He puts the pills into his mouth and washes them down.
“And now,” says the stranger, “it is time for us to leave.”
For a moment he thinks that they are talking about their own departure, that he will be left alone in this beautiful house, but they do not move and he realises that it is he who will be leaving. “Where am I going?”
“Come on. It’s getting late.”
They give him the shoes he has been wearing for the last seven months. They give him the coat has been wearing for the last seven months. Neither has been cleaned. They smell vile and he is amazed that he could have become inured to this.
He is ushered out of the front door and into the rear seat of a black BMW. The snow continues to fall thickly and steadily. He is starting to feel his hand again. The stranger climbs into the driver’s seat and only as they are pulling away does he realise that the woman is not coming with them. In spite of what has just happened he feels both guilty for not having said goodbye and desperately sad that he may never see her again.
It is impossible to work out where they are going. Through the windscreen he can see the constantly expanding funnel of illuminated flakes, the occasional lit window, the occasional glare of headlights from a car passing them in the opposite direction, then darkness again. They drive through a village, then another. He is no longer aware of anything outside the car. He has run out of endorphins. The pain in the stump of his severed finger is overwhelming and he must use all his energy to hold his hand as still as he can while the car bumps and twists along these country roads. He is crying. He has never cried with pain before.
He has no real sense of how long they are in the car. After a period that might be anything between half an hour and two hours they come to a halt. He had assumed that he was being taken back to the train line where the stranger had found him, but he can see lit windows on both sides of the street.
The stranger turns the engine off, gets out, comes round and opens the door. “We’re here.”
Gavin wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and climbs out. It is blisteringly cold. There are three or four inches of snow on the ground and he is surprised that they have driven so swiftly and with no obvious problems.
The stranger shuts the car door behind him. “Follow me.”
Partly it is the injury, partly it is the darkness and the obscuring snow, but he does not realise where he is until he sees that he is being led through the gates of the Rookery. He wants to turn and walk away. He does not want to see his family. He does not want to tell them what has happened to him over the previous year. It is entirely possible that they think he is dead. But he cannot turn and walk away. He knows that the stranger will not let him back in the car and he knows that he cannot survive a night out here without asking for someone’s help.
“Look,” says the stranger.
They are standing on the lawn now. In front of them are the French windows, lit up, uncurtained. He takes a couple of steps forward and thinks, at first, that his parents must have sold the house because what he sees is an old man making his way to the dining table using a walking frame. He wonders if he has been away for a fairy-tale number of years and it is his parents who are long dead. Then the man sits down and Gavin realises that he is looking at his father. Either the fall he had earlier in the year was more serious than he realised or something else has happened to him in the intervening months. He seems half the size and twenty years older.
Gavin takes another step towards the house. His mother sits at the head of the table in the seat his father used to occupy. Leo sits on one side of her, Sarah on the other. His sister seems uncharacteristically subdued. A teenage girl sits beside her, willowy, dark. He guesses that this must be Ellie. It has been two years since he last saw her. Sofie and Anya are having an animated conversation, but he cannot see David, nor can he see a place set for him.
A veil of snow swings between him and the house, breaking his concentration and reminding him how cold he is and how much his finger is hurting. He turns to find that the stranger has vanished. He is alone. He looks down at his hand and sees that the bandage is now soaked with blood which is dripping onto the snow at his feet. He needs to see a doctor. He needs warmth. He needs help of many kinds.
He turns back to the house. Another gust of wind. He takes a deep breath. He steps onto the little paved area between the potted shrubs. The intruder light clicks on. He knocks twice on the glass. As one his family turn to look at him.
THE GUN
Daniel stands in the Funnel, a narrow path between two high brick walls that join the playground to the estate proper. On windy days the air is forced through here then spun upwards in a vortex above the square of so-called grass between the four blocks of flats. The Wizard of Oz in stained concrete. Anything that isn’t nailed down becomes airborne. Washing, litter, dust. Grown men have been knocked off their feet. A while back there was a story going round about a flying cat.
Except there’s no wind this morning, there hasn’t been any wind for days, just an unremitting mugginess that makes you want to open a window until you remember that you’re outside. The end of August, a week since the family holiday in Magaluf where he learnt the backstroke and was stung by a jellyfish, a week till school begins again. He is ten years old. Back at home his older sister is playing teacher and his younger brother is playing pupil. Helen is twelve, Paul seven. She has a blackboard and a little box of chalks in eight colours and when Paul misbehaves she smacks him hard on the leg. His mother is doing a big jigsaw of Venice on the dining table while the tank heats for the weekly wash.
He can see the white socks of a girl on the swings, appearing, disappearing, appearing, disappearing. It is 1972. “Silver Machine” and “Rocket Man.” He cannot remember ever having been this bored before. He bats a wasp away from his face as a car door slams in the distance, then steps into the shadow of the stairwell and starts climbing towards Sean’s front door.
There will be three other extraordinary events in his life. He will be sitting at dusk on the terrace of a rented house near Cahors with his eight-year-old son when they see a barn on the far side of the valley destroyed by lightning, the crack of white light appearing to come not from the sky but to burst from the ground beneath the building.
He will have a meeting with the manager of a bespoke ironworks near Stroud whose factory occupies one of three units built into the side of a high railway cutting. Halfway through the meeting a cow will fall through the roof and it won’t be anywhere near as funny as it sounds.
On the morning of his fiftieth birthday his mother will call and say that she needs to see him. She will seem calm and give no explanation and despite the fact that there is a large party planned for the afternoon he will get into the car and drive straight to Leicester only to find that the ambulance has already taken her body away. Talking to his father the following day he will realise that he received the phone call half an hour after the stroke which killed her.
Today will be different, not simply shocking but one of those moments when time itself seems to fork and fracture and you look back and realise that if things had happened only slightly differently you would be leading one of those other ghost lives speeding away into the dark.