Gavin’s fourth birthday was approaching and Eggie had plans.
“They all want to thank him, to bring by some gifts and watch him enjoying himself.”
Both Gem and Bill were adamant. Gavin’s birthday was not going to see the house filled with demanding old people pulling at him, trying to get him for themselves so they could whisper some complaint, only seeing him as a means to an end, a small fountain of youth that they wanted their hands on.
“It won’t be like that,’ Eggie had insisted. ‘They’ll let him play, have fun with his toys.”
“Gavin will be playing and having fun with his toys,” Bill told her, “with a bunch of four year olds with no creaky knees and withered faces to bother him.”
Eggie drew herself up. “Well really, Bill, you are so rude. If he was my son, I’d be generous with his Gift. I’ve a mind you’re jealous of how popular he is.” She click clacked across the floor on high heels she hadn’t been able to wear in years and left, shutting the door with more energy than was strictly necessary.
Bill rolled his eyes at her. “Oh, now I’ve offended your mother. She might never come back.”
But she did stay away for a few days and that helped too. Her presence reminded Bill of Gavin’s gift. It made him think of it and brood on it and when she wasn’t there, then Gavin was just a boy again. He worked no Magic and they got used to the hint of burning he carried with him, so used to it that they forgot it was there.
“Is Granny coming to my birthday?” Gavin asked her one evening.
“No,” said Bill, and “I’ll ask her,” said Gem at the same time.
Bill slumped behind his newspaper in a dejection that was not entirely a joke.
“We have to ask her,” she said to him. “She’s his granny. It’s not right to keep her away.”
“I miss Granny,” said Gavin, and she could see the broodiness slip over Bill again. She knew the way his mind worked. He would be wondering was Gavin hankering to do some Healing again, or did he really miss Granny.
Later on he came to her and said, “I’m not even sure if what Gavin is doing can be called Healing. He’s taking away the signs of ageing. Where does ageing lead but to death and that’s natural. Is that Healing? Is that a Cure? No old people who’ve come into contact with Gavin have died, you know. I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Maybe he’s a Cure for Death,” she said flippantly.
“Well, that is just wrong.” He emphasised each word and glared at her like he’d hold her personally responsible if that turned out to be true.
She stared right back. “Is this because of Buddy again? Must everything be measured against what was done to Buddy I’ve told you before I don’t even think that was Magic. That was spells and incantations and summonings for all I know.”
Bill lowered his gaze and sat and held his hands as if he was reassuring himself. She sat beside him.
“Besides, none of them were dead. Gavin isn’t hauling them out of their graves. And look at them, Bill. Is there a Buddy among them? Is there a single one of them that looks unhappy with their lot?”
He gave her a weak smile, but his eyes looked lighter already. Bill could get stuck on an idea and keep worrying. She hadn’t known she was going to say all those things, didn’t know the thoughts had been in her head before she said them, but they were all true and the right things to say. At least now for a while he had something new to think about.
“So, we’ll invite your mother?”
That was his peace offering, so she accepted it, but with her own conditions.
“Yes, but not until the evening, when the kids have gone home. Let him have his day without her pointing out her aching knees or whispering to him about how she’s so tired in the mornings. And she is not bringing over any of his creaky fan-club. No exceptions.”
Of course, Eggie, when she listened at all, listened selectively, and when Gem opened the door to her on the evening of Gavin’s birthday, a half dozen members of the Tuesday Morning Bridge Club were gathered behind her, all clutching a gift for Gavin. Did they see it as a price for their entry, or as an offering to their God? Gem wondered bitterly.
Her mother sailed by her without even a word of greeting.
“Where is my little prince? Emily will be by later with her husband, Frank. He’s in a wheelchair. There is a ramp at the side door, isn’t there, Gemma?”
Her mother had already made it through the hallway to the living room, leaving Gem to flounder in her wake.
“Who are Emily and Frank?” She had never heard their names before, and her mother talked about everyone she knew.
“Friends!” Eggie was pulling of her gloves and coat, looking around for Gavin, not making eye contact with Gem. They both knew Eggie had no friends called Emily and Frank.
“New friends. From out of town,” she finally offered.
“And how did you make friends with somebody from out of town?” Gem asked.
“Through the wonders of technology, Gemma,” her mother pronounced. “I shouldn’t wonder if it took over completely from Magic one day. I remember a time when we had to rely on those Long-Speakers to get a message any distance and how snooty they were about it, and you couldn’t trust them to keep a secret. They certainly were taken down a few pegs when we all got phones. And now we have the Internet and what a wonder it is. Those Long-Speakers had nothing like that. Perhaps Magic is holding us all back and we need to embrace technology, not be dependent on some silly Magic workers and their whims and fancies.”
Gem saw a chink in the argument, but her mother closed the gap before she could enter it.
“But that day is not here yet and so here I am, fighting for the chance to get to see my grandson and have him take away a few of the punishments of age, and your husband is trying to make me feel like I’m some selfish vain old hag who only cares about herself. The truth is, I’m not getting any younger. I could die any day. Would you want that to happen?”
The bridge club shuffled their feet and looked down at the floor, nervously passing their gifts from one hand to the other. She sympathised with their predicament. They were caught between Eggie and Gem. Eggie might be their way into Gavin, but Gem could shut the door in all their faces. Still there was something in their manner that suggested they had heard all this before.
She could imagine Eggie telling them, “I will say it to her. I will. She needs to hear it. I’m her mother. He’s my very own grandson,” and wiping away a few tears as she leaned back into the arms of the great injustice being committed against her.
“I’m sure you are not going to die any time soon. Bill would have seen it in the webs and I’m getting better and better at reading the birds and I haven’t seen it there.”
The bridge club fluttered at word of her Gift. There were a few accusatory stares in Eggie’s direction. Why hadn’t she told them? The Gift of Foresight, or Future Sense as some called it, might be considered somewhat frivolous when compared to what Gavin offered, but it could soothe the mind the way Gavin could soothe the body. Also some with Foresight could get just a bit tetchy when consulted too frequently, so the more contacts a person could draw on, the better armed you would be against the anxieties of an unknown future.
A tiny old lady named Mabel stepped forward. Mabel had no Magic. Gem knew this because her mother never failed to mention it whenever she spoke of her. “You remember, Mabel, don’t you Gemma? She has no Magic.” Gem imagined she had received the same treatment many times. “Yes, I have one daughter. Gemma. She has no Magic.”
Of all her mother’s cronies she had always been more drawn to Mabel than any of the others, perhaps for that very reason.
“I would love if you could read the birds for me sometime, Gemma. I’ve had my fortune told in the wind, and in webs, tea-leaves, palms, crystals, cards, waterfalls, you name it, but never birds. Will you please?”
Her eyes buried in deep wrinkles sparkled at the thought of it and Gem suddenly realised the burdens that come with a Gift
, the knowledge that a Gift was not yours alone, that it was supposed to be shared, that her private growing relationship with the birds was about to be thrown open and others would come barging in.
She didn’t want that.
“But what if the news is bad?” she blurted out.
“Oh, don’t tell me the bad news!” Mable squealed. “I just want something good to cling to.”
The bridge club nodded. No one else asked for a reading, but she knew that just as soon as she did one for Mable, the others would gather and dissect the reading for accuracy and flair, for the detail of specific events, even her manner would be scrutinised, but good or bad, once the wall had been breached the others would appear over it.
She mumbled something to Mabel and went outside, ostensibly to fetch Gavin, feeling something sacred had been taken from her. A great sense of annoyance at Mabel, at her mother, at everyone took hold of her. Outside Bill and Gavin were jumping together on the trampoline. The other children had gone home and she might have been happy at their snatching a few father and son moments together had she not been aware that Buddy was there somewhere. She scanned the garden for him. He’d turned up later in the day as the party was on the verge of breaking up. She’d noticed Bill and Gavin making their way over to him on several occasions to hand him a glass of lemonade, or offer him a bun. The rest of the children and their parents seemed to ignore him, not purposefully, but as if he didn’t exist. She’d avoided looking at him, but when she did, the depth of his isolation took her breath away, and it seemed whenever Gavin or Bill returned from talking to him, it took them a few moments to shake off the misery he emanated.
In the corner of the garden, under the Ash, something moved and she knew it had to be Buddy. She wondered how long he was going to stay today, how much of his company Gavin and Bill could take. No, that was wrong. Gavin and Bill seemed able to take any amount of Buddy. She was the one who wished they would tell him to go home and leave them alone. Perhaps since they’d been Magic users all their lives they got used to sharing themselves
She forced herself over to him. He saw her coming and squirmed like a stray dog that was considering bolting but had nowhere to go. With a smile plastered on her face she joined him under the tree.
“Not jumping today, Buddy?”
He pulled off his cap and held it like a shield in front of him, twisting the rim in his thick fingers.
“I’m too clumsy, Mrs Cooper. I’d fall off and before I’d fall, I’d hurt someone.”
She remembered Buddy climbing up trees as easy as if he was running, she’d seem him once leap a six barred gate simply by catching hold of the top bar in one hand and swinging the rest of his body gracefully over.
“I appreciate you letting me come over though,” Buddy went on. “The life streaming off those little ones! Did you see it, Mrs Cooper? It was like they were glowing. Could you see that?”
He was staring at her intently.
“No, Buddy,” she said. “I can only see that they’re lively and tireless and quick, much quicker than I can be. Can you see something there?”
He nodded. “I can see it in everybody except me.”
He looked down at his fingers twirling the hat. They looked dead and grey and if they hadn’t been moving she’d have thought she was looking at the hands of a dead man.
She was suddenly tired of avoiding the issue. She never mentioned the accident to him, his coming back, the fact that he lost his Magic that night. Maybe others had, but she’d never straight out asked how he felt about being alive when he should be dead. She’d heard that a few of the town drunks had been throwing stones at him. How could that feel? Feeling a little like she was about to throw a large rock hard onto the surface of a frozen lake, she summoned her courage.
“Are you happy with it all, Buddy, the way you live now? Do you wish she had never done it?”
She could see that Buddy was rocked by her question. He didn’t answer immediately, and she thought he must surely be shaping his thoughts and his words to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about, but then he seemed to realise that asking her to clarify would only buy him a few extra seconds anyway. He looked away from her, over her shoulder to where the only thing to see was the featureless gable wall of the house, and without being able to look back and meet her eyes, not even once, he spoke.
“People say I was dead, Mrs Cooper, but I wasn’t. They weren’t there and we were. They don’t know what happened.”
It was such a lie and he looked so unhappy saying it. She imagined his mother had made him rehearse his answer for just such a moment. It wasn’t like Buddy at all to be untruthful, but still he had been and she was cross with him, cross with her mother for telling her she had no Magic, cross with everybody.
“So why do you all have to pay so much for bringing you back when you were alive all the time?”
Buddy startled in place. He squeezed his fists together and jerked a little as he thought. She knew his mind didn’t work so fast these days and her clever logic would be a source of torment for him. Any tiny triumph she had felt at pinning him down was washed away and all she felt was an awful sorrow for hurting Buddy. He suffered enough.
She waved a hand in the air like she was washing her cruel questions, his little evasions, all of it right out of the world.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Buddy. We all lie, not just you. Me too. Everyone. My mother. Do you know she lied to me my whole life, pretending I had no Magic when I did? Do you know we lied to you about how all the roses on the pergola died? Gavin did that, when he released whatever he’d been building up inside him. I just wonder why we lie. It builds up and it never does any good, does it? What the hell are we lying for?”
She at least seemed to have knocked some of the misery out of Buddy and replaced it with confusion. His fingers had forgotten to move on the hat as he stared at her.
“Sorry I’m just thinking aloud. You didn’t need to hear this, Buddy.”
She turned to go, her feet moving in the decaying leaves almost drowning out the sound of his voice as Buddy started to answer her.
“Fear,” he said. “I’ve thought about it a bit. Everyone’s frightened of something, and they lie to keep it away from them, to stop it from happening, but it never works the way they plan it. My mother, she couldn’t bear to lose me, but she did anyway. I asked her...” he stopped and gave the hat a particular harsh wringing before he continued. “I asked her could she undo it. Make it go away. Put it back the way it’s supposed to be, and all she will say is that I was never dead, she just got me a good Cure. And that’s a lie, Mrs Cooper, because I was there too. She forgets that.”
“You remember it, Buddy?” She couldn’t imagine what Buddy could remember. Death? Coming back? Being dragged back or coming willingly? Had he known his mother didn’t just want to say goodbye, that she wanted to keep him forever?
She had heard the Reanimated wouldn’t answer questions about what being dead was like. They just spoke of the time immediately preceding their death and said their goodbyes. No amount of clever questioning could get any information about Death out of them and Buddy was no exception. He kept on talking like she’d never spoken.
“And I’m to blame too, because I let her ‘cos I love her. I could have stopped it. I know the choice was there.”
“I don’t think you knew everything you needed to know back then, Buddy. How could you?”
Buddy shuffled his feet and lowered his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “And even if I didn’t know enough about what it was going to be like, it’s all still happening right now, isn’t it?”
She had to admit that was true. What good were her pathetic attempts at consolation when viewed in that light?
Buddy wasn’t waiting for an answer. “Did you ever feel completely stuck, Mrs Cooper? Like something good might be waiting for you? You don’t know what it is, or how it’s going to turn out, but you have to move towards it, you have to do something
different from what you’ve been doing all along, and you can’t. You can’t move. You’re stuck. And everywhere you turn...” he trailed off and then threw up his arms in exasperation at not being able to describe what was happening to him properly.
He tossed his head around a bit, like he was trying to think a difficult thought that had got all mixed up in his brain and he needed to shake it back into place again.
“It like I’m paying for what we did back then, for being frightened, for making a wrong choice. I know I think slow, but I’ve got lots of time for thinking and what I think is that usually, time goes by and things, bad things, get better. They fade away, stop hurting but this stays the same. Always the same and I can’t work out what I’m supposed to do about it. And Magic has abandoned me. There’s always someone to go to, for everything, but not for me. It’s like Magic is saying, well you went too far, Buddy, and now you’re on your own.
He gasped out the last words and she absolutely knew how he felt, how horrible it was to be in a world of Magic and to have none.
“And I miss it so much. I miss my Magic. I miss the animals, all of it. How do I fix this? How do I make it right again?
He had been anxiously stretching his hat between his hands the whole time he was talking and it seemed to Gem that this might be the entirety of Buddy’s existence, nervously playing with his headwear, waiting for Bill and Gavin to have time for him, waiting for whatever had him in its grip to let go. It was like watching a feral beast tied on a chain, the wild world calling to it while it rubbed its skin raw on its shackles and its blood fell on the ground.
And as for Gem, she felt like an ignorant child who had poked that sad beast with a stick. She had made Buddy talk. She had forced him to answer her questions and now she had no solace to offer in return. And to her shame it was Buddy who kept staring at the ground and could not meet her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Buddy,” was all she managed. “I wish I had answers. I wish I could share my Magic with you. I mean I will read the birds for you, anytime you like, but I’d let you feel what it’s like in the blood again if I could. I was without Magic for so long...” She tailed off, knowing she could find similarities, but she could not really understand what Buddy endured.
He was still looking down, but she could see he was trying to smile at her words, being Buddy, trying to make her feel that she really had cheered him up.
Thank you, Mrs Copper. Thank you for letting me come here. Others don’t like me having me around, but you and Mr Cooper and Gavin, you’re really good to me. I don’t do so good by myself these days. Always thought I did, but then I was never alone back then, not really, there were always the beasts, but they won’t come near me no more. And I need to have somewhere to go.
She knew what he meant by that. That ne needed somewhere to go, to get away from his mother and her postponed mourning, her desperate protestations that everything was normal, her frenzied efforts to create a reality where she had done the right time and everything was working out fine.
And to think that Gem had thought about telling Bill to try and get Buddy to not come over so much. The very idea of it now, of Buddy hearing Bill’s words and mumbling his understanding and his acceptance, the slow shuffle down the road, the return to the prison his home had become with practically his only escape route cut off. She felt shaky at the thought of what she had nearly done.