Black Diamond Page 22

  ‘What’s his name again?’

  ‘Eric.’

  ‘Was that the only time he asked you to call him by a different name?’

  ‘What scares me,’ he said, ‘is that he’s getting better at it. The first time, it only lasted a few minutes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The switch-around. And the second time was for three hours. I just hid in the room till it was over.’

  ‘It happened before? This is –’

  ‘The third time.’

  ‘Okay. I see. There’s probably a pattern that’ll help to show how it operates.’

  ‘I don’t think so. The first two times, it happened while I was asleep. I woke up different. Changed. First time, in the morning. And the second time was in the afternoon – I’d just dropped off, having a nap. This time, I ran up the stairs, opened his door and got the lightswitch, and that did it. The light – it was as if the light caused it. I thought I’d been electrocuted. But there I was, all of a sudden: him. And he was sitting up in bed, saying, “Hi, Schizo.”’

  ‘What clothes did you have on?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When you turned on the light, you changed size. What happened to the clothes?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That was funny. I had on this huge suit.’

  ‘And the shoes?’

  ‘Same thing. I had to step out of them.’

  ‘What about Eric? He was sitting up in bed and he’d just been changed, too. So, he was full-sized. Whose pajamas was he wearing?’

  ‘He doesn’t. He won’t wear pajamas.’

  His answer wasn’t quite quick enough. These things always broke down on the detail, like theories of life after death.

  Something was going on. There was no way she could know exactly what, but that didn’t matter. She’d caught the gist of it: that this undersized child felt an overwhelming need to take over the position of father, so that he would no longer be helpless. To pretend that his father had become a child would be paying him back for all sorts of things, including the divorce. But he hadn’t worked out the finer points of his story.

  He’d made a mistake in talking too much. He’d over-explained. He should just have told her that his parents were mean to him. If he’d left it simple like that, she might never have moved away from her initial feeling of pity. But she was being asked for too much. It seemed to her now that he was quite strange and rather creepy. She’d give him something to eat and then call up a rescue squad. She ought to have done that straight away. She sensed herself edging towards betrayal, telling herself that she wasn’t qualified to deal with a child who was obviously so disturbed: that this was a job for professionals. She’d telephone somebody. She’d have to. While they’d been talking, while the light had grown less and had at last disappeared, he’d become her responsibility.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘I think I’ll fix myself something to eat. Come on into the kitchen.’ She got up and walked ahead of him.

  *

  As soon as he saw what was in the icebox, he went to work. Without asking her what she wanted to save or how much he was being offered, he pulled out dishes, bowls and jars. He dropped bread into the toaster and asked where the plates were. He’d just put the finishing touches on a toasted club sandwich when the telephone rang. He froze, his hand covering the food as if he’d stolen it.

  ‘It’s probably my aunt,’ she told him. She walked into the hall and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Sandra?’ Aunt Marion said. ‘Did Lomax & Kidder send the men?’

  ‘Oh yes, that’s fine. I mean, it seems to be. I haven’t measured it, but I’m sure it’s okay. It looks the right size.’

  Aunt Marion was pleased. She asked in a general way if Sandra was all right; if she needed anything. All the arrangements were just fine, Sandra said: they’d see each other soon. She hung up. She’d forgotten to ask about directions for finding the statue of the Revolutionary heroine. She’d been thinking all the time about the boy in the kitchen.

  He was halfway through his sandwich when she got back. She put two more slices of bread into the toaster.

  ‘Was that your boyfriend?’ he said.

  ‘That was my aunt. My great-aunt. She wanted to know about the storm window.’

  ‘Why?’

  She wasn’t going to explain everything to him, to tell him that it wasn’t her house and that she was a guest almost as much as he was. She snatched the hot toast out of the machine and threw it on to her plate. ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘Just asking. You aren’t married, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is your boyfriend coming back tonight?’

  ‘Maybe. Why?’

  ‘Well, if he’s away or something, maybe I could stay over.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just for tonight. It would make a big difference. It would mean he couldn’t find me.’

  ‘I can’t let you stay here. That’s definite.’

  ‘You don’t know what he’s like.’

  ‘Don’t you have any ideas about what I can do with you? I don’t want to hand you over to the police, but what else can I do?’

  ‘You can keep me right here.’

  ‘Would you rather go to a kind of shelter place, or to a hospital, or to the social workers?’

  ‘I don’t want to go to any of those places. They’d just send me back to him.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not if you really made a fuss.’

  ‘They wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Well, don’t tell them everything. Just tell them that he treats you badly and you’re scared of him and you don’t want to go back.’

  ‘They wouldn’t care. They’d all start persuading. People talk and talk at you, till you lose hope. And then you just agree to what they decide.’

  ‘Some of those places give you a lawyer.’

  She sat down at the kitchen table to eat her sandwich. She’d cut it into four sections. As she picked one of them up, he asked, ‘Can I have some of your sandwich?’

  She pushed the plate towards him.

  They ate in silence for a while, then he said, ‘If Jesus Christ came back now, what do you think would happen to him?’

  She chewed. Did he think of himself as a misunderstood Messiah – was he aiming that high? ‘He’d be a rock star,’ she said. ‘He’d capture the audience and then he’d get born again and try to take everybody with him.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think he’d be betrayed again. I know it always happens, sooner or later. They just can’t believe you.’

  She waited. He bit into his quarter of the sandwich. At any minute he might claim to be The Second Coming. Or maybe he’d go for broke and announce that he was an alien.

  *

  He might just want some sympathy. Or he might be out of his mind. The mentally ill came in all shapes and all ages. So did con artists. And you could see anything on television nowadays: you could be excited by the idea of trying out something you’d seen. This might be a practice run, like a rehearsal. It would take a lot of nerve, or course. There couldn’t be many children who would engage strange grown-ups in conversation – that was a thing they were always being warned against. Even if they weren’t scared, they’d expect an unfavorable response. But a lonely boy, without brothers and sisters at home or friends at school, might be driven to make contact with other people: this meeting with a stranger might be a way of asking for advice. It could also, just as easily, be a joke he’d cooked up with his friends. If a joke, how harmless was it? And who else was in on it? She was all alone in the house. Maybe she’d better think about that.

  She also began to wonder to what extent their acquaintance was a matter of chance. Had he picked her out at random, or had he chosen her specially? It was possible that he’d seen her out walking earlier in the day, and had followed her to see where she lived. That wasn’t a nice thought. The picture of a lost and sad little boy didn’t agree with such predatory action.

  He said, ‘If
Jesus Christ was alive today, they’d say he was loony.’

  ‘They’d probably just say he was a Communist, unless he started boasting about who his father was. He’d have to keep a low profile.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Keep his head down, so nobody could see him against the skyline. But you’re assuming that all those miracles and things are true.’

  ‘If Jesus Christ was alive today,’ he said again, ‘his own mother would turn him over to the cops.’

  Not his mother, Sandra thought, nor his wife. They don’t. You can read in the newspapers about maniacs and murderers or rapists, and almost always they have families; they’re married. The wives and mothers have to know some of what’s going on. Part of them doesn’t know, part of them does. But they never say anything. The unspoken, unacknowledged evil in families, society, in politics, isn’t condemned because – if once recognized – something would have to be done about it. And then our world would come to an end. Our world is the one where we don’t do it ourselves, but we can see the advantages to be gained by keeping quiet about it.

  ‘His mother wouldn’t,’ she said, ‘but the neighbors might.’

  She was beginning to feel as if that kind of traditional neighborly interference might make sense. No matter what they were like or what might have happened between them, his father and mother would be worried to death. She had only his word for it that they were even divorced. She ought to turn him in to somebody who could deal with him.

  But not against his will. At the moment he seemed relaxed. It was insidiously agreeable to imagine that he considered her a sympathetic listener and therefore, by inference, a better parent than either of his real ones. There was no denying that he was odd but something about him, from the beginning, had appealed to her. Why had he chosen her to unburden himself to – to put on this performance? Why did people choose each other?

  ‘How did all this begin?’ she asked.

  ‘I told you. With the computer.’

  ‘I mean: when did you notice that things were going wrong between you?’ I sound like the advertisements in a True Romance magazine, she thought: When was it that you first spotted those telltale signs that his love was waning?

  ‘It all goes back to six years ago,’ he said. ‘At Christmas.’

  ‘Was that when the marriage split up?’

  ‘No, that was less than two years ago. It wasn’t anything to do with that. This was just him. It began with his Christmas present. He’d asked for a magic wand. Nothing else. He said afterwards that he figured he wouldn’t have to ask for anything else, because once he had the wand, he could get whatever he made a wish for. That was a disaster. He was so disappointed, he cried. He kept saying, “It doesn’t work.” And he blamed it on us. He couldn’t see why we’d lie to him like that.’

  ‘Didn’t you warn him? That it wouldn’t really be magic?’

  ‘Of course not. That’s silly. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘I can remember seeing one of those tricks at the circus. I thought it really was magic, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t the wand that caused it. Or the cloak and hat, or anything like that. I thought it was the person. I thought he was using something like electricity.’

  ‘He thought it was the wand.’ He wasn’t interested in her childhood memories. ‘You think I could have another sandwich?’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’

  She sat with her elbow bent and her chin in her hand, while he made himself another large sandwich. He’d dropped his guard. All his physical actions seemed comfortable. He was no longer pretending to be a man who had suddenly found himself half the size he was used to being. He must have come to the conclusion that he could count on her allegiance; whereas she, on the contrary, had suddenly had enough. He was too peculiar. Although his story, and the way he was presenting it to her, had its touching and amusing aspects, to hear someone talking about himself in the third person was beginning to annoy her. She remembered with amazement that he, a child, had managed to put her in a position where she was eager to believe that an utterly impossible, supernatural event had taken place. She was right – it wasn’t the wand, it was the electricity.

  As he unloaded plates and jars from the icebox, he started up again. ‘You know how it is,’ he said, ‘when you want something really bad. You think about it so hard, for so long. You think: nothing could ever make you want it less. But then you get nervous about losing it before you get to it. And then people – they don’t actually try to talk you out of it, but they tell you to turn your attention to something else while you’re waiting. So you do. And then somehow, you just forget it. You forget how much it meant. The importance is gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. That was desire: there was a time-limit attached to it. To be grown up wasn’t so marvelous, once you were there. It could only seem wonderful to a child. She hadn’t understood that when she was younger. But he did. He already knew about desire.

  ‘This might be building up,’ he said. ‘That could happen to me. I could just forget my life.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s possible. It happens to people.’

  ‘Amnesia?’

  ‘I meant: forget that I’m me, so that everybody thinks he’s me. But I guess I could get amnesia, too.’

  ‘I got interested in amnesia once. It’s sort of scary to think about. But it usually only happens after a shock or if you get hit on the head, like concussion or something. Sometimes a big mental shock will start it, but then it only happens to a certain kind of person.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘The kind that can’t face things.’

  ‘I didn’t put enough mayonnaise in this one,’ he told her. ‘It’s good but it needs just a little –’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ she said. She stood up, took a few steps over to the icebox and had her fingers on the doorhandle when the front doorbell rang.

  He jumped up. She got the mayonnaise out and handed it to him. He held on to it as if it were some kind of protection. ‘Don’t let anybody in,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll just go see who it is. You finish your sandwich.’

  *

  She walked back through the dining room, the hall, and past the living room. A young man stood outside the front door. He looked like an executive type, not the sort of person to be selling anything door to door or to know her Aunt Marion. A step up from Bert, anyway. Perhaps something had gone wrong with his car or his telephone. Or maybe he was another one who was lost. The knowledge that one other person was in the house – even though underage and possibly not right in the head – made her feel safe against intruders. She opened the door.

  He smiled. He said that he was sorry to disturb her.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘I wonder if you’ve seen a boy, about eleven: my son.’ He raised a hand as if to indicate a flood level, and added, ‘About this high. Hair kind of, um, more or less like mine. Eyes …’

  He was better-looking than his son, though it was impossible to tell how eleven-year-olds were going to turn out, especially in the matter of looks. He seemed completely all right and normal, not a cruel father or a man who was claiming to be something he wasn’t.

  ‘I did see a boy when I was out walking this afternoon,’ she said. ‘He was coming from the direction of town, over there, and I passed him on my way back here. Has something happened?’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He was on the other side of the street. He just looked like a schoolboy. You know. Except that he was all dressed up.’

  ‘That’s right. He was supposed to be going to a party, but he didn’t. He skipped out of it.’

  ‘Is he in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘No, no. This happens periodically. He runs off for a while. Anything he doesn’t want to do.’

  ‘It might have been some other boy. I don’t know. If I see him again, should I phone the police?’

  ‘No, don’t do that. H
ere. I’ll give you my phone number.’ He took a notebook and a pen out of his breast pocket. From inside the book he produced a business card, which he handed to her. ‘And I wonder if you’d mind giving me your name. I’m Roy Martinson: it’s on the card. My son’s called Eric. And this is number –?’ He stepped back. His eyes went to the doorframe and the brass numbers on it. ‘Twenty-three.’

  ‘Sandra,’ she said.

  ‘And do you have a phone number?’

  If the house or the telephone had been hers, she would have hesitated. The thought didn’t occur to her that by giving out the phone number she might be subjecting her Aunt Marion to a spate of unpleasant anonymous calls. She told him the number.

  ‘I’ve been running around for hours,’ he said, ‘and you’re the first person I’ve met who might have seen him beyond Hillside Avenue. Plenty of people saw him at the Perrys’, when he was walking out of the party, but they know him in that neighborhood. So, I think I’m going to knock off for a while. Go back home. He might be there already, waiting for me.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said. Everyone did that: told lies and hypocrisies because they wanted to change things, but couldn’t. They wanted to appear helpful and comforting, even when their actions were obstructive. They needed to be liked. She hoped that everything would be all right for him. She wanted him to be happy. But she didn’t tell him that his son was in the kitchen.

  He thanked her and turned away. She closed the door. She went back to the kitchen, where Eric was sitting behind a pile of jars and plates, his face rigid, his eyes large.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I said that I’d seen a boy, just some boy not specified, going in the opposite direction. But I think maybe I ought to call up and get you back home.’

  ‘You’re a real fool, aren’t you?’ he said. His tone was so assured, adult and nasty that it stopped her in her tracks. He had a look to go with it. Where did an expression like that come from – from the attractive father?

  ‘Why’s that?’ she said.

  ‘I know a lot about this house now.’

  ‘And I know your father’s phone number.’