After his aunt had taken a sleeping pill and gone to bed to try and battle her jet lag, Daniel googled Lawson, but found nothing online about the man. As his mind wandered, Daniel surfed the Internet, clicking the mouse, trying to find out anything about the fit Lawson had mentioned and what it might be. But there was no explanation of the term that seemed to match what he was looking for.
He had Facebook messages from people he knew at school asking if he was all right. Some of them had posted pictures of the newspaper headlines and YouTube news clips of the sinkhole. A message pinged through from his best friend Bennett saying he would be back from holiday in a couple of days so they could meet up then.
When Daniel typed the words ‘induced coma’ into the search engine, his finger hovered over the return key as his mind ticked over. And then he deleted all the text and logged off.
After shutting the computer down, Daniel’s mind was too alert for sleeping, like something hard and brightly polished, so he paced round his room with the light on. When he stopped he found himself staring at the PlayStation on the shelf beneath the TV screen. He took a tartan blanket from the chair in the corner and covered the console with it.
When the landline rang, Daniel rushed out to the phone on the landing to answer it, thinking it might be the hospital. But a rough form of English conjured itself out of the crackle on the line, pleading with him to pray for a sick relative, saying he had been blessed. Daniel listened, trying to interrupt, not knowing what to say, before giving up and clicking the phone back down.
The phone rang again before he had reached his bedroom door and when he answered the line was too distant and crackly to hear much of anything except that it was the same voice as before.
When it rang a third time, he clicked it off quickly as his aunt emerged on to the landing, hugging her nightie round her.
‘They’re just crank calls,’ said Daniel as the phones started ringing again. ‘I’ll pull out the point.’
He disconnected the phone in the kitchen and the one in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, but he soon realized that the main point was in his father’s bedroom. He stood in front of the door for some time, his hand resting on the handle. But, when he heard the phone start to ring again, he walked straight in and yanked out the cord and stood there, breathless in the silence.
His father could have been away on a business trip or staying with a friend. When Daniel thought of that, something in his heart trembled and broke and it felt like angry red drops were rattling down inside him, spreading into the soles of his bare feet, making the carpet hotter and hotter.
A fly was lying dead on its back on the windowsill, lit by the street lights. Daniel picked it up and dropped it into the bin, cursing it for being there, for dying in that room, then reassuring himself it meant nothing at all. But whisperings started up in his head, telling him it was no coincidence, that it was an omen of what was to come for his father, and to drown them out he plucked a tissue from a box on the dresser and wiped down the dust from the windowsill, lobbing it like a dirty snowball into the bin as well.
But the whispers were still there.
He turned on the light and started cleaning everything he could find. Peeling off dust in woolly strands from the blinds. Wiping down the chest of drawers and the bedside table and the top of the headboard. He went into the bathroom and cleaned the basin and then the bath. He rinsed the toilet bowl with bleach, turning the water into a tiny blue lagoon.
He didn’t want to stop. But, eventually, there was nothing left for him to do and crying was the only way to drown the whispers out.
He lay down on his father’s bed and sobbed into the pillows, inhaling the faint notes of aftershave left on the linen.
After he had finished, it seemed enough just to lie there in the quiet, being as close to his father as he could be for now, remembering all the good things they had done, until a memory from long ago came back to him which felt very different in a way Daniel had never thought of it before . . .
. . . Standing with his father on a vast moor, watching a peregrine falcon fold its wings and fall out of the blue sky like a grey droplet and flatten into the purple heads of heather . . .
. . . And his hand creeping into his father’s as the bird rose again, a baby rabbit hooked in its talons, the soft fur catching fire in the sunlight as the rabbit screamed.
It was difficult for Daniel to fall asleep. So he wrote down every word that described how he was feeling on the notepad his father kept on the bedside table for his ‘wide-awake’ moments in the middle of the night. To help him, Daniel remembered what their lives had been like together. All the sounds and the colours. The arguments and the smiles. The love and affection. The down days. The up days. And the somewhere in between. It was only when the page had become so black with ink that the words could not be read that he managed to fall asleep, as if some poison had been drawn out and put on paper.
Daniel dreamt about meeting Lawson on the doorstep of a 1940s, red-brick house set back from a quiet lane, surrounded by fields of wheat.
‘What’s the fit?’ asked Daniel in a voice that was buttery, melting in the warm breeze, as he stood looking at Lawson.
‘Do you really want to know?’ whispered Lawson.
‘Yes. I’ve opened my heart like you wanted.’ Daniel held up the notepad to show him, the page black with words which began to peel off from the paper and float around them like rooks swirling, startled from the trees.
And, when Lawson had read every word, he leant forward and whispered to Daniel the address at which he lived.
When Daniel woke up in the morning, he knew it had been a dream and yet not a dream too because he could remember the address quite clearly.
He wrote it on a fresh page of the notepad and stared at it with a sense of comfort he had not known since before the sinkhole had opened and his world had changed. Somehow, he was certain that everything that had happened with Lawson the day before at the hospital was finally going to be explained.