The Possession of Mr Cave (15 page)

I knew then, right at that moment, that I was alone. Cynthia
was an ally, but she would not join me in this war.

'All right, Cynthia. All right. I'd better go.'

'All right, well, goodbye. But don't do anything silly.'

'No, I won't. Goodbye.'

'Goodbye.'

And I stayed there, listening to the dial tone's eternal hum,
as the nature of my necessary task slowly became more clear.

*

When I told George I was sorry to hear about his father he
nodded and closed his eyes and mouth as if a wasp was flying
past his face.

He kept a lot in, that was my impression. Indeed, I admired
him for it. That is how we rise above ourselves, isn't it? By
leaning hard against those doors to our emotions, in the British
tradition.

I put him to work on a lowboy cabinet, repairing the drawer
rails and runners. He had finished by lunch, when I sent him
out on another errand.

Now, let me think. It must have been ten minutes past
one when George came back into the shop, breathless, with
our lunch and the wax polish I had asked for. He didn't say
anything at first. Indeed, I was two bites into my Wensleydale
sandwich when he casually came out with it.

'I've just seen Bryony,' he said.

So relaxed was his tone that it didn't sink in at first. I nodded
and had another bite, as if he was making a comment on the
weather. Then the alarm sounded.

'Sorry? What?'

He swallowed his mouthful and pressed his glasses further
up his nose. 'Bryony. I've just seen her.'

'No, George, I think you have made a mistake. She's in
school,' I said. 'She has lunch in school.'

He shrugged, and looked over at one of the figures. The
Girl with a Tambourine. 'I might have got it wrong. But
it looked like her. I called her and she turned round but then
kept walking. She looked like she didn't want to be bothered.'

'Was she on her own?'

'Yes,' he said, nudging his glasses further up his nose.

'Where? Where was she?'

'On the Mount,' he said. 'Walking towards –'

'The school?'

'Yes.'

A precious elixir kept in a barrel. You put a hand over the
hole where it leaks but there is another, out of view, that you
have missed.

I felt like a fool. Where had you been? To meet him?

I telephoned your school. I asked to speak to you. They
went to fetch you and I had nothing to say. I had needed to
hear your voice and I was hearing your voice but it expected
words in return. It expected a reason.

'Cynthia's going into hospital,' I said.

'Yes, I know.'

George was looking at me, his sandwich-stuffed face paused
in dread anticipation.

'For her hernia.'

'I know that. Why are you phoning?'

'She's got a date. The eighteenth. She called this morning
and said she's going in on the eighteenth.'

'I was in French.'

'She'll have to stay the night.'

'It was embarrassing.'

'She sounded ever so worried.'

'Is that it?'

'Yes.'

You made a noise at the back of your throat to signify your
frustration.

'I'll see you at four,' I told the dial tone.

George was confused.

'It's difficult,' I said. 'I have to handle Bryony carefully.
There are things she hides from me.'

He nodded, and his eyes flashed wide behind his glasses as
if I had made a considerable understatement.

'George? Is there something you know? About Bryony?'

He paused a moment too long.

'No,' he said. 'I don't see that lot any more.'

'Before, though. You used to know some of the same people.
Was there anything?'

He took the last bite of his sandwich and shook his head,
staring over at the lowboy cabinet.

'George? Was there anything at all?'

'No,' he said. And then, blushing: 'Well, not really.'

'Not really? What does that mean?'

'Nothing,' he said. 'I don't want to get her into any trouble.'

He didn't understand. 'You won't be getting her into trouble,
George. You'll be helping her.'

He considered, or at least seemed to consider, and took two
gasps from his inhaler.

And then, after much interrogation, he told me something
I find myself unable to repeat. Something about what had
happened that evening in the field. An incident which
occurred after you had been drinking, between yourself and
another boy, in full view of everyone. A grotesque act, which
you participated in with full compliance. I remembered Uriah
Heep's hand sliding down your back in that Cockpit, and I
found the story all too easy to believe, especially as George
trod forward through the whole thing with such slow and
reluctant steps.

'I shouldn't have told you,' he said. 'I'm sorry, Mr Cave.'

The sweet chutney at the back of my throat lent the
horrendous images tormenting my mind a sickly taste. I
retched at the idea of you there, with those boys, allowing
yourself to become no more than an object to be enjoyed.
My Bryony. My innocent Petal. What had happened to
you? What had happened since Reuben's death that had
made you lower your own value? I couldn't stop my mind.
I couldn't stop the images of this girl I adored but also
despised. This girl who simultaneously was my daughter
and also the person who was destroying my daughter. I felt
appalled. I felt like I had just watched Marcel Duchamp
draw his moustache on the Mona Lisa. You were my work
of art, my priceless Petal, yet you clearly viewed yourself as
no more than a cheap postcard. A souvenir of the Bryony
who once was.

'You pushed me away,' I said. 'George, you pushed me
away.'

He nodded. His cheeks burned crimson. He understood
his crime. 'I'm so sorry, Mr Cave. I just wanted to fit in. I
just wanted them to accept me. I'm not like that now.'

He was nearly crying. I swear to you, there were tears glazing
his eyes.

'No, I can see that,' I said. And then, realising George was
now an ally in my mission, and an ally with information, I
knew I could not be too severe. 'Don't worry, George. I'm just
glad that you told me.'

'You won't . . . you won't tell Bryony, will you? That I said
anything.'

'Oh no, George,' I said, as Reuben laughed in silence around
us. 'It's our secret.'

I went to pick you up from school. Through the windscreen
I watched the day girls and weekly boarders walk out of the
gates laughing, talking, their voices bubbling up and boiling
over with the promise of the weekend. Four hundred pupils
who were not quite you. More and more of them were spilling
out, heading towards waiting cars or the railway station, ready
to become their other selves. The laughs became slowly more
hideous, the faces more tormenting as they became less, as the
crowds began to thin and the cars, one by one, drove away.

I saw Imogen, but you were not with her. I ran over to her
and tapped her arm and she jumped in shock and took a
moment to recognise me, a moment where I was not her
friend's father but a man she didn't know coming out of
nowhere to touch her arm. 'Imogen? Have you see Bryony?'

She looked at her friends, whom I had not seen before,
who found something in my question to amuse them, and
Imogen shrugged and said with bleak indifference, 'She had
hockey, I think.'

And I remembered you had taken your hockey stick with
you that morning and I remembered the still comfort of having
you there, on the seat beside me before I had known about
your lunch-hour excursion or the incident in the field. I was
remembering your purer, morning self when Imogen walked
away, and added her voice to the giggles. I wondered if something
had happened between you two, something a father
would not know about and would never know.

I looked around and there were only a few uniformed
bodies to be seen, climbing onto bicycles, putting on their
helmets, or (the other type) cupping their hands against the
wind, lighting cigarettes.

Even these stragglers disappeared and I was left staring at
the school building, at the tall Victorian windows and the
dark archway of the entrance, the blank eyes and blank mouth
of a creature that had spat out its last pupil.

I walked inside and navigated my way through the labyrinth
of corridors towards the staff-room, all the time feeling the
invisible squeeze of those walls.

A face came out of nowhere. A sharp and hollow face of
stern womanhood, attached to a body of long, floating clothes
and mock-tribal accessories. 'Excuse me, sir?' she asked, staring
worriedly at the fresh scar on my cheek. 'Can I help you?'

'I'm looking for my daughter. Bryony Cave,' I said. 'She
was not there to meet me. She is always there, on time, and
I am beginning to wonder where she might –'

The face tilted back, allowing my words to bounce off her
chin. 'I'm afraid Bryony isn't in any of my classes, but I'll just
enquire in the staff-room and see if someone might know.'

I followed her to the staff-room and was informed there had
been no hockey practice today as 'Valerie' was away. I saw Mr
Winter and recognised him from parents evening. 'The girls
were told to wait in the library or inform their parents they
were leaving school early,' he said, in a voice so cold and
bureaucratic I could almost see its typeface.

'I wasn't informed,' I said. 'She didn't inform me.'

Mr Winter shrugged and closed the blue folder on his lap,
'I'm sorry, but I can guarantee that Bryony was well aware
that she should stay on the school premises unless she had
managed to get in touch with whoever is responsible for her.
We understand our duty of care.'

My anger burst its cage. 'I am responsible for her from four
o'clock. At a quarter to three she is in your care. Just as she
is during lunch hour. Now, I have it on good authority that
she wasn't here at lunch either. You cannot allow your pupils
simply to wander out of school.'

The whole staff-room was looking at me. I was making a
scene. I was, in their eyes, clearly overreacting. They did not
understand the fatal danger that taints the air of this town,
that rises up from the old Saxon streets to claim those too
fragile to resist the follies of youth.

'She told me she had phoned you and that you were coming
to pick her up,' said Mr Winter.

'And you believed her? You didn't follow her to the gates?'

'Unfortunately, we cannot offer each child their own
private minder, Mr Cave. Not without significantly raising
our fees.'

Someone laughed by the water cooler.

'You don't understand,' I muttered as I left the room.

'Mr Cave, I'm sure Bryony will be absolutely –'

Ten minutes later, I would be pressing my weight against a
door that wouldn't open. I would be standing outside my
own shop as I searched my pockets for the key. What was
George doing? Why wasn't he behind the counter? I made
it inside. 'George? Bryony?'

A floorboard creaked above me. I ran up the stairs and saw
him there, on the landing. Not walking, just standing.

'George?'

'I needed to go to the toilet,' he said, in a voice that might
have been ashamed, or angry.

'Where's Bryony? Has she come back?'

He paused, and then answered slowly. 'Yes,' he said, carefully,
as though the word itself had brought you there. I moved
past him and into your room and when I saw you standing
in front of your rosettes, I felt so relieved that only now can
I see the damp redness of your eyes.

Of course, you didn't witness this relief. You witnessed the
fear, shooting out of me in angry words. 'What on earth were
you thinking? Why did you lie to Mr Winter? Where did you
go? You went to see him, didn't you? You went to see him.
Tell me! Tell me! For God's sake, girl, tell me!'

I didn't mean to shake you, I didn't mean to make you
cry fresh tears.

I want to be back there, I want to step inside that room
and try again. This time, I will listen and you will tell me
what I am sure you would have said, if only I had been a
father and not a tyrant, if only I had trusted myself to love
you the way I should have. But I did not, and you told
me nothing. Inside your head, you already had it planned.

It didn't matter any more. Nothing mattered any more.

Nothing apart from him, that boy who was your world,
that boy who had worked an apocalypse in your mind and
turned the rest of us to dust. And so it was that I let you
collapse on the bed and sink your face in your pillow, before
going downstairs, with George, to reopen the shop.

Please, Bryony, understand this: the pain of a child is the pain
of a parent.

I see it all, now. It was me. I was him as he was me.

I see myself at the window. I see my head busy with the
accounts and I scream to get my attention. Below, they
translate the scream as one of triumph and chant my name.
All of them. All except one.

By the second scream I am feeling the pain in my left
shoulder, a pain so sudden and intense that it becomes impossible
to separate it from everything else. The voices, the
terraced houses ('Gladstone Villas, 1888'), the whiskers of
yellow light, my other self running across the park – all pieces
of the same pain.

Still, I have to hold on. I have to wait until I am there on
the street, running towards me. I watch as I step on the park
wall and jump down to the pavement, landing badly.

'Reuben, Reuben!'

I see me as I push my way through the boys and know that
it is time. This is what I have been waiting for, why I am here,
and know I have no choice but to let go.

'Reuben! No!'

I fall, fast and heavy.

Within a second my screaming has stopped but I am still
there, as there as I ever was, just leaking out from the vessel
that contained me.

'Get an ambulance. Now!'

Little Cam vomited on the pavement as Aaron staggered
back, away, onto the empty road.

I look at myself straight in the eyes and see the fear I know
I am feeling. I turn away from me. Denny is there, silent,
numb, and I see my hatred as I look at him.

'Don't go,' I tell myself, as I rub my hand, and I see the
dread and confusion descend on my face. These are my last
words. 'Don't go.'

I leave my body and the pain it gave me and the material
world sinks into darkness. The road, the park, the shop.
Every building and every object. All I can see is the dull
glow of living souls, guiding me like a hundred lighthouses
in the fog.