When she had gone Annie felt better, more light-hearted. She even sang while she was making Freddie’s meal. She looked at the clock. He should be home by now.
Annie sat in the window to watch for his motorbike coming up the street. For two hours she sat there through the sunset and into the twilight. She watched the lamplighter work his way along the street, and saw people hurrying home, bent against the North wind. She heard the six o’clock train puffing into the station.
But still Freddie didn’t return.
By nine o’clock Annie was distraught. Wrapped in a shawl she paced round and round the cottage, up and down the stairs, looking out of different windows, opening them and listening, watching the distant hills for a moving cone of light that might be a motorbike. All night she paced and she prayed and in the deathly hush of early morning she fell exhausted into the rocking chair and slept, clutching Levi’s dressing gown up to her chin.
At first light she was awoken by a thunderous knocking on the door. Terrified, she heaved herself up and struggled across the flagstone floor. She opened the door just a crack and peered out.
George stood there in a heavy winter coat, his face unshaven, his hair wild, and a grim expression on his face.
‘’Tis bad news,’ he said. ‘I had a telephone call, from a hospital up in Gloucester.’
Chapter Eighteen
FLOATING
Freddie had never been so comfortable in his life. He was floating on a cushion of deliciously warm air and the light streaming over him was intensely yellow like marsh marigolds. He looked down at his body lying in the hospital bed, its face deathly white, its blistered hands limp on the grey blanket, its knees and feet making orderly bumps in the tightly tucked bed covers. He didn’t want to go back into that body which was filled with pain and struggling to breathe.
Each time he looked down, his mind opened up a cavern of nightmares. Ian Tillerman’s voice echoed in there, his eyes gleamed avariciously, he smelled of beer and horse manure and the stench engulfed Freddie like smoke from a wood fire, he had to breathe it and it stung and choked his lungs. Or he would see his motorbike sinking into the deep canal, bits of it shining and bubbling, the handlebars and the headlight were the last to be submerged as the iron grey water closed over that particular pain. A bloody lout, Ian Tillerman had called him. A bloody lout.
For hours he had lain there on the bank of the canal, face down in the mud, the cold earth and the cold sky clamping him like the jaws of winter. Then the floating had started, floating on a cloud made of ice, watching, unable to speak, as his body was dumped on a khaki-coloured stretcher and pushed into the back of an ambulance.
The voices of nurses and doctors had burbled like a distant stream, and he’d felt hands peeling off his muddy clothes. Through half-open eyelids, he glimpsed Herbie’s leather jacket being dropped into a basket, and the pain of thinking he would have to buy him another one sent Freddie deeper into a comatose state, and with the sleep came a profound feeling of surrender as he let go and drifted into the shadows.
Over three days, the darkness of his floating place transmuted into deep colours, ultramarine and crimson, and in the crimson phase he became aware of smells. He lifted his arm and sniffed his skin, vaguely hoping for a reassuring whiff of oil and stone dust, but it reeked of Sunlight soap and Dettol. A pungent tang of camphor hovered around him, and a mild ointmenty smell from the chilblains on his fingers. The space beyond his bed swished and clanked, and squeaked with footsteps, and the alarming rhythmic groans from the man in the next bed. Even more alarming was the shrill rasp of his own breath cutting into his ribs like a bread knife.
Freddie was not reassured by the amorphous shape of a doctor in a white coat sitting uncomfortably close to him, and the starched apron of a nurse bending over him. Freddie had never been in a hospital and he was terrified. He struggled to see the nurse’s face, and she was frowning like a bulldog. She had his arm in a vicelike grip.
‘Keep still or this will hurt,’ she said sharply and a stinging pain drove into his bicep. He heard a man’s voice saying ‘This will make you sleepy, Mr Barcussy.’
Blissfully it faded and he returned to the floating place, so warm and soft now that he no longer wanted to look down at his body lying there. He wanted to go with the man in a cream robe who smelled of meadow hay and boot polish, a shining man who was leading him down an avenue of lime trees. At the end of the avenue was an archway in a high wall with golden flowers hanging over the top of it. Freddie could see a familiar figure standing here, waiting for him. Levi!
He paused, then walked up to his father and looked deeply into the translucence of his eyes, old familiar eyes but different now. The weariness and the gloom, the frustration and the rage had gone, leaving a mysterious contentment. Freddie felt they were both weightless, suspended like feathers on the wind, and he sensed himself absorbing the essence of that sparkle in Levi’s eyes.
‘Now I’ll tell you something,’ Levi said in his normal voice. He put his hand on Freddie’s left shoulder, its comforting warmth radiant like the heat from a flame. ‘That Ian Tillerman. Don’t you let ’im take your life. He’s lying. He’s lying, Freddie.’
Freddie stared into his luminous eyes and felt a change moving over him. Coral-coloured, it wound itself around his shoulders like the hug Levi was giving him now.
‘I’m sorry, son. Don’t you ever be like me.’
‘I’ve forgiven you, Dad,’ said Freddie, and Levi beamed, the smile magically bringing them closer than they had ever been.
Levi stood back and Freddie gazed beyond him into the archway, curiously observing a garden where trees glittered like jewellery and everything danced with colours. Across it was a lattice of brilliant gold.
‘No,’ said Levi firmly. ‘You gotta go back, Freddie. Go on. Go back.’
Freddie nodded. He turned and floated back, still light as air, the man in the cream robe drifting beside him. He looked back once and saw Levi watching him, waving, then melting into the webs of light. The tingle of his feet reconnecting with the earth made him stronger, but still he couldn’t hear his footsteps. What he could hear, louder and louder, was a rushing sound in his ears, a voice speaking his name.
‘Mr Barcussy. Come on. Open your eyes.’
He came back with a jolt into the body lying on the bed. The pain had eased and his skin felt cool and soft, his body relaxed on comfortable pillows. Gradually the nurse’s face came into focus. She was smiling now, a slim glass thermometer in her hand.
‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘We nearly lost you.’
Freddie was ill for many weeks. After George had driven his lorry all the way to Gloucester and fetched him home, he lay in bed watching and listening.
His hearing was super sensitive and so attuned to the land beyond the town that he could hear the quack of herons passing overhead at dawn, and the unearthly sharp yelping of foxes, and in the mornings the squeak of ice being broken and crisp leaves being crunched underfoot. At nine forty-five he listened for the cattle train passing through, and the distressed cries of sheep and cows crowded together, terrified, their faces pressed to the slatted openings, their noses sniffing the fresh turfy fields where they had grazed. He felt their desperation.
Annie lumbered up and down stairs with trays of home-baked meals. She brought him a new drawing book and a pencil, but he didn’t want to draw. He just wanted to stare out at the winter sky. The clouds created curling images of faces and ferry boats, lions and angels. Strangely, the illness was a gift of time to Freddie’s artistic soul, each change of the light adding to his storehouse of ideas waiting to be carved in stone. He dreamed of carving in marble or alabaster, his fingers coaxing a smooth translucence from the rough blocks.