Stopping a few feet in front of her, Roulston looked away, sighed, then returned his gaze to her. ‘In Riverview General Hospital.’ His blue eyes narrowed. ‘She has a broken jaw and it’s infected.’
Somehow Jennifer managed to clamp a hold on her emotions. Without inflection she asked, ‘How long will she be in there?’
Roulston’s frown deepened. ‘Two, three weeks,’ he replied. ‘Depends on how well the antibiotics work.’
Detached, she watched the doctor’s growing discomfort while his words slowly sank into the numbness inside her. She blinked. ‘Could she die?’
His eyes widened briefly. Then he shook his head. ‘It’s not likely, but the chance does exist.’ He looked away. ‘I mean … uh, no, I don’t think she’ll die.’ His gaze returned to hers, and it had suddenly hardened. ‘Look, is your father in the house? I’d like to speak to him.’
Jennifer could feel the blood drain from her face. ‘No. He’s not home, I mean.’ Her shoulders jerked a shrug. ‘He’s gone out.’
Roulston stared at her for a long moment, then he nodded. ‘I see.’ He turned back to his car, then paused and faced her again. When he spoke his tone was cool. ‘In case you’re interested, visiting hours are between one and three tomorrow afternoon. Maybe you might bring your mother some flowers, or something…’ His voice trailed away, and once again he stared at Jennifer.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘she’d probably like that. Flowers.’
A flash of anger showed in Roulston’s eyes for a brief moment. Then he spun around and quickly entered his car. He started it, released the brake, dropped it into gear and drove away without once looking at Jennifer.
She returned to the swing and resumed her seat. It was a struggle to keep pushing the feelings, the thoughts, away, but at last she succeeded. She told herself she’d think about it tomorrow. Maybe she’d even visit Mother. And as for telling her father, well, let him rot a little longer – it might do some good, couldn’t hurt.
Footsteps scraped on the road’s gravel shoulder. Swinging in her seat, Jennifer turned, thinking for a moment that the doctor had returned. But no, it wasn’t the doctor.
‘Hey!’ she called out. ‘Hey, you!’
The boy stopped, faced her.
‘C’mere!’
He didn’t move for a few seconds, then slowly walked towards her.
The first thing about him that Jennifer noticed was his eyes. They were a cold, impassive blue, unwavering in their gaze. A small gasp escaped her lips – he was, openly and deliberately, appraising her. Suddenly she felt a lot less sure of herself, and so said nothing until he stopped in front of her and asked: ‘What?’
His tone took her aback. It had sounded angry, almost affronted. After a moment she recovered, and slowly looked him up and down. He was long-limbed, though barely her height. His hands hung at his sides as if he had forgotten they existed. For some reason this struck her as meaningful. Most boys she knew always hid their hands in their pockets, or hung them from their thumbs on the belt loops of their jeans – but whatever the means, the gesture was always self-conscious. But not this boy. Not the new kid.
Her eyes returned to his face, and she smiled sardonically. But even this seemed to leave him unimpressed. His long face remained expressionless, his eyes flat and cold. She realised then something about the way he stood that was strange, somehow off kilter. He’s tense! He’s tense as hell! Her smile broadened with this realisation – he’s scared of me, and I’ve got him now. ‘You’re the new kid, aren’t you?’ She began casually twisting on the swing. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Owen Brand. Who’re you?’
‘Jennifer.’
His nod told her he knew about her.
She said, ‘You’ve got an older sister, don’t you?’
‘Yes. Older than you.’
‘So what?’ Jennifer snapped. This wasn’t going the way it was supposed to at all.
Owen shrugged, said nothing.
She took out her cigarettes. ‘Want one?’
‘No.’
Pulling one out she laughed. ‘Chicken shit, eh?’
He turned and began walking away.
Jennifer gaped at his back. ‘Hey! Where you going?’
‘Nowhere,’ he answered without turning around.
‘Creep!’ she shrilled at him, but to no visible effect. She leapt from the swing. ‘You little shit! Just fuck right off!’ He continued walking across the field, stiffly, as if driven.
She lit the cigarette and walked to her house. Out back she heard the dogs whining, but it was the only sound to break the deathlike silence. She entered through the front door, then stopped in the hallway.
Her father was standing in front of her. He held a bottle of rye by the neck in one hand, and steadied himself against the wall with the other. His red eyes seemed to burn right through her, and she felt a flutter of fear.
‘Where is she?’ he rasped.
‘Go to hell,’ Jennifer replied, turning to enter the living room.
He lurched forward suddenly, grabbed at her neck and got a handful of t-shirt as she jerked back. With a snarl he pulled her close. ‘You fucking slut! I asked you a question, dammit! Now, where is she?’
Unable to move, Jennifer stared into her father’s enraged eyes. Oh God, she said to herself, he’s going to kill me. His breath washed over her, and its reek made her nauseous. ‘She’s gone to the hospital,’ she gasped.
Abruptly, the fires in his eyes died. His expression went slack, his mouth dropping open. ‘What?’ he whispered.
Jennifer pulled herself free of his now-lifeless grasp, then pushed past him. ‘The hospital, you prick. With a busted jaw and an infection! She’s gone there to die!’ She walked to the stairs, forcing calm into her stride. At the banister she whirled to him. ‘Satisfied?’
There was a loud knock on the door.
Still staring at Jennifer, her father said in a quiet voice, ‘Come in.’
She heard the door open, but could not see who it was from where she stood. Not that it mattered – she knew the voice.
‘Mr Louper? I’m Dr Roulston.’
Before Jennifer turned to run up the stairs, she saw the expression that crossed her father’s face at the doctor’s introduction, and it found an echo inside her, roaring upward into her skull as if from a deep, black cavern in her soul. And when he turned to her and their gazes met, she felt a sudden closeness to him that made her heart jump.
Then she was running up the stairs, down the hall, and into her room. She slammed the door behind her and leaned against it, gasping. Tears filled her eyes, but she ignored them.
Yes, they’d looked at each other, and they’d both realised what they’d seen in each other’s eyes. Terror, raw and exposed, welling upward from that open wound they both shared.
‘Oh, please no, please no…’ But the pleading had lost its power, and denial was a place she could no longer run to – even now every wall was being battered down, one by one, by the soft, deep voice coming up from below, and by the silence of her father.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I
And things were let go.
II
The giant lay there even now, I knew, a faceless lord with gummed slits for eyes, impassive to the world, impassive to the crayfish with their pincers clicking, snipping, clacking. The lord on his throne of gnawed sticks, his loins alive with maggots, reclined with one thick, white arm across his blank brow, and thought of nothing.
I had wandered through those thoughts, lost in the empty blackness. My hands groped outward, but the skull – the walls – were as unreachable as the sky – a sky barren of stars.
Scratching flakes of faded white paint with a fingernail, I realised, with a vague detachment, that I was aboard Mistress Flight. I had no memory of ever coming to this place, and of my final parting words with my friends I recalled only an agreement to meet again – tomorrow. But within all this there were visions heady with terror – the faces of my fr
iends blurred and became the giant’s face – the mouth a round black hole, the eyes pinched slashes across swollen white flesh, the nose eaten away, pink and gaping – a face round and smooth as a ball, the cheeks stretched and shining, the eyebrows plucked away – Roland’s face, Lynk’s face, Carl’s face. My own.
III
The setting sun was turning the sky crimson. I sat on the aft deck of Mistress Flight and watched the stain spread outward. So relentless, that seepage, and though I drew my knees in tight against my chest, I could not move, and so it flowed over and around me. The flaking paint was no longer dull white, but washed-out red; like the laces of my sneakers, the fabric of my socks, the flecks under my nails.
Through the haze I gradually recalled another encounter – with a girl. Where? The playground. Jennifer Louper, whose nipples creased her t-shirt, whose green eyes even now brought a tremor to my stomach. We’d talked. About what? I couldn’t remember.
Had there been anyone else? No.
The smell of rot clung to the air, but I realised that it might just be my imagination. Slowly, it came to me that I was coming out of a kind of shock – details began pressing on to my consciousness. I reached down with one hand and touched the weathered wood of the deck; the wrinkled surface was cool and familiar. And from the cabin came mild wafts of the Windex cleaner we’d used on the windows this morning. Behind me branches shivered as a cool wind drifted in from the river. And the day darkened.
It was late, well past supper-time. I wasn’t hungry – the taste on my tongue was that of rancid meat. Still, they would be wondering where I was – and I’d catch hell when I went home. The thought immediately struck me as silly. I grinned. So what if I got into trouble? It didn’t matter – who cares?
Nothing seemed to matter much, any more – but no, that wasn’t exactly true. What mattered now – more than anything else – was the feel of solid wood beneath me, the wind on my face, the rattling branches and the thickening air. And the giant.
Already, he seemed to have become something more than just a man. The giant. I let the word roll through my mind – Giant. Once a man, now a giant who had swallowed the river, a lord come to visit the wild-lands.
The grin on my face broadened even though I felt a touch of renewed terror. Yes, he’d come from the river, the river from the city; he’d come and the river had made of him a giant. Spring, the season of growth. Ha. The throb of my heart drummed in my ears, and I squeezed shut my eyes. Only human still – yes? Yes? Maybe.
I began to shake, as other things were let go …
* * *
A toaster, dismantled, covered the dining-room table. Pigeons cooed and skittered out on the apartment’s balcony.
Father had been working on it all morning. It was the day after something happened, and there was more still to happen. But this is when the memory starts. He’d been working on it for hours, looking for why it wasn’t working, looking but not finding.
I remember climbing on to the chair to watch him. Mother was in the kitchen, and the kitchen was silent. Debbie – it was as if Debbie didn’t exist.
Father set down a part with one hand, a screwdriver with the other. And the hands rested there, on the table, and he stared at them.
‘Dad?’
He made no reply; instead, he brought his hands up to his face, and began crying.
‘Dad?’
How old was I? I don’t know. A boy, and the boy’s own personal giant, a god, master of all things, sat with his shoulders heaving, his face covered by his massive hands, and wept.
* * *
Between the apartment buildings crouched a block of shattered wood and stone. Two little boys threaded their way between the construction equipment and strode into the shattered world. They’re giants, astride a dead city. Full of grim thoughts, they survey the ruin from behind slitted eyes. And they are faceless. Of course, being memories.
With iron bars they prise loose square concrete blocks and explore dark, dusty holes with pudgy fingers. Hunting survivors, broken-limbed GI Joe dolls, one blond with a scar (German), the other black-haired and angle-eyed (Japanese).
Dismemberment now is part of the ritual – the right of giants, the privilege of gods and victors in war. They hunt for the losers.
Reaching, groping down into the darkness, one of the boys feels sharp teeth pierce his palm, and he screams. He runs home, the other boy, white-faced, following. They are quickly parted, and the bitten boy is carried by strong arms down to the car. He’s rushed to a hospital.
The doctor murmurs – a conference of tall people – and the boy watches, frightened and bewildered. The bite of a mouse, they tell him later, as he withdraws into the cover of his mother’s arms while the tray of needles is being readied by a blond, scarred nurse. He is given a strange word to play with: rabies, hydro-something – he prefers the word ‘rabies’. He likes its sound, and it rhymes with babies.
The boy faints after the sixth needle is plunged into his abdomen – and yet a part of him still remembers to this day. A part of him recalls every needle in the three weeks that followed, every session presaged with the nurse explaining: ‘This is only a precaution.’ The boy learns the meaning of the word ‘precaution’.
Towards the end, through the endless pain, he voices to his father the question that had been haunting him for days. All that clear liquid being pumped into him, day after day … ‘Daddy, has this made me different? Has this changed me for ever?’ What do you mean, son? ‘Daddy, can you see through me, now?’
Just a child, but maybe something more.
Still, the child harbours a secret: all along he has known that they’d all been mistaken. It hadn’t been a mouse. No, there in the darkness of that hole – perhaps even to this day – there waits a broken-limbed doll (German or Japanese?), and if you look very carefully, he tells himself, you will see his tiny sharp teeth, and you will recognise his grin.
When it comes to children, there is no mercy. When it comes to children, there are only ‘precautions’. And so the transparent boy continues his hunt for losers – he has earned the right of giants.
* * *
They are yelling at each other again. Something’s happened. A dream has died. The boy is uncertain of the details, but the talk of a bright new world has ended, and now the voices are loud and angry. In the morning, Father cried. In the morning, Debbie didn’t exist, but now she did.
Walking from the kitchen, he leaves the argument behind. Something has disgusted him; only he’s uncertain what – but the memory whispers a single word: matches. The smell of burning matches. He hates that smell. They’ve promised to stop, but he has his doubts.
In the living room his sister sits on the couch, watching TV. She has the volume turned up loud: the whole apartment seems to be filled with people, voices clamouring from all directions. The boy sits down on the floor, stares at the record player. He wants to play one of his sister’s record albums. The title has no meaning for him, though he knows it: Sounds of Silence. His sense of irony is still years away.
But he wants to sing along with the singers on the record: the words he doesn’t know he tries to match with sounds that he thinks are similar.
But it’s the wrong time: he only sings when he’s alone; he only listens when he’s alone.
Something’s happened. A dream has died. The boy feels guilty, and he wants to sing. He realises that, once again, the future has changed, but the thought does not distress him. It always changes. He’s already known three schools, three sets of faces, strange, familiar, strange again. He doesn’t miss any of them. He likes being alone, like he is now, amidst this roar of voices in this crowded apartment, singing wordless songs in his head in the wake of yet another dead dream. And years later all he will remember of those times will be the smell of burning matches.
* * *
I blinked, shook my head as a wave of dizziness welled up inside and then slowly faded away, and along with it the last of the memories.
&nbs
p; Only human still.
Wings flapped close over my head, and I looked up. Two crows were climbing into the sky above me, silent and ghost-like. In moments they were like flecks of black ash carried high by the wind. They circled once and then headed out over the river.
The sun had almost set, the red glint on the edges of the world had deepened to muddy magenta. Once again the faces of my friends returned to me: childish, small and familiar – not the giant’s face. Still, something had changed, as if every detail of their features had shifted in some odd, uncertain way. And I began to sense in them things I had not seen before, but even still, the nature of that twisting remained obscure. I had realised that there existed a difference, but I could not recognise its meaning.
Well, time to go home. Slowly, reluctantly, I climbed to my feet, crossed the boat’s deck and leaned against the rail. Ten feet below lay a shadowed realm of deadfall and rotting leaves. I shivered as a chill ran through me, then hitched my leg up over the rail and began my descent. Dropping the last three feet, I landed in the soft humus and fell into a crouch, looking around to see if I’d been discovered. But no, the yards seemed empty. I padded down the length of Mistress Flight to her stern, checked the area once again, then quickly scampered across the open ground, my eyes on the softly glowing front window of Gribbs’s shack.
I reached the edge of the shadowed treeline and plunged into the darkness to find myself face to face with an old man. I froze, suddenly terrified. Gribbs – the name flashed through my mind. This must be Gribbs.
‘Hello there, son,’ he rumbled. ‘Out for a walk with us old folk, eh?’
His easy laugh made me relax. He hadn’t seen anything. ‘Yeah, I guess,’ I replied.
Gribbs stepped forward, his eyes on the ground. ‘Yep,’ he sighed, ‘quite a night for it, that’s true.’ He stopped in front of me and asked, ‘See anything you like in the yards?’
‘Huh?’
Chuckling again, Gribbs placed his hands on his hips and gazed up at the branches overhead. ‘Well, I just figured you was looking for a boat to buy.’ He glanced down at me, smiled. ‘Get lots of buyers this time of year. ’Course, nothing comes of most of ’em. What about you? Are you a serious buyer, son?’