The Shades Page 13

  Rowan pushed his head and spine into the surface. The ground created a comforting resistance and the sensation of being pushed up towards the sky. A shard of gravel at the back of his skull was a useful reminder to stay present and mentally sharp. He had given his dad the impression that he had a club session, as he looked as though he needed an excuse to leave, but now he was glad to have time on his own to get his thoughts back in order before his virtual meeting.

  Okay, the planet,

  the planet.

  Science tells:

  The default geopolitical order.

  It has to be radical otherwise—

  His mind kept slipping. It was stupid, but his father’s visit had unsettled him and he didn’t know why.

  Going in, he had known the conversation wasn’t going to be a barrel of laughs but he had approached it as a necessity, projecting reactions based on an understanding of him as a conventionally unimaginative, forward-marching fellow. The point of writing to tell him that he was cashing in Grandpa’s bequest had been to simplify the argument, make him back off and leave him to do what he would have always done whether there had been money or not. (The lawyer’s letter about the legacy hadn’t surprised, as he’d already overheard his parents debating it several times.) But he hadn’t expected him to turn up at school looking aged and small, or to be as staunch as a backtracking snail—he had the sense that he could have squashed him with his foot if he’d wanted. His appearance was so unfamiliar that Rowan wondered whether he, Rowan, had entered a new phase of consciousness—perhaps his dad had been this way before and he’d never noticed? But as he didn’t fear the physical processes that evidently stampeded at a certain stage, he didn’t think this was why he was uneasy. No, the double take was how his view of his father and his mother kept shifting. Every time he looked at them they became more contradictory, fallible, and wrong. Now that he was making his own decisions and being separated was the new normal, Rowan couldn’t understand why any of this mattered. They had always been the same: consistently inconsistent. Rachel had always said so. She had two rants: Mum is insane and Dad is a muppet. He had always thought she was being facetious, but now he wondered why he hadn’t taken what she had been saying more seriously. Perhaps this was what was bothering him the most.

  He had never been interested in what went on between the three of them. Rachel was manipulative and his parents willfully gullible. They had seemed well matched, so there was no need for him to take sides or to get involved. For better or worse, he had accepted this as the way they were together—at least since he had become aware enough to notice during a family trip to Rome.

  His father had organized a long weekend there for half term. Always the history nerd, he had prepped them that this was to be the holiday of a lifetime. They were visiting the eternal city: if Rome wasn’t the cradle of civilization, it was the nursery, et cetera, et cetera. Every time he added a church or museum to their itinerary (espresso and gelato stops were also included), Rachel did her Dad’s a muppet look, crossing her eyes and jigging her head. She did this discreetly so that only Rowan could see. She was already in an evil mood having discovered she would be missing a friend’s thirteenth birthday party in London. The way she saw it, Rome was the obstacle to personal happiness and social success.

  The first night had been pleasant enough. After checking into a small hotel near the Piazza del Popolo, they walked all evening until their feet hurt. They saw famous fountains and piazzas, Caravaggio and Raphael, ending the night in Trastevere, gazing up at the firmament of Cavallini mosaics. Just as Rowan crashed into bed—he was sharing a twin room with his sister, giving him an agitating proximity to her bathroom rituals—Rachel told him that she was bored out of her mind and would stab someone if she had to look at another mannerist masterpiece. “FYI, I am not going sightseeing tomorrow—just so you know.”

  He rolled onto his side to face the wall. “That’s not going to happen.” He pulled his pillow over his head.

  “I’m not”—she jumped on him—“joking.”

  Rowan bolted upright, “If you don’t—” He sacked her with the pillow, lobbed magazines at her—anything to make her go away. He threatened her with the Holy Bible but reconsidered because of the weight. Once she was satisfied that sufficient havoc had been made, Rachel launched herself, cackling, into her own bed.

  The next morning, over cornetto and cappuccino in the lobby’s caffé, Rachel told her family that she had cramps and wasn’t well enough to go out.

  Michael swallowed his pastry and turned to his wife as the arbiter of all things Rachel. “Is this necessary?” he wanted to know, with barely concealed dismay.

  Catherine closed her eyes, something she did when she was stressed, but when she opened them she was eerily calm. “What’s the point of making her go if she’ll be miserable?”

  “Thanks.” Rachel grabbed the room key. She was quizzical. She wasn’t expecting them to be such pushovers. On the way to the stairs, she glanced back at Rowan to make a mournful face that only he could read was triumph.

  “I’d better stay behind as well,” their mother added, making her a total accomplice in the matter.

  Rowan stared at his parents, agog. He couldn’t believe Rachel was being given a free pass for a D-performance. If he had been told to stay in bed to wank, they couldn’t have been any more indulgent.

  Michael gathered his guidebooks and pamphlets. With a tight smile, he rose from the table, turning to Rowan. “Looks like you are the last man standing.” He was grasping for something that approximated ironic humor, but the remark came out heavily and landed with a clunk. Rowan wanted to help his father out by making his words become, in a literal sense, true, so he stood up too. He followed him out of the hotel, leaving his mother still sitting there. She’d put on dark glasses that made her even more inscrutable.

  “Have a good time,” she called after them. Under the circumstances, she was the one who managed to sound ironic.

  His father walked quickly, dodging pedestrians and cars, weaving through the streets to the honk of cars and scooters. There was no breeze, only the heat and steady expulsion of exhaust that seemed a little sweeter baked into ancient stone. Rowan was slow at first, disoriented by the sudden exposure to the sights and sounds. He felt like a mole, head aboveground, squinting in the daylight—unlike his mother, neither he nor his father had remembered to bring sunglasses. By the time they had climbed all 124 of the Aracoeli steps to the highest point of the Capitoline Hill, they were out of breath and sweating. Seeing that his dad’s shirt had become transparent Rowan called a “wet T-shirt competition” and they laughed because it was no contest: Michael’s flesh baring through white cotton had already won against the absorbent taupe of a Gap polo. Having put some distance from the scene of disappointment, his father seemed freer and walked with his arms swinging loosely from his shoulders. Inside the Palazzo Nuovo he became expansive, waving at the busts of emperors, introducing them to Rowan as if he were at a party of old friends: Oh hello, there’s Trajan. Marcus Aurelius! Good to see you, my man. They kicked around on the Via Sacra, deciphering as many tablets as time and skill would allow, and ambled up the Palatine hill to eat stringy rice balls in the shade of an oleander tree. Looking down from the site of Rome’s first settlement, they strained to imagine what the valley must have looked like pre-Republic and Empire, when it was a marsh populated by Latin farmers and goats. For all the sights Rowan saw that day, the Roman experience didn’t turn him on. Sure, he admired the artistry of Michelangelo and Bernini, but he was conscious that every major monument marked the overthrow of another: the Campidoglio was conceived for an emperor’s triumphal march, the rebuilding of St. Peter’s was the ultimate in counter-reformation propaganda; with every step he was treading on the graves of slaves and the overthrown. Standing in the Piazza San Pietro under a giant obelisk that had been carried from Alexandria at the whim of Caligula, it spooked him to think that before it was placed there it had also shadowed the psy
cho-barbarism of Nero’s games. As peace was a blink on the timeline and war was the constant, he wondered what would happen next in this piazza of pilgrims, tourists, and hawkers. Up on Palatine he had started wondering what tangible social benefit there had been from building these massive, fuck-off cities—apart from making better water and sewer systems to combat disease. Obviously, the point was to advertise the glory and culture of the ruling classes, but there had always been too many people and not enough places to live. He didn’t like the way elaborate architecture was used to screen and barrier reality.

  Rowan returned to the hotel to find Rachel, miserable in the room.

  “Where did you go?” her voice quavered with reproach. “I tried phoning but you didn’t answer.”

  “Out. You said you weren’t coming.” He’d left his phone switched off in his backpack, which he hadn’t thought to bring.

  “I changed my mind. You didn’t wait long.”

  “You know what Dad’s like. Best foot forward . . .”

  “I came down almost immediately. I went outside to find you and these creeps came up jabbering che cosa fai. I didn’t know which way you had gone, so I had to come back here.”

  “Didn’t Mum tell you we’d left?”

  “She couldn’t, duh, if she was with you.”

  This was a point of discussion at dinner when they worked out that Mum had gone to her own room seconds before Rachel had come down. Apparently, she didn’t want to disturb Rachel but had left her all day in the room to rest. Privately, Rachel admitted to Rowan that she had regretted not going with them. It had been depressing in the room. There was nothing on TV and she’d found a spider in the sink. She admitted to feeling guilty that she hadn’t made more effort for Dad with all his muppet arrangements.

  Looking back on the weekend from the perspective of the tennis court, he could see how it prefigured the future. Everything Rachel had done was a tryout for an event that never happened, with the result hanging there, a jammed scoreboard that he would thump to move along the result if he could. That she liked winding everyone up was a given, but for what purpose he would never really know. Plus, there was another question lodged there unanswered: why, for all her stuff, did she never con him? She was always honest about lying. When things started happening with boyfriends and partying—the false-alarm pregnancy—she always told him what was going on, even though he didn’t want to know. Often, he felt she was trying to pull him into something that wasn’t his; maybe she was trying to bring him down with her, because she was going that direction, fast. He went with her some of the way because he was curious and willing, until he balked. Her parties at the house when his mum and dad were away at Hamdean, full of buzzed and puking strangers, repelled him, just as the drunken gropes with Char Nestor or Mira, whoever was foisted on him, left him cold. But now he saw another explanation for why she wanted him around. It was the same reason that he’d started having dreams about her when she was still alive: the dreams about the tent he couldn’t put up to save his fucking life; the tent he couldn’t put up to save hers. She looked to him to protect her against herself.

  Earlier, when he had kissed his father goodbye he had known that it was a significant parting, maybe a final one. His dad’s shiny eyes and salty cheeks told him that he was also reckoning with this possibility. But Rowan saw that there would be another goodbye. He would also say adios to the comfortable perception that as family referee, chill observer, he hadn’t really been involved—when, of course, he was. His sister had looked to him for help and he was implicated. If there was a punishment for denial, it was stabbing clarity. Understanding this was to complete a final crossing, to reach the other side, the place where the adults roamed.

  The stone biting into the back of his head was making inroads into his skull and would penetrate all the way through if he allowed. He pushed his head harder into the ground and the pain radiated into his neck, but it wasn’t completely excruciating as the temperature of the granite cooled his heated brain.

  Fuck!

  Skype session with Justice—

  Oh shit!

  It was coming up soon.

  Justice1 had messaged him, We are not noise, we are happening.

  These words had spoken to him directly and couldn’t be denied.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows. The relief was instant.

  He picked the gravel from the back of his head and inspected the stone. The tip was bloody and sharp as a fang.

  He threw it away.

  Being a Vitruvian Man wasn’t realistic for a basic human, but striving to be evolutionary smart was still a reasonable goal.

  Catherine rose early to see the dawn. She threw on an old skirt, shirt, and tennis shoes and left the house through the French doors of the boiler room. Since hearing the girl describe the living area as a dungeon of a boiler room, no décor, structural innovation, or stuffed sofa, could distract her from thinking of it as one.

  Outside, the air was fresh and moist with a recent evaporation of mist. All was still except for the lone chirrup of a bird. Only at this time of the morning, before the day made its disturbances, was nature this pure and serene. As she walked, tendrils of grass caught her bare calves; the dripping flowers of a laburnum brushed past her cheek. Everywhere she looked the leaves and trees had a dewy clarity that was both soft and vivid. The sun was rising behind the hawthorns to make a halo glow of light. Dusk and dawn were known as magic hour. In that moment, the beginning of the day didn’t seem so much an enchantment as mystical and divine.

  She was unusually calm. She had relapsed into sadness the day before, and spent most of it in her bedroom crying. She had cried for Rachel. Cried for Rowan. She’d had moments of compassion thinking about the girl, ruing that the past must have caught up with her poor, damaged soul. “It always does. You can only be so brave.” She spared some tears for herself, for the days when she’d had purpose and belonged to the world. She belonged to no one.

  “You have to have to be of use to belong.”

  She was a little better today. She was already becoming reconciled to Rowan’s brave new world even if she wasn’t part of it. Michael had convinced her that resistance would be futile. She had no choice but to embrace their new reality. Surrendering didn’t come naturally; yielding went against her instinct to fight. Once done, it was liberating. Submission was a new experience that laid her open to another perspective, where she could entertain the positive, look to the future, see that it might not be as bleak as she had supposed. Perhaps she was wrong not to have more confidence in Rowan. Perhaps he was on the path to greatness. He might become the voice of his generation; the galvanic force behind environmental revolution. In the meantime, she had artists and a husband to nurture. Michael was right about selling Hamdean, right to suggest that she go to London this week. This was all possible. This was all something she could do.

  There was movement in the undergrowth by the laurels. When the developer partitioned the house, a line of laurels was planted to mark the boundary between front and back. The trees had grown slowly and plateaued at a dwarfish three feet. It was Judith! She was practically on all fours, foraging. Really, the woman was extraordinary. “A veritable sedge pig!”

  Judith looked up. “Catherine!” she called out brightly. “You’re up with the larks.” She rose to her feet, waving a bunch of nettles in her gloved hand. “Will you come have tea after your walk?”

  “Will do.” Catherine waved back

  “I’d like to talk to you about the banging . . .”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Catherine said, with no intention of going. Always imposing. What right does she have to intrude? She was drawn toward the remains of the old summerhouse, the remains of the place where the beautiful people used to go. The area wasn’t easy to find. If she hadn’t known it was there, she might have passed it by. The concrete foundation was only visible in patches, steadily reclaimed by nature, inch by inch, covered with tufts of grass. A robin flew down, hopped on the
gray fragments. With a quiver, it took flight, as if it had been frightened away.

  Someone was there.

  Catherine turned and saw the girl standing by the house. From what she could tell from a distance, the girl was watching her with a blank stare. Her lack of affect was disconcerting. Catherine wasn’t sure if she wanted to be with her alone. Although she had shunned Judith before, suddenly the idea of her company wasn’t so undesirable. She looked to her neighbor for support, but Judith was gone.

  The girl began walking towards her.