Slade House

The Right Sort, 1979

Whatever Mum’s saying’s drowned out by the grimy roar of the bus pulling away, revealing a pub called The Fox and Hounds. The sign shows three beagles cornering a fox. They’re about to pounce and rip it apart. A street sign underneath says WESTWOOD ROAD. Mum said that lords and ladies are rich, so I was expecting swimming pools and Lamborghinis, but Westwood Road looks pretty normal to me. Normal brick houses, detached or semi-detached, with little front gardens and normal cars. The damp sky’s the color of old hankies. Seven magpies fly by. Seven’s good. Mum’s face is inches away from mine, though I’m not sure if that’s an angry face or a worried one. “Nathan? Are you even listening?” Mum’s wearing make-up today. That shade of lipstick’s called “Morning Lilac” but it smells more like Pritt Stick than lilacs. Mum’s face hasn’t gone away, so I say, “What?”

“It’s ‘Pardon’ or ‘Excuse me.’ Not ‘What?’ ”

“Okay,” I say, which often does the trick.

Not today. “Did you hear what I told you?”

“It’s ‘Pardon’ or ‘Excuse me.’ Not ‘What?’ ”

“Before that! I said, if anyone at Lady Grayer’s asks how we came here, you’re to tell them we arrived by taxi.”

“I thought lying was wrong.”

“There’s lying,” says Mum, fishing out the envelope she wrote the directions on from her handbag, “which is wrong, and there’s creating the right impression, which is necessary. If your father paid what he’s supposed to pay, we really would have arrived by taxi. Now …” Mum squints at her writing. “Slade Alley leads off Westwood Road, about halfway down …” She checks her watch. “Right, it’s ten to three, and we’re due at three. Chop chop. Don’t dawdle.” Off Mum walks.

I follow, not stepping on any of the cracks. Sometimes I have to guess where the cracks are because the pavement’s mushy with fallen leaves. At one point I had to step out of the way of a man with huge fists jogging by in a black and orange tracksuit. Wolverhampton Wanderers play Shining. Berries hang from a mountain ash. I’d like to count them, but the clip-clop-clip-clop of Mum’s heels pulls me on. She bought the shoes at John Lewis’s sale with the last of the money the Royal College of Music paid her, even though British Telecom sent a final reminder to pay the telephone bill. She’s wearing her dark blue concert outfit and her hair up with the silver fox-head hairpin. Her dad brought it back from Hong Kong after World War Two. When Mum’s teaching a student and I have to make myself scarce, I sometimes go to Mum’s dressing table and get the fox out. He’s got jade eyes and on some days he smiles, on others he doesn’t. I don’t feel well knitted today, but the Valium should kick in soon. Valium’s great. I took two pills. I’ll have to miss a few next week, so Mum won’t notice her supply’s going down. My tweed jacket’s scratchy. Mum got it from Oxfam specially for today, and the bow-tie’s from Oxfam, too. Mum volunteers there on Mondays so she can get the best of the stuff people bring in on Saturdays. If Gaz Ingram or anyone in his gang sees me in this bow-tie, I’ll find a poo in my locker, guaranteed. Mum says I have to learn how to “Blend In” more, but there aren’t any classes for Blending In, not even on the town library noticeboard. There’s a Dungeons & Dragons club advertised there, and I always want to go, but Mum says I can’t because Dungeons & Dragons is playing with dark forces. Through one front window I see horse racing. That’s Grandstand on BBC1. The next three windows have net curtains, but then I see a TV with wrestling on it. That’s Giant Haystacks the hairy baddie fighting Big Daddy the bald goodie on ITV. Eight houses later I see Godzilla on BBC2. He knocks down a pylon just by blundering into it and a Japanese fireman with a sweaty face is shouting into a radio. Now Godzilla’s picked up a train, which makes no sense because amphibians don’t have thumbs. Maybe Godzilla’s thumb’s like a panda’s so-called thumb, which is really an evolved claw. Maybe—

“Nathan!” Mum’s got my wrist. “What did I say about dawdling?”

I check back. “ ‘Chop chop!’; ‘Don’t dawdle.’ ”

“So what are you doing now?”

“Thinking about Godzilla’s thumbs.”

Mum shuts her eyes. “Lady Grayer has invited me — us — to a musical gathering. A soirée. There’ll be people who care about music there. People from the Arts Council, people who award jobs, grants.” Mum’s eyes have tiny red veins like rivers photographed from very high up. “I’d rather you were at home playing with your Battle of the Boers landscape too, but Lady Grayer insisted you come along, so … you have to act normal. Can you do that? Please? Think of the most normal boy in your class, and do what he’d do.”

Acting Normal’s like Blending In. “I’ll try. But it’s not the Battle of the Boers, it’s the Boer War. Your ring’s digging into my wrist.”

Mum lets go of my wrist. That’s better.

I don’t know what her face is saying.

Slade Alley’s the narrowest alley I’ve ever seen. It slices between two houses, then vanishes left after thirty paces or so. I can imagine a tramp living there in a cardboard box, but not a lord and lady.

“No doubt there’ll be a proper entrance on the far side,” says Mum. “Slade House is only the Grayers’ town residence. Their proper home’s in Cambridgeshire.”

If I had 50p for every time Mum’s told me that, I’d now have £3:50. It’s cold and clammy in the alley like White Scar Cave in the Yorkshire Dales. Dad took me when I was ten. I find a dead cat lying on the ground at the first corner. It’s gray like dust on the moon. I know it’s dead because it’s as still as a dropped bag, and because big flies are drinking from its eyes. How did it die? There’s no bullet wound or fang marks, though its head’s at a slumped angle so maybe it was strangled by a cat-strangler. It goes straight into the Top 5 of the Most Beautiful Things I’ve Ever Seen. Maybe there’s a tribe in Papua New Guinea who think the droning of flies is music. Maybe I’d fit in with them. “Come along, Nathan.” Mum’s tugging my sleeve.

I ask, “Shouldn’t it have a funeral? Like Gran did?”

“No. Cats aren’t human beings. Come along.”

“Shouldn’t we tell its owner it won’t be coming home?”

“How? Pick it up and go along Westwood Road knocking on all the doors saying, ‘Excuse me, is this your cat?’ ”

Mum sometimes has good ideas. “It’d take a bit of time, but—”

“Forget it, Nathan — we’re due at Lady Grayer’s right now.”

“But if we don’t bury it, crows’ll peck out its eyes.”

“We don’t have a spade or a garden round here.”

“Lady Grayer should have a spade and a garden.”

Mum closes her eyes again. Maybe she’s got a headache. “This conversation is over.” She pulls me away and we go down the middle section of Slade Alley. It’s about five houses long, I’d guess, but hemmed in by brick walls so high you can’t see anything. Just sky. “Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door,” says Mum, “set into the right-hand wall.” But we walk all the way to the next corner, and it’s ninety-six paces exactly, and thistles and dandelions grow out of cracks, but there’s no door. After the right turn we go another twenty paces until we’re out on the street parallel to Westwood Road. A sign says CRANBURY AVENUE. Parked opposite’s a St. John’s ambulance. Someone’s written CLEAN ME in the dirt above the back wheel. The driver’s got a broken nose and he’s speaking into a radio. A mod drives past on a scooter like off Quadrophenia, riding without a helmet. “Riding without a helmet’s against the law,” I say.

“Makes no sense,” says Mum, staring at the envelope.

“Unless you’re a Sikh with a turban. Then the police’ll—”

“ ‘A small black iron door’: I mean … how did we miss it?”

I know. For me, Valium’s like Asterix’s magic potion, but it makes Mum dopey. She called me “Frank” yesterday — Dad’s name — and didn’t notice. She gets two prescriptions for Valium from two doctors because one’s not enough, but—

— a dog barks just inches away and I’ve shouted and jumped back in panic and peed myself a bit, but it’s okay, it’s okay, there’s a fence, and it’s only a small yappy dog, it’s not a bull mastiff, it’s not that bull mastiff, and it was only a bit of pee. Still, my heart’s hammering like mad and I feel like I might puke. Mum’s gone out into Cranbury Avenue to look for big gates to a big house, and hasn’t even noticed the yappy dog. A bald man in overalls walks up, carrying a pair of paint-spattered stepladders over his shoulder. He’s whistling “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony).”

Mum cuts in. “Excuse me, do you know Slade House?”

The whistling and the man stop. “Do I know What House?”

“Slade House. It’s Lady Norah Grayer’s residence.”

“No idea, but if you find her, tell her I fancy a bit o’ posh if she fancies a bit o’ rough.” He tells me, “Love the dickie-bow, son,” and turns into Slade Alley, picking up his whistling where he left off. Mum looks at his back, muttering, “Thanks a heap for bloody nothing.”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to say ‘bloody’—”

“Don’t start, Nathan. Just — don’t.”

I think that’s Mum’s angry face. “Okay.”

The dog’s stopped yapping to lick its willy. “We’ll backtrack,” Mum decides. “Maybe Lady Grayer meant the next alley along.” She goes back into Slade Alley and I follow. We reach the middle section in time to see the stepladder man vanish round the corner of the far end, where the moon-gray cat’s still lying dead. “If someone killed you down here,” I remark, “nobody’d see.” Mum ignores me. Maybe it wasn’t very Normal. We’re halfway down the middle bit when Mum stops: “I’ll be jiggered!” There’s a small black iron door, set into the brick wall. It’s small all right. I’m four feet eleven inches, and it’s only up to my eyes. A fat person’d need to squeeze hard to get through. It has no handle, keyhole, or gaps around the edges. It’s black, nothing-black, like the gaps between stars. “How on Earth did we miss that?” says Mum. “Some boy scout you are.”

“I’m not in the Scouts any more,” I remind her. Mr. Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter. I’d been on the local news and everything. Everyone was angry, but I was only following orders.

Mum pushes the door, but it stays shut. “How on Earth does the bally thing open? Perhaps we ought to knock.”

The door pulls my palm up against it. It’s warm.

And as it swings inwards, the hinges shriek like brakes …

… and we’re looking into a garden; a buzzing, still summery garden. The garden’s got roses, toothy sunflowers, spatters of poppies, clumps of foxgloves, and lots of flowers I can’t name. There’s a rockery, a pond, bees grazing and butterflies. It’s epic. “Cop a load of that,” says Mum. Slade House is up at the top, old, blocky, stern and gray and half smothered by fiery ivy, and not at all like the houses on Westwood Road and Cranbury Avenue. If it was owned by the National Trust they’d charge you £2 to get in, or 75p for children under sixteen. Mum and I have already stepped in through the small black iron door, which the wind closed like an invisible butler, and currents are pulling us up the garden, around by the wall. “The Grayers must have a full-time gardener,” says Mum, “or even several of them.” At last, I feel my Valium kicking in. Reds are glossier, blues glassier, greens steamier and whites see-through like one layer of a two-ply tissue. I’m about to ask Mum how such a big house and its garden can possibly fit in the space between Slade Alley and Cranbury Avenue, but my question falls down a deep well with no bottom, and I forget what I’ve forgotten.

“Mrs. Bishop and son, I presume,” says an invisible boy. Mum jumps, a bit like me with the yappy dog, but now my Valium’s acting like a shock absorber. “Up here,” says the voice. Mum and me look up. Sitting on the wall, three times my height I’d say, is a kid about my age. He’s got wavy hair, pouty lips, milky skin, blue jeans, pumps but no socks and a white T-shirt. Not an inch of tweed, and no bow-tie. Mum never said anything about other boys at Lady Grayer’s musical soirée. Other boys mean questions have to get settled. Who’s coolest? Who’s hardest? Who’s brainiest? Normal boys care about this stuff and kids like Gaz Ingram fight about it. Mum’s saying, “Yes, hello, I’m Mrs. Bishop and this is Nathan — look, that wall’s jolly high, you know. Don’t you think you ought to come down?”

“Good to meet you, Nathan,” says the boy.

“Why?” I ask the soles of the boy’s pumps.

Mum’s hissing something about manners and the boy says, “Just because. I’m Jonah, by the way. Your welcoming committee.”

I don’t know any Jonahs. It’s a maroon-colored name.

Mum asks, “And is Lady Norah your mother, Jonah?”

Jonah considers this. “Let’s say she is, yes.”

“Right,” says Mum, “that’s, um, I see. Do—”

“Oh, splendid, Rita, you’ve found us!” A woman walks out from a lattice-frame tunnel thing. The tunnel’s smothered with bunches of dangly white and purple flowers. The woman’s around Mum’s age, but she’s slim and looks less worn down and dresses like her garden looks. “After I hung up last night, I rather got the collywobbles that I’d horribly confused you by giving you directions to the Slade Alley door — really, I should’ve sent you round the front. But I did so want your first sight of Slade House to be over the garden in its full splendor.”

“Lady Grayer!” Mum sounds like an imitation of a posh person. “Good afternoon. No no no, your directions were—”

“Call me ‘Norah,’ Rita, do: the whole ‘Lady’ thing’s a frightful bore when I’m off duty. You’ve met Jonah, I see: our resident Spiderman.” Lady Grayer has Jonah’s black hair and X-ray vision eyes that I prefer to look away from. “This young man must be Nathan.” She shakes my hand. Her hand’s pudgy but its grip’s strong. “Your mother’s told me all about you.”

“Pleased to meet you, Norah,” I say, like a grown-up from a film.

“Nathan!” says Mum, too loud. “Lady Grayer didn’t mean you—”

“It’s fine,” says Norah Grayer. “Really, he’s welcome to.”

The bright afternoon sways a bit. “Your dress matches the garden,” I say.

“What an elegant compliment,” says Lady Grayer. “Thank you. And you look very smart, too. Bow-ties are terribly distinguished.”

I extract my hand. “Did you own a moon-gray cat, Norah?”

“ ‘Did’ I own a cat? Do you mean recently, or in my girlhood?”

“Today. It’s in the alley.” I point in the right direction. “At the first corner. It’s dead.”

“Nathan can be rather direct sometimes.” Mum’s voice is odd and hurried. “Norah, if the cat is yours, I’m terribly—”

“Don’t worry, Slade House has been cat-less for some years. I’ll telephone our odd-job man and ask him to give the poor creature a decent burial pronto. That’s most thoughtful of you, Nathan. Like your mother. Have you inherited her musical gift, too?”

“Nathan doesn’t practice enough,” says Mum.

“I practice an hour a day,” I say.

“Ought to be two,” says Mum, crisply.

“I’ve got homework to do too,” I point out.

“Well, ‘Genius is nine parts perspiration,’ ” says Jonah, standing right behind us, on the ground — Mum gasps with surprise, but I’m impressed. I ask, “How did you get down so quickly?”

He taps his temple. “Cranially implanted teleport circuitry.”

I know he jumped really, but I like his answer better. Jonah’s taller than me, but most kids are. Last week Gaz Ingram changed my official nickname from Gaylord Baconface to Poison Dwarf.

“An incurable show-off,” sighs Norah Grayer. “Now, Rita, I do hope you won’t mind, but Yehudi Menuhin’s dropped by and I told him about your Debussy recital. He’s positively bursting to meet you.”

Mum makes a face like an astonished kid from Peanuts: “The Yehudi Menuhin? He’s here? This afternoon?”

Lady Grayer nods like it’s no big deal. “Yes, he had a ‘gig’ at the Royal Festival Hall last night, and Slade House has become his London bolt-hole-cum-pied-à-terre, as it were. Say you don’t mind?”

“Mind?” says Mum. “Meeting Sir Yehudi? Of course I don’t mind, I just … can’t quite believe I’m awake.”

“Bravissima.” Lady Grayer takes Mum by the arm and steers her towards the big house. “Don’t be shy — Yehudi’s a teddy bear. Why don’t you chaps”—she turns to Jonah and me— “amuse yourselves in this glorious sunshine for a little while? Mrs. Polanski’s making coffee eclairs, so be sure to work up an appetite.”

“Eat a damson, Nathan,” says Jonah, handing me a fruit from the tree. He sits down at the base of one tree, so I sit down against its neighbor.

“Thanks.” Its warm slushy flesh tastes of early August mornings. “Is Yehudi Menuhin really visiting?”

Jonah gives me a look I don’t understand. “Why on Earth would Norah lie?”

I’ve never met a boy who calls his mum by her Christian name. Dad’d call it “very modern.” “I didn’t say she is lying. It’s just that he’s an incredibly famous virtuoso violinist.”

Jonah spits his damson stone into tall pink daisies. “Even incredibly famous virtuoso violinists need friends. So how old are you, Nathan? Thirteen?”

“Bang on.” I spit my stone farther. “You?”

“Same,” he says. “My birthday’s in October.”

“February.” I’m older, if shorter. “What school do you go to?”

“School and I never saw eye to eye,” says Jonah. “So to speak.”

I don’t understand. “You’re a kid. You have to go. It’s the law.”

“The law and I never got on, either. ‘Nother damson?”

“Thanks. But what about the truancy officer?”

Jonah’s face may mean he’s puzzled. Mrs. Marconi and me have been working on “puzzled.” “A ‘what’ officer?”

I don’t get it. He must know. “Are you taking the piss?”

Jonah says, “I wouldn’t dream of taking your piss. What would I do with it?” That’s kind of witty, but if I ever used it on Gaz Ingram he’d crucify me on the rugby posts. “Seriously, I’m taught at home.”

“That must be ace. Who teaches you? Your mum?”

Jonah says, ‘Our master,” and looks at me.

His eyes hurt, so I look away. Master’s like a posh word for “teacher.” “What’s he like?”

Jonah says, not like he’s trying to boast, “A true genius.”

“I’m dead jealous,” I admit. “I hate my school. Hate it.”

“If you don’t fit into the system, the system makes life hell. Is your father a pianist too, like your mother?”

I like talking about Dad as much as I hate talking about school. “No. Dad lives in Salisbury but Salisbury in Rhodesia, not Wiltshire. Dad’s from there, from Rhodesia, and he works as a trainer for the Rhodesian Army. Lots of kids tell fibs about their dads, but I’m not. My dad’s an ace marksman. He can put a bullet between a man’s eyes at a hundred meters. He let me watch him once.”

“He let you watch him put a bullet between a man’s eyes?”

“It was a shop dummy at a rifle range near Aldershot. It had a rainbow wig and an Adolf Hitler mustache.”

Doves or pigeons coo in the damson trees. No one’s ever very sure if doves and pigeons are the same bird or not.

“Must be tough,” says Jonah, “your father being so far away.”

I shrug. Mum told me to keep shtum about the divorce.

“Have you ever visited Africa?” asks Jonah.

“No, but Dad promised I can visit at Christmas. I was meant to go last Christmas, but Dad suddenly had lots of soldiers to train. When it’s winter here, it’s summer there.” I’m about to tell Jonah about the safari Dad’s going to take me on, but Mrs. Marconi says talking’s like ping-pong: you take turns. “What job does your dad do?”

I’m expecting Jonah to tell me his father’s an admiral or a judge or something lordly, but no. “Father died. Shot. It was an accident on a pheasant-shoot. It all happened a long, long time ago.”

Can’t be that long ago, I think, but I just say, “Right.”

The purple foxgloves sway like something’s there …

… but there isn’t, and Jonah says, “Tell me about your recurring nightmare, Nathan.” We’re sitting by the pond on warm paving slabs. The pond’s a long rectangle, with water lilies and a bronze statue of Neptune in the middle gone turquoise and bruised. The pond’s bigger than our whole garden, which is more a muddy yard with a washing line and rubbish bins. Dad’s lodge in Rhodesia has land going down to a river where there’re hippos. I think of Mrs. Marconi telling me to Focus on the subject. “How do you know about my nightmare?”

“Dunno,” says Jonah. “You have that hunted look.”

I lob a pebble up, high over the water. Its arc’s maths.

“Is your nightmare anything to do with your scars?”

Immediately my hand’s pulled my hair down over the white-and-pink-streaked area below my right ear, to hide where the damage shows the most. The stone goes plop! but the splash is invisible. I won’t think about the mastiff launching itself at me, its fangs pulling skin off my cheek like roast chicken, its eyes as it shook me like a doll, its teeth locked around my jawbone; or the weeks in hospital, the injections, the drugs, the surgery, the faces people make; or how the mastiff’s still waiting for me when I fall asleep.

A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, “Its wings are like cellophane,” and I say, “I was just thinking that,” but Jonah says, “Just thinking what?” so maybe I just thought he’d said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. I’ve noticed it before.

In the house, Mum’s playing warm-up arpeggios.

The dragonfly’s gone. “Do you have nightmares?” I ask.

“I have nightmares,” says Jonah, “about running out of food.”

“Go to bed with a packet of digestives,” I tell him.

Jonah’s teeth are perfect, like the smiley kid with zero fillings off the Colgate advert. “Not that kind of food, Nathan.”

“What other kinds of food are there?” I ask.

A skylark’s Morse-coding from a far far far far star.

It can’t be on Earth. You don’t get skylarks in October.

“Food that makes you hungrier, the more of it you eat,” he says.

Shrubs tremble blurrily like they’re being sketched in as we watch.

“No wonder you don’t go to a normal school,” I say.

Jonah winds a stem of grass round his thumb …

… and snaps it. The pond’s gone and we’re under a tree, so obviously it’s another stem of grass, a later snap. The Valium’s throbbing in my fingertips now, and the sunlight’s a harpist. Fallen leaves on the shaved lawn are shaped like tiny fans. “This tree’s a gingko tree,” says Jonah. “Whoever lived at Slade House half a century ago planted it.” I start arranging gingko leaves into a large Africa, about one foot from Cairo to Johannesburg. Jonah’s lying on his back now, either asleep or just with his eyes closed. He hasn’t asked me about football once, or said I’m gay for liking classical music. Maybe this is like having a friend. Time must’ve passed, because my Africa’s finished. I don’t know the time exactly because last Sunday I took my watch apart to improve it, and when I put it back together again some pieces were missing. Not quite like Humpty Dumpty. Mum cried when she saw the watch’s insides and shut herself in her room so I had to eat corn flakes for tea again. I don’t know why she got upset. The watch was old, dead old, made long before I was even born. The leaves I remove for Lake Victoria, I use for Madagascar.

“Wow,” says Jonah, leaning his head on an elbow.

Do you say, “Thanks” when someone says, “Wow”? I don’t know, so I play safe and ask, “Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not?”

Gentle applause flutters down from an upstairs room.

“My sister and I are a different species,” says Jonah, “but the experiment part is redundant. We pass ourselves off as normal, or anything we want to be. Do you want to play fox and hounds?”

“We walked past a pub called The Fox and Hounds.”

“It’s been there since the 1930s. Smells like the 1930s, too, if you ever go in. My sister and I borrowed its name for a game. Want to play? It’s a race, basically.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll meet her later. Fox and hounds is a race. We start off at opposite corners of the house. We both shout, ‘Fox and hounds, one two three!’ and on the ‘three’ we start running, anti-clockwise, until one of us catches the other. The catcher is the hound and the one who’s caught is the fox. Simple. Up for it?”

If I say no to Jonah he might call me a wuss or a spazzo. “Okay. But shouldn’t it be called ‘fox and hound’ if there’s only one hound?”

Jonah’s face goes through two or three expressions I can’t read. “Henceforth, Nathan, it’ll be known as ‘fox and hound.’ ”

Slade House looms up. The red ivy’s redder than red ivy normally is. The ground floor windows are too high off the ground to see inside, and anyway they only reflect the sky and clouds. “You stay here,” Jonah tells me, at the front right corner. “I’ll go round the back. Once we start, run anti-clockwise — up this way.” Off Jonah trots down the side of the house, which is walled by a holly hedge. While I’m waiting, I notice someone moving in the window closest to me. I step closer, peering up. It’s a woman. Another guest at Lady Norah Grayer’s soirée, I suppose, or maybe a servant. She’s got one of those beehive hairstyles that ladies on Dad’s old LPs had; her forehead’s furrowed and her mouth’s slowly opening and closing like a goldfish. Like she’s repeating the same word over and over and over. I can’t hear what she’s saying because the window’s shut, so I tell her, “I can’t hear you.” I take a step forwards, but she vanishes and there’s only reflected sky. So I take a step back, and she’s there again. It’s like one of those pictures you get in cereal boxes where it looks like the image is moving when you tilt it slightly. The beehive woman could be saying, “No, No, No”; or “Go, Go, Go”; or it might be “Oh, Oh, Oh.” Before I work it out, I hear Jonah’s voice down the holly path, saying, “Ready, Nathan?”

I shout, “Ready!” and when I look back at the window, the beehive woman’s gone, and I can’t get her back wherever I stand or however I tilt my head. I take up my starting position at the corner.

“Fox and hound!” calls Jonah and I call it too. “One, two—”

“Three!” I shout back and leg it down the holly path—slap slap slap go my shoes, and the echo’s whack whack whack. Jonah’s taller than me and maybe he’d beat me over a hundred meters, but I could still end up as the hound and not the fox because it’s stamina that counts over longer distances, and I’m at the end of the side path already, where I was expecting a view of Cranbury Avenue, but there’s just a long brick wall and fir trees and a narrow strip of lawn that goes by in a blur. I pound along and swing round on a drainpipe, sprint down another chilly side path sliced with blades of light coming through a high fence with brambles poking through, then I’m out front again where I smack a butterfly bush and butterflies blizzard up all orange and black and red and white and one goes in my mouth so I spit it out and I leap over the rockery and nearly trip up when I land but I don’t. Along I run past steps climbing to the front door, past the beehive woman’s window but she’s gone now and then around the corner and I’m pounding back down the echoey holly path, starting to get a stitch in my side but I’ll ignore it, and the holly’s scratching the back of my hand like it’s pushing in, and I wonder if Jonah’s gaining on me or I’m gaining on Jonah but not for long because I’m back at the back of Slade House, where the fir trees are thicker and bigger and the wall blurrier, and I keep running running running round the corner to where the brambles really are choking through the fence now, scratching my shins my neck and now I’m afraid I’ll be the fox not the hound, and round the front the sun’s gone in, or gone out, or gone away, and the flowers are withered and there’s not a single butterfly on the butterfly bush, just dead ones smeared into the path, powder-paint skid marks with one half-dead one, flapping a bit …

… I’ve stopped, because the far end of the garden, the wall with the small black door — it’s faded away. Not because of evening. It can’t even be four o’clock yet. Not because it’s misty, either. I look up — the sky’s still bluish, like it was before. It’s the garden itself. The garden’s fading away.

I turn round to tell Jonah to stop the game, something’s wrong, we need a grown-up. Any second now he’ll come hurtling round the far corner. The brambles sway like underwater tentacles. I glance back at the garden. There was a sundial but it’s gone now, and the damson trees too. Am I going blind? I want Dad to tell me it’s fine, I’m not going blind, but Dad’s in Rhodesia, so I want Mum. Where’s Jonah? What if this dissolving’s got him too? Now the lattice tunnel thing’s erased. What do you do when you’re visiting someone’s house and their garden starts vanishing? The blankness is moving closer like a storm-front. Then, at the far end of the brambly side path, Jonah appears, and I relax for a second because he’ll know what to do, but as I watch, the running-boy shape gets fuzzier and becomes a growling darkness with darker eyes, eyes that know me, and fangs that’ll finish what they started and it’s pounding after me in sickening slow motion, big as a cantering horse and I’d scream if I could but I can’t my chest’s full of molten panic it’s choking me choking it’s wolves it’s winter it’s bones it’s cartilage skin liver lungs it’s Hunger it’s Hunger it’s Hunger and Run! I run towards the steps of Slade House my feet slipping on the pebbles like in dreams but if I fall it’ll have me, and I’ve only got moments left and I stumble up the steps and grip the doorknob turn please turn it’s stuck no no no it’s scratched gold it’s stiff it’s ridged does it turn yes no yes no twist pull push pull turn twist I’m falling forwards onto a scratchy doormat on black and white tiles and my shriek’s like a shriek shrieked into a traffic cone all stifled and muted—

“What on Earth’s the matter, Nathan?” I’m on my banged knees on a carpet in a hallway, my heart’s going slap slap slap slap slap slap but it’s slowing, it’s slowing, I’m safe, and Lady Grayer’s standing right here holding a tray with a little iron teapot on it with vapour snaking up from the spout. “Are you unwell? Shall I fetch your mother?”

Woozily, I get up. “Something’s outside, Norah.”

“I’m not sure I understand. What kind of a something?”

“I mean, a, a, a … Kind of …” A kind of what? “Dog.”

“Oh, that’s Izzy, from next door. Daft as a brush, and she will insist on doing her business in the herb garden. It’s jolly annoying, but then she’s very sweet.”

“No, it was a … bigger … and the garden was vanishing.”

Lady Norah Grayer does a smile, though I’m not sure why. “Fabulous to see boys using their imaginations! Jonah’s cousins sit in front of the TV with their Atari thingummies, their Donkey Pong, and I tell them, ‘It’s a beautiful day! Get outside!’ and they say, ‘Yeah, yeah, Auntie Norah, if you say so.’ ”

The hallway has black and white tiles like a chessboard. I smell coffee, polish, cigar smoke and lilies. Through a little diamond-shaped window in the door, I peer out and see the garden. It’s not at all dissolved. Down the far end, I can see the small black iron door onto Slade Alley. I must have imagined too hard. Down the stairs comes Tchaikovsky’s “Chant de l’alouette.” It’s Mum.

Norah Grayer asks, “Nathan, are you feeling all right?”

I looked up Valium in a medical encyclopaedia at the library and in rare cases it can make you hallucinate and you have to tell your doctor immediately. I guess I’m rare. “Yes, thanks,” I say. “Jonah and me were playing fox and hound and I think I got carried away.”

“I thought you and Jonah might have a rapport — and golly gosh, Yehudi and your mother are getting on like a house on fire! You go on up to the soirée, up both these flights of stairs. I’ll find Jonah, and we’ll bring the eclairs. Up you go now. Don’t be shy.”

I take off my shoes and put them side by side and climb the first flight of stairs. The walls are panelled and the stair carpet’s thick as snow and beige like nougat. Up ahead, there’s a little landing where a grandfather clock’s going krunk … kronk … krunk … kronk … but first I pass a portrait of a girl, younger than me, plastered with freckles, and wearing a pinafore thing from Victorian times. She’s dead lifelike. The banister glides under my fingertips. Mum plays the last note of “Le chant de l’alouette” and I hear applause. Applause makes her happy. When she’s sad, it’s only crackers and bananas for dinner. The next portrait’s of a bushy-browed man in a regimental uniform: the Royal Fusiliers. I know because Dad got me a book about British Army regiments and I memorized it. Krunk … kronk … krunk … kronk goes the clock. The last portrait before the landing is a pinched lady in a hat who looks a lot like Mrs. Stone, our RE teacher. If Mrs. Marconi asked me to guess, I’d say she was wishing she was anywhere but here. From the little landing, another flight of stairs to my right carries on up to a pale door. The clock’s really tall. I put my ear against its wooden chest and hear its heart: krunk … kronk … krunk … kronk … It has no hands. It’s got words instead, on its old, pale-as-bone clock face, saying “TIME IS” and under that “TIME WAS” and under that “TIME IS NOT.” Up the second flight of steps, the next picture’s of a man who’s twenty or so, with slick black hair and squinty eyes and a look like he’s unwrapped a present and can’t work out what it is. The last-but-one portrait’s a lady I recognize. It’s the hair. The lady I saw in the window. Same dangly earrings, too, but a dreamy smile instead of streaky eyeshadow. She must be a friend of the Grayers. Look at that mauve vein in her neck, it’s throbbing, and a murmur’s in my ear saying, Run now, as fast as you can, the way you came in … and I say “What?” and the voice stops. Was it even there? It’s Valium. Maybe I shouldn’t take any more for a while. Only a few steps to the pale door now, and I hear Mum’s voice on the other side: “Oh no, Yehudi, you mustn’t make me hog the limelight when there’s so much talent in the room!” The reply is too soft to hear, but people laugh. Mum, too. When did I last hear Mum laugh like that? “You’re all too kind,” I hear her say. “How could I say no?” Then she starts up “Danseuses du Delphe.” I take two or three steps and draw level with the last portrait.

Which is me.

Me, Nathan Bishop …

Wearing exactly what I’m wearing now. This tweed jacket. This bow-tie. Only in the picture, I’ve got no eyes. That’s my big nose, the zit on my chin I’ve had all week, my scarring from the mastiff under my ear, but no eyes. A joke? Is this funny? I never know. Mum must’ve sent a school photograph plus photographs of the clothes I was going to be wearing to Norah Grayer, and she got the artist to paint this. How else? This isn’t bad Valium, is it? Is it? I blink hard at the portrait, then kick the skirting board; not hard enough to break my toe, but hard enough to hurt. When I don’t wake up, I know I’m awake. The clock’s going krunk-kronk-krunk-kronk and I’m trembling with anger. I know anger when I feel it. Anger’s an easy one, it’s like being a boiling kettle. Why did Mum play a joke on me on a day she told me to Act Normal? Normally I’d wait until Debussy was over before opening the pale door but Mum doesn’t deserve manners today so I put my hand on the doorknob.

I sit up in bed. What bed? Not my bed in my titchy room in England, that’s for sure: this is three times the size, with sunlight blasting through the curtains and Luke Skywalker on the sheet-thing. My head’s humming. My mouth’s dry. There’s a desk; a bookshelf full of National Geographics; strings of beads over the doorway; a million insects outside; a Zulu-style tribal shield and spear decorated with tinsel which brings the answer closer now, closer, closer …

Dad’s lodge in the Bushveld. I let out this bark of relief and all my dream-anger at Mum goes phffft. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m in Rhodesia! Yesterday I flew here on a British Airways flight, all on my own, my very first time on a plane, and asked for the fish pie because I didn’t know what boeuf bourguignon was. Dad and Joy met me at the airport in his jeep. On the way here we saw zebras and giraffes. No spooky portraits, no Slade House, no mastiff. Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic “F” if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer; that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. It’s a shame Jonah’s not real, though. I lift up the curtain by my bed and see slopes of woodland and grassland, going on forever. Down below’s the brown river where there’re hippos. Dad sent me a Polaroid of this exact view. It’s on my wall at home in England by my pillow, but here it’s the actual view. African birds, African morning, African birdsong. I smell bacon and get up. I’m in my Kays Catalogue pajamas. The pine floor’s knotty, warm and grooved on the soles of my feet, and the strings of beads are like lots of fingertips on my face …

Dad’s at the table, reading his Rhodesian Reporter and dressed in his short-sleeved khaki shirt. “The Kraken wakes.” Dad always says that in the mornings. It’s the title of a book by John Wyndham about a monster who melts the ice-caps and floods the world.

I sit down. “Morning, Dad.”

Dad folds his newspaper. “Well, I wanted to wake you for your first African dawn, but Joy said, ‘No, let the poor lad sleep in, he flew twelve hours non-stop.’ So we’ll do all that tomorrow. Hungry?” I nod — I guess I must be — and Dad tilts his head at the kitchen hatch: “Joy? Violet? Young man needs his chow!”

The hatch opens and Joy appears. “Nathan!” I knew about Joy, who Mum calls “Your father’s dolly bird,” but it was still a jolt to see Dad holding hands with another woman. They’re going to have a baby in June, so they must’ve had sexual intercourse. The baby’ll be my half-brother or half-sister, but it hasn’t got a name yet. I wonder what it does all day. “Sleep well?” says Joy. Joy’s got a Rhodesian accent like Dad’s.

“Yes. Mad dreams, though.”

“I always have mad dreams after a long-haul flight. OJ, bacon sandwich do you, Nathan?”

I like how Joy says “OJ.” Mum would hate it. “Yes please.”

“He’ll need some coffee, too,” says Dad.

“Mum says I’m too young for caffeinated drinks,” I say.

“Horse pucky,” says Dad. “Coffee’s the elixir of life, and Rhodesian coffee’s the purest on Earth. You’re having some.”

“OJ, bacon sandwich and coffee, coming up,” says Joy. “I’ll get Violet on it straight away.” The hatch closes. Violet’s the maid. Mum often used to shout at Dad, “I’m not your bloody maid, you know, Frank!” Dad lights his pipe, and the smell of his tobacco brings back memories of when he and Mum were married. He says from the corner of his mouth, “Tell me about this dream of yours, matey.”

The gazelle’s head’s distracting, and so are Dad’s grandfather’s muskets from the Boer War and the ceiling fan. “Mum took me to see a lady, like a lord-and-lady-type lady. The house was missing so we asked a window-cleaner but he didn’t know either … then we found it, it was this big house like in To the Manor Born. There was a boy called Jonah but he turned into a big dog. Yehudi Menuhin was there too, and Mum played with him upstairs—” Dad snorts a laugh “—and then I saw a portrait of me, but my eyes were missing, and …” I see a small black iron door in the corner. “That door was there, too.”

Dad looks round. “Dreams do that. Mix reality with moonshine. You were asking about my gun-room door before you turned in last night. Don’t you remember?”

I must’ve, if Dad says so. “It all felt so real when I was in it.”

“I know it felt real, but you can see it wasn’t. Right?” I look at Dad’s brown eyes, crinkly lines, tanned skin, greyish streaks in his sandy hair, his nose like mine. A clock’s going krunk … kronk … krunk … kronk … and there’s a trumpeting noise outside, not far away. I look at Dad, hoping it is what I think it is. “Dead right, matey: a herd drifted across the river yesterday afternoon. We’ll go see ’em later, but first, line your stomach.”

“Here we go,” says Joy, placing a tray in front of me. “Your first African breakfast.” My bacon sandwich looks epic, with a treble layer of rashers, and ketchup dribbling out.

“That’s God’s Own Bacon Sarnie,” I say. Someone said that line on a sitcom I saw once and lots of people laughed.

“Well aren’t you the charmer?” says Joy. “Wonder who you get that from …”

Dad puts his arm round Joy’s waist. “Try the coffee first. It’ll make a man of you.” I lift the mug and peer down. Inside’s black as oil, as holes in space, as Bibles.

“Violet ground the beans just now,” says Joy.

“God’s Own Coffee,” says Dad. “Drink up now, matey.”

Some stupid part of me says, No, don’t, you mustn’t.

“Your mother’ll never know,” says Dad. “Our little secret.”

The mug’s so wide it covers my nose like a gas-mask.

The mug’s so wide it covers my eyes, my whole head.

Then whatever’s in there starts gulping me down.

Time passed, but I don’t know how much. A slit of light opens its eye and becomes a long flame. Cold bright star white. A candle, on a candlestick, on the scarred floorboards. The candlestick’s dull silver or pewter or lead and it’s got symbols on it, or maybe letters from a dead language. The flame’s not moving, it’s as if time’s unspooled and jammed. Three faces hang in the gloom. Lady Grayer on my left, but she’s younger now, younger than Mum. To my right is Jonah Grayer but he’s older than the Jonah in the garden. They’re twins, I think. They’re wearing gray cloaks with hoods half down; his hair’s short and hers is long, and its gold instead of black like before; and they’re kneeling like they’re praying, or meditating. They’re still as waxworks. If they’re breathing, I can’t see it. The third face is Nathan Bishop’s, opposite me. I’m a reflection in a mirror, a tall rectangle, standing on the floor. I’m still wearing the tweed jacket from Oxfam, and the bow-tie. When I try to move, I can’t. Not a muscle. I can’t turn my head, or lift my hand, or speak, or blink, even. Like I’ve been paralyzed. It’s scary as hell, but I can’t even go Mmmfff like scared gagged people do. I’m pretty sure this can”t be heaven or hell, but I know it’s not Rhodesia. Dad’s lodge was a kind of vision. I’d pray it’s only the Valium making me see this, but I don’t believe in God. I’m in an attic, judging from the sloping ceiling and rafters. Are the Grayers prisoners like me? They look like the Midwich Cuckoos. Where’s Yehudi Menuhin, all the guests, the soirée? Where’s my mum?

The flame comes to life, and the symbols on the candlestick change, and keep changing as if it’s thinking fast and the symbols are its thoughts. Jonah Grayer’s head shifts. His clothes rustle. “Your mother sends her apologies,” he says, touching his face as if he’s testing whether it still fits. “She had to go.” I try to ask, “Where?” but nothing I need to speak — jaw, tongue, lips — works. Why would Mum leave without me? The me in the mirror gazes back. Neither of us can move. Norah Grayer’s flexing her fingers like she’s just waking up. Did they inject me with something? “Every time I come back to my body,” she says, “it feels less of a homecoming, and more entering an alien shell. A more enfeebled one. Do you know, I want to be free of it?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” says Jonah. “If anything happened to your birth-body, your soul would dissolve like a sugar cube and—”

“I know perfectly well what would happen.” Norah Grayer’s voice is chillier and throatier now. “The hairdresser paid an uninvited visit, I saw.”

Jonah asks, “What hairdresser are you talking about?”

“Our previous guest. Your ‘Honey Pie.’ She appeared in a window. Then on the stairs, by her portrait, she tried to give some sort of a warning to the boy.”

“Her afterimage showed up in a window, you mean. It happens. The girl is gone, as gone as a smoke ring puffed out years ago in a gale off Rockall. It’s harmless.”

A brownish moth fusses around the candle-flame.

“They’re getting bolder,” says Norah Grayer. “The time will come when a ‘harmless afterimage’ will sabotage an Open Day.”

“If—if—our Theatre of the Mind were ever ‘sabotaged’ and a guest escaped, we’d simply call our friends the Blackwatermen to bring them back again. That’s why we pay them. Handsomely.”

“You underestimate ordinary people, Jonah. You always did.”

“Would it kill you, Sister, to once, just once, say, ‘Top job, a superb orison, you’ve landed us a juicy, tenderized soul to pay the power bills for the next nine years—bon appetit!’?”

“Your African lodge could not have been a cornier ersatz mishmash, Brother, if Tarzan had swung in on a vine.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be real: it only had to match the bushvelt the guest imagined. Anyway, the boy’s mentally abnormal. He hasn’t even noticed his lungs have stopped working.” Jonah now looks at me like Gaz Ingram does.

It’s true. I’m not breathing. My switched-off body hasn’t raised the alarm. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

“Oh stop snivelling, for Christ’s sake,” groans Jonah. “I cannot abide snivellers. Your father would be ashamed of you. Why, I never snivelled when I was your age.”

“ ‘Never snivelled’?” snorts Norah. “When mother died—”

“Let’s reminisce later, Sister. Dinner is served. It’s warm, confused, afraid, it’s imbibed Banjax, and it’s ready for filleting.”

The Grayer Twins make letters in the air with their hands. There’s a slow thickening in the dark, above the candle, at a little above head height. The thickening becomes a something. Something fleshy, lumpish, fist-sized, pulsing blood red, wine red, blood red, wine red, faster and brighter, the size of a human head, but more like a heart as big as a football, just suspended there. Veins grow out of it, like jellyfish tentacles, and twist like ivy through the air. They’re coming for me. I can’t turn my head or even shut my eyes. Some of the vein-things finger their way into my mouth, others into my ears, two up my nostrils. When I see my reflection, I’d scream if I could, or pass out, but I can’t. Then a dot of pain opens up on my forehead.

In the mirror, there’s a black spot there. Something …

… oozes out, and hovers there inches from my eyes, look: a clear cloud of stars, small enough to fit in your cupped palms. My soul.

Look.

Look.

Beautiful as, as …

Beautiful.

The Grayer Twins lean in, their faces shining like Christmas, and I know what they’re hungry for. They pucker up their lips and suck. The round cloud stretches doughily into two smaller round clouds … and splits. One half of my soul goes into Jonah’s mouth, and the other into Norah’s. They shut their eyes like Mum did the time we saw Vladimir Ashkenazy at the Royal Albert Hall. Bliss. Bliss. Inside my skull, I howl and my howl echoes on and on and on and on but nothing lasts forever … The big beating heart-thing’s gone, and the Grayer Twins are back kneeling where they were before. The flame’s stopped flickering. Time’s paused again. The brownish moth is frozen an inch away from it. Cold bright star white. The Nathan in the mirror’s gone, and if he’s gone, I’m—