Feather Boy Read online

  “You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”

  I’m really not painting. I’m just waving a brush about. So I might as well – yap yap – go downstairs and get Mum’s road atlas. This is how she finds me, crouching over England with a piece of string in my hands.

  “Geography prep?” she asks, practical as ever.

  “Yap.”

  “What is it?”

  “Distance in miles from here to St Albans. How far do you reckon, Mum?”

  “You’re the one with the string.”

  “Right. Fine. Ninety miles. Would it be ninety miles?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Could we go there?”

  “Why?”

  Good question.

  “Day out?”

  She sits down, kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up on a little pouffe.

  “Bit far for a day out,” she says. My mum is a small person, with a small face and a little puff of blonde hair. She looks exhausted.

  “Can I get you a cup of tea?”

  “God bless you, Robert.”

  It’s only teabag tea but, the way she takes it, it could be water in a desert.

  “I’d really like to go to St Albans. In fact, I think I have to go to St Albans.”

  She shuts her eyes.

  “Do you think we could?”

  “Mmm.” She’s asleep. I lift the teacup from her lap. Where her skirt has ridden up I can see blood throbbing in her varicose vein.

  In the kitchen I make myself a sandwich and then I return to my desk.

  “It’s really not far,” yaps Edith Sorrel.

  That’s when I decide to set the dream alarm. It’s not an exact science but it sometimes works for me. All I have to do is think about whatever it is that’s bothering me and then set the alarm for 3am. I’ve tried many different times of night but all my best results have come from 3am. Too early in the night and my dreams don’t really seem to have got going, too near the morning and they seem to be petering out. At 3am, I’m normally in the middle of some seething epic. As soon as the alarm goes, I start scribbling. I write down everything I can remember in my dream diary. Even the stupid and inconsequential stuff. Mainly that actually. I note all the colours, the people, the buildings, the looks, the feelings. But I don’t try to make sense of anything. In any case there often isn’t much sense to be made. But in the morning it’s different. Once or twice I’ve woken with some completely crystalline idea about a problem. An idea which often bears no relation to whatever I scribbled down in the night, but it’s still there like some perfect jewel on my pillow. Of course, it’s not always like that. Much more often I have to go back to the diary, reading and re-reading until something jumps out at me – a word, a colour, a phrase, a clue. Something to work with. Naturally, I always hope for the jewel. But somehow I can’t see that happening with Chance House.

  Once I’ve decided to use the dream alarm, the evening normally passes mournfully slowly. But not tonight. It only seems a moment before I’m in bed. Then it’s just a matter of going through the ritual. I lie on my back, close my eyes, and relax my body, starting with my feet. When all my limbs are so heavy that the mattress seems dented with them, I turn to my mind. This is when it can get tricky. I think about the problem – in this case Chance House – but I try not to direct my thoughts. It works better if I can keep everything loose and unfocused. If images come, and they do, I attempt to follow them, but not to pursue them, so they can choose their own way. It normally takes a while for the vague, meandering flow to begin. But Chance House conjures itself at once, arriving exact and massive in my imagination. It’s a huge edifice of dirty cream brick. Wide, concrete steps lead to a forbidding door. The door handle is a twisted ring of metal, fashioned like a rope. I imagine myself walking up the steps, grasping the handle in both hands and passing boldly into Edith’s past and my future. But that’s not what happens. I do walk up the steps. But the moment I touch the door, there is a flash and a bang and the house disappears. Or that’s what I believe at first. A little while later, as I stand in the dark, it occurs to me that maybe I have disappeared.

  4

  Next thing I’m aware of is Mum shaking me by the shoulders.

  “Robert,” she says gently.

  At once I’m in action mode, it can’t be more than three seconds before I’m bolt upright, pencil in hand.

  “Room,” I write in my dream diary. “Small, cosy, warm, not unlike my bedroom.”

  “Robert?”

  “People: me, Mum. Atmosphere: everyday, normal. Colours: pale but bright, morning colours.”

  Mum gets up and opens the curtains. It is bright. In fact, it is morning.

  I grab for my clock, focus. Focus again.

  “You set the alarm for three am,” says Mum. “You silly chump.” She smiles, touches me lightly on the head.

  “What!”

  “Lucky I noticed, eh?” says my mother.

  I fall backwards on to the bed. She re-set the alarm. She re-set the alarm! I don’t believe it. I pull the duvet over my head.

  “Come on now,” she says, “seven-thirty. Chop chop.”

  She leaves.

  I wail, I moan, I thump the mattress. Then I get dressed.

  “I’m on lates,” says Mum over breakfast. “Do you want me to walk you to school?”

  “No,” I say. “No, thanks.” Niker says only girls and wusses are walked to school.

  Mum notes what I eat (one slice of toast with strawberry jam), what I drink (nothing) and then she follows me to the bathroom and fiddles about while I clean my teeth. She watches me put my library book and football boots in my school bag and then I watch her as she takes them out again. She puts the boots, which are mud-free, in a plastic bag, examines the library book, remarks, “Haven’t you read this before?” and then replaces both items in the bag. After which she checks the time.

  “You don’t have to go yet,” she says.

  It’s twenty to nine. The journey to school – via The Dog Leg – is about five minutes. “I like being early,” I say. “I get to use the computers.” Actually Mr Biddulph doesn’t get in till nine-thirty and the computer room is locked like Fort Knox. But Mum doesn’t know that.

  “I’ll get you a computer one day,” she says. “I’ll save up.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “I know you didn’t, love.”

  “Mum…”

  “Yes?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  I peck her quickly on the cheek and go out the back way. As I shut the patio gate, I wave and then turn as if I was going in the direction of The Dog Leg.

  Only the locals call it The Dog Leg. Its real name is the Cut, because that’s what it is, a zig-zag passage that acts as a short cut between The Lane and Stanhope Avenue. Some people say it’s called The Dog Leg because that’s how it’s shaped – like the back leg of a dog. Personally, I think that would make for one pretty deformed dog. The passage goes twenty yards east, then right-angles north for ten yards, then sharp east again for another ten and finally sharp north before coming out into daylight under the arch of two Stanhope Avenue houses, which are joined at the second floor level like some architectural Siamese twins. Other people say the passage is called The Dog Leg because that’s what happens there. Dogs lift their legs. At the lamp-posts. If only they knew.

  There are two lamp-posts, not the concrete sort you see in ordinary streets, with the lozenge of orange light at the top, but ones that look as if they’ve come out of Narnia. Old-fashioned, fluted metal lamp-posts in pale green surmounted by hexagonal glass lamps which glimmer with that soft gas mantle light. Sticking out horizontally, just below the lamp itself, is a fluted green metal arm with a bobble on the end, which looks like a place you might hang a coat if you were given to hanging your coat on a lamp-post. Alternatively, if you were given to climbing lamp-posts this would be an excellent place to sit. It’s where Niker sits. Niker climbs like a spider.

 
I didn’t see him the first time, even though he was directly in front of me. I suppose that’s because I was going along with my head at the five-foot level and he was perched another five foot above that. So when the first apple landed I thought it was just Norbert bad luck. Because, as it happens, there is this large Bramley apple tree on the first bend of the passage. In any case I wasn’t exactly thinking of apple as ammunition, just apple as fruit, and fruit does occasionally fall off trees and hit people on account of the laws of gravity. So it was only when the second apple landed, squidgy and rotten and directly on my head, that I thought to look up. Or maybe it was the laugh that made me look. He’s quite a good marksman, Niker, and I think he hit me another four times before I managed to turn the corner. Afterwards, as I scraped the gunge off my coat with a stick, I wondered why I hadn’t thought to return fire. But I think I would have missed anyway.

  Of course the next time I went via The Dog Leg I checked the lamp-post (which you can see from the entrance) before going in. Only that time he was up the second lamp-post, the one you can’t see until you turn the middle bend. This post doesn’t have a convenient apple tree near by. So he had a plastic bag. He was wearing gloves and he threw something loose and brown that splatted on the back of my neck. I thought it was mud – until I breathed in. When I got to school I washed it out of my hair, but the smell was still on my collar.

  “Norbert,” Niker said at Break. “Did anyone ever tell you, you stink?” He was sitting on the playground wall next to Kate, who was swinging her legs and eating a cheesestring. “You should take a bath.” He jumped off the wall into a puddle, soaking me, but also himself.

  “E-jit,” Kate said and laughed.

  As soon as I got home that afternoon I changed and stuffed my shirt at the bottom of the laundry basket. But Mum has a nose like a bloodhound.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I fell over.”

  “On your back?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a pile of dog muck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Robert?”

  “Yes, Mum, I fell over on my back. In a pile of dog muck. People do, you know.”

  As I bathed, I thought about what Kate meant by “E-jit”. Or rather – who she meant. I decided she meant Niker and that’s why I didn’t stop using The Dog Leg. Not then anyway. No. I walked through it every day. Right up until the Grape Incident.

  I’m not saying I wasn’t scared. The Dog Leg’s a spooky place anyway. Mum says it’s not mortar that holds the walls together but graffiti. And the more often our neighbours creosote their back gates the more elaborate the spray painting gets. It makes the houses looked marked, as if all the victims from the Great Plague ended up with homes backing on to the Cut. And then there’s the broken glass and the smell of urine – and I don’t mean dog urine either. Because dog urine doesn’t smell, does it? And even though the passage is a perfectly ordinary path made of perfectly ordinary concrete, footfalls really echo there. There always seems to be someone behind you, or coming towards you. It’s difficult to locate exactly where someone else is in the passage until you’re right on them. Or they’re on you. But then it should be safe because so many people use it: dog-walkers, shoppers, business people on their way to the sandwich shop, everyday grown-ups going about their everyday business. So maybe it is only me that smells fear there.

  The apple-throwing happened in the autumn. And it wasn’t until the summer that Niker devised the grape thing. There were two new boys in class that term, Jon Pinkman and Shane Perkiss, Pinky and Perky, and he did it to them too. So it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t the only one. Pinky only stayed one term.

  Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that now. I just want to explain why it is that I head south today – towards the sea – instead of east towards school. It’s one of about seven routes I use. I never decide in advance which way I’m going to go on the basis that Niker still manages to intercept me on an unnerving number of occasions, so he either has to be psychic or he’s put some sort of implant in my brain. If it’s the implant then I reckon he can’t know where I’m going until I know where I’m going, so the later I decide the less time he has to get there before me. You could call it paranoid, but then anyone whose been through The Dog Leg with Pinky and Perky and a bunch of grapes has the right to be paranoid.

  I make my route decision the moment I let the back-gate latch fall. Click – I’m going to the sea. Click – I’m going past the Library. Only, to be honest, I do choose the sea more often than the other routes, because I love the sea. Especially in winter. Sometimes, when it’s really rough, the sea throws pebbles on to the promenade, and walking there is like treading on fists.

  Today I choose the sea, but I don’t go as far as the prom, just down to the main road (where I stand a moment to look at the colour of the waves) before turning inland again. It doesn’t really matter which of the northerly roads I take, Occam, The Grove, St Aubyns, they all arrive pretty much at the gas works and then it’s just a few hundred yards to school. Today I select St Aubyns, which is a wide, ugly street with gargantuan four-floor buildings, most of which have now been turned into guest houses. One of them is called the Cinderella Hotel. It has a flight of ballroom-type steps up to its huge front door. And I’m looking, as I always do, for the glass slipper, when my eye is drawn to the building next door. It’s a colossal edifice, grim, square, semi-derelict. And, painted in gold on the glass above the boarded front door, are these words: Chance House, 26 St Aubyns.

  I read the words and then I read them again. After which I shut my eyes, turn a full circle, and open my eyes again. The words are still there. As they must have been every one of the hundred times I’ve walked up this street.

  “You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”

  And of course I know it’s Edith Sorrel’s house because it is precisely what I have been expecting. It’s the place I saw before I slept last night, the one I pretended to imagine. The one I knew was here but, perhaps, would rather not have known, which is why I suppose I chose to hear Edith Sorrel say “St Albans” when her clear-as-a-bell voice actually said, “St Aubyns”.

  Do you sometimes feel drawn and repelled in the same moment? I call it the car-crash mentality – you don’t want to look but you just can’t help yourself. Even though you know you are going to see something appalling. Well, Chance House is my car crash. I’ve tried ignoring it but it won’t go away. So now I’m going to have to look. Worse than that, I’m going to have to go in, though every sensible fibre in my body is willing me to walk away.

  There are two bits of good news. One is that I have to be at school in less than ten minutes. The other is that Chance House is boarded up. And I don’t just mean with a few nails and a bit of chipboard. Each of the eight-foot ground-floor windows has been secured with a sheet of steel-framed, steel-meshed fibreglass. The front door is barricaded with a criss-cross of steel bars, and although the second-floor windows are not obstructed, they are twenty foot from any hand-hold I can see. Of course it could be different around the back.

  I look up the road and then down the road. No-one is watching. No-one I can see anyway. I slip into the shadow of the side of the house. Grass sprouts through the concrete paving. There’s a small door, set into the wall of the house about four foot above ground level. It’s not barred but it doesn’t look like it has to be. There are no steps to it, and as well as being overgrown with brambles, it’s swollen shut, rotted into its doorframe.

  I advance, slowly, towards the back of the house, as if I’m scared of the corner. As if I expect someone to be lying in wait, just out of view. My heart pounds as I walk. But I can’t stop now. I come to the edge of the house, just one more step, I turn…

  The garden is empty, overgrown. There are dandelions in the long grass. Bluebells and a smashed white-wine bottle. The sun is remarkably warm. I compose my breathing. There is steel mesh on the first window. And on the second. There is no way I will be able to get into the ho
use.

  And then I see it. French doors on to the garden. The mesh hanging free, ripped from the wall as if it were paper.

  I don’t know who’s moving my legs but I’m going towards that open door. Walking fast now, past the dirty Sainsbury’s bag and the length of washing line, past the patch of scorched earth where someone has lit a fire. Of course if the door is open there will be people. Squatters, vagrants, drug addicts. Who knows? My heart’s back at it again. Bang, bang, bang. Like my rib cage is a drum. What am I going to tell these people? That I’ve come because some batty old lady asked me to? I should be creeping, slithering along the walls like they do in the movies. But I’m not. I’m walking with the boldness of the bit-part guy who gets shot. Somebody screams, and for a moment I think it’s me. But actually it’s a seagull, wheeling overhead.

  My legs are still on remote control but there’s something wrong with my breathing. I seem to have lost the knack of it. I instruct myself to breathe normally. In out, in out. The ‘out’ seems OK, but the ‘in’ is too quick and too shallow. How long does it take a person to die of oxygen starvation anyway? In out, in out. I’ve come to the door. In.

  In. The room has been stripped. There are brackets but no cupboards, the dust shape of what might have been a boiler, plumbing for a sink that isn’t there and a mad array of cut and dangling wires. On the left-hand wall is a rubble hole where a fireplace has been gouged out and the floor is strewn with paper, envelopes and smashed brick.

  At the far end of the room is a glass door. An internal door which must lead to the rest of the house. I look behind me and then I step inside. The door’s closed but obviously not locked because someone has put a brick at its foot, to stop it swinging. A final look over my shoulder and I’m moving towards that door. But I’ve only gone a couple of paces when I hear the scraping. A rhythmic, deliberate noise that stops me dead. The sort of noise you’d make if you were watching someone, and wanted them to know you were watching, without yourself being seen.