Everlasting Lane (15 page)

Anna-Marie laughed at the look on my face, and whispered, ‘You’re scared of him, just like Tommie-Titmus.’

So I went in, but only to show Anna-Marie that I was braver. And because she pushed me. But I noticed how her own foot hovered just a moment before itself stepping in to that miserable hallway.

And I didn’t blame it either because the house was even odder inside than out: floorboards bare and wallpaper hanging down in flaps. Rubble and rubbish lay on every surface in a grim, smothery gloom. ‘I have an aversion,’ explained Mr Merridew, ‘to the light.’ I tried smiling behind the old man’s back and got a sharp poke in the ribs from Anna-Marie.

The furniture in the living room was old and worn and smelt of damp woodland. Anything not already broken looked ready to break. Books tottered on tables and shelves. There was dust everywhere. There were no photographs.
Anna-Marie and I sat down on an old sofa, the cushions bruising our bottoms, and Mr Merridew sat opposite us in a high-backed armchair. A fire, in spite of the heat outside, roared in the grate. For some minutes the old man stared at us through his small, round glasses, with a mysterious smile on his face.

He produced a packet of cigarettes. I stared as his long fingers prised a cigarette free, and then swallowed with horror as he turned and offered the packet in our direction. I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d offered me a shrunken head. Anna-Marie said, ‘No, thank you,’ and the old man chuckled as a bright flame wrapped around the end of his cigarette. He sucked until his skin stuck to the shape of his skull. He noticed me looking at him and smiled, exhaust fumes gushing from between his yellowy teeth.

‘Biscuits?’ he asked. ‘Milk?’

‘Yes, please,’ we said, and he laughed at our politeness.

Whilst he was gone, I nudged Anna-Marie and sucked in my cheeks, leering through the small round frames that I’d made with my fingers. But she ignored me, turning her gaze to the burning blaze of the fireplace.

The biscuits, when they arrived, were soft and stale, as if they’d sat too long on a sunlit windowsill as if such a thing existed in that gloomy place. The milk too tasted a little funny as if it’d been stood alongside the biscuits soaking up the sun. Mr Merridew prodded the fire with a poker, just as he’d poked the body of the Beast with his stick, before settling with a creak into his armchair.

‘What did you mean,’ asked Anna-Marie, placing, after the slightest sip, her glass on the floor at her feet, ‘before, when you said there was no difference if Peter thought you were a good man or a bad man?’ I was surprised. She was supposed to be asking about Alice.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mr Merridew. ‘An excellent question.’ He turned to look at me with graveyard eyes. ‘I will tell you, Peter,’ he said, ‘it has been my pleasure to watch Anna-Marie grow over several years. Why, do you remember what an uncouth child you were when first we met?’ He drew smoke from his cigarette. ‘I seem to remember,’ he murmured, ‘a blue dress with, I think, a white ribbon in your hair.
Imperious Prima,
indeed. Am I correct?’

Anna-Marie smiled but said nothing.

Mr Merridew shook his head, suddenly waking. ‘Where was I? Where was I? Ah, yes. Well, to answer your question, I would firstly say that I might simply have meant that Peter’s opinion is of no importance, either to me or to the universe at large. Secondly, I probably meant that bad and good, good and evil are meaningless terms: they are simply human descriptions of actions or behaviour that have no bearing on whether the actions or behaviour have any ethical content whatsoever. In brief, although the
con
cepts certainly exist there are no such things as good or bad in a Godless universe. There are merely shades of moral ambiguity.’

I sneaked a glance at Anna-Marie. She was staring at Mr Merridew as she’d done earlier when she’d watched him beat the dog to death. I nudged her once and then twice again to get her attention. She seemed surprised to see me.

‘I kill a dog,’ continued Mr Merridew, ‘and Peter thinks I am a bad man, but I spare a dog pain and he might think me good. But, of course, I injured the dog so I
am
a bad man, but I was protecting children so perhaps I
am
good.’ The room was so warm that I was beginning to feel a bit suffocated. ‘In conclusion,’ said Mr Merridew, ‘perhaps all I meant is that Peter should not leap so quickly to his … conclusions.’

‘If it really doesn’t matter,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘you could tell the police what you … what happened.’

Mr Merridew sniffed. ‘I can’t see what would be gained by such an action.’

‘Well,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘you’d be telling the truth.’

‘The truth?’ asked Mr Merridew. ‘Truth, as you know, is in the eye of the beholder. I tell the truth
ergo
I am a good man. But if you don’t want to hear the truth
ergo
I am a bad man. Is it still the truth?’

‘But it depends on you, doesn’t it?’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Whether you mean to be cruel or kind.’

‘What are my good intentions worth if they result in unhappiness for Peter? Who is to judge? Peter? You? From where do you derive the authority to convict or acquit? Only those with the self-righteous morality of children would dare to pass judgement based on such absolutes.’ He looked at me, his eyes cold dark craters. ‘You are so cock-sure that you are right and I am wrong, yet without God neither even exists. There is only chaos.’

‘No,’ protested Anna-Marie. ‘The world isn’t like that. There are consequences. You’re a scientist. You have laws—’

‘
Was
a scientist,’ snapped Mr Merridew with a sharp flick of his hand. ‘Was. Until I grew sick of the halls of academia bulging with myopic fools: passing their laws, sacrificing their principles as if you could simply trap chaos behind the bars of a chart; just as historians dress cavemen in suits of clothes and call it civilisation. Yes, perhaps if you look with your eyes closed,’ said Mr Merridew, ‘and if your scope is sufficiently narrow you might discern order in anything; but open them wide and you will see only chaos.’

‘But if that’s true,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘what’s the point in even living?’

He chuckled.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I lack the courage of my convictions. But, if life is meaningless then death is also. It is not superior
to life. It matters not if I live or die or if I have never lived; that is not, in itself, reason to proceed from one state to the next.’

‘But what about the dog?’

‘The dog,’ he said slowly, ‘was in pain. Life may or may not be pointless, but life in pain is intolerable; certainly when compared to death free of pain. Don’t you agree?’

Mr Merridew didn’t talk like any other grown-up I’d ever met. He didn’t pretend that everything was all right. I felt I was being shown something dreadful, like a stone being lifted to reveal all the wriggling creatures underneath. His words were even more brutal than the death of the Beast. As I sat and listened his voice became quicksand and I had to fight to keep all the hope from being sucked out of me.

‘But being alive
is
better than being dead,’ protested Anna-Marie. ‘Surely.’

‘Is it? And how do you know?’

‘Well,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘say there’s this girl: Alice.’

Alice? At last!

‘A friend of yours?’

‘Yes,’ without a pause. ‘She went to the college. Did you know her?’

Mr Merridew shrugged. ‘If I ever did, I have already forgotten. My very point.’

‘But she doesn’t want to just live like nobody’s even noticed. Nobody wants that.’

‘My dear, I suppose you would have me reassure you and pat you on the head and say that we live on in the memories of others. Pah! Nonsense!’

‘But what about in books, say?’ said Anna-Marie. ‘We met this man, didn’t we, Peter? And he said when you make up people and things they do in books and stories it is like they could last forever. You can make them real. I mean in the books and the people who read—’

‘Anna-Marie,’ said Mr Merridew, and he leant forward to take her hands from her lap and hold them between his own like a sandwich, ‘I
do
understand,’ and he kind of looked at me as he said it. ‘Your determination is nothing if not endearing but this girl—this Alice—is no different from you or I or … or anyone else. It gives me no pleasure to crush you like this bar the satisfaction of telling you the truth—’

‘But you said truth was—’

He silenced her with another wave of his hand.

‘I suggest, my dear, that you visit the graveyard for a more realistic perspective.’

‘The graveyard?’

‘You will find it littered with corpses any of whom may have imagined they had some claim to renown. Who tends to them now?’ cried the old man. ‘Who fashions the carpenter’s coffin? Who digs the gravedigger’s grave? There is nothing: nothing after; nothing before. Eternity after eternity, eons of vacuum, of nothingness, interrupted only by the briefest flash of sentient consciousness.’

‘But that’s what it’s about!’ pleaded Anna-Marie. ‘Surely! That flash! Isn’t that what makes the emptiness bearable?’

‘No,’ said Mr Merridew darkly, releasing her hand. ‘The emptiness makes the flash intolerable.’

‘Well,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘I can’t speak for Peter, but I
would
rather be alive than dead even if there isn’t a God. I like the world how it is: when the sun comes up in the morning, and the wind. I like watching the butterflies. You know, and when it snows. That’s why people believe in magic. That’s why people hope tomorrow will be better than yesterday.’

Mr Merridew sighed, irritated I thought.

As I sat there I began to remember the world outside: the sun on the lane, the leaves and the cracked old branches. It was all such a long way from that dreadful little room in that
dreadful cottage. It was like when you suddenly remember a dream you had the night before and you start trying to remember all the bits that you hadn’t even realised you’d forgotten. My eyes looked into the fire crackling in the grate. I so missed the light. It had all but ceased to exist since we’d been trapped in Mr Merridew’s home.

Anna-Marie sat straight-backed and cleared her throat. ‘Thank you for the milk, Mr Merridew,’ she said. ‘It was very kind but I think we’d better go now.’ My limbs felt so heavy I couldn’t move. ‘Come on, Peter,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘it’s time to go home.’ My head was swimming and my eyes struggled to stay open. ‘Thank you for the milk, Mr Merridew,’ said Anna-Marie again. ‘Peter, come
on
!’

We left the house. Leaving the darkness, I was so dazzled by the sudden burst of summer’s afternoon that it took me a moment to realise that Anna-Marie hadn’t turned towards home at all but back down the lane, back towards the woodyard, back towards the Beast.

‘Where are we going?’ I said, struggling to keep up with her long strides.

‘
We’re
not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘For all I care you can just toddle off home like a good boy.’

‘But I don’t want to go home,’ I lied.

You see, Everlasting Lane was different than it was before. The air was still now like a heavy cloak and the birds were silent. But I don’t think Anna-Marie even noticed. She was walking as fast as she could and she didn’t slow down or even turn to look as she passed the body of the Beast, a steady pool of blood oozing from beneath its still body.

‘Are you going to the end?’

She gave an irritated sigh.

‘Anna-Marie?’

The lane was twisting and turning now, wriggling like the Beast beneath the blows of Mr Merridew’s stick. As we rounded each bend we held our breaths as if we were bound to find out the truth but each time all we could see was another bend up ahead and then another and another.

‘What if there isn’t an end?’ I said.

‘Everything has an end, Peter,’ sighed Anna-Marie. ‘Didn’t you listen to a word Mr Merridew said?’

I shuddered. ‘Yes, but …’

And then we finally turned a corner and stopped in amazement. But it wasn’t the end: it was something worse. Anna-Marie swore and then she said, ‘Go on, Peter. Make yourself useful. You choose.’

Right in front of us Everlasting Lane did something neither of us had expected or even imagined possible. It split in two. One fork turned to the left and the other, of course, to the right. I hesitated. Why did
I
have to decide? Anna-Marie stood waiting, tapping her foot and I stood there until I wished I could just tear myself down the middle and send half each hopping off in different directions. If only that was possible.

‘I could go one way,’ I said, ‘and you could go the other.’

But I didn’t want to go alone and I don’t think she did either. And, anyway, that didn’t even solve the problem. You see, we could go down one but we couldn’t go down both. I mean, not at the same time. Not together. It was one or the other: like a choice. And if we went down one, say, we went down the right hand one, then we might never know what we might’ve seen down the left hand one. And if we went down the right hand one then all the things we saw and thought about would be different from what we would’ve seen and thought if we’d gone down the left hand one. Or the other way round.

‘Well?’

It kind of made your head all swimmy.

‘Peter,’ said Anna-Marie crossly, ‘which way?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. And then, ‘I want to go home.’

And so we walked back home in silence. You see, I’d been scared that whichever one I chose would be the wrong one and that I wouldn’t even know; not even if the one I chose seemed like it had been the right one because, when you thought about it, I would never know for sure. And then—

‘Oh, Peter, bog off!’

And she didn’t talk to me again for a week.

If I’d squinted I could have just about imagined that, despite her scrawny face, it was Anna-Marie, not her mother, who cowered in the kitchen doorway of their cottage peering at me with bitter blue eyes. Anna-Marie had never invited me into her home. It was wintry cold and I could see dirty plates piled high in the kitchen sink. A peculiar sweet smell rose from the grimy rugs which laid a path through their house.

Mrs Liddell, yet to speak, raised her broomstick a second time and pounded again on the ceiling. In answer I could hear a flurry of footsteps overhead.