‘Have a thought for us. Don’t start us wondering where you are again. We’re past coming to find you.’
‘Where are you? I can’t see.’
‘Just carry on straight,’ his parents’ voices took it in turns to murmur.
He faltered before lurching between the first exhibits. Beyond them matters could hardly be said to improve. He did his best not to see too much of the milkman holding the reins of a horse while a cow followed the cart, but the man’s left eye seemed large enough for the horse, the right for the cow. Opposite him stood a rag and bone collector whose trade was apparent from the companion that hung onto his arm, and Trent was almost glad of the flickering dimness. ‘How much further?’ he cried in a voice that the place shrank almost to nothing.
‘No more than you can walk at your age.’
Trent hung onto the impression that his father sounded closer than before and hugged his briefcase while he made his legs carry him past a policeman who’d removed his helmet to reveal a bald-ridged head as pointed as a chrysalis, a priest whose smooth face was balanced on a collar of the same paleness as and no thicker than a child’s wrist, a window cleaner with scrawny legs folded like a grasshopper’s, a bus conductor choked by his tie that was caught in his ticket machine while at the front of the otherwise deserted vehicle the driver displayed exactly the same would-be comical strangled face and askew swollen tongue . . . They were nightmares, Trent told himself: some he remembered having suffered as a child, and the rest he was afraid to remember in case they grew clearer. ‘I still can’t see you,’ he all but wailed.
‘Down here, son.’
Did they mean ahead? He hoped he wasn’t being told to use any of the side aisles, not least because they seemed capable of demonstrating that the place was even vaster than he feared. The sights they contained were more elaborate too. Off to the right was a brass band, not marching but frozen in the act of tiptoeing towards him: though all the players had lowered their instruments, their mouths were perfectly round. In the dimness to his left, and scarcely more luminous, was a reddish bonfire surrounded by figures that wore charred masks, unless those were their faces, and beyond that was a street party where children sat at trestle tables strewn with food and grimaced in imitation of the distorted versions of their faces borne by deflating balloons they held on strings . . . Trent twisted his stiff body around in case some form of reassurance was to be found behind him, but the exit to the lobby was so distant he could have mistaken it for the last of a flame. He half closed his eyes to blot out the sights he had to pass, only to find that made the shadows of the exhibits and the darkness into which the shadows trailed loom closer, as if the dimness was on the point of being finally extinguished. He was suddenly aware that if the building had still been a theatre, the aisle would have brought him to the stage by now. ‘Where are you?’ he called but was afraid to raise his voice. ‘Can’t you speak?’
‘Right here.’
His eyes sprang so wide they felt fitted into their sockets. His parents weren’t just close, they were behind him. He turned with difficulty and saw why he’d strayed past them. His mother was wearing a top hat and tails and had finished twirling a cane that resembled a lengthening of one knobbly finger; his father was bulging out of a shabby flowered dress that failed to conceal several sections of a pinkish bra. They’d dressed up to cure Trent of his nightmare about the theatre performance, he remembered, but they had only brought it into his waking hours. He backed away from it - from their waxen faces greyish with down, their smiles as fixed as their eyes. His legs collided with an object that folded them up, and he tottered sideways to sit helplessly on it. ‘That’s it, son,’ his mother succeeded in murmuring.
‘That’s your place,’ his father said with a last shifting of his lips.
Trent glared downwards and saw he was trapped by a school desk barely large enough to accommodate him. On either side of him sat motionless children as furred with grey as their desks, even their eyes. Between him and his parents a teacher in a gown and mortarboard was standing not quite still and sneering at him. ‘Mr Bunnie,’ Trent gasped, remembering how the teacher had always responded to being addressed by his name as though it was an insult. Then, in a moment of clarity that felt like a beacon in the dark, he realised he had some defence. ‘This isn’t me,’ he tried to say calmly but firmly. ‘This is.’
His fingers were almost too unmanageable to deal with the briefcase. He levered at the rusty metal buttons with his thumbs until at last the catches flew open and the contents spilled across the desk. For a breath, if he had any, Trent couldn’t see them in the dimness, and then he made out that they were half a dozen infantile crayon drawings of houses. ‘I’ve done more than that,’ he struggled to protest, ‘I am more,’ but his mouth had finished working. He managed only to raise his head, and never knew which was worse: his paralysis, or his parents’ doting smiles, or the sneer that the teacher’s face seemed to have widened to encompass - the sneer that had always meant that once a child was inside the school gates, his parents could no longer protect him. It might have been an eternity before the failure of the dimness or of Trent’s eyes ...
Fear The Dead (2003)
Someone else he didn’t think he’d ever seen before leaned down as if to let him count all her wrinkles. “I wish I’d had the chance to say goodbye to my grandmama, Jonathan.”
Another lady dressed in at least as much black and holding her wineglass askew parted her pale lips, which looked as though they had once been stitched together. “Now you know she’s at peace.”
As he remembered how his grandmother’s cheek had felt like a cold crumpled wad of paper he had to kiss, the winner of the wrinkle competition said “What a brave little soul. He’s a credit to his mother.”
“And his father.”
“Careful or you’ll drip.”
The stitched lady straightened up her glass. “We don’t want stains on your lovely carpet, do we, Jonathan? They don’t make them like that any more.”
He thought the elaborate carpet felt like the rest of the house -furtively chill and damp. “I can just hear her saying that, old Ire,” his father joined him to remark.
“Her friends never called Iris that,” the stitched mouth objected. “Oh, whatever’s wrong, you poor little fellow?”
While Jonathan struggled to think of a reply that wouldn’t be the truth, his mother hurried over to confront his father. “Are you upsetting him, Lawrence?”
“Only saying I could hear your mother pricing the contents of the house. Half of it Jonno wasn’t supposed to touch,” he confided to the wrinkled ladies. “You must have felt like you were living in a museum, did you, Jonno?”
Jonathan was yet more afraid to speak. The wineglass slouched again as its lady crooked her other thin arm around his shoulders and murmured “Don’t worry, your daddy wasn’t really hearing her. She’s gone to Jesus and she’ll be talking to him.”
The mention of Jesus appeared to draw the priest, who smelled rather like an unlit candle wrapped in linen. He hoisted his tumbler of orange juice to acknowledge Jonathan’s. “That’s the right road. That’s what real men drink.”
“Is my grandma really talking to Jesus now?”
“I shouldn’t be at all surprised, but it won’t do any harm to pray she is.”
“How long do you think she’ll be?” Jonathan pleaded.
“That’s one of the things God’s keeping as a surprise for us. We won’t know till we see her again.”
“The father means till we’re with Jesus too,” Jonathan’s mother made haste to say.
“Isn’t she supposed to be there for ever?”
“If you keep your faith up,” the priest said with a smile that was less than wholly aimed at Jonathan, “I’m sure she will be. You know Jesus has time for everyone.”