The air was cold. Yet this chill was light and fragile, ephemeral. Not at all like the entrenched and leaden cold of a British winter.
Nicholas walked across the car park to the rows of white and silver hire cars, reading the space numbers stenciled on the bitumen. He carried just one small suitcase. He found his car, pressed the remote, popped the trunk.
Overhead, the sky was salted with tiny lights.
Stars. I’ve come back to a city where you can still see the stars.
He turned slowly, scanning the constellations. There it was: the Southern Cross. He had expected the sight of it after so many years would inject a warm tequila rush of nostalgia or a defibrillating jolt of hope. But, no. The stars of the cross stared back, unimpressed by his return. A cold July breeze tugged at his hair.
Nicholas got inside and twisted the car alive.
The bones of a city don’t change. Perhaps its skin grows tight or flaccid as suburbs grow fashionable or become déclassé; crow’s feet spread from pockets—new streets, new arteries into fresh corpulence. But the skeleton of its founding roads, the blood of its river, the skull of the low mountain that looms over it with its thorny crown of television towers like its own blinking Calvary … these things hadn’t changed.
It was nearly eleven. Nicholas drove the almost empty streets, amazed to be moving so swiftly and surely: a tardy San Juan Capistrano swallow in a white Hyundai. He had become so conditioned to the London crush that to see inner-city streets this quiet made him shiver and wonder if everyone else knew some secret apocalypse was about to occur; some rapture to which he wasn’t privy.
In the seventeen years since he’d last seen it, Coronation Drive had grown an extra couple of lanes and tidal-flow traffic signals. But as he glanced across the wide, black waters of the river, the doppelgänger lights of factories and apartments winking on its wind-worried surface were so familiar that he could have been a child again, in the backseat of his mother’s Falcon, little Suzette snoring lightly beside him, tucked inside a pile of brightly colored sample bags from the Royal National Show.
Parallel with the river drive ran the train line, its pylons winking into occasional view between new glass office towers and nineteenth-century townhouses resurrected as boutique law firms and restaurants. As he passed them, he said aloud the names of the railway stations, the same he’d rattled through each day returning from art college, each one closer to home and a hurried meal followed by hours in the garage riveting together a chair from coffee cans or weaving a fabric wall from speaker wire—ambitious, excited, even then dreaming of designing in London.
But London had proved nothing to be excited about. At the end of the eighties, it had seemed an endless expanse of dour faces pinched above colorful wide-shouldered jackets; a loud and falsely jolly bustle on a hurtling train heading nowhere in particular. No gyms back then, but a pub every twenty meters. The endless set-backs. The bad bosses. The worse bosses. The dull twist of panic every time you looked in your wallet to pay for a shitty Marks & Spencer’s sandwich and wondered how the fuck you were going to meet next week’s scandalous rent. Too many Australians. No sunshine. No work.
But he was nothing if not creative. He found a niche and jumped for it like a street musician at a dollar bill. A friend of a friend told him about a small team looking to cash in on the love for all things Eire and build “authentic” Irish pubs across the southwest.
He rode to their sawdusty workshop in Streatham; after a coffee mug interview, a squint at his résumé, and a test of his handshake, he got the job of decorating the pubs’ interiors. It sounded easy. But it took less than an hour strolling through London’s Davies Street antique shops to realize that if he bought his knickknacks in the city, he had the budget to dress perhaps one shelf. It was motoring through little villages in the Midlands, Bedfordshire, and Sussex that Nicholas discovered he had charmed luck sniffing out old curios, furniture, and bric-a-brac. He’d leave London in a hire van on a Monday and potter without a plan, letting the front wheels find their own way onto increasingly narrow roads flanked by drystone walls and watched by edgy sheep and unblinking blackbirds. For the first few months of this unlikely treasure hunting, Nicholas actively appraised the buildings in the villages to calculate which would be most likely to house an elderly soul ready to part with old junk. But experience taught him not to think; simply to let the solid feeling of surety in his midriff tell him which barn, which leaning Tudor, which locked presbytery would yield the rusty lamps, the worn shillelaghs, the dry-wattled accordions, and the beaten valises that London paid a fortune for. Without fail, he was guided to homes where owners, daughters, new tenants, disgruntled landlords, weary widows, and forgetful widowers divested themselves of odds and sods they were happy to see the arse-end of.
He would return to London on a Friday, poorly shaved, with a sore back and bowels clogged by the stodge of fry-up breakfasts, in a van filled with crap that cost perhaps three hundred quid yet was worth twenty times that to his employers and customers. He became Nicholas Close, Master of Old Shit. Need some tattered books, a rusty shotgun, and decrepit fishing gear with a distinctly Gaelic twist? Call Nicholas Close. He’s shameless, mildly charming, and he’ll find it cheap. Oh, and did you hear? He used to be a designer or something.
London had finally, shyly, revealed her lucrative teat. One job alone had paid the deposit on the flat. And that contract had led to a permanent consultancy with a firm that opened Irish pubs in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, and Santiago. Nicholas had been charged with the dubious task of vivifying new spaces with objects whose original owners were long dead. It was tolerable and various, and the travel was good. He intended to get back to design next month, next financial year, after Christmas.
He met and married Cate. The mortgage had been reduced at a good clip. But the amusing collectibles, the money, the diminishing loan statements, everything, lost its value the instant he walked into the flat in his wet and scraped motorcycle jacket and found why Cate hadn’t answered his call.
You killed her.
“Shh,” he told himself.
Because you just had to take the bike.
“Shut up.”
There, said the voice in his head, arguing with yourself. The slippery slope to madness. No wonder you couldn’t keep a job.
No. Not true. He was never fired. He quit.
And why was that?
Because the old shit he sought for a living tended to be found in old places. And the older the place, the more chance it had of being …
He didn’t want to think the word.
Go on. Say it. It doesn’t bite. Not anymore.
“Haunted,” he whispered.
The word hung in the air like despair in a dying man’s bedroom. It was still hanging, as if it were itself a ghost, when Nicholas sucked it back in with a gasp.
Time had frozen here.
While his mind had dragged through the thorny brambles of his last few months in London, his hands had steered him by dormant habit six kilometers out from the glass spires of the city and into the quiet Brisbane suburb of his childhood.
Tallong.
For his first eighteen years this had been his home suburb. Earth had first been broken here not twenty years after the city was founded in the mid-1800s. Then the rolling hills of Tallong had been cleared of dense native forest, dotted with farmhouses, and infected with Friesian cows and sheep. But the town became a city, and as it breathed in and its chest pushed out, the paddocks of Tallong were striped with gravel streets. Distinctive clapboard homes with one window glinting from under a high gable and a cheeky wink for a side veranda began to spread along the new roads—avenues with names occasionally Aboriginal but mostly Anglo, as breezy as open sulkies and jauntily optimistic as the residents who built there. Pennyworth Street. Wool Street. Harts Avenue. Princess Street.
Tramlines were laid. Gas lines went in. Bitumen covered the gravel. Tramlines were ripped up. Telephone poles were sunk between yawning jacarandas and festive red-frosted bottlebrush.
In the sixties, when memories of the privations of war and rationing had lost their sting, the wood and iron houses were viewed with eyes now brought to a critical sharpness by the sight of rockets streaking skyward from Kennedy and Baikonur and Woomera. Some houses were torn down and replaced with monolithic hulks of pale brick and yellow glass. Septic tanks were drained and sealed. Sewer lines were dug in. The suburb grew green and fat and settled, a contented dame lounging by a slow loop of river; the fat queen of a well-made hive. Her only wildness was a wide corner of untouched native forest at her edge. Two square kilometers of rippling hillocks thick with trees, ripe for razing and selling and sprinkling with a thousand new houses.
It was the sight of the woods that made Nicholas suck in his breath and step on the brake. They were still there.
He stared out the side window. He was on Carmichael Road, the street he’d walked almost every day to and from school until he was ten. And later, as a teenager, he had no choice but to pass these woods in the bus on his way to high school, then on foot on his way to the train station and college.
Seventeen years he’d been gone. In that time, the value of the houses here must have tripled. Yet this huge tract of densely wooded land sat at the edge of the suburb, unassailed. The moon was up now, furbishing the pelt of the treetops silver. The forest’s bulk glowered below, black as shadowed eyes under a severe brow, watching …
He opened the door and stepped into the crisp night air. He walked across the crackling grass of the no-man’s-land between Carmichael Road and the dark-toothed edge of the woods.
How could they still be here? Some developer should have snapped up the huge block, cleared it, slashed it, veined it with new streets with bromidic names like Spinnaker Court and Mahogany Place, and salted it thickly with pastel-rendered McMansions. Yet here they were, extant and untouched. Was it Crown land, fiercely guarded by some cleverly written covenant? Maybe a park was planned? Perhaps the developers were just waiting till house prices boomed again?
Nicholas’s feet crunched on gravel, and he stopped.
He stood on the same path he used to take home from school. A path on which he’d found something small and disturbing, something silently awful and strange and offensive …
His nostrils flared and his heart—as if having heard its own starter’s pistol—began thudding in his chest. The memory of a hot November day a quarter-century ago reached out of the woods, put its sly hands inside him, and knotted his stomach. He’d been ten. He was with his best friend, Tristram. Running. Terrified. Chased. Soon after, Tristram was dead.
Apart from the silvery whisper of the chill air in the leaves, the night was silent.
Nicholas realized he was avoiding looking at the tree line. He dragged his eyes from the bright crowns of the trees down to the dark trunks. They stood like a row of black teeth, endlessly huge, stretching left and right into the night. The maw of some undersea thing, some behemoth, sentient and unquiet. Waking as it scented prey.
The woods were alive. His heart hammered behind his sternum. Something inside the trees had sensed him, tasted him on the cold air. Recognized him.
It was coming.
Go! he yelled in his head. Run!
But his body was frozen. His feet would not move. His fingers hung cold as icicles. His eyes were locked on the darkly grinning trees, waiting for them to open and for whatever they held to reach from their damp innards and take him and consume him and leave him slit and empty and drained as Tristram’s little body had been so many years ago. And part of him welcomed that fate.
Nicholas flinched. A raindrop hit his scalp. Another, his cheek. And another. His head, as if released from some dark spell, jerked upward.
The sky, clear and starry at the airport, was now an eyelid half-closed; clouds as black and inscrutable as the woods before him had consumed the sky to its zenith and were marching further overhead, already dropping their ordnance of cold, heavy drops.
A whisper of white flickered at the corner of his eye. He turned, catching a glimpse. Something small and pale flickered away between the dark trunks, as if devoured by the trees.
His galloping heart was shaking his whole body. He again told himself to turn; this time his body listened, and he put his back to the biding woods and strode through the matchstick grass to his car.
It took all his willpower not to run.
Rain rioted on the tin roof.
Nicholas watched his mother pour steaming water into a teapot, glumly mesmerized by the billowing clouds of steam. The sight of her making tea was so familiar that it could have been transposed, with just a little loosening around the edges, from two decades ago. The kitchen had been freshened with new benchtops and a stainless-steel fridge, and his mother was the same, maybe a bit heavier and just a little shorter. Seventeen years, and nothing had changed. The thought made him tired.
“Your sister is coming up from Sydney tomorrow.”
Katharine Close’s voice had a singsong matter-of-factness that suggested schoolteacher or marriage counsellor. In the early seventies, she had been a weather girl at a local television station—a shapely lodestone for the discussion of meteorological events in service station garages and on fairways. Katharine had just been offered the upward move to reading the six o’clock news when she fell pregnant with Nicholas. Motherhood then separation then widowhood conspired to pretty well put a bullet behind the ear of her fledgling television career. She raised her two children alone. When they were both old enough for school, she cleaned houses until she had squirreled away enough to buy herself a kiln and wheel. Then she sheeted up a small studio between the stumps under the house and taught herself the secrets of clay and flux and glaze. She paid for her habit by selling her pots and platters at farmers’ markets and teaching a handful of students when the mood took her. On the kitchen dresser, Nicholas saw berthed a small armada of perhaps twenty teapots.
Katharine handed him a steaming cup.
“Suzette’s coming up,” he said. “Why?”
“I have no idea. To see her brother?”
“I only just arrived.”
His mother tapped her spoon sharply on her cup. “Yes. Selfish bitch.”
They drank in silence awhile. Above the surf-like rataplan on the roof, Nicholas could hear the house ticking around them as it cooled. He felt his mother’s eyes crawling over his face.
“You look awful,” she said.
“Cheers, Mum.”
In his memories, his mother’s hair was perpetually chestnut, worn tight as a fiercely guarded nest. Now it was gray and loose.
He took a biscuit from a plate, scrutinized it, and put it back. Katharine tutted and whisked it up, then dunked it in her tea. It was a gesture Nicholas remembered from a frugal childhood—nothing wasted. Nothing, except time. Even after his father died, some two or three years after he left them, Nicholas never saw Katharine with another man.
“Seeing anyone?” he asked.
She scowled at him over the rim of her cup. “I see lots of people. None worth talking to.”
“Having a thing with the clay man? Dalliances with horny kiln repairmen?”
“No.”
“You’ll get a reputation.”
“As what? A cranky old dyke?”
Nicholas shrugged.
“Grand.”
They ate and drank in silence.
“You know they offered me five hundred thousand for the house?”
“Who?”
“People.” She waved the word away. “Not bad, though, for an old girl.”
“Not bad,” he agreed.
Rain gurgled in the downpipe outside, a visceral rush of cold water in dark places. He thought about mentioning the Carmichael Road woods, asking his mother how they could still be there, asking if she thought, too, that they lurked with the menace of a group of shadowed men on an otherwise empty street, men whose silhouettes were drawn taut with latent trouble. But he felt foolish trying to catch the words, and so let them swim away into the ocean-like patter outside.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make Cate’s funeral.” Katharine said it boldly, but the silence that followed bled the words dry.
Nicholas ran his tongue around his teeth, as if hunting for a civil thing to say that might be caught there.
“No airline would have carried you, you were sick as a dog,” he said finally. “She liked you.”
Katharine smiled. It bloomed and died on her lips. “Poor man.”
He looked up. She was watching him carefully, wearing the same owlish look he knew from thirty years ago, when he was five and thinking of raiding the biscuit jar. A look that warned him against doing something he might regret.
“It was an accident, Cate’s death. You do know that, Nicky.”
Nicholas drained his tea, stood, and kissed the top of his mother’s head. She looked old.
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
Katharine dried Nicholas’s teacup and put it quietly back on the shelf. Well, she thought, the day has come. He’s here at last. She flicked the kettle on and sat as it started to sigh.
It had been three weeks since Nicholas rang to say he was leaving England and coming home. Every day since, she’d wondered how she’d feel when he arrived. And every day she’d been forced to admit she was dreading his return. Then she saw him as he stepped from the car—a thin, long-legged man with a shock of dirty blond hair—and her heart had leapt like a pebble on water. Donald! Then she chastized herself. Donald had been dead thirty years. But, by God, Nicholas looked just like his father.
She’d watched him step through the shadows cast by the yellow streetlight, saw how unwell he looked. Like that painting by Sargent of Robert Louis Stevenson. Thin-limbed and long and pale. Harried into long strides by silent things in dark corners. Bright-eyed with something that could be fever or genius or madness. When the doorbell rang, she’d had to fight the temptation to turn off the lights, burrow into a corner, and pretend she wasn’t home. Why? Why did she want to avoid her own son?
Because he’s bad luck.
She’d fairly slapped herself for thinking that, and threw open the door and threw her arms around him before they’d both realized a nod and a kiss would do.
The electric kettle rumbled discontentedly and switched itself off. Katharine popped a teabag into her cup and drowned it in scalding water.
Bad luck. Just like Donald.
She snorted, angry with herself, and sat.
Nonsense. She was unsettled because her boy was coming home after such a long time, and he’d want to be part of a life that she’d made very comfortable without him. Suzette in Sydney, Nicholas in London, a phone call each week, and that was fine. Her life was hers, and her children were loved well from a distance. A visit every six months from Suze and the kids. A flight to London every second year to see Nicky and Cate …
Ah.
Katharine sipped her tea. Cate was dead, and Nicky was home.
She’d almost wanted to see him burst into tears at the sight of his mother. It would have meant he wasn’t coping. She’d coped, when Donald left, and later when he died. She’d had to. She had two kids to raise. If Nicky had cried tonight, well, that would have proved something, wouldn’t it?
He looked so ill. Had she been drawn that thin when she made Donald leave? No: she’d known it was a war then, a war against time and the world, a war to be fought and won; and in war one ate what and when one could. She’d kept her strength. It was Donald who’d faded. Donald who’d grown thin and haunted …
She shrugged off the thought. Past. All in the past.
She took one more sip then poured the rest down the sink. Her boy was home, and he needed looking after. It had been a long time, but she’d at least try to be a mother again.
I don’t see why he can’t come here.”
Suzette ignored Bryan. She was up to her arse in the spare-room closet looking for her second hairdryer, the small one.
“I mean, honestly, it’s just him, right? Couple of days with your mum, then he can fly down here—”
“Bryan,” called Suzette in a sweet voice. “Come here a minute, darling.”
There was a moment’s silence—long enough for Suzette to imagine Bryan realizing he’d really pissed off his wife. Then she heard reluctant footsteps in the room behind her. Aha! There was the dryer, in the Country Road bag. She wiggled out of the closet and turned to face Bryan.
“What?” he asked in a quiet tone that suggested he knew very well what.
“Are you going to keep harping on about this?”
She realized she was holding the hairdryer like a pistol, and so started rewinding the cord. She wasn’t really angry with Bryan; he was a good bloke. A funny bloke. A fabulous father. And it was always his business that played second fiddle when things needed to be done. He was a hydrology consultant and a reasonably successful one, but it was Suzette’s business that brought in the big bucks that allowed them to live in this beautifully renovated stable so close to the center of Sydney. Once again, she would fly out of town, and Bryan would have to put his appointments on hold to look after the kids. Normally, he was so easygoing she wondered if he’d taken up smoking pot. But he had a real bee in his bonnet about this trip.
“I’m not harping. I just don’t see why your brother can’t spend a couple of days with your mum, then fly down here. I mean, it’s not like he has any ties or anything—”
“Now his wife’s dead?” asked Suzette.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” said Bryan. “Forget it. Forget it …”
“No. What do you mean?” She could hear the curtness in her voice, and it reminded her of her mother. Now that was depressing.
Bryan sighed and put his big hands in his pockets.
“Why have you got to go straightaway? He’s hardly back in the country. And I really don’t see why he can’t come here. I mean, we flew all the way to bloody England for his wedding—”
“He did pay for our hotel.”
“—and he’s back for … I don’t know, for good, I guess. So …” Bryan shrugged. “Why have you got to leave us?”
Suzette looked at him. He was like a panda bear, and she felt a sudden wave of love for him. She put her hands around his waist and kissed the spot on his chest just below his neck.
“I’m going because he’s come back,” she explained. “Mum’s not going to be much of a comfort, they’re like dogs and cats those two.”
“I like your mum.”
“Well, you’re a member of an elite minority. Nicholas …”
Suzette pulled away from her husband and looked up into his glum, handsome face.
“I just think Nicholas is going to need a bit of an eye on him. Just for a couple of days.”
Bryan took in a long, slow breath, then nodded.
“Quincy’s going to miss you. You were going to make apple pancakes Sunday.”
“You can make them.”
“I really can’t.”
They smiled at each other.
“You’ll be fine,” said Suzette. She paddled his bum with the dryer. “Now, go get me the blue suitcase.”
The rain on the roof grew louder until it was as steady and manic as applause at a rock concert.
Nicholas lay staring at the ceiling boards. This had been Suzette’s bedroom—lying in his own old room would have made the image of a failed artist too complete.
His mother was wrong. No one had regarded Cate’s death as an accident. Certainly, Cate’s brother, her parents, her friends, their mutual friends, even his own London friends, had all said the word “accident” aloud, but the silences that followed debased its currency. An undertow of quiet blame dragged the time along whenever he met his in-laws. They knew he could have taken the car, if only he’d bothered to speak with the neighbor. They knew he’d already come off his bike once in the rain, on a roundabout in Wembley. They knew that he knew Cate would be up the ladder when he telephoned. Their daughter’s death may have been an accident, but it had been an avoidable one. Cate’s had been a cruelly swift ending, and the blame for it would roost forever darkly on Nicholas’s shoulders.
The Nicholas Close “Welcome to Widowerhood” freeze-out had been choreographed with a subtlety that was a credit to London society. It began with a dwindling of phone calls, ratcheted to a sharp decline in dinner invitations, and climaxed complete as a solid, glacial wall of quiet.
Nicholas had tried to keep working. But it was hard to be productive and persuasive when one kept seeing things that, logically, shouldn’t be there.
The motorcycle accident had left him almost unscratched but not without injury. After the crash, headaches came as unbidden and unwelcome as evening crows. After hitting the car and sailing through brisk London air, the bolt-of-pain landing had rammed his teeth together (slicing out a nice chunk of inside cheek) and jarred his brain like stewed tomatoes in a can thrown against a brick wall. His growing panic about Cate not answering the phone shoved the bright headache to the wings, and later the hollow business of the funeral preparations kept the nagging pain in the background. But as sad days spun out to sad weeks, the headaches made permanent nests in the dark eaves of his skull.
The decision to sell the Ealing flat was the only easy one he took. He listed it with a tall and jolly estate agent, found a room to rent in nearby Greenford, and began excising his life from the rooms he’d planned to share for years with Cate.
The one mercy was that Cate’s brother and his girlfriend had volunteered to box up Cate’s and Nicholas’s belongings. Nicholas knew this wasn’t to spare him more grief, but rather so that almost everything of Cate’s could be taken back to the family home in Winchmore Hill without the need for a scene. He didn’t argue. The idea of packing makeup brushes that would never again touch Cate’s skin and dresses he would never again pull from her shoulders had been filling his chest with a cold and stultifying mud, so he was grateful to find the small hillock of boxes marked “N” packed in the front hallway.
He’d been carrying a last and cumbersome pile of boxes, topped with a framed photograph of him and Cate on their honeymoon in the Orkneys, down the front outside stairs when he stepped on a discarded plastic grocery bag. His feet snapped out from under him. He felt a brief and quite lovely sensation of weightlessness before the concrete steps hit him brutally hard in the small of his back and the rear of his skull. The world skipped forward a few seconds—moments lost in an inverted lightning flash of darkness.
When his eyes fluttered open, his headache was gone.
True, it had been supplanted by a severe slug of hurt between his hipbones and a burning gravel-rash throb on his scalp, but the black worms inside his skull had suddenly been exorcised. He lay motionless staring at the slate sky, enjoying the sensation of feeling—at least for a moment—that pain for once was all on the outside. The sky was as gray as an old headstone, and a small flock of starlings hurried across it.
Then a young man in a stained corduroy jacket stepped into his vision.
Nicholas realized he must look like a drunkard, and hoped this might grant him license to remain lying there awhile longer. “I’m fine,” he said.
The boy looked down at him, unblinking. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and his skin was as pale as herring scales. His hands fidgeted like spring moles in his pockets.
Shit, Nicholas thought. Maybe I’m not making sense. He reluctantly rose to his feet, wincing in anticipation of the flurry of black claws into his brain. But the headache stayed away.
“I slipped,” he said.
The boy pulled his hand from his jacket pocket. It held a screwdriver. Nicholas’s brain just had time to register it was a Phillips head when the boy shoved the chromed shaft hard into Nicholas’s chest. Nicholas jerked reflexively, waiting for the spike of agony that was sure to come. The boy withdrew the screwdriver, then shoved it in a sweeping underhand into Nicholas’s stomach.
Nicholas braced himself. But no pain came.
The boy watched him, jaw tight, red eyes glistening with tears. Then he took one step back, another …
Nicholas looked down at his chest and stomach. His T-shirt was unmarked. No punctures. No blood. No pain.
The boy took a step backward off the gutter onto the road. A blue Vauxhall was racing toward him, only twenty, fifteen, ten meters away.
“You’re going to—”
The car sped right into the boy, sending him flying. It kept going, accelerating.
“Jesus, Jesus!”
Nicholas took one, two, three jerky strides down the stairs and across the footpath. The boy lay prone on the road, a twisted swastika. Christ, he thought. The car didn’t even slow.
He stared.
In fact, you didn’t even hear it hit him …
Then the boy was up. He was back on the weedy footpath, walking toward the flats. As he passed, he rolled his gloomy eyes to Nicholas. Hands in pockets, he climbed the flat’s front stairs to the buzzer panel, pressed it, waited, pulled the screwdriver from his pocket and stabbed an invisible victim twice, then retreated back, back, back and onto the road again before being struck by an invisible car and flying through the air, landing once more in a crippled heap. Then he vanished from the road, was walking on the footpath, and did it all again.
Nicholas was rooted to the spot, transfixed by the macabre loop. A woman with a blue anodized aluminium walker trundled right through the boy as he backed across the footpath. She didn’t see him.
Nicholas waited till the boy had backed off the stairs, then scurried up, grabbed the boxes and shattered photograph, and ran to his car, shaking hard, not looking back.
A CAT scan—booked on the pretext of treating the now-vanished headaches—revealed his brain to be perhaps two percent smaller than average, but otherwise normal.
But nothing was normal.
After his vision of the boy with the screwdriver, Nicholas drove home to his new and humbly tiny Greenford flat, took three Nytols, and slid into a thick and dreamless sleep. The next day, he’d been able to dismiss the boy as a fata morgana brought on by the bash to the back of the skull, but the CAT scan results were a mixed blessing.
“Seeing things?” the radiologist asked. “What kind of things?”
The look on the woman’s face made Nicholas whip out the first lie he could think of, like an underrehearsed magician pulling out a badly hidden bouquet. “Freckles. All over people. Dark, join-the-dot kinds of freckles …”
She’d explained that there was no physical reason she could see for him to be having hallucinations.
Not ten minutes later, waiting for a bus on New Cavendish Street, he saw a portly middle-aged woman gag on a sandwich and fall to her knees. “You all right?” he called, leaping to help her up. His hands passed through her and he landed painfully on all fours on the gum-sticky concrete, shaving skin off his palms. He scrambled up, aware that a small crowd of commuters had taken careful steps backward, trying not to look at him. The choking woman rolled on her back, sausage fingers to her throat, heaving and turning blue until she fell still … and vanished.
Nicholas found himself apologizing to the crowd, and stalked away on shaking knees to find another bus stop.
He saw them every day after that. Curled broken in space, the invisible wrecks of crashed cars around their suspended bodies. Falling from buildings. Screaming silently as long gone flames turned their splitting skin red and black.
He was sure he was going mad.
And that feeling grew worse when he went back to work.
The “you-all-right?” winks and “lovely service, mate” pats on the back lasted a day or two but felt an eternity, so he was glad to get in a van and leave London. But the gladness was short-lived.
His canny hunts led him into wet-throated cellars, dust-cauled attics, lean-boned garages, weed-choked caravans. Gray places, rich and still. Places that were disturbing to stand alone in when the light was fading from the damp sky outside. These gloomy rooms where he found his booty left such a harrowed feeling in him that he was never tempted to keep any of his finds for himself. Not one old Smithwick’s sign, not one dented Royal typewriter, Hignett cigarette card, Ekco Bakelite wireless, or meerschaum pipe. Nothing. They were all strangely tainted. It was only after his fall down the steps and thump on the back of the head that Nicholas understood at last why those grim, quiet places where he found his dusty curios gave him the willies.
They were haunted.
Now, in those silent attics, garages, basements, and back rooms, behind boarded windows or under musty eaves or paused on damp cellar stairs, he watched empty-eyed men throw ropes over rafters, thin farmers ease their yellow teeth over phantom shotgun barrels, tight-jawed mothers stir rat poison into tea, young men slip hosing over invisible exhaust pipes … over and over and over. To make the horrors worse, he was invariably accompanied by the home’s new owner or oblivious executor, who chattered about the charming virtues of the world’s love affair with all things old, about the latest foot-and-mouth scare, about the weather, unaware that lonely death was being silently repeated right before their florid faces. And the ghosts, in return, took no notice of their living landlords, spouses, children, enemies … yet their dead eyes rolled to stare at Nicholas. They knew he could see them.
Nicholas stuck with his job for three weeks. Then, shaking and sleepless, he quit.
He had felt perpetually like crying. The dead were everywhere. He had to tell someone. In the end, he confided in just three people.
The first was his workmate Toby, a full-faced cabinet-maker who headed the team that prefabricated the stalls and bars of the Irish pubs that Nicholas would later line with books, rods, copper kettles, and Box Brownie cameras. Toby was a bit of a tree-hugger, often talking about how the wood under his hands felt alive, always reading his horoscope in the Daily Star. He seemed the sort of chap who might listen to a story about hauntings. Nicholas was most of the way through explaining his fall on the stairs, the attack by the dead boy with the screwdriver, his consequent calls to police, and hunts through newspaper microfiche files to discover that in 1988 a Keith Yerwood had stabbed his girlfriend, Veronica Roy, nearly to death on the stairs of her flat—my flat!—when he noticed the expression on Toby’s face. It had been hard for Nicholas to place; he’d never seen anyone regard him that way before: it looked a little like confusion, a bit like skepticism, somewhat like anxiety … and yet it was something completely different, something solid and primal. Then he placed it. It was fear. Toby was afraid of him. The chat ended there. Very soon after, Toby began avoiding him on the shop floor and stopped returning his calls.
Nicholas finally found the courage to make an appointment to see a psychologist. He told the bird-fingered, beak-nosed doctor about Cate’s death, about the headaches, the fall on the stairs, and the haunted places. She nodded, took notes. He told her that he wasn’t crazy: the ghosts he saw correlated with records of deaths he’d found in newspaper records. They were real.
She nodded some more, and looked up from her notes. “Do you think you’re unwell?”
The question irritated him.
“I’m seeing the dead. It certainly doesn’t feel fucking healthy.”
She nodded again and propped her head on an avian fist.
“Do you miss your wife?”
Nicholas hesitated. Was that a trick question? “Yes.”
She pursed her thin lips. “And do you think you could be inventing these ‘ghosts’ in the hope that you might, at least for yourself, bring your wife back?”
The question struck like a cricket bat.
He’d been seeing strangers’ ghosts for nearly a month, but had never thought about the possibility of seeing Cate again.
He hurried home to Greenford, heart racing, and grabbed the spare key for the as-yet-unsold Ealing flat.
The sun had dropped below the city’s gray skyline when he hurried past the For Sale sign around to the back of the complex (he studiously avoided the front stairs) and up the rear stairwell to their little place. The flat was clean and empty as a robbed tomb. His heart was throbbing in his chest so hard that his fingers shook. He strode through the echoing kitchen, past the still living room, to the bathroom. It was clean now—the long line through the dust where Cate’s heel had slid as her neck swung down on its fatal parabola to the bath edge was long gone, the plaster dust all swept away. The shower curtain that had popped from the rail as she’d fruitlessly grabbed it to save herself had been replaced. The ceiling remained unpainted.
And she was there.
Straining high on an invisible ladder.
“Cate?”
She turned at the sound of his voice. Put one foot down to a step in the air, another … then one foot slipped and kicked out from under her. One plaster-dusted hand struck out, grabbing at empty space. The other closed around a shower curtain that wouldn’t hold her. She fell. Her mouth opened in a small “O” of surprise. One heel hit the floor, and slid out—much as his own must have done finding the plastic grocery bag—and she arced backward. Nicholas dove to catch her, and his fingers smacked painfully into the tiles. Right under his face, her neck struck the hard, tooth-white edge of the bath and her hair tossed backward. The goggles wrenched off. And her eyes stared up at nothing, dusting white under a phantom mist of powder. Her chest deflated slowly and didn’t rise again.
Nicholas felt his throat twist and tighten. His wide eyes stung.
She looked so small. This was how he had found her the afternoon of the crash: sprawled as if exhausted, painfully arched, eyes open to nothing.
Then her eyes rolled toward his. Just for a moment. It was a look that could mean a million things or nothing. A look as empty as a dusty glass found forgotten on a windowsill. Then she was back up the invisible ladder, floating, sanding, about to die again, and again, and again.
Nicholas stayed until midnight, watching her fall and die, until his eyes were so red and his throat so wretched he could hardly see or breathe. He willed his heart to burst and fail, but it kept squeezing, disconnected from his grief. Then he closed the bathroom door, locked the flat, and drove very slowly away.
He stayed in bed for three days.
The third and last person he told about his visions worked out of a small shop off High Street in between a discount luggage store and a bakery. A hinged shingle proclaimed “Madame Sydel—Readings, Seeings.”
She was a wizened lady, brown and twisted as the trunk of some hardy Mediterranean tree, her wildly dyed hair sown with glazed beads. When she reached under her scalp and scratched purposefully, Nicholas realized it was a wig. Still scratching, she led him into a parlor lined with tasseled silks and smelling of incense and burned hair. She sat him down and took his hand.
He jumped straight into business: “I see ghosts.”
“Oh? How much do you charge?”
Nicholas went home, picked up the phone, and bought his airline ticket out of Britain.
The day before he stepped in the cab for Heathrow, he had woken to a rain as light as steam drifting from the sky. By midmorning, when he reached the cemetery in Newham, the sun was having a tug of war with the clouds and was creating small dew diamonds on the roses and willows.
Nicholas sat heavily beside Cate’s grave.
He looked at her headstone and a felt a swirl of guilt. It was black and angular and Cate would have hated it. “Like something by Albert Speer,” she’d have said. Her parents had done the choosing. Nicholas remembered the typed, formally worded letter asking him for nine thousand pounds for the funeral, grave lease, and a “lovely package where the council plants spring and summer flowers on the grave.” He read the gold-lettered epitaph for the hundredth time.
In God’s loving arms.
Was it true? There was no sense of her here. No feeling that she lay below him. No feeling that she watched from above. The air was cool for summer, and, with the rain drying, felt empty and fleeting. Was she trapped in the silent playback going on and on in the echoing little bathroom in Ealing? Was she gone completely, the spark in her brain extinguished and her with it?
He waited. For a sign. For a whisper of wind. For anything that said she heard him and wanted him to stay.
The willows held themselves silent. A car with a sports muffler rutted past on the North Boundary Road. Nothing.
Nicholas got to his feet and left.
Three days later, a hemisphere away, he lay on his little sister’s childhood bed, listening to rain crash down in an endless, dark wave.
And now he was home.
A ring wedding him to a dead woman. A few thousand pounds. A couple of nice-ish Ben Sherman shirts.
Seventeen years. Nothing.
And his mother? No new man. Same house. Twenty new teapots … otherwise, nothing had changed.
Rain. Faces. The dead. Trees.
The doorbell, a Bakelite mechanical thing, rang out two tuneless notes.
Nicholas blinked and picked up his watch from the pink bedside table. It was nearly two in the morning.
“Mum?” he called.
He swung his legs out of bed, sat up.
Dang dong.
“Coming!”
As he passed his mother’s bedroom door, he heard hefty snores befitting a circus strong man.
“Why don’t I get it?” he suggested to no one.
Down the hall. By old habit his fingers found and clicked the switch for the outside light. He swung open the front door.
There were two people waiting on the stoop. One was a dark-haired woman who might have looked quite pretty had her face not been saddled with a heavy scowl. The other was a uniformed police officer; he was fair-haired and huge as a gorilla and loitered behind the woman as if ready to bend the wrought iron handrail or uproot a tree to prevent escape.
“Good evening, sir,” said the woman. In his mind, Nicholas dubbed her “Fossey.”
“Sorry to disturb your sleep. My name is Anne Waller—” she flashed her detective’s badge “—and we’re going door-to-door seeking information about a young boy who’s gone missing.”
On cue, gorilla-man held up a laminated color photocopy of a blond seven-year-old beaming at the camera. Nicholas jolted.
It’s Tristram. But Tristram’s been dead twenty-five years.
He leaned in to look more closely.
The photograph was recent. In the background was an LCD television and the boy wore a Spider-Man 3 T-shirt. Nevertheless, he looked eerily similar to Nicholas’s childhood friend.
His heart was pumping hard. He shook his head. “No.”
But the officers had seen the frisson of recognition. They exchanged a glance, then returned their steady gazes to Nicholas.
“Are you sure, sir?” asked Fossey. Her entrenched frown seemed to deepen.
“Yes. Really. I just got in from overseas tonight.”
“Tonight, sir? What time was that?”
“Half past ten or so.”
Nicholas licked his lips. The police weren’t moving.
“Did you come straight home, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t stop anywhere?” asked gorilla-man.
Nicholas hesitated. He’d stopped at the woods, amazed to see them still as potent and thick as ever. He’d walked halfway to their edge. Had been drawn to them. He couldn’t explain that to himself, let alone the police. Randomly scoping out dark woods in the middle of the rainy night when a boy happens to go missing. He swallowed.
“No.”
Detective Fossey reached for her notebook. Silverback’s right hand casually slipped down to hang straight beside his leg, closer to his service pistol.
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Nicholas Close. Look—”
Fossey wrote in her notebook, asked, “C-L-O-S-E?”
“What’s going on, Nicky?” Katharine arrived silently behind her son, fumbling with her dressing gown’s sash.
The police exchanged a glance.
“A young boy has been reported missing, ma’am.”
Silverback held the picture up for Katharine.
“Oh dear.” Nicholas, who knew her voice so well, could just detect a quiver. “Local boy?”
“Yes, ma’am. This gentleman told us he returned from overseas tonight?”
Nicholas saw his mother’s eyes narrow just the slightest margin.
“My son. That’s right.”
“What time did he arrive?”
“Just after eleven thirty. His flight touched down at nine fifty, which means he made excellent time getting through customs, hiring a car, and getting home here.” Her words came clipped and fast, the shake replaced by something harder. “We talked in our kitchen till quarter past twelve and both went to bed, and it certainly is tragic that a boy’s got himself lost in this rain but I’m not sure I quite understand where this is going.”
The detective and constable shifted back an almost imperceptible amount. Nicholas sagged a little. He was in his mid-thirties and still needed his mother to keep him out of trouble.
“Ma’am, we’re just asking questions,” said Fossey.
“I do understand that. Have you got any more?”
Detective Waller sent one last look at Nicholas.
“No, ma’am. Catherine with a C?”
“With a K and two As. Best of luck, Constables. I hope and pray the young lad turns up safe.”
The officers asked for a phone number—Nicholas had long discarded his cell phone when his friendships had dried up after Cate’s death, so Katharine gave the home line. Finished, Fossey led Silverback into the rain.
Katharine shut the door. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I just hate the fact that if you’re a man you’re automatically a potential sex fiend. Women do it too, you know.”
Nicholas nodded. He felt awfully tired, but sleep seemed a huge ocean away. As they started back down the hall, he saw veins like purple worms crawling on her ankles.
“What woke you up, Mum?”
Katharine looked at him, opened her mouth to lie. But she hesitated. And in that moment, Nicholas saw again the tally of years on his mother’s face.
We’re getting old.
“I had a bad dream. About you when you were small. You and your friend up the road.”
“Tristram Boye. Did you see how much that boy—”
She nodded. “Only in the dream, it was you …”
Her voice trailed off to nothing.
The rumble of the rain was as solid as the darkness outside. He kissed her cheek. It felt dry and thin as paper.
“I’m sure they’ll find him,” he said.
They returned to their beds.
The police did find the child, three days later.
During the first two days, they had searched public restrooms and overgrown railway sidings and mossy culverts, but the deluge had made the hunt difficult. A team of police divers sat ready to strap themselves to cables and search the river and stormwater drains through which water thundered like rapids, but the task was deemed too dangerous. A group of State Emergency Service volunteers waited in the Tallong High School hall to start their search of the Carmichael Road woods, but the rain kept falling, heavy as theater curtains, so they stayed indoors drinking instant coffee from Styrofoam cups and playing Trivial Pursuit. The low sea of dark cloud seemed immovable in the bloated sky.
The boy’s mother was named Mrs. Thomas—an ineloquent woman, though by all accounts a gifted tire-fitter and a regular at the local Uniting Church. She appeared on the evening news, begging through a tight throat for anyone who had seen her boy to help. But in the end, the boy, whose name was Dylan (the press showed unusual good taste in making no sport of the child’s mother unwittingly naming him after that doomed alcoholic), had been beyond help for all of those three days. His body was found hooked in mangrove trees some five kilometers downriver from Tallong. A squad of high school rowers caught sight of Dylan’s red tracksuit pants bobbing in the shoreline shadows. A police spokesman said the boy’s throat had been cut. There were no clear signs of sexual assault; however, time in the water made that difficult to confirm.
Nicholas and Katharine muddled around the house, keeping out of each other’s way. When the television news reported the discovery of Dylan’s body, they watched silently from the sofa. Neither needed to remark how eerily like 1982 this was, when Tristram’s body was found three suburbs from Tallong in a cleared housing block, one pale leg poking out from under a pile of demolished timber, tree roots, and tin. His throat, like Dylan’s, had been slit wide.
Nicholas switched off the television.
Outside, the rain was finally easing.
“I’ll make some tea,” Katharine said quietly.