The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(2)
“Yes, Grandmother,” Katie says.
My turn. “Understood,” I say.
“Perfect.” She arranges her and my grandfather’s iron hair, along with his suit. The chapel doors are open, and a small crowd awaits the carriage hearse within and without. The valet exits our now-idling car to help my grandfather, and when the door opens—
The air is swollen with sound, more heartbeats than I can count, the threads of at least a hundred pulses quickening, the air itself seeming to inhale and exhale with each breath taken behind the stone walls. I can hear the tiny hearts of birds—crows, pheasant, pigeons, distinct from the hawk slicing the air above us. The knotty-wood-and-iron door opens, and it’s like cracking open a hive of bees—whispers and coughs and echoes, every note bursting and lurid. An old, dull impulse to place my hands over my ears and scream like I (very occasionally) did when I was a boy arises, but my ears were never the problem. My mind is.
What it usually feels like to be me:
The sounds I shouldn’t be able to hear skim off the surface of my mind. Everything is white noise until I focus, until something seizes my attention, but this, right now—it’s nothing like that. This feels like an assault, a mess of sounds, like being surrounded by instruments being smashed. It’s distracting enough that I hadn’t noticed the dozens of heads twisted over shoulders to glance at our Long-Expected Party. And lo, among them stands Goose.
The volume of the noise blurs my vision for a moment—crowds are always awful, but it’s especially worse today—and Goose is nothing more than a fall of blond hair and an open smile, flanked by the smudges of Patrick and Neirin. There’s a thunderclap of a hand on my shoulder. “Hard luck, mate,” says Goose, his voice deep and rather astonishingly resonant, rising above the din.
“We’re so sorry,” Patrick follows. A simple nod from Neirin.
Those three faces, none alike in dignity or feature: Goose light and lanky and loud; Neirin dark and soft and innocent; and ginger red and freckled Patrick.
Patrick and Neirin seem frozen in time—their faces the same as they were nearly three years ago when I left Westminster. I see snapshots of memories with their faces: Goose flashing his middle finger at me in Yard; Patrick rolling his first cigarette with ferocious concentration; Neirin scratching at maths problems, his face pinched with concentration.
And then me, holding a champagne sabre, spraying hundreds of pounds’ worth down open throats. Putting my cigarette out in the horsehair pancake to the collective horror of the teachers and students assembled for the Greaze, and the four of us snorting lines of coke Patrick shyly produced from his pocket, off his iPad in his father’s study.
We were not a foursome. For that, we’d need to be bonded by secrets, and I shared none of mine. Secrets cut you off from everyone else, so I would always suggest the vast majority of our exploits to mask that I never could quite connect with them in the first place. Insert a stifled sob here, would you?
A forked tongue clicks beside my ear. “It’s almost time,” my grandmother says, looking at the valet for confirmation, then at my stepmother. With a tiny crunch of a nod she looks ahead, toward the manor house, toward the old stables, ancient but fortified over the centuries. From the gate, four glossy Friesians emerge, a driver in a top hat commanding them, and my father’s coffin encased in a black wood and glass hearse behind.
I can’t see all that well from here—my head is still fizzing with sounds, whispers and coughs and everything else. But not Mara.
The way she sounds, the way she’s always sounded—like one discordant note, twisted just enough to affect the notes surrounding it—is impossible to ignore. An aural fingerprint, distinctly her own, distinctly Mara. The first time I heard her, I never wanted to listen to anyone else.
I look and listen for that note as the horses’ hooves knock the ground in a steady, dignified trot, their large hearts pumping solidly with the effort. I can almost feel their boredom as they approach, which is why, halfway down the path, the ripple of terror and rage in their bodies reverberates in mine. They break their gait, stopping, stamping—one backs up, another sidesteps into another horse. Then one of them rears, nearly snapping the harness. The colour of Katie’s face is ash, her heartbeat racing the way the horses want to.
“It’s all right,” I say reflexively, and my sister snaps her head toward me and slits her eyes. There’s anger there, fighting for a place beside her sadness. Today is changing her, has changed her already.
My grandmother holds tight to my grandfather’s arm, her face a mask of placidity as her blood ices with anger. She looks to the priest, who says something to the people in a vain attempt to calm them, because the horses begin to thunder toward the chapel, eliciting screams despite being several lengths away. I can feel the power of them in the ground. They’re about to turn sharply to their right, cracking into the woodlands just before they do it, just before the hearse overturns.
I know what they’re going to do before they do it, because at that moment I hear Mara, see her running toward us, diagonally through the hedges that enclose the gardens and past the Atlas fountain, and as her path begins to converge with the carriage, the horses blaze with panic. My eyes meet Mara’s, and she stops short. Looks at the horses, then back at me.
It’s her they’re terrified of. I know it, she knows it, and so she vanishes as swiftly as she arrived.