All Sorts of Possible (6 page)

Daniel dreamt about meeting Lawson on the doorstep of a 1940s, red-brick house set back from a quiet lane, surrounded by fields of wheat.

‘What’s the fit?’ asked Daniel in a voice that was buttery, melting in the warm breeze, as he stood looking at Lawson.

‘Do you really want to know?’ whispered Lawson.

‘Yes. I’ve opened my heart like you wanted.’ Daniel held up the notepad to show him, the page black with words which began to peel off from the paper and float around them like
rooks swirling, startled from the trees.

And, when Lawson had read every word, he leant forward and whispered to Daniel the address at which he lived.

When Daniel woke up in the morning, he knew it had been a dream and yet not a dream too because he could remember the address quite clearly.

He wrote it on a fresh page of the notepad and stared at it with a sense of comfort he had not known since before the sinkhole had opened and his world had changed. Somehow, he was certain that
everything that had happened with Lawson the day before at the hospital was finally going to be explained.

When Daniel remembered that both their bikes had gone to the shop for a service, he looked out his dad’s old one. It was tied to the wall of the shed by cobwebs that
crackled when they tore. The chain was stiff, golden with rust, and the gear cassette at the rear looked like the bloom of some long-dead flower.

He found an oil can on a shelf in the shed and eased the upturned bicycle back to life in the garden until the wheel was turning like a spinning wheel as he wound the peddles round.

‘Where are you off to?’ asked his aunt as she stood by the back door, arms folded, the morning sun pooling on her auburn hair in patches.

‘Bennett’s. He’s my best friend.’

‘Really? Didn’t he want to come here?’

‘No.’

‘After all you’ve been through?’

Daniel didn’t know what to say to that.

‘Daniel, where are you really going? We need to sit down and sort things out. Go shopping. What about going to see your father?’

‘We’ll go later. I need to go to Bennett’s first,’ he said again, more urgently.

‘Wait there,’ she said, ducking back into the kitchen. She reappeared, holding out three twenty-pound notes. ‘In case you get hungry or see anything you want. If you need a new
wallet then we can choose one along with anything else you lost in the car. I thought we could make a list before we go shopping.’

‘Sure,’ said Daniel. ‘Thanks.’ He took the notes and put them in his pocket.

He turned round, wheeling the bike over the grass towards the door in the fence. When he lifted the latch and glanced back, his aunt was still standing in the doorway, watching him. For a
minute, he imagined her as someone else, not the person his dad had told him about. And then Daniel whispered to himself that she wasn’t that person at all and went on his way.

Lawson’s house was just how Daniel had dreamt it: a 1940s red-brick affair, standing on its own about a mile outside Cambridge down a potholed lane. Fields of tall golden
wheat shimmered all around it.

Daniel opened the gate and wheeled his bike down the concrete path. Through the front window he could see what the house was like inside. Tidy. But tired. There was a sofa and two armchairs, all
covered in a severe grey fabric that made the seats look hard and uncomfortable, as if designed to make a person sit upright. The arms were stripped down to bare wooden struts. The wallpaper was
densely patterned with precise rainbow semicircles, geometrically arranged one behind the other in rows, seemingly overlapping like fish scales.

The front door opened before he had time to knock and his hand took fright and retreated, his arm upright like a cobra ready to strike. Lawson beamed as if he had been expecting him.

‘What’s happened to me?’ Daniel asked immediately. ‘What’s the fit?’

Lawson beckoned Daniel into the hallway. ‘You can leave the bike outside,’ he said. ‘It’s safe. No one ever comes down here.’ But Daniel stood his ground. Lawson
squinted in the daylight as if he had just awoken from a long sleep. ‘The best way to explain it is to show you.’ He backed away from the doorway and held out a hand again.
‘Please.’

‘You said we could help my dad?’

But Lawson just kept his hand out. ‘Please,’ he said again. ‘I promise I’ll show you what I know.’

Daniel felt the sunlight on the back of his neck, and it seemed all the warmer as he looked into the cool, dim hallway.

He rested the bike against the red-brick wall and then his feet were moving, stepping into the house, taking him with them because they knew he was desperate to know more.

The house smelt vaguely of incense, a smell that grew stronger as Daniel stood in the sitting room and watched Lawson light a series of white candles, then draw the thick
patterned curtains, making the walls shrink in the stuttering light.

‘Your talent,’ said Lawson, ‘can only be used with someone else, somebody who has their own talents too.’

‘What’s inside me?’ asked Daniel. ‘Where has it come from?’

‘It’s something you were born with, like me. My own capabilities began to surface in adolescence too.’ Lawson blew out the last match and tossed it into the empty fireplace.
‘It could be that the trauma of what’s recently happened to you acted as a trigger to release it. Whatever the reason for its appearance, you’re very lucky. Some people think
we’re all born with abilities, which only a few of us are lucky enough to get the chance to use. Daniel, would you like me to show you your particular talent? Tell you more about what’s
inside you?’

‘Yes.’

Lawson nodded and closed his eyes and began to breathe more deeply, making the little flames around them flutter. He pursed his lips as if he was about to whistle and then blew out a breath. All
the candles went out together, plunging the room into darkness.

Daniel gasped as the dark crowded round him, pushing at him, trying to creep down his throat and into his ears.

‘I know how scared you were in the dark,’ whispered Lawson. ‘But there’s no need to be now. I’m here to help you. You’re quite safe here.’

A faint orange light spread slowly round the room as the wire filament in the naked bulb hanging above them began to warm. It was bright enough that Daniel could just see the shapes of the
furniture and the dark squares of pictures in their frames on the walls.

Lawson was standing upright, his eyes like holes, until gradually the light grew stronger and pushed back the dark. He blinked and looked down at Daniel, his bony white fingers outstretched like
a wizard about to cast a spell.

‘I’m a psychic, with just the barest of telekinetic powers too to make things happen.’ And he wafted a hand at the bulb and the still smoking candles. ‘My talents mainly
give me the ability to see things other people can’t. It lights me up just like that light bulb when I hit the switch inside me. But if I’m the bulb, Daniel, then you’re the
electric wire, the power that can make me burn brighter than I’d ever imagined. That’s what making the fit means: two people connecting and combining to do wonderful things. I’ve
read about it, heard whispers, but I never thought I would meet someone like you who could make it happen. We need to find out more. Explore little by little what we can do together.’

Lawson’s face began to tense and Daniel immediately felt a sensation in his chest, like a butterfly trapped behind his ribs. It shifted for a moment and then settled, warming one small
spot.

‘Can you feel what’s different?’ asked Lawson.

‘Yes.’

‘Now let me use your talent. Let me see what I can do with it. Don’t be afraid like last time in the hospital. Don’t panic and shut me out. You have to trust me. It’s up
to you to make the fit happen.’

Lawson raised a hand and pointed at the light bulb, his hand shaking. Daniel felt the warmth growing gently in his chest and he told himself not to panic. Little by little, it grew stronger and
then he gasped as the bulb began to rise, the white cord from which it was hanging bending to form a loop through which the light bulb itself passed, before dropping down and creating a simple knot
in the cord. Still lit, the bulb swayed slightly, hanging a few centimetres higher than before, sending the dark corners of the room bobbing up and down.

Lawson lowered his hand. He was breathing heavily and stumbled a few steps back into the arm of the sofa behind him and perched there, recovering, as if having expended a great amount of
effort.

Daniel felt his jaw and throat relax, and he began to breathe more deeply too. His mind was sharp and bright, like some dial had been turned up, sensing the secret hollow in his chest that
Lawson had filled with a golden heat. But it was growing cold already. He put a hand against his ribs to try and make a difference, but the warmth from his palm only sat on the surface of his
chest, the space inside him somewhere he could not touch.

But somehow Lawson had reached it.

‘You see?’ said Lawson, pointing at the bulb, his breathing more normal again. ‘You see what we can do together? How we can make the fit? Making an object move without touching
it is something I’ve always struggled to do. And now I’ve done it easily because you let me. The fit might allow us to do anything we want the more we explore it.’

‘Can we help my dad like you said?’ asked Daniel. ‘Could we really do that too?’

‘I’d like to think so, Daniel. I really would. If we can make a good fit then we might well be able to do anything we want.’

‘I want to try again. I want to see what else we can do.’

‘Give me a moment,’ said Lawson, nodding up at the bulb. ‘What we just did took something out of me.’ He wiped his glistening brow and smoothed back his peppery hair,
patting its damp strands down. There were dark half-moons under the arms of his bright blue shirt.

As Lawson rested, Daniel blinked at the bulb, staining his eyes with orange spots. ‘Do you really think it was a miracle I was saved?’ he asked.

‘I know what I’d like to believe. But what feels right to you? What makes the most sense?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s difficult to remember everything exactly the way it happened. I was very cold. I wasn’t thinking straight. I don’t
know if it was luck I got out or not.’

Lawson nodded and wiped his brow. ‘Perhaps you’ll work out what to believe when we find out more about the fit and what we can do, whether we can really help your father. It might
help you to decide if you were saved in order to get your life back to how it was before.’

‘But why would someone save me to do that?’

‘Why wouldn’t they? Isn’t it what you want? To have your father back?’

Daniel nodded. ‘Yes, more than anything. Do you feel ready to try again and see what else we can do?’

Lawson cleared his throat. His face looked so white it was almost grey.

‘I think I could do with a glass of water first,’ he said. But before he could stand up they both heard a loud knocking on the front door and then it was opened with such great force
it was banging against the wall. A voice shouted into the house.

‘Lawson! Where are you?’

Lawson tottered to his feet as a huge, bald man wearing a tight-fitting blue suit appeared in the doorway.

He peered at them in the low orange light from the bulb, blinking, as laughter suddenly erupted behind him out of sight in the hallway. It was the sort you might hear late at night in the street
and not want to glance up in case you caught the wrong person’s eye.

The bald man beamed, pointed a finger at Daniel. ‘You’re that boy, the one who came out of the ground, the one in the papers and on the news.’ He rubbed his big hands together
and took a deep breath of the incense-flavoured air, observing the curtains were drawn. ‘What’s going on here, Lawson? What magic are you dabbling in now? Is it something to help with
finding that antique flask I want, the one that’s going to change my life forever?’

Lawson just stood there, his pale face glistening, as if struggling to work out what was happening and why.

‘COME ON, LAWSON!’ shouted the bald man, spit flying like sparks off his lips. ‘I haven’t got all day.’ He peered at him as though trying to spot him through a fog.
‘What’s wrong with you?’

Lawson seemed to think about speaking and then he turned quickly and picked up the metal bin near him just in time before throwing up into the white plastic liner.

The bald man wrinkled his nose as two other large men edged their way into the living room, all three of them watching Lawson as he set the bin outside in the hallway.

‘I hope it’s not catching,’ said the bald man, making the other two laugh. He plucked the immaculate white handkerchief from the top pocket of his jacket and threw it at
Lawson.

‘I’m not myself,’ Lawson managed to say, after wiping his mouth. ‘And the boy was actually just leaving.’

The bald man smiled. Put his arm round Daniel’s shoulders and gave him a squeeze. ‘No he wasn’t.’ He stooped like a bear to look into Daniel’s eyes.
‘I’m Mason. There’s no need to be nervous. There’s no sinkhole to fall into here. This is my house. I say what happens here and what doesn’t, including Lawson paying
me rent and doing what I say.’

He grinned and waved a big hand at the two suited men sitting themselves down on the sofa. ‘These are my acquaintances, Frank and Jiff. Useless, both of them. Don’t do anything
without my say-so either. No brains, you see.’ When he laughed, the two men grunted a laugh too. The one called Frank had a cleft lip, with a raggedy scar like a zipper up to the bottom of
his nose.

‘What are you gawping at?’ muttered Frank, and Daniel looked down at the floor, his heart thumping.

Mason’s black patent shoes shone like bricks of wet coal.

‘So then,’ he said. ‘Tell me what’s going on here. What’s got Lawson so peaky and out of sorts?’

‘I’m fine now,’ said Lawson and tried handing the handkerchief back. But Mason just wrinkled his nose and shook his head.

‘I think you’d best be keeping that, don’t you?’

When Daniel looked at Lawson, wondering what to say, Mason steered him back round. ‘Just keep your eyes on me,’ said Mason quietly. ‘So you can tell me what I want to
know.’