The Boy

There are only two styles of portrait; the serious and the smirk.

Dickens

1

I don’t know what I did that day. Pottered, I suppose, from room to empty room. I lounged for an hour. Read five pages of a book. 

Through windows, I saw clouds with torn black undersides gathering above the sea. As always when storms were near, my elbow ached. I’d fallen from an oak when I was five and crashed through a shed roof. I remember being carried bouncingly inside, then, later, an ambulance. Since then, the spot between my radius and ulna, where I hit the rusting axle of an upturned wheelbarrow, twinges whenever the air thickens and rain clouds darken the sky. My wife - former wife - thought this, the twinge, a talent. She would sit up straight and grin when I told her about it, ask questions. I found a notebook of hers down the side of my bed a number of days ago with a whole page devoted to it. It was neatly done, with the table drawn in pencil, values in ink. Drawings of the elbow too, annotations around the swell.

I suppose now, now that so much of my life is memory, it would have been good to crack its spine and leaf through it. Find further secrets: diary entries, theories, extrapolations. She was a scientist - considered herself a scientist. On walks around our little island, I’d find her examining flowers and fauna, squatted, hood drooping over her face. She kept a collection of snails in the pantry. Knew the latin names for various butterflies. In her bedroom, she piled notebooks on a mantelpiece, their memory threads drooping like rat tails. When she was gone, I built a pyre on the beach and burnt them, with most of the photos. Her clothes too. I must have lost this last notebook, kicked it under the bed. At night, coming across it again on my desk, I trawled to the cliff and hurled it into the sea.

I thought of Mary again, in the pantry, when the storm hit. I’d spent the morning pegging clothes to blue twine, and I watched on, biscuit in hand, as my washing line’s pock-marked post barrelled across the lawn, trailing shirts through the sludge. Socks were scattered towards the beach. A jacket sleeve waved and fell. I cursed, a sharp fuck, and hauled on boots.

*

They arrived, the boy’s father and his arcane chest, on the morning tide. The storm had kept me up most of the night, slamming itself against the house, howling out over the sea. My dreams were storm dreams - me in caverns and coves, a choppy sea breaking against rocks - ladies with soaked hair, damp ringlets, looking drowned across vast stone tables from me - candles; fish heads on white china; dark red wine - curtains of droplets from arches - negotiating floating shipwrecks, upturned hulls, vast frozen crossbeams.

I woke early and wandered the halls, ghost like, while outside a bruisey dusk persisted. Waves rustled on the beach. The house was chilly, like the cold had crept into the stone. In the library I found an unread book, and, skimming through it, returned to my bedroom. Morning came, as it always does, and bloomed pink. I sat up in bed, working my way through an anecdote about memory. Something about the nature of time. At the midpoint - page twenty-six, I think - I saw the boat emerge from the fog.

It came acropper at the foot of my island, rode itself up onto the beach (the beams of its hull snapping and splintering), and then it toppled, lazily, onto its side. The rain was still coming down in waves. It was a frigate, its sails heavy with water, the mast cracked and bent. Its crew were all dead, the sailors, the captain; most of them were prone in the mulch of my garden - or face-up, their jaws unclenched, seeming to howl, their eyes staring at the sky. I heard later that one had made it off alive and washed up, clinging to half a door, on the east coast.

Much later, when I was heading past the slit windows of my stairwell, I spotted him; the scientist. He was just a dot down on the beach, distinct against the billowing folds of his shirt. I went out to him. His tie was wrapped around his left leg. One shoe was missing and the sleeve of his jacket was ripped at the shoulder. A wave broke over his feet and swilled around his ankles. He clenched a fistful of sand. I stood for five minutes, chewing thumbnails, before I made my decision.

*

I tire of listening, this is the simple truth.

When Mary died, I returned to England and rented a crank-handled car. For four days, I drove slowly northwards to see a friend. The countryside was wintergrey, horrible, like it had died just for me. I came to his village, drove for some time down country lanes, arrived at his gravel drive (bold gold gates, rows of trees), drove some more. He stood on his doorstep in a grey cardigan, waiting to greet me. I forget his name. I forget everything now. I had seen a number of friends on the way up and it had been very much the same ordeal. Quiet drinks in living rooms. Chit-chat. Then usually after I mentioned Mary - the twitching began. The uncomfortable glances between loved ones. Her taking his hand. Him standing abruptly. I was ushered onto doorsteps, driveways, gravel forecourts and told so long, see you again. And always they would watch me go, waving from doorsteps and doorways, while I put the car in reverse and made my way unsteadily to the gate. This time, however, was by far the worst. In his plush observatory, we sat and talked. Well, he talked, he was a great one for that, an orator for the ages; he paced, champagne flute in hand, and shook his fists. And I? I merely listened. I could barely stomach the champagne. Mary’s death hung like two stones from my neck. Perhaps he had been informed in advance. A telephone call earlier that day, warning him about myself, about Mary. He would not shut up. I lost it, shouted at him, and he cast me out.

It was a long walk back to the car. He stayed on his doorstep with his champagne flute and watched. I clambered in, half-drunk, and headed off. Trees swept into my headlights. The backs of two hikers. A hotel. 

In a layby, halfway home, I pressed my head against the steering wheel and did my best not to cry. I had never felt so tired.

*

Thomas - that’s the name I gave him. Thomas Eagerton. Thomas James Eagerton. And to think, when I first saw him, I wanted the waves to break over his head and drag him away. 

Instead I hauled him onto my shoulders and returned to the lighthouse. He was light, brittle-feeling, like a sack of loose bones. The sky that day, once the clouds had cleared, was a greying blue, like someone had mixed milk with blueberries. I propped him on a chair and set the kettle going. A crab fell from his hair and scuttled under a crockery cabinet. He shivered, teeth like a rattle. I wrapped him in a shawl (the corner frayed from chewing) and tried to get him a drink. He pushed the cup away. Stubbornly, I insisted, and wished again I had left him.

‘No,’ he murmured, ‘the chest.’

He made me go out for it. It was by a fallen tree, a dead fish wedged in the handle. I tried to lift it, but it came down on the sand with a weighty thud and almost broke my toe. I tried again: failed. Then I attempted to jimmy it open with a branch, to lighten the load, but this failed too. I ended up dragging it, two-handed, across the sand. When I came in, my guest had wandered into the kitchen, the shawl still wrapped around his shoulders.

‘No cigarettes?’ he said.

‘What?’

He held up my ashtray as an indication.

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘No cigarettes.’

‘Where am I?’ 

I told him. He put down the ashtray.

‘And who are you?’ he said.

Joseph Pike. This was a lie. I had dreamt it up on the beach.

The chest sat dripping on the kitchen tiles. Chunks of seaweed were strung across its frame and Apollo, his head haloed in starlight, was emblazoned on its front; maybe Apollo. My mythology is rusty. Let us say Apollo. Let us say it was Apollo and Thomas was Prometheus. And I was Charon, the boatman. And we, all three of us, were stood on the banks of the styx.

‘So tell me,’ Thomas said, ‘how do I get away from here?’

Outside, a seagull clattered from the sky and landed on the forehead of a sailor. It cocked its head and plucked free an eye.

‘The postman,’ I said, ‘you can leave on the post barge.’

*

He insisted upon a desk. I found him one in the basement, a robust oak with a drawer missing and a pair of loose handles. I found him a bed too. And a bedside table, jammed between a doll house and a pair of chess sets. He grinned when I brought that over to him and knocked on it twice with a fist.

‘That’s the ticket,’ he said and pressed an ear to its surface. ‘That’s the ticket.’

I left him, ascending the short staircase to my living room. I should have done something about the sailors, dragged them out of the muck by the boots, covered their faces with white cloth, but I longed for familiarity. I retreated to my study and passed the day in books and manuscripts, and at five, I called down into the dark and inquired about dinner. Thomas appeared in an apron and bent an ear my way.

He emerged at eight o’clock in a fresh shirt and tie (purple, of all colours), pulled out a chair and sat. There was a raw red nick on the underside of his jaw, spots of wetness on his upper chest. I placed him at twenty-five.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, after spearing a potato. ‘What is it, exactly, you do?’

‘I’m a scientist,’ I said.

‘A scientist of what?’

And here I run into some difficulty. The official answer was something to do with time. Chronologist, I suppose. Chronosist maybe? In those days, I entertained this wild notion - and it really was wild, barely plausible, let alone possible - that if I studied time, the concept of time, well enough, dug deep and all that, I would find something - a loophole perhaps, a missing digit in some famous theorem - something, a crack, a crevice which would enable me to head back, squeeze through, re-inhabit my old self, and live out a few golden moments, a few precious days here and there, and then live them again, and then again, and once more, and over, and over, and over. It was a foolish endeavour. I can barely stomach my research now. All piffle and drabbling. But Thomas seemed to like my answer. He nodded, swallowed it whole and said, with a sort of steadfast solemnity:

‘I, too, am a scientist.’

Something shifted downstairs; I heard a pan clatter to the floor and bounce ringingly.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘a mariner?’

‘No.’

‘But the boat?’

‘My research,’ he said, ‘it is - I am - I am an exile.’

‘Ha,’ I said, ‘well, we’re all exiles, aren’t we?’

He picked another piece of meat from his plate and snapped at it.

‘You said you have a wife?’ he said.

*

I loved my little island off the coast. I liked being perched there, about thirty feet up, surrounded by sea. It, the island, was shaped like a large kidney bean, with beaches and rock pools and coves at one end, and a sheer cliff-face at the other. My house squatted near the centre, and if you climbed the stairs to the lighthouse, and the day was clear and crisp, England could be glimpsed on the horizon, a thin seam of rock and sand wedged between sky and sea.

There was a light drizzle when I left my house that morning and a harsh, choppy wind. England was not visible. I found the stake lodged between two rocks on the beach and while I was dragging it back to its original holding (both arms wrapped bodily around its shaft), Thomas appeared in the doorway, holding a heavy tin battery in his right hand.

He came out to me. I took down my hood to hear.

‘Joseph,’ he said and planted both feet. ‘What’s your electricity situation like?’

I let the stake drop.

‘Why?’ I asked.

And he told me some lie about illuminating a fish corpse.

‘For inspection,’ he said. ‘Anatomical drawings.’

He was looking at the body of the captain, hatless in the flowerbed, when he said this. Rain dripped from our noses. 

‘You know,’ he said, ‘all my life I’ve been stuck, it seems, between two choices. I don’t know whether the dead haunt the living or whether the living haunt the dead.’

And then he put his thumb tentatively in his mouth, and a sort of glazed look played over his face. What was this nonsense? I looked at the captain, worms had taken up residence in his skull. I presumed, perhaps falsely, that Thomas was from one of those galvanic cults which had sprung up around London. The box was probably filled with commoners’ pets. The ‘fish’ was probably a family’s Yorkshire Terrier. 

Nevertheless, I pointed him towards the lilting generator shed at the bottom of my garden and watched him march off towards it, with the battery swinging at knee height. For science, you understand, nothing more. For science, which I still worship at the feet of.

Half an hour later, while I was taking a mallet to the washing line, the lights of my house flashed like lightning and went dead. Like an afterthought, my porch bulb popped and showered the doorstep in glass. And do you know what I thought, stood in the rain, in my bright yellow mackintosh and boots, trying, desperately, to get my washing line operational: idiocy, I thought, pure unadulterated idiocy.

*

At dinner one night, I spotted blood on Thomas’s shirt collar, and I did wonder, quite idly, what he was attempting down in the basement. The following day, while perusing the downstairs library, I overheard conversations between Thomas and another. I paused, craned an ear to the door. The second voice was barely formed, a wail without words.

From the glimmers I had sighted of his private life, I knew Thomas was divorced and that his son - Sebastian - was long dead. Sebastian he only mentioned in passing, like it hurt to speak about him. He showed me a photograph of the boy, peering out from beneath a bowl cut, his mother’s dress clasped in a chubby paw.

‘A train,’ he said and withdrew into silence.

2

I used to have a servant: Gerstalt, I shall call him. He was a lumpen, aggressive young man with a large, crooked hunch. The hunch was caused from a fall. A loose set of scaffolding, he told me. I had not expected him on the day he arrived, emerging from the fog in a boat half his size, and then limping loudly up the garden path, with a hand outstretched to greet me.

‘Gerstalt?’ I said.

‘Ja,’ he said and gripped my hand tightly.

Most mornings, I would wake to the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen. He had a particular fondness for fry-ups (no eggs) and would cook up a wad of greasy food every day - I attribute his tremendous size to this habit. He really was big. Sometimes, I would spot him on the beach, sitting like a boulder, a heap of flesh and muscle, looking out over the sea.

Gestalt's advert, located near the back of the paper, was a singly plain thing. Black and white. A line drawing of himself. Support for those who need support, it said, and provided an address - Tuppenny street. I didn’t need support. No. Just companionship. I paid him for that. And there was companionship. Some, at least. He would listen, his head bent, his face screwed up, while I told him about my research. And I, in turn, accompanied him stargazing once or twice a week. We would hobble out into the garden, the grass wet with the night, and set up his telescope and charts, and gaze, avidly, at the stars.

He left quite suddenly. I found his luggage in the hallway - two square suitcases and one small brown bag. No doubt containing something ridiculous. A french horn, perhaps, to sate the silence. He came out of the bathroom with the telescope slung over his shoulder.

‘Ah,’ he said and smiled. ‘I did not expect you to be up.’

I had not expected it either, standing there in my dressing gown, the kettle rattling in the background. He grappled with me in a huge embrace and said goodbye. I waved farewell from the short pier which prods out into the ocean. Him and his dinghy sped away, like a zipper prying apart the sea.

Thomas arrived for dinner, with the boy, on the third day.

I was lighting candles at the time and almost burnt myself on the match. Thomas stood, beaming in the doorway, with his hands on the shoulders of the child.

Later, I did wonder how Thomas had kept the boy so secret for so long. For a moment, I entertained the notion of Thomas stuffing the boy inside the chest and letting him ride around on that ‘frigate of his. The boy was certainly small enough. It did seem, perhaps, a little callous though. A little cruel.

‘Who’s this?’ I said after lighting yet another candle, blowing out yet another match.

‘My son,’ Thomas said. The boy was frowning at Thomas’s right hand.

‘From the photo?’ I said.

‘His brother.’

They boy was short and his face had a thick covering of freckles on the cheeks and foreheads. His hands, fat, unlike his brother’s, also sported freckles. As did his legs, when I saw them. And probably his belly too. And his back. Everywhere, in short. I smiled.

‘Hello,’ I said and held out a hand.

‘He’s still terribly shy,’ said Thomas.

‘Oh,’ I said or something like that. Ah, maybe. I returned to lighting the candles. The boy’s eyes followed me across the room. When I looked at him again, he was marvelling at the freckles on the back of his hand. He gave one a short, forceful rub and frowned at it when he remained. An invalid - that’s what I thought. And, as if to confirm, the boy tripped over his own shoes and landed in a heap.

‘I noticed you had a piano in your library,’ Thomas said. We were reclined, wine glasses in hand, on two big-backed red leather chairs. The boy ate on in the background. He kept glancing at the candles and sniffing nervously at his cutlery.

‘The piano belongs to my wife,’ I said.

Thomas squinted at me over his glass.

‘And you keep it around?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want to throw it out?’

‘No,’ I said.

He picked a strand of something from his teeth and admired it in the half light.

‘That seems foolish to me,’ he said.

The piano was in the study. There were still thin, gash-like marks on the stairwell where we’d moved it from the dining room. I remember we found it at a junk sale, strapped it to the roof of the car, and drove the seventy miles back with it. That had all been Mary’s doing. I never wanted the piano and sulked all week. I did learn to play, but later, when my pride finally faded.

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘My son,’ Thomas said and pointed to the boy, ‘expressed an interest in the piano today.’

‘Really?’ I said and turned. The boy was attempting to get a stack of peas from the plate to his mouth. 

‘He saw you earlier, playing, and wanted you to teach him.’

The boy was still no closer to his goal of getting his food off the plate. If anything, he was further from it.

Had this oaf been tip-toeing around my house all day? Watching me from behind bookshelves? When I turned back to Thomas, the man was attempting to get a cigarette lit.

‘Well?’ he said.

The cigarette caught on the third attempt.

‘Me?’ I said. ‘Teach him?’

He blew smoke. ‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know what good I’ll be.’

Thomas glanced over my shoulder at the boy.

‘I know he’s a little slow,’ he said.

‘More than a little.’

‘But there’s no harm in trying, is there?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, I suppose there isn’t.’

He was fiddling manfully with the cigarette, trying to get the ash off, I think, although failing copiously, and then dropping the whole thing onto the table.

‘So you’ll do it then?’

‘Yes,’ I said and moved the cigarette to the ashtray. ‘Sure.’

‘Do you want money?’

He was leant in, close, and trying to get the cigarette clasped - re-clasped - between his middle and forefinger. I noticed he was a little drunk. Out of sympathy, I almost reached over and tucked it between his fingers for him.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll do it.’

‘I have money.’

‘No, it’s fine. I’ll teach him.’

Thomas leant back suddenly, making the chair wheeze, and clapped his hands together. He grinned.

‘Walter,’ he said, ‘Walter. What do you say to the man?’

*

Truly it was like nothing I had ever heard, that boy speaking. It was like - no, my words escape me. It was horrible, I do not kid. Terrifying. Like someone running over a trombone.

*

I don’t believe I would be lying if I said I loved her. Mary, this is. We met at a quayside restaurant (it was a gathering of friends) and when the evening ended, she wrote her name and address on the back of a napkin and pressed it into my hand. She smelt ever-so-faintly, almost untraceably of vinegar. Her hair was thick and vibrant, like auburn ink. Her waist was seemingly designed for my hand. I won’t extoll the virtues of her smile, how often she made my heart race. She knit me a small giraffe when we next met, and soon after, around six months later, we married.

A few days after we moved to the island, I can remember her standing at the top of the stairs, late one autumn evening, in a dress I had bought her. We had our clothes drying on the bannister and there was a cymbal, for some reason, leant against a stack of books. I was moving a tin of biscuits to the pantry when I spotted her, silhouetted against the landing window with both her elbows upon the sill; dust fell, minutely glinting. I often think of this moment. I can’t explain why. It is not important. I attached no meaning to it. I just revisit it, over and over.

She died bed bound. It was autumn then too. I was downstairs making tea while she coughed out her lungs. When I returned, she was lying, stiff and askew, on the bed. Black blood covered both pillows. I tried to get her neat - arms crossed over her chest, that sort of thing - but this was heavy work, more than I could take. The sky, it was - no, it doesn’t matter. I left my tea on the sideboard and when I was done, adjusting and re-adjusting my wife, a scummy layer of flotsam drifted across its surface. I buried her in the garden, out near the clifftop. I do not remember much of the ceremony. Some vague words. I burnt something perhaps, then headed in. Through the window, I glimpsed a flock of ravens - surely not - take off and bank towards England. I am certain the cliff will fall away one day, the sea will erode its foundations and cause it to topple, and Mary’s pale, worm-gnawed cadaver will slip from the soil and plummet head first into the sea.

*

When it came to playing, the boy was truly terrible. He would mash at the keys, making all manner of racket for the hour or two I taught him. It was his fingers - big for a child, upon recollection, like the hands of a rugby-playing teenager with chubby middles, thick tips and huge horrendously gnarled knuckles.

Most days, he arrived at my study for three o’clock and stayed until five. The first time he came, I was working and didn’t spot him until I turned, by chance, towards the door; I have no idea how long he had been there for, clinging to the doorframe, oppressively mute, watching me from beneath the bowl cut, scared of this hulking adult he had been thrust into the company of; he soon grew in boldness, however, and was coughing into his fist and tapping me on the shoulder to grab my attention whenever he entered. 

He did not, would not, speak. Occasionally, he would growl or groan when he hit a false note. Maybe sneeze if the mood struck him. But speaking seemed beyond him. Still, mute or not, there was something unnatural about every move he made, as if he was being jerked about by a set of invisible strings or was told a few moments before, what he would be doing, and how he would be doing it, only in arabic, or some other language which required translation, re-adjustment, analysis. 

I can tell you now he was never Walter to me. Always the boy. Never a person, always an ‘it’. I would like to allot this to a particular tick or trait of his, but really it was something else, some tension which seemed about to spring forth at any moment. This may be a lie. Maybe it was simply his stillness. He did not fidget. No, he was too dull for that. Instead, he sat, curtly, with his knees together and his hands placed upon his thighs. And, like I said, did not speak. 

But why am I being so insistent here? Maybe I’m hoping to uncover something which did not occur to me at the time. Maybe I’m trying to redeem something of myself here. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m lost, like we’re all lost, and I’m fumbling in this dark room for a non-existent light switch, which was removed long ago - in fact, never installed, and never to be installed either. Maybe, maybe not.

I would like to say the boy grew calmer as time went on, but this was not the case. He seemed to weaken with each session (there were roughly six in all; the post barge had been delayed by further storms) and soon his playing was incomprehensible, a cacophony of missed notes, false starts and jumbled orchestration. Sometimes, Thomas, bored of work, would ascend the stairs early and lean an elbow on the piano’s back. The boy stiffened when he heard Thomas’s boots on the stairs. His cheeks flushed red and, trembling, he fell upon the key’s with increased frenzy. Once, during one of these clattering recitals, I placed a soothing hand on his shoulder and felt a dense heat radiating from his skin. I withdrew my hand in shock and Thomas frowned at me. I told him some lie about arthritis and went back to listening - enduring, sorry - the boy’s atrocious playing.

Thomass pulled me aside after our third lesson, with a cigarette once again in his hand.

‘Why is he so…(and here it was as if he was moving a piece of meat around his mouth)...incoherent?’

‘It’s his hands,’ I said. ‘His fingers are too big.’

We looked over at the boy, who was in the process of removing a book from the top shelf. He smiled at us and the book fell, pages rattling, and struck him in the face.

‘Hmm,’ Thomas said.

*

The next day, a fine bright thing with no sign of rain, the boy came into my study with Thomas behind him and excused himself from practice. Thomas smiled broadly over the boy’s bowl cut. He had on a dark grey waistcoat, with burnished bronze buttons and slit-like, squinting buttonholes, a waistcoat which I recognised from somewhere…

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘He fell,’ Thomas said and held up the boy’s hands. They were bandaged to the wrist with thick, fraying fabric and spattered in orange-ish drops. Blood, I thought, surely. I leant forward and took the boy’s hands in mine. They did feel different. Lumpy. Thomas didn’t go into much detail and kept his eyes from mine. Said he found the boy at the foot of the stairs, splay-limbed.

‘Knocked out?’

‘Oh, no, just a fall.’

‘Onto his hands?’ 

The boy looked up at Thomas pleadingly.

In truth it did not surprise me. The boy was an oaf, after all. He could probably break his foot while trying on new shoes, smash his skull in with an umbrella. No, the real mystery was why Thomas had come to my study, wearing - ah, yes, now I see - one of my old waistcoats.

‘Yes,’ Thomas said, after a while, ‘the klutz fell.’

I nodded.

‘But he’s okay?’ I said and tried to look into the boy’s eyes. They were emerald, I think, and dotted with light orange - bronze, I suppose - flecks.

‘You are okay?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you?’

Thomas pulled the boy towards himself.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘He’s fine. Why not speak to the gentleman, Walter?’

His grip tightened on the boy’s shoulder.

The boy nodded, his cheek twitching fiercely.

*

The bandages came off two days later. Some remained, tattered and yellowish, on the wrists. Faint blue veins, which stood out whenever the boy was warm, were visible beneath the papery surface of his skin. The fingers were slender now, the metacarpals prominent near the knuckles. The freckles gone. The thumbnails bitten to the quick. In short, the boy had received, somehow, through a kind of witchcraft,  a pair of new hands.

He played no better than before. Worse, sometimes. He was more accurate, certainly, but still sorely lacking in technique. There was one bar - it still sticks out in my memory - which he murdered for all eternity.

Thomas arrived near the end of the session and stood smiling in the door frame with a mug of steaming tea. He still had on my waistcoat. I kept my eyes on the backs of the boy’s hands.

Thomas managed to corner me afterwards in the kitchen, when I had soapsuds up to my elbow.

‘So,’ he said, ‘is he improving?’

‘He’s more accurate,’ I said and washed the grime off a coffee cup. 

‘Excellent,’ he said, ‘excellent, excellent. Just like Sebastian.’

*

Later, much later, when I landed on shore, still reeling from the events which had occurred, I bicycled down to the local library and searched through the county archives. The library was a big, ugly-looking place with a set of pillars out front. Pigeon-shit coated its window sills. Inside, there was a delicate, powdery silence and a librarian, Miss Tick I believe her name was, who watched me through half-moon spectacles and frowned while I wandered the shelves. After an hour or two, I hit upon a scuffed news report (at the bottom of one of those bottomless cardboard folders) and devoured it whole. The story featured ‘piano prodigy’ Sebastian Eagerton and his father ‘renowned scientist’ Thomas Eagerton. It must have been a slow news week, because the paper dedicated three pages to it with a full-page photo of the boy and his father, standing side-by-side. No mother though, I suppose she was out of the picture by that point. And the pun there is very much intended.

I’m rambling.

Sebastian was dead. That was the heart of the matter. Sebastian was dead and played piano. That was it.

*

It was Thomas who removed the bodies, out of consideration for the boy I see now. He went out late at night with a lantern and got to work. It was just bright enough to make him out in the moonlight, dragging the sailors downhill by the armpits, binding them to a cabin door and pushing them out onto the waves. I watched him as he watched them drift away.

The ship remained, lying on its side, half-buried in sand. Crabs had taken up refuge in its bilge and I regularly saw gulls perched on its mast. A few days into his stay, Thomas had taken an axe to some of the more expensive features and stashed them downstairs. Now it sat, glowering up at me from the beach. In a sense, I believed the ship blamed me for its idleness. This is your fault, it said and showed me its crippled rigging. How could you? it wept and revealed its broken hull. I wanted to work for a week and chop it into firewood. And if this could not be done, burn the whole thing upon the beach.

*

Oh, and by the way, I was wrong back there: Thomas is not Prometheus. He never was. Thomas is Orpheus. But aren’t we all, in some way or another, Orpheus? Even I, part-Charon, part-Chronosist, am more Orpheus than Icarus. I share no halls with Pygmalion, nor walk arm in arm with Hephaestus. I have never shot the breeze with Cretan constructor Daedalus, stood by while Pandora unlatched her jar, crafted clay with Gaea and her hubby Uranus. That all escapes me.  Mnemosyne is my muse. Moneta the guardian of my soul.

Perhaps not.

A snag: I no longer care. In truth I’ve never known who I was. Whether I was Orphues or Icarus, schemer or scientist, dreamer or deconstructionist. What is it Iago says? Oh yes, I am not what I am.

Isn't that the truth? I am not what I am.

*

A day goes past. Then another. On the next, I spotted Thomas and the boy step out into the garden. The boy was carrying a kite almost twice his size and wore a pair of tiny khaki shorts. It was not a warm day, but the wind was down, the sun was out, and there was no rain.

I watched the boy climb eagerly to the top of a small mound and hurl the kite into the breeze. I watched Thomas slouch into a deckchair with a cigarette behind his ear and open a small, paperback novel; he tucked the bookmark under his left leg and cracked the spine.

I wonder now, while penning this confession, whether, if I were to unfold the collar of the boy’s shirt or peek inside the waistband of his shorts, whether I would find his name there, in crude black marker, or Sebastian’s…

The kite remained airborne for a second or two, wobbling in the wind, before it swerved off in a sharp quarter circle, and cracked its spine in the dirt. The boy’s head dropped. He came scrambling down from the mound and went over to the kite, lying like a crippled bat in the mud. He held it up to Thomas and Thomas got up from the chair and walked over to him.

I choose this moment to leave my desk and head for the basement. I waited till they were both kneeling in the mud and attempting to fix the frame with loose twine - and then disappeared downstairs.

*

Gerstalt and I spent the first few days of spring moving furniture to the basement. It was Julia’s stuff I wished to be rid of. Oh yes, Julia; I had a daughter, once. Every time I passed the half open door of her bedroom, something cockroach-like scrambled up from my stomach and perched in my throat. I spotted her mittens while moving through the basement, and then the purple headboard of her cot - re-painted, of course, she loved purple most of all.

*

I didn’t see them straight away. I saw the bed with its rumpled sheets, the desk, the bedside table, and, of course, the chest, locked, on the floor beside his used clothes. He had cleaned it since the beach. The metal shone and the wood, sandalwood, I think, felt smooth to the touch. It was while running my hand over the modulations of Icarus’s wings that I saw the hands.

They were on a cutting matt with the wrists ragged around the edges. There was a set of straps and a clamp. It embarrasses me to admit I was curious. I found a bone saw and a hammer in one of the desk drawers, along with a notebook. There was not much else. I stood for a long time, thinking. I picked up one of the hands. It smelt like flesh, and when I bit down on one of the fingers, it tasted like flesh. I thought of taking it, smuggling it out of there in my coat pocket. In the end, I stole only the notebook and a few of his drawings. These were scatty at best (bloodstained too), but they depicted his intentions clearly. Something moved upstairs.

I suspect that all of this will be seen as some lengthy illusion of my own making. A web I have woven myself. So be it. I don’t care.

3

I remember it was evening. The stars were out and the moon too, looking chalked in against the clouds. I had gone out for a stroll along the beach to think. Crabs scuttled behind rocks. The waves made their usual racket.

I saw the boy while wandering between the salt-soaked wreckage. He wore a straw hat and those schoolboy shorts and stood, alone, on the clifftop. I had a feeling, a sudden tightening in my stomach when I saw the boy up there, jacketless and leaning into the wind.

It all happened at once - isn’t that what they say? But it did. It was all one, like someone had laid a number of photographs on top of each other. I saw him step off the cliff. I saw his foot find no purchase and fall into nothingness. I saw the wind catch him and turn him onto his back. His hat sailed off, its ribbon snapping, and he reached for it, sadly, hopelessly. I thought suddenly of the rocks, glinting in the twilight. I expected him to hit them, break his spine, and flop fish-like for a few moments.

I did not anticipate the bounce, however, and the brief, tumbling flight into the sea. And then, as in the manner of everything, nothing more.

*

I locked myself in the study after he’d done it. I don’t know why I did that. I expected consequences, I suppose, a kicking off. There was no sign of Thomas when I came in, although the basement door was open. I walked around my study for a few moments, browsed the bookshelves, then I sat and looked at myself in the mirror. My reflection was smudged in the dust, but even then I could see that my eyes had rings around them, that my cheeks sagged. Out in the garden, two shirts appeared to clap hands in the breeze.

For some time, I thought about what I’d seen. The boy turning over and over, hitting the rocks, hitting the water.

There was a knock at the door. Thomas. A thud on the landing.

‘Come out,’ he said and kicked the door three times. ‘Come out and look at what you’ve done.’

I stayed in my seat. Mary’s hair brush was off to my left. I picked it up and ran a thumb over the prongs. A strand of hair came loose and attached itself to my sleeve.

‘I’m not coming out,’ I said.

I had gone up onto the cliff top afterwards. The wind kicked up my scarf and struck me across the face with it. I got it under control with a fist and spotted the boy, swaying face down across the waves. The hat was off somewhere to his left. I called out to him. Two gulls, standing side by side, looked over at me and blinked. Thomas must have drawn upon some supernatural strength to save the boy. I could picture  him wading out, his jacket and shoes on a rock nearby. He showed no signs of exhaustion though, with his pounding, his yelling, his stamping and kicking.

He called me monstrous, a husk, before taking one last running shot at the door. Then there was nothing for some time.

I heard him stomp downstairs a few minutes later and smash something. Then he appeared in the garden with his shirt untucked, his hair matted and dripping. He tossed stones at my window and cursed me. I unknotted my tie and hung it on the rack. Then he returned with the boy in his arms. He had the sad look the drowned always have, the limpness in the neck, the pallid waxiness of the skin, the clothes clinging like a second skin. I retreated to my desk. What was I to do? I sat there and took off my shoes. I supposed Thomas would eventually give up. And he did, eventually, give up.

*

I spent most of the evening in bed with the pillowcase clenched to my cheek. When I emerged about, oh, two, three hours later, the house stewed in eager silence. I descended to the kitchen. A pan lay near the fridge. Some of the cupboards had been opened. I found the handle of a teacup in the sink, two uneven halves of a plate.

A series of coin-sized droplets led the way.

I found him with his back against the bed. The boy, his chest open like a pair of wings, lay across his lap. Thomas’s left hand gripped a pair of bloody surgical scissors. He too had his chest open. And there was blood, of course, pools of it. I turned away and clasped a hand over my mouth. Outside, I threw up in the water trough. The sky, a velvety sort of purple decorated with stars, stared back at me.

When we lost Julia, Mary came into my study and asked, quite calmly:

‘Where’s Julia?’

She leant in the doorway with her hair up in a bun. I swivelled to look at her.

‘No idea,’ I said.

Together we searched the rooms, neither of us calling out. I believe we both knew there would be no answer. I went into the garden on a whim and spotted the hem of Julia’s white dress in the doorway of the generator shed. One of her fingers was blackened and kinked from the electricity. Mary didn’t cry when I told her, instead she rose unsteadily to her feet, using the dining room table for balance, and came over to me. She paused, then slapped me across the face. A week later, I fetched a shovel and dug a pit out in the sand. It was four feet long; I had measured it out the night before.

*

I went back, of course, to Thomas and the boy; eventually, I went back. There was much to be cleared up, bodies to be removed, blood to be swept away. It took me three hours, all in all, to get them out of the basement and tied to a raft.

In the early morning, I sent them out to sea. The sun, just awoken, climbed its way steadily upwards. Gulls cawed. Soft spring surf draped itself across sodden sand. I thought nothing, I had done away with all that the previous evening. I packed my bags, took all my prized possessions, and headed towards the mainland.

Oh, I burnt the ship too. For the hell of it. I sat on the beach and watched while the thing collapsed. Black smoke billowed ceaselessly towards the sky. Its foremast cracked at the base and fell into the ocean and lay there, smouldering. I could just make out the pyre when I landed on shore, a black smudge of smoke on the skyline.

*

I am sure the jury knows what happens next. The summertime retreat, me, upstairs, in a scarlet dressing gown; the revolver. I almost escaped, made a dash out across the Yorkshire dales (my hands cuffed tightly behind my back) while the officers smoked cigarettes in a lay-by. I tripped and fell, face-first, into the mud. They came lumbering over eventually; after I’d spat and called them both fucks, they carried me, squealing and writhing, back ot the car.

I have shouted till my lungs are sore. Kicked until my feet ached.

It was a pair of young lovers, walking hand-in-hand on the beach, who found the raft. Tucked in the pocket of Thomas’s shirt was a letter, partially smudged, indicting me. That was piece one. Then they went to my seaside haven and dug up the graves of Mary and Julia. (I must tell you now, that I picked those names from a hat.) They say - whoever ‘they’ are in this equation - that Julia’s injuries suggest she fell from somewhere, the top of the stairs perhaps. Mary, they say, looks as if she has been strangled.

Like I said, I have shouted till my lungs are sore. Kicked until my feet ached.

But Mary, if we can talk privately for a moment, you don’t believe this, do you? These aspersions upon my character. These false, far-fetched theories. Because it is you I am writing to, by the way. You I’m pleading to.

I’ve spent my whole life, Mary, wandering around, hoping to catch one last glimpse of you. An atom of auburn hair. A bijou, maybe, of sweet smile.

I remember a dream you told me once. You dreamed, Mary, of a faraway land, decked out in forests and rivers and pretty little villages. We were at the base of a great mountain, with some friends, I think, and we intended, when the sun rose, to climb the mountain and look down upon the world from its peak. And that night in the dream, after some fireside chit-chat, we argued over something mundane and, in anger, I sent you away. And in the morning, I searched for you, threw my hat in the dust. Something like that. You refused to answer my calls. Oh, I can’t remember. I can’t remember whether I climbed the mountain or not. Whether you came back or not. I can’t remember anything now. I am empty. I have run out. Oh, Mary, Mary dearest, Mary sweetest, whatever will become of me?