Writing On the Wall

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “Never make judgements,” Vlady said once. “You never really know.”

  Just the same, I made one. Rotten sod.

  After a minute I said, “Goodbye then.” I wanted to tell her to ask Con to ring me if she came back, but she was still staring at the sky and somehow I didn’t want to disturb her.

  24 · Butterflies

  Once before – a long time ago, maybe five years – I’d gone to church by myself in the middle of the week.

  It was because of something I’d done. The sort Mary was talking about. It started quite small, like most of the awful things. Me and Lily had been playing cards in the front room – I’ve forgotten what, Snap, or Beggar-My-Neighbour or some silly game. And Lily kept cheating. She cheated and cheated, and I tried everything to stop her doing it because I could feel myself getting wild inside, but she wouldn’t. She just kept laughing and making this snortling noise in the back of her throat (she still does it sometimes when she wants to goad me) and at last I said I’d tell Dad. Dad would never let us cheat, even as a joke, and she knew she’d cop it if I did tell him. So she just picked up the pack of cards and flung them in my face.

  I must have been half crazy already, because when I felt all those dozens of little jabs in my face from the card-corners, everything went red and black. I dived straight across the table at her and grabbed her by the neck.

  Her chair went over backwards with us on top. I banged my head hard on the wall and I didn’t even feel it. I had my hands round Lily’s throat and I was choking her. And it was lovely. I’d have done for her, for sure – she was turning blue – if Vlady and Sean hadn’t heard the row and come and dragged me off.

  They had to revive Lil with cold cloths, and I got the only real hiding of my life from Dad. And I got the fright of my life, at least till this time. Because Lily was my little sister. I loved her when she wasn’t driving me spare. And I could’ve killed her – I knew that. I’d always had a temper, but that was the first time I’d ever seen what it could lead to if I let it go.

  I never did again, not like that. But it was there, that devil lurking inside me, deep down, waiting its chance. I felt it stirring now, as I walked away from Con’s house, that monster that I’d seen a reflection of in Mum’s eyes last night. It wasn’t only an angry monster. It was a hate monster. My mum had hated me last night. And I hated Kev this morning.

  Funny, it wasn’t till my friends had let me down, one way or another, and I felt all alone, that I knew what I really felt about Kev. I don’t know how it could be that I wasn’t ready to shop him but that if he’d been there, in front of me, I’d have wanted to kill him. It made me feel sick, knowing how violent I could be, wanting to tear Kev in bits as if I could wipe the whole business out by wiping him out. So I did what I did that other time – I walked down the High Street and went into Our Lady of Lourdes.

  It’s nothing special, as churches go. All the coloured windows it had once were broken in the war, so now they’re plain glass, which lets in lots of light. There’s not a lot of atmosphere, like in some places. The altar’s dead plain. There are about four statues, and some plaques round the walls showing the Stations of the Cross. That’s about all. But there was a faint smell of old incense, and some candles lit round Our Lady’s feet, and best of all it was familiar. I’d been coming there, Sundays, all my life. Only now it was different because it was only me.

  I knelt down at the end of the pew where we usually tried to sit on Sundays, not too far forward in case Dad fell asleep. I said a few Hail Marys, to sort of catch Our Lady’s attention, and then I talked to her and told her what had happened. It was a lot easier telling her than telling Dad, mainly because she knew all about it already. Even the part about wanting to kill Kev. I bet she knew the feeling.

  Then I just sat there.

  Funny, when we go to Mass and that, my mind wanders and I get bored very often, and wish it’d be over so we could go. Sitting there alone with nothing going on, I didn’t get bored. I felt as if I could stay for ever.

  I wasn’t praying all the time, or even thinking. Just sitting. After a bit I felt like doing something, only without leaving the church. So I went up to the pulpit and there was the big Bible on its stand, open at last Sunday’s lesson. I read it, but it didn’t say much to me. So I turned the big, heavy pages back a bit until I saw, at the top of a page, the words Lamentations of Jeremiah. I liked the sound of that, it suited my mood. I shut my eyes and put my finger on a verse, and believe it or not this was it:

  She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.

  I must’ve read that verse ten times.

  Don’t ask me why it made me feel so much better, but it did. Perhaps because every now and then you can’t help wondering if maybe it’s all just superstition and there’s no one up there. But if I wasn’t directed to open the Bible there, and put my finger just on that verse, out of all the thousands, well, how could it happen? It proved something to me. That I hadn’t just been chatting away to myself, down there in the pew.

  And if I’d needed any more proof, it came as I was walking home. It wasn’t knocking-off time and he lived the other side of Acton, but there he was – Michael – coming towards me in the precinct. As if he knew where I’d head for. Or maybe he was heading there himself.

  I was so glad to see him! I wanted to run to him, but I just stood still and let him come to me.

  “Hallo, Tracy.”

  “Hallo,” I said. I was blushing but I was so brown perhaps it didn’t show.

  “Been to church?” he said, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world to go to church on a Wednesday morning.

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you feel today?”

  “A bit better. Not much. I wanted to thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “Everything. And – coming to tell my family. That must’ve been horrible for you.”

  “I nearly funked it. I just stood the other side of your front hedge and I was shaking all over. I don’t know how I made myself do it.”

  “I don’t either. I couldn’t have, in your place.”

  “I thought of you in Harwich, waiting,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking across the street, and following every passing car with his eyes.

  “What happened? Who opened the door?”

  “Your brother – not the one with glasses, the other one. I asked to see your dad, and he took me into the kitchen. And they were all there, your little sister too, and they looked at me. They’d been expecting you back. And I suppose I looked. . . . Anyway your mum jumped up at the sight of me and started yelling, ‘Holy God, what’s happened?’ or something like that, so I couldn’t mess about, I had to tell them straight out.”

  “They all heard? Even Lily?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t think till later I should have talked just to your parents. I’m sorry.”

  I dragged up a deep sigh, like one of Dad’s. “You couldn’t help it. They had to know.”

  We stood there for a bit, watching the cars as if they were dead fascinating. I felt Michael touching my hand, and I moved closer to him.

  “You mustn’t be worried,” he said.

  “Oh, no, of course not!” I said, sarcastic.

  “No,” he said. “I mean it. You’ve nothing to worry about. You’ll get off.”

  “It’s heroin,” I said. I hadn’t dared even think it till now.

  “I don’t care if it’s a ton of Dioxin,” he said. “You’ll get off.”

  “You can’t be sure,” I said. “You can’t even be sure I didn’t have anything to do with it. You never saw him give me back that pump – he made sure nobody saw that.”

  “If it’s a matter of witnesses,” he said, “I know you’d lost it, and I know you got it back. But it won’t depend on that. It’ll depend on Kev telling them the truth.
”

  “He won’t.”

  “If you’re so sure of that,” he said, “I wonder you went with him in the first place.”

  “I didn’t know him then, did I.”

  “Maybe you should’ve taken a closer look.”

  “Stop talking like my brother Vlady.”

  “The one with glasses?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s okay, I like him. He was the first one to start talking sense last night, saying you’d need a lawyer and that he betted you wasn’t to blame—”

  “Did he?”

  “He wanted to come up with your dad to get you, but he said he had to go on his own.”

  We stopped talking for a bit and just walked. I even managed to stop thinking.

  My head seemed to have emptied itself down my arm and into my fingers. I was almost living down there, in my hand where it was touching his. It was like the relief of going to sleep, only better. I was even happy.

  But suddenly I woke up. Because I saw where we were walking. Straight onto the railway bridge, where my paint-writing was – my graffiti. I wanted to drag him away so he wouldn’t see it. But that’d be a dead give-away. So I let him walk me towards it, just hoping and praying he wouldn’t notice.

  Who could help noticing? There were the words, glaring at us in the sun. Michael looked at them – and stopped.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  “Oh yeah!” I said, as if I’d never seen it before.

  He smiled at me. “I didn’t do it, Officer,” he said. “I swear! That’s not to say I don’t agree with it, though.”

  Then his eyes narrowed. “Now I wonder,” he said, “who knew him well enough to write that! Someone who can’t spell, that’s for sure.”

  “Spoils the bridge, doesn’t it.”

  “Not much to spoil . . . ugly old thing. Still. If you wanted to get it off, we might try the same technique I used on poor old Erasmus.”

  “But this is paint.”

  “We might try, some dark night,” he said. “Then, when we’d done the job and got it all cleaned off, I might write something instead. I used to be good at love-hearts when I was younger.”

  I stared at him. “You used to write on walls?”

  “I did a lot of things a few years ago I wouldn’t think of doing now,” he said. “But anyway there’s things you don’t want to advertise. These days I keep my love-hearts for February the fourteenth.”

  I took this in slowly, because I was thinking more of something else. It was only later I thought what he really meant.

  “Michael, why – how are you so sure I’ll get off?”

  “I told you. Kev’ll do the necessary.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “And you do, I suppose?”

  “Well enough to know he’d see me rot before he’d land himself in the cart.”

  “That just goes to show, don’t it? Because he’s already done it.”

  He said it so casual I thought he must be having me on.

  “What do you mean? How do you know?”

  “That’s what I was coming to tell you. I didn’t go in to work this morning, I went to see Kev. I thought he might make trouble, but not a bit of it. He was like a lump of jelly, just waiting for someone to come and tell him what to do. You think you had a bad night? He had a worse one. I think he was expecting your brothers to come and do him in! He was so relieved it was only me that he let me trot him down to the station straight away. Left him on the doorstep to go in and say his piece.”

  *

  Kev’s confession hasn’t got me right off the hook. The police thought he might be covering up for me, so I’ve still got to go to court, but the Chief Inspector at Harwich has let Dad know that there’s a good chance I won’t be charged. Or if I am, and there’s still a case, it doesn’t look too bad for me.

  It wasn’t the end of it in the family, though. There’s still a lot of bad feeling. Vlady took it hard, somehow. He said, “We should’ve gone and settled with that little bastard; she’s our sister.” Dad said he wouldn’t have let them. He says you have to trust the processes of law and justice – perhaps because he’s a foreigner, Dad still believes that the British police and courts and that can never be wrong.

  Sean says he would have gone, and beaten Kev to a pulp, if he’d been sure enough that I hadn’t had some part in what happened. It’s hard to love a brother like that, but I suppose I’ll get back to loving him – maybe around next Christmas, when we’re playing our football game in the park.

  When Lily came home she said Gran never doubted me and neither did she. But then, neither of them was caught up in the atmosphere of that first awful night when nobody was sure. Mary was nice. She apologised. She said she’d only been against me because she’d had Mum raving and crying on her hands for five hours before I got home. Well, I can understand that.

  But Mum was the odd one. I couldn’t make her out at first, after she heard about Kev going to own up. I could tell there was trouble between her and Dad. She didn’t look anyone in the eye and she still went around the house sniffing and blowing her nose.

  But then a couple of days later she came up to my room where I was sitting. She actually knocked before she came in, a thing she’s never done in her life.

  “Tracy—”

  “’Lo, Mum.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “What’s to stop you?”

  She came in and sat on the bed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Writing.”

  “What, a letter is it?”

  “No.” I hesitated. “I’m trying to write down – about our trip and that – and how it all happened.”

  She looked down at her hands in her lap. She tried to say something but somehow it stuck.

  “Would you like to read it when I’ve finished?” I asked. I was surprised to hear myself offer that – five minutes ago I’d have said I’d die before I’d show it to her, any of it. (I still haven’t and maybe I won’t, I don’t know if I could show it to anybody yet.)

  Mum looked up. She had tears in her eyes – again: I was getting fed up to the back teeth with her crying all the time, but now she looked so pitiful I felt myself melt.

  “Yes,” she said. “All except the last part. Have you come to the last part yet?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Are you telling the truth about everything?”

  “Yeah. Not much point otherwise.”

  “You always had a gift,” she said quietly. “Don’t be too hard on me when you do come to the last part.”

  And suddenly I saw she’d come to make it up with me. And I jumped up and went to her and hugged her and she hugged me back (she doesn’t hug any of us much; she shows how she feels by doing things for us) and said, “We’ll have it tonight, the welcome-home meal. I must go and do the potatoes.” And she got up quickly and went out, closing the door behind her.

  I felt so choked up after that I couldn’t get on with the writing, so I thought I’d get my presents wrapped nicely, ready for the evening when I could give them out – I’d even give Sean his, though not with a very good feeling. I got them out of the drawer where I’d hidden them wrapped up in one of my T-shirts. And as I unrolled that, I saw something pinned to it. It was the filigree butterfly Michael had bought me in Holland.

  I unpinned it and looked at it. It was so beautiful. I sat with it on my hand, just admiring it. If I moved my fingers under it, it was easy to pretend it was alive.

  After a bit I took it to the dressing-table. I had one of the two little drawers and Mary had the other. Mary’s is always tidy and mine’s always a mess. I opened mine to put my butterfly away, and there, right in the middle of all the jumble, was another one.

  Another butterfly. A cheap little imitation gold one with some glittery stones for eyes and shiny blue paint smeared on its wings. Now where had that come from? Then I remembered – of course. It was the one Kev gave me, that he got out of the grab-mach
ine that first time we went out together.

  I held the two of them side by side. The hand-made silver one, only one exactly like it in the world – and the imitation one, that they turn out thousands of in Hong Kong. Easy to see when they were together like that – easy to see the real difference. The same difference there was in the givers.

  I wrapped the silver one up so it wouldn’t get tarnished and put it in a box by itself in the front of my drawer. And I threw the other one away.