The Possession of Mr Cave. Matt Haig
but all-encompassing evil that stole every last hope.
‘Reuben! No!’
He fell, fast and heavy.
Within a second his screaming had stopped and he was on the concrete pavement in front of me.
Everything about him seemed so hideous and unnatural as he lay there, like an abandoned puppet. The crooked angles of his legs. The accelerated rhythm of his chest. The shining blood that spilt from his mouth.
‘Get an ambulance,’ I shouted at the crowd of boys who stood there in numb silence. ‘Now!’
In the distance cars sped by on Blossom Street, heading into York or out to the supermarket, immune and unaware.
I crouched down and my hand touched his face and I pleaded with him to stay with me.
I begged him.
And it seemed like some kind of deliberate punishment, the way he died. I could see the decision in his eyes, as the substance of life retreated further and further from his body.
One of the boys, the smallest, vomited on the pavement.
Another – shaven-headed, sharp-eyed – staggered back, away, onto the empty road.
The tallest and most muscular of the group just stood there, looking at me, a shaded face inside a hood. I hated that boy and the brutal indifference of his face. I cursed the god who had made this boy stand there, breathing before me, while Reuben was dying on the pavement. Inside the desperate urgency of that moment I sensed there was something not quite right about that boy, as though he had been pasted onto the scene from another reality.
I picked up one of Reuben’s heavy hands, his left, and saw his palm was still red and indented from holding onto the post. I rubbed it and I kept talking to him, words on top of words, but all the time I could see him retreating from his body, backing away. And then he said something.
‘Don’t go.’ As if it was me who was leaving and not him. They were his last words.
The hand went cold, the night gathered closer and the ambulance came to confirm it was too late for anything to be done.
I remember I saw you across the park.
I remember leaving Reuben’s body on the pavement.
I remember you asked me, ‘Dad, what’s happening?’
I remember saying, ‘Go back, Petal, go back home. Please.’
I remember you asked about the ambulance.
I remember I ignored the question and repeated my demand.
I remember the boy in the hood, staring straight at you.
I remember I became insistent, I remember grabbing your arm and shouting, I remember being harsher with you than I had ever been.
I remember the look on your face and I remember you running back home, to the shop entrance, and the door closing. And the knowledge below the madness that I had betrayed you both.
As you know, for much of my life I have spent my time mending broken things. Repairing clock dials, restoring old chairs, retouching china. Over the years I have become accomplished at removing stains with ammonia, or a dab of white spirit. I can remove scratches from glass. I can simulate different grains of wood. And I can restore a corroded Tudor candlestick with vinegar, half a pint of hot water and a piece of fine wire wool.
To buy a George III mahogany dressing table suffering the scars and strains of two centuries, and then return it to its original glory, once gave me such a thrill. Or equally, to have Mrs Weeks come into the shop and run her informed fingers over a Worcester vase without detecting the cracks, not so long ago filled my soul with happiness.
It gave me a kind of power, I suppose. A means of defeating time. A way of insulating myself against this foul, mouldering age. And I cannot explain to you the desperate pain it gives me to know that I cannot restore our own private past in quite the same way.
Here is something you must understand.
There have been four people in this life I have truly loved, and out of those four, you are the only one remaining. All of the others died of unnatural causes. Son, wife, mother. All three before their time.
You love three people and they die. It hardly warrants a public inquiry, does it? No. How many would you have to love and watch die before people grew suspicious of that love? Five? Ten? A hundred? Three is nothing. A fig. Three is just plain old bad luck, even if it is three-quarters of all you have ever cared for in the world.
Oh, I have tried to be rational. Come on, Terence, I tell myself. None of these deaths were your responsibility. And, of course, my defence would hold up in a court of law.
But where are the courts of love? And what possible punishment could they enforce that was worse than grief? I came to believe, after Reuben died, that there was something wrong with me, and with the love I had to offer. I had failed Reuben. I let him die among friends I had never met.
I had loved him, but I always imagined there would be some later day when I could make everything up to him. I couldn’t accept that these later days would never come.
Of course, the death of a child is, for any parent, always an impossible fact. You hear the opening bars of a familiar sonata and the music stops but you still feel those silent notes, their beauty and power no less real, no less complete. With Reuben I had been ignoring the tune. It had been there, all the time, played continuously for his fourteen years, but I had switched off, stopped listening. I was always concentrating on the shop, or on you, and left Reuben to his own devices.
So what I once ignored I strained to find, and if I strained hard enough I caught flashes, brief bursts of the life that was transformed but did not truly end. Notes returning not in pretty sequence, but as a cacophony, crashing over me with the weight of guilt.
The morning of the funeral I awoke to the sound of buzzing. A rather angry, sawing noise that cut its way through the darkness. I opened my eyes and raised my head from the pillow to see where it was coming from. The room, softly lit by the morning sun that filtered through the curtains, was all there. The framed photograph of your mother, the wardrobe, the Turner print, the French mantel clock. Everything, apart from the noise, was normal. It was only when I sat up further, propped on my elbows, that I identified the source. Low above the bed, over the section of blankets that covered my legs and feet, I saw what must have been five hundred small flies, hovering, just hovering, as if I was a sun-rotten corpse in the desert.
For a moment, there was no fear. The sight of these creatures, moving in short oval swirls, at first had a mesmeric effect. Then something changed. As if suddenly aware that I had woken, the flies began to move in one cloudlike motion further up the bed, towards my face. Soon they were all around me, a dark blizzard, with their angry, unstoppable noise getting louder every second. I dived down, deep under the blankets, hoping the flies wouldn’t follow and with that sudden movement the noise stopped completely. I waited a second in the warm and cushioned dark, then resurfaced.
The flies had all disappeared, leaving no trace. I looked around again and, although the creatures had gone, I couldn’t help but feel that the room was different, as if every object had shared my delusion.
I remember Cynthia and me talking in the car, patching our grief with small nothings, as the funeral procession rolled through the old Saxon streets. At one point she turned to you and said: ‘You are doing so well.’ You returned your grandmother’s sad smile and I muttered an agreement. You were certainly remarkably composed, as you had been for much of the week. Too composed, I had thought, worried you were keeping it all locked in.
I tried to keep my thoughts on your brother but found them gravitating towards you, and to the effect your twin brother’s death was having on your behaviour.
You hadn’t played your cello all week. This, I told myself, was understandable. You had gone to the stables every evening, to take care of Turpin, but you hadn’t ridden him since the day before Reuben died. This too was as might