1

 

Even as a boy, Raley Street had been able to detach himself from reality. He called it his gift, as in Superman could fly or the Flash could outrun a bullet, but that was just his way to justify his almost pathological ability to have an internal conversation with himself while sublimating, but remaining aware of, his environment. It was as if he was standing next to himself enjoying a one-to-one while the rest of the world simply faded into the background. It was probably more of a defence mechanism. It wasn’t something he had developed as a reaction to his parents, who rarely, if ever, raised their voices to him above a whisper. Neither had it been a reaction to any traumatic event which had occurred in the few preceding years of his life.

He was simply a nervous child who found that reality was sometimes just a little too bruising for his tender sensibilities to absorb. The ability wasn’t even a conscious thing. He had simply realised its use and allowed it to happen. When the moment became too dull, too stressful, too anything at all, he would simply pop out of himself and hold an internal dialogue that allowed him to still remain in touch with reality and yet, at the same time, distance himself from his surroundings to the degree that they no longer had any effect upon him.

His teachers had grown concerned by what appeared to be a dreamlike state which came over him during class. He would gaze at something, somewhere, with all his attention, as if, out there, lay something more satisfying than what was being said in here.

This was fed back to his mother at a parent-teacher evening. She had feigned shock, but knew in her heart of hearts that her Raley was just a little...well...weird.

She took him to Doctor Fishkind.

‘He drifts,’ she said.

‘He drifts?’

‘Yes, he drifts. Daydreams. It’s like he switches himself off. He doesn’t pay attention in class. The teachers think he has a disorder. It’s the same at home. One minute his father’s talking to him, the next he might as well be talking to a statue.’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘It is a little creepy, I have to say. I know I’m his mother, but I do have to say.’

Doctor Fishkind nodded pensively. He looked at Raley, who indeed appeared to have taken himself elsewhere. He seemed content.

‘You know,’ he said. ‘Kids this age, they have invisible friends. It helps them to work out what they don’t understand, to make sense of the world. It’s normal.’

Raley’s mother hitched her bosom and harrumphed. ‘That’s no friend. It’s a demon. He’s possessed. I bet he got hold of one of those Ouija boards and started talking to unfriendly spirits. They’re all the rage, these things. All the rage.’

The doctor clasped his hands and rested his chin upon them. ‘Unfriendly spirits? Demons? Does this look like a holy place, Mrs Street? I’m a medical doctor, not a witch doctor.’ Secretly, he was mildly amused by this slight play on words, but could see that it broke no ice. He leaned upon his thick oak desk and turned his eyes towards the boy. ‘Raley? Do you hear me?’

Raley did not look at the doctor but continued to gaze lazily into the middle distance. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you pay attention in class?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you listen to your father?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you listen to your mother?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me, how’s school?

‘Fine thank you, sir.’

‘Do you get on with the other kids?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Any friends?’

‘Not really, sir.’

‘Do you ever talk to anyone? Perhaps someone no one else can see?’

For the first time, Raley hesitated and looked at his mother. Dr Fishkind thought that, for the first time, the boy was really reacting. There was an anxiety about him now, his eyes uncertain, as if afraid to answer.

His mother leaned in closely to the side of Raley’s face and whispered. ‘The doctor asked you a question. Talk to the man, Raley.’

‘I have a friend.’

Dr Fishkind smiled benignly. ‘What’s his name?’

Raley again looked at his mother, his lips tight, as if they had to be somehow prised apart.

‘Would you just answer the doctor’s question, Raley?

Raley’s gaze turned again to the distant-straight-ahead. ‘Leary.’

Mrs Street slumped in her chair. Her shoulders looked dislocated as if Raley’s words had somehow physically harmed her. Oh, not this again!

Dr Fishkind ignored her.

‘That’s a bit like Raley, isn’t it? Only the letters are in a different order. Like an anagram.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Does he help you with things?’

Raley considered the question. ‘No, sir. He’s kind of an asshole.’

Mrs Street clipped him across the back of the head.

‘What’s the matter with you? You can’t say asshole in front of an educated man like Dr Fishkind.’

‘Sorry, Dr Fishkind.’

Dr Fishkind chuckled. ‘It’s okay, kid. An asshole’s an asshole in any language. ‘

The doctor tapped his pen pensively upon his desk and turned back to Mrs Street. ‘How are his grades?’

‘His grades? Straight As. The boy’s a genius. You wouldn’t know to look at him. I mean, look at him...’ Mrs Raley and the doctor both turned their heads towards the boy. ‘It’s like you’re waiting for someone to put their hand inside him and bring him to life. He didn’t blink for ten minutes the other day. Ten minutes! How can you not blink for ten minutes? It makes my eyes water just thinking about it.’

‘You were timing his blinking?’

‘It was unnerving, Doctor.’

‘How are his eyes?’

‘Distant.’

‘No, I mean, how are his eyes? Have you had them tested? What about his hearing? Have you had that tested?’

‘Why would I?’

Doctor Fishkind shrugged. ‘Why not?’

Mrs Street raised her eyebrows and again leaned conspiratorially forward in her chair. ‘You don’t think it’s his brain that’s the problem?’

‘Mrs Street, let’s do the easy stuff first. Eyes and ears. After that we can...’ He held up a warning finger. ‘...if necessary, refer him onto someone who looks into that sort of thing.’

‘You mean a psychiatrist?’

Dr Fishkind dithered. ‘Maybe...’

‘He’s not mad, Doctor, he’s distracted. What will people say if they see me coming out of the psychiatrist’s with him in tow, sucking his thumb because he got stuck in some sort of regression therapy?’

The doctor sighed, not unkindly. ‘Eyes and ears, Mrs Street. Eyes and ears. I’ll write you a letter for my good friend Dr Herxheimer. He’ll take a look at his eyes. If that turns out to be nothing, I’ll do you a letter for Dr Tischman. He’s very good with ears is Dr Tischman. See Dr Herxheimer first though. Eyes, then ears. Easiest to most difficult.’

Mrs Street regarded Raley with the affection that someone saves for a three-legged dog. ‘Okay, if you say so.’

Raley ended up with glasses. It turned out that he had in fact, for some time, been seeing the world through what could only be described as frosty-morning-glass.

His mother was happy with this. Something had been done. His father was happy with this because his wife was happy with this.

Raley continued to drift and continued to get straight As. He never let himself interrupt his life, only help him on the journey.

 

2

 

Professor Raley Street stood before his class in the, to him at least, oversized auditorium; row upon curved row of wooden pews, all pointed towards the altar of knowledge, and shared his enthusiasm for all things Egyptian.

‘So, when you look at the Egyptian kingdoms, although you can define them by name, you’re not simply looking at a single, confined era. You have the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom and after all that...’

A shaft of late-day light fell through one of the small arched windows that came part and parcel with the Gothic, eighteenth-century institution. It bathed Raley in an aureate beam. To some it might have looked like a holy embrace; to Raley it was about as close to suffocation as he could get without a pillow held over his face. The heat was magnified to beyond bearable.

‘...you have the Late New Kingdom and it’s important to remember that these kingdoms do not stand in isolation; each kingdom bleeds into another. And each kingdom can itself be broken down into layers, through the dynasties and the individuals within those...’

His eyes fell upon the students in the room. He rarely looked at his audience; it was too much of a critique - the half-closed eyes, vacant stares, open mouths and fallen jaw, although one or two of them remained alert to his every word. His eyes fell momentarily upon a beautiful blonde girl. She listened intently. She always did. It was as if the rather thin, five foot eight, bespectacled man at the front of the class, with slightly-too-long, thinning hair that clawed towards his collar like leafless, wizened ivy, who stood crookedly upon thin thighs and wore an aged corduroy jacket across thin sloping shoulders, actually did have something to say. God bless you, Jenny Summerleas, he thought. God bless your attentive gaze and your gorgeous blue eyes and your golden river of hair. God bless you, Jenny Summerleas. You make it all worth it.

He felt himself begin to slip away, as he always had when he didn’t like the moment. His other self, that not-quite-dark-but-certainly-slightly-desaturated self which lay concealed within, appeared at his side as he continued to talk to the room.

‘My God, look at them,’ said Leary, as Raley had called this almost-other being in an anaemic moment of imagination. He leaned nonchalantly against a desk with a computer upon it which shed PowerPoint images upon a white wall. ‘They cannot wait to get out of here. They don’t care about history. They don’t even care about this morning, never mind three and a half thousand years ago. They have no concept of consequences and time, that what a person does today might dictate what the world does tomorrow. I don’t know why you teach history. No one cares. Remember when you asked that kid about Nefertiti? He said ‘Who?’ You said, ‘What are you, an owl?’ He threw a pen at you; at you. He threw a pen at you. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? When you were at school, if a teacher threw something at you, you took it as a compliment. At least, you did. You were pretty needy. You remember that geography teacher who threw a desk at you? She was so strong. If you throw something at a student nowadays, it’s assault. Assault?’ Leary smirked. ‘You? You couldn’t throw anything across a room without oxygen and a team of medics standing by. You’d fracture an arm if you lifted anything weightier than a lime. Look at you. There’s more meat on an avocado. I mean, why are they here? Why are you here? Why is anybody here? You might as well be at home, making a sandwich; brown bread of course, just to keep things turning over inside, and some mayo, light, maybe some corned beef and bit of salad. What about a drink? Beer? Is it too early for beer?’

Raley looked surreptitiously at his watch.

‘No,’ continued Leary. ‘It’s not too early for a beer. It’s nearly the end of the day. Why not?’

Raley heard a door open at the back of the auditorium. He squinted into the shadows and his heart sank. Doug Jenkins, broad-shouldered, broad-beamed, stood silhouetted against the back-light at the top of the stairs.

He could hear himself lecturing, but it was no more than a mosquito in the room. Leary snarled silently at Doug.

‘Oh, crap! Now what? What can you possibly have done wrong now? You’ve done all your paperwork. You’ve marked every paper between here and the early dynastic period. You even left your bicycle in a safe place since Molly Tasker tripped over it and broke her wrist. It’s true what they say; never work with animals, children, family and friends. Throw a chicken in the room right now and you might as well just give up work.’

Doug began a slow descent of the stairs. How like a giant Gummy Bear he is, thought Raley. He doesn’t take steps like normal people; he lurches, as if his feet belong to someone else.

Doug tapped his watch and gave Raley a wind-up gesture. Slowly Raley heard his own voice seep back into the room, that same slightly whiny, slightly monotone, slightly not loud enough mosquito drone. God, he found himself irritating.

‘So tomorrow we’ll look at the transition from the Early Dynastic period to the Old Kingdom.’ He sighed miserably. ‘Okay. Go. Just try and read something between now and next time. A history book would be useful.’

The students made a bolt for the exit, thoughtful only of their need to be anywhere but here, thoughtless of the idea that their very act of bolting might have finally induced a professor to suicide through a life unfulfilled.

Raley looked up at Doug who worked his way relentlessly through the torrent of young people, a single salmon thrusting against the flow. He picked his worn leather bag up from his desk and began to fill it with papers.

‘Professor Street?’

He turned at the sound of the voice. He was surprised to see Jenny Summerleas, her books held across her chest in typical student pose.

Some things, he thought, are better not viewed up close; one could see the flaws and lumps and bumps. In Jenny Summerleas’ case, he was happy to admit, the rule did not apply; she looked even better at close range. Her blue eyes danced as they caught every stray glint of light; her skin was blush marble and her long hair a rush of thick honey. He put his bag down and leaned as nonchalantly as he could upon his desk. Realising that there was really very little about him that was nonchalant, he dropped his hands awkwardly by his side, tilted his head and gave Jenny his most professional attention.

‘Miss Summerleas. Hi. What can I do for you? Was something unclear? The whole four kingdoms thing can be a bit heavy...’

‘On, no, no, no,’ interrupted Jenny. ‘We’re all going to Benny’s for a drink...’

‘Oh, yes? I like Benny’s. It’s a nice place. Real. Full of...real. Full of...drinks and stuff. It has atmosphere. I like atmosphere. In fact, if there was no atmosphere, I would probably die; we all would. So...’

He floundered. He had floundered internally long before he had floundered externally and now he was no more than an actual flounder dropped upon an empty, dry deck.

Jenny hesitated, uncertain as to whether Raley had finished, before she continued. ‘Yes, it’s great isn’t it. I wondered if...’

‘Yes?’

Raley could hear Doug’s breaths as he tackled the last few steps. It was the sound of a tired bulldog.

‘...if you wanted to come along?’

‘Who?’ Raley looked about, quite reasonably in his view, expecting to see a godlike, muscular man behind him that he quite simply had failed to notice in the preceding hour. ‘Me?’ Jenny nodded. ‘Well, I’d love to but I’m pretty sure that’s against the rules. Mixing students and drinks. And I find that alcohol makes me drunk. Very drunk, especially if I have too much, so maybe, better not...’

Doug, more breathless than someone who had only walked downstairs had any right to be, reached them and stood between them with his arms crossed. His face wore a mildly amused look. It often did when he knew that Raley was locked in discomfort.

Jenny smiled pleasantly. She made the same hot ray of sun that suffocated Raley appear monochrome cool.

‘Okay. Well, if you change your mind, we’re making an evening of it. It’s my birthday.’

‘Really? Well, happy birthday. I hope you’re old enough to drink now.’

‘I’m twenty-two...’

‘Well, there you go. You’re overqualified...’

‘It’s all research-based too.’

They laughed politely. There was nothing like a good dose of academic humour to loosen the noose.

Jenny lifted a hand in farewell. ‘Well, bye then. See you later maybe.’

She smiled disarmingly at Doug and left.

‘Oh, I doubt it,’ said Raley wistfully after her. ‘I’m just going to go home and cry, as usual.’

He and Doug watched her go up the stairs to the exit, to fade into the bright light on the other side of the doorway.

‘You dog!’ said Doug.

‘What?’ Raley returned to stuffing paperwork into his bag.

‘You dirty dog!’

‘Me? No...I...Are you serious? Are you crazy?’

‘She likes you,’ grinned Doug.

‘What? What do you mean, ‘she likes you’? Are we in school again? What does that even mean?’ Raley attempted clumsily to close the worn straps on the bag. All the shine had gone from the leather, to be replaced by a jaundiced pallor.

‘Are you blind?’ persisted Doug. ‘Has marriage turned you completely numb?’

‘Only below the waist. What do you mean?’

‘What do I mean?’ Doug raised himself full square in front of Raley. Raley sighed inwardly. This was what he had come to call Doug’s Bear Moment, when he was about to spout wise about the world and raised himself like a big old bear ready to charge. ‘Okay,’ said Doug. ‘So, a pretty student stays behind after class, asks you out for a drink, then tells you it’s her birthday and tells you her age. If that’s not a hall pass, I don’t know what is.’

Raley tutted and sighed and dropped his head in the way that he only seemed to drop his head when in conversation with Doug. ‘Doug? What do you want? I’m done. I want to go home. I have some crying to do. What did I do this time? Did I fail to cross a T or dot an I?’

‘No, nothing like that...’

‘Good, because I check all my Ts and Is before I hand over anything to you. You won’t find better Ts and Is in this whole university. Except for Professor Dubcek, but he’s OCD, so you can’t include him. He has a head start on all of us.’

Doug leaned against the desk and crossed his arms again. ‘I wanted to talk to you, that’s all. Brother to brother.’

Raley picked up his bag, slung it over his shoulder and edged towards the stairs. ‘Okay, but there’s only one problem with that. You’re not my brother.’

‘Oh, don’t be so pedantic, Raley. Brother-in-law to brother-in-law then, if you really want to cross those Ts and dot those Is.’

‘Do we have to talk? Jesus! Now you’ve made me sound all whiny. It’s bad enough you’re the department head. You already own me. Marrying my sister doesn’t give you any bonus abuse points.’

‘Sure it does. Can we talk? I really need to talk.’

Raley put his bag back down, but remained pointed hopefully towards the stairs. ‘Talk? To me? Like, talk? What about that therapist you’re seeing? Talk to them.’

‘Ah, they’re a waste of time and money.’

‘Then why go?’

Doug scoffed. ‘Boy, do you have short memory.’

‘You don’t have to go...’

‘Of course I have to go. The court ordered me to. I have to go.’

‘Well, it’s probably not such a bad thing. You threw road kill at another driver just because they overtook you...’

‘They cut me off!’

‘Then you hit them. You hit them with the sticky, bloody remains of the animal that you had just thrown at their car. You gave them a black eye with the fluffy end of a dead rodent. It didn’t even have rigour mortis. Do you have any idea of the power there must have been behind that carcass?’ Raley took his glasses off and cleaned them against the tail-end of his shirt. ‘You do know that you’re quite scary, right? If I cut you off, I’d pull over and batter myself to death with a squirrel, just to save you the trouble.’

‘Ah, don’t say that, Raley.’ Doug ran his hand across his forehead in frustration. ‘Listen to me, for God’s sake. I’m beginning to sound like you, all nasal and girly. Come for a drink with me, please.’

‘I just said no to Jenny Summerleas. She’s younger than you, prettier than you and very female. What do you have that she doesn’t?’

‘You’re sister. And we’re divorcing.’

Raley stopped cleaning his glasses and slipped them back on. ‘Oh, my God! Really? You and Elizabeth are divorcing? Why? Why would you and Elizabeth divorce? You’re married...’

‘And that’s why we have to divorce. You see how these things come together, Raley?’

Raley peered at Doug over his glasses. ‘Oh, so now you’re hoping to endear me with sarcasm?’

‘Please. I don’t have anybody else to talk to.’

‘Well, now I feel really wanted.’

‘You know what I mean. Don’t make me beg.’

Raley, determined this time to leave, picked his bag up again and took bold steps past Doug. ‘You’re married. Begging should be second-nature by now. I’m an expert at begging. In fact, I’m so good, Cressy once gave me a dollar and told me to make sure I spent it on food. I asked for sex and I made a profit. Just another one of those silver linings, I guess.’

Doug followed at his side. ‘Would you take me seriously for once? Please. Come for a drink with me. Just the one. I promise not to let you get drunk.’

Raley halted, his foot on the first step up towards the exit. ‘Oh, really? Are you going to put a peg on my nose? Because I only have to smell alcohol and I’m dancing on the table...’

‘One quick drink, please.’ He punched Raley teasingly in the shoulder. ‘We can go to Benny’s,’ he said playfully.

‘Are you...? You’re talking about divorcing my sister while trying to make me see that girl?’

‘That girl? You forgot her name already?’

Raley carried on up the stairs. He was tired and hot and his brother-in-law’s persistence had drained him of any of the residual energy required to resist. ‘Okay. One drink. If I miss my crying time, I’ll be hell to live with.’ He fiddled with his jacket until it straddled his bag precariously. ‘I’m not comfortable with this, you know.’ He carried on up the stairs with Doug hot on his heels.

‘We always talk about your sister.’

‘No, I mean, doing things...out of order. I have an order to things. I finish work, go home, do my things.’

‘I know, and to be honest, that’s a little sad. You should be more spontaneous.’

‘I can’t do spontaneous. It’s too frightening. The last time I did spontaneous I almost fractured a nerve.’