“I’ve not been as good to yow, Astrid, as yow’ve been to me. I canna stop missing my brother, Dryst, and I’m sorry for that.”
“No,” she said to him. “Never think that way. You’ve helped me — you brought me through the Death, you know?”
“I’ve done nothing,” he said. “It’s yow, Astrid. Yow’re the angel.”
In the year he was with her, all this knowledge helped her come to her own livable terms with what happened to her in second withdrawal, when she herself experienced a mystical encounter, and with what had happened since. She’d come to believe that being the Christ of Otters wasn’t a supernatural event; it was subnatural. It was a deeper part of being human.
AFTER HIS NAP, with Muezza at his toes, Cuthbert did something he’d pledged to himself that he’d never do. He snooped around the flat a bit and went where he knew he oughtn’t. He tiptoed into Astrid’s bedroom, looking behind himself continually, terrified she’d walk into the flat. It wasn’t the London Zoo, and there was no malice or prurience, but he hated himself for doing it. He felt compelled only out of a loving, cracked desire to know more about Astrid, whom he still associated with Drystan in a way that was helplessly immovable.
So a few minutes later, the erstwhile saint stood at his Messiah’s dresser, and he gazed at the small collection of things Astrid had put there. They struck him as sacred, even in their mundanity. There were the three fotolives, including the one with Astrid as a girl in a red teepee, and extra hairpins. There was a loose gangliatoxic round packed into its cylindrical bronze cartridge. There was a set of blue nuplastic swimming goggles with a precious white band. And there was a carefully folded DNA wipe with tiny number 5’s all over it.
Cuthbert unfolded and flattened the wipe out. It was dated from the day before yesterday.
He’d heard of these wipes, but he’d never seen or used one. He felt curious. It felt dry and papery, yet slightly sticky somehow, too. He suddenly recalled that, the day before yesterday, Astrid had gently wiped a bit of cake from the corner of his mouth at tea, using what he thought was a serviette. He hadn’t thought twice about it until now. She had looked oddly uncomfortable, he realized, not herself. The wipes were used to establish or prove familial genetic relationships, and this one indicated that the chance of a direct genetic connection between whoever had been swiped was roughly 5 percent. Cuthbert began to refold it, but he couldn’t keep the folds straight, and this — and the sudden dread that she would reject him — caused such anxiety, his hands shook and the refolding process failed again and again.
Such was the weakness of Cuthbert’s hearing, and his distracted state, that when a scrabbling at the flat’s front door began, and Astrid came in, he hadn’t a clue she was behind him.
“No,” she said. “Don’t look at that. Please, Cuddy.”
Cuthbert reeled back, utterly humiliated, his mouth gurning with shame.
“Oh blessed,” he gasped. “Oi’m a sorry yam-yam, I am. A’m sorry, a’m sorry. I’m so desperately sorry.” He held the DNA wipe up. It was balled and slightly torn. “I’ve just cocked up this important document of yours or whatnot, dear, the one with the fives all over. I just — I wanted — I was just curious. ”
“It’s all right,” she said, speaking with a shaky voice. “It doesn’t matter. But come out of there, you silly old rascal. Let’s have a nice tea now, shall we? Cuthbert? Cuthbert?”
But Cuthbert Handley had fallen down. His big, stupid, cardiomyopathic heart had trilled into a lethal ventricular arrhythmia.
“No!” Astrid cried. Without a moment’s pause, she blinked 999 over her corneas, and sent out emergency double-orange-freqs.
Cuthbert lay on the floor, looking up at the white ceiling, struggling to breathe, but not feeling any real pain. His mind began to travel.
He and Drystan had been so perfectly happy, so rarely happy, ambling on a different scalding day in the Wyre Forest. 1968. He remembered again a little detail from that afternoon, how Drystan quite inadvertently stepped on a young snake — an adder — and killed it — oh, they should have turned back then, Drystan had said. It was a complete accident, blameless — the snake had been totally hidden — but Cuthbert instantly saw Drystan’s recognition that he had tread upon a living forest creature. Drystan had jumped in horror, drawn himself back.
“Oh no,” Drystan had said. “I hurt something, Cuddy. Oh, no.”
The venomous adder hadn’t bitten him, but the thought of what he had done seemed to annihilate him.
“It’s only a snake,” Cuthbert had said. “Wasn’t you, Drystan. It’s like a cricket or something, that’s all. A snake is a snake. It’s not even a good animal.”
But no consolation seemed to touch Drystan.
Cuthbert remembered how he had run his finger down the cool scales of the snake, whose upper body had been given a grotesque crook. The string of black diamonds on its back were so perfect and ordered, like some optical art. But Drystan would not touch it. He looked devastated, clutching his cheeks and pulling his own ears.
The two boys had buried it quickly, dug a little hole and covered it in pink mallows and purple betony, but Drystan would not stop weeping. Cuthbert had almost forgotten that, and now he could see Dryst’s face above him, weeping again. He was a brilliant child, and could go from hard lad to sensitive so quickly, Cuthbert remembered — he could be so terribly sincere. He was a good boy, a very good little lad.
“A’m worse than evil,” Dryst had said as they brushed soil over the snake, so genuinely remorseful. “I’ll pay for this — yow’ll see. Them Boogles will get me. Maybe both of us.”
After the burial, they went on exploring the forest. Drystan did seem to lighten up a bit — just a bit, at first. Cuthbert found pieces of old charcoal around some of the old woodland hearths, and he beaned Drystan with them a few times rather beautifully, and eventually Drystan fought back, and they were having fun again. Then they were laughing again, running down that hill in the forest like young puppies, not minding their bearings, speeding through the waist-high maidenhair and bracken, and they ran and laughed and ran and laughed and it was as if they were carving a path through a flood of green and fields of glee that would go on and on and on. Drystan turned around and looked at Cuthbert, and it was the last time he saw his brother’s face alive. He was smiling, but he looked sad, too, as if he knew.
He went back in his memories to the terrible walk back to the cottage, after Drystan vanished. He saw, on its hind legs, the same giant river otter he’d seen and heard under the water with Drystan, trying to save him, or to take him to the animal world. There, near a bend in the brook he could see and hear, again, more softly now, more sweetly, how Drystan had called out underwater to him, and how the words sounded like gagoga maga medu, at least as Cuthbert came to remember them.
There had been an inquest by the county authorities. The death was ruled a “misadventure.” Cuthbert, only six years old, could not be persuaded that “Boogles” hadn’t murdered Drystan. His granny said it wasn’t so, again and again, until the day she died, soothing Cuthbert as best she could.
“Inna wasn’t them Boogles, Cuddy. It wasn’t nothing with the forest.” But he never wholly believed it, and he didn’t think his granny did either.
He thought of his gran for a moment as he gazed at the whiteness above. He wondered if he might see her in the next world. Winefride Wenlock had leaned even more heavily upon “owd” Wyrish folkways after Drystan’s drowning. She used to tell Cuthbert that she had been careful to make sure neither his brother nor he had gazed at a looking glass before age one, but somehow she must have failed with Drystan, she must have. She claimed that white birds were a sign of death, and if Cuddy were playing alone in the garden and a seagull or white owl appeared, he was to “scrobble indoors” right away. One time, when Cuthbert was down with bronchitis, his gran came into his room late at night with scissors. Her Alfie had died of pneumonia, and lung ailments in general obsessed her. He felt her bend down and carefully clip hair from the nape of his neck. He asked her, the next day, why she had taken the hair, and she related that she counted out twenty pieces of the sweet brown strands, folded them into a slice of buttered bread, and fed it all to a stray dog. The dog would take the disease “back to the Boogles,” she said.