Читать книгу Darkmans - Nicola Barker - Страница 16

‘There are many ways in which Fleet is much, much more advanced than all of the other children in his class,’ Mrs Santa explained, encouragingly, ‘his hand–eye coordination – for one thing – is really quite astonishing. And I mean really quite astonishing…’

She glanced over towards the play area in the corner of the classroom where Fleet was currently sitting and boredly constructing a small, neat structure –

A fort, was it?

– out of plastic bricks.

Elen detected a kind of anxiety in the glance. She felt a spontaneous knuckle of rage forming in her stomach (how dare she look at him like that? He was her son. She loved him), and then a balancing knuckle of sympathy (Oh God, he made her feel that way herself, sometimes).

These two contradictory knuckles were Elen’s constant companions; and her gut was the boxing ring in which they staged their spats. ‘Motherhood,’ she told herself, bleakly: ‘the pride, the humility.’

She tried to take a deep breath –

Breathe

Breathe from the stomach

(just like Dory said)

Kinking the back

Diaphragm flat, out, up…

They were sitting on two tiny chairs at a tiny table, like a couple of lady Gullivers amongst the Lilliputians. Elen couldn’t actually remember entering the classroom, or how she’d actually got there. It was all just a blank, a fug. She stared over at the teacher, frowning.

‘But then he might go and do something like…like that for example…’

The teacher indicated (perhaps slightly irritably) at the methodical way in which – before he finally positioned each and every individual brick – Fleet would run the nail of his thumb along the smooth plastic edge, then push the indented side, firmly, into his lower lip.

‘He’ll do that for whole hours at a time. And I mean whole hours, literally. That same, odd little ritual…’

This time her glance extended over towards the door.

Elen’s own eyes followed, hard upon –

Oh my God

The Head Teacher –

Standing guard…

‘He has a phenomenal memory…’ Mrs Santa returned, somewhat doggedly, to her positive sales pitch, ‘although he’s highly selective about the kinds of things that interest him. Very…uh…particular…’

Elen wasn’t paying attention. She was still thinking about the Head Teacher and why he was out there –

Back-up?

Is something wrong?

Does she hate me?

She put a self-conscious hand to her cheek –

Is it the mark?

‘But on the down-side…’ Mrs Santa paused, stuck out her chin, gave a small, Jewish shrug –

Is she Jewish?

Elen stared at her. She was tiny, plump, wore her dark hair – pushed back today with a navy-blue alice-band – in a neat, sharp bob –

Is she?

‘…his language skills are lagging way behind most of the other children’s in his class. And his social skills are still very shaky – even after our previous initiative with the Bradleys’ youngest…’

Elen blinked, snapping out of her reverie –

Oh my, yes –

The Bradley boy…

That ended badly

‘He’ll fall asleep at the drop of a hat – sitting at the table, or when I’m reading a story. Or he’ll just curl up in a corner,’ Mrs Santa twisted the engagement ring on her finger, smiling, almost fondly, ‘like the dopey little dormouse in Alice in Wonderland.’ She cleared her throat and then waited for a response. None came.

‘It’s not that he’s bored – at least I certainly hope it’s not that…’ she drew a quick breath, as if anticipating some kind of heartfelt affirmation of her teaching skills from Elen (she waited in vain), ‘but he’s definitely tired. And yet when he is awake, when he’s on the ball…’ she adjusted a gold link on the bracelet of her watch, ‘he goes straight to the opposite extreme. He focuses too much…’ she paused, speculatively. ‘I’m sure you’ll be aware of this yourself. He can try too hard. He can get too involved in certain projects – certain situations – and then get incredibly frustrated if things don’t work out properly…’

‘Is Fleet causing trouble in class?’ Elen butted in, almost hopefully (there was something so reassuringly normal about the thought of a naughty, disruptive little boy).

Mrs Santa looked shocked. ‘No. Absolutely not. In fact quite the opposite. If anything he’s actually…’ she winced, putting up a small hand to adjust the tiny, faux-Hermès-style silk scarf around her neck ‘…too well behaved. And too hard on himself. Extremely hard…’ Elen frowned. This was definitely not good.

‘So you called me in today,’ she spoke calmly and evenly (purposefully misinterpreting what the teacher was telling her –

This is a game, Elen –

Come on, girl,

Play)

– ‘because he’s too well-behaved?’

‘Yes.’ Mrs Santa nodded.

‘And you really think that’s a problem?’

Mrs Santa smiled. ‘Problem seems rather a harsh way of putting it…’

‘Right. Fine.’

Elen could feel herself growing defensive. She sensed a degree of soft-soaping. And, worse still, bobbing around, perniciously, beneath all those suds and lather: a hidden agenda. She glanced over towards the door again. The Head Teacher had ducked out of view, but she was certain he was still there.

‘Some children find it difficult to concentrate,’ Mrs Santa tip-toed onward, ‘and some children are just…’ she struggled to find the correct word, then gave up ‘…too concentrated. Fleet finds himself in this second category. He’s very grown up for a boy of his age. In fact we’ve all noticed – myself, the classroom assistants, some of the mothers who like to help out sometimes – how much better he seems at interacting with adults than with other children of his own age…’

‘Yes,’ Elen was perfectly willing to take this on board –

Unreasonable?

Me?

‘…Fleet’s an only child,’ she murmured, ‘I suppose that must impact on him at some level…’

‘We all think he’s experiencing a certain amount of…of stress,’ Mrs Santa rushed on (emboldened by Elen’s apparent compliance), ‘and that he’s expressing it through particular…’ she paused, as if searching for the least damning formulation ‘…behaviours. Tasks. Symptoms. Habits.’

‘I see.’

Elen’s voice was clear as a glass of spring water.

‘He never seems quite able to switch off…’

Elen was quiet.

The teacher cleared her throat, nervously. ‘We wondered whether there might be anything…anything unusual going on at home at the moment which could offer some kind of…of…?’

She gazed over at Elen, appealingly.

‘…Perhaps a recent family bereavement? The loss of a job…?’

Elen said nothing. Mrs Santa filled the awkward silence by commencing a detailed inspection of the heel of her black court shoe.

‘We have a hole in the roof,’ Elen eventually volunteered, ‘the roof’s leaking.’

‘Really?’

Mrs Santa seemed relieved by Elen’s input, and yet somewhat nonplussed. Elen had a sudden sense of how it might feel to be a student who wasn’t excelling in Mrs Santa’s class (that atmosphere of ‘tolerant’ disappointment; of ‘accepting’ disquiet). She didn’t like it. The angry knuckle tensed itself up inside her stomach again –

Cow

– then the second, gentler knuckle – the pacifier –

She’s his teacher –

She just wants to help…

– predictably balanced it out.

‘I know it mightn’t sound like much,’ Elen explained, patiently, ‘but it’s leaking directly above Fleet’s bedroom. We’ve had to move all his…his toys down into the living-area. Everything’s a little chaotic.’

‘Ah.’

Mrs Santa tried to appear as if she’d been enlightened in some way by this explanation. She failed. She glanced down at her hands, then back over towards Fleet again. Fleet did a tiny, involuntary jump, for no apparent reason.

‘Did you just see that?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘That little jump? That “tick”. He does it fairly regularly.’

‘Does he? Yes. Well that’s…’ Elen bit her lip ‘…that’s something he…he does, occasionally.’

She smoothed down the fabric of her skirt and folded her hands across her lap. She knew she wasn’t helping matters. She felt frustrated – impotent. There was so much she could contribute –

So much

– but she just…

Just…

No.

Can’t.

Her eyes shifted over towards the classroom windows. It was a new building (everything was new here – for Isidore, something being ‘new enough’ was always a primary concern). She idly noticed how one of the smaller, higher windows had been left open. She gazed up at it, ruminatively. Her eyes moved to the square of putty surrounding the pane of glass. She could see – even from where she was sitting – that the putty had been interfered with. It was puckered; sliced; gouged out in some places.

She shuddered.

‘We all want what’s best for Fleet, after all…’ Mrs Santa continued. ‘Of course,’ Elen was still distracted, still looking up at the window. ‘So we wondered,’ Mrs Santa grasped her moment, ‘if it might not be an idea to book him in for a brief session with the child psychologist.’

‘No.’

Elen immediately snapped back to attention. ‘Absolutely not.’

Mrs Santa seemed shocked; less by the refusal itself, than by the casual manner in which it was delivered. ‘But it’s a perfectly normal procedure,’ she emphasised, ‘a significant percentage of our children end up seeing the psychologist at some time or other during their school career.’

Elen pushed her hair firmly behind her ears. ‘What percentage would that be, exactly?’

Mrs Santa floundered, ‘I don’t know. Two…three…’

‘That’s not a significant percentage,’ Elen was very calm, ‘that’s a tiny percentage.’

Fleet had completed his task in the play area. He yawned. He rubbed his eyes and then stood up. Elen reached out her hand towards him, almost as if appealing for his support.

‘If you’re concerned that there might be some kind of…of stigma…’ Mrs Santa continued, staunchly.

‘Yes I am worried,’ Elen nodded, ‘very worried. Because there would be.’

‘The point is that we’re extremely concerned about Fleet, and we simply feel…’

‘The fact is,’ Elen interrupted, ‘that I’m not really the problem here. It’s Dory, Fleet’s father. He’s German. He’s very old-fashioned. He simply wouldn’t tolerate the idea.’

‘Fleet’s father doesn’t necessarily have to be involved,’ Mrs Santa proclaimed boldly (glancing towards the child with a bright smile), ‘it could simply be something that the school has instigated, something which just “spontaneously happens”, so to speak.’

Elen seemed genuinely alarmed by this suggestion. Fleet was standing at her side, now. She slipped her arm around his waist and pulled him closer.

‘I don’t like the sound of that at all, Mrs Santa.’

Her gentle voice contained a strong warning.

Mrs Santa looked uncomfortable, as if a breach had been established and she – for one – was going to experience some difficulty in recovering from it. ‘Well just think it over, at least. We’re only trying to do our best for the boy,’ she leaned forward and chucked Fleet, playfully, under his chin (he stiffened). ‘We want him to be happy. We want him to excel.’

‘Of course.’

There was a sudden, loud creaking sound directly above them. Elen glanced up. One of the classroom’s suspended strip-lights had slowly begun to rock.

Mrs Santa glanced up, too.

‘It’s the breeze,’ she said, ‘it often does that.’

She clambered to her feet, walked over to the line of windows, picked up a specially adapted pole and pushed its metal tip through the high, open window’s latch. She briskly pulled it shut.

The light continued to swing. Fleet stretched up his arm towards it, pointing his index finger. He paused for a second, then jumped again – a tiny, apparently involuntary jolt – before smiling and carefully touching that same index finger to his right shoulder (as if in some kind of convoluted boy scout salute).

Elen quickly stood up as Mrs Santa walked back over. She grabbed her bag to try and signal an end to their discussion.

‘There, that’s better,’ Mrs Santa murmured. They all looked up towards the light again, their heads tipping, in unison, their chins lifting; like three, simple flower petals unfurling from the bud in a time-lapse-photography nature documentary.

At night he did his real work. You couldn’t call it ‘play’, exactly. It was far too serious – too painstaking – for that. He’d been re-creating, in perfect miniature, the Cathedral of Sainte-Cecile (the world’s largest ever brick-built structure) which was located (and this meant nothing to Fleet, he was six years old, and geography, to him, was just a clumsy four-syllable word) in the beautiful, French medieval town of Albi.

Fleet’s tools: a trusty pair of children’s paper-cutting scissors (the blades of which he’d secretly stropped on a stone until they were razor-sharp), some general-purpose adhesive (the white kind which came in a blue tub and smelled of marzipan), and matchsticks (in abundance; pristine – never spent – with the brightly tinted sulphured end cleanly lopped off).

He had a small black and white picture of the cathedral (a partial view – it was a monumental, many-faceted construction, 200 years in the making) which he’d discovered, by chance (at least, that’s how he remembered it), aged four, in a French holiday brochure. He liked to keep it hidden (he didn’t know why: instinct, perhaps) inside a folded strip of cardboard hoarded from a cereal packet, shoved under the dishcloths in the back of a kitchen drawer.

Sometimes he would creep into the kitchen at night with his torch, open the drawer and stare at the picture for hours, without blinking (or until his re-chargeable batteries faded). He would consume it, devour it. Then he would squirrel it away, and not feel the need to refer to it for days.

It was all a question of dimensions with Fleet, and of form: the scale of a thing, the logistics (what was feasible, what was not). Aesthetics didn’t enter into it. Beauty was just something that worked. Beauty paid its way. It was infrastructure. It was superstructure. All the rest was simply floss.

He had no pictorial evidence of the cathedral’s interior (which was legendarily beautiful, with an immense nave containing an Italian fresco of the Last Judgement, hundreds of sculptures, and one of the world’s most impressive organs), but the inside of his matchstick monolith had been just as fastidiously re-created (was just as pristine – no bish-bosh job, this) as the exterior.

He’d made certain, educated leaps based on his tours of Ashford Church (the inside a crazy mish-mash of ancient period detail) and – but of course – two wonderful day trips he’d taken (aged three and a half and five) to the astonishing medieval village of Chilham, with its grand, stately home, thirteenth-century church and numerous timber-framed houses and cottages.

It was a big project –

Big

– and his parents weren’t what you might call ‘entirely behind it’. In fact they’d done everything they possibly could to try and disrupt him (financial and spatial restraints had been suddenly – and arbitrarily – imposed at various points, karate lessons were posited, extra reading classes, the bloody cubs).

Fleet was even suspicious – although this was sheer paranoia on his part – that the leaky roof scenario was yet another complex gambit they’d suddenly dreamed up to foil his progress (since his quality time alone with the cathedral had been profoundly undermined by it).

The truth was that Elen and Dory hadn’t particularly minded the cathedral – at least, not at first. They’d found it charming; extraordinary, even (although – as was only to be expected – their tolerance of ‘difference’, or – worse still – of ‘eccentricity’, was entirely predicated by Isidore’s own mental health scenario. The question of heredity was naturally an explosive one).

Fleet’s burgeoning ‘obsession’ with structure (and they didn’t even dare use this key word in private together) had been some time in the making, although Isidore held himself chiefly responsible for initiating this current phase (which they both thought especially severe), after he’d idly bought Fleet a small, Airfix aeroplane from a closing-down sale in a local toy shop.

His son had always been a frail, cerebral little creature – physically unadventurous – and his father (in whom nature found the perfect, working definition of ‘robust’) battled constantly to try and toughen him up. He’d take him out for walks, or cycling, or to the park to mess around on the Adventure Playground. He tried to interest him in competitive sports.

Fleet absolutely dreaded these activity-based excursions, would be sullen, uncooperative, virtually monosyllabic. When his father threw a ball at him, he’d simply neglect to raise his hands, and if it hit him, he would buckle and fall, without a sound (like a tragic young soldier in a silent film, mown down, in his prime, on the front line).

Sometimes his mother joined them (acting as a buffer between her husband’s enthusiasm and her son’s recalcitrance) and he’d cling miserably to her skirts, begging her, in urgent whispers, to help him, to save him, to just take him home again.

Isidore felt like the whole world was alien to his son; that he was a stranger, dispositionally; that there was a quality within him which was fundamentally ‘foreign’ (this was something which he understood only too well himself – and why on earth wouldn’t he? It was the keynote of his own existence; something, as a German, an outlander, that he battled constantly to overcome). Yet he found Fleet’s total inability to fit in – the boy’s effortless facility for bucking and chafing against even the most basic of social conventions – unbelievably infuriating.

Home life wasn’t much better. When they’d moved to the new Cedar Wood development, Fleet had been inconsolable for weeks; kept feeling for the familiar walls of the old house whenever he walked in his sleep – as he sometimes would, when he was especially stressed – calling out, in sheer terror, when he couldn’t locate them; or, worse still, they’d discover him, pushing, exhaustedly (tears streaking his cheeks, panting for breath) against a solid surface, as if fully expecting that it might desolidify in front of him…(or that he might, even).

During his waking hours he rigorously avoided the new kitchen appliances, quivered at the bathroom taps, baulked at the low-flush toilet and the dimmer switches. He even had to re-learn how to use his fork (exactly the same fork he’d used at their previous address); would hold it, loosely, in his hand, head tipped on one side, like a suspicious young thrush, inspecting the prongs with a mixture of fury and wonder.

It was all a matter of context, Isidore felt, and a question of adaptation. Neither of these concepts had any kind of hold on him. His dreamy, impish mind would simply wriggle free and he’d be set loose in the world again, unconstrained by anything.

It was an awful kind of liberty.

Model building – on the other hand – was something they could share in, something simple and quiet and relaxing; a perfect opportunity – or so Dory thought – for a little gentle father and son bonding. After the plane they’d made a tank (Isidore still taking the lead at this stage, Fleet mainly standing by, standing back, observing), then a sports car.

They’d graduated on to aquatic vehicles – a hovercraft, a submarine. Finally, a boat. A big one. Fleet chose the model himself (as a special fifth birthday treat). He plumped for a clipper (a 200 foot-er).

He built the bulk of the main structure, virtually single-handed, in just under three days (the age recommendation of the box specified twelve years and over) then got caught up in the rigging – tangled, knotted – spent hours on end perfecting the whole thing, even adding – much to Isidore’s amazement – several home-made modifications where, apparently, ‘the model wasn’t proper.’

They’d visited the Cutty Sark, in Greenwich, as a family, when Fleet was just a toddler, and he’d completed a school project on deep sea diving (earning himself a much-coveted gold star), but these meagre, boat-related provenances were barely adequate – Dory felt – to justify the extent of his son’s precocity.

There were – inevitably – a few gaps in Dory’s memory at this stage (which didn’t really matter – he told himself – since even the most superficially straightforward child’s developmental progress was rarely – if ever – entirely linear) but the next thing he knew, Fleet was experimenting with the idea of making objects ‘from scratch’. They’d messed around with clay (Fleet had screwed up his face; the clay was too gloopy, too glutinous, he was far too fastidious), then wood (Elen had stepped in and insisted – much to Fleet’s irritation – that the boy was too small to handle sharp tools responsibly).

Then, finally, on an especially boring Sunday morning, Isidore had grabbed hold of a box of kitchen matches, rattled it, speculatively, tipped the matches out on to the table-top, unearthed a stray tube of glue in a nearby drawer, and quickly built a sentry box for one of Fleet’s highly prized, enamelled Beefeaters.

That was it.

Fleet dived straight on in (not a whiff of uncertainty, no whining or faltering) and carefully began constructing a long, formal, looping creation (like an early piece of lace or crochet, or a dramatically enlarged chromosome – a cell, or a gene – cut open, stretched out, unwound). It was flat-topped, 2 inches wide, several feet long. It was beautiful.

‘The Bridge’, he called it. His parents watched on in quiet bewilderment.

Elen immediately divined (it was a curious feeling, a familiar feeling) that something primal was connecting within him. She didn’t know what or why. But she could see that he was spanning some kind of a divide (mentally, physically, symbolically), that this behaviour was unusual, that it was out of the ordinary.

Suddenly, without warning, ‘The Bridge’ was quietly placed aside and superseded (no fuss, no fanfare) by a menacing, fortress-style basilica. And with the arrival of this ‘cathedral’ it became patently obvious that parental participation was no longer an issue.

Isidore wasn’t entirely certain (as a play-mate, or as a father) just how much of an influence he’d actually been on his son; whether Fleet’s obsession reflected well (or badly) on him. He had a nagging – an uncomfortable – feeling about the whole affair. Had he led the boy, or had the boy – somehow, ineluctably – led him?

Fleet seemed happy (at least, to start off with), and that (they told themselves) was the important part. He seemed more confident, more at ease, was ‘opening up’ (asking for things, making lists, barking out instructions if anyone dared to try and join in).

As parents (as guardians, even, with a vested interest in his welfare) their enthusiasm had waned marginally when he’d expanded his architectural portfolio to include not only ‘The Bridge’ and ‘The Cathedral’, but a cluster of brand-new, subsidiary properties (a large, secondary building – down what was now ‘The Hill’ a-way – which he described as ‘The Palace’, then, shortly after, another structure, which he casually referred to as ‘The Dungeon Tower’. He’d even commenced work on a water mill, whose connection to the other buildings seemed, at best, entirely marginal).

And everything (Elen quietly observed – although she didn’t – for her own good reasons – confide in Isidore) was now suddenly on-going (happening all-at-once, burgeoning uncontrollably…like a…how to express it? Like the frantic, shifting interior of one of those toy kaleidoscopes, or a hall of mirrors, or a…a –

God help him

– some kind of a disease, maybe).

She tried to quell her increasing agitation by telling herself that Fleet’d seen development all around him (they were in a new-build property in a newly built area); the builder, the digger, the lorry, were all part of his locality; change was part of the milieu in which he lived and breathed and grew…

But it didn’t work. It didn’t mesh. It didn’t entirely ring true.

Space was increasingly at a premium (the inside mirroring the outside in an funny kind of way). Everything – Elen observed, with an encroaching sense of terror –

Oh no…

I’m…

Can’t…

Can’t breathe

– was now thuddingly equal (Flat. Reduced. Like a beautiful, five-course meal, tossed into a large bowl and then devoured all in one go). Nothing took precedence. Nothing was ever rounded off (finished, honed). There was no sense of an end to it, of a neat conclusion. Of curtailment. Of release.

Elen knew all about the brochure in the kitchen drawer. She’d found it, looking for a tea-towel, and had made the connection. Its placement, she presumed, indicated something – she wasn’t sure what – about Fleet’s unconscious desire to involve her (she was, after all, the only person in the house to do the drying up; Isidore, in general, preferred to wash).

She’d kept it a secret. Isidore still firmly believed that ‘The Cathedral’ was just part of some magical ‘dream landscape’, that it was simply another perplexing facet of the boy’s highly developed – if distinctly wayward – imagination (he needed to believe this, and Elen responded, automatically – as any considerate partner would – to whatever his needs were).

But she knew better. She’d been to the library and had looked up Sainte-Cecile in a Rough Guide travel book. She’d expanded her search on to the internet. There she’d seen a series of modern, photographic images of Albi, in all its glory (clinging to its hill, surrounded by water); then (with an increasing sense of claustrophobia) the Cathedral Basilica, the adjacent La Berbie Palace, the dramatic Dungeon Tower, the hooped colonnades of the St Salvy Cloister. Even the mill, sitting quietly downstream on the River Tarn.

And the bridge.

The link –

Oh God –

There it was

She traced its familiar, looping grandeur on the glaring screen with her index finger –

Yes

But of course –

Her wait was over. The worst had finally happened. This was the beginning.

This was the crossing.

They’d pushed the two boys together in class (what else to do?). They were both a little dippy. Steven Bradley had a Gameboy and a registered learning disability – dyspraxia; but very mild (words spilled out of his mouth in entirely the wrong order; he made regular trips to see the speech therapist in Canterbury). He could be clumsy –

Bless him

Came from a family of ten, so it was difficult, sometimes, for his parents (who were extremely well-meaning) to give him all the attention he so desperately required. He could be slow on the uptake, obdurate, even, but he was fundamentally a solid, sweet-natured boy.

Fleet on the other hand…

Hmmn

Fleet had…

What did Fleet have? Whatever it was, the parents wouldn’t deal with it (were uncooperative, wouldn’t face facts), which automatically rendered them a part of the problem. To care too much was a weakness all parents could quite reasonably be found guilty of, but to actively obstruct? To smother? To deny? Not only was it unhealthy, but in the voluminous wardrobe of parental misdemeanours, this was that fine-seeming, well-laundered garment hanging neatly alongside the foul and mouldering suit of abuse (contamination was always a real possibility when two items were hung so close).

Fleet wasn’t a lost cause. Absolutely not. Because when all was finally said and done – with a modicum of support, a few one-to-one sessions, some firm guidance – they might actually be able to straighten the poor boy out (although he’d never be…not quite what you might call…well…vertical, exactly).

It was nothing insurmountable, in other words. But it was something (a blip, a phase – rather hard to put your finger on, really, without the benefit of professional input).

One thing was for certain: the boy was much smarter than he might initially appear. He was no Will o’ the Wisp. No charming, harmless Puck. He was evasive, sly, elusive. And –

Why not let’s just call a spade a spade, eh?

– you didn’t have to hunt very far to find out who he might’ve learned that particular mode of behaviour from.

The mothers sat in Elen’s brand-new kitchen (pale ash units, double-sink, waste disposal, grey marble counter) and enjoyed a pot of tea together. Fleet’s father – the German, terribly handsome – Dory? Isidore? – had popped in to say ‘Hi’ (shook Mrs Bradley’s hand, very formally, before heading upstairs for a quick nap. He’d been out on a job, he informed her – with an apologetic yawn – since eleven o’clock the night before).

Fleet (who didn’t initially seem entirely delighted by their arrival) took Steven up to his bedroom and guided him, nervously (the boy was just an accident waiting to happen) around his model of Albi (which currently took up a significant proportion of the floor-space in there).

Steven (extremely polite, but essentially unmoved by the tour) listened, blankly, waited until it was all over (offering no comment), then perched himself on the edge of Fleet’s bed, took out his computer and instituted his own kind of play (his head at an angle, his mouth falling slack, his fingers convulsing).

Okay

Fleet squatted down, picked up a boxful of matches and shook them, meditatively. He appraised his work. He mused. He calculated.

This arrangement suited them both perfectly (no pressures here, no expectations, no demands). Fleet worked away diligently on The Dragon Tower, leaving Steven entirely to his own devices.

Everything was proceeding in the best possible manner, and then…

Eh…?

Fleet scowled. He suddenly found himself distracted by the computer’s tiny voice. A tune. So simple. So repetitive. It hung in the air around him like a busy hover-fly. It buzzed. It troubled his ear. It reminded him of something. A folk memory. He cocked his head quizzically and focussed in on it, fully –

Zzzzzzzzzeeeee

Click –

Ah…

He closed his eyes, briefly.

Steven pressed pause and glanced up. ‘What?’

Fleet looked straight back at him (his fingers slightly glue-ey). ‘Huh?’ Steven frowned, then looked down, released pause, and continued to play. He tried to concentrate, but something was interfering. He pressed pause for a second time.

‘Stop that,’ he demanded.

‘What?’

Fleet didn’t even turn around, he just continued to build, methodically.

Steven cocked his head to one side. Couldn’t he hear it? The humming? Didn’t it…? Wasn’t he…?

It filled the air around them.

‘That!’ Steven exclaimed, pointing at nothing (his tongue twisting awkwardly).

Fleet slowly shrugged his shoulders and then continued on – doggedly – with what he was doing.

Steven sat in silence, frowning. He studied Fleet’s breathing patterns from the back, to see if they might give him away.

‘It’s not song…not even same,’ he eventually stammered.

‘It is the same,’ Fleet’s voice was deadly calm, ‘only it came from before.’

He continued to build.

‘No,’ Steven stammered. ‘Not.’

Fleet merely shrugged.

‘Not!’

Steven looked down at his Gameboy. His hand was shaking slightly. He wanted to play – he needed to – but he was suddenly overwhelmed by an extraordinary sense of dislocation. He blinked, then he gasped. A gulf was opening up around him (was being scribbled – in thick, dark crayon – over the gleaming surface of his everyday world).

He sat on the edge of the bed, like a frightened nestling on the lip of a precipice, remaining perfectly still, hardly even breathing, until his mother had finished her tea and was standing at the bottom of the stairs, calling him –

‘Steven? Steven!’

Then, and only then, could he blink back the darkness and run.

For the next two days, he didn’t feel even the remotest inclination to turn his Gameboy on again.

The second time she literally had to drag him there. He kept telling her that he didn’t like Fleet, that Fleet was mean, that he really didn’t want to go and visit him any more. But the school had recommended it, and Mrs Bradley thought Elen was incredibly charming (quite the loveliest person. It took a little while to get to grips with her – sure – what with that severe, home-spun look; the dark, sober clothes, the long hair, the thinness, the birthmark – but once you did, there was something so…so friendly, so informal, so calm, so intelligent…).

And the house was so nice. And the area. Everything so new. Everything so…Shhhhhh! (Can’t you hear that? The silence? No traffic, no dogs barking, no stereos blaring…)

Although on this occasion – it soon transpired – the marvellous quiet was to be interrupted (and quite notably), by a series of strange noises emanating from above.

Elen was cutting into a small, home-made fruitcake when the pandemonium first began. The mothers’ eyes had met – in mutual alarm – across the table-top.

‘Are they…are they singing?’ Mrs Bradley asked (she couldn’t actually remember ever having heard Steven sing before).

Elen gently pushed a slice of cake towards her.

‘Yes. Yes, I think they must be…’

‘But isn’t your husband still working nights? Won’t they disturb him?’

‘No. That’s…It’s fine, honestly.’

Elen stood up – slightly flustered – and went over to close the door. Then a few minutes later, while she was refreshing the pot, she casually turned on the oven’s extractor-hood.

All subsequent extraneous sounds were expunged by its whirr.

She’d gently questioned Fleet about his ‘project’ (this matchstick structure now took up the best part of their dining table – his bedroom having long since been evacuated because of the leak). She was especially interested in why it was that he hadn’t completed the cathedral itself before moving on to some of the surrounding buildings.

‘But what about this section?’ she’d asked, standing on the cathedral’s south side, where a large hole still gaped, unattractively, at the entrance.

‘It’s not finished,’ Fleet had murmured.

‘Then finish it,’ she’d said.

He’d scowled up at her. ‘It’s not finished,’ he repeated, as if speaking to an imbecile. ‘They haven’t built it yet.’

Steven had the most beautiful voice, and once he’d been set off, there was literally no stopping him (although he only ever really sang one song, and he sang it in what appeared to be a foreign tongue). When he did sing, though, his usually jumbled pronunciation sounded smooth and unhalting.

His speech therapist claimed that she’d seen this happen before (that it was relatively common, even). ‘Remember Gareth Gates,’ she’d said, ‘with his terrible stutter, who finished up second on Pop Idol? Steven’s like him…’ she paused, speculatively ‘…although perhaps a little…uh…’

One of the volunteers in Steven’s class was a member of Ashford Church’s prestigious choir. With Mrs Santa’s encouragement, she took Steven – and his mother – along to meet the choir master. Steven sang for him. In fact he sang – his shoulders back, his hands clasped, his tiny face all pinkly beatific – for upwards of half an hour.

The choir master had been both charmed and bemused.

‘It’s an early Madrigal,’ he told them (over the continuing sounds of Steven’s vocalising), ‘in a kind of bastardised Latin. Or maybe Welsh or Cornish. Definitely not a tongue I’m especially familiar with…’

‘D’you think he made it up?’ his mother asked.

‘I simply can’t answer that.’

‘D’you think you could make him sing something else?’

‘I’m sure I could try.’

But when the choir master sat down at his piano and began to play, Steven put his hands over his ears, began rocking and screaming.

The instrument, the rhythm, the tempo, the pitch. They were all wrong. They were vile and cacophonous.

Modern.

He found it disgusting.

Elen couldn’t help wondering why.

Why Albi?

At first she’d considered the actual place – its geography; its historical background – tales of religious strife were certainly legion; the basilica had been built by a cruel bishop –

Blah blah

Uh…

– Toulouse Lautrec had been born in the town, they’d built him a museum…

Hmmn

But after a while she decided to simplify things. She went back to basics. She began by considering the word itself, the name; its linguistic ramifications; the actual semantics (to do so, she’d found – in her extensive experience of problems of this kind – could often pay dividends).

Albi?

Al – bi?

Hang on…

If you inserted the ‘I’ (placed yourself in the picture), you got ‘al-i-bi’.

Alibi

In Latin (she looked it up in a dictionary) that meant ‘elsewhere’. I-am-elsewhere.

This funny little riddle just lodged in her head. And it stayed there.

Soon Steven was actually speaking – was chatting away, and with an amazing fluency – in this extraordinary new language of his, but only – Mrs Santa noted – when he was in (or around) Fleet’s general vicinity. It was almost as if he felt Fleet might respond (but Fleet never did), as if he thought Fleet might actually understand.

And while Fleet wasn’t ever aggressive (it wasn’t in his nature to be), it was plain that he found the boy (and his language) both stupid and exasperating. He would turn his face to the wall, or simply walk away. He made his contempt quite obvious. Everybody noticed.

Eventually the home visits were gently discouraged.

Two weeks after Steven had entered the Special Care stream, he completely abandoned his strange, new tongue. He began to stammer and to falter again. He lost his curiously ecstatic air. He recommenced his relationship with the Gameboy (head cocked, mouth open, fingers jabbing), but he’d only ever play with the sound turned off. He was almost ludicrously punctilious on that point.

He took no interest in Fleet any more.

A while after that, when the dust had finally settled, Mrs Santa caught Fleet staring at Steven during break one morning.

‘Is anything wrong, Fleet?’ she’d asked.

Fleet’s eye-line didn’t alter. It remained fixed on Steven as he answered her.

‘Steven should stay hiding behind the shapes,’ he murmured, ‘inside that funny little play-box of his.’

‘Really?’

Mrs Santa tried her best to draw him out.

‘Yes.’

‘And why do you say that, Fleet?’

Fleet glanced up at her, a look of mild surprise in his impish eyes.

‘Because that’s where he’s safe, Mrs Santa. All alone. In the quiet.’

‘But of…of course.’

Mrs Santa delivered him one of her brightest smiles. She glanced nervously around her. Two girls were squabbling over a skipping rope –

Of course…

She rapidly marched towards them, determined to interfere.