Beattie cooks Adrian’s dinner early, while it is still light; he perches at the kitchen table, frowning his way through his homework, while she fries an egg and a pair of whippy sausages. He has to put his books aside and eat at the table, but he’s allowed to take his dessert into the den and eat that in front of the television. He curls in one of the big leather chairs with a bowl of ice-cream drenched with chocolate topping from a bottle. His grandmother supposes it is bad for him, having so much syrup that the white globes of ice-cream are floating and drowned, but she also thinks that, in this life, there are more important things worth worrying about.
One of them is on the TV.
The news is showing images of the scene of the crime: the milkbar, the house, places along the route the children travelled between the two. When the reporter mentions ice-cream, Beattie sees Adrian lick syrup from his lips. He asks, “Is that close to here?”
“Twenty minutes in the car,” says Rory.
“Shush!” snaps Beattie.
The colour dial on the television is turned a fraction too high. The shots of the Metford garden are gaudy green, the picket fence clashy white. The dress worn by the mother is a tint of hysterical orange. She is filmed walking towards the garden gate, leaning on the shoulder of a slightly doughy man. He must be the father, holding a hand out before him as if unseen obstacles hamper his way. The woman seems weak, as though the strength has been extracted from her using a method that has also reduced the years she will live. The couple are shown getting into a police car, the man’s arm guiding the woman’s shoulders, and Beattie clicks her tongue. It’s a picture that makes the mother look guilty of some wrong.
After the shot of the police car, photographs of the children are flashed. Veronica has fair hair, the kind of blonde that never looks clean. She is cuddling a flop-eared rabbit to her chin. Zoe has freckles across her nose, standing stiffly in her best dress, clutching a present wrapped for a friend. The photograph of Christopher shows him reaching for the handle of a lawnmower, his upturned face full of giggles. Christopher, the reporter says, has asthma, and needs medicine.
The image of the laughing boy is replaced by the black and white sketch of a man seen in the vicinity of the milkbar. His hair hangs lifeless on his head, long around the shoulders. He is young, believed to be aged between eighteen and thirty. He is tall and described as gaunt. On the day in question he was wearing a red T-shirt and navy jeans. In the sketch he looks ethereal; his eyes, with their white irises, have a shallow, insect look to them. Adrian murmurs, “He looks like a ghost.”
“Shush!” says Beattie.
Police hope to speak to this man.
The Metford children have been missing since Sunday afternoon – for more than twenty-four hours. The police are requesting that anyone with any information contact them – they put up a number that can be rung. When the report is finished and the newsreader comes back on the screen, his lips are pressed together by the seriousness of the thing.
The clink of the spoon against the rim of the bowl makes Beattie glance at her grandson. Adrian is in his pyjamas, his feet swaddled in fuzzy bedsocks. A fastidious child, he hasn’t spilled a drop of the liquefied ice-cream, nor has a spot of it gone astray on his chin. He looks very pale against the darkness of the leather, and he has stopped eating the dessert. He can be fretful, easily put off his food. It is one of the things that annoy her about him.
Adrian worries about all sorts of things. Many of his fears he keeps private, sensing that there’s something a touch ludicrous about them, but that does not lessen their power. He is afraid of quicksand – scared that one day he’ll be walking along the street and find that the footpath is gobbling him down. He’s heard about quicksand on TV and read about it in his grandfather’s collection of National Geographic, the magazines a source of untold marvels and menace. In the streets he never sees any signs alerting pedestrians to the presence of the treacherous glug and he worries that he won’t discover for himself what it looks like until it is way too late.
Naturally he dislikes seeing his cupboard door ajar, especially at night, especially when he knows that when he last saw it, the door was closed.
Spontaneous combustion worries him. He knows enough to know there’s nothing one can do to avoid it – it’s pointless, for instance, seeking the shade on a hot day, or keeping some distance from the gas stove, in the hope that this will ward off the smoking fate. If one is programmed to self-combust, it’s going to happen eventually, regardless. It’s like being born with six fingers, a curse.
Tidal waves are another thing. Adrian doesn’t spend much time at the beach, but the concern is there. He envisages himself sucked far out to sea by the retreat of a great wave, bobbing helplessly among umbrellas and bottles of sunscreen. He thinks of the water not yet risen into the wave, swirling, scheming, passing the time, in the pits of the ocean, restive as blood.
And now there are sea-monsters, of course.
Others of his fears are more personal, they touch his heart like a needle through his skin. If he is in a shopping centre with Beattie and the alarm rings for closing time, he is almost frantic to drag her out the door. The idea of being locked inside a shopping centre fills him with absolute horror. He dreads and distrusts crowds, and amid them his one aim is to prevent himself getting lost. To be lost in a crowd would, he thinks, be like being buried alive. His father had once taken him to a carnival that was dazzling with colour and fumes and bustle and noise, he’d been given a ball of fairyfloss and patted a Clydesdale’s satin hide, but Adrian’s strongest recollection is of the sweat that slicked his father’s fingers as he clutched the man’s hand in his own.
He worries that one day his grandmother will forget to pick him up from school. He thinks he could walk home if he had to, though the walk would take a long time, but when he tries to travel the route in his head, the streets twine and mingle like spaghetti in a can, disorienting him in his chair. Each time the school bell signals the end of another day, he feels a chill down his spine: maybe today is the day. To be lost or forgotten or abandoned and alone are, to Adrian, terrors more carnivorous than any midnight monster lurking underneath a bed.
And now there is this new fear, one that settles so comfortably among its myriad kin that it seems familiar, as if it’s skulked there, scarcely noticed, all along. He does not know those Metford children, but they are children just like him, just like the children he sees every day at school. On the TV, in the Metford yard, he had glimpsed a black and white striped basketball exactly the same as his own. He does not recognize their street, though it’s only twenty minutes’ drive away, but he feels as though he has seen it before. The trees, the fences, the rooftops, the clotheslines – that is middle-class suburbia, and Adrian is a suburban boy. He has been to the birthday parties of his classmates and he knows that most things everywhere are more or less the same. A cat that strolls along the fence, a clock that ticks on the kitchen wall, fingerpaintings magneted to the fridge, sidetables marked with coffee-mug rings.
It has never occurred to him – and he blushes faintly, for being so stupid – to think that children can vanish. The Metfords have not been lost or abandoned – they have been made to disappear. They have not run away – they have been lifted up and carried. They’ve been taken somewhere as distant as Jupiter. Adrian has never thought that an ordinary child, a kid like himself or Clinton or that freckle-nosed girl, might be of interest to anyone excepting family and friends, that an ordinary child could be worth taking or wanting, a desirable thing.
He stands at the wide lounge-room window, which overlooks the steep slope of the front yard. In the centre of the lawn is a liquidambar that’s losing its leaves. Along the fence are the thorny remains of Grandpa’s roses. There are lots of roses planted in the neighbourhood’s gardens, for most of the people who live nearby are ancient, or at least seem so to Adrian – he thinks of roses as flowers of the elderly, coral-pink, waxy-cream, blowzy crimson. His grandmother’s house stands high at the junction of a T intersection, and the house frowns down the stubby stalk of the T. In the smoky twilight Adrian can see only shadows of what lies down there – a great expanse of little-used parkland and, beyond that, the local swimming pool enclosed behind cyclone wire. The crossbar of the T curves at both ends like a pair of bull’s horns, the road sweeping around the shape of the hill. This makes it difficult to see the neighbouring houses, and Adrian sometimes imagines that his home sits by itself on the hillside, solitary as a ship on the sea. The parkland is as murkishly green as any weedy ocean. Only one thing spoils this flight of his imagination, and that is the existence of the two houses that stand across the street, in the armpits of the T, the only houses, of the thousands that surround him, that Adrian can easily see.
Both houses are owned by one man, though they’re separated by the road. Mr Jeremio lives in the smaller and older house, and he spent five years toiling to build the grander and uglier of the two. The new house hulks up from its concreted land, two storeys of plasma-yellow brick. Although it is supposed to be finished now, to Adrian’s artistic eye the house looks somehow incomplete. It looks, to him, in desperate need of cleaning, or decorating, or grace – like a doll to whom the manufacturers have forgotten to give hair. But Mr Jeremio is proud of it and thinks it’s beautiful, and that, says Gran, is what matters.
Adrian stands at the window, gazing through the venetian blinds, but his hand has crept up, to the full reach of his arm, and his fingers have hunted in the air until they’ve come to rest on the cool swayed back of a cherub. The cherub, sitting perkily upright on its knees, forms a handle for the lid of an antique ornamental bronze bowl which occupies the end of the mantelpiece and generally goes unadmired. Adrian, however, loves it – he has inherited his grandfather’s baroque taste. He loves the curvaceous shape of the bowl, its fruity heft and mossy colour. He loves its frieze of wildflowers and its four spindly clawed legs. The lid fits the bowl with a precision that utterly satisfies. The cherub, with its know-all leer, is less angelic than Bacchanal, less endearing than jeering brat. It is chubby, every part of it convex, hoping to look tender and vulnerable when it is in truth hard and cold. Three fingertips fit nicely around the putto’s walnut-sized head, and its chin is polished from years of being thus grasped to lift the lid, but when Adrian pincers its ears between his fingers, he imagines the cherub’s shrieks of insulted rage. Of all the things in his grandmother’s house, his favourite is this cocky angel on a bowl. It pleases him just to see it, to sniff its archaic aroma, to touch its patina hide.
With his other hand he pushes the venetian slats a little further apart, edging nearer to the foggy glass, his concentration caught on the big house across the road. Yesterday and always there was never light in its windows, but this evening light is there.
The sound of the door opening makes him jump backward, his hands huddling to his throat. But it is only his uncle, who smiles quickly at him. Rory is odd, sometimes he is unnerving, but he never accuses Adrian of being into mischief and probably would not care if he was. He is carrying a mug of water, which he puts down coasterless on the piano. Adrian watches him take from the lion-handled sideboard one of Gran’s precious wine glasses. The glass is perfect, like a jewel (“I want to keep them that way, Adrian”). His uncle says, “Now listen.”
He dips a finger in the water, shakes the drips onto the carpet, and puts the finger to the glass. He runs his fingertip around the rim and in a moment Adrian hears it, a high thin wail that is hardly there, a sound like ghosts thinking, like the shimmer of sleet in the air. Adrian looks wide-eyed at his uncle, who lifts his dark eyebrows. The noise dips and crests and rings away as Rory’s circling finger slows down. “You see?” he says. “Didn’t I tell you? Crystal sings.”
“Can I try?”
His uncle proffers the glass: Adrian dampens a fingertip and presses it to the rim. At first the glass is mute as a fish; then, like a dog, it begins to howl. Its song summons goblins and worms from the ground. Adrian smiles, handing the glass back to his uncle. “That’s good,” he says.
“Were you spying on the new neighbours?”
The boy quails slightly. “No. I didn’t see anyone. Only light.”
“There’s people there, though.”
Rory puts the glass aside and Adrian follows him cautiously to the window. In the minutes that he’s had his back turned, darkness has come down. Nevertheless the pair of them peek through the blinds, Adrian at his uncle’s elbow. They can hear, drifting from the den, the theme tune of The Young Doctors, Beattie’s favourite programme.
“Mr Jeremio’s finally rented out the house.” Rory, home all day, has plenty of time to observe the happenings of the neighbourhood, although he would not say that doing so particularly amuses him. “They spent all morning shifting in.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know who, I only know what. There’s a man, and there’s some children.”
The news doesn’t please Adrian: he knows his grandmother will try to force an introduction and maybe even friendship, and Adrian’s shy soul rebels. He asks, “What about a mother?”
“A mother I didn’t see. The children were two little girls and a boy.”
Adrian sniffs, rubs his eyes with a pyjama sleeve. He is tired, and the information doesn’t sink in. His uncle must stare down at him and say, “That’s strange, don’t you think?”
“What’s strange?”
Rory sighs. “Concentrate, Adrian. Two girls and a little boy. Like those kids we saw on the telly.”
To Adrian, Rory’s reluctance to do anything except wander round the house is less a mystery than a fact of life – the boy knows his uncle’s lifestyle is unusual, but it’s never offended him. Adrian wants a calm and rosy world, he is prepared to accept anything, if anything is what keeps the peace. He isn’t old enough to understand that not all lifestyles are deemed acceptable to live. Rory’s sister Marta knows better – she is a woman who unfailingly knows better. Marta believes that her brother is doing nothing more dignified than malingering.
Only Beattie understands that Rory is hiding. Although her patience is tested by him, she understands that he stays indoors because if he went outside he would blow away on the lightest breeze, so excavated is he.
Rory’s father, just over one year dead, had been a prosperous accountant. He had known his spirited son would never join the family business, and indeed, when Rory finished school he had taken on a job at a local bottle shop. The young man had wanted money, a lot of it very fast, and his father, although wealthy, would give him none. The accountant knew that money shows its true worth only to those who earn it. But Rory thought his father tightfisted, he cultivated a grudge. He needed to show how much he despised every mundane principle that guided his father’s life. He worked day and night until he’d saved enough to buy the most wasteful thing he could think of, the single item most likely to appal his father’s utilitarian heart. On the day after his twenty-third birthday Rory bought a mustard-brown, silver-spoked, walnut and leather trimmed MG convertible.
Though it had been bought as a vehicle of resentment, the MG was the most gorgeous object Rory ever owned.
The car was almost two weeks old when Rory drove it at breakneck speed into a traffic-light pole. The tall pole had shuddered, its three blinkered lights flickering above the driver’s woozy head. Rory opened his eyes to see the bonnet of the MG, once as sleek and curved as the flank of a cat, snarling and torn as a dog in a fight. It was night, there were flashing lights, Rory was groggy but conscious, and for a minute he was alone. Once the minute passed there’d be eyes staring into his, hands reaching out for him, urgent voices in his ear. But he had a minute in which to exist alone, to hear a great silence within roaring noise, to crane his pounding head sideways on the creaking bucketseat, bitten tongue sponging the split in his lip.
His lifelong friend David was belted into the passenger seat. His head had been thrown back by the impact, so his nose pointed up like an arrow. A streetlight poured a misty beam over the young man’s face, which was unmarked, not even bruising. In David’s eyes Rory saw vacant places where David used to be. His face was so bland and shallow that Rory thought of the white interior of an empty and discarded bird’s egg. A cool wind rose and he thought of the life his friend no longer had in front of him, the woman he would not marry, the children he would not carry across the road, the old age he would not endure.
Footsteps were hurrying to the hissing, spitting MG when Rory saw David’s hand move spasmodically in his lap. David had only died on the inside.
His body would continue its outside work, breathing, pumping, squeezing, sighing. But still there would not be a wife, babies, old age. On the inside there would always be the whiteness of the empty eggshell.
Rory often thinks about his father these days – he misses David, but he misses his father more. His father had not been a cruel or petty or spiteful man, but he’d known, Rory suspects, what cruelty and petty spite can breed. To Rory they’d brought destruction and boundless waste. His friend, his father, himself; the future, the past.
His father lies under churned clay and soil. David lies under blankets that are dyed baby-blue. Each day Rory asks forgiveness from both of them. He knows the accident had sped the cancer through his father’s body, that his father was killed by the guilt he’d determined to carry. The crash had been, for the older man, a symbol of mistakes he had made.
With the death of Rory’s father had come other victims – Beattie, Marta, Adrian’s mother Sookie, Adrian, all of these now missing a fraction of themselves. Rory often thinks about David’s parents, growing sadly older as they nurse their inert son. The effects of what Rory did that night have sprayed out like acid rain.
There is no making amends for stealing life but Rory has given up much of his own vitality, as if trying to even the score. He has no desire, now, to truly live – none to participate, none to appreciate. Two years have passed since the collision, although the time seems longer. Rory is not the person he once was, and it’s getting harder to remember what that diminishing person was like.
Rory paints strange pictures now, he hears himself saying strange things. Occasionally he’ll be rude or nasty, unable to help himself – sometimes people have difficulty getting along with him. Rory hears things, he imagines things, some days he sees things scrabbling on his flesh. He prefers not to go outside. Like David, he is dead below the skin. His innards have been gutted, slashed, pulled about. Inside his chest is a cavern, and dripping slabs of muscle hang from his ribs like meat from butchers’ hooks. No one knows about this abattoir within his body – or maybe his mother does. No one except maybe Beattie knows that Rory needs to stay indoors watching the world through a window because, when he steps outdoors, the meat hanging on his ribs swings and sorrows with the wind.
At school the children are told they must not talk to strangers on the street. They are told that if they ever feel frightened by what a stranger says or does, they must run immediately to a parent or teacher or neighbour or shopkeeper, to anyone that they trust. The children sit quietly in their chairs, memorizing these instructions. One frightened girl begins to cry.
Adrian tells Clinton there are tenants in Mr Jeremio’s house, but such news is singularly uninteresting to a nine-year-old boy: enthusiastically caught up in the day’s football match, his teeth black with licorice, Clinton hardly listens. Adrian reddens, wishing he’d never said anything, wishing he could scratch the words out of the air. He feels sick with the thought that he has been boring. For long moments he dares not speak, staring intently at the ground.
All week the newspaper has nothing to say about the sea-monster.
Every night on television they show the scenes of the crime. They show the house the Metfords live in, the streets along which the children walked. The milkbar has become famous. They show close-ups of the clothing and sketches of the Thin Man, the wanted man, the one with whom they wish to speak. Every night they ask for help. There’s nothing new to show or say.
Aunt Marta comes over for dinner, as she does once every week. Adrian sits alone in the den while his aunt, uncle and grandmother eat in the dining room. He hunkers close to the heater, its warmth radiating down his spine, playing idly with an old boardgame. It is a vaguely magical game in which a small plastic robot-man, when pointed at a question printed on the board, will swing around of its own accord and touch the corresponding answer with its wand. What are the three pure primary colours? Red, blue and yellow. Who carved the “Pietà”? Michelangelo (1475–1564, Rome, It.). Adrian tests the robot-man’s knowledge again and again, until it rocks unsteadily on its lead-weight base. Which is the world’s largest mammal? Blue whale. Who developed the theory of gravity? Isaac Newton. Mostly he can’t hear what the adults are saying, but sometimes Marta’s voice comes shrilling down the hall. She is never laughing – rather, he senses she is being thwarted, that she is lodging sharp protest. If he happens to be in the kitchen helping himself to ice-cream or to Beattie’s sultana scones he may hear his gran tell her daughter, “Quiet now, don’t get fussed.” Some nights, although not this night, Marta leaves in tears.
On Friday Adrian’s teacher announces that the class will be having a substitute teacher for the next fortnight. She is coy as to why this is, but Clinton reliably knows. Clinton’s mother is on the school board – she is the kind of pushy parent every school principal dreads – and uncovered the truth weeks ago. The teacher is getting married and afterwards going on a honeymoon. (“Someone must have money,” broadcasts Clinton’s mum; “You’re not going to Hawaii on a schoolteacher’s wage.”) Some of the girls devise a plan, and when the bell rings to mark the end of the day they make their teacher sparkle-eyed by hooting and whistling and throwing dabs of coloured paper into the air. Above their cheers can be heard the alarmed, piercing whinny of a horse.
That night on television three mannequins are shown dressed in clothes which match the ones the missing children wore. The mannequins stand rigid, casting angular shadows against a wall. Their faces are pretty but blank. The tallest one, Veronica’s, wears orange trousers and a handknitted vest; the sleeve of the skivvy is pulled up to expose, on the wrist, a tiny, inky, heart-shaped mole. The Zoe mannequin is wearing overalls on the bib of which is appliquéd a rampant purple kitten; the bare arms of the dummy look breakable, subjected to the cold. The last and shortest, Christopher, wears velour, a matching navy set, its feet encased inside a pair of stunted blue gumboots. The three mannequins are arranged side by side, and a tape measure, tacked to a wall, indicates their heights. Adrian is struck by their frozenness. The mannequins wear wigs of bulky fair hair and their skin is painted softly pink, their faces are dusted with makeup to give them colour, ivory teeth shine from between rosy lips, but still they look far from alive.