Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

She laughed. ‘Yuh. Cup-plates. Croquet mallets.’

On the way down, she started telling me that she had seen Patrick for the last time three Easters earlier. He had left early to cut the grass, she said.

‘He just came to eat. He looked awful.’ Offal was how she said it, which made it sound even more evocative. ‘I mean, really awful. His hair!’

‘Strictly speaking, it wasn’t his,’ I said.

She rolled her eyes. ‘He had a plate piled this high with food.’ She took her hands off the steering wheel to indicate a mound about six inches deep. ‘He went back twice for more. I’d made some Swedish meatballs and offered him some. “Not for me,” he said. He pointed at them. “Pure death.” Pure death! “I’m dieting,” he said.’

‘Do you think he meant it or was he trying to be rude?’

She took her eyes off the road to look at me. ‘You know what, Damien, maybe he was, but I don’t care.’ As a true Bostonian, she gave ‘care’ two full syllables: ki-ya. ‘I would have done anything for him. He was my brother. He knew that I loved him. I can put my hand on my heart and say: My conscience is clear.’ Kli-ya.

The subject of the will hovered in the air between us and made the atmosphere in the car, despite the air-conditioning, seem faintly oppressive.

‘The will must have come as a surprise,’ I said finally.

Judith turned towards me, pursed her lips, sighed and pursed her lips again. ‘I’ll be honest. I was hurt. I don’t want you to think I’m jealous, because I’m happy for you. Really. I’m hurt for my girls. Damien, they loved him. They loved him so much. But he didn’t just not think of them, he deliberately hurt them. He gave Tricia those stupid books. It was so mean-spirited. They would have been happy with so little.’

Outside the car, the numbers on the exits were counting down our approach to the bridge. I found myself saying: ‘You must come visit. I’d like people to look on it as a family house.’

Judith startled me by saying, ‘I know you do. And I know that you and Patrick were close.’

I looked out of the window at the struts of Sagamore Bridge, thinking that I knew neither of these things myself.

I FINALLY TOOK POSSESSION of my new home on a warm June evening slightly more than six weeks after my uncle’s funeral. The ferry had been delayed because of rough weather. Aunt Judith left me at the dock to drive back to Boston.

It was dark by the time I arrived at the house. The taxi driver dropped me off at the side of the road, from where three steps led up to the swinging wooden sign that still said: PATRICK M. MARCH J.D. The driver offered to carry the suitcases all the way up to the door, but I told him not to bother. He climbed back into the car and set off towards Westwich. I could hear the clamour of his engine dying away in the darkness, until the only sounds were the crickets and the restful boop of the lighthouse ship miles out in the bay.

It was a mild evening and the moon was bright enough to cast a faint shadow under the apple trees as I carried my bags over to the veranda and searched on my hands and knees for the envelope that was supposed to be waiting for me.

Mr Diaz, Patrick’s lawyer, had told me he would leave a set of keys under the porch. But there was no sign of them. I cursed myself for not having thought to bring a torch. I had a book of paper matches which flared brightly for a fraction of a second before becoming too painful to hold. The pitch-black crawl space under the porch had trapped a pocket of the day’s humid summer air. It was musty and smelled of wood and paint. I had my chest flat on the ground and was groping blindly around me, between striking matches, with the awful presentiment that something was about to scuttle across my neck. I gave up and crawled back out into the moonlight.

I felt a diffuse sense of rage and regretted having come. At that moment, Platon Bakatin was sleeping soundly on the brand-new mattress I’d bought for his fat Russian arse. I walked once around the house and once around the summer kitchen to see if there was any way into either. There was none. The storm windows had not been taken off since winter and the doors were impregnable. I thought of smashing my way in, but it seemed such a bad way to begin. And I had no way of reaching Mr Diaz without a phone.

The nearest houses were about a mile back the way I had come, so I left my bags and started walking. If I waited any longer, it would be too late to turn up on a stranger’s doorstep and ask to use their phone. I was reminded of the Japanese tourist who had been shot dead when he knocked on a door to ask directions in New Orleans.

Both sides of the road were lined with trees, whose branches blotted out the moonlight. I felt disconnected from myself in the darkness, as though I were swimming through warm ink. I could hear the sounds of my feet on the tarmac, but my body had become invisible, and I was momentarily startled by the unearthly sound of my own whistling. Once I became aware of it, I tried to shape it into a tune, but it sounded like something someone might whistle in a movie shortly before they get dragged into a bush and disembowelled by a man in a hockey mask. I thought how much futility and false levity is encompassed by the phrase ‘whistling in the dark’.

After walking for about twenty minutes, I came to a shingled cottage set back from the intersection between the road that links Westwich and Pilgrim Point and the turnoff that leads to my uncle’s house. I rapped loudly on the door, and rang the buzzer, my banging growing bolder and more insistent as I became more convinced that there was no one at home. I was ready to set off again when I saw the lights of a car approaching from the direction of Westwich and pulling into the driveway.

I shaded my eyes from the light and called out a greeting as the sound of the engine died away.

The middle-aged woman at the wheel switched off her headlights and got out of the car. I was so busy trying to look neighbourly and non-threatening that I barely noticed her two passengers.

‘Hi,’ I said again. ‘Sorry to bother you like this. I’m Damien March. I’m staying up the road. I’m locked out of my house and I wondered if I could use your phone.’

The woman drew close to me. She was, I learned later, only about five years older than me, but the difference seemed greater, and not only because of the children. She was heavyset, with pale eyes and greying hair, and an expression that seemed to hover between humour and perplexity. She was studying me very hard.

‘Sorry about this,’ I continued, unnerved by her silence and talking loudly. ‘Someone was supposed to leave the keys for me but there’s been a cock-up.’ ‘Cock-up’ was a deliberate Anglicism on my part. I was laying on the Brit stuff thick, as though my English accent was in itself proof that I was a gentleman and had no plans to rob them: a piece of romanticism I must have picked up from my father. But the woman said nothing, simply peering at my face as though she hoped to read my intentions there. It occurred to me that my accent, far from being reassuring, was just incomprehensible to her.

Suddenly she turned her head and looked at the boy beside her. A young woman in her late teens was eyeing me from a few paces behind him as intently as her mother had.

The boy asked me to repeat myself.

I was confused. I looked from one to another as I told them again that I was locked out and needed to use a phone.

The boy rested some groceries on his knee to free one of his hands and gestured to his mother. He shook his head as he mimed a hand fitting a key into a lock.

I pointed at my ear. ‘You’re deaf?’ I said.