Midnight Sun

THREE

At first Ben thought she was exaggerating. She thanked the policeman and watched to make sure he closed the gate behind him. "Up with you" was all she said to Ben for now, waving her hands as if she was wafting him upstairs. He used the banister to haul himself to the bathroom, where the lid of the toilet was disguised by white feathers, and was sleepily brushing his teeth when he found himself peering at his face in the mirror. Just now it seemed unreal as a mask, his metallic-blue eyes underlined by tiredness, pale bitten lips precisely bisected by the shadow of his sharp nose on his thin face, silvery blond hair lolling in all directions above his large ears. He was still wondering what he felt the sight should tell him when his aunt bustled in to drag a comb through his hair. Even the scratching and yanking at his scalp was unable to rouse him. He staggered into his bedroom and buttoned his pyjamas haphazardly, and crawled under the blanket, his eyes closing before his head located the pillow.

Midday sunshine and the rusty notes of a huge music-box wakened him. He laid his forearm over his eyelids and enjoyed his unhurried return to consciousness, his feeling that it didn't matter how long it took him to recognise the sound as the call of an ice-cream van. It receded gradually, dwindled, went out at last like a spark, and only then did he realise that he couldn't hear his aunt in the house.

He pushed himself out of bed so hard that his arms shivered, and clattered downstairs, hoping the noise would make her respond. She wasn't in the kitchen, where the stove and the metal sink gleamed as though she had just polished them, nor in the dining-room, where black chairs stood straight-backed around the bare black table overlooked by framed browned photographs of old Norfolk seaside views, nor in the front room, where the radio sat on top of the revolving bookcase.

Usually the radio put him in mind of an outsize toaster made of off-white plastic, but just now it seemed to crystallise the silence of the house; it made him think of a heart which had ceased beating. He was staring at it, afraid to move, when he heard a sound upstairs: a choked snore, suddenly cut off.

She must have slept as long as he had. He wasn't supposed to go in her room, but surely she wouldn't object if he made her a cup of tea. He took the kettle to the kitchen sink and listened to the clangour of water in it growing less hollow. He watched the kettle boil, grasped the handle as soon as the lid began to twitch, poured the water onto the tea he'd spooned into the pot, forcing himself to keep hold of the handle when the steam made his fingers flinch. Surely now she wouldn't be so cross with him. Placing one foot and then the other on each stair so as not to spill the brimming liquid, he bore the fragile cup on its saucer to her door and knocked timidly on a panel. When a longer knock brought no response, he set the cup and saucer down and inched the door open.

The room felt muggier than his, as if its contents – the quilt which hung down to the floor on both sides of the bed, the dwarf cushions bristling with hatpins on the dressing-table, the fat-bottomed chair confronting itself in the mirror beyond the pins – had soaked up the heat. His aunt was huddled under the quilt, looking smaller than she ought to. Her face was greyish, pulled out of shape by her slack drooling mouth. He couldn't tell if she was breathing.

Then she snorted and closed her mouth, and her eyes wavered open. As soon as she saw Ben she sat up, wrapping the quilt around her and wiping her chin furiously with the back of one hand. "I've brought you some tea, Auntie," he stammered.

By the time he reached the bed with it she had put on her bed-jacket and spectacles. Her squashed curls were springing up, but she still looked greyer than she ought to. "Leave it on the little table," she said when he attempted to hand her the cup and saucer. "Go and be a good boy while I get up."

Perhaps she wasn't fully awake, but the blurring of her voice unnerved him. "Are you all right, Auntie?"

She placed one hand over her heart as if she was examining herself. "I hope I will be this time. But you must never upset me like you did yesterday, do you see?"

"I won't ever," Ben said, and retreated to his room. If she died he would be wholly alone, and where would he have to go? He set about tidying his room to take his mind off the possibility, lining up his Dinky toys on the windowsill, one model car for each Christmas since he was three years old. They made him think of frost at the windows, sparks flying up the chimney as the wrapping-paper blazed.

He carried the bundle of his books down to the front room. When he untied the string from around them the books seemed to expand with relief, the Hans Andersens his father had given him and the boys' adventure annuals his aunt had. Best of all, because it was still mysterious, was Edward Sterling's last book, Of the Midnight Sun.

He had only begun to leaf through it when his aunt came downstairs. "Don't put too many books in my bookcase or you'll be making it lean. We don't want people thinking we bought our furniture off a cart, do we?" she said, and frowned at the book in his hands. "What's that musty old thing? You don't want that. It might have germs."

Ben hugged it. "I do want it, Auntie. It's the book Great-Granddad wrote. Granddad gave it to me and said I should keep trying to read it until it made sense."

"There's no sense in it, Ben. These books I gave you, they're the kind boys ought to read. There's nothing in that one except stories made up by people who had to have Edward Sterling write them down because they couldn't do it for themselves. Nasty fairy tales, like some of those Hans Andersens, only worse. They're from the same part of the world." She held out a hand which he noticed was shivering slightly. "Why don't you give me it to look after if it means so much to you? It can be a special kind of present to you when I think you're old enough."

"Can't it be in the bookcase where I can see it? It makes me think of Granddaddy."

His aunt was struggling with her emotions. "You'll have me thinking I shouldn't have wasted my money on buying you those books," she said, and blundered out of the room.

By dinnertime she seemed more in control of herself. They had meat and vegetable stew as usual, the meal which she often told him was what a growing boy needed. As usual, it tasted blander than it had smelled, as though the tastes had drifted away on the air. He mimed enjoying it, and after a few mouthfuls he said, "I like you buying me books, Auntie. I do read them."

"Do you truly? They weren't just my idea, you know. Your mother thought they would put your mind on the right track." She scooped a mush of vegetables onto her fork and looked up, balancing her cutlery on the edge of her plate. "Try to understand, Ben – this is hard for me too. It was one thing having you stay for a week every so often, but I never thought I'd be sharing my life with someone after I'd got used to living on my own, even with such a good boy as you. You mustn't think I'm complaining, but you'll give me time to get used to it, won't you? 1 know I can never replace your mother, but if there's anything within reason I can do to make you happier, don't be afraid to speak up."

"Please may I have one of the photographs you brought from the house?"

"Of course you may, Ben. Will you have one of you with your mother?"

Ben chewed another mouthful, but that didn't keep his ques? tion down. "Auntie, why didn't you like my dad and his? family?",

She closed her eyes as if his gaze was hurting her. "I'm being silly, Ben, you're right. I'll find you a photograph of all of you."

"But why didn't you like them?"

"Perhaps I'll tell you when you're older."

He thought she was blaming them for his mother's death. If he persisted she mightn't give him the photograph. Later, while he was clearing the table, she went up to her room, and stayed there until he began to think she had decided to refuse. At iast she brought him a photograph of himself as- a baby in his mother's arms. "That's your christening. I got your mother to have you baptised."

His father was supporting Ben's mother, or perhaps he was leaning on her; he looked as if he wanted to mop his shiny forehead. The summer heat which had stretched wide the leaves of the trees in the churchyard of St Christopher's had visibly enfeebled his grandparents. All the smiles, even his aunt's, were past their best, as if everyone had tired of waiting for the click of the camera. Ben gazed at the photograph, feeling as if he was somehow missing the point of it, until his aunt hugged him awkwardly, making him smell of her lavender-water. "You can always talk to me about them if you need to," she said. "You ran away because I hadn't given you enough time to say goodbye, didn't you?"

The question sounded casual, but he sensed how on edge she was for his answer. "Yes, Auntie," he said, unable to decide how far he'd fallen short of telling the truth. "What do you think happened to them all? Nobody would tell me."

"Carelessness, Ben. That's all it could have been, up there in broad daylight in the middle of nowhere. You should never distract someone when they're driving." She enfolded his hands in her warm plump slightly wrinkled grasp. "Thank God you were staying with me that week. We can't bring any of them back, but we'll do our best for each other, won't we? Time for bed now. No arguments, you've school tomorrow. A fine guardian I'd be if I let you bend the rules."

When he was in bed he called down to her. She let him lie under the blanket while she knelt by the bed and intoned prayers for him to amen. Her praying for peace for his family stayed with him after she'd tucked the blanket tight as a bandage around him. Somehow the idea of eternal peace invoked a memory of being carried on his father's shoulders, feeling as though he could pull the stars down from the black ice which held them and from which they had seemed already to be falling, gleams turning slowly in the night air. It had been snowing, of course, but it was odd that his father had carried him into the forest on such a night, so deep into the forest that it had swallowed the lights of Stargrave. Where had his father meant to take him that Ben had been shivering with anticipation? Ben's mind seemed to shrink from the memory, and soon a jumble of thoughts like overlapping channels on a radio put him to sleep.

He awoke feeling full of the night at its darkest. A thought had wakened him – the thought that the dark, or something in it, had a message for him. He lay staring up, trying to recall what he'd failed to grasp. Surely this wasn't yet another of the mysteries which had to wait until he was old enough. That reminded him of Edward Sterling's last book, of Ben's grandfather telling him that in order to finish it Edward Sterling had ventured so far into the icy wastes under the midnight sun that he'd had to be brought back more dead than alive from a place without a name, and had died in Stargrave almost as soon as he'd finished the book. "What did he find?" Ben had wanted to know.

His grandfather had gazed hard at him, looking like himself reflected in a distorting mirror – withered, pale, his limbs stiffening into unfamiliar shapes – and Ben had wondered if Edward Sterling had looked like that too. "One day you'll know," his grandfather had said.

Ben gathered himself like a swimmer and slipped quickly out of bed. His aunt was snoring so loudly she must be fast asleep. Nevertheless he left the light above the stairs switched off as he tiptoed down to the front room. The house stood in the dimness between two streetlamps, and the houses opposite were unlit, but he was just able to distinguish Edward Sterling's book, its spine darker than those of its companions on the shelf. He closed his fingers around the spine, whose binding made him think of old skin, and squatted by the gap between the curtains.

The book fell open at the frontispiece, which showed a wizened old man sitting crosslegged and beating a drum with the palms of his hands. In the dimness his eyes resembled globes of black ice. Ben had often thought that he must have been one of the magicians who were supposed to beat drums for months to keep the midnight sun alight, but now the eyes unnerved him. He began to turn the pages, peering at the chunks of unrhymed verse which the book said was magic poetry but which he had never been able to follow. He supposed he would have to turn on the light when he found what he was looking for, though the stars tonight seemed almost bright enough to read by. Indeed, he was beginning to distinguish the separate lines of print on the pages. He felt as if illumination was reaching for him. He didn't know how long he crouched there, but he was sure he was about to be able to read the words and what they had to tell him when he heard his aunt wailing his name.

She ran downstairs clumsily, switching on lights. She must have found his bed empty while he'd been so engrossed in gazing at the book that he hadn't heard her get up. When she barged into the room, grabbing wildly at the light-switch, he wobbled to his feet. "I couldn't sleep, Auntie. I only wanted -"

He wasn't sure how to continue, but she appeared not to be listening; she was staring grey-faced at the book in his hands as if it mattered more than anything he could say. He leaned it against the boys' adventure annuals on the shelf and headed for the door as she stepped aside like a wardress.

The guilt of having upset her again kept him awake almost until dawn; but when she wakened him for school she was smiling as if the day had disposed of the night. He felt better at once because she did. If his reading the book bothered her, he'd wait until she was out of the house.

But that evening, when he sneaked into the front room for a surreptitious glance at the picture of the shaman with the drum, he found the annuals were alone on the shelf. He ran into the kitchen, where his aunt was chopping vegetables. "Auntie, where's my book?"

She glanced at him with a casualness which didn't begin to fool him. "I couldn't have been thinking, Ben. A woman came collecting books for some charity, and I didn't like to let her go away empty-handed. Never mind, you've still got the photograph I gave you. It was only an old book."