Voices in the Dark

by Catherine Banner

  ‘Look,’ Jasmine called as we passed the Barones’ shop. ‘Stop, servant! Stop! Someone has moved in.’We stopped to stare in through the window. ‘What are they doing?’ said Jasmine.

  Three men in shabby clothes were stripping the old paper from the walls and sawing up planks. Behind the dust on the window, they moved like ghosts in our vision. The old letters on the window, MICHAEL BARONE, JEWELLERS AND PAWNBROKERS FOR FIVE GENERATIONS, were already half scratched away. A few of the other traders were standing at their shop doorways, watching the three men work. ‘Anselm?’ said Jasmine, and dropped down to the ground again and put her hand in mine. ‘Do you miss Michael?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘You never talk about him.’

  ‘Did I used to?’

  ‘Sometimes. And when people go away, you have to talk about them, don’t you? Because that way you keep remembering them, and they aren’t really gone.’

  ‘Michael hasn’t died, Jas,’ I said.

  I watched the nearest workman taking a sledgehammer to the old counter and throwing each dismembered plank into a corner of the room. ‘Can we write him a letter?’ said Jasmine.

  ‘I don’t know his address. He said he would send it, but he hasn’t. Maybe they are still looking for somewhere else to live.’

  ‘But what if he doesn’t send it?’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Mr Pascal was standing in the shop doorway, berating Leo over something. He raised his arm to let us under it and went on talking. ‘It is a solid gold venture,’ he was saying. ‘If you don’t make a fortune, I solemnly promise you, you can have everything I make out there in repayment for the inconvenience. You will be rich, North; may God strike me down if I tell a lie.’

  Jasmine glanced up at me with a grin. She thought Mr Pascal’s outrageous bargaining the funniest thing on earth.

  ‘I’ll put the water on to boil for tea,’ I said. Leo nodded. He was listening intently to Mr Pascal, and as we passed him, he kissed Jasmine and ruffled my hair without really noticing us.

  ‘It would only be until Christmas,’ Mr Pascal continued. ‘Listen, North, this country is as good as occupied already. The economy is a tower of cards. But Holy Island is ruled by no one, and that is where money is to be made. Everyone is going west.’

  ‘I don’t believe these stories about gold paving the streets of Holy Island,’ said Leo, putting the pieces of an old lamp together with a steady hand. He had his spectacles on. They still looked strange on him, but Leo’s eyesight was deteriorating young, and Father Dunstan had recommended them.

  ‘They aren’t stories, North. Come on, give me an answer.’

  ‘I can’t, not just like that.’

  ‘Well, let me know by the end of the week. One way or the other. I had better go, but don’t forget.’

  Leo nodded and raised his hand as Mr Pascal stepped out of the door. ‘It’s all changed next door,’ he remarked from the step. ‘I still can’t get over Barone leaving like that. The shop has been in his family since the first King Cassius. I hope his view of the future turns out to be wrong, or we are all in trouble.’

  With that dismal thought, Mr Pascal left us. I put the water on the stove to boil, all the time watching Leo. He carried the lamp carefully to a shelf and set it there on a faded piece of velvet. Then he jammed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it.

  ‘What was Mr Pascal lecturing you about?’ I asked him.

  ‘He wants me to go with him to Holy Island for the winter. He’s shutting up his shop to go and trade there; that’s what he says.’

  ‘But you’re not going to?’ I said. Leo did not answer. He just took the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled carefully.

  It was only then that I heard the silence. The street had been noisy, but now only the birds were singing, and their voices seemed artificially loud and bright. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Listen to the silence.’

  ‘I can hear it too,’ said Jasmine, and ran to the door.

  ‘Don’t go out there,’ said Leo suddenly. ‘Jasmine, come back here.’

  He stepped forward and shot both bolts home. At the same moment, three men in blue uniforms appeared farther up the street, sauntering along with rifles on their shoulders. ‘Jasmine, Anselm, go into the back room,’ said Leo. ‘At once.’

  ‘No, I want to see,’ said Jasmine.

  ‘I’m not joking, Jasmine! Go!’

  I had not heard Leo shout for as long as I could remember. We both obeyed him. We stood in the doorway of the back room, watching the street, Jasmine leaning forward desperately to try and see. The men were coming this way. They stopped opposite the pharmacist’s, and one of them took out matches. I thought that he was going to light a cigarette. But instead he struck a match and held it up in the still air. Another man took out what looked like a can of paraffin. I bent down, trying to see what they were doing, but they had moved out of my vision.

  ‘Papa,’ Jasmine murmured once or twice, and Leo said, ‘Shh.’The men marched away down a side alley.

  Then there was a roaring hiss, like a stove catching. The men had set light to the nearest flag, and from the way the flames engulfed it, it looked like they had drenched it in paraffin first. The fire was racing along the washing line, burning the pharmacist’s shirts and a stained old blanket. It caught the next flag and leaped towards the sky with a triumphant roar. Trails of paraffin in the dust blazed like spirits. The next washing line caught and burned, and the people out in the street were shrieking and coughing and running for shop doorways. The flags were all catching now; the man must have thrown the paraffin upwards indiscriminately, drenching everything. The washing lines blazed like cords of fire and crumbled. People ran out with buckets then and threw water from their upstairs windows. The lines fell in a tangle of scorched rope, and the shrivelled remains of the flags went with them. It had all taken less than a minute, and for a long time nothing broke the stunned silence in the street.

  People began emerging from their houses at last, though Leo was still holding us back. ‘Could have set the whole house on fire,’ someone was muttering, and someone else said, ‘Bloody fools.’ A baby above the old stationer’s was screaming in outrage. Billy and Joe began parading around with a half-extinguished flag, but the pharmacist slapped them both so hard they staggered. Into the chaos, serene and beautiful, walked my mother. ‘What is all this?’ she said. Then, ‘Leo! Anselm! Jasmine!’

  I will not forget her face before she saw us. It was the start of something, that expression, like the reflection of terrors still to come. The look of someone who suddenly saw their family taken from them, torn apart or scattered in what would soon be an open war. Then Leo said, ‘It’s all right; I’m here,’ and she was with us again. Someone, maybe Mr Pascal, tried to turn it into a joke. The siege atmosphere returned. And we pretended that everything would still be all right. But the men had been in blue uniforms; we had all seen it. Those were uniforms I knew well, from pictures in history books. They were the clothes Lucien’s soldiers used to wear.

  That night, after the others had gone to bed, a kind of restlessness came over me, and I went down to the shop to search for evidence of my real father. There must be something, I was certain, some record of his name. I began in the back room, with the drawers of the old desk. But I found no sign there. Only a pile of unpaid bills, and a thousand letters, and a bundle of Jasmine’s drawings. I put them back and carried the lamp with me to the front room.

  We had only lived here five years, but in that time, the shop had grown cluttered with half-forgotten objects. In a corner, I unearthed a box of books that Leo had never been able to sell but that he could not stand to part with either, half of them copies of Harold North or old things from before my grandmother was born. I opened a worn-out third edition of The Sins of Judas and read the last page. ‘Some things that I have lost I will never find again. Like the river that flows and becomes a different river, I have stepped out of the world and it ha
s gone on without me. And I wish wholeheartedly that I could return and live differently. And I wish I could tell my younger self that it would have been all right.’

  When I closed the book, a cloud of dust rose like a phantom and vanished in the draught. Underneath a pile of secondhand clothes, I found a case of letters that Mr Barone had passed on to us. People left them in his shop sometimes, forgotten in the drawers of desks and locked in writing cases. As I turned over the first bundle, moths rose and threw themselves against the glass of the lamp. The quiet whir of their wings went on as I continued to search. In the drawers of the counter were brooches that had lost their jewels, and books without covers, and a china swan with a broken neck, wrapped in newspaper. I found all my school reports, and a lock of Jasmine’s baby hair in a yellowed envelope, and a tarnished ring. The ring made me pause for a moment. But how could it be anything to do with my real father? He would never have given my mother a sign like this when they were not even married.

  Something made the drawer stick, and I had to reach in and pull a sheaf of papers out before I could close it. I hesitated before I put them back. They were not old, and the writing was Leo’s. I held them to the lamp.

  '“Once, many years ago,” the lord Rigel began, “there was a boy who wanted more than anything to study magic.”’

  That was how the page started, and it made no sense to me. But as I read it, I heard Leo’s tread on the stairs. I moved without thinking. I put the papers back and turned down the lamp.

  ‘Anselm?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m over here.’

  He came down the stairs slowly, his head bent to avoid knocking it on the low door frame, then straightened up and looked at me. ‘Can’t you sleep?’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Neither can I.’ He sat down at the counter and watched the moths thudding softly against the lamp. He did it without really seeing them. I pulled up a rickety dining chair priced half a crown and sat opposite him. I thought I knew what kept him awake, more than anything. Mr Pascal’s talk of Holy Island.

  Leo leaned on both elbows on the counter and lit a cigarette. ‘Anselm,’ he said at last. ‘If I ever had to leave … I mean, if I went away …’

  ‘Is this about Mr Pascal?’ I said.

  The smoke gained a life of its own, making ghostly patterns that hung between us. ‘No,’ said Leo.

  He breathed in smoke, and his voice shuddered when he did it. I could hear it catching on something in his chest. It was a strange sound, like listening to an old man, but he was only thirty-one. He leaned on the counter and coughed.

  ‘Your cough is starting already,’ I said. ‘It’s only September.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why are you talking about leaving?’

  ‘Anselm, the other night,’ he said, ‘there was a man standing outside the shop watching us.’

  I did not answer. The silence was charged suddenly, as though lightning had run through it.

  ‘Do you know anything about this?’ said Leo. ‘Have you seen him before?’

  I did not know how to answer. I could not tell him that I had seen the man; it would only make him more anxious. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen people outside, but they might just have been walking past.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Weeks ago. It was probably nothing.’

  ‘Not this time,’ said Leo. ‘This time, there was a man standing outside watching us.’

  ‘What did he want?’ I said. ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘He could be anyone,’ said Leo. ‘He could be a debt collector. I owe money. Doctor Keller has sent a final demand; the bills are piling up. Someone is going to stop being lenient sooner or later.’

  I did not answer. I had seen the bills just now, searching through the desk in the back room, and the situation was bad.

  ‘Or he could be someone from the government,’ Leo went on. ‘All able-bodied men older than eighteen are supposed to have signed up for National Service; it’s all over the city on those government posters.’

  ‘I know that’s the law,’ I said. ‘But they aren’t going to enforce it for months, Mr Pascal says.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Pascal says.’

  ‘Everyone says.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.

  ‘So is that who you think he is?’ I said. ‘A debt collector or someone from the government?’

  Leo shook his head. ‘Anselm, there are things you don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think people are looking for me. I can’t help believing that he’s someone from the Imperial Order who means no good.’

  ‘Why would they be looking for you?’

  He did not answer. He went to the front window instead and stood looking out. The wind was driving pale clouds across the narrow strip of sky. ‘Is it just because our family are royalists?’ I said. ‘You weren’t even in the resistance, Papa.’

  ‘But I was involved with the resistance,’ said Leo.

  I watched the back of his head. He did not turn. ‘I never knew,’ I said eventually.

  ‘No one knew. It was just a mistake. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m not saying it wasn’t my fault. It was. But no one knew about it, because I haven’t told anyone.’

  ‘But then if no one knew, how could this man—’

  ‘I can’t be sure,’ he said. ‘That’s the thing. The Imperial Order seem to know everything, and I can’t be sure any more. I can’t be certain that there wasn’t someone who saw or heard about it and who could have spoken to them since.’

  ‘Papa, do you really think they are going to take over here too?’ I said.

  He did not answer. His silence was worse than anything he could have said. I ran my fingers along the worn leather of the counter to try and convince myself that it was still really there and that everything was the way it always had been. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said again. I was half proud of him, in spite of his talk about mistakes, and half shocked. The resistance men were all hardened fighters in their time, and I could not imagine Leo ever being one of them.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was never part of it; it was just a mistake better left forgotten.’

  ‘How was it a mistake?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Leo ran his hand backwards over his hair and came back to the counter. When he did, I noticed the letters on the window. Something was different about them. I picked up the lamp and crossed the room, then raised the light to the glass. Half the sign was gone. Where L. NORTH & SON used to be, the letters were scraped away. A network of scratches shifted in the lamplight, arranging themselves into circular patterns. It looked as though someone had taken a file to it. ‘Who scratched off the sign?’ I said. ‘Did you see someone do it?’

  ‘I did it,’ said Leo.

  I stood there stupidly, the lamp still raised in my hand.

  ‘I did it,’ Leo said again. ‘Anselm, sometimes it is better to be anonymous, you know? The Norths are Aldebaran’s family – I don’t think there is one person in the city who doesn’t know it. Do you remember when we used to have well-wishers coming to our door, in the old days? People who thought Harold North was some kind of martyr. You probably don’t remember; you were too young.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘A woman brought a wreath once.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But, Papa, why take our name off the window now—’

  ‘Because I’m frightened,’ he said. ‘I’m frightened of what they will do when Harold North is no longer a martyr.’

  ‘Is everything going to be all right?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. Anselm, I have such dreams.’

  I had always admired Leo for his honesty, but sometimes I would rather have heard him lie. I would rather he had said, Yes, forget about the men outside the door; it will be all right. I rested my forehead against the window and stared out. Somew
here in the east, a fire was blazing. The Imperial Order burning old buildings was no longer a new occurrence. A derelict building on Citadel Street, two doors from our old house, had gone up in smoke.

  ‘It is not just because of my father,’ Leo said. ‘Anselm, it was a very bad thing that I did. If it ever comes out – if anyone ever learns about it – I will be in trouble. And so will you – all of you.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked, turning to him. The way he spoke about it made my heart turn cold. ‘Maybe if you just told me—’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘But it was something connected to the resistance?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I know telling you would be dangerous. Anselm, don’t tempt me to do it.’

  ‘All right. All right, I won’t, Papa.’

  My own voice sounded frightened, like a child’s. ‘I wish Aldebaran was here,’ Leo said. ‘I never knew how much I relied on him before.’ He sat down at the counter again and lit a third cigarette. ‘Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I start wondering where he is now. Is that madness? I don’t know. I can’t think of him as just gone away for ever.’

  ‘He’s still watching over us,’ I said. ‘I believe that much.’

  ‘When you lose someone,’ Leo said slowly, ‘they watch over you. I know they do. But the fact is, they can’t always help you any more. They can’t be there to catch you. That’s what troubles me about it. To think that if I died, I would see you and Jasmine and Maria suffering and not be able to do anything about it. Is there anything worse than that?’

  I did not know what to say. I did not like to think of it. ‘Papa?’ I said, changing the subject as far as I dared to. ‘Did you ever find out about that book? The one that Uncle left you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing of consequence. I asked Markey about it.’

  ‘You asked Daniel Markey?’

  ‘Yes. I met him by chance, and Mr Pascal thought he would be the only person who would know.’