The End of Innocence

Chapter 3

Chapter 2

From Violet and Dr. Atwood and the importance of details

IT WAS AN ODD THING, but shortly after his mother died, Adam recalled feeling an almost relieved feeling. There was no other word for it, and Adam felt bad about it. His mother was gone and she would never come back. It didn't matter what the priest said in his sermon: that Adam's mother was in a better, happier place now and her pain was at an end. It didn't help when he told Adam that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An invisible mother could not take long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or helping you with your homework, the familiar smell of her in your nostrils as she leans forward,

But then Adam remembered that his mother hadn't been able to do any of that these past few months. The drugs the doctors gave her made her dizzy and sick. She could not even concentrate on the simplest of tasks, much less take long walks. Sometimes, toward the end, Adam wasn't even sure if she knew who he was. She was starting to smell funny: not bad, just weird, like old clothes that hadn't been worn in a long time. At night she cried out in pain and Adam's father held her and tried to comfort her. When she was very ill, the doctor was called. Eventually she was too ill to stay in her own room and an ambulance came and took her to a hospital that wasn't a real hospital, because no one ever seemed to get well and no one ever went home. Instead of this,

The not quite hospital was far from their house, but Adam's father would visit him every other night after he got home from work and he and Adam had dinner together. Adam rode with him in her old Ford Eight at least twice a week, although the round trip gave him very little time to himself after he'd done his homework and eaten his dinner. It also made his father tired, and Adam wondered where he found the energy to get up every morning, make breakfast for Adam, see him off to school before he went to work, come home, make tea, Adam to help with all schoolwork that proved difficult hard, to visit Adam's mother, to go home again,

One night Adam woke up with a very dry throat and went downstairs to get some water. He heard snoring in the living room and looked in to find his father asleep in his chair, the paper falling around him and his head hanging unsupported over the edge of the chair. It was three in the morning. Adam wasn't sure what to do, but he ended up waking his father because he remembered how he himself had once awkwardly fallen asleep on a train on a long journey and had had a sore neck for days afterwards.

His father had looked a little surprised and a little annoyed when he woke up, but he got out of the chair and went upstairs to sleep. Still, Adam was sure it wasn't the first time he'd fallen asleep like this, fully clothed and away from his bed.

When Adam's mother died, it meant no more pain for her, but also no more long drives to and from the big yellow building where people disappeared into nowhere, no more sleeping in chairs, no more rushed dinners.

Instead, there was just the kind of silence that comes when someone takes away a watch to be fixed and after a while you become aware of their absence because their soft, soothing ticks have gone and you miss them so much.

But the sense of relief faded after only a few days, and then Adam felt guilty because he was glad they no longer had to do everything his mother's illness had asked of them, and over the months that followed, the guilt faded not. Instead, things only got worse and Adam started wishing his mother was still in the hospital. If she had been there, he would have visited her every day, even if he had gotten up earlier in the morning to do his homework, because now he couldn't bear to think about life without her.

School became more difficult for him. He walked away from his friends before summer came and its warm breezes scattered them like dandelion seeds.

There was talk that all the boys would be evacuated from London and sent to the country when school resumed in September, but Adam's father had promised him he would not be sent away. After all, his father had said, there were only two of them now and they had to stick together.

His father hired a lady, Mrs. Howard, to keep the house tidy and did some cooking and ironing. She was usually there when Adam got home from school, but Mrs. Howard was too busy to speak to him. She trained with the ARP, the Air Raid Precautions Wardens, and cared for her own husband and children, so she didn't have time to chat with Adam or ask him how his day was going.

Mrs. Howard left just after four and Adam's father did not return from work at the university until six at the earliest, sometimes even later. That meant Adam was stuck in the empty house with only the radio and his books for company. Sometimes he would sit in the bedroom his father and mother once shared. Her clothes were still in one of the closets, the dresses and skirts lined up so neatly that they almost looked human if you pinched them hard enough. Adam ran his fingers over them and made them swing, remembering that they had moved exactly as his mother had walked in them. Then he lay back on the left pillow, because that was the side his mother used to sleep on,

This new world was too painful to deal with. He had tried so hard. He had stuck to his routines. He had counted so accurately. He'd played by the rules, but life had cheated. This world was not like the world of his stories. In this world, good was rewarded and evil was punished. If you stayed on the trail and stayed out of the woods then you would be safe. If someone was sick, like the old king in one of the stories, then his sons could be sent out into the world to seek the cure, the water of life, and if only one of them was brave enough and true enough, then The life of the king could be saved. Adam had been brave. His mother had been even braver. In the end, courage wasn't enough. This was a world who were not rewarded. The more Adam thought about it, the more he didn't want to be part of such a world.

He still stuck to his routines, if not quite as strictly as before. He was content to touch the doorknobs and taps only twice, first with his left hand, then his right, just to keep the numbers even. He still tried to put his left foot first on the floor or on the stairs of the house in the morning, but it wasn't that difficult.

He wasn't sure what would happen now if he didn't play by his rules to some extent. He assumed it might concern his father. Perhaps sticking to his routine had saved his father's life, even if he hadn't entirely succeeded in saving his mother. Now that they were just the two of them, it was important not to take too many risks.

And that's when Violet walked into his life and the attacks began.

The first time was in Trafalgar Square when he and his father went down to feed the pigeons after Sunday lunch at the Popular Cafe in Piccadilly. His father said Popular would be closing soon, which saddened Adam as he thought it was great.

Adam's mother had been dead five months, three weeks, and four days. A woman had joined them for dinner at Popular that day. His father had introduced her to Adam as Violet. Violet was very thin, with long dark hair and bright red lips.

Her clothes looked expensive, and gold and diamonds glittered on her ears and neck. She claimed to eat very little, although she ate most of the chicken that afternoon and had plenty of room for pudding afterwards. She looked familiar to Adam, and it turned out that she was the administrator of the hospital where his mother had died. His father told Adam that Violet had taken very, very good care of his mother, although not well enough, Adam thought, to keep her from dying.

Violet tried to talk to Adam about school and his friends and what he liked to do with his evenings, but Adam barely managed to answer. He didn't like the way she looked at his father or called him by his first name. He didn't like the way she touched his hand when he said something funny or clever. He didn't even like the fact that his father initially tried to be witty and smart to her. It was not right.

Violet held onto his father's arm as they strolled out of the restaurant. Adam walked ahead of them and they seemed content to let him go. He wasn't sure what was going on, at least he told himself he was. Instead, he silently took a bag of seeds from his father when they reached Trafalgar Square and used it to draw the pigeons towards him. The pigeons obediently hopped toward this new food source, their feathers stained with the dirt and soot of the city, their eyes blank and stupid. His father and Violet were standing nearby, talking quietly to each other.

When they thought he wasn't looking, Adam saw them kiss briefly.

That's when it happened. One moment Adam's arm was outstretched, a thin line of semen spread across it and two rather heavy pigeons were pecking at his sleeve, and the next he was lying flat on the ground, his father's coat under his head and curious onlookers - and the odd pigeon - stared down at him, fat clouds shot up behind their heads like empty thought balloons. His father told him he had fainted and Adam assumed he must have been right, except now there were voices and whispers in his head where there hadn't been voices and whispers before and he had a fading memory of a wooded landscape and the howling of wolves. He heard Violet ask if there was anything she could do to help and Adam's father told her it was OK that he would take him home and put him to bed. His father called a cab to take her back to her car. before he left

That night, as Adam lay in his room, the sound of the books joined the whispers in his head. He had to drape his pillow over his ears to drown out the noise of their chatter while the oldest of the tales awoke from their night's sleep and began looking for places to grow.

Dr Atwood's office was in a terraced house on a tree-lined street in central London and it was very quiet. Expensive carpets covered 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, sorting papers, typing letters, and taking phone calls. Adam was sitting on a large sofa nearby, his father next to him. A grandfather clock ticked in the corner. Adam and his father did not speak a word. Mostly it was because the room was so quiet that anything they said would have been overheard by the lady behind the desk, but Adam also got the feeling that his father was angry with him.

There had been two other attacks since Trafalgar Square, each longer than the last and each leaving stranger images in Adam's mind: a castle with banners flapping from the walls, a forest of trees bleeding red from their bark, and a half-illuminated figure, bent and wretched, moving waiting through the shadows of this strange world. Adam's father took him to her family doctor, Dr. Benson, brought, but Dr. Benson hadn't been able to find anything with Adam. He sent Adam to a specialist in a large hospital who illuminated Adam's eyes and examined his skull. He asked Adam some questions, then he asked Adam's father many more, some of them concerning Adam's mother and her death. Adam was then told to wait outside while they talked and when Adam's father came out,

Dr Atwood was a psychiatrist.

A buzzer sounded next to the secretary's desk and she nodded to Adam and his father. "He can go in now," she said.

"Let's go," Adam's father said.

"Aren't you coming in?" Adam asked.

Adam's father shook his head and Adam knew he was already with Dr. Atwood had spoken, perhaps on the phone.

"He wants to see you alone. Don't worry. I'll be here when you're done."

Adam followed the secretary into another room. It was much larger and grander than the waiting room, furnished with plush chairs and couches. The walls were lined with books, although they weren't books like the ones Adam was reading. When Adam arrived he thought he heard the books talking to each other.

He couldn't understand most of what they said, but they spoke very slowly, as if what they had to say was very important or the person they were talking to was very stupid. Some of the books seemed to be arguing with each other in blah, blah, blah tones, the way experts sometimes spoke on the radio when addressing one another, surrounded by other experts trying to impress them with their intelligence.

The books made Adam very uneasy.

A short 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 so he wouldn't lose them. A red and black bow tie was knotted tightly around his neck, and his suit was dark and baggy.

"Welcome," he said. "I'm Dr. Atwood. You must be Adam.”

Adam nods. Dr Atwood asked Adam to sit down, then flipped through the pages of a notebook on his desk, tugging at his beard as he read what was on it. When he was done, he looked up and asked Adam how he was doing. Adam said he was fine. Dr Atwood asked him if he was sure. Adam said he was reasonably sure. Dr Atwood said Adam's father was worried about him. He asked Adam if he missed his mother. Adam didn't answer. Dr Atwood told Adam that he was concerned about Adam's attacks and that they would try to figure out what was behind them together.

Dr Atwood gave Adam a box of pencils and asked him to draw a picture of a house. Adam took a pencil and carefully drew the walls and chimney, then put in some windows and a door before getting to work putting small curved slates on the roof. He was absorbed in the act of drawing on slate when Dr.

Atwood told him that was enough. Dr Atwood looked at the picture and then looked at Adam. He asked Adam if he hadn't thought of using colored pencils. Adam tells him that the drawing isn't finished yet and that he plans to color it red once the tiles are on the roof. Dr Atwood asked Adam, in the very slow way some of his books speak, why the slates were so important.

Adam wondered if Dr. Atwood was a real doctor. Doctors were considered very smart. Dr Atwood didn't seem particularly smart. Very slowly, Adam explained that without slate on the roof, the rain would penetrate. In their own way, they were as important as walls. Dr Atwood asked Adam if he was afraid of rain. Adam told him he doesn't like getting wet. It wasn't too bad outside, especially if you were dressed for it, but inside most people didn't dress for rain.

Dr Atwood looked a little confused.

Next he asked Adam to draw a tree. Again Adam took the pencil, carefully drew the branches and then added small leaves to each branch. He was on branch three when Dr. Atwood asked him to stop again. This time is Dr.

Atwood had the kind of look Adam's father sometimes had when he managed to finish the crossword puzzle in the Sunday paper. Without getting up and shouting “Aha!”. pointing his finger in the air like mad scientists did in cartoons, he couldn't have looked happier with himself.

Dr Atwood then asked Adam many questions about his home, his mother and father. He asked again about the power outages and if Adam could remember any of it. How was he feeling before they happened? Did he smell something strange before he passed out? Did his head hurt afterwards? Did his head hurt before? Does his head hurt now?

But he didn't ask Adam's most important question because Dr. Atwood chose to believe that the attacks caused Adam to pass out completely and that the boy could not remember anything before regaining consciousness. That wasn't true. Adam considered Dr. To tell Atwood about the strange landscapes he saw when the attacks came, but Dr. Atwood had already started asking about his mother again, and Adam didn't want to talk about his mother, any more, and certainly not to a stranger. Dr Atwood also asked about Violet and how Adam felt about her. Adam didn't know what to answer.

He didn't like Violet and he didn't like his father around her, but he wanted Dr. Not tell Atwood if he told Adam's father about it.

At the end of the session Adam was crying and he didn't even know why. In fact, he cried so much that his nose began to bleed, and the sight of the blood startled him. He started screaming and screaming. He fell to the ground and a white light flashed in his head as he began to tremble. He banged his fists on the carpet and heard the books clapping their disapproval as Dr. Atwood called for help and Adam's father burst in and then everything went dark for what seemed like seconds but was actually a very long time.

And Adam heard a woman's voice in the dark, and he thought it sounded like his mother. A figure approached, but it wasn't a woman. It was a man, a long-faced dishonest man, who finally emerged from the shadows of his world.

And he smiled.