The Possession of Mr Cave. Matt Haig
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out. ‘I hope you had fun, watching him die. I hope you sleep the innocent sleep, knowing you are soaked in his blood.’
They stood there, behind the crossed wire, like thugs in a Bernstein musical. The shaven-haired boy with the sharp eyes made a rude gesture, but said nothing.
‘Murderers,’ I yelled, before screeching off.
And I didn’t leave it there. The next evening I yelled the same accusation. And the next, and the next, but I never saw him. I never saw Denny there. Indeed, by the fourth time, I couldn’t see any of them. I was yelling into nothing, accusing the air. Guilt had made them evaporate, I told myself. My words had moved them on. The strange thing is I felt no satisfaction at this. My heart fell when I realised they weren’t there, and my anger sank swiftly back to despair.
From his early school reports it was clear that your brother was not going to be a high achiever in an academic sense. There were none of the ‘outstandings’ or ‘exceptionals’ that always rained down on you, never a ‘pleasure to teach’ or a ‘joyous addition to the classroom’.
Reuben had no interest in books in the way you had. For him, reading never rose above the level of a necessary chore. He enjoyed my night-time stories of Dick Turpin and all those other old rogues, as you both did, but once he had heard one story he wanted to hear it again and again, whereas you always craved tales you had never known before.
I see him now, at the window, his finger making patterns in the condensation. ‘A quiet boy.’ ‘Easily led.’
Money, in this blind century, has become the measure of love. A crude outsider would tell me I exercised more care for you because, from the age of eleven, I paid for your schooling.
Yet what could I do? I could only pay for one of you – should you have both suffered for the sake of equality? Was it my fault the Mount was a girls’ school? Would it have been better to send Reuben, who had never shown any interest in his education? No, St John’s was the obvious choice for him.
Yet, of course, I must admit this was not the only extra-vagance I afforded you. After all, you wanted to ride, so I paid for a horse and for it to be at livery. You wanted to play music, and I paid for you to have violin and then cello lessons at the college. You wanted a cat, specifically a coffee-cream Birman, and I bought you Higgins.
Yet you were actively interested in these things. They weren’t acquired out of any fatherly overindulgence, or if they were I would gladly have shown the same indulgence to your brother if he had only requested such presents. Where were Reuben’s interests? I never had any idea. He wanted a bicycle and the one I bought wasn’t good enough. He wanted all this technological claptrap that he knew I wouldn’t allow before he asked. No, we must never forget it, your brother was not easy. Even in my grief I could not ignore this. Indeed, my grief required me to remember it very well, for I already knew how sentimentality can flood in and drown memories, leaving the true person beyond recall.
I wanted to remember him as he was. I wanted to remember his incessant screams through the night as a baby, his later tantrums, his insatiable appetite for jellied sweets. I wanted to remember how cross he got when you used to read from the same picture book together. I wanted to remember the rows he had with you, even the one where he tore up your sheet music.
I wanted to remember the way he used to sit and watch television, with his hand covering the birthmark on his face. I wanted to remember the cigarette incident, the shoplifting incident, the smashed vase incident. I wanted to remember the early Sunday mornings when you would both go with me to an antiques fair, and he would grumble all the way down the A1.
Yet the memories of him were always hard to relive and restore. When I thought of him a thought of you would swiftly arrive in its place. When I tried to picture you as babies, as your mother last saw you, I wouldn’t be able to see his screaming face. There was always just you, lying placid by his side, lost in your innocent unworded dreams. A dream yourself.
Now, that first day I opened the shop after his funeral. Your first day back at the Mount. I kept myself busy polishing the ewers and tureens and all the other pieces of silverware. All day I was there in my white cotton gloves, filling the shop with the smell of polish, my curved reflection staring back with manic eyes.
Customers came in and I scared them out of spending their money. I made mistakes. I gave people the wrong change. I dropped a Davenport jug. I was feeling dreadful.
‘Come on, Terence, pull your socks up,’ said Cynthia, helping out behind the counter. ‘You’ve got my granddaughter to feed.’
I know I used to grumble to you about how she scared away the customers with her witch’s nails and wardrobe and forthright manner, but really she was a great help.
zThen there was her special meal she was already planning for no specified purpose. ‘I’m inviting my old am dram friends,’ she said. ‘We’re going to the Box Tree. It’s got a Michelin star, apparently, and just had a refurbishment. You have to book months in advance, so if I want it for August I’m going to have to arrange it now. Do you both want to come?’
You were on the sofa, in your jodhpurs, ready to go to the stables. ‘Yes, I’ll come,’ you said, much to my relief.
‘Yes, Cynthia, of course,’ I said, realising how important it seemed to her. ‘I’d love to be there.’
‘Very good,’ she said. ‘I’ll write it on the calendar.’
* * *
You said little in the car, en route to the stables. I remember leaving you there, and feeling what I had felt at the funeral. That strange sensation of departing myself, a leaking out of my soul, complete with the darkening sense of vision. And then on my return, of course, I saw him. Denny. It was getting dark and so, when I turned towards the paddock and saw this sweating figure in running clothes, shining pale in the car headlights, I thought it might be a hallucination. I blinked him away but he was still there, staring straight at me.
I got out and told him to leave. He walked away, giving me a look of steely resolution, before continuing his run. Then I called to you, do you remember? And we had that row as we walked Turpin back to his stable. Apparently you had no idea what he was doing there. Apparently you hated him just as much as I did. Apparently he’d never been to gawp at you before.
You were perfectly convincing, and I was perfectly convinced, even if I had the sense that I had been woken up to something. There was so much that was precious in my life that I had been leaving open and undefended. ‘I’m sorry, Petal,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have raised my voice.’ And you nodded and watched the houses slide past, perhaps wishing you were behind their square, golden windows, happily lost in another girl’s Tuesday night.
I remember trying to sort out your brother’s belongings. I sat there, on his bed, and felt the foreignness of the room. Posters of films I had never heard of. Unfathomable technology I didn’t even realise he owned. Magazines covered with women who didn’t look like women, women who looked so inhuman they might have been designed by an Italian sports car manufacturer.
I went through his school bag and found a letter he never gave me. It was from his headmaster, informing me that he had missed two of Mr Weeks’ history lessons. The letter dated from March, before Mr Weeks had lost his job. I remembered him from the time he had come into the shop with his wife and his son George, to buy the pine mule chest. A tall yeti of a man who could have been quite a bully in the classroom, I imagined.
It was strange, being in his room. Reuben’s presence was so real, contained as it was in all those objects, those possessions that reminded me how little I had understood him. With Cynthia’s help we eventually packed a lot of stuff away in the attic. You helped with some of it, didn’t you?
Though the thing I really need to tell you concerns his bicycle. As you know, I popped an advertisement in the window, offering it for twenty-five pounds. Within a day a woman had called and arranged to come in and buy it for her son. A Scottish lady with a long face that reminded me rather of the aboriginal statues on Easter Island.
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