The New Uncanny (21 page)

They arrived back late, after ten, each bearing a sleeping child. She held the screen door while Dan fumbled with the key. Inside, he smacked the switch for the overhead light.

She stopped, her back tensing. ‘He was here again.’

He scanned the room. ‘Who was? Oh God. Don’t do this now, Mia. It’s been a hell of a long day.’ He lowered Felix onto his bed and started gently pulling off his clothes.

She paced from the door to the window, from the window to the bathroom, checking their things. ‘I left the desk lamp on deliberately, Dan. I hate coming back into this room in the dark. And I left the window open a crack. He’s closed it again.’

‘So he’s a control freak. It’s not as if he’s taken anything.’

She lay Rosie in the playpen and arranged her pillow and stuffed toys. ‘It’s
our
space, Dan. Who knows what he does when he’s in here?’

‘From what I understand, he turns off lamps and closes windows.’ He struggled out of his jacket and tie.

‘Or, he watches to see when people drive off, then rummages in their rooms.’

‘I need to sleep, Mia. We’re out of here first thing tomorrow anyway.’ He cranked open the window. ‘I’ll leave the main door open tonight. Maybe we’ll get a bit of a cross-breeze and you’ll get a better kip.’

She’d forgotten to take off her watch before falling into bed. Twenty past five, it said. But no panic this time. No slamming of her heart in her chest. No cold sweat. Just restlessness. She couldn’t wait to pack and be gone.

Dan was snoring lightly. Rosie gurgled in her sleep. She turned her head to listen for Felix’s soft breathing.

She propped her head on her elbow and listened again.

She opened her eyes and studied the darkness for the glimmer of his face and hair. Then she was throwing back the covers and springing from bed.

Her hands groped his sheets.

‘Dan. Get up!’

She turned, knocking over Felix’s cup on the nightstand.

Dan’s hand fumbled for the clock by their bed in London.

‘Felix isn’t in his bed!’

He rolled out from below the sheet before he could make sense of what she was saying. She flung back the curtains, half tearing them from the rail. Rosie started to whimper.

‘What time is it?’ He was zipping up his jeans.

‘Twenty past five.’ She pulled on a tank-top, her camp skirt and flip-flops. ‘You left the main door open. There’s no lock on the screen door.’ She couldn’t believe she was saying it, blaming him.

He was pulling on his trainers. ‘I’ll take Rosie and go right, towards the main road. You go left.’

She nodded and they ran into the morning.

She checked between parked cars and beneath picnic tables. She ran to the hammock. She called over the duck-pond fence, waking the geese. ‘Felix! Felix!’ She stared hard at the surface.

Something pale drifted near the far edge.

In the half light of day, she saw his forehead, smeared with green.

Oh God, oh God.
She was over the fence and sliding down the bank before she realised.

It was a pale piece of wood. A half-submerged duckboard that had slid from the path. She bent double and was sick into the pond.

Then she clambered back over the fence and ran on, clenching her armpits. It felt as if the sobs she was forcing down would split her chest in two. ‘Felix!’

At Room 17, a middle-aged couple appeared outside their door. ‘Is anything the matter?’ The woman’s eyes were huge, kind.

‘It’s my son,’ she started. The tears were coming. ‘We can’t find him.’

‘We’ll pull on our shoes,’ said the man. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Felix,’ she mumbled through her sobs. ‘It’s Felix. Could you try the back lawn?’

She jogged past the barbecue pit, across flowerbeds, searching. Only the pool lay up ahead – she could see it now – mercifully fenced in. He
had
to have gone the other way, toward the road. The 6A. What was the speed limit? Sixty? Seventy?

‘FELIX!’

Maybe Dan had him by now. Maybe in a few minutes she’d hear him calling: ‘Mum! We’re over here! You’ll never guess what I did!’

She could hear the couple from Room 17 behind the motel. ‘Felix...! Felix…!’

Lights were appearing behind closed curtains. If Dan didn’t re-appear with him within minutes, she’d be on the phone to the police. She’d demand police dogs, a man-hunt. She’d show them hysterical.

She stopped. Up ahead, the door of the pool’s enclosure was propped open with a cleaning trolley.

She slipped off her flip-flops and lurched into a run.

‘Oh, my lovely boy,’ she whispered hoarsely.

He was so still. So incredibly still.

He crouched at the edge of the sundeck.

‘Felix, sweetheart?’ she softly called. ‘Daddy and I were so worried. We didn’t know where you were.’

He was inches above the deep end.

‘We woke up and thought, where’s our Felix? Mummy was so sad.’ She edged her way along the length of the sundeck.

He stretched his right arm above the water’s surface, and uncurled his palm.

‘But the only thing that matters now is that you’re here and safe.’

She was close, almost close enough to touch him.

He shifted on the balls of his feet, then stretched his arm out further, so his weight rested only on his toes. Balance had never come easily to him. At home, on his bike, he found it hard not to wobble, even with the stabilisers.

‘Felix?’ She bent down over him.

His eyes were open but he was far away. He was lisping, almost inaudibly. ‘Goosey goosey gander where do you wander goosey goosey gander where do you…’

‘Felix, love, can you hear me?’

He was feeding geese only he could see. His face was pressed to invisible chicken wire.

She reached for the hand that rested, limp, at his side and wrapped it in hers. ‘It’s Mummy, bunny rabbit. Mummy.’ Then she hauled him into her arms.

As she bore Felix away, the Earl passed, laden with a mop and a hose on a reel. She stared, her eyes molten, but only the Doberman paused to observe them, its ears sharp and its nostrils flaring.

Dan came running, with Rosie pressed, pale-cheeked and tearful, to his chest.

‘I’ve got him,’ she breathed. ‘It’s okay. I’ve got him.’ In the room, she collapsed on the bed under his weight.

They got him under the covers, then sat hunched, watching him sleep. Dan pressed his thumbs to his eyes. ‘Maybe it was the funeral. The coffin being lowered…’

She could hardly speak. ‘It’s my fault.’ She pulled the sheet over Felix’s ankle. ‘When I ran off to get the First Aid kit, I should have explained.’

‘Explained what?’

‘He was in my arms, and I was saying “Mummy’s here”. Then I was gone. I was running away. And afterwards, I knew he was upset about it, but I just papered over the cracks because we had to get to the funeral.’

‘No. He was upset because he’s never hurt himself that badly.’

‘But what could he see? The back of me, leaving him.’

‘Mia, if this is still about– You have to let it–’

‘And when I found him just now, he was muttering about the geese.’ She turned to her husband and winced. ‘Yesterday, The Earl ticked him off over by the duck pond. He warned him not to go too close; Felix says he told him the geese would peck out his eyes. I didn’t know if he was making it up or not. Maybe he was – to please me.’

‘To please you? To please you how?’

She shook her head, cancelling the thought. ‘Something did scare him, Dan, something that bloke did or said. Felix said his eyes weren’t alive.’

‘He’s six, Mia.’

‘I should have told you yesterday.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Because I thought you’d think I was making something of nothing. You know – over-egging The Earl. But it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left Felix alone at the duck pond. I should have been with him.’ She pushed her hand up his T-shirt and rubbed his lower back. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You didn’t let him down.’ He reached behind and pressed his hand to hers. ‘You have never let him down.’

She was at the office door as they opened for business. Dan waited in the car with Rosie. Felix had announced that he wanted to go to the office too. He wanted to see The Earl’s glass eyes one more time. Mia breathed easier. He’d woken an hour before and bounded into their bed, himself again.

But it was Mrs Earl who looked up from the desk as he and Mia walked in. Felix sighed and kicked the floor softly. The Venetian blind was half open. He walked over to the window sill and made faces in the shiny lanterns on display.

‘We’re on our way,’ she said, avoiding the woman’s eyes. ‘I’m just popping in for our passports.’ She couldn’t bear to speak of that morning. She had to believe what Dan had said. It was all just a horrible, sickening fluke.

Mrs Earl disappeared and returned with three passports.

Mia opened them. ‘There should be four. The name on the other one is Felix Hamlyn.’

Mrs Earl crinkled her forehead and disappeared again.

Mia drummed her fingers. Outside, she heard Dan switch off the engine. Felix was trying to raise the blind.

When the woman re-appeared The Earl was behind her. He laid the missing passport on the desk. Felix turned to stare.

‘I’m afraid it was in with Room 12’s,’ explained Mrs Earl. ‘Sorry about that.’ Her smile flickered. ‘Safe journey.’

Mia watched her son. He didn’t go shy this time. He didn’t blink. He held The Earl’s bland gaze, as if something was passing between them.

She felt her skin go cold.

Then Mrs Earl leaned across the desk. Her cheek twitched. ‘Aren’t you cute?’ She looked at Mia. ‘Six? Seven?’

Mia got hold of Felix’s hand. ‘Six.’

Mrs Earl looked from Felix to her husband and back again. She wiped her palm across her forehead. Then she leaned across the desk towards Felix, her smile straining. ‘We’re going to have to keep you!’

The Earl laid his hands on the desk and blinked.

DAD WAS CHOKED. It was the day I got the e-mail telling me I’d passed A-level Maths, Physics and Biology, all at grade A! Success beyond his wildest dreams! His dreams. Far from wild to me. He’d pushed me into the sciences, but only because he wanted me to have a safety net, he always said. He was keeping an eye out for me; it was the promise he’d made Mum. Well, over her grave anyway. I left her there, don’t remember much of her, hardly saw her after I got the microwave, tv and computer with broadband in my bedroom, which then became my bedsitstudiocellspaceship. But Dad fixated on her once she was good and gone. A man is as good as his word, he’d say, and his word is his bond. And now I was the weakest link. He was letting me have it good style...

Sacrifice. I didn’t know the meaning of it. Hard work. Alien to my nature. Shirking. All I’m good for. Appearance. A disgrace. Self, self, self. Mother. Grave. Turning. Duty. Indulgence. On his back. Shoulders of giants. Which led him to one of his heroes, Isaac Newton. Real geniuses worked hard, showed dedication, patience, attention to detail: can it be a coincidence so many were lens-grinders like Newton? Or Spinoza? Or Descartes? Or Hooke? He told me for the umpteenth time about Newton pushing needles into his eyesocket in the course of his experiments on optics. He knew this got me as I had a real thing about eyes - I’d been told at school about a kid in another class who was running with a newly-sharpened pencil...he’d have been safer with scissors. I never used a pencil again. It gave me nightmares for months. Some things are well beyond my ability to put into words (that’s where the creative writing foundation course came in). I wanted to talk to Dad about images, about glass and mirrors, his world being the one, mine the other, that’s all – in fact, as careers, they reflected each other... but I didn’t have the bottle.

If I had said this, his eyes would have bulged out on their stalks like chapel hat-pegs, the veins on his face colour it to a road map, his loosened teeth in their retreating gums drop out and rattle into his glass of Sanatogen, then his whole head explode like in the film ‘Scanners’. Scary but I’d like to have seen him explode. I’d keep that picture on my mobile so I could look at it and laugh to myself whenever the whim took me. Whim, not prescription. It would take more than a prescription to fix Lucy, another one I couldn’t get out of my mind. St Lucy that is, not my Lucy. We saw a picture of her ‘Exoculation’ (good word, though) in an art gallery once; she’s stood there with her eyes held out in front of her on a little silver dish as if they were a couple of oysters for the viewer to eat. The world is your. Choose. She didn’t need them, saw better without them, like Oedipus.

11000100

I was born with a caul and espionage skills. Mum said she didn’t even know she was pregnant until I was nearly due. I kept them guessing about when I’d arrive, was late, wrongfooting everybody. Eventually they resorted to a Caesarean, lancet not forceps. Blended into the background at school. Exams have always been easy for me: photographic memory and even speed-reading, a flypaper-mind for words, hoovering up millions from all kinds of books like a whale shark taking in plankton. Everything sticks, even much of what I wanted to get rid of - I envied Sherlock Holmes, who could do that easily. The Copernican theory? Do I look like I give a shit? I’m doing my best to forget lots. How do you do that? It’s like trying to count up to ten without thinking of rabbits. The ties that bind. Even bondage freaks had their safe words. Dad wanted me to be safe in a way that he knew would work, because it had worked for him: to get married and give him grandchildren during the course of a successful career as an optician, like him. Ophthalmic, that was, not just Dispensing in a shop, a cut above: able to test and make out prescriptions. I’m sure Dad was on the square as well as square, though of course we couldn’t talk about it. But he was always out for some ‘meeting’ or another, coming back half-cut with no explanation, strange creases in one trouserleg. But he wore the trousers in our house. I was a Lodge orphan, Mum a Lodge widow so he could play the Widow’s Son. So the Widow’s Son begat a widower’s son, his mirror image, but unworshipful. Who said the only secret Masons possess is the secret of getting drunk? It’s a secret.