Ritual. Part 5

'You're not just saying that to stop us from having an argument?'

Charlie unfastened his cufflinks. 'Since when did boys talk to their fathers like that?'

'You said we were supposed to be friends.'

'Sure,' said Charlie, and felt a wave of guilt. He went over 48.to Martin, and laid his hand on his shoulder, and said, 'I've been travelling around on my own for too darn long, that's my trouble. Too much talking to myself in hotel mirrors. I guess it's made me a little nutty.'

'You can believe me,' Martin told him; although Charlie detected a strange hoa.r.s.eness in his voice that didn't sound like Martin at all. 'You can believe me.' And it wasn't so much of an affirmation as a command. It wasn't really, You can believe me. It was more like, You must believe me.

He sat on the side of the bed and waited for Martin to return with the suitcase. He thought about a quiet foggy afternoon in Milwaukee, parking his car and walking up the concrete pathway to a small suburban duplex. Six or seven children had been playing ball at the end of the street, and their cries had sounded just like the cries of seagulls. He remembered pus.h.i.+ng the bell, and then the front door opening. And there she was, her brown hair tangled, staring at him in complete surprise. 'You came,' she had whispered. 'I never thought you would.'

Martin returned with their zip-up overnight bag. He laid it down on the bed, and said to Charlie, 'Are you okay? You look kind of logic.'

'I'm okay. Tired, I guess, like you.'

'I'm not tired.'

'Well, then, let's freshen ourselves up, and get on down to Billy's Beer & Bite.'

Martin looked around. 'There's no television here. What are we going to do all evening?'

'You know how to play cards, don't you? Let's see how much of your allowance I can win back.'

Martin said, 'Mega-thrill. If you really want it back that bad, I'll give it to you.' Charlie couldn't even smile. He wondered what he was going to say to the boy next - let alone how he was going to find something to talk about for ten more days. His tiredness was mostly caused by the strain of keeping 49.up a long-running conversation. He wanted with all his heart to develop an easy father-and-son relations.h.i.+p with Martin, but right now he would have given a month's salary to be alone.

They ate in a corner booth at Billy's. A jukebox played 'Joleen' and 'Blanket on the Ground' and 'DIVORCE' and what with the rough wooden decor and the loud laughter and the red fluorescent lights they could have been in Amarillo, TX, instead of Alien's Corners, CT. Martin seemed to have rediscovered his appet.i.te, and wolfed down a king-sized cheeseburger with mammoth fries. Charlie restricted himself to a New York steak sandwich with onion rings. Afterwards, they walked around the windy deserted green for a while, with their hands in their pockets, not talking, and then went back to Mrs Kemp's to play cards.

Before he went to bed, Charlie found Walter Haxalt's telephone number in the local directory, and called him up from the phone in Mrs Kemp's parlour. The phone rang and rang but there was no reply.

Mrs Kemp was watching him through the partly open doorway. 'Do you know anybody who goes to Le Reposoir to eat?' Charlie asked her, as he waited for somebody at Walter Haxalt's number to pick up.

Mrs Kemp shook her head. 'You'd be better off keeping clear,' she advised him. 'I don't know what's so bad about that place, but if I were you I wouldn't want to find out.'

CHAPTER FOUR.

It was well past two o'clock in the morning when Charlie awoke. For a moment he had that terrible vertiginous feeling of not knowing where he was, or what city he was in. But after years of waking up unexpectedly in unfamiliar rooms, he had developed a trick of closing his eyes again and logically a.n.a.lysing where he must be.

Usually, his sense of smell and his sense of touch were enough for him to be able to re-orient himself. Howard Johnson's all smelled like Howard Johnson's and TraveLodge beds all felt the same. This was somewhere private. This was somewhere old. This, he thought, opening his eyes again, is Mrs Kemp's boarding house in Alien's Corners, C T.

The bedroom was intensely dark. Charlie felt as if black felt pads were being pressed against his eyes. Either the moon had not yet risen, or it was obscured by thunderclouds. The room was also very quiet, except for the intermittent blowing of the wind down the chimney, and the soft ticking of Charlie's watch on the bedside table.

Charlie eased himself up into a sitting position. Gradually, he found that he could make out the slightly lighter squares of the windowpanes, and the gleam of reflected street light on one of the bra.s.s k.n.o.bs at the end of the bed, but that was about all. He strained his ears to hear Martin breathing next to him, but from the other side of the bed there was no sound at all.

'Martin?' he whispered. There was no reply, but he didn't call again. He didn't want to wake Martin up for no reason at all. He reached out his hand to make sure that his son was well covered by the thin patchwork quilt, and it was then that he realized that Martin was silent because Martin wasn't there.

He fumbled around in the darkness of the top-heavy bedside lamp, almost knocking it over. He switched it on and it lit up the room as starkly as a publicity photograph for a 19505 detective movie. Martin's side of the quilt was neatly folded back, as if he had left the bed quietly and deliberately, and Martin's bathrobe had disappeared from the back of the chair. Charlie said, 's.h.i.+t,' and swung himself out of bed. His own bathrobe was lying on the floor. He tugged it on, raked his fingers through his hair, and opened the bedroom door. Outside, the house was silent. Engraved portraits stared at him incuriously from the brown-wallpapered landing. There was a smell of dust and sticky polish and faded lavender; the sort of smell that dreams would have, if dreams were to die.

'Martin?' His voice didn't even echo. The darkness m.u.f.fled it like a blanket. 'Martin - are you there?'

Charlie cursed everything he could think of, and in particular he cursed himself for having thought that it would be a good idea to bring Martin along with him on his tour of New England. G.o.dd.a.m.nit, the boy was nothing but confusion and trouble. Charlie called, 'Martin?' again, not too loudly in case he disturbed Mrs Kemp, but a whole minute pa.s.sed and there was still no answer, and so he ventured out on to the landing and peered down into the stairwell.

He made his way downstairs, treading as softly as he could. The house all around him seemed to hold its breath. He could feel the string backing of the worn-out stair carpet under his bare feet. When he reached the hallway, he paused, and listened, but there was nothing to be heard. He was tempted to go back to bed again. After all - where could Martin have possibly gone? Out for a walk, that was all, because he'd eaten too much, and couldn't sleep. Out for a walk, because he wanted to think about his parents, and his fractured upbringing, and how much he distrusted his father. Charlie could hardly blame him.

52.But then he heard a door softly juddering, as if it hadn't been closed properly and the wind was shaking the latch. He paused, and listened, and the juddering continued. For the first time in a very long time, for no earthly reason that he could think of, he was alarmed - so alarmed that he groped around the shadows of the hallway searching for something that he could use as a weapon. An umbrella, maybe; or a doorstop. All he could find, however, was a very lightweight walking stick. He swung it in his hand so that it whistled through the air. Then he made his way along the hallway to the kitchen door.

'Martin? Are you there?' His voice sounded unfamiliar, and he turned quickly around to make sure that there was n.o.body standing close behind him. For one second he felt the thrill of real fright. A shadow was standing close to the front door, its huddled shape limned by the blood-red light that gleamed through the stained-gla.s.s panes. But it was only an overcoat that Mrs Kemp had left hanging on the hallstand. Coats and blankets and dressing gowns, thought Charlie. Innocent garments by day, threatening hunchbacks by night. He couldn't count the number of times he had woken up in some strange hotel bedroom to stare fascinated and frightened at his own coat, crouched over the back of a chair.

He turned the handle of the kitchen door. It grated open, grit dragging against floor tiles. The kitchen smelled of burned fat and sour vegetables. There was an old-fas.h.i.+oned cooking range, and a white-topped table. In the corner stood a coffee grinder and an old rotary knife-sharpening machine, like Puritan instruments of torture. Blue-patterned plates were stacked on the hatch. Charlie stayed in the half-open doorway for a moment, holding his breath, but when he heard nothing he turned away, lowering his walking stick. Martin is fifteen years old right? He isn't a child any more. And just because you happened to miss his childhood, that doesn't give you any kind of right to treat him like a kid. If he wants to take a hike in the middle of the night, that's up to him.

53.Charlie wasn't convinced by any of his reasoning, but he retreated slowly along the hallway, tapping the tip of his walking stick gently against the walls, like a man who had recently lost his sight. He was just about to return it to the cast-iron umbrella stand, however, when he thought he heard somebody whispering. He froze, his head lifted, trying to catch the faint sibilant sounds of conversation.

Maybe it's the wind, thought Charlie. But he knew that it wasn't. No wind ever argued, the way that this voice was arguing. No wind ever begged. Somebody was right outside the kitchen door, in Mrs Kemp's back yard; and that somebody was talking, quickly and urgently, pleading, the way that a lover pleads, or a man asks for money - one well-rehea.r.s.ed argument after another.

Raising the walking stick, he retraced his steps along the corridor. The clouds had suddenly moved away from the moon, and the kitchen was illuminated in cold, luminous blue, knives and grinders and mincers gleaming, like some spectral abattoir. There were two panes of Flemish gla.s.s in the kitchen door, and through their watery distortion Charlie could make out the shadows of two people, earnestly engaged in conversation. A thin, boyish figure, which must have been Martin, and another smaller figure, which must have been wearing a hat or a hood, because it was strangely rhomboidal in shape, like an old-fas.h.i.+oned coal scuttle.

Charlie tiptoed close to the door and listened. The whispering voice went on and on, as endless and insistent as water running over a weir; yet peculiarly seductive, too, in a way that Charlie found it very hard to understand. It wasn't erotic, yet it gave him a thrill that was almost entirely physical. It was a voice that knew the desires of the flesh, and pandered to them. It was frightening, but at the same time irresistibly alluring.

You shall find happiness; you shall find joy. You shall find friends and lovers. You shall find the most complete fulfilment 54.known to man, and the name of that fulfilment is written where n.o.body can find it but you.

Charlie waited for almost a minute. Then he reached out and clasped the cold bra.s.s doork.n.o.b. He wasn't sure if he could be seen from the yard or not. It depended on the angle of the moonlight. He took a breath, and then tugged the door open - at the very instant a huge grey cloud rolled over the moon and obscured it completely.

He saw something. He wasn't quite sure what it was. A face, or a mirror reflecting his own face. A white transfixed face, with eyes that glittered at him. A blue-white tongue lolling between blue-white lips. Then a white blur of fabric, a hood tugged hurriedly over, and a small crooked figure crab-hopping away; then darkness. No sound, no cry, no noise at all. Only the breeze blowing boisterously over the yard, and the irritating banging of an upstairs shutter. Squeeak-shudder-clop!

Martin was standing in his dressing gown, his thin-wristed hands down by his sides, his face concealed by shadow. Charlie looked back down the yard, in the direction the hunched-up creature had fled, and said quietly, 'You want to tell me what's going on here?'

Martin said nothing. Charlie took two or three steps into the yard, but it was too dark for him to see very much. The moon remained hidden behind the clouds. The was.h.i.+ng line sang a low vibrant tenor. At last Charlie turned back to Martin and said, 'Who was that? Are you going to tell me who that was?'

'It wasn't anybody.'

'Don't bulls.h.i.+t me!' Charlie yelled at him. 'I saw him and I heard him! A little guy - no more than four feet tall!'

'I was here on my own,' said Martin. His voice was flat and expressionless.

'Martin, don't try to kid me, I saw him for myself. It was ^the same boy who was looking into the window at the Iron 55.Kettle, wasn't it? It was the same boy you were talking to in the parking lot. You didn't really think I believed that guitar stuff, did you? I saw him again this afternoon, on the green, and now here he is, in the middle of the night, at Mrs Kemp's.'

Martin lowered his head. The very faintest touch of moonlight illuminated the parting in his hair.

'Martin,' said Charlie. 'I'm your father. You have to tell me. It's my duty to look after you, whether I like it or not. Whether you like it or not.'

'You don't have to look after me,' said Martin.

'I'm your father.'

Martin raised his head. Charlie couldn't make out his face at all. 'You're a man who happened to f.u.c.k my mother, that's all,' Martin snapped at him. Then he wrenched open the kitchen door and ran inside. He left the door ajar, and Charlie standing in the dark back yard, feeling more isolated than ever before. Even in the Criterion Hotel in Omaha, Nebraska, in the middle of winter, he hadn't felt as isolated as this. He began to feel that real life was a little more than he could manage.

He turned and looked up at the moon, masking itself behind the clouds. He felt there was something he ought to do, some magic ritual he ought to perform to ward off malevolence until morning, but he couldn't think of anything else to do except to cross his two index fingers in the sign of the crucifix and hold them up to the sky. 'G.o.d, protect me,' he said, although he wasn't sure what good that would do, or even if he meant it.

He went back inside, locking the kitchen door behind him. He returned the walking stick to the umbrella stand. The house was silent. He climbed the stairs feeling very tired. One of the reasons he had been able to survive his job for so long was because he had always gone to bed early, with two large gla.s.ses of water to drink if he happened to wake up, and he 56.had always made sure that he stayed in bed for a full eight hours.

Martin had returned to bed, and was lying with his back turned to the door. Charlie climbed between the sheets, and lay there for a long time listening to Martin breathe. He knew he wasn't asleep, but he was waiting for him to say something.

After a while, he felt Martin gently shaking. He realized with intense pain and discomfort that he was crying.

'Martin?' He laid his hand on the boy's shoulder. 'Martin, for Christ's sake, if you can tell anybody what this is all about, you can tell me.'

'I can't tell anybody,' Martin sobbed.

Charlie was silent for a very long time. The worst part of it was not having the experience to be able to think of the right thing to say. Marjorie would know; Marjorie was unfailingly good with children. Marjorie had been unfailingly good with him, too, but not good enough to know what he really wanted out of life.

Martin wiped his eyes on the corner of the pillow slip and then lay there silently, not sleeping, but perfectly still.

Charlie said. 'I don't know what any of this means.'

'It doesn't mean anything.'

'But I don't see why you have to lie to me, Martin. I don't see why you have to pretend that there was n.o.body there when there very obviously was.'

'There was n.o.body there, Dad.'

For a split second, Charlie felt angry enough to smack Martin's head. But he made a deliberate effort to turn away, and stare fiercely at the bedside table, and let his sudden burst of temper dissipate into the darkness like a tipped-over basketful of small black snakes.

'We're going to have to talk this over tomorrow,' he said.

'Okay,' Martin said, as if he didn't have any intention of discussing it again.

There was another long pause, and then Charlie said, 'Was he a dwarf, or what?'

57.Martin didn't reply. His breathing was regular and even. Charlie leaned over him and saw that he was asleep - or, at least, that he was pretending to be asleep. He lay back on his pillow and looked up at the ceiling and wondered what the h.e.l.l he was going to do now. There were no handbooks for the estranged fathers of awkward and secretive teenage sons. There was no advisory service which could tell you what to do if your offspring started making mysterious trysts with white-hodded midgets in the middle of the night. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so distressing; and if Martin hadn't plainly been so upset.

The night went by as slowly as the great black wheel of a juggernaut. Every time Charlie checked his watch, it seemed as if the hands had hardly moved since the last time he had looked. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't even remember what it was he normally did to get himself to sleep. He thought about Marjorie, he thought about Martin. He thought about Milwaukee and the pain that he had suffered there. He half dozed for a while, and dreamed that he was eating dinner in a strange high-ceilinged restaurant with a long white napkin tucked into his collar. The waiters were all hooded, like monks, and they came and went in silence, carrying plates and wheeling chafing dishes. There was no menu, you had to eat whatever the monk-waiters set in front of you. The other diners were smooth-faced and expressionless. There was no food in front of them, and yet they waited at their tables with consummate patience, as if their meals would be worth waiting for even if they took several hours to be served. The men were dressed in evening wear - white ties and stiff collars and tail coats. The women wore extravagant wide-brimmed hats with wax fruit and flowers and ostrich plumes. They also wore glittering diamond necklaces and earrings that sparkled like Christmas trees, but apart from that most of them were nude. Looking around the restaurant Charlie saw bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s everywhere, some with nipples that had been rouged, others which had 58.been pierced and decorated with golden rings. He saw a redheaded woman with a feathery hat talking to the maitre d', smiling archly as she did so. Her thighs were wide apart on her satin dining chair, and a small hairless dog, was lapping with its tongue at her bushy, russet v.u.l.v.a. He turned. A monk-waiter had brought his meal, concealed beneath a s.h.i.+ny dish cover. The monk-waiter's face was as black as the inside of a clothes closet. 'Your dinner, sir,' he whispered seductively, and raised the dish cover with a flourish.

Charlie looked down at his plate and screamed.

The plate was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with thin, greyish soup, in which Martin's face was floating, staring up at him in silent desperation.

He opened his eyes. He was twisting the quilt in both hands, and he was smothered in sweat. He also had a taut, painful erection.

He thought for a moment that he had screamed out loud, but the night seemed so silent and undisturbed, and Martin was still breathing steadily and peacefully, and he realized then that he must have screamed only in his dream. He checked his watch. A minute and a half had pa.s.sed since the last time he had looked.

He thought for a while about Martin's face staring up at him out of the plate. Then he thought about the naked women in his dream restaurant. There was no question about it, his daytime problems were catching up with him while he slept. The problems of food, fatherhood, and s.e.xual frustration. He lay there feeling very middle aged and inadequate and tired, for hour after hour. He didn't know when he fell asleep; but shortly afterwards Martin opened his eyes and turned and looked at him, and then slid quietly out of bed and went to the window.

Martin stood by the window for almost a half-hour, while the sky gradually grew paler over the treeline towards Black Rock and Thomaston. In the yard below him, the small hooded 59.figure stood, equally silent, its cloak ruffled by the thin, early-morning wind, its eyes fixed steadily on Martin, waiting with a patience that had been shared by the diners in Charlie's dream.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Walter Haxalt was smooth, patronizing, and impatient. He sat behind his leather-topped reproduction desk, his hands steepled, gently tapping his fingertips together as if he were counting the valuable seconds that Charlie was wasting, second by second, dollar by dollar.

The morning sun struck through the window of his office and illuminated, as if it were a sign from G.o.d, a gold presentation clock that stood on the bookshelf just behind him. There was a motto engraved on the clock, 'Time Driveth Onward Fast'. Strangely, Charlie could remember the verse from which that motto had been taken. It ended, 'all things are taken from us, and become/Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past'.

Walter Haxalt said, 'I can't help you, I'm afraid. My only contract with M. Musette is purely professional. He lives here and so he banks here, and that's as far as it goes.'

Charlie glanced towards the window. Martin was waiting for him outside, in the car. 'I wasn't asking for anything more than an introduction.'

'Well, I wish I could help,' said Walter Haxalt, making it quite plain by his disinterested tone of voice that he didn't wish anything of the kind. 'But I can't abuse a customer's personal relations.h.i.+p with the bank for any reason at all, even if that reason happened to be meaningful and advantageous.'

'Have you ever eaten at Le Reposoir?' asked Charlie.

Walter Haxalt kept on tapping his fingers, but didn't answer directly. 'I guess you'll be leaving us now,' he said. 'Travelling ever onward, in your search for culinary perfection.'

Charlie stared at him. Walter Haxalt became suddenly self- 61.conscious about the way that Charlie was looking at him, and s.h.i.+fted in his studded leather chair. 'How did you find out what I do for a living?' Charlie asked.

'You told me,' said Walter Haxalt, uncomfortably.

'I never tell anybody.'

'Well, to tell you the truth, I had Clive check it out for me. He ran your licence through the computer.'

'Clive? That deputy who told me to move my car yesterday?'

Walter Haxalt nodded. 'This is a small town, it's vulnerable. We always have to take certain elementary precautions when strangers come around.'

'Did you take any elementary precautions when M. Musette set up shop?'

Walter Haxalt said, 'I can't discuss M. Musette with you, Mr McLean. If you want to know anything at all about M. Musette, I suggest you ask him yourself.'

Charlie eased himself out of his chair. 'All right,' he said. 'What can I say but thanks for nothing?'

Walter Haxalt focused on Charlie narrowly. 'We do try to be friendly, here in Alien's Corners. I want you to know that.'

'I think I've been able to make my own a.s.sessment, thank you,' Charlie replied.

'In that case, I hope you won't judge us too harshly.'

Charlie opened the office door. 'It's not my job to judge you, Mr Haxalt. Only your hotel and refreshment facilities. Right now, I'd say that Alien's Corners deserves the bent spoon award for service, the broken spring award for comfort, and the golden barbed wire award for hospitality.'

Walter Haxalt stood up. 'I hope you're not going to try to publish anything like that. If you do, I'm going to have to speak to your employers.'