Читать книгу The Half Sister - Catherine Chanter - Страница 17

Chapter Ten

And it is Wynhope who is the first to sense trouble. There are intruders in the cellar, they are rattling the wine racks, their booted feet are pounding up the stone steps, breaking into the hall and giving the grandfather clock a good kicking until it peals for help. The house is shaken awake.

A helicopter, that’s what Diana thinks, but it’s too low, it’s going to crash. Half awake, she cries out for Edmund, but he’s in London and she’s at Wynhope. Hot, sweating, drink, menopause, fear, whatever, she is disoriented and breathless from panic. On her dressing table, face creams and foundation, the necklace she wore to the funeral, silver trinket boxes, they are all dancing to a discordant orchestra made up of expensive bottles of scent. Kefalonia, three years ago, honeymoon with Edmund, running from a restaurant, plates of moussaka sliding and bottles of retsina smashing onto the terrace, cries of seismos, seismos, as the locals fled screaming into the streets. Seismos. Earthquake. Out. Hide. Doorframe. But this is here, now, Wynhope, England. Stumbling down the landing, Diana trips on something, a body, a bag of bones, a boy.

Get out. Get out.

The boy is bumping along the floor, in his half-dream sleep he is lying across the back seat of Solomon’s car and Solomon is rescuing him, driving him away from somewhere he does not want to be and his mum’s in the front seat singing, but when he reaches out, there is no door and no handle, and he does not know where he is or why the car has become a ghost train, the rails rumbling in the dark, the rough carpet against his face. This is his aunt’s house, he remembers, and he does not know where to go so he crawls until his face finds a foot and he curls in on himself like a hedgehog.

The boy. In her panic, Diana has forgotten the boy. Grabbing at his hair, pulling at his legs, he resists, she screams. Somewhere, maybe in the hall, a smash of glass and that energises the child. Together they hurtle down the stairs to the front door, but she can’t slide the bolt across and she can’t get out, she can’t get out. Then. Stop. It’s over. The door swings open and they fall out into the blank, unmoving dawn, triggering the security lights, herself and the boy bewildered players in an unscheduled performance. He slips free of her grasp. The wind whips Diana’s dressing gown around her, the stones on the drive are mean and she retreats to the lawn to feel the sweet firmness of the damp grass between her toes. Were it not for the relentless wail of the alarm and the dog howling in the kitchen, she would have thought that she dreamed the whole thing. There is no way she can go back in there and rescue Monty, she can’t trust the house to keep its word, but imagine carrying the dog’s body from the ruins, Edmund would never forgive her. But she and the boy, they’re out. She did not think it happened like this, when you’re alone; on the news from other countries there are always neighbours running into the streets, hugging each other, counting each other, reaching for their phones and banging on doors. But here, it is just the two of them, mute, as if all words have been shaken out of them. It is so quiet she can hear the hum of the tilted, turning world.

‘That was an earthquake,’ Diana says, more because she needs to hear herself speak than anything else. ‘I know it was. Probably not a real earthquake, just a tremor. We do get them in England, not very often, but we do. And it’s over now. Everything will be all right.’

Finding no words of his own, Mikey processes those coming from this woman. He wants so much to hold on to something which is not moving, but he cannot bring himself to touch her. He has something important to say. It is an earthquake, he repeats inside his head, and his brain scans his memory: it finds a children’s book with a picture of a volcano all mixed up with doing a sponsored skip at his last primary school which had blackberries in the bushes round the edge of the playground which they weren’t allowed to eat. It did all that in a millionth of a second, but then the brain realises the uselessness of this information in the current situation and it returns to the one overriding word pounding inside him, so insistent that he holds his head between his hands for fear it might split him apart.

‘Mum.’

Inside the tower, Valerie is consumed by this sudden stillness. It is unreliable, as is the silence which has replaced the inexplicable muffled roar that rumbled up the spiral staircase and blundered into the room. When it woke her, she thought it was a bomb; that is the only thing she has ever seen on telly which might be like this, coming out of nothing and shaking everything without warning. By the light shining in from outside, she can see splinters of glass on the floor and she remembers the sampler, it must have shattered, and then she pieces together where she is and why. At Wynhope. With her sister. Not a bomb then, the only thing she can think of is a hurricane or an earthquake or something from the weather channel but whatever it is, it seems to be over. She’s survived. And Mikey?

‘Mikey,’ she screams.

Her son fills her up, there is no room in her left for anything else other than him, the Michaelness of him, his smell, his voice, his being is all that matters to her, his being safe. Without warning, the light outside is switched off, the bedside lamp isn’t working, she is inching blind through the unfamiliar room with her arms outstretched. The steps on the spiral staircase turn their backs on her and twist away beneath her feet. She slips and falls and it hurts, but not so much that she cannot carry on, one hand on either side pressing against the cold walls, reading her way out. At last, a gap. Valerie reconstructs yesterday’s guided tour and knows this must be where the passage connects the tower to the house to the landing to the spare room to Mikey. Wood. Door. Handle. Latch. Open, for Christ’s sake, open will you.

‘Mikey, Diana! Let me out. Mikey, are you there, love? Are you all right?’

In her heart she knows the door is locked from the other side. She might have been drunk last night, but there’s no mistaking what she heard. She must go on down to the door onto the drive, and even if that’s locked, they’ll be out there. Someone will hear her calling, but what if they’re not, what if she’s alone, what if the house has collapsed and Mikey is, what if, not that, please God anything but that. Finally, there are no more steps. She can go no further. This is the bottom, stone to her left, stone beneath her feet, stone close above her head, damp and slick to the touch and smelling of cellars, and here to her right, rough brick. With a sick lurch in her stomach, she remembers the cavernous pool excavated beneath her feet and she panics, clawing at the vast oak door, tracing the metal brackets of the hinges, finding the handle and grasping it. Although she can feel blood on her knees like a child who has fallen in the garden, she holds on to the fact that she is safe. Only one word matters now, only one word has ever mattered.

‘Mikey.’

‘Diana! Mikey! Is there anyone there? Mikey!’

From their world, the unlimited outdoors, they hear her. Valerie is calling madly the names of anyone she has ever loved, anyone who might have ever saved her.

‘Solomon? Mum, are you there? Somebody help me. Mikey.’

Mikey hammers at his aunt with his fists. Why is she standing like that, a skeleton statue, her bones sticking out from her nightie, her hair thin like a witch and straggling? He is so scared by this woman who is his aunt and by this thing that has happened that is called an earthquake and by the screaming of his mother that dizziness spins him and he has fairground feet. A grown-up should say what they are going to do, but there is no one, there never is anyone to see what is happening or do anything about it. They turn a blind eye, that’s what his mum says, but although it’s night, he can see, and although he has his hands over his ears, he can hear, and there are no other sounds in his world, only the screaming of his mother and the hammering on the door of the tower.

Di. Unlock the door, please. Di, don’t leave me. Mikey. Di, Di, Di.

With his thin pummelling arms in her hands, Diana seizes the boy, holds him writhing like a monkey. ‘Stop it,’ she shouts at him. ‘This isn’t helping. I can’t bear it, I can’t think straight, stop it.’

The stitching on her dressing-gown pocket rips from the seam as he lunges for the key. ‘Let her out, let her out.’

The pounding in the tower is violent now. The boy yanks at her, grasping her nightie, exposing her breasts.

‘Get off me.’ She pushes him so violently he falls.

‘Please,’ he sobs from the ground, ‘it’s my mum. Let her out. I’ll be good, I won’t tell, I promise, please.’ His mother’s cries are a lurch in the pit of the stomach.

‘Mikey.’ Behind the thick walls and slit-eyed windows of the tower, Valerie has heard the voice that matters. ‘Mikey, is that you? Are you all right, baby? Thank God.’

‘I’m here, Mum. I’m coming to get you.’ The boy crawls on the grass, gets up, slips, stumbles towards the house. He will get to his mum. He will go back inside the house, up the wide staircase, past the pictures of the old men, onto the landing and turn right because that door leads to the round and round staircase. In his mind there’s no need for keys in this rescue mission, there are no locks. He can navigate the first five levels of Lockdown on the computer, all it needs is for him to be there for her, to make it all better; she always says he is the only one who can do that for her.

As lightning pins its victims, simultaneously energises and paralyses them, in a matter of milliseconds voltage snatches away both breath and thought, so Diana is disabled. Something has struck through her, it is not lightning, but she feels the shock of it as if it were lightning. The key brands the palm of her right hand and she holds tight to the burning and relishes the pain: she does not run; she does not save; there is something in the crying and the darkness which electrifies her. The earthquake is over. Let Valerie scream a little longer, if only to know what it feels like to call for help and for no one to come. Let her wait and see.

It is only Edmund’s voice in her ear which cuts through her strange hypnosis and challenges this mastery. She hears him so clearly it is as if he is right next to her.

Diana, what are you doing standing like a rabbit in the headlights? Your sister is trapped, the key is in your pocket, save her.

His words earth her and she is released. The toes of her right foot press into the soft earth, the heel of her left foot rises above the wet grass, she is coming, she cries, but it returns, galloping behind her, beside her, overtaking her, hooves reverberating and churning and turning the ground. The boy is ahead of her, he’s almost at the house. Diana reaches him just in time, she falls upon him, she saves him from himself.

As the earth trembles beneath Mikey, some new beast falls on top of him and knocks all the air out of him, pins him to the ground, its breath hot on his neck, its heaving weight pressing down into him. Its bare breast slides against his grazed cheeks, he can see the stains of blood on its translucent skin and smells its scented sweat, feels its nakedness. It’s much bigger than him, this monster. He can never escape from it. He’s trying to say get off, get off me, but it doesn’t speak his language. My mum is in there. She needs me. I love her. Without her, I am nothing. There are no words for this. With great effort, he pulls his knees up under his body, the gravel grinds into him but he hardly feels it, he summons great strength to throw the humping thing off his back, to get to his feet, to get the tower, to get to his mum to save her, but even when he is free, he cannot stand because its long nails fix his bare ankle and trick him, trip him again.

The second tremor is weak and mean, the feeblest member of a gang who puts in the boot at the end when the hard work has been done by the others. It is looking for imperfection, senses it in the joists which connect the tower to the house; they don’t belong together, never did, the relationship makes no sense, and now even their foundations are unaligned, unearthed. At that moment of extreme stress, there is no resilience. For years, unnoticed, the tower and the house have been bickering, winter after winter the frost picks at the crevices, drop by drop the rain weakens the mortar, then someone starts digging up the past and like a family facing uncertain times, they realise they have nothing keeping them together. With a terrible moan of separation, the cracks between the two structures widen, the house loosens its hold and, unsupported, the tower crumbles to its knees, head in its hands. There is no way of telling what is falling, except there is falling and the sounds of falling, of stone, beams, turrets and gargoyles and wires and pipes, and when it is all fallen, it is anarchy softened only by smoke, stillness and silence.

No more shaking. No more screeching. All the lights are out. No more barking. Only a sort of nothingness, an absence of what has ever been relied upon before. Like the earth under their feet and the sky over their heads.

‘Oh God.’ Diana drags the boy away from the billowing dust. ‘Oh God,’ she chokes over and over again.

Mikey allows the holding on and the letting go, but does not know it. He shakes as if the disturbance of the tremor has found its way inside him and he has taken on the spasms of the earth’s core as if they are his own.

His fitting is unbearable to Diana. ‘What could I have done? Stop it, Michael, stop.’

He cannot stop.

‘I was just about to go in and then . . .’ Diana’s speech is swallowed up by coughing.

His head jerks and his limbs twitch; all thought, all language gone.

‘What shall we do?’ Diana is oblivious to the age of her partner. ‘I can’t go in there, what if it all comes again? Where’s my phone? I’ll call nine-nine-nine.’ Suddenly she recognises that this is a child and she sinks down to his level, fumbling towards a hug and failing, pulling at his sleeve and promising. ‘She’ll be all right,’ she says, her teeth chattering. ‘People live for days after buildings collapse, in air pockets, things like that. I’ve seen it on the news. Mummy will be all right. I love her too. If only Edmund was here, he’d know what to do. But it will be all right. I promise you, it will be all right.’