Advent (64 page)

 
No bell. He knocked, hesitantly at first, then louder. No answer. Of course not. No one could have got anywhere in this snow.

 
He crumpled to his knees on the doorstep, his shoulders shaking. The little voice inside him that he’d always thought of as being his own was carrying on its usual boastful litany.
I’m brave
, it said.
I’m tough. I won’t let anything beat me
. But he didn’t believe it any more. He was just an abandoned child. He’d got so scared he’d wet his pants. He was freezing and soaked and terrified and he wanted his mother. He pulled the edges of Cassandra’s cloak tight around him, wrapping his fists in it, and began to sob, while the expectant crows flitted down to the gutters above. He cried in little gulps of freezing air, each one stinging his parched throat. He wished the angel had let him die in the snow. He wished the nightmare dog had snapped his neck too. He wished the mermaid had drowned him.

 
Curling himself tighter and tighter, trying to clutch up inside himself like a snail in its shell, his fists pushed against the little lump hanging at his chest.

 
Keep it close. Wear it if you must.

 
His hands were so cold. He tunnelled them up inside his jumper. They felt the smooth circle looped on the silver chain.

 
Wear it if you must. Maybe it will protect you.

 
He remembered lifting the chain out of the dead angel’s hand. Her palm had still felt slightly warm. He couldn’t remember why he’d done it, except that she’d been kind to him somehow, and he didn’t want that other woman to get the thing they’d argued over. Then he’d run, and then the dog thing had come after him.

 
Maybe it will protect you.

 
Under his jumper he curled the fourth finger of his left hand alongside the slender silver chain and slipped it into the ring.

 
The crows stirred on the roof, ruffling out their feathers and shivering. Horace

heard their harsh excited chatter, felt the forty pairs of glassy eyes on him, knew their eager thought. He heard the wind sough around them, heavy with approaching snow, threaded through with the influence of the hidden stars. He heard the caged and buried winter earth mumble in its half-sleep, ground bass to the whole concord of the coming twilight

 
He stood up.

 
There were other voices. Nearer. Single voices, together making a deep turbulent murmur. He wasn’t alone any more. He was in company.

 
Come in
, they said.
The door is open.

 
The boy turned the handle of Hester Lightfoot’s front door and swung it inwards. The slow-moving throng of voices spread around him. Behind its tightly closed blinds the room was almost dark, but that was all right. He stepped inside, among the masks, bearing the open door.

 
By a light that was not the grey remnant of the winter afternoon he saw the speakers of the voices. One of them seemed to single itself out and turn to him. It addressed him.

 
Water-child.

 
The sound of its unspoken words was deep, placid, without echo.

 
Bring me home.
Take my way.

 
At once the boy knew the way it meant: a great, endless, open expanse, in which a tender and beautiful light was suspended, azure-gold above, indigo below; vast and free. His heart leaped at it. He strove to answer the invitation, seeking the one that had offered it. It turned to him, and

ma’chinu’ch

in the darkness he saw its oval-eyed, high-snouted wooden face, every curve and line the shape of an ocean wave.

Home.

 
Gawain sat with his legs outside the car. The letter lay open on the seat behind him. He stared out across a wide white emptiness.

 
The glow of Owen’s phone on the dashboard was growing luminous. It was beginning to get dark.

 
Time to go home, he thought.

 
But before that there was one last goodbye to deal with.

 
His fingers were unsteady as he reached for the phone, though that might not have been because of the cold.

 
Each of the many times he’d fantasised about this moment, he’d rehearsed a quick, gleeful, perhaps even vengeful goodbye, succinct as a punch. Now that the time had actually come, he wasn’t sure what to say.

 
He dialled the number, listened to the message, waited for the beep.

 
‘Mum, Dad. It’s . . .’ He couldn’t use the name they’d given him, but he didn’t want to say the true one. ‘Me.’ He stopped, listening to the phone’s soft echoing hiss, wondering if it was the sound of the hundreds of miles through which his voice was travelling, dissolved and beamed through the air, reassembled as a spectral sound in an empty house, a speaking machine. ‘Nigel and Iz, I mean. Not Mum and Dad.’ He felt the vindictive bitterness rising and swallowed it down. ‘So. I found out who I am. Or at least who I’m not.’ A few more seconds of the ghostly hiss. ‘Anyway. Mum, you’ll be the one who hears this. Don’t worry about me, OK? I’ll come and find you someday.’ These words astonished him. He’d only meant to tell them that he was never coming home. ‘It may be a while. Just try not to worry, OK?’

 
He started to picture his mother listening to this message, dialling in from some crappy anonymous hotel in whatever ski resort it was, like she’d probably been doing every hour she could get away from Dad, getting more and more anxious as yesterday passed without a word from him, and most of today, and now listening to this, her relief at finally getting a message turning so quickly into bafflement and shock and then a permanent hurt.

 
‘You’ll soon see why I left. Everyone will. You won’t understand it, but . . .’

 
He closed his eyes. ‘Anyway. Forget that. Just remember what I said, OK? I’m not coming back, but one day I’ll find you. OK? OK Mum.’ But he wasn’t talking to Mum. He was talking to an artefact of plastic and circuitry. She wasn’t his mother, anyway. She was his mother’s twin sister; his mother was dead. Her grave was far to the east.
The sun rises on your mother’s grave.
Miss Grey never lied, never. It was just that he’d never believed her.

 
‘OK, bye then.’ He took a breath, then said the word more gently, with care. ‘Bye.’

 
When he brought the phone round to look for the button that would hang it up, he saw that its bland light had begun to dim of its own accord. The numbers faded. The little screen went dark. It had gone dead in his grip. He prodded some of the keys to make sure, but there was nothing in them. It had always been dead; it had just taken a minute to accept the truth from his hands.

 
There’d be no calling for help. There was no connection. The last tether anchoring him to his old life had been slipped. He tossed the phone onto the floor of the ruined car, down with Horace’s keys and other bits and pieces, rags and junk, possessions and accessories and detritus, the graveyard of things.

On his way back to Mrs Pascoe’s house to retrieve his notebook, this is what J.P. saw:

 
The sky came suddenly alive with a welter of black birds, swarming together. The air shuddered with massed wing-beats. Under their shadow a small thing with legs and arms and a huge misshapen empty-eyed head was disgorged from one of the houses and came barrelling out into the lane, flurries of snow sheeting up around its feet. It paused in the middle of the road, monstrous head swaying, long enough for everything J.P. thought he was sure of in the world to dissolve, and then it crouched and loped away.

 
Then all he saw was a village lane in deep snow. When he looked around himself to check that the world was still standing as it had a moment before, he noticed a disapproving elderly face peering at him from a window.

 
His feet were damp. J.P. tried to remember why he was standing there, the cold of the grave crawling up from his legs.

 
After a while it struck him that he probably ought to do something.

 
He thought about going back to the pub. His room was all arranged. The radiator clanked and the back of the cupboard smelled of piss. Could be worse. A few more drinks and a night’s sleep and in the morning he could start again. Tomorrow is another day.

 
But he knew, all of a sudden, that there’d be no sleep for him that night, and he knew that tomorrow would be nothing like today, nothing like yesterday, nothing like all the days he’d known up until that one. Not unless he turned on his phone and discovered that the picture was gone and in fact had never been there at all. Not until he could persuade himself that his own eyes hadn’t seen what had just appeared in the street, right here, right in front of him.

 
He tried the second tactic. (The first hadn’t been working very well, all afternoon long.) He walked up to where the thing had appeared and studied the snow.

 
There were footprints. They were small, a child’s, and deep. They were fresh. He knelt down and touched the delicate rim of flakes at their edges, feeling the tiny stings of cold on his fingertips.

 
The footprints came out of the crazy woman’s house. He looked across and saw its door swinging open.

 
It would have been easier to bear if it hadn’t been for those prints. Then maybe he’d have blamed it on the pint he’d had with his lunch, or maybe the other one, or the stress of work, or a trick of the light. But there they were, neat, clear, deeper at the toes to show someone was running, perfect hollows of shadow in the silk ribbon of the lane. They stretched out ahead of him like an invitation.

 
‘Ah Christ,’ he muttered aloud. ‘You’re going to regret this, J.P.’

 
He balled his hands in his pockets and set off in reluctant pursuit.

On a white page, Gawain was a speck of spilled ink. The cold had penetrated him so deeply it had become an irrelevance. He went barefoot through the snow, keeping his eyes mostly on the sky. The birds had abandoned it. Eastwards, ahead of him, its murk faded to iron-grey. Dusk was coming.

 
He wondered whether his mother had walked down this same road, fifteen years, a month and fourteen days ago, carrying him, bleeding. He wondered what had driven her into the woods. He wondered what she’d known, what she’d hoped for.

 
He ought to have been afraid, but he wasn’t. He thought about that too. It occurred to him that the perpetual swamp of low-level fear in which he’d passed his life for almost as long as he could remember was, when you got down to it, the fear of being wrong, of having his incurable galloping wrongness exposed to the world. Now that was gone. Terrifying as Holly was, as the hell-dog was, terrifying as was his utter ignorance in the face of whatever he was heading towards, none of them were as frightening as the old habitual fear that he’d accidentally made it all up.

 
But he wasn’t wrong. It was the rest of the world that had been in error, all this time. Who’d have thought?

 
He wasn’t even Mum and Dad’s child. He’d never been that person.

 
Gawain.
The name your mother gave you.
Miss Grey never lied. It was his parents who lied. No, not his parents. Nigel and Isabel whose name they all had to pretend wasn’t really Iseult. Fifteen years of lying. Fifteen years of trying to force on him the difference between what was real and what wasn’t, and all the time having it exactly backwards.

 
The landscape was utterly transformed. Snow lay over it like another language. It might have been starting again from nothing, like him.

 
A faint sound occurred, drifting from the east. Gav stopped to listen. When he held his breath, the sound became the only noise in the whole white world. It rose and fell, suspension and cadence.