reading for comfort, and then throwing up as a result of the tranquillizers his psychiatrist was forced to prescribe him for whenever the street doors of his parent’s house needed to be shut and bolted.
In true prep school tradition, Sabir had found it impossible to squeal on his tormentors. But years later, as a journalist, he had taken his revenge on them in a manner reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo – he had built them up, in other words, each man in his turn, and had then proceeded to tear them down again in an avalanche of failed vainglory.
But the fear of enclosed spaces still lurked in his psyche like a recurring nightmare – only a thousand times exacerbated by what he had experienced earlier that summer, in France, in the cellar of an abandoned house in the French Camargue.
Over the past few months, Sabir’s cycle of disrupted sleep had always followed the exact same pattern. First would come the hyper-realist dreams, in which he was back in the cesspit again, deep in the cellar below the Gypsy safe-house in the French Camargue. In these dreams he was up to his neck in raw sewage, his head bent backwards to protect his mouth, his forehead tight up against the lid of the cesspit, which Achor Bale was sliding shut across his face.
Then came the dreams of dreams, in which Sabir revisited the hallucinations he had experienced whilst sealed inside the cesspit. Hallucinations in which his arms and legs were torn off, his torso shredded, his intestines, lights, bowels, and bladder dragged out of his body like offal from a butchered horse. Later in the dream a snake would come towards him – a thick uncoiling python of a snake, with the scales of a fish, and staring eyes, and a hinged skull like that of an anaconda. The snake would swallow Sabir’s head, forcing it down the entire length of its body with convulsive movements of its myosin-fuelled muscles, like a reverse birth.
Later, Sabir would become the snake, its head his head, its eyes his eyes. It was at this exact point in the dream that he always awoke, his body drenched in sweat, his eyes bulging from his face like those of a startled cat. He would throw on his dressing-gown and hurry out into the garden, where he would stand, gulping in fresh air, and cursing Achor Bale and the perniciousness of posthumous effect.
The rest of the night would be spent in his father’s old Hatteras hammock, in the garden house, with the veranda doors thrown open to the elements, a single blanket draped over his quasi-foetal shape. He had tried switching to a sleeping bag, but the bag’s innate constriction had seen him thrashing around like an emergent chrysalis, desperate to disentangle its body from the pupal shell before serving as some passing bird’s hors d’oeuvre.
On this particular evening the dream had come to him with more than its usual vigour and destructive force. Sabir was perilously close to hyperventilating by the time he made his way across the lawn and into the garden house.
Rationally, he knew that it made no earthly sense for him to persist in trying to sleep in the main building. What was the point, when he would simply come rushing out again, three hours later, gasping for air? But some obstinate part of himself refused to give up on the attempt to live an ordinary life.
He privately feared that once he abandoned all pretence at living inside – once he gave up fighting, in other words – his claustrophobia would enter the obsessive-compulsive stage, dooming him to a downward spiral of psychoanalysis and soporifics.
For that was the way his mother had gone. A steady, inexorable descent towards drug dependence and enforced hospitalization. It had destroyed his father’s life, and it had come close to destroying his own.
Recently, Sabir had begun wondering if he wasn’t hellbent on repeating the family pattern?
3
‘I like small town Americans,’ said Abiger de Bale. ‘They’re so fucking trusting.’
The twins were sitting in their rental car, watching the outside of Adam Sabir’s house. They had been in the United States for a little less than twelve hours, and already they had identified their mark.
‘What do you mean, trusting?’
Abi wound his seat back to the prone position, so that his silhouette would no longer be outlined against the street lights. He glanced over at his brother. ‘I’m pretending to be a tourist, right? I ask them things, right? In the American idiom. Things like “you got any celebrities in this town?” Then they give me a list. Including Norman Rockwell, and Daniel Chester French, and Owen Johnson, and Mum Bett – oh, and that guy who wrote the bestselling book on Nostradamus’s private life. And because the writer is the only one on the list who isn’t dead yet, they tell me about his private life. That he can’t keep a woman. That he lives alone. That his mother went mad. Stuff like that. And all without me, the tourist, needing to ask anything at all. Try the same thing in France, and it’d be like attempting to crack a stone wall with the tip of your nose. How did you do?’
‘Pretty much the same.’
‘You see? I like these Americans.’
Vau cast a quizzical look at his brother. ‘You don’t think they’ll remember us?’
‘Lighten up, Vau. Nobody ever saw us together. So they’ll just assume we’re one and the same person. And the Amis can’t recognize accents, anyway. They never travel abroad. They’ll think we’re Canadians.’
‘I still think we ought to take him away somewhere. Not do him here.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ve got a better idea. Sabir’s been behaving strangely lately. People around here are starting to think he’s taking after his mother. We’ll play on that.’
‘How?’
‘Wait and see.’
4
Adam Sabir’s ‘Berkshire Cottage’ style home was set well back from the Stockbridge Main Street, in grounds totalling a little more than an acre and a half – or roughly the size of a baseball field.
The ultra-discreet street lights cut a fragile arc across the front lawn, but they fell just short of the main part of the house, which was consequently shrouded in darkness. The back garden, in which Sabir’s summer-house- cum-writing-hut was situated, stretched for a further fifty feet towards a thick stand of trees, which marked the extreme boundary between Sabir’s property and next-door’s smallholding. The rear of his demesne was bounded by a small white picket fence, whilst the front of the house lay directly open onto the street, as if its original nineteenth-century occupants had not wished to mar the vista of its rolling lawns with anything as common as an enclosure.
At a little after two o’clock in the morning, Abi and Vau emerged from their car, checked up and down the street, and then moved swiftly across the floodlit lawn until they were swallowed up by the darkness surrounding the main house.
Once at the rear of the house, Abi made his way cautiously up the veranda steps and tested the back door. It was open. He grinned at his brother. ‘Jesus Christ, Vau-Vau. This idiot doesn’t even lock his door at night. Do you think he knew we were coming?’
‘I don’t like this, Abi. No one in the United States leaves their house door open at night.’
‘Well Mr Sabir does. And I, for one, am most grateful to him for the courtesy.’
The twins edged their way through the door. They stood in the back hall, staring up at the main stairs.
Abi covered his mouth with his hand. ‘You saw him earlier, didn’t you? You’re sure of that?’
Vau echoed the movement. ‘Clear as a bell. His bedroom is the last room on the right, below the gable window.’
‘And no one else here?’
‘No. He was alone. And behaving like a lone man. You know. Pottering around. Tinkering with stuff.’
Abi shrugged. ‘Crazy. Crazy to leave your door open. What is the man thinking of?’
The brothers made their way to the base of the stairs. Halfway up the staircase they stopped and listened once again, but the house was silent as the grave.
