere’s open. And the police are going to be here, probably. I just think they maybe don’t need to be here for it.’
‘You called the police?’
‘Not yet.’
She cried again and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. Yes, alright. Go on. You know Matthew won’t want to… can you deal with it, please. I don’t want to fight with him now. Jacob’s on another fucking planet anyway. Where is he?’
‘He hasn’t been to get any breakfast,’ Jim said, pacing over to peer into the kitchen window.
‘Wait — Jim — wait. Does he know?’
None of them had noticed Jake still in the window, staring down at the chaos the entire time.
When Jim took Jake aside and gave him a very basic summary of what had happened, Jake looked by turns frightened, anxious, vulnerable, empathetic, reassuring — which was exactly how he looked whenever you spoke to him about anything. This worried Jim a little, as it reminded him that it had always been difficult to tell how Jake was doing, and that mattered more than usual right now. Jake didn’t let on that he had seen everything, and heard plenty, from an upstairs window — but Jake with plenty of information was difficult to distinguish from Jake with no information. So Jim simply kept talking, gently and comfortingly, and offered a few candid guesses to Jake about how Matthew was doing, too. Jake was receptive to it and grateful for it, but he felt awful, and did take unawares to gnawing with his very front teeth on the sides of his index fingers.
A clock went. Matthew’s mother joined them in the kitchen. Jim said, ‘Aidan didn’t pick up.’
‘I actually think we should ring the police either way. I mean, just — what on God’s Earth.’
‘Okay. I can do that. Unless you want to do that. But I’m happy to do that.’
‘No, you do it.’
‘Okay.’ He paused. ‘Then, I think us three should still go.’
There was an awkward silence. Matthew’s mother was not convinced. Jim made the unwieldy move of putting it, effectively, to a vote, by saying:
‘Don’t you reckon, Jake?’
Jake really didn’t want to go fishing. But he felt put on the spot by this. He couldn’t bring himself to say any words, but he smiled awkwardly and nodded.
‘There we go then. Be a good lad, and go and finish getting dressed. Um, where’s Matthew, now?’
Jake, who hadn’t actually started getting dressed, could tell the question was not directed at him, so he walked out into the hallway. He stopped just outside the kitchen door, distracted by a bit of wall, flush with the doorframe, on which Matthew’s height, and his brother’s, had been recorded on the plaster in pen every birthday and Christmas since his brother was tiny, with a line drawn above their heads as they’d stood there with their backs to the wall. He could still hear Matthew’s mother, in the kitchen:
‘Yes. I do know that. But I told you, he won’t talk to me. He won’t even come inside, he’s still, I think he’s… I think he’s just throwing stones at the shed still.’
Sometimes the chart seemed to have been added to on random dates for no reason, though two of them bore the words ‘NANNA JO 80’ in a shaky hand. Jake felt a strange, sad envy at this chart. He stared, craning his neck at Matthew’s brother’s highest-up line (CHRISTOPHER 20, it said), and thought at first that his envy had something to do with being allowed to draw on walls. He heard Jim in the kitchen:
‘I know. Christ. He’s closer to that dog than he is to anyone.’
It was true that Jake couldn’t draw on the walls at home, but really, he slowly realized, he just wanted to have lived in one house his whole life. He hadn’t yet much understanding of what it meant to rent, rather than to own; he just hoped his next few birthdays could happen in the same home. He didn’t even know why: it just seemed appealing, and cosy, and kind of safe. He could sense it, though he couldn’t understand it, that whatever the reasons he didn’t have a height chart like this at home, they somehow had a lot to do with why his mother was often so cross and upset.
The boys stared out of opposite car windows, turned away from each other in silence on the back seat. Matthew resolutely refused to communicate, except to shout at his father that he hated fishing and he hated him. Neither of these things was true, and although there was no way Matthew would admit it, he was despite everything quite looking forward to setting up by the river. Fishing was the best time he ever spent with his father. Besides, he had a fetching new waterproof jacket which it had not yet been wet enough to try. He was torn between being heartbroken for Stitch — which he truly was — and grudgingly accepting the idea that his dad, who he loved and trusted very much, was absolutely right that it would be good to do something, rather than stay at home, and that it would be particularly good to do this. It was certainly wet enough now for the new jacket. Jake had been given Matthew’s old one to wear, and he leant sullenly up against the other window, wishing he’d put it on sooner, as his jeans and shirt were already very damp under it. He was reminded of swimming, of how much he hated being in the water, and how glad he was to get into dry things afterwards.
Jake felt a drip land on his wrist. His nose was vaguely above his wrist, so there was a tiny moment of panic — but it was fine. No blood: it was ordinary, boring water, probably from a leak in the sunroof. Everything, everywhere, was wet. Jake wanted, more than anything, to go home — but home was hours, days away. He actually wanted to cry, but he wasn’t crying; he felt, dreamily, that he was hovering around and pressing into something, as if holding two repelling magnets to each other. He would have to sleep in that room again, he thought to himself. He shuddered with the sense that something had happened there. Or, maybe, the happy thought arrived, he and Matthew would be allowed to build that den in the living room tonight. Then, Jake heard again those words in his head. He’s closer to that dog than he is to anyone. ‘Anyone’ included him, for sure. Of course it did.
At this — although Jake felt it was true, and did not resent it — his sadness seemed at last to sit down heavily inside him, as if it was itself exhausted and sad, filling all of him up, and knocking things over as it did so. Everything, everywhere, was completely soaked, forever, so it felt very natural to Jake that suddenly there was more water in his face than it could contain. He cried very quietly, staying very still. He thought of his tears as river water, rather than rain water. The sense of relief was immense, as if remaining watertight was just as much of a hateful duty as swimming on a Friday — he was still thinking about how much he loathed swimming — and this feeling, his lower lashes beginning to fill with tears, was almost as good as the glow of hearing it had been cancelled. He went to catch or scoop some of this overflowing liquid from his eye, gently, with his fingers, but in his tiredness it suddenly seemed more comforting to just rub his eyes.
Yawning, he screwed his eyes up tight, and pushed his hands into them, in the best position he could find; he forced the heels of them so hard into his eyes that he could not actually tell whether he was still crying. They were a sort of stopper, they confused the sensations; sometimes he had done this at night, on the way to sleep, to see those same marvellous patterns behind the eyelids that he was seeing again now. He liked the way that the shape of the road somehow bumped its way through the car and through his body, up to the high-pressure connection between his hands and his eyes. He remembered that riddle, and wondered what his tears were called before he cried them. When at last he felt like opening his eyes, he lowered his hands, interlacing his fingers, and onto them from his nose fell a single drop of blood.
For a dreadful and anxious minute, he thought there would be a repeat of last night. But this too seemed to be fine — there was no more bleeding — even when he released the thumb and forefinger he had hastily clamped round his nose. There was no more blood. For the first time since that awful smash on the bedroom window, which had spun the day off its axis so horribly, Jake relaxed a little. Crying had helped. He sniffled, wiped the tiny drop of blood away with his fingers, and decided to think no more about it.
‘And… Here we are!’ said Jim, slowing the car a little. Both boys recognized that he had said it far too happily, and both boys recognized that he knew he had. Neither was in the mood to say anything. Jake wondered where ‘here’ was. His window by now was steamed up — they all were — so he wiped a misshapen oval out of the condensation with a flat hand. They were just pulling off into a layby that was signposted for Waller’s Haven. The name gave Jake a shiver, a memory of brushed nettles. As soon as he noticed the sign outside, his eyes focused again on the damp glass of the car window, and the faint, dilute streaks of blood he had just smeared across it.
No other vehicle was ever found. There were no witnesses, and not a scratch on the car. Matthew was killed instantly. He was flung so powerfully into his own window, and so powerfully back across the car, that when his head smashed into Jake’s his skull cracked. Jake’s brain was badly damaged, and bled a lot, though his skull was intact. His neck was broken, as well as his nose and one of his shoulder blades, and he was rushed to hospital where he somehow lasted another ten hours. He never regained consciousness.
Jake’s mother, after the police had spoken to her, spent days in hell, neither sleeping nor eating, her home still freezing cold, then drove to the farmhouse in tears, hammered on the door, and broke down; she screamed at Jim; she tried to physically attack him, she almost vomited with the intensity of her crying, and she screamed that she would never, never, never, never, never forgive him. Matthew’s mother was unable in that moment to intercede, because she felt the same wild and unforgiving hatred for her husband. She was suffering too much to be able to hear anything about what was and wasn’t possible; so notwithstanding all his desperate protestations about there not being another soul on the road when it happened, her anger fixed itself vice-like onto the fact that he had insisted on taking the boys for a drive in the first place. She felt that this anger would never let go. Within a few months she had moved to a tiny house in the middle of nowhere, in a different county, and had broken contact with Jim, with her entire family, with Jake’s mother, with everyone.
Jim sunk fast into a deep depression and lost his job. Unable to live at the farm but unable to find the energy to sell it, he went to live with his parents. He had a recurring nightmare about being, himself, the force which had killed the dog; about flying through the air and smashing Stitch’s head against the window frame of the spare room, before flying high again then hurling him to the ground. He would wake up with a gasp and a jolt, and spend the next hour shaking and despairing, in the bed in his parents’ spare room, weeping to himself that he didn’t understand, he just didn’t understand how any of it could have happened. He didn’t understand why when a bedspring suddenly sprang, or a door slammed, or some other noise startled him, he heard that smack again, the thud of a dog’s head dashed open, didn’t understand why he had such vivid dreams of something he hadn’t seen, and which couldn’t have happened. He didn’t understand why he had visions and dreams of that, rather than of whatever had happened to the boys in the car. He hated himself for that most of all, and if that weren’t enough, the last thing his son had ever said to him was that he hated him.
Some months later, Jake’s mother tried to get in touch with Jim, to apologise for the savage things she had said in the worst agonies of her grief. But she couldn’t get hold of him. In the spring, the week before Jake’s birthday, she received notice that rent on the flat was going up, beyond what she could afford. She took herself for a drive, swallowed more than a hundred pills with all the brandy she had left, then stepped a little way into Waller’s Haven and simply let herself fall, backwards into the water.
27–31.10.2023. Nottingham