The Wolf in the Attic
First published 2016 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
ISBN: 978-1-84997-918-4
Copyright © 2016 Paul Kearney
Cover art by Oz Osborne
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
In memory of my father, James Francis Kearney,
who showed me what it was to be a good man.
Author’s Note
D
URING THE COURSE
of this narrative I have striven to follow faithfully the geography and history of the places described therein, but I have also taken certain liberties with space and time. I know the distance from Idstone Hill to Wayland’s Smithy; I have walked it more than once. And I know that my fellow Ulsterman, C.S. Lewis, found his faith some months before his appearance in this text. I hope that the reader will forbear from comment if he or she finds that I have skewed dates and places a little in my telling of Anna’s story.
Part One:
Jericho
I form the light, and create darkness;
I make peace, and create evil:
I the Lord do all these things.
Isaiah 45:7
1
A
LL DAY,
P
A
went on, and it was raining outside in buckets and bowls, the kind of rain that makes another life for itself on the ground – it grows up and gathers together and starts gurgling everywhere. I like that rain – sometimes – I like looking at it, and thinking about it, but it’s nasty really.
I
LIKE TO
hear Pa talking, and better still when he reads to me as it’s growing dark and the lamp-smell is warming up the room. It reminds me of that other time long ago, before Oxford and England.
But when he stands on that dusty stage and speaks and raises his voice over their heads in the hall, I hate it so much. I don’t want to shake hands with them as they file in and out, like they were a congregation and he was their priest. They all have such sad eyes. Even Pa can’t change the hopelessness in them.
T
ALKED TO
P
IE
today for a long time and tried to make her dance, but she’s lazy. She’d much rather sit in the crook of my arm and watch things. I could scold her for being so lazy, but that would be
Hypocrisy
, which Pa hates, because he says I’m as lazy as Pie, and I hate the rain even more.
I’m getting too big for Pie, Pa says. I like it when he tells me I’m growing up, but I won’t let her go. She’s my best friend, if a friend is someone you can tell things to, and sit quiet with, and hug in the dark of the night.
He doesn’t like her. She still has the burn marks on her from that last terrible day, when we were hemmed in between the fire and the sea. The day mama died.
W
ELL, ALL RIGHT.
In this country there are galoshes and things, which can be fun; I love rubber boots, (and umbrellas – especially in the wind), but in the by and large of all that, the weather here is not nice.
I
REMEMBER THE
warm rain coming over the hills behind the city; they were blue in the distance, and then yellow with sun and dust up close, and the crickets shimmered in them like an invisible gossiping little crowd. And the rain was warm, and swept across the land and upon the sea like a vast hanging music, dark and bright and silver, like God had made a painting.
Pa tells me I have no memory of anywhere else but England, and really doesn’t like me talking about it. He gets angry sometimes, and has that look in his eye, the bright fire where bad things burn. So I go quiet, and he lays his hand on my head – sometimes – and it’s all right again.
I am getting big. I got new shoes last week. Except they weren’t new. They belonged to Miss Hawcross’s niece, who must have very big feet. But I stuff newspaper into the toes and they’re quite all right, except when they get wet. I wonder if she is a pretty girl, whose shoes I wear, and if her toes feel something when I wiggle mine in her old shoes. That would be nice. We could talk to each other, make up a language of twitching toes, and compose long letters while walking down the street.
Miss Hawcross says I have a mind like a dragonfly, which I thought was a fine thing, but apparently it’s not; and she snaps the ruler across my knuckles when my dragonfly mind wanders, sometimes soft, like a joke, and sometimes hard, with the edge. She is very old, thirty at least. Pa told me once that she loved a man who died in the War, and that I must be good and meek and kind with her. I think of that when the ruler cracks against my knuckles, and I look at Pie and smile knowingly.
S
O,
I
KNOW
all this stuff – and so much I know is supposed to be useful but isn’t, like algebra and the gerund and how the subjunctive works and who was the king with all the wives. And the other things, the important ones – I am not allowed to mention them. As though the dragonfly is walled up in a quiet garden and flits around all the dead flowers, and can tell what colour they were when they were alive, and the names they had and how they smelled…
I do remember – and even the priest says you don’t have to forget a sin. You are sorry for it, and then it’s forgiven.
God forgives you. Our God, anyway.
But I remember what happened to us between the fire and the sea, and sometimes I think Pa hates it because the things I remember are not for me to be forgiven, but for him. And he can’t forget or forgive himself. That’s why he never sleeps, and why he drinks so much. He told me once that there are no memories at the bottom of a glass.
But even I can recall as clear as anything our lives back then so far away, in the lost city, when it was warmer – hot, lizard hot – and that bright, bright light had the dust-herb smell in it.
Nothing smells like that here. The only smells at this time of year are unpleasant: the drains, and the omnibus. The people on it when they are damp.
But I remember looking up at another sky, it was so blue and bright, and hot – I remember the stones burning under my legs, and something else in the light, that bright, bright light. I remember…
T
HE RAIN TAPS
the glass, like a polite little man wanting in. I wish there was less noise in the house. I wish… I wish we had some more peace, Pie and me. I wish Pa would talk to me like a person again, and not like I’m some dog he is training.
I like dogs too. And cats. And horses. I think we had a horse once, but we never had a dog. I would have remembered that.
I remember the horse galloping past us that day through the crowd, knocking people down. It was all on fire, flames streaming from its mane, and its eyes so wide and white with the agony. It galloped past us, and I never saw where it went.
I want to stop having to look at all these people who come into our house – it’s not our house, really, but we do live here – and they sit down on our chairs, and talk to me in the old language and they think I understand what they’re saying, but sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t and I don’t want to anyway. And when they troop through the door I stand sometimes where the glass is, and watch them come in, and the way they wear shawls over their head, and even the set of their faces – no-one in Oxford is as lined and brown as these people are – and this is not who I am or was or will ever be.
Pa told me that. I would never be the same. I kiss Pie, and am so
so
glad. Pa loves me more than anything else in the world – he told me so, a long time ago – and so everything is all right. I suppose everything is all right.