The Gift (5 page)

The Prices had come to Spenser Mills in the early spring. Dad hadn't had a job since Christmas, but then, all of a sudden, he landed a very good post in the Labor Office of one of the huge contracting firms that were doing the actual building. The firm put them into one of its own new houses, which was empty because it didn't come quite up to what the firm called “our own high standards of completion.” This really meant that parts of the house were so badly built that if they'd sold it to some eager citizen, he'd have been sure to complain and there might have been a public fuss with stories in the papers. But they knew their own employees wouldn't kick.

The chief trouble was that when it rained with the wind in the northwest, the water somehow hum-mocked itself out of the gutter and came streaming down the wall of the best bedroom. And some joists must have been left out of the bathroom floor, because the bath had tried to sag through into the hall. The firm had kindly put this right by filling the hall with scaffolding, which meant that the front door wouldn't open and you had to edge sideways to get into the sitting room, whose door—to even things up—wouldn't shut. And the gas central heating, if you turned it on at all, made all the radiators so hot that their paint stank.

It was these problems, rather than anything Dad had done, that had made Mum go off on the “holiday” from which she'd returned with the black eye and the red suitcases.

But things had improved when Penny and Davy got back to Spenser Mills. Dad had worked one of his wangles inside the firm, as a result of which three workmen who should have been bringing a different house up to “our own high standards of completion” had spent a week putting the roof right and propping up the bathroom joists more sensibly. He'd also managed to swap the boiler, so now the house was as good as any other in the road, provided nobody ran more than six inches of water into the bath.

Mum had changed, too. She'd managed to lay right off one sort of nerve pills and to cut down on two of the others. She had a bank account which she dared to use, and had joined a bridge club. She opened letters the day they came, reasonably sure now that none of them would be a threat from a debt-collecting agency. She stuck to the same hairstyle for several weeks at a time, and stopped badgering Penny about her own hair.

“In fact,” said Penny, “I don't feel every time she comes into the room I'm going to be got at about something.”

“It's great to hear her laugh,” said Davy. “Have you noticed? She says something pretty silly and you laugh at her, she joins in, and her laugh sounds clever, as though she knew all along?”

“I found her necking with Dad in the kitchen last night. She laughed so much she gave herself hiccups. So did Dad.”

“I wondered what that noise was about. I suppose they don't think they're really as ancient as we think they are.”

“Of course not. Dad's eased off a bit, too.”

This was true, though you had to know him well to notice it. He sometimes spent whole evenings behaving like an ordinary, tired citizen and not like an emcee at a ninth-rate beauty contest, as Ian had described it. (Ian was in Cardiff, which helped to ease the tension.) He had even bought a car which hardly rattled and didn't smell, a white Ford Corsair only two years old, of which he was immensely proud. He was longing to teach Penny to drive.

School, Davy thought, was okay, too. The building stood about three-quarters of a mile from their house. It was a showplace, a big new Comprehensive, and educationists and architects came from all over the world to study it. From the outside it looked as though its own architect would really have been happier designing forts and gun emplacements, because it was built of brutal gray concrete with many gaunt projections. Once you were in, though, you found that he must also have been mad about greenhouses—almost all the roof was glass, and on sunny days whole classes slowly roasted. Apart from that Davy liked it. The equipment was marvelous, the other kids okay, and the teachers a less dejected lot than he'd found at some of his other schools. If only Dad could stick to his job, he thought, he might get decent results when his exams came around in a year and a half.

In keeping with its architecture the school was always trying out new theories, and Davy's year were being given a real bashing at what the children called local geog. For the first half of the term they spent one whole morning every fortnight out in the town, or the country roundabout, finding out how the sudden rise in population had affected farmers, or counting and analyzing the goods traffic through the station, or mapping the old silted canal, or drawing diagrams of the earth layers in some great hole which the builders had excavated. In the second half of the term they were going to split into pairs to study separate projects. And at the end of it all an educational researcher in London was going to analyze their work and write a thesis.

The second local geog expedition that term took them to the head offices of Dad's firm, which were in twenty trailers on a site which would one day be a pleasure ground. All morning they were talked to and shown maps and diagrams and plans by a smoothfaced man who called them “kiddies”; so, though it ought to have been interesting to know what was going to happen to the town next, the whole class was thoroughly bored and rebellious by the time they got back to the bus and found that the driver had disappeared.

It was a muggy, windless September morning. Davy looked out of the window and tried to guess which trailer Dad was working in, but there was no way of knowing, so he lounged back in his seat, sleepy with heat and airlessness.

A picture floated into his mind. This very bus, fat and sleek by the curb of the mud-streaked road, all its colors too bright to be true. It came nearer, and Davy hoped it was the driver returning, but then he saw that the picture was framed by the windshield of a car, with a peacock blue hood showing at the bottom, so whoever's thoughts he was picking up was sitting in a car. And the car was still now. There was something funny about the too-vivid colors of the bus and the hood. Davy was just about to crane around and see who was looking at the scene in that strange way when the picture shrugged itself. A line of little holes raced along the paintwork. The windows smashed. Orange flames and oily smoke billowed up. Children were rushing out of the bus door, screaming, but the same little lines of holes dotted to and fro over them and they fell in sprawled heaps on the road. Just as Davy noticed the barrel of the machine gun juddering in the foreground, the picture was all wiped clean.

But it was still a picture, a vague blank of fawny yellow, like perfectly smooth sand. Into this blank, from the furry darkness of its edge, wriggled a whirling black shape. It darted erratically about like a protozoan under a microscope. And now there was another, and another, and then more, all coming from different sides, smothering the smooth yellow in a whirling storm of black squiggles. They meant nothing, and that made them more horrible, worse than the picture of the blazing bus. Their mad, meaningless mess increased and increased its fury with a pounding rhythm, pumping yet more rage and terror into a mind that already seemed about to burst with the pressure of them. Davy was opening his mouth to yell when the horror was all suddenly wiped out, just as the bus had been, and there was the fawny blank again. Into the blank a squiggle darted, and then another …

The complete process, from blank to blank, lasted about ten seconds. It happened a dozen times, and then there was the road again, and the bus and the mud streaks, all looking as though they were lit with a strong sun. When the first line of bullet holes slashed across the paintwork, Davy drove the picture from his mind with the seventeen times table and twisted around in his seat to look back along the road.

A car had appeared about forty yards back, a bright blue Jaguar, but not peacock blue. But if that was where the pictures were coming from, you couldn't see the bus door from there. Whoever it was had
invented
a door and steps, and made them seem as real as the bus; and he'd done the same with the flames and the gun. It was as though he couldn't tell the difference. Only the sunlit colors were too garish for this dull day.

Davy cringed back into his seat, frightened and worried. It wasn't only the horribleness of the pictures or the madness of the mind that thought them. It was the way they never let up. He'd never felt anything like this before.

In the comfort of his seat he automatically relaxed—and there were the pictures again. The road, the bus, the mud … but on the far curb a round figure was walking away with a well-known jaunty stride, in his shirtsleeves with his jacket over his arm. Davy drove the pictures out, sat up, and looked forward. Dad was there, in the real world, striding away just like that. In the picture he was twice riddled with bullets and fell screaming into the gutter, but in the real world he walked on unharmed. When he was getting small in the distance, the blue car accelerated past the bus and the pictures faded.

Davy watched the car slow beside Dad, and saw him halt. The conversation only took a few seconds before Dad raised his arm as if he were acknowledging some remark. The car moved on. Dad stood at the curb gazing after it, then turned and walked slowly back toward the trailers. The bounce had gone out of his step. He never noticed Davy.

Next week was September's finest. Davy wheeled his bike out of the garage and stood waiting for Penny, breathing deeply at the prickling sweet morning air.

“You'll be taking cold baths before breakfast soon,” said Penny.

“It's almost as good as Wales,” he said. “It's as though it hadn't realized it was all town here now, and was still trying to be country.”

Penny freewheeled out into the road without answering. He had to pedal hard to catch her.

“What's up?” he said.

“Didn't you notice? Dad? Last night?”

“Nothing special.”

“Mr. Observant!”

“Well, what?”

“Oh, he's done something. Or he's going to do something. He was all bounce and laughs. You
must
have noticed. Just like last time he got the sack.”

“Oh, Lord, I hope not.”

“So do I. Hi, Charlotte!”

Davy fell back so that Penny could bike beside her fat friend and talk about diets, pop, and the amorous scandals of the Upper Fifth. The delicate, delicious air seemed stale now. He told himself that the blue car might only have stopped to ask Dad the way somewhere. But in that case, why had Dad turned back to the office, and with so depressed a walk?

“We'll be at The Painted Lady,” said Mum.

“No, we won't,” said Dad. “I've gone off it. We'll be at The White Admiral.”

The White Admiral was their usual Saturday pub, but this was Wednesday night and Mum had become sufficiently irritated by Dad's ceaseless jauntiness to insist that he should take her out somewhere. Now she stood in the hall and pouted down at her new white drill trouser suit with the bell-bottomed legs.

“I'm not going to The White Admiral in this,” she grumbled. “I'll have to change again. Tommy Middle-ditch will go on and on. You know how he is.”

Dad laughed and did a few steps of hornpipe in the tiny hall. They argued around and eventually settled to drive several miles to a village where there was a proper old pub, not named after a butterfly at all. Dad was pleased with the idea, as it meant a longer trip in his smart car.

“You'll be all right, darlings?” said Mum.

“I'm going to watch
Carry on Spying
” said Penny.

“You've seen it before,” said Dad.

“Only eight times,” said Penny. “It's that sort of film.”

“Poor old Dave,” said Dad.

“It's all right,” said Davy. “I've got a lot of chemistry homework. I'll do it upstairs.”

Davy liked to do homework on the floor, lying on his belly and writing with the paper only two inches from his nose. He wasn't shortsighted, but it made a change from school. Even so it was wearisome work. He was about halfway through when the page blurred in front of his face and became a fawny yellow blank onto which a black squiggle darted, twirling with furious menace. Then another. Then another.

He shook his head, concentrated on the isotopes of carbon and managed to force the idiot mess out of his mind. Even so he could still sense the pressure of it, like a shoulder against a door. Then the pressure relaxed and he did the same. Instantly he saw another picture. Night. A clear sky with a few stars. A house with lit windows. Only the stars were too big and bright, and the windows glared as though there were a furnace inside. But the house was a particular house, the Prices' house, the one where Davy lay at that moment on the floor of his bedroom and Penny was watching
Carry on Spying
downstairs. So the man who had been in the blue car, who carried the furious squiggles in his mind, had not just been strolling past—he was standing somewhere out there in the dark, watching this house.

Without putting any more lights on Davy stole into the bathroom, shut the door, and eased the curtains open. Under the pale glare of the streetlamps the scene looked normal, all shades of gray and black. There was no one about.

Deliberately he relaxed and allowed a picture to form. It was the house again. The downstairs window shattered, then flared with an explosion. All the lights went out, but a searchlight cut a white staring circle in the blackness, with the front door as its center. Dad rushed out, shouting, and was gunned down. The same happened to a woman and two children, real people but not anybody Davy knew. Then the picture was wiped away and there was the fawny yellow blank, but before the whirling squiggles could rush in, that too was wiped away, and the picture of the house came clear again, dark against the night sky with its two blazing windows. Davy tried not to bother with the explosion and the corpses, but to look where things like the gate and the lampposts were. Then he pushed the picture out of his mind again and studied the same things in the real world; he decided that whoever it was was standing farther off than he had thought, in the shadow of the carport of the empty house one down on the other side of the road. Quietly he went down and locked and bolted the back door and checked the downstairs windows. He couldn't do the living room windows without making Penny ask questions, and Mum and Dad would want to come in through the front door.