His mother, meanwhile, missed him. But it was a peculiar kind of missing, because Andy was there in front of her, sitting on the wooden chair that was half sofa, the light of the television whitening his face, with a fly swatter in his left hand. Where the fly swatter had come from, she had no idea. Probably the garage, she imagined, where her husband’s condiment samples and the empty jamjars he used to experiment with mixing tended to attract flies. And now that she thought of it, too many things in there were coated in an invisible, sticky essence, even Jim’s carpentry table, which was one of the reasons she rarely ventured inside. But she resolved to do so now, and give the place a thorough cleaning. She had been neglecting things of late, and obviously had taken her eye off her growing boy, given the evidence of this apparent stranger in front of her. They don’t develop in an ascending curve, she remembered the teacher saying, they tend to make quantum leaps, from one state to the next. But what was a quantum leap? she wondered. She had been bored by physics and tended to think of scientific parallels with life itself as so much mumbo-jumbo. She had not done badly, she hoped, given the stresses of conception. And she shivered a little at this memory, and looked once more at the fly swatter, banging against the upturned sole of his shoe with an annoying persistence and a persistent regularity. It was like a metronome, set to a fast rhythm, too fast for whatever tune should have accompanied it. Her boy seemed to have vanished, and yet there he was. And she thought some more about quantum leaps then, something to do with particles that didn’t behave the way they should have, but jumped from one level to the next. Like the stairs that led to the dormer bedroom. Was the movement always upwards? she wondered. Could he take a quantum leap back, to the state she so loved?
Because she had always relished these moments, just with the two of them, kneading dough or washing dishes, when whatever spell the television had cast was broken and her son would turn and join her at the sink and take the sudsy dishes in his hands, washing them clean with the damp towel, or cutting the pastry into starfish that would later become baked biscuit, both of them covered in flour from fingertip to elbow. She would never have to vocalise it, the invitation to join her and help, at the dough-covered table or the sink; she would do her thing patiently, knowing the rhythm of her work would gradually draw him in, make him turn and utter the magic phrase: ‘Hey Mum, let me help you with that.’
She switched her attention from the fly swatter to a panel show with those witty comedians, which only tired her brain, but he would watch, even while thumbing his phone or his game console. ‘Mongolia,’ the dickie-bowed host was saying, ‘is famed for many things, but rarely for its popular singers. And can anyone give me the Mongolian name of the following member of the boyband—’
She moved past him, through to the kitchen, expecting a word, at least. But none came. A glance was all she got, and a brief grimace which could have been a smile.
And she knew then she wouldn’t hear that phrase, ‘Hey Mum’, maybe not that evening, or the next. Mother was what he had called her, coming home from the carnival. It seemed a word from a different boy, in quite a different home. In fact she knew something worse. She knew she didn’t want to hear that word, mother, and again that foreboding licked at the edges of her consciousness, where understanding lay over the illogic of dreams. Night would fall, sooner or later, and the shadows would be all the darker for it. And the only respite would be the return of her husband, the rattle of his briefcase off the front door, the metallic series of clicks he made as he tried to extract his front-door key.
There was a sound at the door now, and she saw the boy’s head turn. Not the sound of a key, or a briefcase, but the rat-tat-tat of the doorknocker and the drumming of fingers on the door that only a boy’s hands could make. And she had to remind herself that Andy had friends. Friends that she could see through the hallway, their faces pushed against the bubbled glass. She recognised the tousled head of Darragh, the short spiked hair of the one they called, for some reason, Drum. She walked down the hallway, opened the door and saw four of them there. ‘Is Andy in, Mrs Rackard?’
‘Yes, he’s watching television.’
‘Get him to come out, Mrs Rackard, he’d kill us if he missed this.’
‘Missed what?’
‘The rats. They’re pulling down the trees, below the football pitch.’
‘Rats?’
‘Rats everywhere, coming out of the roots.’
And he was behind her now. She felt this, without turning. She saw their eyes register him.
‘Come on, Andy. They’ll be all done if you don’t hurry.’
He walked past her to join them. She observed the slaps, the high-fives, the knuckles meeting knuckles.
She watched them run, like a gaggle of boys again, along the cement path past the privet hedges, and out of sight. He quickened his pace, to keep up with them.
What was this about rats? And she heard the groan of a great earthmover, and found herself following.
Down the pathway, to the right by the creaking gate. He seemed to be the son she had known again, running with the bunch of them. There was another posse of kids coming up from the sea road. And from the end of the football pitch she saw the top of a huge, gnarled beech tree quiver and tumble out of sight.
She walked past the bus stop, down the slope past the other bungalows that she knew so well, each not too dissimilar to her own. There was a fresh wind blowing, and the distant caps of white showed on the horizon. She hardly noticed them today, though, since the groan of unseen machinery and a slight trembling in the earth – she had crossed from the bungalows to the grassy edge of the pitch – seemed to herald what was the event, as yet out of sight. She followed the smudged white line, the crushed cider bottles lying in the longer grass, and only when she reached the sagging goalpost could she see what all of the excitement was about.
The tangled slope of undergrowth and ancient trees was being cleared. One huge beech tree was down, and the others would soon follow. There was an immense earthmover, with metal cables running from it to the next tree trunk, on the slope. A man with a high-vis jacket and a yellow hard hat was clambering down to the base, spikes on his reinforced boots. He stood back and gave the earthmover the all-clear. The rusted chimney belched smoke, the tracks churned up the ground beneath them and the beast moved. The trunk began to give way, not in a regular curve, she noticed, but in jerked stages, like the quantum leaps the teacher had mentioned. Eventually the huge beech tree fell and was dragged towards its companion, on the safe, flatter ground. It wrenched its huge roots from the earth and from the dark wound left behind came the surge of rats.
There must have been hundreds of them. A seething mass that could have been grasshoppers from her high vantage point. She had to suppress a wave of nausea. They seemed to foam from the jagged hole like maggots leaving a cadaver. But there was no doubting what they were, as the adolescents all around reverted back to unruly, childhood, chasing them with sticks, broken pieces of branch, concrete blocks, held aloft, ready to crush the squirming rodents below. And among them was Andy, who seemed just like a boy again.