Half-Sick of Shadows (7 page)

‘Sounds good to me. That’s your radius,’ he said.

‘What’s a radius?’ Sophia said, while I searched my brain.

‘A radius is a line going from … It’s half a diameter. It’s the distance, in a straight line, from the centre of a circle to its rim, and the rim is called its circumference.’ Gregory accompanied his definition with finger-drawing in the air. ‘If you draw a straight line from circumference to circumference through the centre of a circle, that straight line’s the diameter.’

In one voice, Sophia and I – neither of us had been introduced to mathematics beyond adding and subtracting – said, ‘You what?’

‘Imagine Edgar standing at the gate with a ball of string.’

There was a ball of string in the kitchen drawer which seemed just the thing for Edgar. ‘Got it,’ I said.

‘Right. Sophia, imagine yourself walking away from Edgar with
the
string’s tail end in your hand. You keep walking in more or less of a straight line. When you get to the tree, you stop.’

‘Does Edgar follow me?’

‘Don’t be stupid. Edgar holds the string tight so no more unravels, just the amount that stretches from him to the tree. What you want is a length of string from Edgar to the tree.

‘The length of string that stretches from the Manse to the tree is called the radius. Right? That’s because the Manse marks the centre of a circle. You walk in a circle around the Manse, holding on to your tail end of string, and end up back at the tree. The circle you’ve walked in is the circumference. See? All the time, Edgar will be holding the ball of the string tight, so if you kept your end tight too, you would walk in a perfect circle.’

Sophia asked, ‘What’s the diameter, then?’

‘I already told you. It’s twice the length of a radius … Never mind … Look, if you really want to know, the diameter stretches from the tree, to Edgar at the gate, through the centre of the Manse and across the cemetery, into the field. You don’t need to think about the diameter, or the radius or circumference for that matter. All you need to do is walk in the circle that the tight length of string lets you make.’

‘Just walk round holding the string?’

‘Just walk round holding the string.’

‘What if I come up against weeds or a shrub too big to climb through, or stinging nettles or sinking sand? There’s an awful lot of holes and things there. I wouldn’t like to fall in. I might get trapped. Mother says to be careful.’

‘It’s all right to walk around things, but you can’t let go of the string. You must keep it as tight as you can. Well, fairly tight anyway.’

Sophia looked to me for confirmation that Gregory was making sense. I knew her thoughts: what if her walk round the Manse turned out to be zigzags or a square rather than a circle? Or a rectangle or a triangle, although Sophia might have no knowledge of rectangles and triangles – I’d go over it with her later.

Meanwhile, as I imagined Sophia circling the Manse with her string, something occurred to me which Gregory had overlooked.

‘But if Edgar’s standing at the garden gate holding the ball of string,’ I piped, commanding Gregory’s attention, ‘and if Sophia walks round the house the string will wrap round it and she’ll end up against a wall unless it’s a very big ball of string that never runs out. If there’s not enough string she’ll run out of radius.’

I looked at Sophia to see if she understood what I meant. If she did understand, I hoped she might explain it to me. With my attention elsewhere, Gregory took his opportunity and punched me in the head, which hurt him more than it hurt me because he had never broken the habit of punching with his thumb inside his fist instead of out. When he returned to the living room, after running his hand under the cold water tap, he said that we were stupid and he refused to have anything further to do with us.

Sophia and I, with Edgar’s help, attempted to create the circumference outside which Sophia had been forbidden to venture. It didn’t work. Edgar was supposed to hold his end of the string and stand still, but he kept following us.

We agreed that ‘the Manse’ meant the building and the land around it. But how much land? Could she venture into the fields behind the cemetery, or on to Hollow Heath beyond the front garden?

We understood the boundary to be a fixed boundary for all time. Children have a weak perception of change and shifting boundaries, and Sophia and I had almost none. I wanted to award her a greater range in which to roam than she felt entitled to. She would have restricted herself to the garden at the front, the cemetery at the back, and the outbuildings where Father stored his farming tools and jars of nails and rat poison. The fence round the front garden made an obvious boundary, but I saw no harm in her venturing on to the heath so long as she remained in view from the Manse.

Crossing the heath to the railway track clearly had to be forbidden; she would be too far away at the track, and out of sight to anyone looking for her without binoculars. Hollow Wood had to be out of bounds too. It was almost as far away as the railway track. We never went there anyhow. It looked dark and creepy. When the sun fell behind it, it looked like a black wall. Tramps and escaped criminals lived there. They hunted hares for food and slept under tents made from old blankets.

We settled on a fixed object. The lightning-struck tree became her limit. It took a healthy run and skip, from the broken garden gate over weedy clumps, to reach the lightning-struck tree.

Sophia caught a cold, which meant that I caught it as well. Mother confined us to our bedrooms, but allowed me to visit Sophia or her to visit me so long as we kept warm – which meant two crushed together in a single bed. She forbade Edgar access to us in case he got it too. She allowed us to come downstairs for part of each day – the afternoon while Father was at work and the living room was warm – and Edgar enjoyed our company then. We sniffled, sneezed and blew our snouts until they were red and skinned. The cold settled in our chests. Mother was afraid we might take pneumonia and fed us large spoonfuls of foul-tasting medicine that made us sleepy. Father complained about us disturbing his sleep by barking through the night, and promised us the strap unless we barked more quietly. Our nearly pneumonia lasted for ever. Sophia’s lasted longer than mine.

Each day, wearing slippers, and a pullover over my pyjama top, wrapped in a blanket, I stared from my bedroom window at the cemetery, and Granny Hazel’s grave in particular. Profound thoughts, like the necks of giraffes, twisted towards frightening ones. What if she woke? What if Granny Hazel opened her eyes like Lazarus, and Jesus said Granny Hazel come forth but she couldn’t get the lid off? What would happen then? Would Granny Hazel
scratch
the inside of her box and scream? No one would hear – except Jesus, who would be no use to her unless he had a spade.

I looked at her grave as Sophia barked on the other side of the wall. Granny Hazel’s destiny was my destiny too: to be one day still, silent, and buried under earth for ever with no room to move. With no one to hear me if I wept aloud, went mad, and survived a while longer by eating both fists. I would pee myself.

When Sophia started getting better she came to my room at night and we stared out of the window together. ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked. The sky, a star, the darkness, I lied. ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked. I never told her the truth. The realness, the trueness, and the oursness of death seemed to me to be something Sophia needed shielding from. The lumpy mounds of earth around Granny Hazel, the headstones and sculptures of angels, seemed to nod in agreement with my thoughts. Their nods were gloomy, but comforting too. They said, resign yourself to one day dying; get used to the idea; everyone must.

Sophia and I hoped Father might mention the promise, but having brought it up once already he never did. He brooded all day, every day. Mother stayed out of his way while he brooded – but she usually stayed out of his way anyhow.

Granny Hazel’s death broke Father like a cup. I watched him slinking up the stairs and down. He never raised his head or looked at me. Sophia said he looked at her in the corridor ‘in a funny way’. He said nothing though, just stared, then turned away, into his room. Mother took meals to the bedroom and he ate alone. Normally, he insisted that we ate together at the kitchen table. Ordinarily, Father would say grace. Only when his hands parted and his eyes opened could we raise our knives and forks. When he said we were excused, and only then, could we leave the table.

That way of living became a memory after Granny Hazel died. Gregory, Edgar, Sophia and I were happier at mealtimes because
of
Father’s absence – as well as his mother’s. None of us asked Mother about Father for fear that asking might prompt his return.

One day, Sophia stared at, over, beyond or through the graves of Pikes long departed. She stared at the graves often. I stared at them often too, but staring never made them sprout flowers, or enticed their occupants to climb up through the earth and dance a jig.

She held in her hands a posy made of daises from the front garden. I held a similar posy in mine, wondering if I should get the ball of string from the kitchen drawer to tie the stems with. I jumped when a hand rested on my shoulder, and dropped my posy.

Mother smiled at my fright.

Something caught Mother’s eye. She started at the grave, troubled by something visible only to adults. I looked where Mother did, but saw only Tennyson’s grave – nothing odd about that.

Sophia rose with dirty knees and stood beside us.

‘Children,’ said Mother in a scolding voice. Then she changed her mind. Bending down to our height, hands between her knees, she said, ‘What have you pair been up to this morning?’

‘We reburied Tennyson, so he could be with everybody else,’ I said. ‘I think he was lonely over there.’

‘What’s left of him. He pongs a bit, Edward.’

Perhaps I should have dug the grave deeper to get all his legs in.

‘They’re very nice daisies, but don’t you think it would be nice to put daisies on the graves of people? Grandparents, for example? Bear in mind, the dog wasn’t ours, and blood’s thicker than water.’

‘Why’s blood thicker than water?’ asked Sophia, for whom asking for the answer came easier than puzzling it out – such wise economy of thought deserved more credit than she received. I, on the other hand, tended towards puzzling out until my skull hurt.

‘It’s a long story,’ said Mother. ‘Your grandparents would appreciate having flowers on their graves.’

Sophia said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and grabbed the daisies from my hand. She
would
have been off, but Mother spoke her name and fixed her to the spot. ‘While you’re at it, put the cross back at the head of Granny Hazel’s grave. When your father gets home and finds you’ve given it to a dog he’ll hit the roof. He spent hours on that cross.’

Sophia extracted Granny Hazel’s cross and tramped across the cemetery to relocate it with its rightful owner.

Mother turned her attention to me. ‘And you should know better, Edward Pike. Now, come and wash your mucky paws.’ She reached out one of her fine, pale, beautiful long hands for me to take in one of my fine, pale, muddy short ones.

Following Mother, I looked over my shoulder at Sophia on her knees at Granny Hazel’s grave, scattering daisies. She had forgotten my existence, and I wanted to call to her, ‘Sophia! Sophia! Don’t forget about me!’As Mother led me away, I experienced a vast sense of loss, and I swallowed down the lump that rose in my throat.

‘Is blood really thicker than water?’ I asked. The consequences of blood’s being thicker than water must have been important if someone made a saying out of it.

‘Is what?’

‘Is blood really thicker than water. You said …’

‘The places your brain goes is nobody’s business. It’s just a saying, like two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s called a metaphor … I think. Don’t worry about it; you’ll learn these things at school.’

‘Why do two wrongs make a right?’

‘They don’t; that’s the point. You ask the strangest questions.’

In the kitchen, Mother got to work on my hands. She seemed teary and flustered. ‘Boys are dirt magnets. I should know. The three of you are the same. Four counting your father.’ The notion of Father being the same as Gregory, Edgar and me seemed so mistaken I wondered if Mother and I were thinking of the same father. ‘That’s to be expected, him on a farm from dark until the cows come home.’

Mother’s joke made me smile.

She stopped scrubbing. ‘What?’

‘We don’t have cows.’

‘And?’

‘So they can’t come home.’

She narrowed her eyes, which made me smile again.

Mother resumed her scrubbing. ‘I want to ask a favour, Edward. Favour’s the wrong word, but will you make me a promise?’

Promises were suddenly popular. I trusted them less than before Sophia made hers to Father, but making a promise to Mother was probably all right. Mother arranged the question in her head while erasing my flesh through scrubbing. ‘Here’s what it is …’

I waited to hear what it was.

‘You’re both growing up fast, you and Sophia. You’ll be young adults in no time. And you’re her big brother. Will you promise to be the best big brother in the world and watch out for your sister?’

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking, naturally, of course, what else?

‘Will you promise me you’ll be her brave soldier?’

I grinned.

‘I needn’t ask such a favour; you always do watch out for her and you always will. It’s just, now, on our own, now Hazel’s dead.’

She choked up.

‘Are you sad because Granny Hazel’s dead?’

She laughed a cry as if cracked with an insanity-shaped whip. If she washed my hands much longer my upper limbs would start at the wrists.

Mother turned to the sink. With her back to me, she buried her hands in the suds. ‘Aye, you’ve hit the nail on the head, Edward. I’m crying because Granny Hazel is dead. At long last. That’s about the size of it.’ I rejected the idea that she would ever cry over Granny Hazel. A hundred Granny Hazel’s deaths would fail to make Mother sad. They never cared for each other.