Undercurrent (23 page)

It would be darker down there. There was floodlight in these cavernous rooms, sconces on walls creating a warm glow on stone which varied in colour from ochre to grey granite. For a full, poignant, hesitant minute, Henry wished his father was here, raising his eyeglasses from his hooked nose and saying. Will you look at that, son, they dug up every damn quarry they could find to make this mongrel. Even with that, Henry knew he did not want to go down. He would read the guidebook and pretend he had. He knew his limitations.

He turned from the larger room, marked at one angle with yet another sign WAY OUT, a description which was, for an American of his generation, deeply deceptive for an exit sign, looking more like a sixties description of approval: way out, man. At the top of the slope, and the place was fuller of slopes than stairs, as if stairs were scarcely invented, he had noticed a great brute of a big black door. Toiling towards it, he could see a welcome patch of puffy, grey sky and a light outside.

One of those security lights which reacted to the onset of darkness by becoming at first luminous and then timidly brighter as evening encroached, the kind of device his father would have examined, too. Such a cute thing, he might have said, stroking it, always amazed at how the simplest of things worked. Halfway up the slope, the door closed. Then the spotlights went out.

He stumbled uphill to the door and thumped on it, not alarmed, simply annoyed in the same way he always was by the inefficiency of others. He thumped again, creating a small, ineffectual sound against the wood and hurting the heel of his hand on a metal stud. Henry did not shout; it was not something he did in response to simple mistakes; anger was something he controlled. He just wanted out. The solidityof the door muffled noise, but he could hear scrabbling on the other side.

He knocked again, yelling this time EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! His voice came back inside his ears, sounding foreign and false. Once he stopped, he could detect an increase in the scuffling beyond, then the child screaming, half hysterical: 'Nooo, Mummy, no. He's in there. If he stays in there, he'll get so cold. You mustn't lock it. Henry hates the cold. NO. No, no no, stoppit, stoppit, stoppit. LET HIM OUT.' And after that, with his head pressed against the wood, Henry heard murmurs of brisk consolation: 'Aren't you a little silly one, aren't you just? It isn't a person, silly.

That nice man went home.

I told him please go. He's deaf. That thing in there is only one of Neil's silly ghosts.'

There was a further protest, Angela's voice shriller.

'What do you want, silly? Do you want me to be sent away too? Is that what you want? Come on, darling. Time for tea.'

I don't really understand the purpose of imprisonment (except as a form of revenge) and I
don't really think I ever did. It alters nothing. A sentence like mine is only a warning, not an education.

I am not imprisoned because I would otherwise take to the streets, killing children at random. No one
suggests that my criminality is bound to become a habit. The only child who was ever vulnerable to me
was my own son. No one is in danger from me, except me. Or from my friend in the kitchen. She killed
her husband and she makes everyone think that's what I did, too.

I think I imagined, in a daft kind of way, that having sentenced me and sent out all the
necessary messages about justice and condemnation, someone might say. What really is the point of
keeping a useful woman locked away, doing nothing? They would think, what a waste of money and
quietly let me out the back way. Maggie says that's basically what they will do, although not for fifteen
years. It is the years that weigh on me, not the present. The only way to deal with incarceration is to
take it one day at a time. Not a whole day, even: an hour, a minute. And the only way I can accept it is
to remind myself constantly that it does have a purpose even if it isn't obvious to anyone but me.

Without that, I'm sure I should go mad. ' .

Not everything I've ever done has had a purpose.

One's aimless so much of the time, which is just as well because it's when I've been my most
determined that I've been my most mistaken. Poor Harry. You deserved better.

I asked for more of the pills. Otherwise I shall scream and cry.

Forget my stiff upper lip.

FMC.

CHAPTER NINE.

Uncle Joe, Tom Cobbley and all could wait.
'Life without you is not the same
. . .' Maggie read in the letter. She put it down on the threadbare carpet of the office and stamped on the envelope, as a substitute for the immediate desire to tear it up. It was an odd aspect of legal training which made it impossible for her to destroy a letter because of its evidential value, but she could abuse it. The paper was creased from a working day's contact with Edward's pocket, improving the fulsome prose.
'I do not know what madness possessed me
,' he wrote,
'to imagine I could have a better
existence with someone who is so much your inferior in every way . . .'

'Life without you is not the same,' she mimicked to Edward, flourishing the letter at him.

'What did he bloody well expect? He didn't want it to be the same.

And what possessed him was perfectly obvious. A
bitch
with big boobs, sixteen years younger than me. He's a cliché. A ten-foot transvestite, at least I'd have a topic for conversation.'

'What do you think of its style?' Edward murmured.

'He hasn't got any style'.' she yelled.

'I meant the letter.'

She looked at the sentences, perfectly punctuated and nicely turned. He had taken his time to construct his thoughts and give his plea for a meeting the right degree of pathos and dignity.
'I
can't get you out of my mind and I'm full of sorrow
. . .'

'Rather contrived, I thought,' Edward said. 'You shouldn't have married another lawyer.

We're all pompous farts. What are you going to do?'

She looked at him and the fish behind the desk, all hazed in cigarette smoke.

'Drink,' she said.

Henry focused on the words. Time for tea. Quaint. He was trembling with fury and willing it to cease as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. A couple of dim security lights high on the walls blinked into life within minutes and for these he was profoundly grateful. He had space to move; there was a mean ration of light, sufficient for reading the large print of the direction signs, he was not cold, and in a minute she would come back and open the damn door. He felt in his trouser pocket for his packet of cigarettes, lit one and began to pace the floor, counting his steps, one, two, three. He shrugged inside the warmth of his leather jacket and soft sweater. He would circumnavigate the central keep, beginning here, fifteen times, and by the time that was done she would have come back. Or someone would come back; there would be a night watchman; someone.

On the seventh round of the bare rooms, kitchen with bread ovens, mess room with fire, interconnecting rooms off, he began to wonder if such a thing as a night-watchman was necessary.

There was nothing to steal except the fabric of the building, which was undoubtedly solid enough to resist larceny. The wretched woman would come back after she had given the child her tea. What a strange way of describing what must be dinner, and the thought reminded him that he was hungry.

He lost count of his circumnavigations and repetition did not improve the view. He sat down by the fireplace and dozed for a while. When he came round, stiff an chilled, a dull anger began to settle into a kind of mental indigestion, combined with boredom and a sense of being completely ineffectual, a person who was simply a suitable candidate for a practical joke.

The worst that could happen was a hungry night alone and a touch of hypothermia. He could go upstairs and deface the portraits, or form them into a shelter in the middle of the room and play at camping. Pity he could not borrow their garments. It was beginning to become colder. Then he considered the prospect, not of the night, but the morning, when the door would creak open and he would be seen, abject and stupid. She might gather a crowd to jeer at a tourist who could not tell the time; she might send a posse of name callers to bait him like a dancing bear in a medieval illustration. The poor, captive bear who did not even try to bite or release himself from his chains.

Who did not consider the affectionate solicitude of his hosts in this town enough to be concerned about them and their possible anxieties. The dummy who just sat there, and found a corner to urinate, and in the middle of that friendly crowd there would be Maggie with her metal hair and sweet, sardonic smile and it was Maggie's opinion which mattered most.

Time had moved on: Henry tried to recall what he had read about the castle in the relative comfort of the library and what he had learned from the map which he could no longer read. None of it helped, but it stood to reason that a place designed to house so many men must have a dozen exits, even if they were also designed to repel those who wanted to enter. Go down to the level of the moat area. Henry, where you saw all those little windows. You aren't too fat to squeeze through, find a door, get out, and once out, holler. Better the contempt of a single passer-by who might throw him a rope than that of the Mayor and the other inhabitants next morning. They would not beg leave to approach him with feelings of devoted loyalty and affectionate attachment.

Besides, he was sick of the sight of these particular walls. Any other set of walls would be an improvement. He took the downward slope from the fireplace room, marked the runs, with enough of his sense of humour intact to notice how uninviting this description was. What a crass lot they are, he reflected. Way out via The Runs. The slope was shallow, and then became steeper, suddenly, so that he stumbled to a halt in front of glass in a wall and a painted arrow telling him go left. What was this? A political instruction? He was feeling slightly hysterical and followed the sign.

Henry entered a narrow passageway which curved away to his right. There were narrow windows recessed into the deep walls and, out of habit, he began to count. One, two ... five, six, twelve, thirteen. Some of the windows were framed in crusty metal; he had stopped to touch, recoiling from the cold and the dampness of the condensation. The last security light had faded into memory. Now he touched each window; some stood open, level with his chin, but most of them were closed. The fifteenth window had no glass at all and cold air breezed over his forehead.

He wanted to go back, but surely he would be round the other side in a minute. His right foot hit shallow water. In this lack of light, he did not know if was encountering a flood or a puddle, and in the pause, as he began to step carefully rather than hurry, he heard the rustling ahead.

Loud. A furious, fluttering sound which arrested and then accelerated the motion of his heart and made the blood it pumped turn into boiling water.

Then a noise of furious knocking, tap, tap tap, TAP ,TAP, tap tap tat, tap tap tap TAT. He looked behind him and could not see from where he had come around the curving wall, looked ahead and saw the promise of another security light. The tapping ceased; the rustling, like the frantic shuffling of a hundred garments moving towards him, increased.

Became still, for a moment.

Henry could not see the ceiling and he could feel the walls squeezing him. It was less of the fear of what lay ahead than the fact that he no longer knew where he was and did not know the way back out. Fool, fool. There were all the symptoms: the desire to smack his head against the bricks so that at least pain could distract; the impulse to run, moan, lie down, the sensation of some massive blow to the solar plexus, the acute lack of breath and the madness. The overpowering imperative to fight, kick, beat his way out, the inability to breathe or even to shriek.

If the window had been wide enough and the drop a thousand feet, he would have jumped; if there had been knife, he would use it to mutilate himself, anything to stop it. Anything. And it would not go; he knew it could not go. Claustrophobic agony, each time a little taste of death so full of excruciating panic, he would cut off his hand to avoid it. Then he screamed and screamed and screamed, tried to stumble back in the direction he had already walked, tried to be logical, but he could not move; panic forbade. He braced himself against the narrow walls to get his breath, bashed his hand against the window, stuck his fingers inside his mouth and bit so hard he tasted blood.

Crouched in a heap in the puddle of water, he struggled for breath and began, manically, to chew his fingernails. The sounds were irrelevant. He could hear nothing.

Whatever he could see, was doubled. There was fungus on the wall; it reached out and.

touched Henry fainted.

A second. Maybe an hour. Came round, deafened by his own breathing, UHUH, UHUH, uhuh, uhuhy UHUH, and the scream coming, unable to emerge.

Apart from the thunder of his own breath, the silence was total, a background only to UHUH, UHUH, and the horrifying wheeze creeping out of his mouth in a desperate, gulping sound, like his father, close to death,
ownuff, ownhuff, ownfuff
, with the whole body of him involved in the effort.

Henry fixed his eyes to the patch of indigo sky visible from the high slit of window above his head only because it was different from the black of the wall. Forced himself not to blink until his eyes watered from the strain. The cold of the water seeping through his jeans began to have some remote meaning. He was lying in cold water and he must get up. He managed that, but the panic did not subside. He could get himself upright and know he was cold, was all. Then the fluttering sound began again, came towards him and retreated. He took two steps forward.
One of Neil’s silly ghosts.

Harry is here to see you, kill you
. He took one more step. The only way forward was towards the next light. The bird struck his outstretched arm, flew away and began battering, pecking, fluttering at the next barred window.