Voices in the Dark

by Catherine Banner

  ‘You’re just on your way back from a walk,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Leo, putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘I will be all right here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  I got up and went with Michael. When I glanced back, Leo was studying something across his knees. It was that book again, The Darkness Has a Thousand Voices. As I watched, he took a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil from his pocket and began writing.

  ‘What is your father doing?’ said Michael.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s the book?’

  ‘The one Aldebaran left him. He has been reading it since last night.’

  We went through the demolished part of town and past the government hospital. People were queueing outside, some of them lying on stretchers and others sitting wrapped up in coats on the steps. We passed the Heroes’ Monument on Castle Street, and I glanced up at the memorial to Harold North. His date of death was fixed in the year he had left the country – twenty-two years ago now. ‘And also his wife, the singer and dancer Amelie’ was inscribed under his monument.

  As we stood there, thunder began low over the houses, and lightning flashed. The rain came out of nowhere and pounded on the roofs. ‘Come on,’ said Michael, catching hold of my arm, and we ran for the nearest doorway. We stood and watched the rain fall.

  ‘Do you think there is any way Harold North could still be alive?’ I said.

  ‘Where did that come from?’ he said.

  I told him about the book. Michael considered it for a long time. ‘Maybe,’ he said at last. But he did not sound convinced.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It sounds impossible. But I wish there was some chance.’

  ‘If he was still alive, why hasn’t he come back?’ said Michael.

  I sat down on the step, and he sat beside me. The rain was falling hard now, soaking the red dust of the city so that it ran like blood. ‘Maybe if he was too scared,’ I said.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of facing his old life. Of seeing Leo again after all this time.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Michael.

  ‘Or maybe if he couldn’t come back,’ I continued. ‘If he was in prison, or ill, or …’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But if he could have come back, he would have, wouldn’t he?’ said Michael.

  ‘People do stupid things,’ I said. ‘Without meaning to hurt themselves, or even wanting to.’

  ‘That’s true.’ He turned his hat round in his hands and replaced it on his head. ‘Very wise, Anselm.’

  It was something I had learned from Leo. In truth, nearly all my wisdom was secondhand. We fell into silence again. The storm raged briefly, then wore itself out. ‘Come on,’ said Michael as the rain dwindled. ‘Let’s go to the Royal Gardens and then home.’

  ‘What about your father?’ I said as we resumed our walk. ‘What was he angry about?’

  Michael jammed his hat down harder on his head. ‘He wants to leave the country.’

  ‘Is he serious? You told me before—’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t know if he’s serious, but he keeps ranting on about it, day and night. I swear to God, it’s all he ever talks about!’

  I was startled by the real exasperation in his voice. ‘Do you think he would make you—’ I began.

  ‘We are in a bad state,’ he said. ‘We have very bad debts. My father is trying to be the first honest pawnbroker in the family, and it’s going to finish the business. He gives people back their things when they can’t pay. A few weeks ago, we had the debt collectors in—’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes. Of course I am.’

  I didn’t know what startled me more – that the debt collectors had been at the Barones’ shop or that Michael had not told me. We walked on in silence, along the alley beside the Five Stars Inn. The wind cut sharply, as though it was already winter. I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders. It was an old leather jacket of Leo’s, with his cigarette burns in the sleeves.

  ‘I don’t want to leave,’ said Michael. ‘But I don’t want to stay if things get as bad as they are supposed to.’

  ‘Where would you go?’ I said.

  ‘South.’

  ‘Where south?’

  ‘I don’t know, Anselm.’ The exasperation was creeping back into his voice. I kept quiet and waited for him to continue of his own accord. ‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to live in a country ruled by the Imperial Order. And they wouldn’t want me. So maybe it would be best just to get the hell out of here.’

  ‘But, Michael—’

  He shook his head then. ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ he said. ‘It might not even happen.’

  He had a way of dismissing a matter just when you reached the heart of it, and it exasperated me, but I knew from experience that I could do nothing about it. We ran the last few streets to the Royal Gardens. They were almost deserted tonight. A few boys our age were throwing stones into the empty fountain. A couple of children were dodging in and out of the old maze. Hardly anything remained of it now except a few overgrown hedges. The government had never been able to afford to restore the gardens. We took the least weed-choked path to the far fence, behind which an old house stood. It was where we always came to get away from Trader’s Row.

  The house had been boarded ever since I could remember, and red signs warned trespassers away. Michael and I knew how to get under the barbed wire, and when we were younger, we made a den in the broken carriage that stood in front of the doors and spent every waking hour of one summer there. But we did not go inside tonight. I watched the starlings settling in the pine trees on the other side of the fence, and through the branches, I saw the lights of the castle, appearing then vanishing again as the wind moved the trees.

  ‘Look,’ said Michael suddenly, making me start.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I thought I saw a light. Look … there.’

  ‘What, in the castle?’

  ‘No. In the house. The first floor.’

  We both stared at the house, but no light came again. ‘Where?’ I said. ‘Tell me which window.’

  ‘It was somewhere near the middle.’

  The darkness around us was suddenly charged with energy. When we were children, we had firmly believed the house was haunted; that was part of the attraction of the shut-away world on the other side of the fence. And now those old fears stirred in my mind and made me stop breathing as I stared at it. But no light shone from the windows, though we watched in silence for several minutes.

  ‘Maybe I imagined it,’ said Michael eventually. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

  By the time I got in, the argument had burned itself out, and my grandmother was leaving. My mother was sweeping up the broken glass from the floor.

  ‘Let me do that,’ said Leo. As he took the dustpan and brush from her, I saw his fingers rest against hers for a moment.

  ‘I see you’ve decided to grace us with your presence,’ my grandmother remarked as she crossly swept past me at the door. ‘I will see you all next week.’

  We listened to her heeled shoes vanishing along the street. ‘Jasmine wanted to speak to you,’ my mother said as I took off my jacket.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I don’t know. She told me to send you upstairs. I think she wants some help with her newspaper cuttings.’ My mother smiled tiredly and touched my arm as I went past her up the stairs. I knew it was a kind of apology for my grandmother.

  Jasmine was sitting up in bed, cutting up a newspaper with my mother’s dressmaking scissors. ‘Anselm, help me cut along the edges,’ she said. ‘I can never do it right.’

  ‘Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But help me first, Anselm.’

  I sat down on the edge of her bed. There were two articles – one was about the king a
nd the second about Aldebaran, another testament from a great man who had once known him. Jasmine had already cut out a picture of the king looking tired and handsome, and she was arranging it in the last remaining space on her wall. She collected every article about them both; if someone raided our house, they would think it the hideout of some outlawed band of royalists. I cut around the articles carefully and handed them to her. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Will those do?’

  ‘Thank you, Anselm.’ She laid them carefully on the chair beside her bed.

  Aldebaran’s wooden box was there beside them. She glanced at it and sighed. I had not looked at it properly until now. The lid was carved into a neat pattern of stars, and the inside was balding velvet. I opened it and then closed it again, then set it back down beside her bed. ‘It’s a nice box,’ I said. But I did not really understand why he had given it to her.

  ‘Anselm, are you sad?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I hesitated. But I could not tell her about Michael leaving. I felt as if I could make it less likely by forcing myself not to even think about it. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s really nothing at all, Jas.’

  Jasmine picked up the box and began tracing the pattern of stars with one finger. ‘Anselm?’ she said, pausing halfway along the line and gazing up at me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Grandmama like you?’

  She was looking up at me intently, her thumb in her mouth, and I could tell this was what she had wanted to ask me all along. ‘She does …’ I began. But it was no use. Jasmine had been able to see my thoughts since before she could talk. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Sometimes she doesn’t act as if she likes any of us very much.’

  ‘But she’s different with you,’ said Jasmine.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘She is. Can’t you remember when she started being like that?’

  I hesitated. ‘She’s always acted like she disapproved of me, as long as I can remember. Not all the time, but sometimes. My seventh birthday – that’s the first time I can think of.’ I made to leave. ‘To be honest, Jasmine, I gave up trying to understand her long ago. I wouldn’t pay it too much attention.’

  ‘You’ve never told me the story of your seventh birthday,’ she said.

  I smiled at that. ‘There isn’t a story.’

  ‘You could make one.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t.’

  ‘Please. Make me a story about your seventh birthday.’

  It was something to think about instead of the storm that was rising again outside and Michael’s talk of leaving. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But only a short story. It’s half past nine already.’

  ‘All right,’ said Jasmine, replacing her thumb in her mouth. ‘A short story.’

  It started with Leo’s writing. On winter nights when I was a small boy, he used to sit by the fire writing pages and pages, and I tried to copy him even before I could spell out my own name. The year before my seventh birthday, my mother was working late as a governess, and the evenings were long. Leo and I used to sit and write while we waited for her to come back. And it was on these evenings that Leo talked to me about his past life. One night he told me about Stirling. I was struggling to copy a line of a poem out of my school textbook, and Leo stubbed out his cigarette and said, ‘You remind me of him, you know.’

  ‘Who?’ I said. He had been thinking aloud.

  ‘Stirling,’ he said. ‘My little brother.’

  I closed my book. In the metal coal bucket, I could see my reflection, a large-eyed boy with reddish brown hair and a mouth just like my mother’s. ‘It’s not that you look like him,’ said Leo, seeing me studying it. ‘I don’t mean that. But there are certain things about you that are the same.’

  ‘Tell me about him,’ I said.

  He lit another cigarette and inhaled slowly. ‘I remember this one time,’ he said. ‘We were planning a picnic, and your mother decided we shouldn’t bring you. You were a tiny baby. So Stirling promised to remember and take you on a picnic too, one day. That’s what he was like, you know? Things like that mattered to Stirling. I think that’s what I remember most about him, that he cared about things like that. They don’t matter to everyone else.’

  ‘What was the picnic like?’ I said.

  Leo shook his head. ‘We never went. Stirling fell ill and …’ He shrugged and drew on his cigarette.

  ‘Maybe we should go on a picnic now,’ I said.

  Leo watched the flames waver in the grate. ‘Look,’ he whispered, pointing with his cigarette. ‘A horse rearing. Quick, or you’ll miss it.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. It was a game we’d always played. We sat in silence while the wind troubled the flames, but no more shapes appeared.

  ‘We should go,’ he said then. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ I waited for him to continue. ‘In April, for your birthday,’ he said. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  He ruffled my hair, then got up and rolled yet another cigarette, standing in the light of the fire. We did not speak about it again, but that was how it was decided. And for the next two months, I remembered.

  The twenty-second of April dawned grey and cheerless. I got up and dressed and went to the kitchen, where my mother and Leo were wrapping up a basket of food. ‘Are we still going?’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Leo with a quick smile.

  ‘What’s a few raindrops, after all?’ said my mother.

  She hugged me tightly, and Leo swung me up onto the top of the cupboard and set me down there so that I was on a level with them. ‘Open your presents,’ said my mother, taking down two parcels from the shelf. ‘Go on. I can’t wait until your grandparents get here.’

  I opened the parcels. She had bought me a fur hat that I had dearly wished for. Leo gave me a box of coloured pencils that were so good they made the rest of our possessions look grey and dismal. While I was still thanking them, Aldebaran arrived at the door, stamping his feet against the cold. ‘Uncle!’ I said, and jumped down to run and meet him.

  Aldebaran made a great impression on me as a child. His face was so thin when he smiled that you could imagine every bone under it, but he had Leo’s young grey eyes, and he was the cleverest and most impressive man we knew. ‘Anselm, you look older already,’ he said, which made me laugh. He had brought me a book of stories wrapped in brown paper and a rose in a jar.

  ‘Where did you get a rose at this time of year?’ said my mother.

  Aldebaran only smiled. ‘Are you looking forward to the picnic?’ he said, ruffling my hair.

  ‘Yes, Uncle. Can you come?’

  He nodded. ‘They will not miss me at the meetings. I told them my great-great-nephew’s seventh birthday was more important.’

  ‘Tell us how you are, Uncle,’ said my mother. ‘We have not seen you for days.’

  ‘Sorry. I have been so busy. Losing Rigel has made things harder.’

  ‘When will he be back?’ said my mother. ‘I read about it in the papers.’

  ‘It is a long-term mission,’ said Aldebaran.

  I did not understand this conversation, though I listened. I learned, years afterwards, that Rigel had once been the head of the secret service and that Aldebaran had sent him away on some important mission from which he never returned. At the time, I thought he must be some kind of animal – how else could he get lost? ‘Will you find the poor thing again?’ I asked, which made my mother laugh.

  My grandmother and grandfather arrived not long after. We set out in a hired carriage. The frost was disappearing from the roofs of the city, and my mother called it the first real day of spring, though the sun hardly glanced out between the clouds all that morning. We spread out rugs in a valley of wild flowers. At that time, the factories and metalworks had barely advanced into the eastern hill country, and you could lay out a picnic anywhere you chose. As soon as we arrived, my mother and Leo unveiled an iced fruit cake.

  ‘Very good, Maria
,’ said my grandmother in almost an approving tone. ‘That looks just the proper thing.’

  ‘Oh, Leo was the one who made it,’ said my mother. ‘I just drew the pictures in the icing.’

  ‘Making your husband do the cooking!’ said my grandmother. ‘Whatever next, Maria?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said my mother, cutting the cake carefully into pieces with our old kitchen knife. ‘Leo is not my husband.’

  She laughed and made my grandmother shake her head. But my mother’s face turned serious as we sat there. A darkness passed over her and made her shiver. I could not take my eyes away from her, after I noticed that. ‘Anselm,’ said my grandfather then, ruffling my hair. ‘Come and take a walk with me.’

  My grandfather could not walk far, on account of his leg, which was damaged in the war, but he led me around the valley and pointed out the flowers and butterflies to me with his walking stick. He was a man who knew everything, and yet he passed on his knowledge quite carelessly. ‘Look,’ he said as a tiny blue butterfly spiralled past us. ‘Princess Marianne Blue. There are hardly any in the city, but you see them sometimes out here. They live just one day, you know.’

  ‘Just one day?’ I said, startled by that. It made seven years seem an age of some importance.

  ‘And look at that flower,’ said my grandfather. ‘Bleeding heart, they call it. It looks so like the bloodflower that people still confuse them, and hearts have been broken that way.’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Because people who find it are convinced that it is the cure for silent fever, and they bring it home for their relatives. And of course, this flower, this bleeding heart, can’t do anything at all.’

  Leo got up and wandered away, towards the crest of the nearest hill. I watched him go and lost the thread of my grandfather’s voice. ‘Stop lecturing the poor boy, Julian,’said my grandmother then. ‘He doesn’t want to hear your stories.’

  ‘Oh, he does not mind it,’ said my grandfather.

  ‘No, Anselm is a clever boy,’ said Aldebaran. ‘He will be a great man when he grows older.’