Decay Inevitable

He wondered if Catriona might have given birth to a girl. They both had hoped for a daughter. Cat had said it felt like a girl even though it was her first child and she wouldn’t have known if a boy felt any different.

“Do you want to do some colouring in?” he asked her. He was so tired.

She brightened at this idea and nodded her head. She said, “You can help. I’ve got a farmyard to do. Can you colour in the chickens?”

He nodded. “Go on. I’ll catch you up.”

She ran back to the classroom. He heard the static of radios going mad as the snipers reported this. A minute later, he heard a door clicking open and footsteps in the corridor. He didn’t look up.

“I have a gun,” he said. “In my pocket.”

A calm voice, surprisingly young, told him to lie on the floor, face down, with his hands on his head.

“I don’t think so,” Will said. “I don’t think I’ll do that.”

“It would be more helpful to us if you did,” came the voice.

“I’m tired of being helpful. I didn’t kill my wife, you know. Everyone reckons I did. But I didn’t. I didn’t do quite as much as I might have done to help her, but I didn’t kill her.” Now he looked up into the face of a young man, a ridiculously young man, holding a Heckler and Koch submachine gun. Will remembered running around a playground like the one outside when he was little, pretending to be a British soldier, or, if he drew the short straw, a German. Pretending to hold a Tommy gun. Pretending to spray the enemy with bullets while you made that noise with your tongue and your teeth: Ddddrrrrrrrrraaa! Ddddrrrrrrra!

The armed policeman said, “It doesn’t bother me what you did or didn’t do. We can sort all that out later. You need some rest.”

Will nodded. “Lots of it,” he said, and reached into his pocket.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: KATHEUDO

HE OPENED HIS eyes and the sound was all around him. Incessant whispers, nervy bleatings, a cacophony that set his teeth on edge. The tree behind him bore a mass of black parrots chiding him like bitchy next-door neighbours. The stench from the parrots scratched at the back of his throat. White guano streaked the tree and turned its tarry bark into a nonsense emulsion, gleaming as it ran and set in the midnight sunlight. It wasn’t the parrots making the noise. He couldn’t see where the noise was coming from. Or what it meant, for clearly they were words: sibilants and fricatives multiplied by the many voices until form was lost to a hellish, snake-like hissing.

Will sat upright. He was perched on the edge of a path. Behind him, an ocean he couldn’t put a name to exploded repetitively on a shingle beach. On the other side of the path, a rank of houses turned tawny-coloured, peeling faces to the view. Made from tired wood, with overgrown gardens and gates that sagged like Friday-night drunkards, not one of the houses looked remotely habitable from Will’s vantage point.

Will too felt a little inebriated. Gathering himself, he rose, which brought a fresh, sarcastic chorus from the parrots. They flapped their wings, exposing deep-red feathers, and points of wild light, as if they were dotted with sequins or bits of broken glass. The air was warm and sweetly spiced, much like his mother’s kitchen had been when he was a boy. She made apple pies on Sunday mornings. Bramley apples that collapsed in a pan with a little more sugar than was strictly necessary. She put cinnamon in the pies, an idea that she pinched from the Americans. They were good pies, especially if they were served hot, with vanilla ice cream.

His mind on pies, he crossed the street to the houses and tried to remember what had happened in the seconds before he became aware again. It was no use. All he could picture was a childish face being obliterated by a black hole that became suddenly, intensely white, splintering like glass in his eyes.

The houses, as he had believed, were uninhabited. Through the windows he saw sofas that sagged with invisible bodies, and tables laid for a coming meal. Coats were piled on the newel post of stairs littered with childhood gear. Now and again, Will would blink, thinking that he saw movement. A hand on the banister; the shadow preceding a body, approaching along the hallway; a dog’s tail wagging. But it was all periphery. Whenever he jerked his head to catch the mote, it would be gone. A flaw in the eye, then. A blight on his focus.

Frustrated, he tried knocking on one of the doors, to prove his conviction that the row was deserted. The door duly opened, but there was nobody behind it. Will went in and hunted for life, room by room. The house didn’t smell old or disused; it smelled of nothing at all. Nobody here. He stalked out of the house and slammed the door shut. Marching across the street, he ignored the guffawing parrots and struck out towards the treacly sun, his boots crunching across the shingle beach.