by Kevin Brooks
A long straight road stretched out ahead. Parallel lines of hazy white lights drawing us into the outskirts of town. Nearly there.
‘Alex?’
‘Mmm?’
‘How do you feel?’
She glanced across at me. ‘About what?’
‘About Dean.’
Her lips tightened and she turned her attention back to the road. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I only want to know how you feel about him.’
‘What?’
‘How do you feel?’
‘How do you think I feel?’
‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.’
She changed gear angrily. ‘I feel like shit, that’s how I feel. He’s a bastard. All right? I hate him.’
‘You must have liked him before, though.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone out with him.’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I might.’
I watched her from the corner of my eye. Her face was a mask.
‘You’re too young,’ she snapped. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
I don’t think she meant it nastily, it just came out that way.
‘How can I understand if you don’t tell me?’ I asked quietly.
She frowned at the windscreen.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s just ... I know what he’s like, OK? I always did. He’s stupid ... boring ... selfish. I know that. He’s not even good-looking. I know.’
‘So why did you go out with him?’
‘Because ...’
‘Because what?’
‘Just because, Martyn! All right? Just because.’
I thought it was best to leave it there. She was either going to lose her temper or start crying if I carried on. Anyway, I had a pretty good idea what she was talking about and I didn’t really want to hear it. But before I shut up, I had one more thing to say.
‘He’s not going to get the money, though, is he?’
Slowly, she turned to me and smiled. A grim, determined smile. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘He won’t be getting the money.’ And then she laughed, a curiously cold sound, almost vicious. If it had been anyone else but Alex, I think it might have scared me.
We rode the rest of the way home in silence, each of us lost in our own little world. I was tired – exhausted. Too tired to think. It had been a long day. A very long day. My legs ached. All that walking on the beach, all that running. Was that only this morning? It seemed like a lifetime ago. Briefly, the memory of Dad in his scarecrow dress flashed into my mind. The snow-maker, staggering up the beach. Christ. I dismissed the image. Whatever had happened had happened. It was over. Done. Gone. Forget it. Think of something else.
There was too much to think about. I just wanted to get home and go to bed. Tomorrow I’d think about things. Sunday’s a good day for thinking. It’s quiet. I’d spend a quiet day thinking, working things out. On my own. In my house, on my own. Nobody but me. No body. Just me.
‘You’d better drop me here,’ I said, as we drove down the hill towards our street. ‘Best not to be seen together in the car.’
‘It’s a bit late for that,’ said Alex.
She stopped anyway. I stepped out. The night sky had cleared. The snow had stopped falling. Stars shone in their thousands. Cosmic dust.
My legs felt a bit unsteady as I leaned in through the door. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘OK,’ she said.
I slammed the door, stood to one side and watched as the car tootled away down the road, indicated right, then left, then swung out into the middle of the road and turned right into our street.
I put my hands in my pockets and looked up at the stars. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control.
Well, I thought to myself, that’s that.
Sunday
Clingclangclong, clingclangclong, clingclangclongclong ... Bloody church bells. Every Sunday morning they’re at it, damn bell-ringers, clanging away like lunatics. I wouldn’t mind if they knew what they were doing, but they don’t, they don’t even know any tunes. All they do is clingclangclong, clingclangclong, hour after hour, the same old racket over and over again – clingclangclong, cling, cling, clingclangclongclong. Don’t they know it’s Sunday? People are trying to sleep.
The bell-tower’s in the church on the other side of the main road, opposite the timberyard. A dirty old place, the roof’s covered with sheets of blue plastic and you can hardly see the walls for rusted scaffolding. There’s a graveyard out front, overgrown and abandoned, where crumbling gravestones lean drunkenly in a jungle of rampant weeds. It’s a ghost church. No one ever goes there, apart from the bell-ringers. I saw them once, a bunch of sad-looking vegetarian types with beards and long arms. Bell-ringer’s arms. Perhaps that’s where they drink – the Bellringer’s Arms. Ho ho.
It was nearly eleven o’clock.
Despite the cold, I’d left all the windows open during the night. Under the duvet I was warm and snug, while my exposed face tingled pleasantly in the icy breeze. I lay there and breathed in the cold air, sucking it right down into my lungs. It didn’t smell of anything – no cigarette smoke, no stale beer, no whisky, no sweaty clothes, no Vaporub, no dead bodies – just cold December air.
Beautiful.
The bells stopped ringing and a dead silence descended. A snowy silence. You can tell when it’s been snowing, it soaks up all the sounds, deadens everything. This was a snowy silence. I lay there and listened to it. A soft, white sound.
After a while I dragged myself out of bed.
It was freezing. I skipped naked to the window and checked outside. I was right. The street lay covered in snow. Crisp and white, unbroken. I smiled. Everything was clean and white – cars, walls, the road, the pavement. All the muck and the dirt was hidden beneath a pure white blanket of snow.
It wouldn’t last long, though. Cars driving up and down, people out with their shovels and brooms, gritter lorries spreading sand and salt all over the place – by this afternoon it’d just be a wet, grey, mushy mess. Why can’t they just leave it alone? It’s only snow. It’s not a plague of locusts or anything. It’s the same with fallen leaves in the autumn. Why can’t people just leave them be? Why does everybody rush round dementedly sweeping up every little leaf that falls to the ground? Sweep ’em up, brush ’em up, pile ’em up and burn ’em. Burn the buggers! Burn them all before it’s too late!
They’re all mad.
I closed the window and got dressed.
I made boiled eggs and toast soldiers for breakfast. Three eggs and four slices of toast. And a pot of tea. A pot, not just a cup, with real tea, loose, out of a packet. I couldn’t remember how many spoonfuls you’re supposed to use. Someone once told me: one for each cup and one for the pot. Is that right? I put two spoonfuls in the pot but it didn’t seem enough so I put another one in. I could do whatever I liked. I even laid the table in the kitchen. Tablecloth, place mat, teaspoon, salt and pepper.
What else? The radio. I turned on the radio and turned the sound down low. Desert Island Discs murmured in the background. While I waited for the eggs to boil, I asked myself what I’d take if I was marooned on a desert island. I wouldn’t bother with any records, for a start. If you’ve only got eight, you’re going to get fed up with all of them pretty soon. They’d start to get on your nerves. So, no records. That left me with a book and a luxury object. What book would I take? Sherlock Holmes? Raymond Chandler? Agatha Christie? There’s tons of books I really like, but what’d be the point? One book’s not much good. Once you’ve read it half a dozen times you might as well throw it away. No, I wouldn’t take a book, either. That left me with a luxury object. Luxury object? Something of no practical value. What? What do I like? What do I really like? Think. Come on, Martyn, there must be something? I stared into the pan of boiling water and watched the eggs bobbling about in the heat. Steam drifted
up into my eyes. Water bubbling, eggs bobbling, tapping against the side of the pan. Luxury object? I couldn’t think of anything. Nothing. There was nothing I wanted on my desert island, nothing at all.
The egg-timer dinged and I turned off the gas.
After breakfast I went into the front room. Now that I was alone, it was quiet. Wonderfully quiet. But strangely unfamiliar. Like it was someone else’s room. There was something about it, I don’t know what. It was the same old front room – dim, slightly battered, out of date – but there was something different about it. Something ... the light, maybe, cutting in through the window, snow-bright and clear. Bright, but not bright enough to spoil the darkness. No, it wasn’t the light. Perhaps it was the room itself? I sprawled out on the settee and let my gaze wander round the room, studying things, taking it all in. I looked at the bare walls. The thinning wallpaper, dull-green and lifeless, faded by years of weak sunlight, almost see-through. I looked at Dad’s armchair, my armchair. High-backed, worn, a sort of grubby-brown/greyish colour, the colour you get when you mix all the colours in the paintbox together. The armchair just sat there looking back at me like a beaten-up dog whose master has died. Forlorn. I looked away. Opposite the chair the big old television perched stupidly on its four tapered legs – like something out of the 1950s, a joke television. A square-eyed monster with big fat control knobs down one side. We didn’t have a remote control. I’d once asked Dad if we could get one. He told me not to be so bloody soft, remote controls are for girls.
I turned my head to the floor and looked down at the carpet and saw a mirror-image of the walls – pale green, worn-thin and sorry. Above me, the ceiling – yellowy-white, clouded with nicotine like a poisonous sky.
It’s amazing how you can live somewhere for years without ever really knowing it.
Against the far wall a wooden cabinet stood tall and rigid, like a dark sentinel. Dad was so proud of it. ‘That’s oak, you know,’ he used to say. But it wasn’t. The glass doors were always locked, as if there was something of value inside. There wasn’t. Just knick-knacks, cheap porcelain figures, empty plate stands, a pewter beer mug engraved with someone else’s name, a darts trophy, a presentation coin-set with half the coins missing. A lazy collection of rubbish.
The telephone table by the door, scuffed and dull. Ragged bits of paper scrawled with telephone numbers, taxi cards, two chewed biros in a plastic pot. And the telephone, mute and black, still waiting. Go on, before it’s too late.
It was too late.
Then the fireplace. Artificial fire, artificial coal, dulled brass fireguard. False flames, unreal orange, unwarm. A cold fire. When it wasn’t turned on it was the coldest-looking thing in the world. To one side, a chipped vase with a bent poker in it. Brick-red floor tiles. That grey-stone surround. Uniform cubes stuck together in an ugly jigsaw. The fireplace. I remembered the sound, bone on stone, that hollow crack. Bloodstone. Cold and hard and clean and deadly.
And on the mantelpiece above the fire the clock ticked slowly.
Twelve o’clock.
This room.
Something. I don’t know what it was. It wasn’t real.
I reached for the phone and dialled Alex’s number. A deep, throaty voice answered. ‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Freeman?’
‘Hello, Martyn. How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks. Is Alex there?’
‘She went out about an hour ago.’
‘Oh.’
The line was silent.
‘Do you know where she went?’
‘No, sorry.’
‘Oh.’
‘Shall I tell her you called?’
‘OK.’
‘I’ll tell her when she gets in.’
‘OK.’
‘Bye, then.’
I put the phone down.
I had some thinking to do, anyway. I had to work on my plan. Like most plans, it wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough. The trick with plans is that you have to take into account unforeseen circumstances. However well you work things out, there’s always a chance that something you hadn’t thought of will happen. Something unexpected. So what you have to do is work out all the possibilities – what if this happened, what if that happened, what if this happened and then this happened and then that happened? Of course, it’s impossible to think of everything – there’s a billion things that could happen – but what you have to make sure of is that you’re prepared for things to suddenly shoot off in another direction. Contingency plans, that’s the thing. It’s no good just relying on Plan A, no matter how good you think it is. You’ve got to have more up your sleeve than that. You need a Plan B, a Plan C, a Plan D, E, F, G ... You need a whole alphabet of plans. You’ve got to be ready.
Two hours later, all thought out, I called Alex again. The phone rang unanswered. The sound of an empty house.
Well ...
I hate that. Not knowing where someone is. It bothers me.
Five o’clock. It was dark now. Sunday-afternoon-in-December dark. Winter dark. It comes down quick – I watched it from the bedroom window. Sunset. The blood-red disc of the sun outlined against a flat sky, the sky a dull glow of pearl-grey light. The sinking sun throwing out threads of colour as it dies, reaching up into the dark, like a drowning man throwing up his arms, reaching out for something that isn’t there. Then down it goes, vast and perfect, burning down into the sunrise of another time, another world. And when it’s gone, the patient black water of the night steals in and up crawls the moon.
I watched it. I watched it all. I watched the colours. I watched the stars. I watched the movement of the skies. It made me realise just how small I am.
I rang Alex again at six. This time I really let it ring. Still no answer. I let it ring some more, imagining the lonely echo of the phone at the other end. Pheep-pheep, pheep-pheep, pheep-pheep ... Was anybody listening?
I placed the telephone, still ringing, on the table, went out into the hall, put on my hat and coat and went outside. Dusty snow feathered in the air, blown from the roofs of houses. Head down, I crossed the street, kicking idly at browned lumps of snow, and headed down towards Alex’s house. I stopped outside. No car, no lights. Curtains drawn. I listened, heard the faint pheeping of the telephone. That’s me, I smiled. I stood there for a while, just looking, checking it out. There was no one home. I turned around and walked back home.
I turned on the television, clicked through the channels, then turned it off again. The sound of it was irritating: everybody shouting, stupid music, adverts. I feel like chicken tonight ...
I turned out the lights and sat there.
Unexplained sounds flickered in the background – a wooden creak from upstairs, a faint hum, something shifting somewhere – shadow noises. I took no notice. That kind of thing doesn’t bother me. Ghosts and stuff, spooky business, there’s nothing to it. It doesn’t happen. Only in films and books. Not in real life.
Dad was dead, that was all. Gone. The thing lying in a sleeping bag at the bottom of a deep pool, that was just a wet sack of bones and meat. That was nothing to do with anything. An empty wrapper. Whatever it was that Dad was – his self, his being, his soul, call it what you like – had drifted away like a wisp of smoke the second his head hit the fireplace. Just drifted away. Where? Who knows? Who cares? Not me. Wherever it went, it wasn’t here.
This house is empty.
Nine o’clock.
I watched the second hand tick slowly round the clock dial. Then I watched the minute hand, staring hard, trying unsuccessfully to catch its movement.
Five past nine.
At nine-thirty a car pulled up across the street. I jogged upstairs to my bedroom and peeked through a gap in the curtains, hoping to see Alex and her mum. But it wasn’t them. It was a dark-coloured Escort. Two men sat in the front, faces dimly lit by the interior light. Both in their early twenties, one with a bush of frizzy red hair and a pockmarked face, the other dark and angular. I didn’t recognise them. They were talking. R
ed opened some kind of wallet or bag and passed something to the dark one. Money? Red laughed, revealing a mouth full of strong white teeth. The other one cupped his hand to a lighter and lit a cigarette. Then they both got out of the car, slammed the doors and slouched off down the snow-packed road, nodding their heads and muttering to each other. Off to Don’s, I thought. Don’s a drug dealer. He lives in a shabby old terraced house just off the main road. The curtains are always drawn and a huge white dog barks like mad whenever you pass the front door. Don’s all right, though. I see him sometimes walking his dog down by the river. He always smiles and nods at me, bug-eyes rolling all over the place. He’s all right. His customers often park in the street outside our house. Less conspicuous than on the main road, I suppose.
I watched the car for a while to see if they came back, but they didn’t. The street remained still and quiet.
I let the curtain drop and lay down on the bed.
When I was a little kid I used to think about dying. I’d lie in bed at night with my head beneath the covers trying to imagine the total absence of everything. No life, no darkness or light, nothing to see, nothing to feel, nothing to know, no time, no where or when, no nothing, for ever. It was so unimaginable it was terrifying. I’d lie there for hours staring long and hard into the dark, looking for the emptiness, but all I’d ever see was black black black stretching deep into space for a million miles, and I knew it wasn’t enough. I knew that when I died there’d be no black and no million miles, there wouldn’t even be nothing, there’d be less than nothing, and the thought of that would fill my eyes with tears.
