Noonday

TWELVE

Nightmares crawled across each other like copulating toads. He was walking with Neville along a shingle beach, the rasp and roar of waves loud in his ears, but then he realized it wasn’t the waves, it was Neville’s breathing. Humped shapes lay at intervals along the shore. He assumed they were seals, and expected them to heave and lollop into the water, but they didn’t, and as he got closer he saw they were corpses, some stranded on the shoreline, others drifting to and fro on the tide: all too badly burned to be identified. Then, as he probed them, one stood up and seemed about to speak, its lipless mouth struggling to form words…

The dream shifted. He was going through the front door at home, throwing his school satchel down on the floor by the stairs. His hand was on the living-room door, but he hesitated, afraid to go in, afraid of what he would find. She’d be standing by the window and, though he knew she’d heard his footsteps, she wouldn’t turn round. She never turned round. Always, he had to touch her, pull her back, make her notice him. Then, slowly, she would turn — and turn and turn and turn, day after day. He never knew which face he was going to see: blank with misery, blubbery with tears, contracted into a hard, angry knot. Sometimes she didn’t turn at all, merely brushed his hand away as if it were an insect crawling across her skin. At other times, but rarely, she managed a smile: always with that curious string of saliva at the corner of her mouth — it should have been repulsive, but it wasn’t, not to him; it was one of the things he loved most about her — and then sometimes she’d say his name, but tentatively, as if she couldn’t quite remember who he was.

On the day they came to get her, she was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, and so, for a moment, he thought she must be better. But his father was home from work and he shouldn’t be — he was working two till ten — and Gran was in the kitchen, banging pots and pans. “I thought you were going to tea at your Auntie May’s?” she said. “Why, what’s happening?” “Nothing.” He looked at Dad, who just shook his head. It was bad, Paul knew it was. So he went straight to his mother and knelt beside her.

She had tears trickling down her face. Back when things were normal, before the standing-at-the-window began, she used to sing, and so he sang to her now: hymns — she knew hundreds of hymns — music-hall songs — she loved the music hall — and so he sang all her favorites, every single one. He was afraid to stop; he knew if he stopped something bad would happen. He even had a go at the “Hallelujah Chorus.” “Jesus Christ!” Gran muttered in the kitchen. At first, it didn’t seem as if his mother were listening, but after a while she reached out and squeezed his hand.

A knock on the door. Wiping her hands on her pinny, Gran went to answer it. His father hung back. A horse-drawn wagon had pulled up outside; he caught only one glimpse of it before Dad grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him into the front room. From the window, he saw them helping her into the wagon. The driver flicked the reins, the wheels started to turn, and, as if realizing what was happening for the first time, she turned to look back.

Meeting him in the street a few weeks later, the vicar said, “Why’ve you stopped coming to choir practice, Paul?”

Because. Because, because, because, because…

He went on seeing her standing by the window. She lingered like an after-image on the retina, except that after-images fade and this never did. There she stood, looking out onto a yard where nothing grew, where there was nothing to see except brick walls imprisoning a patch of sky. Still, even now, he had to touch her, make her acknowledge him: Mam, Mam. Still, he never knew which face he’d see. The angry face was the one he dreaded most: the shout, the slap that sent him flying…She was angry now and he was frightened, really frightened this time — only, thank God, he heard Dad coming up the passage, the door opened, and there he was—

“Dad!”

A cold hand touched his forehead. He opened his eyes and it wasn’t Dad, it was a man he’d never seen before, a man whose face, like a reflection in ruffled water, slowly settled and resolved into—

“Neville.”

“You were shouting.”

“Was I?” He stared round the room. “I’m sorry, I—”

“You were shouting, ‘Dad!’ ”

“Was I?” He struggled to sit up, but the movement set the vertigo off and he was glad to sink back onto the pillows. “Poor old Dad, he was never much use when he was alive. What time is it?”

“Ten to four.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Look, you go back to bed, I’ll be all right.”

But he couldn’t stop looking at the window, afraid of finding her there, or something there.

“I’ll get you some water.”

Even in the few minutes Neville was gone, Paul must have drifted off to sleep for the next time he woke Neville was at the window pulling up the blinds. Hard, scouring light flooded into the room and, like slugs sprinkled with salt, the nightmares shriveled and died.

“Let’s get you into these pajamas, shall we? You’ll feel a lot more comfortable.”

Before helping him into the jacket, Neville took a flannel soaked in tepid water and gave Paul’s arms and chest a quick rub. Paul knew it made sense, his skin was slick with sweat, but he hated it all the same, the enforced intimacy, and withdrew, as far as he could, turning his head to one side, disowning the stinking carcass on the bed. When it was finished, though, he did, admittedly, feel a whole lot better.

Neville threw the towel over his shoulder and picked up the bowl. “I think I should phone Elinor.”

“There’s no need, she’s got enough on.”

“I think she should know where you are, at least.”

“I’ll be home in a couple of hours.”

Neville looked doubtful. “Let’s see how you get on.”

Though the nightmares had gone, their fetid darkness stained the day. Paul kept looking at the window, expecting to see her standing there, or his father coming through the door, shambling and inept. As you get older, you think you’re moving further away from your parents, leaving them behind, but it’s not like that. There’s a trick, a flaw, some kind of hidden circularity in the path, because suddenly, in old age, there they are in front of you again, and getting closer by the day.

This particular day dragged. Neville closed the curtains because the brightness hurt Paul’s eyes. He couldn’t read: even the movement of his eyes across the page was enough to bring the dizziness back. He could do nothing, in fact, except lie with his eyes closed or every now and then glance apprehensively at the lighter square of gray that was the window.

Surprisingly often, he found himself thinking about the woman in the square. How she must’ve noticed him watching the ginger-haired boy kicking the football around. No other explanation of what she’d claimed to see was possible. But the woman herself haunted him. Her singing. “Land of Hope and Glory” of all things, one of the songs he’d sung that day. She’d had remarkable eyes — blue with the merest hint of mauve, the color of harebells — and all the more remarkable for being sunk in wads of fat. And my God she stank.

Yet, somehow, this ludicrous woman had seen him watching the boy and put her finger — possibly a rather mercenary finger — on his grief.

If “grief” was the right word. He’d scarcely known Kenny well enough to grieve for him. No, what he felt was regret; guilt, even. Taking Kenny back to his mother had been the wrong decision, arrived at for the wrong reasons. Elinor was right: he hadn’t been thinking about Kenny at all. It had been about himself and his mother. A kind of proxy reconciliation; a reconciliation that in his own life had never been achieved. So he’d failed in the most basic human task: to shield the present from the deforming weight of the past. And now, lying in a strange bed, in the hot, close darkness of a strange room, his condemnation of himself was absolute.

By midafternoon he was starting to feel hot again. Neville brought him a cup of tea, but he couldn’t drink it. Sleep, that was the thing — and no more nightmares, please God. Throwing off the covers, he tried to ignore the images that clung to the inside of his skull, thousands of them — black, furry, insistent, clicking…

“Ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous?”

“This. Me.”

“Blame the Witch of Endor.”

“Oh, so you think I’m cursed, do you?”

Neville tapped him on the head. “Go to sleep.”

And, abruptly, as if he’d been waiting for that word of command, he fell asleep.