Read The Waking That Kills for Free Online Page B

she reached for the egg cup and slipped her rings back onto her finger. It prompted me to ask, ‘And where is your husband? Lawrence has mentioned his father a few times...’
    ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll make you another coffee. Lawrence won’t be up yet. You don’t have to clock in and start work, like you do in your school in Borneo.’
    So we sat opposite one another at the table and drank coffee. It didn’t take long for her to tell me what had happened, only long enough for me to take a few sips and burn my lips and for the smell of the cooking scones to fill the kitchen. Last autumn, her husband had taken off on a routine training flight, a Tuesday morning, the 13th September, with two other Phantoms... and as she talked she drew into the flour on the table with her left forefinger, to illustrate what had happened. A dot in the flour for the air-base at RAF Coningsby, a line in the flour to the coast, the line continuing across a powdery white sea, and then a sudden angry squiggle where her husband’s plane had impacted with the water, smashed into pieces and sunk.
    She looked across the table at me. ‘Missing, presumed dead. One moment he was on a regular sortie... the other pilots said it was a clear, calm day and they were going out to sea and up the coast... and then he was gone.’ Again she squiggled into the flour, to mark the spot where the plane had vanished. ‘They couldn’t explain it. They’d circled back to see what had happened, seen nothing on the surface but a slick of oil... he’d just gone. There was a lot of searching. They opened an enquiry.’ She made one big circle around the scribble into which her husband had disappeared. ‘Missing, presumed dead. The enquiry was closed.’
    There was a long silence. We both sipped our coffee. The kitchen door opened and the boy came in. He was tousled and bleary, in a t-shirt and shorts, straight out of bed. He paused for a moment to appraise the scene and then went across to where his mother was sitting and stood behind her. As he squinted and frowned at the mysteriously chaotic diagram on the table, he put his hands on her shoulders, moved them closer to her neck. He looked very big, his face pale and unsmiling. She looked very small, more like a little sister than his mother, and somehow vulnerable. He loomed over her and his white bony fingers tightened near her throat. She didn’t cringe, at the weight of his hands or the sinewy maleness he was exerting over her, but neither did she relax as one might relax at the first caress of a masseur.
    ‘So what’s all this?’ he said. He bent so close to her that her hair fluttered when he whispered the same words again. ‘So what’s all this, Mummy? What’ve you been telling my new teacher? Telling him a story?’
    He took an enormous breath, inhaling long and slowly and holding the air in his chest for a long time. And then, at last, he blew with all his strength. The flour puthered up and up from the table. For a few seconds, until his breath ran out, there was a white powdery haboob in the middle of the room. He stopped and the dust settled.
    ‘End of story,’ he said. There was nothing but a smooth film of flour on the table: a ghostly palimpsest.
    He crossed to the oven, opened it, snatched a tea-towel and lifted out the tray of scones. They looked perfect, they smelled delicious. Juliet slid some of them onto a plate and told us to take them upstairs to the tower.
     
     
    I WAS PUZZLING over what the woman had told me, unsure whether or not to broach the subject with the boy, feeling a knot of nervous apprehension in my stomach as I climbed the narrow stairs behind and followed him into his room. I didn’t know what we were going to do that morning, if we were going to read or listen to some music or share some ideas from a newspaper or magazine; the account of his father’s death had left me quite unready for any kind of structured tutoring of the boy. So I was relieved when he