Boy on the Wire

BOY ON THE WIRE

ALASTAIR BRUCE
was born and raised in South Africa, spending a large part of his childhood on a smallholding outside the city of Port Elizabeth. He currently lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife and two young children.

ALSO BY ALASTAIR BRUCE
Wall of Days

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

The Clerkenwell Press

an imprint of

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London
WC1X
9HD

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright © Alastair Bruce, 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 78283 161 7

For my family

Prologue

December 2011

Cape Road leads from the centre of Port Elizabeth, near the cricket ground, west into the suburbs. At the national road it branches south and the tarmac becomes narrower as it leads away from the city. The houses grow larger and are set further and further back from the road. Some are invisible behind the blue gum trees. If you follow this road for about twenty minutes, until after the streetlights end, you will come first to a single-storey house, painted white, but now brown with dust. There is a light on in the lounge of this house. Next door is a larger house, two storeys, built out of red-brick. This house is in darkness, save for a single light over the front door.

John Hyde sits in a chair in the bungalow. The patio door is open and the drawn curtains shift in the breeze.

There is a full moon. The moonlight gets in between the gap in the curtains and washes over Hyde’s face. The light seems to wipe his features away.

His hands rest on the arms of the chair. The upholstery is sticky. Sweat, dirt from other people, people he does not know. His fingers are curled as if he wants to scratch the chair, but he does not move them. He has been still for some time.

Hyde stares ahead. Against the wall is a television and a laptop is on the floor in front of it. There is a stack of discs on the floor. Most have dates written on them, a few are still in their wrappers.

In the laptop is a disc with yesterday’s date on it. Hyde is watching this in black and white. He sees a figure facing away from the camera, standing in the middle of a room in front of a mirror. The figure in the mirror looks back towards the camera but the face is blurred.

The television gives off a low buzz, but that is the only sound. When the man on the screen opens his mouth, nothing is heard. There is only a picture of a man with his mouth moving, skin stretched over his face.

Hyde gets out of the chair and goes into the garden. He looks up at the stars, leaning his head back as far as it will go. He has not seen stars like this since the last time he was in this country, eighteen years ago.

He turns his head and begins walking. He walks up the drive, out to the road, and along to the house next door. He freezes when opposite it, thinking he has seen someone in a window. He stares at the window for a long time. He can see a man there, or he imagines he can see a man.

Something twitches inside him: a memory of a boy standing at the same window, watching a woman – his mother – as she drives away. He feels this twitch like a creature with spines unsheathing inside him.

He pushes at the gate and it swings open. The noise goes through him. He waits before stepping in. A minute. He scans the windows, but there is nothing.

He moves to his right and walks along the fence that separates the larger house from the bungalow. It is darker here in the shadows of the trees. He walks to the closest point to the house and stops. All is quiet. From here he can see the garage and through a window into the kitchen and another top-storey window into one of the bedrooms.

After a while he approaches the house. In his pocket is a key to the kitchen door. He places it in the lock, turns it. It has not been bolted from the inside. He steps in and shuts the door quietly after him.

He knows the house well. He has been staying here when not in the bungalow: it is the house in which he grew up. All the same, he feels like an intruder.

The carpets have been stripped, leaving the stairs bare concrete, and each footstep echoes through the house. At the top of the stairs is an iron security gate. Hyde takes one step at a time, leading always with his right leg. The gate bolt is shot. He begins to draw it back, tries to stop it touching metal. Like a child’s game. He stops every time the metal scrapes, and listens but hears nothing.

Hyde stands, the open gate before him, on the final step. He peers around the wall to his right towards the main bedroom. The door is ajar, though it is black beyond. He waits, leaning his head against the wall. He looks straight ahead through the open door of another bedroom and out of the window. A light moves across the sky. An aeroplane. The outside world. He stares until it disappears.

At the main bedroom door, he stops again. He hears breathing, whether his own or someone else’s, he cannot tell. It is soft. Perhaps not breath but the wind.

He pushes the door open another few inches and sees a foot, a leg, a torso. A thin shaft of moonlight lies over the face, over one eye. Hyde jerks his head back.

When he looks again, the body lies stretched on the bed, the chest rising and falling evenly. Hyde feels sick standing there watching this, feels a black sick rise in him.

He marvels, too, at the extent of his deception. Here he is, guilty, in plain view. He knows, too, he cannot touch him, cannot touch the lying man. If he even touched the tip of his fingers to the man’s forehead, it would all be over.

There are photographs on the bedside table. He flips through them. The first shows a boy crouching in the bush, his back to the camera, a small boy trying to be smaller still.

In the second are three boys, the older two with their arms around each other, grinning, the youngest standing in the background. They are in a valley, surrounded by mountains. There is a date on the back: 11 December 1983.

The last shows two of the boys from the previous photograph. They crouch before something in the road – a dead animal. The arm of one of the boys, the eldest of the three, is around the shoulder of the smallest child – or on the shoulder. Pushing or pulling, it is not clear.

Hyde has seen these photographs before. He took one of them, in fact, many years ago. Though he looks at them for some time, he shows no reaction.

He goes out of the room and walks along the corridor. He is about to enter the bedroom furthest away from the main bedroom when he stops. There are footsteps behind him. The concrete of the passageway amplifies the noise, but it seems to have begun right behind him. He feels his neck tingle and turns slowly. There, framed in the doorway, standing still, is the man he has been watching, his head hanging down, arms at his sides. Scarecrow. One arm reaches for the frame and the man’s fingernails begin to tap at it. The sound goes through Hyde, who has not moved.

He watches the man, who now walks right up to him. Hyde can smell him, the stink of him. He walks backwards as the other walks towards him – almost, he feels, into him – slipping under the skin of him. Hyde closes his eyes for a moment and feels the heat of the other, feels his breath on him.

It is not this that troubles him, the proximity of this figure, but it is the way the man looks. Now, with the moonlight full on the man’s face, Hyde can see, though it is exactly as he expected, what he most fears. It is not a shock. Somewhere he has enough left in him not to be surprised, to know the true meaning of the man opposite him, the truth of his guilt.

He is a man who lied, who told a story, a wild, fanciful story, about the death of a child, a hard and unyielding story. It is that, he finds, that he hates most. The story that was told.

Standing this close to the man, looking into his eyes, the scar on his chin from a fall, his familiar smell, John Hyde knows now what he has done. And there is no going back from this.

1

It is a Sunday, the eleventh of December 1983, a day the boy has looked forward to for some time. His head hangs out of the window. He feels the wind in his face and twists his neck so the wind blows his hair backwards, then to the sides. His hair tickles his forehead. His face will feel warm later from the wind and sunburn. He has freckles on his nose that will disappear as his skin grows darker in the sun.

From inside the car he hears a voice telling him to pull his head in. He ignores it and does not hear it again. The voice had not sounded urgent, as if the speaker was only saying it because he felt he had to, not because he meant it. It is the holidays after all and they are on their way to a cottage they have rented in the mountains of the Karoo.

The Chevrolet has brown plastic seats which stick to the boy’s skin and the tiny holes in the plastic leave an imprint on his legs. He runs his fingers over the bumps.

The back of his hand brushes against the leg of another boy, an older one, sitting in the middle seat, who knocks it away with his leg. Still, the younger boy does not pull his head in.

He looks at the fields rolling past. They seem almost endless, stretching off to mountains in the distance. The fields are different colours, some like beach sand, others grey. He thinks of these as the surface of the moon. He imagines what it would be like to be in the middle of one of the fields now. Silence. An ant scuttling over his toe. In the field he turns his head and in the distance sees a car on the national road. He cannot hear it – only see it – and when the sun catches the car at the wrong angle, he is blinded for a second. He cannot see inside, but can see the boy’s head, his own, hanging out of the window. He feels their eyes lock for a moment. Then the car disappears, and he is alone, and he thinks that if he goes into the gully where the grass is a bit longer, he could sleep, and with the water in the animal troughs he could survive out here.

The other boy knocks him again. This time the younger one’s camera has become wedged between their hips. He had been given the camera for his birthday a few weeks before. He has taken one roll of film already. On the roll in the camera there is just one photograph. The camera was his mother’s idea. His father said it was too much and he was too young, but his mother bought it anyway. Her boy seemed to have a talent for it and she wanted to do this for him, wanted also to have this to do with him. He was still her boy. The other two were rapidly approaching their teenage years.

The photograph is of a dog. The boys had discovered it lying in the road outside their house the day before. Being boys, they poked at it with sticks, even poked its eye as a dare. The youngest did not like this, but he went along with it. He was with his brothers and he didn’t want to play alone. He did not take the photograph. It was taken by the middle child, the one sitting next to him now. In fact, it was only this morning, when he checked the camera, that he realised a photo had been taken.

He reaches back for the camera, still not drawing his head in. As he moves it onto his lap, a piece of paper that had been there is lifted up. He tries to grab it before it flies out of the window, but it is gone. It is the scorecard he had filled out from a game of cricket they had been to the day before yesterday. He watches as it is lifted up by the breeze, floating, buffeted, and then comes to rest in the middle of the road.

He closes his eyes now. He can imagine the boy in the field having seen this. The boy would come over, climb the fence, pick up the piece of paper and place it in his pocket. He would keep it safe, put it under his head at night so it would never be lost again.

Before they reach their cottage, they park their car at the side of the road in a mountain pass. There are pools in the valley.

They pick their way through gorse on the slope of the mountain. They move slowly and from a distance seem not to move at all. But the bush sways as they sink through it, like ripples on a pond. They have their arms up, over the surface of the scrub. Only their tops are visible: arms, torsos, heads, drifting to the valley floor. Silt through water.

The father leads the way, a child behind him, his eldest son, followed by the second child. They push the shrubs aside. Their skin, though it cannot be seen from here, is scratched. White on brown. There is a widening gap between the first three and the last two. At the rear, the third child, the youngest, is a few paces behind his mother. Only the top of his head is visible, the head that had been sticking out of the car window an hour before. The thorns of the bush are level with the eyes of the child.

There is no sound. Or, there is the sound made when you put your ear to a shell, a sound that makes you want to put your finger in your ear, let the water out and listen again.

Behind the third child, the broken twigs and leaves of the path they have forged. It leads up the slope, winding along the contours of the mountain and ends at a road, which cuts through the rock and leads, in one direction, to cities, airports, flights away from here. In the other direction, the tarmac grows whiter until it is the colour of the sand that surrounds it and is lost altogether in the paleness of the interminable desert.

The father carries a basket. He holds this in front of him, clearing the branches. The boy behind him has to hold up his arms and catch the branches as they fly back. His face jerks from side to side as he does this. It is a game.

Sweat on the father’s face, not the boy’s. He does not drop back. He does not give a step. He is twelve. Making his mark. I can do anything, perhaps he thinks. I can fly.

Behind him, his younger brother, his face hidden, shadowed by the leaves and his own arms held up as well. Over his shoulder a red towel – or brown – it is hard to tell. The picture is faded.

The mother has stopped. She is half-turned towards the youngest child. He is eight. She turns to where he is but cannot see him. Swallowed by the bush. Her lips move. She could be talking to him, shouting at him. John, hurry up. Her lips move, but there is silence.

He has a streak of blood across his face. His mother has not noticed the blood, or if she has, has not mentioned it. He wipes it off. There is not much. What there is sticks to his fingers and he rubs them over a twig. The blood soaks into the bark. He breaks off the twig, crushes it in his hands and feels the splinters cut him. He will not look at her.

She turns away again once she sees him and carries on down the slope. She too is carrying something. An umbrella, perhaps.

They come through the bush, which ends at the rocks on the banks of the river. They come through the bush and out – spat out – onto rocks warmed by the sun. Lizards scatter. The man stands on a rock and looks downstream. From here the river drops rapidly. The eldest child stands nearby, shoulder pointing to his father. The middle boy comes to a halt too. The mother near the father. Then the youngest. He comes through the bush and he sees them lined up there in front of him, sees them on the rocks in the sun, the sun on their backs. He walks between them, picking his way over the rocks. When he’s not looking at his feet, he looks at his family. They stand still and silent, looking down the river. He picks his way amongst them, looking up at their faces in shadow.

They have gone. They have gone somewhere and he is left behind. He wants to shout at them, to scream at them. He has felt like this for a while, but does not know why. Not really. There are no words for it now and he will never find words for it. He picks his way between the statues, but does not cry.

Then his father turns to him. Or, his father turns. He says something: ‘Here.’ Probably that. He shakes out a blanket and sits down. The woman opens the basket, hands him a drink. The eldest boy stays standing on the rock, staring down the river. He turns then and looks back at his parents. The middle child comes and stands next to him.

This boy, the middle child, is hard to see. His face, of all of them, is the most hidden. A sheet of skin drawn over his skull, his mouth an O in the blankness. Do not look directly at him. Look to the side of him. Perhaps then his features will push through the skin and he will come slowly to life.

The other two boys look similar to each other. Save for the gap of four years, they could be twins. They are easier to make out.

The mother sits down. She says something now. The two older boys nod. They all look at the third child and he looks back at his brothers, then at his parents. He looks between them. The elder two set off. His mother waves. At least, her hand moves. The fingers go under the wrist, flick out again. The youngest turns away and begins to follow the others. They are disappearing over the ridge and he runs to catch up.

The three climb down rocks, slip over moss, step around puddles. The youngest drops further and further back, like before. He walks into things, slips, as if he cannot see where he is going. But he does not stop.

They follow the river some way below them now, looking for a way down. They go off the main path. The third child hangs back. It is steep and the rocks are loose beneath his feet.

His feet slip and his face grazes against the rock. He calls out. The eldest boy comes back, but then he goes and the youngest gets up and follows. Barely a mark on him. Not yet. That comes later. Not much later. Just a few seconds.

He follows, but thinks about turning back now. He stands there in the path. He breathes in and out rapidly, his fingers curled into his palms. He opens his mouth to shout and he does, but it cannot be heard. There is no sound that escapes the weight of the mountain, the rocks, the river.

He looks behind him and in front. He can see no one, can hear no one. The ticking of the bush around him like a clock, the heat of it, sweat beginning to seep through his shirt. He starts to turn back, the way he has come. He changes his mind. He begins to walk, then run downhill. It is steep, the stones are loose.

There is a splash. And then another. His brothers are in the water.

He hears something else too before the splash. What that is he cannot yet name.

He hears this. He rolls over, for he is on the ground again, and looks up at the sun. He keeps his eyes open. It hurts. It hurts to do this, but he does it anyway.

After some time – he does not know how long – he peers over the edge at the pool below. He is blinded, but his vision begins to clear. The pool is half in sunlight, half in the shade thrown by the mountain. The water is brown. Clear, but brown. Mountain water leaching the rocks, the plants.

He sees his two brothers in the pool. The water ripples around them. They’re half in the sun, half out. They lie on their bellies, backs to the sun, bobbed gently by the water. They are playing a game, pretending to be dead. He says their names over in his head. Paul, Peter.

He wants to go down there, to be with them. But it is too far, too far for a boy of eight.

The parents sit in the sun. They are laughing. The father has his shirt off. He leans over to kiss his wife, his fingertips on her cheek. Then, for a reason that cannot be understood, the smiles are gone. Perhaps they hear something, or sense it. They stand up as one. They are frozen, if only for a second. Then the man starts running. He runs through the rocks, through the bush. He throws himself down the mountain and runs – so it seems to the child who watches him go past – right through it. He runs through it to get to his boys and when he sees them he dives into the pool. He dives – there is still no sound – and grabs one of them. He grabs him by the hair and some of it is torn from the scalp and he pulls the boy across the water and holds him by the neck and throws him onto the rocks. Then he is back for the other and his hands thrash about him. His fingers hook in the mouth of his child and he pulls and he pulls. This one, too, he throws onto the rocks. The boy bounces on the rocks. The man is out of the water too, next to them, and he looks at one and he sees the whites of his eyes and the blood on his skull and he takes the other and puts his mouth to the boy’s and his hands on his chest and there is the crack of a rib. He wants to punch the boy’s chest, to get the water out, to get all of it out. He does. He pulls his fist back and lets it go. Again and again. The soft pap of the sound. This can be heard. Only this.

The boy’s arm rests over his father’s leg. Peter’s twelve-year-old arm, soft white hairs on brown skin, rests over the man’s leg, like it has done many times before. But not like this. Not like this.

He is breathing. It is something.

From a distance, perhaps perched on a rock up the mountain, reaching over into the blue sky, from there one could see a man rocking back and forth. A man sitting on the rocks, a child on his lap. Another child at his feet, skull crushed and neck twisted to the side. A third lying flat against a different rock, making no sound, his face pressed into the rock. A woman standing, her hands to her mouth. She could be calling to them. She could be saying, ‘Come and have lunch.’ It is impossible to tell she is screaming, making a noise that cuts through all of them, a noise that they hear and do not hear. From this place you would not know anything was wrong at all. Only the swaying, the rocking of the father, his broken child at his feet, another held to his chest, back and forth, back and forth, only this would give you any clue that this scene was anything other than a family enjoying a picnic in the mountains of the Karoo. Only this would tell you that this scene was somehow not right at all.