Castle Of Bone (5 page)

Hugh went downwards now, into the hollow with the willow trees. The slope cut off the castle bit by bit, until he could see only the topmost battlements, and then not even them, for the hollow, engulfing him, wiped out the landscape. There was only sky and the remains of bracken, sodden and brown and patched with coarse, greyish-looking snow. There was also the group of willow trees.

Hugh put out a hand and touched a willow tree. The bark was pitted, coarse and lined. He stroked it, feeling still more roughness than his eyes saw, and when his hand slowed it took a moment for him to realize that he had not meant to slow it; that his brain had not ordered nerve, nerve had not ordered muscle, even subconsciously. The hand had seemed to slow, stop, entirely of its own accord. It was as if it had frozen. And when he touched the tree with his other hand he found that that at once was frozen too, that he could not move either hand, that indeed he could not move at all.

His brain searched out each nerve to command each muscle. But he could not sort out one from another, work out which muscle controlled which limb. He was frozen totally.

It was then that he realized there was another traveller, a man on horseback. But he was moving, he came on – Hugh heard him for considerably longer than he saw him – the jingle of harness, the clod and thump of feet on bracken. Not only could he not turn his head to see, he found that now he could not even move his eyes. They were fixed in one focus, confined to a single plane, as if he looked out from the narrowest of windows. The man passed across it briefly, and so near that Hugh saw pieces only of man and horse, not the whole at once. He did not see the man’s face, and the man entirely ignored him. The sound of his going went on for a long time afterwards.

The next thing Hugh knew was his own bed. He lay in it frozen still, uncertain still how to make any movement. He felt huge, edgeless, like a landscape in which the lines of his body formed the folds and dips and ridges. Cautiously he began testing nerves; fitting muscle to limb; moving head, hands, body, and in turn each arm and leg; rolled over in bed at last, wallowing hugely, and fell asleep with a heavy sigh.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“It’s
not
plastic, it’s leather,” said Jean. “
Real
leather. You said we mustn’t put in leather things.”

“It isn’t leather. It’s imitation. Smell it. Leather doesn’t smell like that,” said Penn.

“But it looks like leather.”

“It’s plastic and it looks like plastic.”

“What is plastic, anyway?” asked Hugh to calm the two of them. But no one really knew, when they considered it. Hugh dug up the word synthetic but that led them nowhere beyond itself. “We know it’s not an animal, only chemicals of some sort,” said Penn, “so at least it’s safe to put it in and see.”

“Look I tell you Penn, you are not to have my one and only purse, even if it is plastic. And I think it’s leather anyway.”

“So where’s your spirit of inquiry, Jean?” asked Penn.

“There’s some plastic ducks in the bathroom, we could use them instead,” suggested Hugh.

“Hughie’s bath toys, I suppose?”

“They’re from when we were
little,
’ Jean said. And it was true their mother rarely, if ever, threw anything away, let alone sorted things. Downstairs in the hall, stratified by age like rock, hung layers and layers of clothes that Jean and Hugh had worn, going back to the days before they went to school; the bulk tending to reject any current garment hung too carelessly on top of them, so that Hugh invariably went to school in a blazer that had sat on the floor all night. Jean had given up long ago, and kept her coats always in her room.

Hugh returned from the bathroom with a pair of dented and faded ducks to find that Penn, meanwhile, had seized Jean’s purse after all, and flung it in the cupboard. He pushed aside the feeling that he ought to be indignant on Jean’s behalf – he did not actually feel indignant at all – in his interest at what might emerge. But when they pulled open the cupboard doors they found only an oily and malodorous liquid, slightly warm and definitely unpleasant, reflecting acid colours not to be found in the room. Jean, neat-stepped, tight-lipped, straight-backed, went down to the bathroom in her turn to fetch a cloth to wipe this up; but first plucked the plastic ducks from Hugh and hurled them at Penn, who fielded with utmost nonchalance, at the same time saying rather indignantly to Hugh, “We need a scientist round here, why aren’t you a scientist, Hugh?” – the kind of unhelpful remark Hugh’s father more usually made to him.

Penn and Anna had brought from home a torn supermarket carrier stuffed with odds and ends; a comb with a few teeth left, a ripped and moulting Davy Crockett hat (“How about ducks now?” Jean muttered on its appearance, but Penn did not bother noticing, let alone taking offence), a fleet of matchbox cars lacking most of their paint, newspapers, handkerchiefs, a box of matches, a painted wooden horse minus two legs, a china dog, a glass mug, a tin plate, a chipped china bowl; even a toothpaste tube with a little toothpaste left; also nails, screws, bits of string and thread and wire. It looked as if Penn had chosen carefully at first, then chucked in everything that he could find.

Jean contributed a small tortoise-shell box, and she and Hugh together had brought a large mahogany box with a small brass inlay at the centre of the lid. It was Jean’s idea. Hugh, feeling that he had already provided more than his fair share, had sorted out all the things he particularly cared about, painting things mostly, paints, brushes, canvasses and drawing-pads, kept unlike his clothes in impeccable order, and hidden them all in his bottom drawer, turning the clothes out on to the top of the chest.

“Mum never uses the button box,” Jean said. “In this house it’s me that sews buttons on.”

The box had sat in the bottom drawer of a huge oak tallboy as long as Hugh could remember. When little he had sometimes played with it for hours, devising button pictures and button patterns. It gave him a sense of curious displacement touching these buttons again now – a sense of loss almost – of time perhaps, but more, of himself.

They dated generations back; there were modern plastic buttons, brass buttons, plain or with anchors on, almost all tarnished; velvet-covered buttons, the velvet mostly split and faded; smooth round pearl buttons, flat, subtler mother-of-pearl buttons; some large white buttons minutely carved. “These are bone, I think,” said Hugh. “We’d better be careful.” “What sort of bone?” asked Jean. “How should I know,” Hugh said. “How about whalebone?” suggested Penn. “I say we don’t find out,” said Hugh. He and Penn looked at each other and laughed and threw punches, aimed at, but not meeting, flesh.

Hugh picked a bone button from the box. Its carvings must have needed a point of needle size; they made an intricate, geometric pattern that he thought entirely abstract at first glance. But then, as he was examining it, it was as if his eyes changed focus suddenly. The pattern shifted, jumped out at him – however hard he tried he could not blink it away again. For there was a castle; flattened, one-dimensional, but a castle nonetheless with lines indicating battlements and the dimensions of hewn stone blocks.

All the bone buttons were similar. On each a castle now came to eye. Though Hugh hunted feverishly he could not find one without. Meanwhile, the familiar clack, clink, slither of the buttons revived other familiarities. The bone buttons had always been in the box, he remembered. Even the castles were not as strange to him as he had thought initially. Recognition of memory came, then memory of knowing them. Yet he did not lose his sense of shock. Bone buttons. Castles of bone, he thought. “Just suppose they were made of human bone,” said Penn.

But it was hard to tell of what many things were made. The Davy Crockett hat, for instance, could have been rabbit or cat or even nylon. “It’s certainly never seen a racoon,” said Hugh. They were very careful at first, trying only the most obvious materials. A box of matches became a small fir tree with its roots still full of earth. (“What a pity it isn’t Christmas,” Jean said, but it was an uneven tree, much bushier on one side than the other. Hugh would never have chosen it from a shop.) A brass button emerged from the cupboard as two small pieces of rock, one greyish, one yellower, that Hugh explained held zinc and copper ore before metal had been smelted out of stone.

“Man ain’t this educational,” said Penn. “But not just educational,” Anna said quietly. And it was not indeed. You did not, in merely acquiring knowledge, wait with such a shiver between question and answer. You did not impose ritual, such as they imposed on themselves at first. Someone would advance alone, place an object on a shelf and close the door, the gentleness or firmness of that depending on who it was; Penn for instance decisive, Jean brisk, yet a little hesitant. Anna was quite as decisive as Penn, Hugh thought, but in a very different way; slower, more deliberate, prolonging each moment and giving it weight. He himself tried to shut the doors so quietly that there was no click at all. Silence in this seemed to him aesthetically necessary, even satisfying.

Then they would wait; silent and intent. Light in these moments took on almost the quality of sound for Hugh, while sound had a grainy texture to his ears, as if he could touch and see, as well as hear it. Sometimes, waiting, he felt no tension. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, with no apparent difference the tension was unbearable. He noticed Anna watching him once. He had been scratching his groin, only half consciously, and hastily he moved his hand. The movement broke the thread, for him, for everyone. Someone opened the cupboard door. This time a white cotton handkerchief had turned into a plant with a fluffy untidy head.

“Everything has stages of development,” Penn said. “But we don’t know which stage the cupboard is going to choose. It takes things back to any stage, you can never predict what.”

“Hugh’s wallet turned back into a pig itself. His sweater didn’t become a sheep,” said Jean.

“If you put a person in,” said Anna smiling at Hugh, “a person of thirty, say, they would come out a baby or a child, or even a younger grown-up. And you wouldn’t know which in advance.”

“That’s exactly it.” Hugh felt Penn watching him smile back at Anna.

“That’s exactly what I meant. How about trying a person then,” Penn said. “You would do fine, Hugh.” He nudged Hugh, a nudge perhaps sharper than necessary. Hugh might have protested or retaliated had not the cupboard at that moment illustrated the point exactly, by returning for the chewed and twisted toothpaste tube, instead of a heap of materials, a new tube, shiny, plump and full. It might have come straight from the manufacturers.

All of them suddenly became lit and warm and wild. They rolled about with laughter, as if someone had made a particularly funny joke. But the excitement was dangerous, frosty-edged, a little hysterical. The tortoise-shell box became actually a tortoise with blinking eyes and a prehistoric scaly skin – the first live creature to emerge from the cupboard since the white sow itself – which so fired Penn that he grabbed Hugh’s one silk scarf from an open drawer, and let the cupboard turn it into a silkworm, little as a pin. None of them could find this at first, it was so small, and while they hunted on hands and knees, Jean, enraged about the scarf and still angry about her purse, seized, from the back pocket of his jeans, Penn’s diary, in which he put the dates of his cricket and football games. It emerged from the cupboard an unattractive mixture of wood-pulp and oil. “So
that
wasn’t leather-covered either, Penn,” she said. Hugh thought Penn might actually hit Jean then. He towered; his fist was raised, his face on fire.

From then on they seemed to be arguing all the time. Penn accused Jean of being officious; Jean accused Penn of bossiness. Hugh was distracted, felt apart and unhelpful, succeeded only in being clumsy. Anna said almost nothing but carried on exactly in her own way. She irrationally but quite profoundly irritated Hugh, who dismissed the feeling as one of the many he had these days which seemed much too large and unwieldy for whatever had aroused it.

Ritual first blurred, then entirely disappeared. They started to shove everything into the cupboard at once. Newspapers and buttons, string and nails emerged in pointless, unpromising heaps, from which it would have been impossible to disentangle the origins of anything. As Hugh raked out the whole lot rather angrily on to the bedroom floor, his sister Jean turned uncharacteristically perhaps the wildest of them all, rushed away downstairs, returning a little later with raisins, dried beans, a box of salt, and a jar of meat extract with a bull’s head on its label. “Well you can ditch that for a start,” said Penn.

Hugh took the raisins from her hands. They were actually muscatels, in a three-cornered box, very wrinkled and dried up. He put them into the cupboard and closed the door on them just as his mother walked in, panting a little from the climb up four flights of stairs.

She stood in the doorway shouting. She wore a brown cotton skirt with a split in one seam and the hem halfway down the same side. Her hair must have been newly washed the way it flew out from her head, with a blur of little lights round the edge of it. She never had the smooth, the polished look, that Hugh thought other people’s mothers had.

And there they were: Hugh standing by the cupboard, with his hand on the catch; Jean, flushed and unusually rakish and untidy-looking, holding a box of best sea salt; Penn leaning nonchalantly against the window, his body distorting a beam of light; Anna sitting on Hugh’s unmade bed, holding the little fir-tree from which she plucked needles and crushed them between her fingers – Hugh’s nose caught wafts of their small strong pungencies. His mother looked oddly at Anna, looked at her twice, but did not speak, as if she could not quite analyse why what she saw was strange. Then she swept across the room and pulled open the cupboard door.