He must be expected to take part. He had to, or he wouldn’t be a man. He pretended not to want to go home, and did his best to simulate enjoyment of the television programmes and the games that the others were anxious his grandmother should like. He feigned an appetite when the remnants of Christmas dinner were revived, accompanied by vegetables that his mother succeeded in rescuing from his grandmother’s ambitions for them.
While the day had felt far too protracted, he would have preferred it to take more time over growing dark. The wind had dropped, but not so much that he didn’t have to struggle to ignore how his grandmother’s eyes fluttered whenever a window shook. He made for bed as soon as he thought he wouldn’t be drawing attention to his earliness. “That’s right, Davy, we all need our sleep,” his grandmother said as if he might be denying them theirs. He suffered another round of happy Christmases and hugs that felt more strenuous than last night’s, and then he fled to his room.
The night was still except for the occasional car that slowed outside the house – not, David had to remember, because there was anything on the roof. When he switched off the light the room took on a surreptitious flicker, as if his surroundings were nervous. Surely he had no reason to be, although he could have imagined that the irritable buzz was adding an edge to the voices downstairs. He hid under the quilt and pretended he was about to sleep until the sham overtook him.
A change in the lighting roused him. He was pushing the quilt away from his face so as to greet the day that would take him home when he noticed that the illumination was too fitful to be sunlight. As it glared under the curtains again he heard uncoordinated movement through the window. The wind must have returned to play with the lit sign. He was hoping that it wouldn’t awaken his grandmother, or that she would at least know what was really there, when he realised with a shock that paralysed his breath how wrong he was. He hadn’t heard the wind. The clumsy noises outside were more solid and more localised. Light stained the wall above his bed, and an object blundered as if it was limbless against the front door.
If this hadn’t robbed David of the ability to move, the thought of his grandmother’s reaction would have. It was even worse than the prospect of looking himself. He hadn’t succeeded in breathing when he heard her say “Who’s that? Has he come back?”
David would have blocked his ears if he had been capable of lifting his fists from beside him. He must have breathed, but he was otherwise helpless. The pause in the next room was almost as ominous as the sounds that brought it to an end: the rumble of the window, another series of light but impatient thumps at the front door, his grandmother’s loose unsteady voice. “He’s here for me. He’s all lit up, his eyes are. The worm’s put him back together. I should have squashed the worm.”
“Stop wandering, for God’s sake,” said David’s grandfather. “I can’t take much more of this, I’m telling you.”
“Look how he’s been put back together,” she said with such a mixture of dismay and pleading that David was terrified it would compel him to obey. Instead his panic wakened him.
He was lying inert, his thoughts as tangled as the quilt, when he heard his grandmother insist “He was there.”
“Just get back in bed,” his grandfather told her.
David didn’t know how long he lay waiting for her to shut the window. After that there seemed to be nothing to hear once her bed acknowledged her with an outburst of creaking. He stayed uneasily alert until he managed to think of a way to make sense of events: he’d overheard her in his sleep and had dreamed the rest. Having resolved this let him feel manly enough to regain his slumber.
This time daylight found him. It seemed to render the night irrelevant, at least to him. He wasn’t sure about his grandmother, who looked uncertain of something. She insisted on cooking breakfast, rather more than aided by her husband. Once David and his mother had done their duty by their portions it was time to call a taxi. David manhandled the suitcase downstairs by himself and wheeled it to the car, past the decorations that appeared dusty with sunlight. His grandparents hugged him at the gate, and his grandmother repeated the gesture as if she’d already forgotten it. “Come and see us again soon,” she said without too much conviction, perhaps because she was distracted by glancing along the street and at the roof.
David thought he saw his chance to demonstrate how much of a man he was. “It wasn’t there, Granny. It was just a dream.”
Her face quivered, and her eyes. “What was, Davy? What are you talking about?”
He had a sudden awful sense of having miscalculated, but all he could do was answer. “There wasn’t anything out here last night.”
Her mouth was too nervous to hold onto a smile that might have been triumphant. “You heard him as well.”
“No,” David protested, but his mother grabbed his arm. “That’s enough,” she said in a tone he’d never heard her use before. “We’ll miss the train. Look after each other,” she blurted at her parents, and shoved David into the taxi. All the way through the streets full of lifeless decorations, and for some time on the train, she had no more to say to him than “Just leave me alone for a while.”
He thought she blamed him for frightening his grandmother. He remembered that two months later, when his grandmother died. At the funeral he imagined how heavy the box with her inside it must be on the shoulders of the four gloomy men. He succeeded in withholding his guilty tears, since his grandfather left crying to David’s mother. When David tried to sprinkle earth on the coffin in the hole, a fierce wind carried off his handful as if his grandmother had blown it away with an angry breath. Eventually all the cars paraded back to the house that was only his grandfather’s now, where a crowd of people David hadn’t met before ate the sandwiches his mother had made and kept telling him how grown-up he was. He felt required to pretend, and wished his mother hadn’t taken two days off from working at the nursery so that they could stay overnight. Once the guests left he felt more isolated still. His grandfather broke one of many silences by saying “You look as if you’d like to ask a question, Davy. Don’t be shy.”
David wasn’t sure he wanted to be heard, but he had to be polite and answer. “What happened to Granny?”
“People change when they get old, son. You’ll find that out, well, you have. She was still your grandmother really.”
Too much of this was more ominous than reassuring. David was loath to ask how she’d died, and almost to say, “I meant where’s she gone.”
“I can’t tell you that, son. All of us are going to have to wait and see.”
Perhaps David’s mother sensed this was the opposite of comforting, for she said “I think it’s like turning into a butterfly, David. Our body’s just the chrysalis we leave behind.”
He had to affect to be happy with that, despite the memory it threatened to revive, because he was afraid he might otherwise hear worse. He apparently convinced his mother, who turned to his grandfather. “I wish I’d seen Mummy one last time.”
“She looked like a doll.”
“No, while she was alive.”
“I don’t think you’d have liked it, Jane. Try and remember her how she used to be and I will. You will, won’t you, Davy?”
David didn’t want to imagine the consequences of giving or even thinking the wrong answer. “I’ll try,” he said.
This appeared to be less than was expected of him. He was desperate to change the subject, but all he could think of was how bare the house seemed without its Christmas finery. Rather than say so he enquired, “Where do all the decorations go?”
“They’ve gone as well, son. They were always Dora’s.”
David was beginning to feel that nothing was safe to ask or say. He could tell that the adults wanted him to leave them alone to talk. At least they oughtn’t to be arguing, not like his parents used to as soon as he was out of the way, making him think that the low hostile remarks he could never quite hear were blaming him for the trouble with the marriage. At least he wouldn’t be distracted by the buzzing and the insistent light while he tried to sleep or hear. The wind helped blur the voices below him, so that although he gathered that they were agreeing, he only suspected they were discussing him. Were they saying how he’d scared his grandmother to death? “I’m sorry,” he kept whispering like a prayer, which belatedly lulled him to sleep.