The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory Read Free Book Online

just gestured me to sit down in an old armchair by the open balcony window, and he set about re-assembling the model aeroplane he’d smashed the other day.
    I watched him and I wondered what he was thinking. He bent his head and gulped his Adam’s apple and examined the shards of plastic he’d spread all over his bed. Obviously he didn’t want to talk to me or listen to me talking. Perhaps, as he applied himself to the rebuilding of the toy, he was imagining the wreckage of the real Phantom which would never be mended, which had disappeared to the bottom of the North Sea with the body of his father.
    I ate a scone. I looked out of the window, past the Scots pine and the spars of the tree-house in it, towards the horizon where the coast might be, where my father would be. I pictured him so vividly in his room in the nursing-home that I could conjure the smell of him and his things. How odd, I thought, for me to be sitting in this strange tower, in this strange house, with a strange boy I’d never met until a week ago... to have flown thousands of miles from Borneo to settle my own father, and now to find my head fuddled with someone else’s worry and frustration. For a moment it rankled with me, the unfairness. I should’ve done it myself... I mean, before the boy had come into the kitchen and erased the complicated mess his mother had made on the table, I should’ve done it myself. I should’ve stood up and stopped her talking. I should’ve swept the flour from the table with one swipe of my hand and reminded her I’d come back to England to comfort my own father, not her, not her son...
    Screaming. Screaming outside. So high-pitched that it was more like a whistle than a scream. An alien sound. Inhuman.
    Something, a black projectile, hurtled through the open window and into the room.
    The boy leapt off the bed and scattered the splinters of plastic onto the floor. I clenched my hand on the scone so suddenly that it exploded into crumbs.
    A swift. The bird had swerved through the window, and now it was battering and beating hopelessly among the model planes which dangled from the ceiling. And screaming a pathetic rasping scream, so hoarse and high that it scratched at the very limit of human hearing...
    The boy stood up on his bed. Like a silly kid in his t-shirt and pants, he bounced up and down and flailed his hands at the bird, as though to swat it like a shuttlecock. He clapped at it, as though he might catch it, or crush it. ‘Leave it, Lawrence, leave it...’ I was calling to him, ‘just leave it and it’ll find its way out...’ but he bounced like a child and giggled in a manic high-pitched way, a sound as alien as the weakening screams of the swift. The bird snagged its long black wings among the invisible threads of nylon. Entangled for a moment, it writhed and freed itself and cut at the wings of the green and grey toys. The planes clattered together. There was an oddly musical clacking of hollow plastic and the mad, feeble fluttering of the bird.
    ‘For heaven’s sake, Lawrence, just leave the thing!’ And as he sprang off the bed and loomed towards me, his eyes flaring with anger, the bird flopped from the ceiling. I’d seen a split-second of an uncontrollable threat in his face... but the fall of the swift, the way it spiralled softly down and crash-landed on the bed with nothing but a puff of sound, made both of us turn and stare and forget each other.
    We sat on the bed and leaned over it, the two of us.
    Exhausted. Dying? The swift lay on the bed-cover, heaving so hard that its little chest might burst. Black, uniformly black... no, the darkest, deepest brown, its plumage as smooth as the richest, most expensive chocolate... sooty-black, as we bent over it and took away the light. A slim tubular body, perfectly aerodynamic. Wings so long, longer than its body, like scythes for cutting and carving and slicing the air. The swift: the ultimate flying-machine, more exquisitely refined for