Numbers

by Rachel Ward

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  We unwrapped the parcels of food. Anne had brought us sandwiches, homemade cake, potato chips. Karen made us both a cup of tea, and we sat on either side of the table.

  I was waiting for the probing questions, the time Karen would want it all explained to her, but for a while she was happy to chatter away about the twins and the media fuss — there’d been reporters camped outside their front door, apparently. I thought she was going to ask about the numbers, all the rumors flying around, but, of course, she asked the question a mum would ask.

  “So what’s going on with you and Terry — Spider — then? More than friends now, is it?”

  I didn’t want to talk about him, not with her, but I realized that I did want her on my side. Maybe she could help me see him again. So I didn’t tell her to mind her own business, which is what I wanted to do.

  “Just friends,” I mumbled, “good friends.” A hateful warmth was spreading into my cheeks. God, it’s hideous when your body betrays you. She saw it, and started smiling.

  “But you like him,” she said coyly.

  I was bursting inside. Yeah, I liked him. I thought about him every minute of every day. I ached without him. I loved him. All those things I could never say out loud — except, maybe, to him.

  “Yeah, I really like him,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, willing the hot skin on my face to cool down and get back to normal. “And I really need to see him again. It’s important, Karen. I need to see him.”

  She smiled at me, a twinkling, sympathetic smile. “I know what that feels like. I was young once, too, you know.” How many more middle-aged clichés was she going to roll out today? “You will see him again, Jem. The police are holding him at the moment, but nobody thinks either of you planted that bomb. They want to talk to you as witnesses. And then there’s stealing cars and whatever else you’ve been up to in the last few days. And we still haven’t heard what they want to do about you taking that knife to school….” She sighed. “I’m not saying it isn’t a mess, Jem, because it is, but we can sort it all out. You just need to cooperate with the police, and then, eventually, they’ll let you see Spider again.”

  “Eventually’s no good,” I blurted out.

  “You’ve got to learn to be patient. I know it’s difficult…”

  “We haven’t got the time to wait. It has to be before the fifteenth!”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re both fifteen. You’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “No, we haven’t. You don’t understand.”

  “Then you’d better tell me.”

  Faced with no alternative, I did. I told her about the numbers, like I’d told Spider, the day the London Eye was blown to bits.

  She looked uneasy all the way through, fiddling with the foil food wrappers, and when I finished, she laughed, a really nervous little whinny.

  “Come on, Jem. You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “It’s not what I believe or not. It just is.”

  She snorted and looked down at her fingers, restlessly squeezing and shaping the tinfoil.

  “That’s not real, Jem. That’s not real life.”

  “It is, Karen. It’s been my life for fifteen years.”

  “Jem, sometimes things get muddled up. I know how tough it’s been for you. You’ve been through so much unhappiness and change. I knew that when I agreed to take you on. Sometimes, when things are confusing, anyway, we try and make sense of it our own way, we find ways of coping….”

  She still didn’t understand. “I didn’t make it up! Do you think I want to live like this?”

  “Alright. Calm down. You didn’t make it up on purpose, I know. I’m just saying that sometimes the mind plays tricks on you.”

  “So I need a psychiatrist?”

  “No, you need a proper home. There is nothing wrong with you that some stability — love, even — wouldn’t cure. All things I’m trying to give you.” Her eyes flicked up to me nervously. She was used to me throwing things like this back in her face.

  The thing was, even as I was almost screaming with frustration, I could see where she was coming from. If someone else had told me my story, I’d have thought they were pulling a prank or were schizo or something. I wouldn’t have believed them. Karen’s world was one of routines and rules. She had her size-seven feet firmly on the ground. Of course this didn’t make any sense to her. She was looking at me now, just waiting to be kicked, and I would have just a few days ago, but what would be the point now?

  “I know you are, Karen,” I said. “I know.”

  And she pressed her lips together in a tight little smile, a grateful acknowledgment of the effort it had cost me to say that.

  “’Nother cup of tea, love?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I’ll just stretch my legs while the kettle’s on.”

  “OK.”

  I got up and walked out into the abbey, surprised again at its sheer size, the space above me. All over the floor were stones with writing carved into them. I was standing on one: the marker for someone, dead for two hundred and thirty years. The walls, too, were a patchwork. Words that had lasted for hundreds of years — describing people nobody remembered anymore. I was surrounded by bones and ghosts.

  I looked around the abbey, stopping here and there to read the stones. It should have creeped me out. It didn’t. I liked it — I liked the honesty of seeing people’s numbers. The stones told the facts: birth date, death date. The numbers were fine — it was the words that were more troubling. DEPARTED; LAID TO REST; TAKEN BY HER MAKER; GONE TO A BETTER PLACE. I stopped in front of this last one. Was it wishful thinking, belief, or even certainty? If I’d written that memorial, I would have rubbed out the last four words. Just GONE.

  That’s all there was, as far as I could see. How could anyone possibly know any different?

  It made me wonder where my mum was now, or where what was left of her was. What had happened to her after they’d taken me away in that car? Had she been buried somewhere, or cremated? Had there been a funeral, and had anyone gone? Or do junkies, dossers, and slags just get chucked in a ditch? All of a sudden, I really wanted there to be a grave somewhere for her. I wanted her messy, messed-up life to have ended properly.

  Then a chill ran through me. What would they do for Spider? It seemed impossible that just over twenty-four hours from now, he’d be needing a gravestone. How could someone so alive, so fizzing with energy, just stop?

  I felt a tide of panic rising up inside me. Despite what Karen thought, Spider’s life could be measured out in hours now — minutes, even. I’d seen his number so many times. It didn’t change. It was real. He would die in jail, or some police cell. Beaten up, probably. Unless he was ill. Perhaps he was ill right now, already in the grip of something that seemed trivial, that nobody knew would be fatal. I couldn’t possibly wait out these next hours until someone came to me, told me the news. I needed to step up the pressure, somehow get them to release him.

  “Tea’s ready.” Karen’s voice echoed into the church.

  I wandered back into the vestry, determined to find a way to see him again. I’d been like a cork at sea all my life, tossed around from home to home, no say in what happened to me. I had to take control.

  We had our tea and got ready for bed. Karen went on chatting away, trying to make it fun. By then I was so tired, I was nearly falling over. I let her tuck me in and then listened as, huffing and puffing, she got into her bed.

  “It’s quite comfy, isn’t it?” she said, in a cheery, making-the-best-of-things kind of voice.

  “Uh…no. But it’s better than sleeping under a hedge.”

  “That what you’ve been doing?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Well, you get some kip now, and tomorrow we’ll talk more about you coming home and having a proper night’s sleep in a real bed.” Her duvet rustled as she shifted about. “Honestly, Jem, you’re quite right, I don’t think I could sleep more than one night here — the flo
or’s so hard….” But no more than five minutes after that, she was gently snoring. She was well out of it.

  Perhaps I would have slept on my own, but the steady noise of her rumbling breaths in and out seemed to fill the room. It was irritating beyond belief. I was jealous, too. How could this woman just drift off so quickly like that? My head was full of the last few days, racing ahead to the next few days. After half an hour or so, I knew I’d have to get up or kill her where she lay. Even to me, the murder option seemed a bit extreme, so slowly I peeled down my duvet and stood up.

  I remembered Simon’s whispered words to Karen before he left, and tiptoed over to the table, quietly easing out one of drawers. The keys were in there sure enough, a big, thick bunch. As I went to pick them up, they moved against each other, a metallic, oily noise. I stretched the bottom of my hoodie out and wrapped them up, smothering their telltale sound. Then I padded out of the vestry, into the dark cavern of the abbey.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  It wasn’t pitch-black in the church. Streetlights from outside filtered in through the stained-glass windows. Once your eyes adjusted, you could see the shape of things: pews, statues, pillars, all in shades of gray. I knew the doors at the far end and at the side led outdoors, but I didn’t want to leave — I was pretty sure I’d have more negotiating power while I stayed inside the church. But I did want to explore. I picked a door in the corner, to one side of the altar, and started trying all the keys.

  The third one worked. I opened the door, which led through to a little room full of junk — well, at least it looked like junk: bits of old stone and wood. It was darker in here, but I could just make out another door on the far side. Again, I had the key to this one. It was darker still inside there, the light just picking out the bottom of some stone steps twisting up ’round a central pillar. I hesitated for a minute. This was starting to creep me out. I didn’t think I could go up there in the dark. I stepped inside and rested my hand on the cold stone wall. There was something knobbly there, too, a switch. I flicked it on and the staircase was lit up, disappearing up and ’round.

  “Come on,” I said, trying to psyche myself up. My words bounced off the stone. It’s bad at the best of times, isn’t it, talking to yourself? Sounds even crazier in a church.

  I started up the stairs. My legs were pretty wobbly, my knee still not very good, but I took it steady, just one step after the other. You could only see a few steps ahead, and once you lost sight of the bottom, it felt like it could go on forever. Everything about it was cold: the stone through my socks, the walls, even the air was colder here. I was starting to think I should go back for my sneakers and my coat, or just go back, period, when I got to the top. The stairs just ended, a blank wall in front of me, but there was a door to the side. Again, the keys did the job. I swung the door open and was met with a blast of cold air. I stepped through and smiled, couldn’t help myself: I was on the roof.

  I’m alright with heights — lucky, that — but as I stepped out onto the roof, a wave of sickness swept over me and I felt lightheaded, dizzy. I was breathing hard from the climb. I sat down and hung my head forward. The sharp air hurt my lungs. I tried breathing in through my nose, to warm up the air as it went inside. That helped a bit. Slowly, slowly, I got back to normal. A little stone wall ran down each side of the roof. Like everything else ’round here, it was carved into a pattern, big holes in it. Even sitting down, I could see through to the rooftops all ’round me. Holding on to the stone, I pulled myself up.

  God, it was beautiful, even I could see that. A different kind of city. From up here, you couldn’t see the street-level grime; it was all roofs and chimneys, spires, squares, and arches. The orange streetlights made the pale stone look warm: The buildings were almost glowing, even though it was freezing outside, and you could see strings of lights crisscrossing the little streets. In the yard next to the abbey, there was quite a crowd, some of them sitting down on benches or the ground, others gathered near the tree, with policemen dotted among them. Amazing how stupid tourists can be, hanging around outside on a night like this.

  The tower rose up from the other side of the roof. Keeping my head lowered, I scuttled along until I reached another door. Again, my keys didn’t let me down, and I was through, fumbling for the light switch. Another staircase, but this time with rooms leading off it. The first one I came to was full of ropes hanging down from the ceiling. The ends were all tied up on one side of the room, and I didn’t twig what they were until I saw a photo on the wall labeled ABBEY BELL — RINGERS 1954. They were bell ropes, and my fingers twitched at the thought of untying them, giving one of them a good yank.

  There were more doors leading off this room.

  I chose one with another staircase. Up and up, trying each door as I went. One room was different from the others. There was a wooden walkway across, suspended above a stone floor that dropped away on both sides, with odd ridges sticking up. Took me a while to realize why it looked like the negative of the roof downstairs. That’s exactly what it was — the other side of the fan shapes in the abbey ceiling. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up — I felt like I was in a secret world.

  Another door at the end of the walkway. This one revealed a tiny room, a dead end. The far wall contained a big, round white disc, lit up by the soft streetlight. There were markings ’round the edge and two sticks — a clock’s hands. I was behind the clock on the abbey tower. There were stone ledges running along either sidewall. I sat down on one, keeping my face turned to the clock — it made me smile; I’ve never been anywhere so weird. It was like sitting inside the moon. Then one of the metal rods feeding into it clicked, and the minute hand shifted forward. Another minute gone, and, with a wrench to my guts, Spider was back in my head.

  All over the world, clocks were marking each second, minute, and hour. On and on. Thousands, maybe millions of clocks. If I’d had a brick in hand, I’d have launched it right through the round white clock face, sending the glass spraying out into the night. I’d smash every watch, every clock in the world. But would it do any good? Don’t shoot the messenger, that’s what they say, isn’t it?

  And sitting there, it came to me: I was blaming the wrong thing. I was looking outside, when anyone could see that there was someone at the middle of all this. Me. I was the only one to see the numbers. I saw something that no one else saw. My eyes, my mind, me. Whether they were real or imagined, the numbers were me and I was them.

  Without me, would they even exist?

  The lever running along the wall gave another lurch and the minute hand thunked forward again. Suddenly, I had to get out of there. The room would suffocate me if I stayed a minute longer. I sprang up and started running, across the walkway, back to the stairs, and then on and up, blindly, to the top.

  Although it was cold on the staircase, the iciness of the open air was a shock again. There was nothing up there, just a flat roof and an empty flagpole. Another stone wall ran ’round the edge. The view was even better up here — the orange lights of the town sprawling up into hills all around. There was a swimming pool on one of the roofs, turquoise water lit from below. And immediately below me, another pool, square and green, with statues ’round the edge and steam gently rising up from it. From here, it felt like you could dive off the tower right into it. You could dive down and wipe it all away: the memories, the pain, the guilt. All you’d need to do was climb up on the little wall and jump….

  From far down below, a voice drifted up to me. “There she is!”

  In the abbey yard, floodlit faces were turned upward now. This far away, they all looked the same, a crowd of puppets. And it struck me, they weren’t tourists down there, they were actually waiting to see me.

  Someone screamed, their terror drifting up to me a split second after it had left them, infecting me, suddenly making me afraid. The ground below seemed to be moving, the people merging into a random pattern, swimming and shifting in front of my eyes.

  My legs gave wa
y and I sank down. Who was I kidding? I couldn’t jump off there — my strength and my nerve had gone. My legs were so wobbly now, I couldn’t even manage the stairs. So I bumped down them on my butt, one at a time. I’ve no idea how long it took — I didn’t lock the door behind me, just bumped and crawled my way all the way down into the abbey and then across the cold floor into the vestry.

  I curled up in my makeshift bed, next to Karen, and shut my eyes tightly, but the numbers were still there: Mum’s, Karen’s, the old tramp’s, the bomb victims’.

  And Spider’s.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “It’s all right, Jem. It’s only us. Simon and me.”

  I swam up to the surface again, through the green, green water of sleep toward the light. A woman’s voice was speaking to me, and from somewhere a long way away my memory started to put the pieces back together. I sat up, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, swallowing back the sour stuff at the back of my throat. Anne was over by the table, and Karen was already up.