Black Chalk E-Book

Albert Alla

• Herausgeber: Garnet Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In the Oxfordshire countryside, a student walks into a classroom and starts shooting. Nate Dillingham, friends with shooter and victims alike, is the sole survivor and only witness. Easily led and eager to please, his recollections weave around others' hopes, until he loses track of what really happened that day. Unable to resume his normal life after he leaves hospital, Nate decides to travel instead of going to university, hoping to escape, to avoid the memories. After eight evasive years on the road, he returns to Oxford, meets Leona and plunges into a world of candour and desire. But his defences are deteriorating, and Leona shares too much of his past...This chilling contemporary thriller is an unsettling tale of passion and guilt, which takes the reader on an edgy journey into twenty-first century morality.

Leseprobe

Black Chalk

Albert Alla

Black Chalk

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Garnet Publishing Limited

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Copyright © Albert Alla, 2013

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by

any electronic or mechanical means, including information

storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing

from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote

brief passages in a review.

First Edition

ISBN: 9781859643587

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset bySamantha Barden

Jacket design byGarnet Publishing

Cover imagesSilhouette of man © Harsanyi Andras and Diffuse sexy woman silhouette, hands © Daniel M. Nagy, courtesy of Shutterstock.com

Printed and bound in Lebanon by International Press: [email protected]

.

One

I guess this is the story everyone’s been waiting for. The badges who expected me to bow and confess. The friends who kept quiet and hoped I’d let something out. The twenty-year-old I met in the Mediterranean, who heard my name, stroked his chin, and demanded my story as if it belonged to him. And most of all, the inspector who probed and probed, until all he had left was a challenge.

I’ve never wanted cameras brandished in my face or tape recorders thrust at my throat. And I’ve done as much as I could to avoid it. Not only did I leave the country, but I’ve also been calling myself Nathan, for Nate Dillingham evoked too much blood.

Now eight years on, I’m back in Oxford. I’m sitting in an attic room that contains all the things I owned before I went off. A room my mother put together to help me dispel my doubts. There’s even a poster of The Verve above my bed. And, of course, she’s done what she set out to do: after years on the road, this red-brick house off the Banbury Road feels like home. She’s thrust me back into the world I fled, as convinced today as she was then that stability is what I need.

My laptop is set up on the one item which wasn’t mine, a creaky walnut desk which, if I remember right, was in the guest room of our Hornsbury home. The blue of my old chair has faded, but my back still rests comfortably on its cushions. There’s a photo board to my right full of old family pictures. A childhood pruned of all my school friends.

In one picture, I stand between my father and my brother. We are in our cricket whites, standing in front of the pavilion. My sixteen-year-old frame hasn’t had time to fill out yet. My torso leans away as if I’m trying to escape through the edge of the picture. I wear an awkward smile: my thick lips show a fraction of my teeth, while my eyes look seriously at the camera. In comparison, my little brother seems natural, holding a sullen pose on one arched leg, while my father stands straight and content, a cricket bat balancing between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Seeing this picture reminds me of who took it: Jeffrey, on the day he clung on to a one-handed diving catch at gully, which he talked about for weeks afterwards. The same Jeffrey who should be pruned from my life. I shouldn’t have to think about him and the others in this roundabout way. This is exactly why I’m sitting on this chair staring at a black cursor flashing against a white background.

I’ve made myself two cups of tea since I started this, and my legs are consorting with my mouth, itching for a third. I won’t do it, not until I’ve started writing. From photographic reels to blurs and blanks, I should begin with the destruction itself.

***

The 10th of February 2000 was a rare bright day in a generally overcast winter. The sort of day that made me think that school was almost over. Along with the rest of my class, I was ambling along, convinced that there was always more time ahead, and that if all else failed, I could use the weeks leading up to the exams to cram everything I’d been taught over the last two years. I already had an offer and I felt confident I could get the marks. In eight months, if everything went well, I would start Physics and Philosophy eight miles away, in Oxford.

The first lesson of the day, history, was held in the red bricks of the main building. When it ended, Jeffrey and I headed for our physics class, along an outdoor archway that stopped halfway down the hill, its arches supported by columns, and the columns adorned with eroded crests. As our school’s only shot at the grandiose, it featured heavily on all its propaganda, and in much of the coverage that followed that day. Beth, whose lipstick matched the scarf around her neck, walked with us up to the point where the archway leaves the building – it was a detour in the cold for her, but she’d taken it every Thursday since the New Year. Ever since she’d dragged Jeffrey and a bottle of whisky into a night of platonic debauchery.

When she left us, I noticed his backpack for the first time. It was new: its body was bright red, its base was leather tainted burgundy. The same colours as that thing she wore around her head. I pointed at it and laughed. He smiled but he sounded sad:

‘Tuesday, we spent the whole night in bed.’

‘Alone, just the two of you?’

‘I don’t know what’s going on. Didn’t even kiss or anything.’

‘Did you try?’

‘She was like, she didn’t want to. I even gave her a massage.’

We went quiet, for we’d arrived at the Kemp Annexe, a 1960s addition overlooking the sports ground.

For many months after that day, my conversation with Jeffrey was a safe memory. My thoughts would start with him looking longingly at Beth, and if I felt strong enough, I’d stop them at Jeffrey’s new bag. In those happy instances, I would be left with a smile. But there were plenty of others when I felt weak, when the redness of his bag collapsed in a gallop, and I started thinking of the way Mr Johnson looked at us.

We were late and he stared at us. The last row was empty, the chairs still on the table as he insisted we keep them. He already had both hands in his pockets, his arms framing his pot belly, as he tsk-tsked and shook his head. We took our seats. Jeffrey nudged me under the table, and I struggled to keep a straight face.

‘Mr Dillingham, Mr Baker, welcome!’ Mr Johnson was still shaking his head. ‘I’m honoured that you managed to join us. But let’s give you your due: you’re not as late as Mr Knight and Mr Williams. I’ll give them another thirty seconds.’ He looked down and clicked his tongue in time with the second hand of his watch, before he raised his eyes to the class, a satisfied expression on his face. ‘Can’t say we didn’t wait for them. Let’s get going.’

We opened our books on page 212 – it had a picture of a teenager in bright green short shorts, a basketball inches from his fingers, black dashes arching between his hands and the basket – and started a problem set. Mr Johnson believed in teaching passively, asking us to try problems much like the ones we would encounter in our exams. While we sat and worked, he was at his desk marking copies, and when he had no copies to mark, he gazed through the window at the sports ground. There’s a form of respect in acknowledging that he was a little lazy, that he wanted to use his teaching time to do his evening work. But his methods were successful. Some, like Eric, had changed schools so that they could take physics at Hornsbury School.

A few minutes into the class, Jeffrey tapped me on the hand and pointed at Jayvanti who was sitting one table in front of us. Arching my neck, I couldn’t see very much. But then Jeffrey whispered her name, she turned around, and for a few seconds, while they traded answers, all I could see were four undone buttons and a braid tickling the top of her brown breasts. When she turned to face the front, Jeffrey nudged me under the table and we stifled a snigger. Then he wrote on my notebook:

‘Is it true Eric fancies her?’

‘Who wouldn’t?’ I wrote.

He put his pencil down and started whispering:

‘Can you imagine? Him with a girl!’ He nudged me again. ‘Oh, come on, tell me. I’m sure he told you!’

At that moment, Mr Johnson noticed students chatting and cleared his throat. He asked whether everyone had finished. When no one answered, he considered us all one at a time, as if his next decision required deep thoughts, until his eyes settled on Anna.

‘Miss Walker, will you come to the board and show the rest of us how to solve the third problem?’

She was still sitting on the other side of the room from me, where she’d moved to after we split up. And just as she had done for the last month and a half, she looked at everyone but me while she made her way up the centre aisle.

As she stood up, a rattling sound came from the vestibule, the sound of thick metal sliding, links clanging against each other softened by a door or two. Anna turned her head towards the door and when no one said anything, she went up to the blackboard and started talking about the problem: acceleration and velocity in a frictionless world. Just as she started to differentiate a binomial, the door opened.

Eric walked in – a chain in his hand, a large blue sports bag slung over his shoulder – and shut the door, his back to us.

‘Mr Knight, you are late! But it doesn’t matter. It’s your future. Take a seat’ – Mr Johnson pointed – ‘and listen to Miss Walker tackle this problem.’

Eric paid no attention to Mr Johnson. Instead, he turned his attention towards the door, and we watched him, bemused, as he uncoiled his chain and looped it between the door handle and the frame of a nearby shelf, looping once, looping twice, as he bolted it with a padlock and checked the whole mechanism with a firm tug.

‘Mr Knight?’ Mr Johnson said. ‘Eric, what are you doing? Eric!’

Eric advanced towards a window opposite the door, the one with a green exit sign above it, checked it was locked, and turned towards us. He looked prophetic: his face starved, his usually floppy black hair stretched above his skull, and his ever-intense eyes now bloodshot, wide open, taking in everyone. Even Mr Johnson went quiet as we waited.

Perhaps I am imagining this, but I have a vague memory of Eric’s eyes boring into my face during that silence. And if I’m not inventing this, he lowered his chin once in my direction. Still, I can’t be sure this happened, for all I have are those two faint images, a close-up on his eyes, a slow nod.

Some things, I remember as if they happened last week. Eric reaching into his bag and grabbing two objects. And for an instant, my eyes seeing nothing but the barrels’ glistening metal, and the matte texture of the grip through the gaps between his fingers. Placing one in each hand, his voice: ‘This won’t last long.’ He said it as if his future had already taken place, as if his design came from more than himself. ‘And,’ he added, ‘don’t worry, that includes me too.’

Writing this, I find myself squirming, making up reasons to leave my desk. It seems I’ve been telling myself the pain was gone, when I really meant the memories had grown more distant. I have to push past the image of Eric standing armed in front of us while we watched and waited. It lasted but a moment, and then the stillness shattered.

At first, it was Anna screaming and then desks flipping and falling onto the floor, chairs and bags flapping along. There was a rush of bodies towards the door which did not give, and two deep voices trying to break through the cacophony. The girls sitting at the table behind me stayed put and whispered to one another, as if they were discussing the best way to leave an awful play. But their whispers were hoarse: they were stifled shouts, a restraint on madness. And two voices kept on trying to break through. Mr Johnson, in the same voice he always used, proclaiming that we were not in America, that this was ridiculous. And another voice asking for calm. It wasn’t Eric – he was observing from his corner of the room, waiting for us, it seemed.

It was Tom Davies standing up and moving towards Eric. When he was two metres away, Eric took aim. Tom stopped and raised his arms, his lips still forming soothing sounds – sounds which I wish I could recall. But sadly, they have left nothing but conflicting echoes. And yet, as I picture him now, I reconstruct his likeness and see him speak, and I hear him too, saying words that I conjure up from the traces he left behind.

Tom turned and addressed us, those who were listening. ‘Quiet, quiet,’ I hear him say, ‘we can work something out. There’s no need to do anything silly. We just need to talk it out.’

Tom was splendid, his voice coaxing us into hope, his gentle movements and his statements still carrying the authority he deserved. He loomed large in my mind then, an everyday example risking centre stage when it might mean death. He was facing the front wall, Eric to his left, the door to his right, and the rest of us strewn across the classroom.

‘Eric, there’s no need to do this. Think about it. Please.’ He tried to engage Eric’s eyes.

‘Sit down, Tom,’ Eric said, still aiming at Tom’s chest. ‘Don’t get in the way.’

Perhaps Tom thought Eric was listening, or perhaps he thought he’d appear less threatening sitting down. Whatever the reason, he obeyed him, taking down a chair from the last row and starting to talk again, his tones low and soothing: ‘Think of everyone here, think of your friends. You’ve spent two years here with us. And think of our families, think of—’

‘Shut up,’ Eric said with quiet strength. ‘If you say another word, I’ll shoot you.’

Tom looked stunned only for an instant. He recovered and looked at us, two rows from him, and started coordinating a sally with small movements of his head. I believe Eric saw it all but decided to ignore it. Instead he addressed Laura, and, almost kindly, asked her to put her phone away.

‘Thank you,’ he told her and turned to the three students working on the chain. His voice remained even, each sentence pronounced with the same rehearsed emphasis. ‘It won’t budge, and the vestibule’s locked too. Go back to your desks. I don’t want to get in between you and your deaths. If you want to write something, or if you want to pray, I can wait one minute.’

One minute. All of my blood seemed to have drained to my feet. I looked across at Anna and saw her looking at me. Her right hand was clutching the backrest of a chair, and her left was clawing at her right forearm. Her eyes were moist, and I wanted to bridge the distance. One minute. There never was that minute. Had Tom and Mr Johnson held off a little longer, the few who considered writing – I remember Edward Moss and Jayvanti Patel in front of me grabbing their pens – would have had time to set something down.

Instead Tom leaped, and there was the first of many hollow cracks, and there was no more splendour, no more calls for calm. And there was a jolt starting in my chest and spreading down my limbs, and I was fast as a blur. And Eric looked around, arms raised, or perhaps he was shooting from the hip, and there was no more pretence. And we were ducking, crawling, crying, and most of all shouting. And we tried the windows but the windows could only open so as to let in the smallest of draughts, except for the one window which opened all the way, but that was where Eric stood.

I tasted metal. I had blood in my mouth, but I wasn’t wounded. The thought crossed my mind that I might not feel a gunshot, that I would die too quickly to feel the bullet butcher my flesh, but that, in death, I could carry over something so trivial as the taste of blood in my mouth – the last input my brain would have been able to decipher. But I wasn’t dead: I just had blood in my mouth.

Anna was crouching next to me, holding my hand, struggling with the onset of a panic attack. For a brief moment, as I squeezed her hand, a sudden sadness weighed on my shoulders. And it was gone with a grunt, one loud grunt at first, and then four more in decrescendo. Jeffrey was on the floor in pain. And Anna was crushing my hand, her breathing reduced to a rasping sound, air scraping into her lungs, her breasts jerking up and down ever faster. In the few seconds I spent stroking her arm and whispering so she would calm down, I was aware of a body I had loved, now fighting itself. I knew I ought to feel something, perhaps apprehension or dread. Ideally it would have been love and forgiveness but I would have taken simple lust. It didn’t have to be beautiful. But I wanted it to be strong. Nothing came.

Jeffrey was no longer grunting. Eric wasn’t by the window anymore, and pretty Jayvanti’s curvy body straddled a fallen chair on the floor. I surveyed the scene. It was meticulous, yes: neat and precise. Even the chaos made sense. Don’t listen to me, there was no honour in the chaos. One, two, three, crack. I’d survived. One, two, crack, crack, three, crack. Even now, I can’t do the moment justice. Even now, I can’t tell it right: the images are there, however smudged, but the words don’t follow.

***

They were all still, except for Anna whom I could hear breathing, and Grace whose leg I could see twitching. How long had it been since Eric had come into the classroom? It felt like it had happened a long time ago and that it hadn’t happened yet. But the classroom was quiet, except for the three of us breathing and bleeding. Grace made no sound, as quiet in agony as she had been in life. And I crawled back to Anna’s side, who was silent now. I lay there wondering what to do about the bullet in my stomach.

If a part of me remembers the pain, another sees me disassociated, above the room, floating amongst ideas and images. My hands were covering my stomach, my back resting against two school bags and part of an overturned table, my knees as close to my midriff as I could bring them, blood slowly seeping out. Help was coming, I knew. Help: the word came to life. I imagined a swarm of doctors resuscitating our limp bodies, lifting us onto comfortable stretchers, airlifting us to a new hospital, removing and discarding the traces of the day from our bodies, and discharging us a day later after a long night’s sleep. I needed sleep. And then school would declare a week-long recovery, which I would spend reading and watching cricket.

The picture was too hopeful. Help would be two policemen coming to investigate a routine call, wondering what to do outside the chained door, and deciding to kick it in and assess what was inside before asking for reinforcements. They would come in, see the carnage and then, it was almost worth a laugh, I would die before the ambulance turned up.

***

Help arrived as help is meant to arrive. The spectacle trod on, and I was draining away in its midst, curiously overtaken by a profound wonder. Wonder at the eclectic scene around me, and wonder at the commotion gathering outside. At first, it was the lonely sound of a siren blaring far from all traffic – I imagined its cold blue light flashing past the grey leafless trees up to the cold blue sky. As if it realised its incongruity, it stopped, giving way to a murmur of muddled voices. To the sound of metal on metal: they were cutting through the outside door, and then they were hammering their way through. These were harsh sounds but they had to be. And then a teacher led them to the fire exit on the side of the building, hidden in between two thorny bushes. It wasn’t much of an exit, just a low-lying window with a foldable stile. And then they were in. Shock gently etched onto their faces, giving way to an uneasy determination, the scowls and pursed lips smoothing into a final flat mask. There were to be no smiles, no tears – just a job to do.

A woman was sitting by me.

‘Let me see,’ she asked. But I didn’t want to show her. I told her to go and see to the others, I was fine and they needed help. ‘Let me see,’ she said. I told her to take a look at Anna. I asked her whether anyone else was alive. She didn’t know. ‘Let me see,’ she said. I just had to lift my hand for a few instants.

I noticed sweat glistening on her forehead. She was a nice woman, I decided. ‘Are you cold?’ she asked. I was a little cold – she took off her jacket and laid it over me. She told me to stay in the position I was already in. I was doing just the right thing. ‘I’m a natural,’ I told her. She smiled and helped me get more comfortable. ‘Is this your blood?’ she asked. I explained to her that I didn’t know, but I thought a lot of it was Jeffrey’s, and a little was Anna’s. She wedged a toppled chair between my toes and another table. I hadn’t noticed how tense my legs were until I was able to relax them. She asked me what had happened. Such an innocent question, I thought; she didn’t need to look guilty. ‘Eric,’ I started and stopped. She seemed to understand.

I asked her why she was helping me when so many others were worse off. ‘I’m staying with you until we can take you to a hospital,’ she said. I told her she should take care of the others, I was fine. She gave me a tight-lipped smile and said the others were being taken care of. I looked around: there were about ten people in the room, all paramedics except for two people in plain clothes with a bolt cutter having a go at the chain. I recognised the groundsman and an old maths teacher. Their names stuck on the tip of my tongue. A man was by Anna’s side, back to back with the woman taking care of me. She told me her name was Liz. Just like my mother. They were about the same age. I couldn’t think of any more similarities.

I wanted to tell her something. But I couldn’t recall her name. Yes, of course. ‘Liz.’

‘I’m here. I’m still here. You’ll be on your way to hospital in no time. Don’t worry.’

I told her I wasn’t worried, but I had to tell her something. ‘Yes, I’m listening, don’t worry.’ I explained I wasn’t worried, but I wanted her to tell my parents how much I appreciated what they’d done for me, and that I didn’t want a grave. I thought graves were too grim. If they needed a monument, couldn’t they plant a tree? Liz was nodding along, saying I shouldn’t worry – I wasn’t worried – and that I would be able to tell them myself. I smiled at her and thanked her.

They put me on a stretcher, stuck a few cushions underneath my knees, and covered me with a blanket. Outside, rain was approaching. A hint of mist was drifting through Hornsbury School but the sun kept on shining. Colours were stronger and warmer for it. The incandescence of the ambulances on the grass, the reflections of policemen’s jackets standing guard, the contrasts in the resurgent crowd. I looked for Anna and saw Grace in an ambulance shutting its doors. Liz was still by my side. ‘Where’s Anna?’ I asked her. They slid my stretcher into the ambulance and she asked me who Anna was. She was already ahead, she then explained. I imagined Anna in an ambulance asking the same questions about me. She’d gone by helicopter, Liz added. Anna would like that, I thought. ‘Where’s Jeffrey?’ I asked. She said he was being taken care of. I asked whether he was in an ambulance. ‘Not yet,’ she answered. I understood what she wasn’t telling me.

I needed to stay awake, to fight off the great weariness dulling my pain.

And I wanted to ask where Tom was. And I wanted to know where Mr Johnson was. And Jayvanti Patel, and Laura Clarkson, and Satish Choudary, and Edward Moss, and Paul Cumnor, and Harry Williams. But Harry Williams hadn’t come to class today. And Eric Knight. I had to complete the litany.

I looked around myself and wondered where I was, wondered why I wasn’t in school. My answers were exotic, my logic capricious, my impressions oneiric. Odd yet normal, twisted yet clear. It had to be a dream, I told myself. But my lacerated stomach wouldn’t let me escape. I tried anyway, sprinkling my wishes with realism. It was morning and I was on my way to school, another day except that physics had been cancelled.

The ambulance slowed suddenly. Something rattled, a soft sound of metal on metal, and the spell broke. It started to come to me, a swirl of sensations sweeping all in their way, gathering speed, shimmering outside a familiar building, materialising in anticipation, and entering brashly into an unwary classroom – I stopped the thought. There was no need to go any further, I knew it all so well.

‘That’s right, we’re almost there. You only need to hold on a little longer. You’re very brave, you know. We’re in Marston already, yes, it’s not far.’ She was holding my arm. It seemed like she was whispering in my ear, keeping me from wasting into nothingness with her murmurs.

***

My memories of A&E are incoherent. Like a childhood condensed, I remember things I didn’t do and events I wasn’t at. Liz had left me, or I had left her. And perhaps necessity unlocked an awareness that let me see my mother drive towards the hospital, or perhaps the vivid details that come to my mind are nothing but the product of a pronounced delirium. Yet there she is, coming out of a lecture and hearing of the shooting. Immediately deciding to drive to the John Radcliffe Hospital instead of my school.

Meanwhile, my flesh was in a large rectangular room on a table that paraded as a bed, surrounded by a team of doctors in garbs. I see them all wearing the same loose sober greens, asexual and indistinguishable. As I was wheeled in, I noticed two teams waiting and one already at work. Grace being brought in ahead of me; I had time to see her unit set up before the curtains were drawn shut. Her team seemed military: a stout man – his silhouette rises out of the fog – delivering curt orders, everyone following them, his soldiers either moving purposefully or standing at attention.

They ignored the shout-fest coming from the team on the other side of the room, but I couldn’t. There, looking past two blurry greens, I glimpsed a foreign face: pale and drawn. It was her hair, ash darkened by damp, which I recognised.

A doctor gave me something for the pain: this will make you feel like you’ve had five pints, I heard. My carcass stopped mattering as its suffering washed away. What was left of my attention, the spirals which had survived the doctors’ concoctions, listened to the enumeration of expletives coming from my left. And then I heard her staunch the profane. Was she speaking? My limbs weren’t responding, surgeons were at me, I couldn’t get closer and decipher her groans. I started to empathise with her pain, but too soon they were barking over her, and I was left to myself. Alive. Alone.

Loneliness was sweeping me towards a hollow, defeated and drained, when I saw my mother by my side. It’s the last memory I have of that decisive day, the last memory before I gave in to the inevitable slide. She had followed someone through the electronically locked doors, bravado carrying her past hospital protocol. She stood and looked at me a full minute before anyone saw her. When asked to leave, she approached me. Her fingers covered mine. She squeezed them until she knew I could feel her.

Two

The memories of my early convalescence are of ash and soot. My eyelids too heavy to respond, I was at the mercy of a slow current. My consciousness dragged me through greys and blacks. Through the ash, I glimpsed a small house with no door. I tried to get closer but we were floating in the same river. For all I knew, the house could have been a pile of granite and burned wood. It left me behind when the soot settled.

Respite came when sleepless dreams congealed into dreamless sleep. There were voices around me and then they were gone. I did not have the will to understand them. All my strength veiled the blunt pain that spread through me with every throb.

The soot was more violent than the ash. It took me to a great windswept plain. I was surrounded by an ocean of yellowed grass. And the clouds promised blood. I turned and turned, afraid to look up, searching for shelter, a trench, a furrow.

Dreams went but the pain persisted.

As the slumber thinned, voices became people. There were nurses talking over me, and there were nurses talking over others. A new strand brought me relief: its warm lilt, its limpid diction, its calm command, and the courtesy it elicited. My mother was asking the nurses about me. I could hear her breathing by my side, murmuring, paper rustling. I could feel her hand on my forehead, the familiar calluses, her fingertips lingering at my brow before rearranging my hair.

***

My first complete memory happened on the 12th of February, two days after I was rushed through A&E. I am told that my eyelids flickered and that my tongue gibbered before then. I put my body’s twitches to the fever I was fighting, an infection I picked up somewhere between the classroom and surgery, which was draining me quicker than a punctured stomach.

It was the sound of both voices at the same time that pierced through the stupor. And her confessional tones, almost submissive, made the moment stand out.

‘Someone needs to be here,’ she was saying.

‘What about James? He needs you too.’

‘Now that you’re back, can’t you take care of him?’

‘He needs his mother.’

Her words briefly unravelled into inaudible whispers, before her voice reasserted itself: ‘… Nate gets better, I’ll spend more time at home.’

They were right by my bed, speaking in hushed tones. I had the sense of listening in to a private conversation, the sort they would have in their room, the door closed, before coming out to present my brother and me with a common front.

‘I sat next to Grace’s mother at the meeting this morning,’ my mother was confessing. ‘I didn’t know what to say… But she understood. It’s not what she said, she hardly speaks English.’ She paused. ‘Henry, she’s so dignified! I wanted to hug her… But I didn’t dare, it’s not like we know each other. Still, moments like these bring people together.’

They stayed silent for a minute. I wanted to stretch my hand and touch them, but my fingers wouldn’t heed my orders.

‘Have you seen Eric’s parents?’ my father said.

‘Do you think I should?’

‘Well, they were good friends.’

‘Nate’s friends with everybody… But I’ve been thinking about it. His mother must be suffering more than any of us.’

‘No, you’re right.’ My father’s tones became more assertive. ‘You don’t have to go see anyone. The police will do all that, and you heard that Hill fellow, they’ll let us know what they find. We just have to wait for their findings.’

My mother’s voice weakened. ‘But does he really understand? He’s got no idea. He can’t, he doesn’t know what it means to be sitting here.’

My father had come back from overseas, Kenya, I think, where he’d been volunteering for one of his company’s pro bono projects. To have them both! I basked in the thought. But the matter of the conversation gnawed through the glow.

I groaned, my eyes half open, light streaming in. They were both up on their feet. My mother stroking my cheek, my father’s arm around her. I looked towards them and tried to smile.

‘Is he?’ my mother said looking towards my father. She cupped my forehead with her hand.

He went around the bed and laid his hand on my left wrist. ‘Nate?’ he asked.

‘He feels cooler. They said he’d hear first.’

I wanted to say I could but my lips wouldn’t part fully. I focused on my left hand, on the warmth of my father’s skin, and straightened my index finger, a tendon cording out all the way to my elbow.

‘Nate,’ my father said, ‘you’re safe. We’re here with you.’

I could hear my mother crying. ‘Darling,’ she said, fighting with her face. She looked to my father: ‘Oh, I’m glad we’re both here for this.’ Checking a sob, she turned towards me again, studied my face, and smiled timidly: ‘Nate, darling, your stomach, and then that fever… We love you so much, you know.’

I looked at the tears running down her face and felt helpless.

‘We’re very lucky…’ She was wearing one of my father’s old cardigans, the same green one she would take on road trips. ‘And look here,’ she moved aside and pointed at the window, ‘isn’t that a lovely view? You can even see Grandma’s old house from here. We used to go there once a month when you were little. Do you remember? She lived very close to here. I’ll show it to you when you get stronger.’ She leaned towards me and kissed me on the cheek.

She stopped talking and stood rooted by me. My father’s face was tanned for February. I tried to speak and nothing came out. I felt her hair brushing my lips.

‘What about the others?’ I whispered. Whispering was all I could manage.

She didn’t answer straight away.

‘What did he say?’ my father asked.

‘He asked about the others. Your brother was here yesterday, but he’s scared of hospitals you know. He’s staying with Stan today. I know you want to see him.’

She stopped as if there were nothing else to add.

‘What about the others?’ I whispered again.

She leaned back and breathed deeply. Looking at my father, she said: ‘He wants to know about the others. Nate, the most important thing is that you’re safe here with us. The doctors say you’ll be alright, you just need time to build your strength.’

I tried to speak again, but she didn’t lean forward to hear what I had to say. She exchanged a look with my father.

‘Darling, Nate. The others…’ When it seemed like she wouldn’t say any more, my father said:

‘They told us to let him rest.’

For a moment, I thought my mother would agree with ‘they’, the control-men, but she shook her head several times. ‘No, no, that’s not how we raised them. Nate, it’s not good news…’ One hand on my cheek, another stroking the fingers of my right hand, she looked for the right words. I could feel it coming from the coldness of her fingers.

‘It’s tragic, Nate, it’s so sad, I don’t know how to put it. All I know is that you’re here, and that’s a gift, and we should be thankful for it.’ She looked up towards the ceiling, tears illuminating her eyes.

I looked for the right word. It didn’t come. ‘Everyone?’ I said.

She hesitated. ‘No one outside your physics class.’

‘And Anna?’ I asked.

‘What did he say?’ asked my father.

‘He asked about Anna.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘Anna’s very weak. And even if she makes it, she won’t be the same.’

My father spoke: ‘You’ll get better in no time, Nate.’

I closed my eyes and searched for the house again, willing the current back into motion.

***

This morning, I went looking for my old drawing case. My mother thought I’d find it in the storage room under the stairs. The room was full of boxes, crates, and paintings that this new house has no space for. I didn’t find it – I may well come across it tomorrow if I rummage through the back section of the room.

My search stopped when I came across a dusty blue chest. It was just as I had left it all those years ago, the rusty padlock testifying that it had stayed closed over the years. I felt relieved. Her son gone for eight years, silent for seven, I would have understood my mother breaking the lock and looking inside. Knowing her curiosity, I’m surprised she left the chest alone. Perhaps she always expected me to come back, or perhaps she preferred ignorance in this one regard. Whatever its source, I appreciate her restraint – I don’t think I would be able to face her over dinner tonight if she were armed with my hospital thoughts.

I couldn’t remember where I’d hidden the key, so I fetched a large screwdriver from the kitchen and wedged it in the padlock and pushed. I could hear movements within its mechanism but it held together. There was a bigger toolkit in the garage: I found a handheld metal saw. I sharpened the blade and took it to the padlock. Once I managed to nick the shackle, the saw tore through the lock and the chest pried open.

The boy who locked the chest would have been too shy to tackle a reticent padlock. He would have scratched his head and moved on to something else. Or he would have asked someone else for help. Menial jobs, fluctuating finances, and wading through mud must have done their bit.

I’ve spent the best part of the day sprawled over my bed, immersed in my hospital diaries. In between tentative sketches, I found a medley of spare thoughts and painstaking descriptions. Nine words on Anna, followed by a sketch of my foot, and three pages on the nurses’ interactions. A paragraph on Jeffrey, another sketch of my foot, a still life, six words (no verb) on Eric, a page and a half on Inspector Hill’s mannerisms.

I’m starting to think that my psychiatrist was right, that I was fleeing it all. And yet, such things affect us differently. My reactions were just as right as those of snarling mothers and pontificating principals.

***

My parents moved to Hornsbury when I was four. A year before I was born, my father had left London and, teaming up with two colleagues, started a management consultancy. As luck had it, my mother was made a fellow of her college just as his business was becoming viable. Tired of their small Jericho flat, they decided to move out of the city and into the country. The way she tells the story, it sounds like it was my father who wanted to raise his children the way he was raised. But when I asked him about it, he explained in his careful, measured voice that he’d had a slight preference towards staying in Oxford, while my mother had had a strong preference for a garden: hence, as couples ought to do, they’d looked for a house in the country, and found what they were looking for in Hornsbury.

Now that I’ve heard stories of others’ childhoods, I realise how good mine was: I had a spacious garden, and up until my brother was old enough to play with me, a father who happily taught me how to juggle a football, catch a cricket ball, swing a racket. During the winter season, my mother drove me to football games, and my father took me along to his squash tournaments. In the summer, I followed him around the county’s cricket fields, at first cheering his every run, and then playing alongside him.

I still remember the day I first came on the field. I was eight, and it was only as a substitute fielder, but to me that didn’t take anything away from the moment: I was all of a sudden in the middle of everything. Every time a bowler ambled to the crease, I expected the ball to come my way. I walked in as I’d seen internationals do on television: my hands on my knees, a smile betraying my otherwise focused face. Thinking about it now, I realise they’d put me at short forty-five, where the ball would never come fast, especially given the pace of our attack. I still see Garry, the wicketkeeper, crouching over his large belly, and turning to me every third ball to check that I hadn’t moved, and happy I’d stayed where he wanted me, giving me one of his cavernous smiles before smacking his gloves together, and telling the bowler to bowl full and straight. And Garry calling to my father, telling him to warm up, and my excitement at the prospect – even then, my father didn’t bowl much. And I still remember my father’s off-cutter – it was in either his first or second over – and the burly batsman’s wild swish, the ball looping ever so high (to my eight-year-old eyes) in my direction, Garry’s call of ‘Catch it, mate!’, the fear that gripped me, my legs suddenly unsteady, and the ball arching down towards me. The sting of leather hitting my palms, the ball rebounding, and my desperate lunge to grasp it before it hit the floor. I’d made the simplest of catches look difficult, but that didn’t matter. It seemed that the whole team was as happy as I was – they were shaking my hand just as they did when adults took a good catch. Even my father offered his hand, gripping mine harder than any of the others, so that I had to massage my palm when no one was looking. I fell asleep reliving the moment for weeks afterwards.

Perhaps I am looking back on my life through rose-tinted glasses, for school also seemed to have gone well. My mother tells me I was a sweet child, content to stay silent when left alone, but ready to break out of my reverie with a wide smile whenever someone talked to me. I found the first few days of school difficult, but I never locked myself in the toilets at home the way my brother did, and I don’t remember any problems with the other students until the third grade, when Andrew joined our class.

To the teacher, he was a bright, jovial child with a penchant for practical jokes. To me, he was a selfish brat who wanted to be the centre of everyone’s attention. When he walked in one day and, taking on a deep voice, pretended to be the principal, I didn’t laugh the way my teacher did. I’m not sure why, but I decided that what he was doing was wrong, and that he needed to be punished. With Jeffrey, I chased him across our primary school’s courtyard, caught him, pinned him down and spat in his face. It was a fitting lesson, I thought.

My mother had other ideas: never have I seen her so angry as she listened to my teacher over the phone. She hung up, walked over to where I was sitting, and slapped me. The pain shocked me; the shame had me in tears. She pointed at my room, and in a tone that expected no argument, told me to go and wait for her.

During the hour it took her before she came and spoke to me, I stayed glued to my bed and cried into my pillow. Whenever I tried to stoke my anger, to tell myself that I’d done nothing wrong and she was very mean to slap me, I remembered the paleness of her face and started crying again, feeling as though I deserved the shame. I’d almost exhausted my tears when she knocked on the door. She walked in with a solemn expression and sat next to me. Wanting to avoid her, I once again dug my head into my pillow. The smell of my tears on the cloth had me sobbing once again. I told myself that was a good thing, for it would make her feel guilty. But she didn’t seem aware of my pain as she spoke.

‘Do you know that Andrew lost his dad last year?’ she asked me. Her voice that evening, as she carefully explained what it meant, and her tender gestures – stroking my hair, or holding my hand, which to me implied that I was as much a victim as Andrew – left a lasting impression. For many years, whenever I didn’t like someone, I recalled a shadow of the Andrew episode and repressed my feelings. After my mother’s intervention, I sought Andrew out, invited him to my house, and set out to make him my friend. I remember thinking hard about what present to get him for his birthday, and settling on the very one I wanted most: a gold and black football that had been used at the previous European Championships.

Andrew left Hornsbury the following year, but he was an exception. Most of the people who started primary school in my year stayed in the same track I was following, so that by the time I was in sixth form, I’d known many of my friends for over ten years.

Jeffrey was foremost amongst them. We’d first met as preschoolers on the cricket field, haggling about which of our fathers was the better player. When the cricket season threw us together, we seemed to spend every weekend with one another. He even came to Sicily with us one summer, the year after I went to the French Alps with his family. The winters saw us drift away from each other, as I had squash and football, and he played rugby, but even if I didn’t see him outside school for a month, I always felt like I could call him and be at his house the next day, kicking a ball against the yellow-bricked wall at the back of his garden.

Jeffrey never disliked Eric as some of the others did, but he never understood why I was friends with him either. One day soon after Eric arrived at our school, as Paul Cumnor was relating an anecdote about him – the startled look he’d had when a teacher addressed him, his stumbling answer – Jeffrey turned to me and, in his usual tone, told the others that I’d been to Eric’s the previous weekend.

‘What’s he like?’ he asked me. ‘What do you like about him anyway?’

At that instant in time, Eric’s social standing was in the balance. He hadn’t come across as likeable. Had he been awkward, we would have happily cast him aside, but his case seemed more complicated. Only a week earlier, at lunch break, I’d been chatting with Jeffrey, Tom and the usual crew, when I saw Eric pace around the building, his head down, his floppy black hair covering his eyes. The second time he walked by, I tried calling him over to our group, but he walked on as though he hadn’t heard me, his eyes fixed on the pavement. Tom noticed and made a joke, but no one followed his lead.

Opinions were still divided. One camp condemned him – Paul and Tom Davies were in that camp. If he hadn’t made it yet, he wasn’t worth the effort. And another, to which it seemed most people subscribed, Jeffrey among them, still hadn’t formed an opinion. Eric had just arrived and, despite his oddness, hadn’t done anything that deserved to be condemned yet.

And in that moment, as Paul and Tom Davies smirked, hoping I’d give them some ammunition, as Jeffrey looked at me, sincerely wanting to know what I thought, all I could do was shrug and smile.

‘I don’t know. He seems alright to me,’ I said.

Paul looked at Tom and sniggered. And I laughed along, genuinely happy to share in the joke.

***

The day after I first woke up, when the house and soot felt most distant, my mother grabbed my hand and talked to me. Her fingers squeezing mine comforted me more than her worried smile and the kindness in her moist eyes. She asked me how I was. Finding my voice strengthened, I told her the fever was gone. It had left me with an intense tiredness, deep enough that my lacerated stomach kept quiet.

‘That’s good, Nate. Good.’ She let go of my hand and leaned back far enough that I could no longer make out her familiar perfume.

‘Think happy thoughts. Are you seeing yourself on the cricket field?’

‘No, but you’re right,’ I smiled. ‘I should.’

‘Yes, think about playing cricket with your brother and your father…’ Her voice trailed off as she edged a little further away. ‘Did you manage to fix your bat?’ she asked, her voice almost steady.

‘I think so. It took a few goes but it looked good in the end…’ The roundness of her eyes and the cock of her eyebrow made me feel as though I were lying.

‘Oh… I hope you didn’t spend too much time working on it. Dad can buy you a new one if you need.’

‘No, it’s alright. It only took a few minutes, but it didn’t work the first time, that’s all.’

‘Good,’ she said, nodding while her eyes looked at my feet.

I extended my hand palm up hoping she would take it again, but she couldn’t have noticed for she turned around and made her way back to her chair.

***

The world around me seemed to gather definition. Or perhaps I was now staying awake long enough to appreciate it, to expect its contours every time I broke through the lethargy.

I was in a large room with yellow walls and no doors. Badges roamed along a corridor to my right. And a window spanned the entire length of the room to my left. When I crooked my neck, I could take in the whole of south-east Oxford. I could lose myself in Headington’s parks, and if I squinted hard enough, I could imagine my grandmother’s old house, the one she had before she moved to Cambridge, my grandfather died, and my mother found her a nursing home. It stood off a main road at the end of a hazy cul-de-sac. I remembered the Sundays we spent there well: in the winters, I would only breathe through my mouth, because there was something wrong with the sofas and it wasn’t just their flower print – no, if I breathed through my nose, their musky dampness would settle in my stomach and start breeding mould. Our summer visits were much safer: then, I could spend hours hiding with my cousins in the labyrinthine hedge that ran along the garden walls.

To the right of my grandmother’s house, I could watch the traffic crawling on Cowley Road, and further right still, I could glimpse far-off Iffley and its lock. But I hardly ever looked. I preferred observing the people around me. When my mother was not sitting on a chair near me, when she wasn’t watching over me, reading through academic papers, jotting down her esteemed thoughts, I was left with three other silent patients, perennially waiting for something: nurses, meals, examinations, or the omnipotent team of doctors.

I was luckier than most: my mother was with me throughout the entire visiting hours. She’d been spoken to – your son needs rest, he needs sleep, he needs calm. She’d nodded her head and made up her own mind. Her lab, her students, her colleagues, she told me, could go on without her, and plus, she pointed at her papers, she could work by my side too. A professor of experimental psychology. When I was little, I’d imagined patients reclining on a leather chaise longue while she fitted a flashing helmet on their skulls and jotted down the value of each dial. Even when she started taking me to her lab after school, on the first floor of a building that looked like an overgrown concrete bunker, I kept on believing there was something vaguely sinister about her work. It took me years to dispel that idea. Whenever I’d ask her about her work, she’d either give me an answer that was too broad or one that was too detailed – so that all I remembered was that she, and her lab, ran experiments on memory, biases, encoding.

Once, as she sat by my hospital bed, I put down one of the books she’d brought me, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and I asked her what she was reading. She put her papers aside, stretched her arms out and, leaning towards me, asked me whether I really wanted to know. I hesitated but only for an instant: I hadn’t seen her so engaged for some time. She read out the title of the article she’d been reading: ‘Homocysteine and Cognitive Performance…’ She stopped halfway through the subtitle. ‘You don’t know what homocysteine is, do you?’ I could pretend to know what cognitive performance meant, but homocysteine was beyond me. ‘It’s an amino acid.’ She waited for a sign. ‘You don’t know what that is, do you?’

The same day, after I’d lost her to her pile of papers, I asked her why she sat with her head resting against the window, when she could sit against the wall and enjoy the view over the town. I pointed at a spot right next to my bed, and I turned the cover of The Idiot towards her. We would discuss this book like we’d discussed most of the books I’d plucked from our collection at home – the rows of classic and modern novels that had left the upstairs bookshelves and littered my floor until they’d earned fresh creases. She would ask me what I thought, what I felt, and, talking to her, I’d work this book out like I’d pieced together the others.

She waved at the door:

‘I like to be able to see who’s coming in and out,’ she said.

It was a sensible reason in theory, but in practice she rarely looked up from her reading stack.

‘It’d be easier to talk if you were sitting here,’ I said.

She smiled, moved to a chair by my bed, and plunged right back into her papers.

‘Have you read this?’ I asked her.

She took a few seconds to look up.

‘A long time ago,’ she said, and she looked down again, squinting.

From the way she was reading her papers, I realised that her usual prompts – How far along are you? Are you enjoying it? – wouldn’t come. I lowered my voice until I felt sure that no one else would hear me. My words were travelling in a space that belonged to no one else but us:

‘Everyone loves him, but I’m not sure why.’

She looked up sharply.

‘In the book, I mean,’ I said, lowering my voice further, so that she had to lean forward to catch my words. ‘They all pretend that he’s a fool, but they all love him. Don’t you remember?’