The Children’s Home (14 page)

There were four of the children in the back. David, of course, with Daisy, a toddler in her arms, and Melissa. Morgan had called the toddler August because that was the month he had been found, but the other children called him Mite, and that was the only name he recognized. He was fast asleep and seemed to be dreaming. “Wouldn’t it be better to leave him at home?” Morgan had said as they approached the gate, but David shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “We might need him later.” “Might need him? What do you mean?” But David stared out through the window and didn’t answer. A few moments later, he pointed to a tree at the side of the road as Morgan drove slowly past. “That’s a willow, isn’t it?” The Doctor nodded. “I see you’ve been studying trees,” he said. “Oh yes, I need to know about everything, just in case,” said David in his solemn way. Then, in a quieter voice, he added: “Aren’t you afraid of being seen?” And Morgan turned and nodded, because he had been waiting for this; had hoped to provoke it. “Then you’d better have this,” David said and gave him the face. With Crane’s hand steadying the wheel as the car moved forward, Morgan lifted the face to his own face and felt it seal to the warmth of his furrowed skin, as though it knew what to do without his bidding. Morgan had seen what he looked like, in the still dark water inside the boathouse, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to turn the mirror in the car towards him and take a second look. How strange it was, he thought, to see himself like this. Yet no one else seemed to find it strange. Even Crane, who had never seen the face on his before, seemed calmly to accept it. He was staring ahead, his hand still on the steering wheel, but Morgan had caught him glance across and nod, already used, it seemed, to the idea. How quickly we learn, thought Morgan. That was all it took to get used to the idea. Everything became inevitable with time.

It took no more than an hour to reach the outskirts of the city, driving directly west towards the risen sun. Morgan had expected interruptions, disturbance, he wasn’t sure of what kind, but the roads had been almost empty. He was, perversely, disappointed. A dozen or so men, most dressed in mismatched pieces of uniform, turned to watch the car and its occupants from the overgrown verges, halting until the car had passed, their faces wary, their hands gripped tight round whatever they had to hold. Morgan’s first instinct was to flinch, but there was no need for that. He felt an unaccustomed warmth in his cheeks, almost a stinging, as though they had been rubbed with alcohol. He stared back at the men as he drove past. He found himself wishing, despite his better instinct, that they could know what he really looked like, wanting to dare them to see what that might be. “Where are the walls?” he said at one point, as the car rose up a low hill and they saw the countryside around, barren and with burnt-out houses dotted across it. “There’s nothing left to protect round here,” said Crane. “It’s all been destroyed, by fire and time and neglect, if nothing else. That’s why we’re left alone at the house, I suppose. Most people have forgotten we’re there.”

“I thought it was I that scared them off,” said Morgan, with a laugh, feeling his warm cheeks taut on the bone.

“Well, yes, that too, I imagine,” murmured Crane. “They’re fools enough for that.”

They came to a stop at a red-and-white-striped metal bar that had been lowered across the road. A man approached them from a wooden hut at the far side of the bar. The children in the backseat began to wriggle with excitement as Morgan wound down the window to greet him. Bending, the man stared into the car, then nodded.

“Good morning, Doctor,” he said. For a moment Morgan thought that the man was talking to him, but before he could speak the Doctor had already leant across to answer. The man was standing back by this time to look at the car. He bent down once again to see inside. He hadn’t shaved; his uniform was creased and soiled along the collar.

“Nice car,” he said.

“It’s mine,” said Morgan, who wanted to feel once more the effect on the skin of speaking.

“I haven’t seen one like this for a few years,” the soldier said, stepping back. He stood where he was, looking around as though he had heard a noise, then walked to the end of the bar and raised it. As soon as the bar was vertical, he waved them through, his hands on his hips, his feet apart. They were almost beyond the barrier when the soldier lifted an arm to stop them and called something out. Morgan almost continued to drive; if Crane hadn’t touched his thigh with a warning hand he would have.

“I suppose you’ve got business in town,” the soldier said to Morgan.

“Yes,” said Morgan, feeling the smile in his perfect new face, enjoying the tension of muscle and sinew. “Ministry business.”

“Only I ought to see official papers of some kind, you see,” said the soldier, as though the words were being dictated to him by someone else. He looked behind Morgan, then back into Morgan’s eyes. “Seeing that it’s the Doctor, though, I don’t suppose it matters.”

Morgan turned round to look at David, who shrugged. The Doctor laughed, then leant across Morgan to speak directly to the soldier.

“How’s the back?” he said. “I do hope the irritation’s eased.” The soldier blushed.

“I do have papers, if necessary,” Morgan said, but the soldier had moved away from the car, apparently embarrassed.

“No, no,” he said, waving them on. “There’s no need for that.”

The road beyond the metal bar was identical, with its ragged unkempt verges and vista of gray fields. Soon, though, houses began, at first one or two, often unoccupied, and then in groups of half a dozen or more, with rusted bicycles propped outside and dirty curtains at the windows. Sometimes a curtain would twitch and then fall back into place.

“It wasn’t his back that needed treatment,” the Doctor said, with a laugh, as a child ran out from one of the houses, almost in front of the car, then pulled up sharply. Morgan swerved and would have continued, but David told him to stop, and Morgan instantly obeyed. David opened the back door of the car and beckoned the child across. It was a boy, a little younger than David, in a worn gray suit that was far too big for him; the jacket sleeves had been rolled up, the trousers cut down to fit and hitched in with string. He had no shirt under the jacket, just bare white skin. He was thin, with pale tangled hair that fell to his shoulders, which made him look less feminine than wild. He stared at David, his mouth falling open.

“What do you want?” he said.

“What do
you
want?” David replied. He moved over on the backseat, to make room. “Come with us.” The boy looked mortified and turned his head away.

“I can’t.”

“You can if you want,” said David, his voice almost indifferent. “They won’t miss you.”

The boy grinned then, as if he had found a friend, and climbed into the car beside David. “They will be glad,” he said, when Morgan turned to examine him more closely. “He’s right.” He grinned again, at Morgan this time. “I was going to leave anyway, one of these days. Any day now.”

“We seem to have another charge,” the Doctor said quietly. He reached between his legs to a basket he had brought, and pulled out a tin of biscuits Engel had packed for them and a flask of milky tea. The boy reached forward hungrily then paused, as if some notion of politeness had occurred to him. But the Doctor opened the tin and offered the biscuits to them all. “You’ll have to drink out of the flask, one after the other,” he said. “I don’t have enough cups.”

“He can have mine,” said Morgan. Through the rearview mirror he watched the boy drink greedily from his cup, grab biscuits, cram them into his mouth, swallow them almost whole, his white throat working. Morgan hadn’t imagined this, such hunger. He was shocked; his understanding of the outside world had been so tame, so feeble. As they continued along the barely surfaced road towards what must be the center of the city and the houses became larger, although always rundown and often derelict, he thought about his father, who had driven this same car along these same roads, and who must have seen all this a thousand times. What had he thought about as he drove, or was driven by others? His own house, with its walls and lake, its rooms filled with furniture and porcelain and carpets from countries he had never seen and the distant soothing rustle of people at work to keep him in this comfort? His wife and her exquisite clothes and shoes, which came from other cities than this, larger more splendid cities, famous cities whose names were poetry, and which seemed to speak only of taste? Had he thought about his son, the beautiful child who would one day inherit everything, the wealth that he had also inherited, but also conserved, and encouraged to grow? Had he felt shame, ever, for more than a moment, like a breeze from a window briefly opened and then closed again for good? And Morgan thought about his mother and her contempt, which had reached so far and so deep within her it had left no room for anything else, and had then reached out and burnt him, as certainly as the acid had done.

The boy wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around him at the other children. He held out his hand to David in the oddly formal way so many of the children seemed to have, thought Morgan, as though it were not a formality at all but natural to them, and said that his name was Godfrey but that everyone called him Goddie for short. “It sounds like Goodie,” said Melissa, and he grinned. “That’s what my little brother calls me,” he said, “only he can’t say the
g
, he just says
oodie
.” He reached out then and lifted Mite away from Daisy and held him up, making the child giggle. “Godfrey’s a dreadful name,” said Daisy. It was the first time she had spoken since the car had left the grounds of the house. Now she pressed her face against the glass and began to sing a song that Morgan didn’t recognize, too low for him initially to catch the words. Straining his ears, he heard a word or two, a phrase, a snatch of phrases, until it became clear to him, with a shiver of delight, that she was singing what she saw. Cars and trees and gardens and a woman with red hair and bicycles and soldiers and a dog with three legs and a dead thing that looks like a cat and two flowers on a branch and heaps of rubbish, all in a singsong tone as though she were reciting a mantra, and a man with a spade and a telephone box and a blue car and a brown car. After a minute or two, Melissa joined in, in perfect unison. How odd that she knows what to notice, thought Morgan, despite his awareness that he ought to be used to this sort of thing by now, this synchronicity of thought and deed among the children. He shouldn’t be surprised if David and Mite joined in as well; even Goddie, who was sitting in the middle of the children with an ecstatic smile, Mite on his lap. He would also know what to see and do.

“Here we are,” said Crane in an urgent tone some moments later, when Morgan had simply been driving along the road, not looking at what passed so much as listening to the song of it.

“Here, where?” he said.

“We have to turn down here.” said Crane, gesturing across Morgan towards a turning on the left. “That’s where the ministry is.”

“No,” said David. “Moira isn’t at the ministry.”

“Where is she?” Crane said.

“Keep driving. I’ll tell you when to turn.”

Morgan drove for another half mile, waiting for David to tell him what he should do. Goddie was becoming agitated, twisting around in the seat to stare at the road behind them; but Morgan, through the rearview mirror, saw David whisper in his ear. “No, no, you don’t understand, you don’t know them like I do,” said Goddie. “If we go too close, they’ll get us.” He pulled as David took his hand and held it tight, but couldn’t break away. “David knows best,” said Melissa. “You have to trust him, like the rest of us do.” She craned forward and touched Morgan’s neck gently with her fingers, which were cool and soft, Morgan noticed; he could feel them through what? his skin or the skin of the thing he was wearing? But what was his skin and what wasn’t? Where was the edge? “You’re much prettier like this, Morgan,” she said, with a little laugh, “but I like you better as you really are. When you’re you.”

David told him to stop for a moment. Morgan pulled over and turned to look at the children, who were sitting there in a row in the back of the car, their faces slightly raised as if to sniff the air, like mice aroused by a distant whiff of cheese, thought Morgan. Then David smiled and nodded. “All right,” he said, “you have to drive on until you see a big gray stone place with a sort of tower on the right and colored glass in the windows, and then you go right and right again. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“That’s a church,” said Morgan.

“What?”

“The big place you described. It’s called a church.”

“And that’s where you go right,” repeated David, with a trace of impatience in his voice, as though what things were called no longer mattered.

Morgan did as he was told.

“But where are we going?” he said, after turning right twice as David had directed him. They were on a wide road, recently resurfaced, with two lanes on each side divided by a low concrete wall, making it impossible to turn except at certain points where the wall was interrupted. There was no other traffic. On the far side of the road was an area of grass, hundreds of yards deep, with ribbons of concrete crisscrossing it. Morgan assumed it was an airport, although he hadn’t seen one for fifteen years, maybe more. He had waved his father off on a journey once, as a boy; he remembered watching from the roof of a large glass building as the nose of the plane lifted up, so sharply it took his breath away. His mother was with him, she held his hand and then his shoulder and then her hand fell away and the plane was so far off he could barely see it and then it had disappeared and he had thought, maybe my father will never come back, and there will be just the two of us. Already Rebecca had fallen away. Perhaps it was here, he thought, perhaps this was the airport. He glanced across as he drove. Low metal structures with curved roofs could be seen in the distance, blurred by a fine low mist that had begun to drift across the empty field towards them. There were no planes, only trucks and platforms of various kinds on wheels. Perhaps it was not an airport at all, but something else. Perhaps from above, the ribbons would form a pattern of some kind, thought Morgan, would form a sign. And someone would read it and understand.