Ritual (8 page)

‘Martin?’ he
whispered. There was no reply, but he didn’t call again. He didn’t want to wake
Martin up for no reason at all. He reached out his hand to make sure that his
son was well covered by the thin patchwork quilt, and it was then that he
realized that Martin was silent because Martin wasn’t there.

He fumbled
around in the darkness of the top-heavy bedside lamp, almost knocking it over.
He switched it on and it lit up the room as starkly as a publicity photograph
for a 19505 detective movie. Martin’s side of the quilt was neatly folded back,
as if he had left the bed quietly and deliberately, and Martin’s bathrobe had
disappeared from the back of the chair. Charlie said,

‘Shit,’ and
swung
himself
out of bed.
His own
bathrobe was lying on the floor. He tugged it on, raked his fingers through his
hair, and opened the bedroom door. Outside, the house was silent.

Engraved
portraits stared at him incuriously from the brown-wallpapered landing. There
was a smell of dust and sticky polish and faded lavender; the sort of smell
that dreams would have, if dreams were to die.

‘Martin?’ His
voice didn’t even echo. The darkness muffled it like a blanket. ‘Martin – are
you there?’

Charlie cursed
everything he could think of, and in particular he cursed himself for having
thought that it would be a good idea to bring Martin along with him on his tour
of New England. Goddamnit, the boy was nothing but confusion and trouble.
Charlie called, ‘Martin?’ again, not too loudly in case he disturbed Mrs Kemp,
but a whole minute passed and there was still no answer, and so he ventured out
on to the landing and peered down into the stairwell.

He made his way
downstairs, treading as softly as he could. The house all around him seemed to
hold its breath. He could feel the string backing of the worn-out stair carpet
under his bare feet.

When he reached
the hallway, he paused, and listened, but there was nothing to be heard. He was
tempted to go back to bed again. After all – where could Martin have possibly
gone? Out for a
walk, that
was all, because he’d eaten
too much, and couldn’t sleep. Out for a walk, because he wanted to think about
his parents, and his fractured upbringing, and how much he distrusted his
father. Charlie could hardly blame him.

But then he
heard a door softly juddering, as if it hadn’t been closed properly and the
wind was shaking the latch. He paused, and listened, and the juddering
continued. For the first time in a very long time, for no earthly reason that
he could think of, he was alarmed – so alarmed that he groped around the
shadows of the hallway searching for something that he could use as a weapon.
An umbrella, maybe; or a doorstop.
All he could find,
however, was a very lightweight walking stick. He swung it in his hand so that
it whistled through the air. Then he made his way along the hallway to the
kitchen door.

‘Martin? Are
you there?’ His voice sounded unfamiliar, and he turned quickly around to make
sure that there was nobody standing close behind him. For one second he felt
the thrill of real fright. A shadow was standing close to the front door, its
huddled shape limned by the blood-red light that gleamed through the
stained-glass panes. But it was only an overcoat that Mrs Kemp had left hanging
on the hallstand. Coats and blankets and dressing gowns, thought Charlie.
Innocent garments by day, threatening hunchbacks by night.
He couldn’t count the number of times he had woken up in some strange hotel
bedroom to stare fascinated and frightened at his own coat, crouched over the
back of a chair.

He turned the
handle of the kitchen door. It grated open, grit dragging against floor tiles.
The kitchen smelled of burned fat and sour vegetables. There was an
old-fashioned cooking range, and a white-topped table. In the corner stood a
coffee grinder and an old rotary knife-sharpening machine, like Puritan
instruments of torture. Blue-patterned plates were stacked on the hatch.
Charlie stayed in the half-open doorway for a moment, holding his breath, but
when he heard nothing he turned away, lowering his walking stick. Martin is
fifteen years old right? He isn’t a child any more. And just because you
happened to miss his childhood, that doesn’t give you any kind
of
right to treat him like a kid. If he wants to take a hike
in the middle of the night, that’s up to him.

Charlie wasn’t
convinced by any of his reasoning, but he retreated slowly along the hallway,
tapping the tip of his walking stick gently against the walls, like a man who
had recently lost his sight. He was just about to return it to the cast-iron
umbrella stand, however, when he thought he heard somebody whispering. He
froze, his head lifted, trying to catch the faint sibilant sounds of
conversation.

Maybe it’s the
wind, thought Charlie. But he knew that it wasn’t. No wind ever argued, the way
that this voice was arguing. No wind ever begged. Somebody was right outside
the kitchen door, in Mrs Kemp’s back yard; and that somebody was talking,
quickly and urgently, pleading, the way that a lover pleads, or a man asks for
money – one well-rehearsed argument after another.

Raising the
walking stick, he retraced his steps along the corridor. The clouds had suddenly
moved away from the moon, and the kitchen was illuminated in cold, luminous
blue, knives and grinders and mincers gleaming, like some spectral abattoir.
There were two panes of Flemish glass in the kitchen door, and through their
watery distortion Charlie could make out the shadows of two people, earnestly
engaged in conversation.
A thin, boyish figure, which must
have been Martin, and another smaller figure, which must have been wearing a
hat or a hood, because it was strangely rhomboidal in shape, like an
old-fashioned coal scuttle.

Charlie tiptoed
close to the door and listened. The whispering voice went on and on, as endless
and insistent as water running over a weir; yet peculiarly seductive, too, in a
way that Charlie found it very hard to understand. It wasn’t erotic, yet it
gave him a thrill that was almost entirely physical. It was a voice that knew
the desires of the flesh, and pandered to them. It was frightening, but at the
same time irresistibly alluring.

You shall find
happiness; you shall find joy. You shall find friends and lovers. You shall
find the most complete fulfilment known to man, and the name of that fulfilment
is written where nobody can find it but you.

Charlie waited
for almost a minute. Then he reached out and clasped the cold brass doorknob.

He wasn’t sure
if he could be seen from the yard or not. It depended on the angle of the
moonlight. He took a breath, and then tugged the door open – at the very
instant a huge grey cloud rolled over the moon and obscured it completely.

He saw
something. He wasn’t quite sure what it was. A
face,
or a mirror reflecting his own face.

A white
transfixed face, with eyes that glittered at him.
A
blue-white tongue lolling between blue-white lips.
Then a white blur of
fabric, a hood tugged hurriedly over, and a small crooked figure crab-hopping
away; then darkness. No sound, no cry, no noise at all.
Only
the breeze blowing boisterously over the yard, and the irritating banging of an
upstairs shutter.

Squeeak-shudder-clop!

Martin was standing
in his dressing gown, his thin-wristed hands down by his sides, his face
concealed by shadow. Charlie looked back down the yard, in the direction the
hunched-up creature had fled, and said quietly, ‘You want to tell me what’s
going on here?’

Martin said
nothing. Charlie took two or three steps into the yard, but it was too dark for
him to see very much. The moon remained hidden behind the clouds. The washing
line sang a low vibrant tenor. At last Charlie turned back to Martin and said,
‘Who was that? Are you going to tell me who that was?’

‘It wasn’t
anybody.’

‘Don’t bullshit
me!’ Charlie yelled at him. ‘I saw him and I heard him!
A
little guy – no more than four feet tall!’

‘I was here on
my own,’ said Martin. His voice was flat and expressionless.

‘Martin, don’t
try to kid me, I saw him for myself. It was ^the same boy who was looking into
the window at the Iron

Kettle, wasn’t
it? It was the same boy you were talking to in the parking lot. You didn’t
really think I believed that guitar
stuff,
did you? I
saw him again this afternoon, on the green, and now here he is, in the middle
of the night, at Mrs Kemp’s.’

Martin lowered
his head. The very faintest touch of moonlight illuminated the parting in his
hair.

‘Martin,’ said
Charlie. ‘I’m your father. You have to tell me. It’s my duty to look after you,
whether I like it or not.
Whether you like it or not.’

‘You don’t have
to look after me,’ said Martin.

‘I’m your
father.’

Martin raised
his head. Charlie couldn’t make out his face at all. ‘You’re a man who happened
to fuck my mother, that’s all,’ Martin snapped at him. Then he wrenched open
the kitchen door and ran inside. He left the door ajar, and Charlie standing in
the dark back yard, feeling more isolated than ever before. Even in the
Criterion Hotel in Omaha, Nebraska, in the middle of winter, he hadn’t felt as
isolated as this. He began to feel that real life was a little more than he
could manage.

He turned and
looked up at the moon, masking itself behind the clouds. He felt there was
something he ought to do, some magic ritual he ought to perform to ward off
malevolence until morning, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do except
to cross his two index fingers in the sign of the crucifix and hold them up to
the sky. ‘God, protect me,’ he said, although he wasn’t sure what good that
would do, or even if he meant it.

He went back
inside, locking the kitchen door behind him. He returned the walking stick to
the umbrella stand. The house was silent. He climbed the stairs feeling very
tired. One of the reasons he had been able to survive his job for so long was
because he had always gone to bed early, with two large glasses of water to
drink if he happened to wake up, and he had always made sure that he stayed in
bed for a full eight hours.

Martin had
returned to bed, and was lying with his back turned to the door. Charlie
climbed between the sheets, and lay there for
a long time
listening to Martin breathe
. He knew he wasn’t asleep, but he was
waiting for him to say something.

After a while,
he felt Martin gently shaking. He realized with intense pain and discomfort
that he was crying.

‘Martin?’ He
laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Martin, for Christ’s sake, if you can
tell anybody what this is all about, you can tell me.’

‘I can’t tell
anybody,’ Martin sobbed.

Charlie was
silent for a very long time. The worst part of it was not having the experience
to be able to think of the right thing to say. Marjorie would know; Marjorie
was unfailingly good with children. Marjorie had been unfailingly good with
him, too, but not good enough to know what he really wanted out of life.

Martin wiped
his eyes on the corner of the pillow slip and then lay there silently, not
sleeping, but perfectly still.

Charlie said.
‘I don’t know what any of this means.’

‘It doesn’t
mean anything.’

‘But I don’t
see why you have to lie to me, Martin. I don’t see why you have to pretend that
there was nobody there when there very obviously was.’

‘There was
nobody there, Dad.’

For a split
second, Charlie felt angry enough to smack Martin’s head. But he made a
deliberate effort to turn away, and stare fiercely at the bedside table, and
let his sudden burst of temper dissipate into the darkness like a tipped-over
basketful of small black snakes.

‘We’re going to
have to talk this over tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ Martin
said, as if he didn’t have any intention of discussing it again.

There was
another long pause, and then Charlie said, ‘Was he a dwarf, or what?’

Martin didn’t reply.
His breathing was regular and even. Charlie leaned over him and saw that he was
asleep – or, at least, that he was pretending to be asleep. He lay back on his
pillow and looked up at the ceiling and wondered what the hell he was going to
do now. There were no handbooks for the estranged fathers of awkward and
secretive teenage sons. There was no advisory service which could tell you what
to do if your offspring started making mysterious trysts with white-hodded
midgets in the middle of the night. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been
so distressing; and if Martin hadn’t plainly been so upset.

The night went
by as slowly as the great black wheel of a juggernaut. Every time Charlie
checked his watch, it seemed as if the hands had hardly moved since the last
time he had looked. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t even remember what it was he
normally did to get himself to sleep.

He thought
about Marjorie, he thought about Martin. He thought about Milwaukee and the
pain that he had suffered there. He half dozed for a while, and dreamed that he
was eating dinner in a strange high-ceilinged restaurant with a long white
napkin tucked into his collar. The waiters were all hooded, like monks, and
they came and went in silence, carrying plates and wheeling chafing dishes.
There was no
menu,
you had to eat whatever the
monk-waiters set in front of you. The other diners were smooth-faced and
expressionless. There was no food in front of them, and yet they waited at
their tables with consummate patience, as if their meals would be worth waiting
for even if they took several hours to be served. The men were dressed in
evening wear – white ties and stiff collars and tail coats. The women wore
extravagant wide-brimmed hats with wax fruit and flowers and ostrich plumes. They
also wore glittering diamond necklaces and earrings that sparkled like
Christmas trees, but apart from that most of them were nude.