Beau: Chapter Seven — The Shape in the Corner

The Grandmother came for tea on a Friday.

This was an event. Not because the Grandmother was difficult, although she was, in the way that people who are usually right about things are always difficult. It was an event because Clementine’s mother became a slightly different version of herself whenever her own mother was in the house. She wiped surfaces that were already clean. She folded tea towels. She said things like, “I was going to do that,” about things she had not been going to do.

“She’s coming at five,” said Clementine’s mother, at half past three, in the tone of voice usually reserved for incoming weather systems.

“It’s your mum, not an inspection,” said Clementine’s father, who was sitting at the kitchen table in his socks, doing the crossword and eating crisps directly from the bag, which was precisely the sort of thing that would need to stop happening before five o’clock.

“Put the crisps away.”

“They’re in a bag. Bags are containers. Containers are tidy.”

“Put. The crisps. Away.”

He put the crisps away. He winked at Clementine. Clementine grinned.

Beau was under the table, positioned in the exact spot where crumbs were most likely to fall, which was either a sign of intelligence or greed or both. His tail thumped once against the table leg when Clementine’s father rustled the crisp bag. It thumped twice when the bag was put away, as though registering a formal objection.

The Grandmother arrived at ten past five, which was late for her and therefore deliberate, because the Grandmother did nothing by accident. She came in through the back door without knocking, the way she always did, carrying a tin that contained either cake or judgement and usually both.

“Lemon drizzle,” she said, setting the tin on the counter. “The oven’s been playing up so it’s slightly flatter than I’d like but it’ll do.”

“It looks lovely, Mum,” said Clementine’s mother.

“It looks flat,” said the Grandmother. “But flat cake is still cake. Where’s my girl?”

“Here,” said Clementine, and the Grandmother opened her arms and Clementine walked into them and the Grandmother smelled the way she always smelled, of lavender and kitchen warmth and something else that Clementine had never been able to name but which she associated with the feeling of being completely safe.

“You’ve grown,” said the Grandmother.

“You always say that.”

“You always grow. Beau.”

The last word was not part of the conversation with Clementine. It was its own sentence, directed at the dog, who had come out from under the table and was sitting at the Grandmother’s feet with his ears forward and his eyes on her face.

“Beau,” she said again, and put her hand on his head, and Beau closed his eyes.

Clementine’s father put the kettle on. Clementine’s mother cut the cake, which was indeed flat but was also, as the Grandmother had accurately predicted, still cake. They sat around the kitchen table, the four of them, with Beau at the Grandmother’s feet, and the kitchen was warm and the windows were steaming up and the radio was on low, playing something old and orchestral that the Grandmother approved of and Clementine’s father tolerated and Clementine’s mother had stopped hearing years ago.

“How’s school?” said the Grandmother.

“Oliver Marsh put another raisin up his nose,” said Clementine.

“The same nostril?”

“The other one. Eliza says he’s working through them systematically.”

“A boy with a plan,” said the Grandmother. “You have to respect that.”

“You absolutely do not have to respect that,” said Clementine’s mother.

“Commitment to a project is admirable regardless of the project,” said the Grandmother, and took a bite of her flat cake, and Clementine’s mother closed her eyes briefly in the way that meant she was counting to five, which was a thing Clementine had noticed her mother doing more and more since the Grandmother had started coming for Friday tea.

Clementine’s father, who had the diplomatic instincts of a man who has learned that the safest place in a conversation between his wife and his mother-in-law is nowhere near either of them, changed the subject. “Film tonight? There’s that one on with the penguins.”

“The documentary?” said Clementine.

“The one where they walk a long way in the cold. Seemed appropriate. It’s freezing out there.”

It was. The temperature had dropped all day, and now, at half five on a November evening, the dark had come down hard and fast and the kitchen windows showed nothing but their own reflections and the warm yellow light of the room.

They moved to the sitting room. Clementine’s father made a performance of finding the remote, which involved lifting every cushion, checking behind the sofa, accusing Beau of eating it, and finally discovering it in his own back pocket, where he later admitted it had been the entire time. Clementine’s mother brought tea. The Grandmother settled into the armchair by the fire as though it had been built specifically for her, which, given the way she occupied it, it might as well have been.

Clementine sat on the floor with Beau. The penguin film began. It was the kind of film where nothing happened very quickly and everything happened very beautifully, and the narrator had the sort of voice that made you feel calm and slightly sad at the same time, and the penguins walked and walked and walked across an enormous white emptiness and you wanted them to be all right and you were not entirely sure they would be.

It was warm. It was ordinary. It was a Friday evening in a house with a family in it, and there was flat cake and hot tea and a dog on the floor and penguins on the telly and nothing, nothing at all, to suggest that anything was about to change.

But Clementine felt it.

She felt it before Beau moved. Before his head came up. Before his ears went forward. She felt it in the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm, not in your mind but in your body, in the back of your neck, in the hairs on your arms.

The room was colder.

Not all of the room. Just the corner. The far corner, behind her father’s chair, where the old bookshelf stood with its rows of paperbacks and its collection of small ornaments that her mother called “character” and her father called “a dusting nightmare.” The corner that faced the window. The corner where the curtains hung.

The cold was not the cold of November leaking through the glass. This was a different cold. A cold with weight to it. A cold with attention.

Beau stood up. Not fast. Not with the burst of energy that signalled a Mumpkins performance. He stood the way a soldier stands when the alarm has sounded and the training takes over and there is no time for anything but the thing you were made to do.

He did not take a shoe. He did not run. He did not play the fool.

He walked to the space between Clementine and the corner, and he stopped, and he stood, and he did not move.

Every muscle still. Every sense forward.

Clementine’s father glanced over. “All right, mate? Need to go out?”

Beau did not look at him.

The Grandmother put down her tea. Slowly. Without taking her eyes off the dog. Clementine saw her do it and saw something in the Grandmother’s face that she had never seen there before. Not fear. Not surprise. Recognition. The look of someone who has been expecting something for a long time and has just seen it arrive.

“Beau,” said the Grandmother. Quiet. Steady. The True-name.

Beau’s ear… the one that would not stand… twitched. But he did not turn. He did not sit. He stayed exactly where he was, between the girl and the corner, and his eyes were fixed on something that no one else in the room could see.

No one except Clementine.

Because Clementine was looking.

She was looking at the corner the way Beau had taught her to look, without knowing he had taught her, without knowing she had learned. She was looking not at the bookshelf or the ornaments or the curtains but at the space between them. At the air itself. At the thin place where the room stopped being a room and became something else for just a moment, just a breath, just a flicker.

And she saw it.

Not clearly. Not the way you see a chair or a person or a dog. She saw it the way you see a shape in fog… an outline, an impression, a suggestion of something that was there and was not there and was there. It had no colour she could name. It had no face. It was not a shadow because shadows are made by light and this thing was made by the absence of light. It was a shape that the darkness had put on the way you put on a coat, and it was in the corner, and it was looking at her.

Not at the room. Not at the penguins. Not at the flat cake or the tea or the family.

At her.

At the fire she carried and did not know she carried. At the golden moths she could not see. At the brightness she threw into the world with every laugh and every word and every breath.

It wanted her.

The cold deepened. Clementine could see her own breath now, just for a second, a small cloud of warmth in the air in front of her face. On the telly, the penguins walked their long walk. Her father was watching the film. Her mother was watching the film. The Grandmother was watching Beau.

And Beau was watching the shape.

He did not bark. He did not growl. He stood between, and his standing was enough, the way standing on a hill in the before-time had been enough, the way presence had always been enough, the way the oldest ward in the world was simply this: I am here and I will not move.

The shape looked at the dog. The dog looked at the shape.

And Clementine, without knowing she was going to do it, without planning or thinking or deciding, reached out and put her hand on Beau’s back.

Her hand was warm. She could feel it… the warmth moving out of her palm and into his fur, and something else moving too, something she did not have a word for, something that was not heat but was kin to heat, something that was bright and young and fierce and real.

Her fire. The small-fire. Flowing through her hand into the guardian at the threshold.

Beau did not move. But something changed in him. His shoulders settled. His breathing steadied. He seemed, for a moment, larger. Not in size but in presence. As though the dog shape had thinned and something older was showing through, the way the moon shows through a cloud… the same shape, the same creature, but lit from within by something ancient and unafraid.

The shape in the corner thinned.

It did not leave the way a person leaves a room, with footsteps and a closing door. It thinned, like mist. Like breath on a cold window. Like a word you almost heard but didn’t. It was there, and it was less there, and it was not there, and the corner was a corner again, with books and ornaments and curtains and nothing else.

The cold lifted.

The room was warm. The penguins were still walking. Her father was asleep, his head tipped back, his mouth slightly open. Her mother was watching the film with the peaceful expression of a woman who does not know what has just happened in her sitting room. The Grandmother was looking at Clementine.

Not at Beau. At Clementine.

And the Grandmother’s eyes were bright and wet, and her mouth was set in a line that was not quite a smile and not quite anything else, and she nodded. Once. The same nod Beau had given the bridge-keeper at the stream. The nod of recognition. The nod that says: I see you. I know what you are. Welcome.

Clementine’s throat was tight. Her heart was beating hard. Her hand was still on Beau’s back.

Beau turned his head and looked at her. His brown eyes. The floppy ear. The expression that was not silly and not fierce and not anything she had a name for except whole. He was all of himself. Not Tumpkins, not Mumpkins, not Rumpkins. Beau. The True-name. The one that meant all of him.

She knelt down and wrapped her arms around his neck and put her face in his fur and whispered, so quietly that only he could hear, “Good boy.”

And he was. In every leg. In every fur. In every life.

Good boy.

The Grandmother picked up her tea and took a sip and said, “I think the flat cake wants another slice, don’t you?” and the evening went on as though nothing had happened, because that is what evenings do.

But something had happened. And Clementine knew it. And Beau knew it. And the Grandmother knew it.

And the corners were clear.