III
The Cuts
These were the things Shadow learned that night, sitting around the kitchen table with Moira and Oliver:
He learned that Oliver had not been happy or fulfilled in his London advertising agency job. He had moved up to the village and taken an extremely early medical retirement. Now, initially for recreation and increasingly for money, he repaired and rebuilt drystone walls. There was, he explained, an art and a skill to wall building, it was excellent exercise, and, when done correctly, a meditative practice.
‘There used to be hundreds of drystone-wall people around here. Now there’s barely a dozen who know what they’re doing. You see walls repaired with concrete, or with breeze blocks. It’s a dying art. I’d love to show you how I do it. Useful skill to have. Picking the rock, sometimes, you have to let the rock tell you where it goes. And then it’s immovable. You couldn’t knock it down with a tank. Remarkable.’
He learned that Oliver had been very depressed several years earlier, shortly after Moira and he got together, but that for the last few years he had been doing very well. Or, he amended, relatively well.
He learned that Moira was independently wealthy, that her family trust fund had meant that she and her sisters had not needed to work, but that, in her late twenties, she had gone for teacher training. That she no longer taught, but that she was extremely active in local affairs, and had campaigned successfully to keep the local bus routes in service.
Shadow learned, from what Oliver didn’t say, that Oliver was scared of something, very scared, and that when Oliver was asked what had frightened him so badly, and what he had meant by saying that the black dog had followed him home, his response was to stammer and to sway. He learned not to ask Oliver any more questions.
This is what Oliver and Moira had learned about Shadow sitting around that kitchen table:
Nothing much.
Shadow liked them. He was not a stupid man; he had trusted people in the past who had betrayed him but he liked this couple, and he liked the way their home smelled – like bread-making and jam and walnut wood-polish – and he went to sleep that night in his box-room bedroom worrying about the little man with the muttonchop beard. What if the thing Shadow had glimpsed in the field had not been a donkey? What if it had been an enormous dog? What then?
The rain had stopped when Shadow woke. He made himself toast in the empty kitchen. Moira came in from the garden, letting a gust of chilly air in through the kitchen door. ‘Sleep well?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Very well.’ He had dreamed of being at the zoo. He had been surrounded by animals he could not see, which snuffled and snorted in their pens. He was a child, walking with his mother, and he was safe and he was loved. He had stopped in front of a lion’s cage, but what had been in the cage was a sphinx, half lion and half woman, her tail swishing. She had smiled at him, and her smile had been his mother’s smile. He heard her voice, accented and warm and feline.
It said, Know thyself.
I know who I am, said Shadow in his dream, holding the bars of the cage. Behind the bars was the desert. He could see pyramids. He could see shadows on the sand.
Then who are you, Shadow? What are you running from? Where are you running to?
Who are you?
And he had woken, wondering why he was asking himself that question, and missing his mother, who had died twenty years before, when he was a teenager. He still felt oddly comforted, remembering the feel of his hand in his mother’s hand.
‘I’m afraid Ollie’s a bit under the weather this morning.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘Yes. Well, can’t be helped.’
‘I’m really grateful for the room. I guess I’ll be on my way.’
Moira said, ‘Will you look at something for me?’
Shadow nodded, then followed her outside, and round the side of the house. She pointed to the rose bed. ‘What does that look like to you?’
Shadow bent down. ‘The footprint of an enormous hound,’ he said. ‘To quote Dr Watson.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It really does.’
‘If there’s a spectral ghost-hound out there,’ said Shadow, ‘it shouldn’t leave footprints. Should it?’
‘I’m not actually an authority on these matters,’ said Moira. ‘I had a friend once who could have told us all about it. But she . . .’ She trailed off. Then, more brightly, ‘You know, Mrs Camberley two doors down has a Doberman pinscher. Ridiculous thing.’ Shadow was not certain whether the ridiculous thing was Mrs Camberley or her dog.
He found the events of the previous night less troubling and odd, more explicable. What did it matter if a strange dog had followed them home? Oliver had been frightened or startled, and had collapsed, from narcolepsy, from shock.
‘Well, I’ll pack you some lunch before you go,’ said Moira. ‘Boiled eggs. That sort of thing. You’ll be glad of them on the way.’
They went into the house. Moira went to put something away, and returned looking shaken.
‘Oliver’s locked himself in the bathroom,’ she said.
Shadow was not certain what to say.
‘You know what I wish?’ she continued.
‘I don’t.’
‘I wish you would talk to him. I wish he would open the door. I wish he’d talk to me. I can hear him in there. I can hear him.’
And then, ‘I hope he isn’t cutting himself again.’
Shadow walked back into the hall, stood by the bathroom door, called Oliver’s name. ‘Can you hear me? Are you okay?’
Nothing. No sound from inside.
Shadow looked at the door. It was solid wood. The house was old, and they built them strong and well back then. When Shadow had used the bathroom that morning he’d learned the lock was a hook and eye. He leaned on the handle of the door, pushing it down, then rammed his shoulder against the door. It opened with a noise of splintering wood.
He had watched a man die in prison, stabbed in a pointless argument. He remembered the way that the blood had puddled about the man’s body, lying in the back corner of the exercise yard. The sight had troubled Shadow, but he had forced himself to look, and to keep looking. To look away would somehow have felt disrespectful.
Oliver was naked on the floor of the bathroom. His body was pale, and his chest and groin were covered with thick, dark hair. He held the blade from an ancient safety razor in his hands. He had sliced his arms with it, his chest above the nipples, his inner thighs and his penis. Blood was smeared on his body, on the black-and-white linoleum floor, on the white enamel of the bathtub. Oliver’s eyes were round and wide, like the eyes of a bird. He was looking directly at Shadow, but Shadow was not certain that he was being seen.
‘Ollie?’ said Moira’s voice, from the hall. Shadow realised that he was blocking the doorway and he hesitated, unsure whether to let her see what was on the floor or not.
Shadow took a pink towel from the towel rail and wrapped it around Oliver. That got the little man’s attention. He blinked, as if seeing Shadow for the first time, and said, ‘The dog. It’s for the dog. It must be fed, you see. We’re making friends.’
Moira said, ‘Oh my dear sweet god.’
‘I’ll call the emergency services.’
‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘He’ll be fine at home with me. I don’t know what I’ll . . . please?’
Shadow picked up Oliver, swaddled in the towel, carried him into the bedroom as if he were a child, and then placed him on the bed. Moira followed. She picked up an iPad by the bed, touched the screen, and music began to play. ‘Breathe, Ollie,’ she said. ‘Remember. Breathe. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.’
‘I can’t really breathe,’ said Oliver, in a small voice. ‘Not really. I can feel my heart, though. I can feel my heart beating.’
Moira squeezed his hand and sat down on the bed, and Shadow left them alone.
When Moira entered the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, and her hands smelling of antiseptic cream, Shadow was sitting on the sofa, reading a guide to local walks.
‘How’s he doing?’
She shrugged.
‘You have to get him help.’
‘Yes.’ She stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked about her, as if unable to decide which way to turn. ‘Do you . . . I mean, do you have to leave today? Are you on a schedule?’
‘Nobody’s waiting for me. Anywhere.’