All Sorts of Possible (10 page)

Daniel looked at him, cocking his head like a little bird. ‘Bennett, seriously, you’ve drunk too much.’

Bennett stared at him, then smiled and slowly shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He picked up a stone and hurled it as hard as he could and watched it land in the water with a
springy, hollow sound as if it had been dropped into a deep well.

‘Let’s just stick to being best friends,’ said Daniel and Bennett nodded.

‘Yep.’

‘Thanks for coming,’ said Daniel.

‘You are very welcome, my friend.’

And the two of them smiled at each other.

Bennett spread his arms wide and flapped himself into a standing position like some lopsided chick on a ledge and grinned.

‘Maybe we need to go in,’ he shouted.

Daniel shook his head as he stared into the green water. ‘It’s cold, trust me.’

‘It’ll be good for you.’

‘How’d you figure that?’

‘How do you know it won’t be?’

Daniel’s fingers hooked even tighter into the little cracks and crevices on the surface of the rock. He kept looking at the water until he realized Bennett was still staring at him,
waiting for an answer. It was the sort of thing he would normally have done without even thinking about it.

‘I’ll be here with you,’ said Bennett.

They took off their trainers and socks and left them on the shoreline, wading in until their legs were eaten up to the bottoms of their shorts, the green and blue ripples coming at them. Greasy
rocks moved beneath their feet, threatening to trip them up.

‘See, it’s not so bad, is it?’ shouted Bennett and Daniel shook his head.

‘No,’ he shouted back.

Bennett scanned the surface like a lifeguard.

When Daniel saw something silver, he peered through the wobbly surface of the water and saw a tiny fish gawping, fanning its fins, until it seemed to sense him watching and vanished into a
deeper part of the pool.

Bennett picked off a ruby crystal of blood where he had cut his finger coming down the tunnel and dipped it into the green water and watched a faint pink star-burst appear, then untangle itself
into nothing. When he raised his hand, he studied the cut, as if surprised to see it still there.

‘There’s definitely no magic here,’ he announced, chopping the surface of the water with karate hands. ‘I don’t think you were saved. It was luck, that’s
all.’

Daniel was about to nod, the whisky woozy in his head, when a shadow moved over the entrance to the tunnel and the light dimmed for a moment, like a candle flame blown flat by a draught.
Spooked, he looked up as Bennett scooped up water and drank, his chin dripping and shining.

‘HELLO?’ shouted Daniel, cupping his hands. ‘Is someone there?’ A blackbird landed at the mouth of the tunnel and looked down at them, before flapping away with a shriek.
Daniel kept staring up at the entrance, his heart thumping. It was difficult to hear much of anything over the sound of the waterfall. By the time Bennett looked round, Daniel was already wading
back to the shoreline.

‘I think there’s someone up there,’ shouted Daniel, pointing at the tunnel as he emerged dripping from the water.

Bennett stood watching it like a hawk as Daniel picked up his socks and trainers and started back over the rocks, creeping as quickly as he could in his bare feet.

‘Hello?’ shouted Daniel again as he picked his way quickly over the rocks in the tunnel, hopping to put on his shoes one at a time.

But when he emerged, panting, into the daylight, with the fence all around him, there was no one there. He blinked in the bright sunshine, looking all about him. In the distance, a tractor the
size of a toy suddenly breached the horizon and then turned and dipped below it again, into a green field half ploughed.

Daniel studied the ground around the edge of the hole.

‘Well?’ asked Bennett when he emerged, stamping his left foot down to make sure his shoe was on properly.

‘I think there was someone here.’

‘You think or you know?’

Daniel watched Bennett raise his eyebrows, wondering what he meant, until Bennett waggled the half-empty hip flask. His friend plucked the topmost wire between two wooden posts, making it
thrum.

‘Well, if there
was
someone here, they’ve gone now,’ said Bennett. ‘Maybe it was just someone leaving another letter, worshipping at the shrine of
Daniel.’

Daniel scanned the notes and offerings lying on the ground, and the ones hooked on to the wire and tacked to the posts, but he couldn’t tell if there was anything new since the last time.
He looked to his left and studied the dark fringe of the woods and then he heaved himself up over the fence and started walking towards the trees. He thought he heard Bennett muttering something,
but he couldn’t be sure as the breeze blew over his ears and he didn’t turn to find out.

He lingered on the edge of the pines, looking into the cool, muffled dark, and then he walked on, beyond the first row of trunks.

The floor was a weave of soft brown needles, springy, like matting beneath his feet. He trod carefully as if it might give way any moment, listening for the sound of another person, his hearing
seeming keener after spending so long near the waterfall.

The cracks of sky shone bluer between the tapering tops the deeper he went. But when he heard Bennett coughing behind him, the needles hissing as he kicked at them, Daniel stopped and picked at
a nub of hard sap on the trunk beside him. ‘Let’s just say it was nobody then,’ he said.

‘Or a passing cloud,’ said Bennett. He sighed. ‘It hasn’t been a waste of time though, has it?’

Daniel thought about that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’

And Bennett smiled.

The boys pedalled back across the meadow, leaving two bright, winding trails in the grass. When they arrived at the wheat field, they started back through the lumpy tractor
channel.

Daniel looked back over the bobbing, bearded heads of wheat towards the woods, imagining that someone was watching him. But there was just a wall of trees. And then he thought he saw something
moving on the edge of the woods. It could have been a figure flitting between the trunks. Or it could have just been the sunlight and shadows falling through the branches of the trees.

‘There’s no one there,’ said Bennett, ‘however much you want there to be.’

Daniel kept watching for a few seconds more and then just turned round. ‘Let’s go or we’ll miss the train,’ he said.

Sitting on the warm platform, waiting for the train, they watched the shadows creeping across the concrete. Daniel moved his leg when one black finger touched his foot.

When the boys heard the rails begin to
twang
, the two of them stood up and picked up their bikes as two carriages came round the bend.

‘We could just keep going, you know,’ shouted Bennett above the noisy brakes of the train. When the carriage doors opened, Daniel propped his bike alongside Bennett’s and
imagined choosing a seat and riding the train until it terminated before catching another one going somewhere else, followed by another, and then another, never stopping anywhere and having to
be
someone. But, when the train lurched, the idea fell away inside him and he knew there was no point poking around in the jumble of daydreaming and pointless thoughts to find it, because
he was never going to leave his dad.

The rest of the carriage was deserted. Bennett inspected the crescent moon of a burger and bap left in its tray on the seat opposite, but decided it wasn’t for him. So he opened his hip
flask and took a swig and offered it to Daniel who did the same.

As he handed the flask back to Bennett, a previously unseen figure rose up from the seats further down and tottered towards them along the aisle, like an ancient spirit of the carriage. He was a
grimy, wiry man, with a matted beard the colour of rust, and he wore a tatty blue shirt, shorn of buttons to below his ribcage, which flapped beneath a tattered white mackintosh mapped with stains.
His white, freckled chest was daubed with two nipples the colour of terracotta and, through the fuzz of cropped orange hair on his head, Daniel could see a pale scalp pocked and marked with scrapes
and cuts.

The man stood swaying with the carriage, licking his blistered lips, then held out his hand for the flask.

When Bennett shook his head, the man sat down beside Daniel and reached into a pocket of his mackintosh and drew out a large darning needle and aimed its tip a couple of centimetres from
Daniel’s ribs.

‘I’ll burst his heart,’ said the man.

Up close to him, Daniel could see muck in every pore. There was a hot, bitter tang around the man like a fox.

Bennett grunted something before handing over the flask and the man took it and wedged it between his knees.

‘Pockets too,’ he said.

The tip of the needle stayed close to Daniel as each of them handed over their loose change. When the carriage lurched, Daniel’s fingers brushed the man’s upturned palm as he dropped
the coins into it, and when he drew back the man was staring at him, dropping the change into the pocket of his mackintosh. Suddenly, he moved across the seat to get closer, the needle flashing
back the sunlight. Daniel shrank into the corner and felt the
click clack
of the wheels on the track up his spine.

‘Leave him alone,’ growled Bennett. But the man didn’t seem to hear as he peered closer. Daniel could smell the reek from his clothes, like hot, wet cardboard. Teeth stained
the colour of cork. But in his eyes a flicker of something bright. He grabbed Daniel’s wrist, the fingers tightening like wire, the needle in his other hand drooping.

‘Oh, you got the fizz, boy,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’ve got the voltage.’ The man gasped. Whooped like a cowboy.

Daniel felt a sudden fluttering in his chest, but it was faint and feeble, a series of warm golden spots flitting inside him like fireflies.

‘Can we make the fit?’ asked Daniel. ‘Do you know how to?’

‘There was a time once I might have done, but now I’m not so sure.’

‘But we need to try. See what we can do.’

‘It’ll cost you,’ said the man, holding out a grimy palm.

‘We already gave you everything,’ said Bennett.

‘No then. Cos a man’s got to make a living, you know.’

‘But I need to find someone who can help me,’ said Daniel.

The man raised the needle like a single finger to make a point. ‘It won’t be me unless you pay for it.’

‘I can get you money. I can.’

‘No one knows the future,’ laughed the man. ‘No one knows that. So it’s pay up now or never!’

‘But it’s important. I need to help someone.’

‘The one in the bed or the bald man?’

Daniel’s mouth opened, but he didn’t know what to say.

The man just grinned. ‘It’s only flickers and sparks in me now. Flickers and sparks on a good day. Not the raging fire it used to be. But I can still see some things. So who is it?
Who do you want to help most?’

‘The one in the bed.’

‘So what about the bald man? What about what he wants? How are you going to handle him?’ The man smiled when Daniel said nothing. He shook his head as he picked out a blue loop of
seat fabric with the needle. ‘Find someone else to help you,’ he said. ‘That bald one’s a problem that won’t go away. He’s like gum on your shoe.’

He laughed and lifted the hip flask from his knees and took a sip, watching Bennett as he did so with bright blue eyes in case he tried to snatch it back. After swallowing a mouthful and wiping
his mouth on his sleeve, he said to them, ‘There’s something you should know though, and I’ll tell you about it for free.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Daniel edging forward to hear.

‘That we all want lives we can understand. But the world doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t care what we want.’ He wove the needle up and down, as if stitching an
invisible thread through the air. ‘So we sew in the bits that don’t make sense, making up stories about ourselves we can believe in or at least pretend to.’

Suddenly, he stabbed the needle into the seat, making Daniel flinch and sending dust motes streaming into the sunlight. ‘It’s a curse being human.’ He pulled out the needle and
pointed the tip at Daniel. ‘So make up whatever stories you need to explain it. Make sense of that talent inside you however you want, especially if you find them.’

‘Who?’ asked Daniel.

‘Someone else to make the fit with.’

‘Where are they?’

The man laughed out loud. ‘How should I know? Just make sure they fit you better than last time.’ He pumped his hand open and shut and then balled it tight into a fist, making it
shudder. ‘Went off like a bomb, I bet?’

He smiled and stood up as the train started to slow.

‘Wait,’ said Daniel. ‘I need to know where to look.’

‘They’ll be wherever you are because they’ll need you as much as you need them. That’s what making a good fit’s all about, helping each other, but not in the way
you’re expecting. Don’t ask me why. But that’s how it was for me.’

He grinned and his smile was like a dirty crescent of moon. ‘I ended up telling myself all sorts of stories to try and make sense of it, and now here I am.’ He shook his head as the
train pulled into the station and bade them good day with an elaborate bow, one arm twirling its hand and then sweeping aside the air.

They watched him get off the train, draining the last of the whisky and Diet Coke from Bennett’s hip flask and beaming into the sun. Bennett picked up the burger in its tray and flung it
at him before the carriage doors closed and the tramp waved them off as the train left the platform, a stripe of ketchup glistening on his mackintosh.

Before they lost sight of him, they saw him dancing down the platform as if accompanied by some ballroom music piped out of the sky for him alone.

Daniel’s aunt was out and the windows seemed larger and more full of daylight, as though the house had taken a secret moment to relax without her. Daniel drifted from
room to room, pausing to look in each one.

In the sitting room, his father was reading the paper with his feet up and the television turned down low.