CHAPTER TWENTY

Apart from the fact that he was kept off school, Branson might not have known that anything unusual had happened. His mother went about her business shopping, cooking, laundering and mending just as she always had. The only difference was that now she did these things with a silent, almost mechanical efficiency. The fact of Tom’s death was not fully explained to him. His mother was only able to report that Tom had had an accident and that he wouldn’t be coming home. Branson couldn’t understand his mother’s expression as she told him this news. She had her eyes screwed up, as if against smoke, then seemed to wink at him. Then suddenly her face was open, and the eyes appeared damp and troubled. Then she would wink again. She ended the conversation by kissing him on the forehead, which Branson found funny and laughed, but quietly. The girls went about the house in tears, but wouldn’t say why. Their faces were as red as if they’d been slapped, and they looked as angry as sad. Branson kept out of their way. At the funeral, he found himself passed from person to person, each of whom would speak to him seriously and firmly, as though passing on important instructions, but all they were saying was things like ‘How are you?’; ‘How’s school?’; ‘How’s your mother?’ Branson observed the funeral from afar, he was kept at the back among people he didn’t know, and only saw the coffin once, as it passed down the aisle of the church on the shoulders of six young men in black. It seemed to tower above him, like a liner passing out of port.

*

At home, things continued in this silent, efficient way for another week, and then, one night, things changed.

The first Branson knew about it was when he was lying awake in his bed in the darkened room with its empty other bed. Out of the great engulfing silence of the house there came a very small sound, like an enamel plate being rolled across the floor down-stairs, its course becoming more wonky as it slowed, until it collapsed, like a coin, into a slowly increasing spin that gathered speed until, with a sort of metallic glissando, it stopped.

There should have been no one awake to cause such a noise, and Branson tried hard to get himself to sleep. But he was awoken again, this time by heavier sounds. As though someone was delivering sacks of linen. They were crashing softly downstairs. Or it was like very fat men, so fat they had lost the use of their limbs, falling over each other, pulling and squeezing past each other in the passageway … Then, the crisp, brittle sound of a small glass object falling onto a hard floor. Branson looked at the foot of his closed door. There was only a dim line of light there, which meant the landing light was off but the passage light was on. No shadows had moved past it. No one had come out of their room to see what the noise was. Then there was a colossal sound, so loud it was as though a part of the house had fallen down, except that it was a wooden, rather than a stony sound. As though there was a tree growing in the middle of the house, and someone had just chopped it down. Branson tightened the bedclothes around him, watching with one straining eye, too scared to blink, the line of dim light under the door. Surely that noise would have brought Mrs Head out of her room, or the girls, but there was no movement on the landing. Perhaps they had all gone and left him alone in the house. Perhaps he was the last surviving member of the household, which had been invaded by some sort of consuming demon, and he was the last one remaining to be eaten.

Then came laughter, a tinkling, brittle peal that was so uncharacteristic Branson couldn’t be quite sure that it was his mother’s. It seemed to Branson to be a perfect example of laughter such as you would give to demonstrate to someone who didn’t know what laughter was. Then other voices, a sort of conversation, though it was difficult to tell between how many. In his half-awake state Branson thought that they were rehearsing a play. That would explain the range and speed of the voices he could hear, the way they were punctuated with other noises – shrieks, wails, laughs, and the rumble and judder and thud of scenery being shifted, props being tested and discarded. That was surely the explanation. Branson went to sleep.

*

In the morning he went downstairs to an apparently normal house, except that the door to the sitting room, where his father had lived as a semi-recluse for so long, appeared to have been smashed through. All that remained were the stiles and one panel on the hinge side. The rest hung in jagged shreds, or lay in dagger-shaped splinters on the sitting-room floor beyond. And there, in the kitchen, was his father Donald. As it was so unusual to see his father in the kitchen at this time of the morning, Branson couldn’t help but stare. His father looked extremely crestfallen, sitting hunched, like a dog that had been whipped, not meeting anyone’s eye, his lower lip drawn in. Branson’s mother was standing behind him, and she was gently and very tenderly applying ointment to his fused scalp.

A china spaniel lay in pieces on the floor. As with the debris of the door, Branson wondered why no one had yet picked up the pieces. They seemed to have been deliberately left where they had fallen.

Mrs Head was at the kitchen table. She smiled in a serious way at Branson as he came in, and then she turned to his father and said, ‘And this is Branson.’

It was as though she was introducing him for the first time. It was as though his was the last name on a long list Mrs Head had gone through that morning, a list in which she’d been saving the best until last. Then Branson’s father did a most unexpected thing. He held out a hand towards him. It was a long-fingered, bony hand, and Branson found it slightly repellent. His mother continued her balming of his father’s head, and appeared to take no notice of Branson. It was such a peculiar reversal of roles that Branson didn’t know what to do. But he stepped forward because the hand was beckoning in quick, shaky finger movements.

When Branson stepped within reach of the hand, which in his mind seemed somehow disembodied, a big, bony, gesturing shape hanging in the air, it came to rest on his shoulder. And tears were falling down his father’s face. But Branson’s mother was still not looking at him.