Number 11

by Jonathan Coe

  She sensed a movement behind her; she heard voices, murmuring. Turning round sharply, she thought she could make out two figures, talking in the shadows beyond the choir stalls. She took a breath and, in an act of desperate courage, called out: ‘Who’s that?’

  After a couple of seconds the voices stopped and one of the figures stepped forward. It was Nicholas. It was all Rachel could do to stop herself from letting out a yelp of happiness. She ran towards him and threw her arms around him. He embraced her, too, but there was something cold, preoccupied about the gesture. He did not look down at her, barely seemed to notice that she was clinging to him. Soon he eased himself away – pushing her from him – and then he glanced back towards the spot where he had been talking, a frown upon his face, as if something he had been told there was still puzzling him.

  ‘Where have you been?’ said Rachel, her voice loving, accusing. And, when he didn’t answer: ‘And who was that? Who were you talking to just now?’

  ‘She’s one of the wardens here.’ Nicholas continued to stare back towards the rear of the church. Then he shook his head, and in a tone both brisk and nervous said: ‘Come on, I think we should go. This wasn’t a good idea.’

  He hurried on towards the main door, Rachel padding along behind him, struggling yet again to keep up.

  ‘Nick, wait! Slow down, can’t you?’

  The door of the vestibule was still open, but the main door, the door leading to the outside world, was now locked.

  ‘It’s shut!’ Nicholas said, unnecessarily, after twisting the handle a few times.

  ‘I know. I heard him close it. That man with the funny hair.’

  ‘Come on.’

  He strode off again, back in the direction of the choir stalls, and she scurried after him.

  ‘Where are we going now? How are we going to get out?’

  ‘There’s another way. A little door down a passageway here. The lady told me.’

  Even for Rachel, now, there was no mistaking the note of panic in her brother’s voice; and this was what scared her more than anything. She knew that if Nicholas was frightened, something must be very wrong.

  ‘Can’t you find her again? She could show us the way.’

  ‘I don’t know where she is.’

  The candles had been snuffed out, and now with a click which itself echoed around the Minster walls, stretched and amplified a hundredfold, most of the lights were abruptly switched off. Darkness engulfed them. There was just one pinpoint, glimmering faintly, on the northern side of the nave.

  ‘Come on,’ said Nicholas. ‘That must be it.’

  She tried to grab his hand again but he was already on his way. This time she broke into a sprint in order to catch up. In a matter of seconds they had reached a little arched doorway that led into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, at the end of which was a door marked ‘Exit only in emergency’.

  ‘Phew – this is it,’ said Nicholas. ‘We’re going to be OK.’

  She followed him as he entered the tiny corridor, but instead of opening the door he leaned against the wall for a moment or two, breathing heavily to calm himself down.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Rachel asked. Her brother didn’t answer and so, following a hunch, she made the question more specific. ‘It was something that lady said, wasn’t it? What did she say to you?’

  Nicholas turned to her, and his voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘She asked me what I was doing here, and I told her Mr Henderson had let us in and said it was OK for us to have a look around. But she said that wasn’t possible. She said …’

  He tailed off. Rachel herself was too petrified to speak, but her eyes, fixed unmovingly upon her brother, demanded that he finish the explanation.

  At last Nicholas swallowed hard and concluded, in a whisper that was softer but more urgent than ever: ‘She said, “It can’t have been him. Teddy Henderson died more than ten years ago.”’

  He looked down at her, waiting for her reaction. She returned his gaze, her eyes steady and without expression. It was clear that she did not, at first, understand the full meaning of what he had just told her. It was too terrible for her to absorb. But slowly it began to happen. Her eyes widened and she put her hands to her mouth in horror.

  ‘You mean … You mean he …?’

  Nicholas nodded slowly and then, without another word, he grabbed the handle of the exit door, pulled it open and was off: away, out into the freezing October air, down the path which led towards Minster Yard North and then back to the shops and safety. He outpaced Rachel easily and it wasn’t until he stopped to recover his breath in a sweetshop doorway that she was able to catch up with him. Her own sprint through the streets had been, up until that point, a thing of panic, confusion and heedlessness; already she could remember nothing about it. Now she stood and watched as Nicholas doubled over in the doorway, his shoulders heaving. As usual she wanted to hug him, to cling on to him, but this time something held her back. Some creeping element of suspicion. She looked at him more carefully. Her capacity for rational thought started to return as the pounding of her heart relaxed into something more measured and regular. And then the realization hit her. It wasn’t the fear, it wasn’t the exertion that was causing his shoulders to heave like this: it was laughter. Nicholas was laughing – silently, helplessly, unstoppably. Even then, she could not think what was making him laugh like this. It seemed an inexplicable reaction to the experience they had just been through.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked him. ‘What’s so funny?’

  Nicholas straightened himself up and looked down at her. He was laughing so much that his eyes were running with tears, and coherent speech was almost impossible.

  ‘Your … Your face,’ he spluttered finally. ‘Your face when I told you that story.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘Oh my God. God, that was priceless.’ His laughter subsided, and he became aware that his little sister was still staring at him in bewilderment. ‘The story,’ he repeated. ‘About that guy who let us into the church.’

  ‘You mean the ghost?’

  At which Nicholas burst into laughter again. ‘No, you dumbo,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t a ghost. I made that up.’

  ‘But that lady you spoke to said –’

  ‘She didn’t tell me anything except how to get out.’

  ‘So what about …?’

  And then, finally, she understood. She understood, and she saw the full cruelty of the joke he had played on her. The boy she had trusted, the one person from whom she had thought she could seek comfort, had only wanted to upset and torment her. Of all today’s horrors, this was the worst.

  She did not scream, though, or burst into tears or shout at him. Instead, a sudden numbness overcame her, and all she said was:

  ‘You’re horrible and I hate you.’

  She turned and walked away, not having a clue where she was heading. To this day, she has never been entirely sure how she found her way back to her grandparents’ house.

  2

  The paradox is this: I have to assume, for the sake of my sanity, that I am going mad.

  Because what’s the alternative? The alternative is to believe that the thing I saw the other night was real. And if I allowed myself to believe that, surely the horror of it would also make me lose my mind. In other words, I’m trapped. Trapped between two choices, two paths, both of which lead to insanity.

  It’s the quiet. The silence, and the emptiness. That’s what has brought me to this point. I never would have imagined that, in the very midst of a city as big as this, there could be a house enfol
ded in such silence. For weeks, of course, I’ve been having to put up with the sound of the men working outside, underground, digging, digging, digging. But that has almost finished now, and at night, after they have gone home, the silence descends. And that’s when my imagination takes over (it is only my imagination, I have to cling to that thought), and in the darkness and the silence, I’m starting to think that I can hear things: other noises. Scratches, rustles. Movements in the bowels of the earth. As for what I saw the other night, it was a fleeting apparition, just a few seconds, some disturbance of the deep shadows at the very back of the garden, and then a clearer vision of the thing itself, the creature, but it cannot have been real. This vision cannot have been anything but a memory, come back to haunt me, and that’s why I’ve decided to revisit that memory now, to see what I can learn from it, to understand the message that it holds.

  Also, I’m taking up my pen for another good reason, quite an ordinary reason, and that’s because I’m bored, and it is this boredom – surely, this boredom and nothing else – that has been driving me crazy, provoking these silly delusions. I need a task, an occupation (of course, I thought I would find that by working for this family, but it has been a strange job so far, quite different from my expectations). And I’ve decided that this task will be to write something. I’ve not tried to write anything serious since my first year at Oxford, even though Laura, just before she left, told me that I should carry on with my writing, that she liked it, that she thought I had talent. Which meant so much, coming from her. It meant everything.

  Laura told me, as well, that it was very important to be organized when you write. That you should start at the beginning and tell everything in sequence. Just as she did, I suppose, when she told me the story of her husband and the Crystal Garden. But so far, I don’t seem to be following her advice very well.

  All right, then. I shall put an end to this rambling, and attempt to set down the story of another visit to Beverley to stay with my grandparents, in the summer of 2003. A visit I made not with my brother this time but with Alison, my dear friend Alison, who at last after so many years’ mysterious distance I have found again, picking up the threads of our precious friendship. This is our story, really, the story of how we first became close, before strange – not to say ridiculous – forces intervened and drove us apart. And it’s also the story of –

  But no, I mustn’t say too much just yet. Let’s go back to the very beginning.

  3

  The body of Dr David Kelly, the United Nations weapons inspector, was discovered by Oxfordshire police at 8.30 on the morning of Friday 18 July 2003. The body was found in the woodland on Harrowdown Hill, less than a mile north of the village of Longworth, in a spot accessible only on foot, where Dr Kelly had sometimes been known to take his afternoon walks. A verdict of death by suicide was quickly announced by the authorities.

  His death was a matter of huge public interest. In preparation for Britain’s supporting role in the US invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair had been trying to persuade the British people that Saddam Hussein’s regime presented a significant threat to British security. A government dossier had been prepared which included the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that these could be targeted at the UK within a timeframe of forty-five minutes. After an interview with Dr Kelly, a BBC journalist had broadcast a report suggesting that this claim was unrealistic, and that the dossier itself had been ‘sexed up’ in order to bolster the case for war. The widespread belief that the source of this report was Britain’s leading international weapons inspector suddenly made Dr Kelly a controversial and politically inconvenient figure.

  I don’t really know why I think so often about David Kelly’s death. I can only suppose it’s because, at the age of ten, it was the first national news story that made any impression on me at all. Maybe, too, because it evoked such a strong and chilling image: the loneliness of his death, the body discovered so many hours later in that remote woodland, silent and unvisited. Or maybe because of the way Gran and Grandad reacted: the way they made it clear that this was not an ordinary death, that it would have consequences, send ripples of unease and mistrust throughout the country. That Britain would be a different place from now on: unquiet, haunted.

  The first I heard of it was on the six o’clock news, the day that Alison and I arrived in Beverley. We’d not been there long. Grandad had driven over to pick us up from Leeds and we’d both said rather teary-eyed, apprehensive farewells to our mothers, who would be heading off to catch a plane together that evening. On arriving back at my grandparents’ house, Alison and I had gone upstairs to the bedroom in which I’d stayed so many times before, sometimes alone, sometimes with my brother. Unpacking took only about two minutes; then Alison went out into the garden, and soon afterwards I went downstairs to follow her but I must have looked into the living room first to ask Gran and Grandad something, and that was when I got waylaid by the news. They were both totally absorbed by the television, and normally when I saw grown-ups like that I would just have left them to it, but this time there was something about the news item they were watching that drew me in. I stepped further into the living room and sat down on the sofa next to Gran, who barely seemed to notice that I was there. On television the reporter was talking in a portentous voice over helicopter shots of a verdant and wooded patch of English countryside. On the screen and in the room, there was an atmosphere I had never encountered (or at least noticed) before: charged, expectant, filled with shock and apprehension. I sat in silence and watched, not really understanding any of it except for the fact that a man had died, a doctor who had lived in Oxfordshire and had something to do with Iraq and weapons and everyone was very upset and worried about it.

  When the report was over, Grandad turned to Gran and said: ‘Well, that’s that, then, isn’t it? He’s got blood on his hands now.’

  Gran didn’t comment. She rose to her feet – quite a slow, effortful process – and shuffled into the kitchen. I got up and followed her.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  She was reaching up into the cupboard, looking for tins of something.

  ‘What, lovey?’ she said, turning.

  ‘What Grandad said. Who was he talking about?’

  She tutted and went back to her task. ‘Oh, you don’t want to take any notice of him. He’s always getting on his high horse.’

  This was not exactly a satisfactory answer, but before I could ask her to be a bit clearer Grandad came hurrying into the kitchen, muttering words of reproach: ‘Now why didn’t you tell me you were getting tea ready? You know I’m supposed to be the one who does that. You’re not to let these girls tire you out.’

  She rounded on him and said: ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not feeling tired.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Grandad. ‘You should be taking things easy. Let me do it.’

  I left them to their squabble and went to call Alison in from the garden, and then the four of us sat around the kitchen table eating sardines and tomatoes on toast. Grandad seemed moody and didn’t talk much. I was still thinking about the story on the news, the dead doctor who had been found sitting up against a tree in Oxfordshire, wherever that was. And Grandad’s remark about the other unknown man, the one who had got blood all over his hands. It was all very disturbing and mysterious. So that just left Gran and Alison talking together. Gran asked her what she wanted to do for the next week and Alison said she hadn’t really thought about it and she didn’t especially mind. ‘I hope you don’t find it too quiet here, that’s all,’ Gran said. ‘You’re not in the big city now, you know.’
By ‘the big city’ she meant Leeds, which she always seemed to imagine as a teeming metropolis, even though the part Alison and I lived in was not like that at all.

  A few minutes later, when we were out in the garden together, Alison asked me, ‘So what are we going to do here for a week? No offence to your grandparents, but they seem a bit … old?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘We’ll find stuff. There’s a big moorland near here with woods and trees and stuff.’ Alison did not look impressed. ‘Ooh – and there’s a library.’

  ‘A library? Great. A week reading books.’

  ‘I bet they have CDs and stuff as well.’

  Alison was making me cross. We were doing her a favour by inviting her here, after all. It wasn’t even as if she was one of my best schoolfriends.

  ‘What’s in that shed?’ she asked.

  ‘Let’s go and look.’

  We spent a few minutes rummaging through the contents of Grandad’s little lean-to shed, but our pickings were slim. We found a cricket bat and a couple of very old tennis balls, and I was on the point of retrieving what we thought must be a skipping rope from one of the furthest corners when I saw something and gave a little scream and ran back out on to the lawn.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, joining me.

  ‘It’s full of spiders back there. I can’t stand them.’

  ‘Really? What’s so scary about spiders?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard of arachnophobia?’ I asked.