The Lanyard (2 page)

"It's better with drainage," he said.

"I know."

"In a dried up pool, or here..."

"But pools don't drain," she replied.

"They evaporate."

CHAPTER ONE

The boy stood frozen at the far corner of the yard behind the house, beneath the vertical slats of the fence, out of sight. He stood staring into the dark knot in the wood of the old dead tree in front of him, wrapped in mottled grey bark that appeared to have trapped a thin layer of smoke, like the skin of a peppered moth, hardened and pinched into ridges as if hundreds of fingers had run over a chunk of clay before it set, where the light faded fast beyond the double edged lip that jutted out. He stared hard, until this dead wood around the border of his view seemed to pulsate, until he feared the sensation of something clamping around his brain, forcing those coiled grey tentacles that he had seen lived inside skulls down towards his eyes, his nose, mouth, threatening to burst through the bone like a creeper on an abandoned house. His tongue came out and pressed against the corner of his lips, his eyebrows arched and he leaned forward, keeping balance until he could taste the vision at the back of his throat, and he shook himself free, and turned.

The rest of the yard seemed brighter in contrast to the knot, and breathing hard for a moment he made sure to run his eyes over the pale flowers in the grass as if using them to sponge himself clean. Free of colour, these little balls of white amongst the green could have been small cotton swabs. Or white flags of surrender. He looked past the grass, towards the house, gaze travelling over many patches of shadow caused by the leafless trees, on and up the pebbledash walls of the small garage, over to the eyes of the house itself, all covered in smears, unbroken. He cursed under his breath, knowing, as he clenched his fists into the bottom of his vest and pulled on it so that it stretched into a slide, that he would have to start over.

But why?

He smiled to himself. Because that was the way it would be, of course. Because of what his mother had said again as he had watched her through the thin glass of the kitchen window, when she took a step back from his father as they argued, returned with her arm outstretched, fingers shaped like a blade, chopping through the air. He could never understand why it mattered so much.

He must have walked a similar pattern since the day he was born. They all had. Though he could not remember those early steps or being led, he imagined his head down the whole time, not paying attention, growing old without realising it, rattling back through the many houses, the many lives they had lived -- or if not so much lived then lived in -- like tired feet pushed into broken shoes, until thinking on it became like staring through a mist he could not penetrate. Either way he knew it had not been enough time, nor enough steps, to consider himself a man, pursued as he was by a small shadow. So at best he was just bordering on adolescence, like a hiker staring across to a well-climbed hill to another land, staring into a tree, but not yet on the final ascent, rehearsing it in his head all the same, the same pattern, the same steps, rehearsing the winding crossing into that new country, above him at the same time as it was below, a trip that already felt like it would be long and fraught, a journey he didn't believe he was in a hurry to make as he clung on against the wind, grasping the top of the grass stems like rope.

What other way could he think, given more often than not he found himself stood outside the house just like this, at best listening in, not participating, excluded from adult life, left out, and yet not alone, for he imagined others like him, distant children around the house, yet never seen, on the other side of the fences, on the other side of his dreams, ducked down at the bottom of that valley he felt encouraged to cross.

At least his parents were unaware he could hear them if he got close enough to the house, to the boundary marked by an area of the yard where the dirt was paved with thick slabs of rock that couldn't have come from anywhere close, blue marble flecked through with polymer strands of rose, where he liked to make white marks by splashing them from a height with chunks of brick that had crumbled from the side wall.

"Something still isn't right with him," she said.

Something.

"I'm telling you, he never looks me in the eye..."

Outside the house he could turn away, he could walk away, so that her voice faded into the background, under the song of invisible birds with blood red feet, under the whispers of gliding branches, the sound grass made when it swayed in those patches where it had grown into long strands that felt thick like shoebox lids and yet could cut his skin, becoming smaller tufts peeking from the dirt closer to the shadow of the fence.

Away from the house, he could look back over his shoulder and imagine a football spiralling his way, like in the comics, like in the old pile of video tapes, like how his father used to throw for him until a year or so ago, that one they had found ages before, in another house, which had lost its air and its shape, deflated like a good intention. The current house had been concerned not so much with games but with arguments, about him, about them, lines repeating the way he walked in a fixed pattern across the hills, lines he could only listen to for so long.

To avoid them, or to work through them, he'd begun picking up two sticks and sword fighting with himself outside, beating one branch against the other until the skin of the wood flew off and the white was revealed inside, strong and hard, a sudden surprise, as if wood had turned into bone. He'd soon learned that the older the branch, the longer it had been on the ground, the more likely it was to snap, while the newer sticks turned into tooth bristles before they broke, allowing the slick, colourless, marrow within to coat his hands, the sap on his fingers, resilient to his blows.

Lately, he used the sticks as throwing weapons, ever waiting for the next hit against the base of the tree from across the yard, and then the next twist, the rise and dip and the fall. All life in one motion. Sometimes, turning around in this way, battling himself, stick on stick, sap on sap, he would all at once feel those eyes watching him, and he'd turn, and he'd spin, and he'd be sure he'd seen, for just a moment, the darting shadow of another person looking through the fence. And even though today was not one of those days that he had heard those whispering ghosts, he struggled to get the expectation out of his head. He tensed up. Did they only come when he thought of them? Perhaps. But if they were real, if other people like him existed, where did they live if not in the shadows of his vision? Could it be up in the backwoods that came onto the circle of houses, further up the way? On the rooftops of the neighbouring properties where he would swear to have seen them once? All musings, he knew, that were the games of a lonely boy, desperate to invent a world to fight for and/or  against.

It had been this way for a long time, and he had become used to it. Just like he had got used to waking up each morning in another boy's room, under sheets that spoke of dreams of space, of sport, of super powers, with another boy's posters on the wall, another boy's clothes in the cupboard, all the things left behind, smelling of mould, not fit to wear, the curtains on their windows falling apart, pots shaped like animals with useless pennies inside, sometimes paper, hopes and dreams, little stars struck on the ceiling, no longer glowing when the sun went down, more likely to drop like roaches to mark the ever-shortening days.

Now as he thought about it, he could still hear his mother from inside, even though he was way down by the big trees with the roots that had begun to climb free of the dirt around the base and reach for him. Perhaps it was just a memory of another day, another verse in the same song that she always seemed to sing, or, at least, that she sang to him, for him, about him, like he still remembered her doing when he was younger and could not go to sleep without light.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you. How many times? Is that so much to ask?"

He focused hard on his tree knot in response, and tried to picture his frustration behind that black disk that hung on the wood. He stared at it. So hard that laser beams might come out of his eyes. Superhuman hard. And he realised it wasn't so bad. He felt like he could stare at this knot all day.

For all time.

But he knew it wasn't the same as looking at a person. Human eyes were different to the void, even if they shared the black centre. For one, the knot lacked the bead of the light in a person's eye, in which was stored a glancing reflection of the rest of the world. And then there was the colour wrapping the black, not just grey like here but often startling shades -- bronze, blue, or green -- impossible to replicate, not to mention the flash of white at the edge.

He shook his head and turned back to face the house, glaring at it, baring his teeth somewhere between rage and a pitiful howl. Wanting to scream at the top of his lungs a sudden realisation that if he knew so well all the details of eyes then he must look at them. He must see them.

What was wrong with him?

The house deflected his vision and his head dropped. His feet stagnant on top of the mud, the shoes that didn't yet fit him, and he was supposed to wear in, with laces stuffed inside the tongue rather than tied, worn through at the front, toe tapping, his default position, gazing at the earth as if he longed to be it, to join it. He turned back to the knot as if going to embrace an old friend. Maybe it wasn't the black part of the eye that made it so hard at all, but the white, that flash of thick, glassy ice before the soft skin, he tried but could not conjure it on top of the tree, surrounding the hole. There was no such thing to practice on, not anything in the house or in the yard he could think to make, not even in winter when he might hope for a black stone to stand on some snow. Even then it wouldn't be so reflective. Even animals lacked that part, and maybe that's why people felt they were somehow different?

He tried to imagine people with solid coloured eyes like owls, or bears, and that was even worse, even harder to hold in his head. He started to feel his lip quiver, water on his vision, an itching that it hurt to rub, that stink of grass all at once over the top of him, that gritty bark from his hands stuck to his face from where he had held the tree for balance when he first tried to look in close. The black knot now seemed more like a mouth than an eye, yawning, calling for him to disappear inside.

He straightened up his back and refocused his efforts, not caring what the hole resembled any more, falling into it, daring it to blink, to swallow him, one and the same. And as he looked he began to see the brown edges fade away, bending under the will of dark. Stepping closer so that it grew in size, hands touching, he found it easy to do. He found it easy to stare into the abyss.

But there was something within.

He could see it now, glinting at the base. He leant forward. The black gave way to brown, became a dead star, a presence, not a space at all. He reached into it, fingers cautious at the edge, travelling through a small pool of wet that tickled his hand, then turning and taking hold. He looked down at one of the toy cars he sometimes found in the yard around the house, a metal frame with red paint that had almost gone, plastic base with small wheels that spun on a bent axle. The windshield was cracked, warm to the touch, plastic. He cleaned it as best he could on his vest and ran it back towards the house.

CHAPTER TWO

Sometimes he dreamed of groups of cars like this, of many cars, of a thing he'd never seen, of traffic: he dreamed of long lines of sunburnt metal pursuing his eyes as they passed him on the road, of windows that trapped heroic light, of wheels leaving tar trails in their wake, laying down thick lines of rubber all over the land, thick enough to trip. He dreamed of them when he closed his eyes, when he let his head fall on his arms, and his fingers began to kneed the bed, when soap washed over his head, in the sink, in the pan, as water filled his ears, whether outside or in.

Had his father ever seen such a thing as traffic? Real traffic, not the shells they sometimes overtook as they drove lonely on the road. Had he seen it since, before, after? Had he wondered about it too? Had he tried to imagine how it would be to be one of those men of the old road they sometimes talked about, stuck like a sinner in a line of souls waiting to enter hell, driven by an ironic feeling of freedom within a cage, hands gripped to the steering column, thinking they controlled their dream, when at best they nudged it this way and that?

It must have been something to experience that snake tail of cars, winding its way, slithering, looking for prey. The closest he had seen was a long clutch of logs and other rotting paraphernalia drifting along in a dirty river near to where they once stayed, the remnants of an old wooden hut that had collapsed and sped through, like an island of broken hope, or so his parents had said. The result must have been much the same.

Perhaps when all people idled they thought of being in traffic; such a state was not beyond being a subconscious goal, what with the opportunity to sit and think and wait. He took the time to do all three now, so why wouldn't any other person do the same? Why wouldn't they daydream until they forgot thinking, until they forgot waiting, until they shuffled forward.

There wasn't much other choice: this trip had not been pre-announced. At least, his mother stayed back at home and hadn't even waved them off as they set out onto the dismantled roads. The boy put his hands onto the window frame as the car crawled down another empty street that curved like a string tied around a blind man's neck, gliding for several yards as it looped around and down, gathering momentum like a flower girl gathering cut heads, before his father tried to start the engine again, pushing the key all the way and holding it through the splutter before he let it come back for a moment and twisted hard, in what had become a gentle trick, an intricate dance, some sort of fine brocade stitched from memory, which the boy liked to picture as a scene out of the hardboiled fiction they sometimes read together, in which somewhere amongst the pipes the ignition tried to speak to the pistons over the snap snap of a cigarette lighter in a dull bar, low voice, raspy, its dry and dusky liquor breath, coughing polite into the back of the hand, offering another sip, a perfumed whiff, as it gradually, gently, repeatedly seduced a smile, then a spark, then a touch, bringing the whole engine to life, like a dog on a chain suddenly kicked.

When the car was finally running, the boy's father waited; he didn't press the accelerator right away; he let the wheels roll further on their own, all the way down to an adjoining road where he would need horses to get any further, where the tarmac became dark blue, grazed by those many memories of long dead rubber, like a deep ocean of endless depth boiled down. He pushed on the accelerator and leant forward as if to listen to the sound the car made as it half-pulled, half-pushed itself up to the crest at the top of the next road, dropped, and then began to move away from itself.

All the way along the road the boy tried to look for the glimpses of children he knew were in the area, who he sometimes saw when he was alone in the yard. He wondered if they might not hear the car driving off and come to investigate, jealous of him, like natives watching a steam train, catching sight of the boy stuck inside the car, with his father, and no one else.

He turned around in the seat, strained for a moment against the belt that drooped across him having lost its spring, no use in a crash, but nothing to crash into here, aside from the couple of rusting vehicles on the sidewalk near where they turned that looked like they hadn't been motioned for years, not worth taking, not even worth trying to see if there was any fuel. He'd learned only polished cars might have reserves, and these were cars that lived off the streets, in locked garages with large white doors under the house, down a step, that could be opened with the rap of an axe.

"Are you sure we're not moving again?" the boy said.

"We're not moving."

"But are you
sure
?"

He crossed hands as he turned the wheel to negotiate a gap in a metal barrier to the other side of the road. The engine sputtered. He responded by wiggling the stick without pressing the clutch.

"You'd think I'd know?"

"Swear?"

"Ok, I swear."

He swept his brow to get the hair out of his eyes. He checked the mirror. He often checked the mirror.

"Alright," the boy said.

The car joined a wider highway. Mountains started to encroach the view from out of the distance -- several peaks had hints of snow on top, which made them look like jagged teeth on a distant jaw snapping across the sky. The boy wondered what the world thought of all these roads, of the concrete ribbons that had been drawn tight all across it. Not just here, but most places, from what he had seen, across it, around it, even beneath it, as if these lanes were built to divide it up, pulling tighter and tighter each day for no reason he could see or understand.

"Did you actually think we'd just leave your mother?"

"Well where is she?"

"Back at the house..."

"But why?"

"Because... "

"Where are we going then?"

"That way," he said, pointing out of the window ahead, towards the mountains.

"
Where
?"

"I just wanted us to get away for a few days, you know? Give her a break. Give us a break. She's been tired of late..."

"Of what?"

"Just tired... It's a chance for us, so that we can just be together too..."

"She didn't want to come?"

He laughed.

"No. It's not like that."

"Oh?"

"I thought it was better if it was just us."

"Why?"

"You'll see."

He glanced across at something out of the right side of the car, but the boy didn't register what it was.

"When I was your age my Dad did this for me, you know, took me out to the country. We made a camp, we fished, we built a lousy fire that just smoked all night and... yeah, we almost froze. But it was good. I loved it, even if I complained all the way there t--"

"I'm not complaining."

"I know, I know. But I did."

He pulled down the driver's side sun visor, even though there was no sun. Then he pushed it up again.

"Can we fish?" the boy said.

"I guess... If we can find a spot... You brought your line?"

The boy shook his head, then he smiled. He glanced over to where scores of abandoned cars made a running tally at the side of the roads.

"Did people really just leave them like that?"

"They must have."

"But why?"

"Ran out of fuel, didn't want to drive anymore? Your guess is as good as mine."

"But you were there, weren't you?"

The boy pushed his face up on the glass. Some of the vehicles were skeletons, burned free of their wheels and seats, no sense of the type of car they once were, as if the metal and the colour that must have turned to smoke were just like skin, just like corpses out to rot. After a few more yards the cars vanished again, peeling away to leave long stretches of scrubland without anything of note, where the road relaxed and widened too, and he could see clean out beyond the brown metal barrier that had become a constant presence, away to hills that once more seemed to glide, allowing his eyes to roll along the top of them like a pair of marbles along a track, bumping over rocks feathered with white, down many gentle valleys that curved like a river turned on its side. Not a house in sight anywhere. And then again, the snap of a fresh collection of cars, this time turned into a circle, stacked up.

"They'll get cleaned up someday," his father said.

The boy turned back towards him, with a serious look.

"Did Mom leave us?"

"No!" he took his hands off the wheel and held them open. The car began to drift until he grabbed it again and made an attempt at easing it back into the old line. "What makes you say that?"

"I heard what she said about me, the other day."

"The other day?"

"Yeah."

"What did she say?"

"She said there's something wrong with me."

"She did not."

"She did."

"What?"

"That I can't look at people."

"Oh, that."

"It's true, isn't it?"

"...she's just concerned, that's all."

"So it is true?" he turned to face his father, but he continued to stare at the road. Then he shifted in his seat as if he could feel the burn of the glare.

"What?" he said, taking his hands off the wheel again.

"Is it true that I can't look at people?"

"You are looking at me now, aren't you?"

"I know, but... Ah just forget it."

The boy's head dropped and even while staring into his lap he could tell that his father turned away from him, as if it was easier to focus on the mountains than face another person. Maybe that was the real lure of driving.

"I don't know what's best to say to you. It's just not something I've experienced. I know you must find it tough. It's not your fault."

"See, there is something..."

"I'm not saying that."

"I just can't help it,"

"I know. But you know what there was a book about it at the last house. That's why your mother was saying what she did."

"".

"Remember I told you? How we said that place must have belonged to a doctor, once?"

The boy folded his arms. He felt the car shifting beneath him into the outside lane.

"You don't even want to hear about it?"

"I don't care."

"It's nothing bad..."

Outside, a broken down house had somehow snuck into the mid-distance. It had sides that sloped into the top -- the way roofs were designed to let rain come off them -- but it wasn't just the roof sloping; the whole house had fallen in on itself. The boy gazed at it for a while through the glass. When it was clear his father wasn't going to say anything else until he gave some sort of response, he looked over, just for a moment, and that was enough.

"It said there was a study that found when people answered questions they did better if they didn't make eye contact... Said it must use less brain power, not trying to read facial expression, or whatever. That's kind of good, right?"

"I guess."

The boy felt his chair growing in size to swallow him. He wanted to reach down and turn the handle on the side, fold the seat forward to snap closed around him. The words now started to take hold; he could imagine them spreading through his head like dye in a river, poisoning his soul, his hope. He couldn't read faces? Was that it? Was that why he was strange? He was strange, wasn't he? But strange compared to what exactly, he fought back inside himself, a rare energy starting to well up from within... maybe he didn't want to read faces, didn't need to.

There were no other faces.

"I don't want you to think it's ever a criticism of you," his father said.

"Sure."

"Come on, don't be like that."

"I'm not."

"Don't get defensive."

"How else am I meant to get when you're picking on me for nothing."

"I'm not. You just think I am..."

"Maybe I can't help that, either?"

"".

"Forget it."

The boy started poking around in the recess under his seat to get out of the conversation. Down there were some maps spread across the floor with green and brown and blue colours, intermingled with the red boxes of grid lines and the letters and numbers on the side. He kicked at them with his foot, lifted up one side and then hid his toe beneath it like a blanket.

"I know I'm not making this any better, but I just wanted to say that whatever is going on, it's no bad thing either way."

"I said, it's fine."

"I'm not trying to be condescending. I know you've had it pretty rough... Who's to say what causes this or that. Some book?"