The Boy Who Climbs in Through the Bedroom Window

by Mairead Robinson

There’s a boy in my class looks like an empty chair and he never puts his hand up. I chew paper into spit balls and cannon them through an empty pen casing, but he never fires back like he used to. They splat on his desk or fall to the floor.

At home-time, his mother waits at the school gates. She wears mismatched shoes and her eyes turn in all directions while the other mothers look away. He’s always the last to leave and as we all pour outside I hear her say, “My boy? Is my boy there?” and my mother’s hand grips mine just that little bit tighter.

Sometimes the boy climbs in through my bedroom window. I hear him squelching in over the sill in his wet jeans. His trainers leave a dirty trail on the carpet and he sits on the end of my bed, staring at me with pale eyes. His damp hair is tangled with broken twigs and rags of moss and he smells like diesel and hot metal. One time he stood up and pulled off his sweater to trace a finger over the milky filmed scar that crossed his stomach and stretched all the way around his back, like he was a thin planet showing me his equator, and all these maggots and shiny scrabbling beetles began to squirm and scuttle their way out and inch and crawl up over his chest until they were on his face, burrowing into his eyes and hanging from his lips. Mom came in and said Aw sweetie, did you have a bad dream again? She stirred honey into warm milk and let me climb into her bed, into the cold space where I guess my dad used to sleep. Mom turned on her side and when I heard her breathing shift, I put my arms around her and crooked my knees to fit into hers like a puzzle piece. I could feel the hard knots of her spine through her nightdress, taste the sweat on the nape of her neck.

We used to have a striped cat that jumped in over the fence that separates our back yard from the rail tracks. He was skinny, half-starved, and terrified. Mom scraped tuna onto a plate and left it by the back door and before too long he was wrapping himself around her ankles. She called him Purdy because just listen to that purr! He’d settle himself on her lap, paws tucked in, buzzing like an overhead powerline. He brought half-eaten mice and laid them at our feet or left them on the stairs. Once, I woke up and he’d placed a chewed-off head on my pillow. Its eyes glittered into mine like chips of agate. About six months after he arrived, he left again. Cats do that. Mom spent weeks calling him from the back gate, looking up and down the tracks all the way to the tunnel mouth, but she never walked inside there. Maybe if she had, things would’ve been different.

The boy used to come and play in our backyard after school. We’d sit on the fence, drinking Coke, and feeling the hot wall of air on our faces as the trains sliced past before disappearing into the black mouth of the tunnel. Mom loved the boy. It’s so nice you have a friend, and he’s so polite. She’d make cookies heavy with chocolate chips and bake cakes oozing with lemon syrup, always letting him take some home when his mother came to collect him.

It was his idea to explore the tunnel at midnight, though I guess it was me that first mooted the possibility. I told him armed robbers had left their loot buried beneath the clinker and had never retrieved it, so he snuck out after dark and climbed up to my bedroom window, tapping at the glass like a magpie seeking trinkets.

He was spooked at the tunnel. It really is black as tar and our torches pushed only the thinnest grey suggestion of light through it. Enough though, to illuminate the hardened scrap of striped fur from the last time I’d been there. “Here’s where we dig,” I said, bringing the sharp edge of the spade hard down on the back of his head. He was still groaning as I arranged him over the tracks, blinking uncomprehendingly at the searing yellow light of the post train as it relentlessly hurtled through the tunnel. I stood with my back pressed against the sooty brick, enjoying the hot rush of wind on my face.

Mairead Robinson writes stories that frighten even her with how dark they can be. She’s currently writing a dark novel. It keeps her awake at night.