The Waking That Kills Read Online Free PDF

identified a handful. Never an enthusiast as a boy, never interested in planes or cars or steam engines, I glanced up too and said, ‘I haven’t got a clue, Lawrence. Let me see...’ I pointed with my thumb. ‘That’s a Lancaster bomber, and there’s a Spitfire, and is that a Mosquito? Oh, and the airliner, the white one with the blue stripe, is that a Comet?’ I scanned around the rafters of the high room. ‘Green one? I don’t see it... which one do you mean?’
    He reacted explosively. One moment he was a drawling teenager lying limp and exhausted on his bed... and then he bounced onto his feet, reaching up, reaching up, his face suddenly clouded with a rushing of blood into his cheeks. The cat was out of the room in one long orange streak. The boy grabbed one of the planes, wrenched it off its thread and flung it onto the floor. It smashed into pieces.
    ‘Green!’ he was hissing at me. ‘Didn’t I say the green one? The Phantom he flies out of Coningsby!’
    He was calm again. The blood drained out of his face. His skin was as white as before, with only a residual blotchiness where the nettles had blistered him. He stepped off the bed and busied himself picking up the pieces of the shattered aircraft. ‘I can fix it, I can fix it,’ he was saying to himself, and then he turned to look at me over his shoulder, as though he’d suddenly remembered I was there, and he said more loudly, ‘I can fix it, I’m good at fixing things, it’s only a model.’
    He sat on the bed with the fragments in his hands. He spread them across the blanket and rearranged them, the bits of a puzzle, like an archaeologist about to reassemble the fossilised bones of a dinosaur he’d unearthed. His calmness was rather unnerving. I watched his hands, the long, white, bony fingers, as if I would detect a tremor or a twitch, some aftershock of anger. There was none. There was no quaver in his voice, when he said to me, ‘My mum will tell you. She’ll explain it all, I guess. I get angry. That’s why I’m here right now, that’s why I’m at home and not at school. That’s why you’re here.’
    Indeed. I wanted to tell him – to counter his burst of anger with a show of my own resentment of what he’d said – that I was there because I’d chosen to come, that I was staying of my own free will and not because I’d been summoned by his mother to take charge of her spoilt, solitary son. But I held my breath and didn’t say anything. For one reason, I knew from my experience of teaching how a few cross words too soon in a new relationship with pupils could make things prickly for weeks or even months; and furthermore, the matter-of-fact way the boy had spoken, without a trace of rancour in his voice, made me hold my tongue.
    As though he could read my thoughts, he turned his face towards me as he re-aligned the pieces of the plane on his bed, and with a quick, charming smile he said, ‘I’m sorry. I get angry. That’s all you need to know about me for the time being.’
    I followed him across the room to the open window. He picked up the binoculars and handed them to me. I held them to my eyes, readjusted the focus and looked as far as the silvery horizon. ‘On a clear day you can see the sea,’ he was saying, ‘and sometimes the planes taking off and coming back to Coningsby, where my Dad flies from...’
    I instinctively dipped the glasses when the top of the Scots pine blurred my view of the further distance. I changed the focus and followed the bristly blackness of the tree down and down to the very base of the trunk. The orange cat was sunbathing on the bonnet of the hearse. For a second, a spangle of light from the crazed windscreen dazzled me so that I held the binoculars away from my face and rubbed my eyes. It gave the boy the chance to take the glasses from me and put them back on the window-sill.
    ‘The garden and everything, I’ll show you. Come on.’ He gestured me to follow him out of the room and down