Sunday lunch at the Popular Cafe in Piccadilly. His father said that the Popular was due to close soon, which made David sad as he thought it was very grand.
David’s mother had been dead for five months, three weeks, and four days. A woman had joined them to eat at the Popular that day. His father had introduced her to David as Rose. Rose was very thin, with long, dark hair and bright red lips. Her clothes looked expensive, and gold and diamonds glittered at her ears and throat. She claimed to eat very little, although she finished most of her chicken that afternoon and had plenty of room for pudding afterward. She looked familiar to David, and it emerged that she was the administrator of the not-quite- hospital in which his mother had died. His father told David that Rose had looked after his mother really, really well, although not, David thought, well enough to keep her from dying.
Rose tried to speak with David about school and his friends and what he liked to do with his evenings, but David could barely manage to respond. He didn’t like the way that she looked at his father or the way that she called him by his first name. He didn’t like the way that she touched his hand when he said something funny or clever. He didn’t even like the fact that his father was trying to be funny and clever with her to begin with. It wasn’t right.
Rose held on to his father’s arm as they strolled from the restaurant. David walked a little ahead of them, and they seemed content to let him go. He wasn’t sure what was happening, or that was what he told himself. Instead he silently accepted a bag of seeds from his father when they reached Trafalgar Square, and he used them to draw the pigeons to him. The pigeons bobbed obediently toward this new source of food, their feathers stained with the muck and soot of the city, their eyes vacant and stupid. His father and Rose stood nearby, talking quietly to each other. When they thought he wasn’t looking, David saw them kiss briefly.
That was when it happened. One moment David’s arm was outstretched, a thin line of seed spread along it and two rather heavy pigeons pecking away at his sleeve, and the next he was lying flat on the ground, his father’s coat beneath his head and curious onlookers—and the odd pigeon—staring down at him, fat clouds scudding behind their heads like blank thought balloons. His father told him that he had fainted, and David supposed that he must have been right, except there were now voices and whispers in his head where no voices and whispers had been before, and he had a fading memory of a wooded landscape and the howling of wolves. He heard Rose ask if she could do anything to help, and David’s father told her that it was all right, that he would take him home and put him to bed. His father hailed a cab to bring them back to their car. Before he left, he told Rose he would telephone her later.
That night, as David lay in his room, the whispers in his head were joined by the sound of the books. He had to put his pillow over his ears to drown out the noise of their chatter, as the oldest of the stories roused themselves from their night slumbers and began to look for places in which to grow.
Dr. Moberley’s office was in a terraced house on a tree-lined street in the center of London, and it was very quiet. There were expensive carpets on the floors, and the walls were decorated with pictures of ships at sea. An elderly secretary with very white hair sat behind a desk in the waiting room, shuffling papers, typing letters, and taking telephone calls. David sat on a big sofa nearby, his father beside him. A grandfather clock ticked in the corner. David and his father didn’t speak. Mostly it was because the room was so quiet that anything they said would have been overheard by the lady behind the desk, but David also felt that his father was angry with him.
There had been two more attacks since Trafalgar Square, each one longer than the last and each leaving David with more strange images in his mind: a castle with banners fluttering from the walls, a forest filled with trees that bled redly from their bark, and a half-glimpsed figure, hunched and wretched, who moved through the shadows of this strange world, waiting. David’s father had taken him to see their family doctor, Dr. Benson, but Dr. Benson had been unable to find anything wrong with David. He sent David to a specialist at a big hospital, who shone lights in David’s eyes and examined his skull. He asked David some questions, then asked David’s father many more, some of them concerning David’s mother and her death. David had then been told to wait outside while they talked, and when David’s father came out, he looked angry. That was how they had ended up at Dr. Moberley’s office.
Dr. Moberley was a psychiatrist.
A buzzer sounded beside the secretary’s desk, and she nodded to David and his father. “He can go in now,” she said.
“Off you go,” said David’s father.
“Aren’t you coming in with me?” asked David.
David’s father shook his head, and David knew that he had already spoken with Dr. Moberley, perhaps over the telephone.
“He wants to see you alone. Don’t worry. I’ll be here when you’re finished.”
David followed the secretary into another room. It was much bigger and grander than the waiting room, furnished with soft chairs and couches. The walls were lined with books, although they were not books like the ones David read. David thought that he could hear the books talking among themselves when he arrived. He couldn’t understand most of what they were saying, but they spoke v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, as if what they had to impart was very important or the person to whom they were speaking was very stupid. Some of the books appeared to be arguing among themselves in blah-blah-blah tones, the way experts sometimes talked on the wireless when they were addressing one another, surrounded by other experts whom they were trying to impress with their intelligence.
The books made David very uneasy.
A small man with gray hair and a gray beard sat behind an antique desk that looked too big for him. He wore rectangular glasses with a gold chain to keep him from losing them. A red and black bow tie was knotted tightly at his neck, and his suit was dark and baggy.
“Welcome,” he said. “I’m Dr. Moberley. You must be David.”
David nodded. Dr. Moberley asked David to sit down, then flicked through the pages of a notebook on his desk, tugging on his beard while he read whatever was written on them. When he had finished, he looked up and asked David how he was. David said he was fine. Dr. Moberley asked him if he was sure. David said that he was reasonably sure. Dr. Moberley said David’s dad was worried about him. He asked David if he missed his mum. David didn’t answer. Dr. Moberley told David that he was worried about David’s attacks, and they were going to try to find out together what was behind them.
Dr. Moberley gave David a box of pencils and asked him to draw a picture of a house. David took a lead pencil and carefully drew the walls and the chimney, then put in some windows and a door before he set to work adding little curved slates to the roof. He was quite lost in the act of drawing slates when Dr. Moberley told him that was quite enough. Dr. Moberley looked at the picture, then looked at David. He asked David if he hadn’t thought of using colored pencils. David told him that the drawing wasn’t finished, and that once the tiles were added to the roof he planned to color them red. Dr. Moberley asked David, in the v-e-r-y s-l-o-w way that some of his books spoke, why the slates were so important.
David wondered if Dr. Moberley was a real doctor. Doctors were supposed to be very clever. Dr. Moberley didn’t seem terribly clever. V-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, David explained that without slates on the roof, the rain would get in. In their way, they were just as important as walls. Dr. Moberley asked David if he was afraid of the rain getting in. David told him that he didn’t like getting wet. It wasn’t so bad outside, especially if you were dressed for it, but most people didn’t dress for rain indoors.
Dr. Moberley looked a bit confused.
Next, he asked David to draw a tree. Again, David took the pencil, painstakingly drew the branches, then proceeded to add little leaves to each one. He was on only the third branch when Dr. Moberley asked him to stop again. This time, Dr. Moberley had the kind of expression on his face that David’s father sometimes had when he managed to finish the crossword in the Sunday paper. Short of standing up and shouting “Aha!” with his finger pointing in the air, the way mad scientists did in cartoons, he couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself.
Dr. Moberley then asked David a lot of questions about his home, his mum, and his dad. He asked again about the blackouts, and if David could remember anything about them. How did he feel before they happened? Did he smell anything strange before he lost consciousness? Did his head hurt afterward? Did his head hurt before? Did his head hurt now?
But he did not ask the most important question of all, in David’s view, because Dr. Moberley chose to believe that the attacks caused David to black out entirely and that the boy could remember nothing of them before he
